PART TWO
When I returned to pick up my repaired violin I took him a bag of homemade oatmeal cookies and we ate them together, sitting near the welcome warmth of his Round Oak stove. We became friends that day, and I returned often thereafter to talk with him and to play the many pianos and organs that filled the storage loft which adjoined his workshop.

Now, with the wind howling outside and snow and sleet hissing against the windowpanes, Mr. Allen stared at me, his eyes filled with dismay. "Why, I thought everyone knew about Blind Boone. He was the greatest pianist who ever lived! Played classical music the first half of a concert. Then he'd say, 'Now we'll put the cookies on the lower shelf where everyone can reach them', and he'd play his own arrangements of Negro spirituals and camp meeting songs and popular songs and ragtime. You should have seen him in his prime, the way he'd sway back and forth at the keyboard, his hands just a blur! You never heard such music!"

"Tell me about him," I said.

Mr. Allen faded blue eyes probed the past. "I didn't get to know Boone personally until he was already famous, although we both grew up in this area. He was born in a Union army camp near Miami, Missouri, where his father was a bugler and his mother was a cook. She'd once been a slave to some of Daniel Boone's people in Kentucky, but she'd run away and made it to Missouri. Boone was six months old when he got brain fever and almost died. His eyes became so infected that the doctor took his eyes out and sewed the eyelids shut."

I shuddered at the thought.

"His mother had taken him to Warrensburg by then, where she worked as a cook and cleaning woman for the white people," Mr. Allen went on. "She taught her blind boy early on how to get around, and he became friends with a lot of people in town, young and old. He was musical right from the start. When he was only three years old he used to make up his own songs and beat out the rhythms on a pan lid. Soon he was playing a tin whistle, a toy flute, a harmonica, anything for music. Turned out he had an amazing ear. He'd listen to the white children playing the piano in the homes where his mother worked, and he'd then sit down and play their pieces all the way through, even though he'd only heard them once. When he was maybe six or seven, he taught other children to play whistles and harmonicas and formed his own band. He told me about it later, how they used to play on street-corners and get pennies from the people."

That was my introduction to Blind Boone. During later visits with Mr. Allen I heard more stories about Boone, and I started taking notes.