2. BLINDED
2
BLINDED
Southeast, New York, in Putnam County, was more a geographical district than a town in 1820. It was a rural area of forest and farmland, with a few tiny hamlets here and there. The largest village was Doanesburg, then a thriving center with a Presbyterian church, a parsonage, a post office, a school, and even a library.
The countryside round about was dotted with trees and marked with the stone walls typical of New England. The soil was not good, producing more rocks than crops, and it was virtually impossible for a small farmer to survive. Many men either hired themselves out as hands on the estates of one of the several great landowners or combined with fathers, brothers, or cousins to farm jointly a substantial tract of land. Most of the more than nineteen hundred inhabitants of Southeast in 1820 were “peasants.” In those days, the term did not have the lowly meaning it has today; it simply denoted rural working folk. Fanny Crosby often spoke in later years of the “humble peasants” from which she sprang.
FANNY CROSBY OFTEN SPOKE OF THE “HUMBLE PEASANTS” FROM WHICH SHE SPRANG.
Almost everyone in Southeast was of solid Yankee stock, descendants of original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and of largely English extraction. Familially, the area was comprised of clans, and in 1820, virtually everyone seemed to have been related to one another. There were only a few dozen family names in the area, and certain families were very large. The largest of the Southeast clans was the Crosby family, numbering eleven households. Sometimes the various families who comprised a clan would be clustered in a settlement bearing their name. The community where Fanny Crosby was born was named for the Gay clan, who lived there in large numbers.
The men wore black clothing, and most sported long, full beards. The women, too, wore black, and their full-skirted “Basque dresses” with stiff, white collars and cuffs had buttons all the way down the front, from neck to hip.
They were pious folk, these Southeast peasants. The Presbyterian church still taught almost unadulterated Puritan-Calvinist doctrine, with its tenets of “irresistible grace,” “double predestination,” and the need for a distinct personal conversion experience.
Although poor, they were literate, managing somehow to sandwich, between long hours of hard labor, a few years at the little red district schoolhouse. There, the children of Southeast would learn from a man or woman who had gone scarcely further than the highest level of training being taught. But they learned! These “humble peasants,” few of whom went beyond sixth grade, would read and write poetry as they sat by the fire on winter nights when the work was done. They could recite Milton and Shakespeare and Chapman’s Homer. All of them knew Bunyan’s classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and, of course, the King James translation of the Holy Bible.
A half-hour’s walk along a winding road from Doanesburg was the settlement known as Gayville. One of the half-dozen dwellings in that wooded paradise was a small, rough, one-story frame cottage. Situated near the crest of a hill, it looked out onto a landscape of rolling hills dotted with trees. Behind it was an open field surrounded by a virgin forest full of towering oaks and maples, with thick underbrush.
This was the home of Sylvanus Crosby, a veteran of the War of 1812, who was probably in his mid-forties. A poor man eking out a marginal existence through his farm labor, he claimed direct descent from William Brewster, one of the Pilgrim fathers. Arriving on the Mayflower in 1620, Brewster had helped establish Plymouth Plantation. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, one of his descendants, Patience Freeman, married Eleazer Crosby.
Eleazer was the grandson of Simon and Ann Crosby, who came from England in 1635 and settled near Boston. Simon Crosby came from an old Yorkshire family. Born in 1608, he married Ann Brigham (1606–1675) and came to the New World. He helped found Harvard College soon after his arrival, and died a few years later. One of his sons, Eleazer’s father, Thomas (1634–1702), was graduated from the college his father helped found. Although never ordained, he conducted services as a “religious teacher” on Cape Cod; he also was connected with the shipping business.
Eleazer had a son named Isaac, born in Harwich, near Cape Cod, in 1719. Shortly after that, the family moved to New Milford, Connecticut, and then to Southeast, New York. It is not recorded how long Eleazer lived, but Patience, his wife, lived to be 103 years old and until her early eighties made horseback trips alone to visit relatives at Cape Cod.
Isaac Crosby married a woman named Mercy Foster who bore him nineteen children. The youngest of these was Sylvanus, who was born during the Revolutionary War. Despite his being in his late fifties at its outbreak, Isaac volunteered to serve in the war. Isaac won no laurels, but he managed to return home alive and to stay that way until he was past one hundred. He and his descendants were proud of his service and of the exploits of other distant relatives during the Revolution. Fanny liked to recall some of the tales she was told as a child. “When General Warren was killed at Bunker Hill,” she wrote, “it was a Crosby who caught up the flag as it fell from his hands.”
“WHEN GENERAL WARREN WAS KILLED AT BUNKER HILL, IT WAS A CROSBY WHO CAUGHT UP THE FLAG.”
Around 1798, when Sylvanus was about twenty-one years old, he married Eunice Paddock. Sylvanus and Eunice had four children, each six years older than the next. The eldest, born in 1799, was named Mercy, after Sylvanus’s mother. She was followed by Theda in 1805, then Joseph in 1811, and finally Mary, whom everyone called Polly, in 1817.
Sylvanus tried to farm the little plot of ground as best he could, scratching out an existence for his family. By 1820 he was not the sole breadwinner, for Mercy had married and lived with her husband in the family cottage.
Mercy’s husband, John Crosby, was an older man, perhaps not much younger than Sylvanus. He probably was a cousin (marrying a cousin was not unusual in Southeast). Nothing is known of John Crosby, and since he died when Fanny was a baby, she had no personal recollection of him. She was always told he had been an extremely ambitious, hardworking man who, like Sylvanus, apparently was a veteran of the War of 1812. He had been married before and had one daughter, Laura, who was about the same age as Mercy’s sister Theda.
On March 24, 1820, two months before her twenty-first birthday, Mercy gave birth to a daughter, christened Frances Jane Crosby after one of her mother’s numerous aunts, Fannie Paddock Curtis.
By late April, the Crosbys were alarmed. Something was wrong with the baby’s eyes. In later years, Fanny spoke of a sickness that made her eyes “very weak.” More disconcerting, the family was unable to obtain competent medical assistance; the community doctor was away.
THE CROSBYS WERE ALARMED. SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE BABY’S EYES.
Finally, they found a man who claimed to be a physician. Eighty-six years later, Fanny wrote of him as “a stranger.” Whoever he was, he horrified the Crosbys by putting a hot poultice on the baby’s inflamed eyes. The “doctor” insisted the extreme heat would not hurt the child’s eyes and would draw out the infection. When he had finished his treatments, the infection gradually cleared up, but ugly white scars formed on the eyes. As the months went by, little Fanny Jane made no response when objects were held before her face.
The “doctor” did not remain long in Southeast. The Crosbys accused the man outright of blinding the baby and stirred up such indignation in Gayville, Doanesburg, and neighboring hamlets that the man, no doubt fearing lynching, fled the vicinity and was never heard from again.
Further disaster was to strike the household of Sylvanus Crosby. November 1820 was cold and rainy, but John Crosby labored in the fields, even in the downpours. One night he came in badly chilled. The next day he was seriously ill, and a few days later, he died.
The Crosbys considered themselves devout Puritans, and Mercy, a widow at twenty-one, was comforted in the hope that she and her husband would meet again one day in heaven. But on earth, Mercy realized her father could not support a household of six persons alone. So shortly after her husband’s body was lowered into an unmarked grave in the Doanesburg cemetery, she hired herself out as a maidservant for a wealthy family nearby. Fanny Jane would be taken good care of by Mercy’s mother.
Though desperately poor, the Crosbys, buoyed by their devout faith, were a happy family. During the day, Grandmother Eunice and her middle daughter, Theda, kept house and cared for Fanny and Polly, who were more like sisters than niece and aunt. Joseph by now was no doubt assisting his father in farm work. In the evenings when Sylvanus, Joseph, and Mercy returned home, the family would sit reading and reciting poetry. As a little girl, Fanny Jane listened with rapt attention to the ballad of “Rinaldo Rhinaldine,” the robber chieftain, to the tales of Robin Hood, to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to John Milton, and to the Bible.
Eunice took a special interest in Fanny, and during the child’s first four or five years was closer to her than her mother. “My grandmother was more to me than I can ever express by word or pen,” Fanny wrote. When it had become obvious that Fanny Jane was deprived of eyesight, Eunice decided she would be her granddaughter’s eyes. She firmly resolved that Fanny Jane would not be a helpless invalid, dependent on others as so many blind people were in those days. She undertook to describe the physical world to the child in terms she hoped she would understand. Eighty years later, Fanny remembered her grandmother “taking me on her knee and rocking me while she told me of the beautiful sun with its sunrise and sunset.” How Eunice could describe colors to a child blind almost from birth is not so great a mystery, for Fanny Jane could perceive very intense light and sometimes could distinguish various hues. Eunice also taught the blind child about birds:
EUNICE DECIDED SHE WOULD BE HER GRANDDAUGHTER’S EYES.
One day I heard a strange sound coming from the meadow, saying, “Whippoorwill.” Grandma told me about the bird which gave out that curious note and described its mottled wings and reddish brown breast, and its bristled mouth, with its white bristled tail.*
How did Fanny understand what “bristled” meant? Eunice would place in her hands a surface similar to the one she was trying to describe. Afterward, whenever Fanny heard the sound of the whippoorwill, she knew the color and shape of the bird that produced that sound. Eunice also taught her about the meadowlark, cuckoo, song sparrow, goldfinch, yellow warbler, wren, and robin.
The remarkable Eunice, a peasant from the remote backwoods of New York, was as skillful and successful in instructing the blind child as many with degrees. She taught her granddaughter about botany. By the time Fanny was three or four, the violet was her favorite flower and would remain so for the rest of her life. In autumn, Eunice took Fanny on walks over the hills, telling her about the trees and their leaves. Fanny Jane came to know the trees as she did the flowers—by means of touch and smell—and the leaves by “handling and remembering.” Eunice realized Fanny’s memory would have to play an especially important role in her life, so she began exercising it. Eunice would gather up piles of autumn leaves and have Fanny play with them. “Now what tree is this one from?” she would ask. It was from the early training at Grandma’s hands that she acquired a capacity for detailed description, and it was from this training that she acquired a wonderful memory.
FANNY CAME TO KNOW THE TREES AS SHE DID THE FLOWERS— BY MEANS OF TOUCH AND SMELL.
Eunice also had a great influence on Fanny’s religious development. All the Crosbys were devout Christians, but Eunice seems to have been practically angelic. Grandma saw all the world as God’s book and each natural phenomenon as a manifestation of God. Like many people of her day and of earlier generations, she saw nature as a mirror of the spiritual world. For Fanny, the walks she took with Grandma over the hills and through the fields were walks with God, as Eunice pointed out that every tree, every flower, every bird was put there by God and served His plan and purpose.
Eunice taught Fanny and Polly that whatever happens, good or bad, is a manifestation of God’s delight or wrath. She taught them that not a sparrow falls to the ground without God seeing it, that every hair on the head is numbered. She instilled in them the conviction that God is an ever-present help in trouble.
Eunice was a tower of strength to her daughter Mercy in the first years of her widowhood. Often, Mercy would become distraught by her difficulties. She had to work all day to support her child, whom she could see only at night. And she fretted about Fanny Jane, wondering what would become of this little girl who seemed so hopelessly handicapped. When Mercy collapsed upon her rough cot, weeping, Eunice would go in to her, place her hard, worn hand upon her thin shoulder and recite from a favorite hymn or quote the old Puritan adage that had been a favorite of the Puritan leader, Cotton Mather: “What can’t be cured can be endured.” In her nineties, Fanny Crosby still would be repeating that saying to all who came to her with their troubles.
From as early as Fanny could remember, Eunice would assemble her children and read the Bible to them. “The stories of the Holy Book came from her lips and entered my heart, and took deep root there.” Eunice did not simply read from the Bible without comment but took time to explain everything in terms children could understand. Sitting in her rocking chair, she would tell them of “a kind heavenly Father Who sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, down into this world to be a Saviour and a Friend to all mankind.”
Not only was Grandma a woman of the Bible, she also was “a firm believer in prayer.” Prayer was essential to the Christian life, not merely as a form of mental exercise or simply in meditating on God, but as a direct communication with her loving Saviour. She taught Fanny that they should call upon God in every need and give thanks to Him for everything good that happened. She taught that there was nothing too difficult for God to do and that, whatever their need might be, He could meet it. No matter how extravagant or unlikely their request, He would grant it—if it were good for them. If God did not grant the request, then they should not be downcast, for He had something in store for them better than their wildest hopes and expectations. They should rejoice, therefore. The sufferings and frustrations of life could be borne patiently and cheerfully, because they were being led to something better.
NOT ONLY WAS GRANDMA A WOMAN OF THE BIBLE, SHE ALSO WAS “A FIRM BELIEVER IN PRAYER.”
Every Sunday, the Crosbys walked, like the other villagers, barefoot—shoes in hand—to the church. They went into the outlying horse sheds, tidied up, put on their shoes, and went into the meeting. In winter, the wooden structure was heated by a potbellied stove set in the center of the sanctuary. It often grew very hot inside, with two hundred persons crowding into the room, and the tobacco smoke issuing from the lips of most of the men made for an insufferable atmosphere. The sermons seemed to last forever and often were so full of tedious vagaries of Calvinist theology that people dozed throughout. At noon, the congregation went home to dinner, then promptly returned to hear more preaching. “As long as they got home in time to milk the cows, they didn’t mind,” recalled a resident.
There were no organ and no hymns, as such, in the “Southeast Church.” Like the early Puritans, the theologians of the era did not believe in hymns of human composition; they would use only the Psalms, which were “dictated” to David directly from God. Most of the music consisted of psalms chanted in plainsong with, now and then, their metrical paraphrase by Isaac Watts, who lived and wrote a century earlier.
A deacon at “the desk” would be the only person in the room with a text. “Lining out” the psalm, he would recite one line, and the congregation would repeat it; they proceeded in this fashion until the entire psalm was chanted. This rather awkward brand of church music did not impress the child Fanny.
As a little girl, Fanny Jane was quiet and pensive but cheerful. She became staunch friends with the postman, and one of the grand events of the week was to get the mail from him each Thursday. From the age of three, on pleasant days, she would make her way with the ease of a sighted person to a large rock. There, under the watchful gaze of Grandma, she sat listening to the “voices of nature,” all of which, she said, spoke a language familiar to her soul. Were it not for the persistent though well-meaning commiserations and “I wish you could see this or that,” Fanny would not have known she was different from other children. She was quite satisfied with her lot, not realizing there was anything limiting about it.
FANNY WAS SATISFIED WITH HER LOT, NOT REALIZING THERE WAS ANYTHING LIMITING ABOUT IT.
She loved to sing. By the age of five, she knew such songs as the stately “Hail Columbia, Happy Land” and rather crude ballads like “Fourscore and Ten Old Bachelors.”
Eunice and Mercy let Fanny and Polly have quite a bit of freedom. Far from keeping the little girls constantly at her side, Grandma let them roam in the vicinity of the cottage. She and Mercy even permitted them to play outside at night with the other children of Gayville. Fanny could play in the night just as well as she could in the daytime.
*Samuel Trevena Jackson, Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years (New York: Revell, 1915), p. 119.