The Ouachita Telegraph - Old Gilbert Dies

Date: Aug. 2000
Submitted by: Lora Peppers <lpeppers@ouachita.lib.la.us>

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The Ouachita Telegraph
Friday, June 1, 1877
Page 3, Column 3

OLD GILBERT.
        Old Gilbert, an aged colored man of some local fame, was sitting in his
chair Sunday night, in front of his room (next door to this office) chatting
and laughing, and, seemingly, in excellent health.  His co-renter went off
to church, and when he returned at eleven, old Gilbert was dead.  His wife
from her bed heard the old man breathing hard, went to his relief where he
sat, and found him dying.  Taken to his bed, he soon died, with “Good-by,
Lizzie,” (to his wife,) as his last words.
        Old Gilbert, as we have often had occasion to notice, was not a very common
character.  He was respectful, obliging, industrious, and had no mean idea
of manly dignity.
        His other claims to our notice consisted in his afflictions, and in the
energy and success he exhibited in having surmounted them.  In one eye he
was blind, and he had but one arm.  The loss of an eye gave him, apparently,
no trouble; he would march as straight to the front and walk as upright as
an Indian, and the blind eye seemed to twinkle and shine in laughter almost
as merrily as the good one.
        His right arm was but a stub, but it as no useless, idle stub.  Gilbert was
a fiddler, and no very mean one either, as many lads and lassies about
Monroe, and older toes, too, might attest who have danced many pleasant
hours into the past to the music of old Gilbert’s fiddle.  Perhaps, some
one-armed soldier who, before the war, like Burns’s old friend, could make
his “elbuck jink and diddle,” but has now no supple elbow and no music, save
in his head and heart, left, may be curious to know how this old darkey
managed to draw his bow with only a stump of an arm, such as this same old
Confederate may remember Major General Loring has.  The mechanism may, or
may not have been Gilbert’s invention, but the movement certainly was his.
        To his short stump of an arm old Gilbert had rigged up a frame-work of
small iron rods, so arranged that the fiddle-bow could be secured at the
end, the whole being adjusted so as to be put on, or removed at pleasure.
With this simple contrivance, the bow could be made to oscillate with all
the rapidity necessary in the fastest jig or fiercest puncheon-floor
break-down ever fiddler fiddled.
        Gilbert was also an expert woodchopper, missing his kerf but seldom and
cutting a chord of wood for burning in such time as enabled him at least to
make a living.  But Gilbert tired of land and pole axe, and took to fishing
with a trot line in the rive, in which one has need of a skiff and of the
knowledge and skill necessary to use it.  Swimmer, or not, the old darkey
set his lines in water forty feet deep at places and tended them punctually
in his skiff, taking off fish and re-baiting his hooks, in spite of wind and
weather, and managing his skiff, sitting amidships, with one arm, better
than the writer can with two.  His adroitness in this business may have
passed unobserved, save by a few, but it is, nevertheless, no small
achievement for a man with but one arm to accomplish, successfully, that
which will puzzle most full-armed oarsmen to do without considerable
practice.
        But Gilbert’s fishing venture did not prove lucrative, and, we believe,
like many others who have courted and cajoled the fishes and got no bites,
he reeled his lines and betook himself to some other calling, exactly what
we do not know, except that he devoted his head to the business of carrying
clothes for his dusky spouse, a colored woman who takes in washing, and
survives to wonder, perhaps, if there was not some way and means by which
that large basket of clothes could not have been moved about with calling
into requisition the head of her old one-armed devoted husband.
        Good-by, Gilbert!

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