A Sorrow So Deep

In the great president’s eyes,

I recognized at once what we both shared

- Elizabeth Sherrill

It was my grandfather who gave me a lifelong love of Abraham Lincoln, one that was to help me in a way he could never have imagined. As a boy of seven, Grandfather had seen the funeral train carrying Lincoln’s body home to Springfield, Illinois. From that moment, sobbing by the tracks, he’d taken Lincoln as the model for his own life of battling injustice.

I was seven when Grandfather gave me my first book about Lincoln. In Abraham Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy, I read about the son of a near-illiterate farmer, walking miles through the snow to borrow a book. Straining his eyes to read by firelight because he had to work in the fields in the daytime. Starting to write and getting whipped when his father caught him “scribbling” instead of feeding the pigs. Lincoln went right on writing. This determined boy became my model too. I started writing, and when I had to stop to set the dinner table I was sure Lincoln would have understood my feelings.

At eight, I went to a new school. I remember going for the first time to its library, much bigger than the one in my old school, with quiet signs on the tables and portraits on the walls. Over the librarian’s desk was a color photograph of the president, Franklin Roosevelt, seated at his desk. On the right wall was a painting of George Washington standing by a cannon; on the left was one of Thomas Jefferson, holding the Declaration of Independence.

But it was the picture over the door, when I turned to leave with my new library card, that stopped me. It was a photograph, this one black-and-white: a tall, thin man with his hand on a table and with the saddest, most pain-filled face I’d ever seen.