Talk:Uncle Tom

Uncle Tom's cabin exists: in Canada. One day soon I'll add some info....DW

   Actually it's the cabin of Josiah Henson (located near Chatham, Ontario), the escaped slave whose experiences inspired much of the book.

   It would be better included under Uncle Tom's Cabin - stewacide 22:57 Dec 21, 2002 (UTC)

A comment on the note about a cook and fine ground glass: no body would die from eating glass if it is fine enough to be eaten without noticing, nor will anyone eat it if it where noticeable. Fine ground glass has no more effect then the sand of the sea shore. If anyone has a beter example, please edit it.

   Obviously, you're not familiar with real-life examples of this. Yes, it WAS effective over time; slave masters died slowly, from internal bleeding. (Ya-aay! One more for our side) :-p deeceevoice 17:07, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC) From the Internet: "They poisoned masters and mistresses with arsenic, ground glass and 'spiders beaten up in buttermilk.' They chopped them [slaveholders] to pieces with axes and burned their houses, gins and barns to the ground." (Robinson) Plottin' and schemin', grinnin' an' skinnin' to ol' massa's face, but with a stolen knife in a back pocket and an escape plan at the ready. 'S how we got ovuh. :-p deeceevoice 11:39, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

       I suggest you read this before you believe a general list of ways to poison people... http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/glass.htm

Gee, thanks for the patronizing suggestion, but the author of the piece you cite makes certain assumptions based on free folks in the modern era: 1) speed. Slaves were slaves for life. It's not like they had someplace to go. The amount of time it took to accomplish a murder was insignificant. In fact, the slowness of a hated master's death and watching as it took hold of him could make the process even more satisfying/gratifying. :-D 2) Medical care. Rather than visit a physician, it would be far more likely that the afflicted slaveowner would rely on home remedies for something apparently so minor (in the beginning, at least) as intestinal discomfort or stool blackened by blood. And guess who would've tended to him? Yep. Good ol' "Mammy." :-p 3) Poison. Most slaves did not have free access to poisonous substances; indeed, even so common an agricultural substance as lye often was carefully controlled/accounted for. Did vengeance homicide using poisonous substances happen? Of course (hooray!). But shattered glass from an "accident" in the kitchen would have been discarded without reservation. Further, it would have been relatively plentiful over time and never missed. If one had the time (and it's already established they did) to grind it, glass made a perfectly serviceable, untraceable instrument of murder. Poison could be more easily detected -- and, in case of the existence of an antidote -- more easily treated. Given a choice, would you choose to kill a racist, rapist crakkker, or someone who sold your children away from you, and be found out, mutilated/murdered for your trouble in a public and agonizing way so as to be made an example of? Or, would you rather do so surreptitiously over time and survive to savor the act?

"Uncle Tom" was an "uncle" because "uncle" was/is a derogatory term for an elderly black man. A reminder: the subject under discussion here is tomming -- not how to be a "bad nigguh" and die young. We're talking stealth here, cunning subterfuge. Rule number two: get even/get ovuh. Rule number one (and the most important; it is "how we got over"): stay alive.

4) Efficacy. Snopes doesn't say ground glass wouldn't kill someone; it most certainly did. It simply says it would take -- again -- time. 5) Detectability. Finely ground glass can be concealed in food -- particularly in the kind of simple food eaten in the antebellum South. The texture of stoneground grains, nuts, porridges and stews -- rather than the refined flours and highly processed and relatively sophisticated fare of today -- could easily disguise it, the occassional grit detected as merely a consequence of rural circumstances, incomplete washing of raw ingredients. Such acts of defiance were more than wishful thinking/apocryphal folklore. They actually happened. deeceevoice 22:08, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but where is a single cite that supports someone dying from ground glass? --Vision4bg 02:18, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm not going to waste a lot of time hunting down evidence on something so widely known as this. Just about anyone who's studied slave resistance knows of this method of retribution. From ReligiousTolerance.org, "A brief history of the "peculiar institution": 16th-18th centuries, in North America & Britain":

   "Many, perhaps most, slaves engaged in passive resistance:

   "'They worked no harder than they had to, put on deliberate slowdowns, staged sit-down strikes and fled to the swamps en masse at cotton picking time. They broke implements, trampled the crops and 'took' silver, wine, money, corn, cotton and machines.' 3

   "Others were more aggressive:

   "'They poisoned masters and mistresses with arsenic, ground glass and 'spiders beaten up in buttermilk.' They chopped them [slaveholders] to pieces with axes and burned their houses, gins and barns to the ground.'"

Another source:

From a curriculum abstract developed by Yolanda Jones-Generette of Yale:

   "Female slaves were often given the job of cook for their slaveholders. These slaves would sometimes poison the food that they prepared for their masters. Slaves would create concoctions from different herbs and plants and put them into the food of their masters in which resulted in death for some slave owners. These slave cooks would grind up glass in food and they would prepare meals with other harmful items in them.2"

If I searched my personal library, I probably could come up with more information on this relatively widespread practice -- but I haven't the time or the inclination to do so. deeceevoice 13:12, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is a fairly minor issue so this is the last thing I'm going to add about this since you seem to feel fairly passionately about the testimonies you've read, but the article says:

"or exact a slow and agonizing death from her master by lacing his food with finely ground glass"

Whereas as far as *I've* read there has never been a proven case of poisoning by ground glass being hidden in food. If the article was reworded so that it said something to the effect of "attempting to poison", it'd be better. Pedantic, yes, but also factual. --Vision4bg 14:11, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've returned to the snopes.com article and re-skimmed it from top to bottom. The case it presents has done absolutely nothing to overturn the historical accounts of poisoning using glass. In fact, it doesn't even address the numerous historical references to the practice of slave cooks grinding glass in their masters' food, which attests to the historical and cultural bias inherent in the article -- something which I suppose is understandable, given the times, but is not at all useful in debunking numerous credible historical references to slave resistance.

Incidentally, it has also occurred to me there is another wrinkle in all of this, and that is the relatively high lead content of a lot of early glass and the effects such lead poisoning would have over time. If players of the water harp (armonica) contracted serious nervous system disorders, insanity and other maladies from merely rubbing the rims of leaded glass, consider what ingestion of it might do over time. Unless you come up with something better than the snopes article to challenge what has been widely accepted as historical fact for decades (ask virtually anyone who has studied the subject or read any decent related work), I'm strongly inclined to let the passage stand. Some historians, for example, have challenged the authenticity of folklore recounting quilts being used as "flags" of sorts to point the way to runaway bondsmen and women (based on the absence of written evidence of the practice before the 1980s) and all sorts of other things -- but never, to my knowledge, such accounts of black, uh ... culinary creativity. deeceevoice 16:48, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fair/ Unfair Accusations

Hey guys, I was wondering if it was worth putting in something about many people accused of being Uncle Toms based on views that simply aren't in line with the majority of the black race, rather than actually being against the race. For instance, some called Bill Cosby an Uncle Tom because he said black parents were not doing enough. In this day and age, such accusations of "Tomming" are quite frequent and I thought it would be worth a mention.--Zoso Jade 20:36, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

Ignorant or offended people say lots of things. That doesn't mean they merit mention in a Wikipedia article. IMO, Cosby's right on time. deeceevoice 18:40, 4 May 2005 (UTC)