by Vincent Edwards
IN THE High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, there are two beautiful silhouettes which are the work of a young artist, Joseph Cranston Jones. When he was only two years old, he became a victim of a disease of the spine which was so crippling that he had to lie in bed or in a chair all the time.
When Joe was six years old, a circus came to his hometown of Augusta. A brother held him up to the window to see the parade. Joe missed nothing. Every animal registered upon his sensitive brain as on a photographer's lens. He observed them all--the lion, the tiger, the bear, the elephant, and all the rest.
Not long afterward he asked his mother for a pair of scissors and some paper. She gave him her small embroidery scissors. Then Joe went to work. One by one, he cut from the paper the shapes of all the animals he had seen in the parade. He showed them with their lithe, vivid forms, and he arranged them in the same order in which they had marched down the street past his home.
Mrs. Jones was quite amazed. She had never dreamed that her bedridden son had all that talent. From that day on, Joe never lacked for a way to pass the dull hours he had to spend in bed.
When he was fourteen, he was taken to the Scottish Rite Hospital in Atlanta. Doctors thought they might find some way to relieve his malady. There he lay for a whole year in a brace, in one fixed, unchanged position. But never for a moment did he give up cutting out his silhouettes. When he held his hands up to cut, bits of paper would drop down in his face, but Joe brushed them away and kept right on.
Everyone who saw Joe's work greatly admired it. They had never seen such delicate tracery of landscapes or such vivid representation of moving figures. Joe's friends thought he might be helped by special instruction. But when teachers came, they said he already knew more than they could teach him. In his line he was a genius!
When the boy's silhouettes were sent out to magazines, editors were only too glad to use them--and they asked for more. Those beautiful designs were even printed in England.
After a while, Joe had enough money from his silhouettes to buy a home in Augusta for his mother and sister and brother. He even bought a small car with a special brace for his back. He now could be driven out to the woods to watch the animals and to study them.
The next year he was asked to illustrate a famous book of fairy tales. But now at last Joe knew it was too late--the incurable disease had overcome him. He was only twenty-one when he died.
Before he passed away, however, Joe expressed in the following poem his invincible spirit:
A Pine's Thanksgiving
Master of all creation--
hear me in my thanksgiving!
I thank Thee for the strength
Thou gavest me when
As a sapling I cracked the rocks
that bound me.
I thank Thee that though in earthly
weakness I bent and
mourned before
The storms of years, none of them
have broken me.
For it all I thank Thee, Master!
For mine is the strength of rocks
and storms I have conquered;
And the mountains speak to me
of Thy power, and the ocean
breathes--Eternity.
i guess the answer to that question: when is a man beaten?
is.. when the man gives up
