Remembrance of things past

At nine, he suffered what seemed a minor injury to his left eye when a stick he and a playmate were throwing hit his lower lid. He could still see through it, but with diminished sight. Though his right eye was fine, premonitions of blindness began to haunt him. At school he became obsessed with re-reading a story “about a blind swan and another about a boy who had lost both eyes at different times”.

In Jackson he practiced almost being blind, holding a hand over his right eye, getting around as best he could with only his diminished left. When he visited the Institute for the Blind, he told a boy there that he did not know how long it would be before he himself would be a resident. He had a nightmare; “I dreamed I was blind and in the rotunda—the second story—where the capitol met and some of the boys had hung me over that place for fun”. Two days later he was demonstrating, for the children of the state senator at whose home he boarded, a crossbow that he had bought as a present to send to his brother. It was a fragile contraption, dependent on worn rubber bands. When the children asked him to shoot it, he said he “did not want to as it was not shooting well”. They insisted. “I had it standing there on the floor. I dropped the arrow down the barrel. I glanced down in the barrel to see if it was right and while I was looking at it, it went off. It shot me in the right eye blinding me on the instant.” His father took him to New Orleans for medical treatment. Whatever sight he had in …