"Crippled Fayette," of Rockingham, detailing his times, and giving his rhymes... Made helpless by the rheumatism since the 20th of October, 1847.
Mountain Valley, VA: Joseph Funk & Sons, 1857. First Edition.
Leather-backed boards, 18mo; 187, (1) pp. Fair to Good with heavy rubbing and abrasion; dampstaining and waviness to boards, splitting to the front joint, lacking ffep. Foxing and occasional tidemarks throughout text. Pencil ghosts and surface wear to and opposite the title page, 61 & 172. Scrawled portraits on the rear endpapers. Closed tear at 166. Contents complete. Sabin 35976. Not in Howes, which notes only his 1861 travelogue The Book of Sunshine… 12 copies in OCLC—mostly in Virginia and Texas. Seen at auction in 1896 and 1921 only.
The autobiography of “Crippled Fayette” bears little resemblence to tales of piety through suffering and solace through prayer. He seeks the guidance of a clairvoyant, not a priest; takes comfort in secular literature, not the Bible. He has long periods of convalescence and writes about his wild “Opium dreams.” When his pain subsides, he is left without the use of his lower body, but is able to travel. He writes about all the pockets of Virginia and his trips to Georgia and Tennessee, including depictions of the men of color he encounters, written in a way that negotiates the politics of his Mennonite publisher and expectations of his Southern patrons.
The introduction would have you believe that Crippled Fayette is imbued with morality and religion: “He has been a sufferer all his life,—a sufferer both in body and in mind… this record of his painful life shows a quiet and patient submission to the will of a mysterious Providence” (5). The suggestion of piety is more of a marketing framework than a guiding principle.
Thomas Fayette Jeffries, of Rockingham, b.1829, had great ambitions for a life of travel and adventure. He spent boyhood exploring the mountains and caves of the Shenandoah Valley, was elated the first time he saw Harrisonburg (“Oh Moses!”), and imagined himself one day going to China. The onset of rheumatic pain thwarts his ambitions, restricting him for nearly ten years, “To read, to suffer, to take medicine, and to write doggerel rhyme” (64). Navigating a crisis of faith in his melancholy confinement, he reads voraciously, including “that great hater of the Bible, Tom Paine,” and tries to get his hands on “more convincing” texts by Rousseau, Volney and Hume. Stuck in the countryside and unable to access any copies, he settles for Byron, “to strengthen both my skepticism and my misery of mind” (55).
There’s a plotline wherein Fayette’s depleted faith is replenished by reading theology and receiving the Christian sympathies of others. He receives letters of sympathy and replies with requests for books. To one woman who wrote to encourage his faith, he replied: “When I reflect how blood hath flown / The Bible all about, / My Heart swims round—I search for truth, Yet ever am in doubt… Please send me Milton’s glowing verse, perhaps he’ll clear my eyes…”
Fayette gives a few shout-outs to the Grace of God throughout the text, but reserves the heavy handed morality for the last ten pages, wherein he dedicates himself to Christianity (175-180), denounces ardent spirits and their resultant societal ills (181-183), reminds the rich to be charitable (184), and that we will all shall die (185-187).
Fayette graphically depicts his mental state during convalescent periods, marked by depression from ineffective medical treatments and heavy use of morphine and opium-laced concoctions: “At this period in my life's history I was undergoing the wildest and most unreal things of which the human imagination can possibly conceive. Persons who have never used opiates to any extent, will scarcely believe that opium, laudanum, morphine, byocyomus, and other narcotic drugs and medicines could ever produce such fantastic and nonsensical dreams” (81). Even without the drugs, Fayette writes he “was often in a state of mind bordering on lunacy. Strange hallucinations and erratic idiosyncrasies would beset me” (52, emphasis his).
The recurring descriptions of his “Opium dreams” are the literary revels of the book. Chickens turn into hand saws. Stars “get mad” at each other for exploding. Oxen build coffins and sloppily bury other farm animals. The entire United States turns into a mill, each state a cog that corresponds to its size, then it turns into a fir tree he falls from, breaking his ribs on Rhode Island and waking up in Texas, “just in time to save me” from the Gulf of Mexico (85).
Opioids provide escape, but not relief. Fayette reads about magnetism and mesmerism, and writes to H.H. Sherwood wishing to be his patient. He encloses a gold dollar with the letter, “to get [Sherwood’s] wonderful Clairvoyant, old Mrs. Lawson,” to tell him “how to proceed.” Sherwood had died, and the response he got from Mrs. Lawson was useless, but concluded: “I wish Fowler could examine your head, for I never saw such a brain in my life, for if you cannot travel with your legs, you can travel with your brain” (67-68). He also received a letter from Sherwood’s successors advising their own treatments. Fayette writes, “I began to think it would be a doubtful undertaking and certainly a very expensive one, to try all the remedies named in the New York letters.” Instead, he turns to “Dr. Henkel’s medicines,” referring to a well-known Virginia family of apothecarists and physicians. He fails to get any good results from those, too—and when he meets the “Drs. Henkel” again later, they admit there was little hope of him being cured, anyway.
Fayette’s depiction of the people of color he encounters during his travels—and his relationship to them—is another rarity. Printed by Joseph Funk & Sons, the first Mennonite publishing house, his characterizations negotiate anti-slavery politics and performative stereotypes agreeable to the Southern audience on whose money he relied.
When his pain subsides, he can travel, though left without the use of his lower body. He travels principally by rail, propped up with pillows and requiring assistance provided by the men of color who worked, and were likely enslaved by, the railroad company. His depictions engage performative stereotypes and narratives, with inflections of endearment mixed with distortions palatable to his Southern audience. During one stop, “an old servant met up with his long absent master, and such a wild, almost frantic manifestation of joy as was then exhibited, is seldom seen, —he laughed—he leaped —he shouted —he grasped his master's hand”…until the “master” tossed a few coins his way (157). Another anecdote acknowledges the unlikeliness of its premise:
I was forcibly struck with the binding power of the love of ones (sic) native land even in the breast of those whom we would be apt to think did not and could not possess it… No sooner did he hear the name of Va., than he fairly bounced up, with joy mingled with melancholy, in every lineament of his ebony face… I asked him whether he would like to live in Virginia again: He jumped around and brought down his sable hand against his thigh, and literally screamed out, “Oh yes!” (89).
“Crippled Fayette,” who is transported on trains and handled like cargo, shares, by necessity, a physical intimacy and dependency that rarely existed in the public sphere—not behind closed doors in domestic settings. Fayette tells of determining his weight, “While I was at Cross-keys among my good old friends and neighbors, Sam, a colored man, took me in his arms and held me on the scales” (168-169). In a poem to one of his charitable ladies, within a narrative of the performative stereotype, he writes: “They ‘liff’ me from one car to t’other, / Just like I were their loving brother…”
As noted on the last page of the book, Fayette published the “first edition” of his story as Nine Years in Bed, or, Affliction’s Own in 1856 (then as Ten… in 1857). Despite his wording, those 76-page pamphlets are not the same as what’s in the present volume. He published another book in 1861, The Book of Sunshine; or, the bright side of everything, recorded in Howes. He was the first peddler recorded in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he went seeking a cure and paid his way selling pamphlets. After the Civil War, he bought a large stereoview collection and toured it to different towns, charging admission. He endorsed Stackhouse-made wheelchairs in newspapers and published rhymes in the Rockingham Register as “Crippled Fayette” and the “Roaming Invalid.”
Thomas Fayette Jeffries was ultimately killed in a “most peculiar and particularly pathetic manner” in 1904 while in Georgia, where he resided in his later years. Required to sleep in the stables while visiting friends—in a buggy, where he could be propped upright—a “frisky” black horse broke loose from his stable and rammed into him. His hips were broken, his skull was crushed in two places, and he never woke up again.
(See: Rockingham Register, June 17, 1904. A History of Rockingham County, Virginia, 324)