The Man Who Played You Back

Thomas Wiggins was born into slavery in 1849, blind and, by every available account, autistic. None of this prevented him from becoming the highest-paid pianist in nineteenth-century America. By his teens he had memorized roughly 7,000 pieces of music. His working vocabulary was around 100 words.

He did not merely learn music. He absorbed people.

Concert promoters loved to stage challenges: a pianist from the audience would play something obscure, and Tom would reproduce it on the spot. But Tom did not just reproduce the notes. He reproduced the mistakes. If a challenger stumbled on a phrase, Tom stumbled on the same phrase, in the same way, with the same hesitation. He was not playing the piece correctly. He was playing the person correctly.

Georgia Routt tried to outfox him. At the Macon Opera House, she played her challenge piece with her left hand only, tucking her right hand behind her back. Tom nearly shoved her off the bench. He sat down and played the piece with his right hand behind his back. He had mirrored not just her music but her body. Nobody asked him to. One imagines the silence in that theater lasted quite a while. Routt later said she was so frightened she left at once.

He never controlled a dollar of the fortune he earned. But the piano was his, and everyone who sat at it became his material.

Tom played it all back.