Inoculation

This poem begins a story about Cotton Mather. I looked him and found he was a very influential New England Puritan minister. He was also a writer and was known for his neutral, unbiased perspective. In this poem, he is speaking to his slave, Onesimus, which means profitable and helpful. When asked by Cotton Mather if he has ever had the smallpox, he replies, "Yes and No." Cotton Mather ponders how "a man can take inside all manner of disease and still survive." Seeing as Mather was a minister, this is also an allusion to sin in the world and it references how corrupt we can be, but still go to heaven. The third quotation in this blog is interesting. Rather than putting it in quotes as she did the first two, Susan Donnelly chooses to italicize it. Onesimus replies to Mather saying, "My mother bore me in southern wild. She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave." This quote is filled with irony. Onesimus had escaped one bondage only to be enslaved another. The sarcasm you can hear is this quote is very clear, and Susan Donnelly did a good job making it stand apart from the rest of the poem by italicizing it. This shows a slight amount of hypocrisy in Cotton Mathers. Here he is, a Puritan minister, teacher citizens to cleanse themselves of sin and disease, yet he believes it's ok to keep a slave and rob him of his God-given freedom. hmmm....

A possible antecedent scenario could be that Susan just finished reading about or watching a documentary on Cotton Mathers and decided she felt he was a little hypocritical in his teachers. this poem definitely could have been a reflection of her own opinions of Mathers.