The Blind Slave Boy
Born in Virginia, Margaret Lucy Shands Bailey (1812–1888) married the abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey in Cincinnati in 1833. Mother of six children (six other children died in infancy), she wrote for various antislavery periodicals including the National Era, edited by her husband, in which Harriet Beecher Stowe first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1878 Stowe revealed that the episode of Eliza crossing the Ohio River on ice floes was inspired by an article in Bailey’s children’s magazine A Friend of Youth. Her sentimental song “The Blind Slave Boy” was published in George W. Clark’s Liberty Minstrel in 1844.
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My mother, come back to me! close to thy breast
Once more let thy poor little blind one be pressed;
Once more let me feel thy warm breath on my cheek,
And hear thee in accents of tenderness speak!
O mother! I’ve no one to love me—no heart
Can bear like thine own in my sorrows a part,
No hand is so gentle, no voice is so kind,
Oh! none like a mother can cherish the blind!
Poor blind one! No mother thy wailing can hear,
No mother can hasten to banish thy fear;
For the slave-owner drives her, o’er mountain and wild,
And for one paltry dollar hath sold thee, poor child!
Ah! who can in language of mortals reveal
The anguish that none but a mother can feel,
When man in his vile lust of mammon hath trod
On her child, who is stricken and smitten of God!
Blind, helpless, forsaken, with strangers alone,
She hears in her anguish his piteous moan;
As he eagerly listens—but listens in vain,
To catch the loved tones of his mother again!
The curse of the broken in spirit shall fall
On the wretch who hath mingled this wormwood and gall,
And his gain like a mildew shall blight and destroy,
Who hath torn from his mother the little blind boy!
(1844)