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Samson d'Arnault

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Also referred to as "Blind d'Arnault," he is a blind Black pianist who plays a concert at the Black Hawk, Nebraska, Opera House, followed by a dance at the Boys’ Home in Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Ántonia.

Cather gives a brief sketch of his history in Book 2, chapter 7 of the novel. He was born "in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted" and went blind after an illness when he was three. At six, he snuck into the plantation house to touch the piano, which he had heard through the window. The mistress catches him, but allows him to continue to learn music.

As a very young child he could repeat, after a fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any finish. He was always a Negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully. As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses—that not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro enjoying himself as only a Negro can. It was as if all the agreeable sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those black-and-white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them through his yellow fingers.

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