Inoculation by Susan Donnelly

Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,

instead of sin.  Boston was rife with it.

Not being ill himself, thank Providence,

but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,

if he’d ever had the pox.  To which Onesimus replied,

“Yes and No.”  Not insubordinate

or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps

musing, as one saying to another:

“Consider how a man

can take inside all manner of disease

and still survive.”

Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:

My mother bore me in the southern wild.

She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived

to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.

           

This is such a rich poem. It is hilarious. But maybe I see that because I find satire and irony funny. And this poem is full of it. It seems every two lines or so, there is a spike that jabs at the point of life, and poor Cotton Mather is at the tail end of every joke. However, perhaps the most ironic point about it, and the subject of the poem, is the slave Onesimus. Biblically, Onesimus was a slave that ran away from his master, and encountered and became good friends with Paul the Apostle. Why he becomes worth notice in the Bible is because he becomes “useful” to Paul and the early Church. Here is the quote that mentions him.

“Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me.” Philemon 1:8-10

The ironic thing is that in Greek, onesimus means useful. So ‘formerly Useful was useless to you, but now Useful has become useful to you and to me.’ This is all meant to illustrate the fact that Onesimus to Mather was all that his name implied: Useful. It’s the end that brings this home, to be freed young only to become a ‘useful’ slave, and becoming an example to free others.