ABE LINCOLN & ME
    
The Recently Discovered Memoir
Of Abe Lincoln's Disabled Mentor & Friend
           Clarence Smith
                 By Robert Mauro

     I, Clarence Smith, am a man with a disability.  I lived in a
world where people with disabilities were relegated to lives of
quiet desperation.  No one thought much of us back then.  We were
scorned and disregarded as useless and worthless.  But my friend
Abe was different.  He never saw me that way.  In fact he saw me
in many ways as his mentor.
     Who was my friend?  Abe.  Abraham Lincoln.
     Yes, Abe Lincoln was my friend.  Never heard of me?  I'm not
surprised.  As I said, the lives of "cripples" were often
ignored, especially by historians.  I hate for us to be ignored,
so I've written this memoir.  Maybe one day it will mean
something to someone.  It meant a lot to me.
     It's a fact that history books don't tell the whole story. 
As a result, you've heard about Honest Abe but probably not about
me.  Why?  No one cared about us disabled folk in the 19th
century.  Certainly not the historians.  But my friend Abe was
different.  He cared.  Oh, Abe wasn't perfect.  He could be a bit
condescending.  But he could also be great.  This is how I
remember the Great Emancipator...who, by the way, didn't
emancipate me.
     I spent my life in a wicker wheelchair.  Abe talked to me
about his troubles.  He was often depressed.  I knew something
about depression.  You try to get a job while in a wicker
wheelchair in the 19th century, you soon learn all about
depression.
     "We don't hire cripples!  Get lost!"
     I heard that a lot.  So I wrote and I painted.  No one knew
I was disabled when I published a story or painted a landscape. 
Abe loved my studies of Native Americans, but mostly Abe loved my
depictions of the horrors of slavery.
     "You really make a guy think, Clarence," Abe told me after
seeing one of my slave paintings.
     Abe also enjoyed my tales of honesty and justice.  I wrote
about a lot of things, but mostly I wrote about slaves running
away from their cruel masters, how they broke their chains.  A
lot of mostly unknown emancipation newspapers published my
stories.  Horace Greeley loved my writing, but always said his
paper was "overstocked."
     Abe also loved my stories and articles.
     "You have such a hunger for honesty and justice, equality
and freedom -- and independence, Clarence."
     When Abe's girlfriend, Ann Rutledge, died in 1835, I did my
best to keep Abe from going over the edge.  I told him about the
women I loved.  Yes, we people with disabilities in the 19th
century were sexual.  But the public hated to even think about
that.  They characterized any "cripple" who looked at another
human being in a sexual way as evil, fiendish, perverted,
monstrous.  Abe and I hated that.
     So when Ann died, I told Abe how the hurt goes away in time. 
It always did with me.  Okay, not completely.  But you
have to move on.  Hey, sex and love aren't easy for anyone.  Take
me, for instance.  I'd meet a woman.  She'd at first pity me.  I
absolutely detested that.  I'd tell her to stop treating me like
some useless piece of human flotsam.  Most women didn't know what
"flotsam" meant.  In the 19th century women, like people with
disabilities, were denied the educational opportunities
nondisabled white men received.  Some women, however, read a lot,
like me.  But most women were just considered to be breeders. 
They weren't even taught how to do that.  They just endured a
life of quiet desperation.  I once told that to my friend, Hank
Thoreau.  He laughed.  A smart kid.  But too in love with the
great outdoors.  Hank was not a people person.  Nope.  He
preferred living in the woods.  But that was Hank.  A dreamer.
     So, anyway, Abe recovered from Ann Rutledge's death.  He
then met Mary Owens.  But she said, "I thought Mr. Lincoln was
deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a
woman's happiness."  Oh, well.  Abe fell into another one of his
pits of despond. 
     I knew depression was nothing to sneeze at.  Abe even
contemplated suicide.  But I told him to think of how much
reading he had done, thanks to my lending him books.  I lent him
the Greeks.  Shakespeare.  I even told him he could make a great
writer.  He wanted to be a great lawyer.  And little by little,
with my help, he came out of his depression and did become a
lawyer.  Okay, maybe not a great lawyer.  But a good one.
     Once Abe had set up his law office, I talked to him about
making it more accessible to me and my wicker wheelchair.  He
looked at me and sighed.
     "You know, Clarence, I never thought of that.  I
apologize."
     Abe went right out, split a few rails and, before you could
say antidisestablishmentarianism, he'd built a ramp for my old
wicker wheelchair.  Abe even widened the door to the outhouse!   
     Abe was always able to find a way to do things.  Same with
me.  I had been hoping to become a lawyer before Abe had even
contemplated that profession.  I had spent a lot of money on law
books.  I earned that money selling my stories and paintings.  No
one could tell I was disabled from my writing or my painting. 
When they saw me selling my paintings, they assumed someone else
had done them.  Okay, I did sign a few with names like Rembrandt
and Whistler.  A guy has to earn a buck!  And no one was
interested in crip art let alone hiring the handicapped during
the 19th century.  So I earned my money any way I could.  I knew
how to survive.
     I eventually earned enough money to keep my wicker
wheelchair in axil grease and to buy a bunch of law books.
     I'd spend night after night by candlelight reading up on
torts and precedents.  I knew more law than most U.S. Supreme
Court judges, especially that racist S.O.B. U.S. Supreme Court
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who rendered the Dred Scott
decision.  Imagine calling a human being property.  Abe just
shook his head.  He vowed one day to change all that, if he could
scrape up enough money for a few really decent law books.  Well,
guess what.  I gave my entire law library to Abe.  It wasn't any
use to me.  No one would hire a lawyer with a disability back
then.  But Abe asked me to become his law clerk.  I would have,
but it was about that time I was thinking of going to New York.
     I'd heard that there were a lot of employment opportunities
for disabled folk in the New York City.  When I got to the Big
Apple, I learned what "employment opportunities" meant.  This
asshole named Phineas Taylor Barnum was displaying my friends, my
fellow human beings with disabilities, for a few cents!  They
were calling us freaks!
     I asked my extremely tall friend Igor Schultz, who Barnum
called The Aryan Giant, why he had decided to give up his
experiments in aeronautics for the freak show biz.
     Igor sighed and said, "Even though I now know after reading
Leonardo Da Vinci's experiments in lift and wing design that
powered flight is possible, I still can't get a single
bank to lend me research and development funds!  They say they
don't lend money to freaks."
     Then there was Charlie Sherwood Stratton.  A brilliant young
guy.  You, sadly, only know him as General Tom Thumb, one of P.T.
Barnum's "freaks."  
     Charlie Stratton was a guy who could turn a horse-drawn
carriage into a horseless carriage!  How he did it, and at such a
young age, was beyond me.  I think it might have had a lot to do
with what he discovered in his back yard.  Oil.  Even though
Charlie discovered it in the early 1840s, no one paid any
attention to any of Charlie's discoveries.  So in August of 1859
some nondisabled guy in Titusville is said to have discovered
oil.
     But it was Charlie Stratton who figured out a way to build
an internal combustion engine.  He said it could easily power my
wicker wheelchair, not to mention his Shetland pony cart.  But no
one was interested in some "new fangled contraption designed by
some midget freak."  So Charlie fell into a deep depression.  Old
P.T. "came to his rescue."  Phineas T put Charlie on tour.  And
my brilliant inventor friend started working the world-wide
freak-show circuit.  True, Charlie went on to fame and fortune
here in the United States and Europe as a "freak."  But it just
pissed me off that a few decades later some anti-Semitic, racist
creep named Henry Ford discovered Charlie's designs in some
Bridgeport, Connecticut garage sale and ended up claiming
he invented the automobile!  But that's the way it's
always been for disabled folk like us.  In the 19th century we
just never got the opportunity to do great things.  
     So I gave Abe my law books and he applied himself.  I
tutored him nightly by candlelight.  Abe would ask me questions
like, "What's a tort?"  He kept getting it confused with
tart.  I'd explain the difference to him and Abe would say
to me, "You have such a wonderful mind, Clarence."  Then he'd
sigh and shake his head.  "But you are, after all, a cripple."
     Okay.  Abe wasn't perfect.  He, too, was a victim of
the times.  People had weird ideas about us people with
disabilities.  If you ask me it all started with writers like
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  She wrote that dang book
Frankenstein.  I mean, what was that woman thinking?  I
know she and her literati friends used to get a charge out of
telling horror stories every night.  But why create a giant like
my dear friend Igor, who nearly invented a flying machine, and
turn that giant into an evil monster?
     Once Shelley's book was out, a whole bunch of monster tales
started to appear.  People were fascinated by "monsters" like me. 
I told Abe about this and he said, "If they weren't obsessed with
monsters, they'd be obsessed with miscegenation."
     I guess when you get right down to it, sex is what most
people are thinking of.  And they probably wondered how my friend
Charlie, A.K.A., General Tom Thumb, and that sweet Lavinia Warren
(Charlie's beautiful bride) did it...or if they even could do it. 
Well, they could and they did!  Truth is Charlie was only small
in one area.  He had his share of women before he met Lavinia and
achieved fame and fortune as P.T. Barnum's head freak.  Charlie
and I would often laugh about it over a good two-dollar cigar.
     "Old P.T. thinks," Charlie would say, puffing on his big,
fat Cuban, "that Lavinia and I are so cute.  He tried to teach us
about the birds and the bees.  Well, I asked P.T. if he had ever
tried the Upsidedown Bangkok Swinging Yak position.  The old fart
nearly passed out.  He thought I was some fucking midget virgin. 
Get a life!"
     Charlie went on to tell me how, before meeting the lovely
Lavinia, he had nearly married the red-headed owner of the Kansas
City Happy Riding Club, Miss Moll Flanders Jones.  "But my pecker
was too big for her, so she married this wimp named Black Bart or
something.  Go figure."
     I would get depressed over things like that.  But I kept
writing.  One of my writing buddies was Sammy Clemens.  Sam and I
had a lot in common.  We both loved the Mighty Mississippi and
telling tall tales.  Sam once told me that he had modeled Tom
Sawyer and Huck Finn after me.
     "I couldn't make them cripples, however, don't you know,"
Sam said.  "Folks in these here parts are far too unsophisticated
to see the rebel, the dreamer, the adventurer I see in you, my
dear friend."
     Sam felt really bad about not giving Huck or Tom a
disability like mine.  But he knew if he had, no publisher would
ever publish his books.
     "And I wasn't about to turn my best friend into some monster
like that Shelley bitch," Sam confessed.  "You are far too much
of a human being to make me stoop to such fiddle faddle for a few
fucking buck."
     Old Sammy Clemens had a way with words.  I loved the guy. 
Dearly.  I did wish he would have at least given Tom or Huck a
limp.  But no.
     Once again, back to Abe.  Mr. Lincoln, Esq., did well as a
backwoods lawyer.  In fact, he won one famous case thanks to
something I pointed out to him one dark and starry night.
     I loved astronomy.  I had built my own telescope.  Abe and I
would often look at the moons of Jupiter and think about Galileo.
     "That poor schmuck had to renounce the very thing he knew
was true!" said Abe.
     "It was either that or be burned at the stake."
     "He should have stood up for the truth, Clarence!" said Abe. 
"He should have been honest!"
     But then Abe looked at me, and I could see he realized how
he had never asked me to be his law partner.  I was holding my
almanac.  He stopped thinking whatever he was thinking and asked
me what I was doing with the almanac.  I told Abe that that
witness who had testified against his client, Duff Armstrong, had
lied.  There was no way that lying bastard could have seen Duff
murder anyone on the night of the crime.
     "I kinda figured that, Clar," said Abe.  "But how do you
prove such a thing?"
     I showed him the almanac and the phases of the moon for the
night of the murder.  Immediately Abe caught on.
     "Exactly!  There was no moon!  So that son of
a bitch couldn't have seen Duff!" Abe cried, slapping me on the
back.  "You're a genius, Clar!"
     Well, Abe won that case.  Later he met Mary Todd.
     Abe had his doubts about wooing or winning Mary.  He even
backed out of the wedding and wooed this young beauty.  But then
Mary seduced old Abe.  Yep.  Some say she wanted him so much, she
said after they had made love, that she might be pregnant.  So
the next day they married.  And...their son was born nine months
after the wedding!  That's a fact!  So I've often wondered if the
story was true.
     Abe did tell me a few things about Mary.
     "She's...very moody.  But, dang, Clarence, the woman is
great in bed!"
     Abe went on to tell me about how he had gotten his moniker:
"Honest Abe."  This was before his marriage.  Seems he was once
with a lady of the evening that his cousin had "referred" him to
for a little...relaxation.  Abe didn't have the five dollars to
pay the lady.  He confessed this to her before she went down on
the old rail splitter.  She smiled and said, "Most men would have
waited until after I sucked them off to tell me that.  But not
you.  So, Honest Abe, this one's on me."
     "I told her no, Clar.  I couldn't accept a freebee.  So I
put on my britches and left.  I did return, however, with the
full five dollars the following week -- after I got paid by
Georgie Turner for winning his case," Abe assured me.
     Georgie's cow, Bosie, had wandered onto a neighbor's farm
and had eaten some grass.  The owner of that farm sued Georgie. 
Abe sued the fence maker.  The fence maker sued the fence lock
maker.  Everyone eventually sued everyone.  But Abe came out on
top!  The fence lock was faulty and it had allowed the cow to
escape from its pen.
     I was proud to have given Abe the law book How To Sue A
Robber Barron's Corporate Ass.  It helped Abe win the case.
     You all know that Abe eventually became President of the
United States.  What you probably don't know is that that was
mostly the result of his debates with Stephen Douglas and
my help with a few of his speeches.  I told Abe about a quote I
had once read in the Bible: Mark 3:25, "If a house be
divided against itself, it cannot stand."  That did the trick. 
Abe, who had been a virtual unknown before that speech, after it,
rocketed to political super stardom.  His, or Mark's words, were
splashed across every front page on every newspaper in the United
States.  And Abe was elected.  Of course, that nearly destroyed
the Union by starting the Civil War.
     During the war years Abe and I exchanged many letters.  I
once wrote him that it had been fourscore and seven years ago
since our country had been founded.  And I urged him to go to
Gettysburg.  He had been invited to give a speech there.  But
ever since his boys Eddie and Willie had died, Abe had hated
cemeteries.
     Yeah, Abe and I often wrote each other.  None of our letters
survived.  I think they were destroyed because Mary, whom I also
loved, began to write to me about her fears.  If you ask me, her
son Robert discovered those letters and burned them.
     Mary had often confessed to me in her letters that she was
terrified someone would kill Abe.
     "Mr. Lincoln has these terrible nightmares about being dead. 
So do I.  I'm so afraid someone will murder us all, Clarence,"
she'd write. 
     To this day I firmly believe that her only surviving son,
Robert, found my letters.  They were in the same box with the
letters I had written to Abe, all of which, Mary had told me, she
had lovingly saved after Abe was assassinated.  I just know
Robert Todd Lincoln burned them.  He was a corporate New York
insurance guy and didn't want anyone to know his mom and dad were
getting advice from some "uninsurable crippled freak."
     Abe and I talked a lot about depression, freedom,
independence, love, and honesty.  I think Abe learned a lot from
our friendship.  But that's how life is.  "No man is an island
unto himself," as the poet John Donne once wrote.  We can all
learn from each other.  Disabled and nondisabled alike.  We all
have something to contribute.  Abe knew that well.
     When Abe was murdered, I was devastated.  I not only lost a
friend, I lost someone who valued my intelligence.  After Abe
left us, I tried to keep in touch with Mary.  God, that poor
woman needed a friend.  But Robert couldn't deal with our
relationship.  Mary became more and more depressed.  I tried to
see her, but in those days a person with a disability who used a
wheelchair couldn't get into a stage coach.  So I wrote and
telegraphed Mary, but Robert intercepted many of my friendly
missives.  And he destroyed most of them before his mother could
even read them.  I fear, in the end, Mary thought even I had
deserted her, as her children and her dear Abe had.
     Eventually Mary was institutionalized.  Eventually so was I. 
Yes.  Sadly my intelligence wasn't enough to keep me free.  Not
in the 19th Century.  I pray times have changed for us disabled
folk.
     Well, there's my story.  If you're reading this memoir, I'm
overjoyed.  I asked Sammy Clemens to do his best to preserve it
for you, my dear reader.  And I guess Sam did.  I guess most
people would never believe that some "cripple" could have such an
influence on history, as I had.  Most would say it's just some
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.  But then they'd be wrong!  Very wrong! 
And we, my friends with disabilities in the future, hopefully
have gotten others without disabilities to learn that!