My Encounter with Lincoln

[Sebastiao Albano]

My interest in Lincoln began in 1956, when I was 12.
My father died when I was 4 and my mother, with her three kids, went to live at our granny's house. In spite of being a big old house, it was a little far from downtown and we were poor. My grandfather, grandmother, my grandmother's sister, two of my mother's brothers, and now there were we, the four newcomers.
I grew up a barefoot boy until 1951, when I went to school.
At that time I had to help my family with all the chores. I had to cut wood for my grandma's stove. I had to bring drinkable water from the spring almost half a mile away from home. I helped my uncles to build fences in the big backyard and a lot of other chores. But at free time I liked to read. I learned with granny. She was always reading newspapers and had some books at home. Most of them were religious books but I liked to read them anyway. Besides reading, I liked to play soccer with other boys of the street, and swim and fish in a brook near our house.
This same year my mother began to work as a cleaning person in the big old school downtown. She had to work to raise her three kids. Besides cleaning she had to prepare lunch for the students. The lunch was a vegetable soup, sometimes with pieces of meat, but not always, onion, tomato and other vegetables. After 5 p.m. she and three other women, had a lot of classrooms to sweep. Then every afternoon I went there to help her with the cleaning.
Under the big building there was a large basement and I always wanted to enter there to explore it but my mother never allowed me to do that. However, one day, after having swept my classrooms I found the basement door open and without my mother's consent I began my exploration. I went up to the last room on the west side, not without a certain fear because it was dark, and there I found a bookshelf with several big black books covered with dust. I picked up one, went near the little window in the thick wall, and opened it. I opened exactly in a full page photograph of a man's face. It was a dark, shaved, thin face. That face caught my attention and I read the name at the foot of the page, written in Portuguese: Abraão Lincoln.
At this very moment my mother was screaming from the basement door. I put the book back in its place and ran to the door where my mother scolded me for quite a while and made me promise that I would never enter the basement again. She said me that in that basement there were cockroaches, spiders and scorpions, and that I was never allowed to return there.
But that photograph and that name remained on my mind. On the way home I asked she who Abrãao Lincoln was. She was angry with me yet and answered with a simple "I don't know!" In fact she did not know. At home I asked my uncle who Abraão Lincoln was and he replied: "I don't know, but you can ask your granny. She is always reading the newspapers and perhaps she knows."
Granny only knew that he had been president of the United States. I was eager to lean more but she said:
" Oh, boy! You always want to know too much! I don't know. Isn't it enough to know he was an American president?"
" No!", I yelled, "I want to know more." And at this very moment I was scolded again, this time by my uncle who was entering my granny's room.
However, uncle Geraldo had a heart this big, and at one of his trips to São Paulo, the capital of our state, he bought me a Lincoln biography, written for children, and in Portuguese, of course. I passed some days reading the book and when I discovered that Lincoln had done all the chores I had to do every day, I never stopped reading about that man. And then I established two to fulfill: I would learn English and one day I would go to the USA to know all the things I had read about Lincoln.
In 1979, when I was 35, I fulfilled that old dream. I visited Chicago and Springfield. Unfortunatelly I did not have the chance to see everything I wanted because of the lack of time and money, but I intend to return there some day. Maybe for the inauguration of the new Lincoln Museum / Library next year.
Today, 46 years later, I don't remember the name of that first book any more, but as time went by I began to buy every book I could find here in Brazil about that great man. It was a hard work to find a book on the subject here, and in all these years I could get a dozen of them, but now, thanks to the Internet I have made friends in the USA and some of them have sent me several books. And some I buy via Internet too.
Now I can say I'm really learning about Abraham Lincoln.