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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue

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Title: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue

Author: Various


        
Release date: June 29, 2008 [eBook #206]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/206

Credits: Produced by Judith Boss, John Hamm and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY, 1995, MEMORIAL ISSUE ***




Produced by Judith Boss and John Hamm





THE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY, 1995, MEMORIAL ISSUE.

By Various

Edited and Assembled by Judith Boss and  John Hamm



Table of Contents -----------------

     Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl.............Harriet Beecher Stowe
     Reconstruction................................Frederick Douglass
     An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage..Frederick Douglas
     The Negro Exodus..............................James B. Runnion
     My Escape from Slavery........................Frederick Douglass
     The Goophered Grapevine.......................Charles W. Chesnutt
     Po' Sandy.....................................Charles W. Chesnutt
     Dave's Neckliss...............................Charles W. Chesnutt
     The Awakening of the Negro....................Booker T. Washington
     The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin................Charles Dudley Warner
     Strivings of the Negro People.................W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
     The Wife of his Youth.........................Charles W. Chesnutt
     The Bouquet...................................Charles W. Chesnutt
     The Case of the Negro.........................Booker T. Washington
     Hot-Foot Hannibal.............................Charles W. Chesnutt
     A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South.........W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
     The Capture of a Slaver.......................J. Taylor Wood
     Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories.............W. D. Howells
     Paths of Hope for the Negro
     Practical Suggestions of a Southerner.........Jerome Dowd
     Signs of Progress Among the Negroes...........Booker T. Washington
     The March of Progress.........................Charles W. Chesnutt
     The Freedmen's Bureau.........................W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
     Of the Training of Black Men..................W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
     The Fruits of Industrial Training.............Booker T. Washington
     The Negro in the Regular Army.................Oswald Garrison Villard
     Baxter's Procrustes...........................Charles W. Chesnutt
     The Heart of the Race Problem.................Quincy Ewing
     Negro Suffrage in a Democracy.................Ray Stannard Baker

     Bibliography of Sources





SOJOURNER TRUTH, THE LIBYAN SIBYL by Harriet Beecher Stowe


Many years ago, the few readers of radical Abolitionist papers must
often have seen the singular name of Sojourner Truth, announced as a
frequent speaker at Anti-Slavery meetings, and as travelling on a
sort of self-appointed agency through the country. I had myself often
remarked the name, but never met the individual. On one occasion, when
our house was filled with company, several eminent clergymen being our
guests, notice was brought up to me that Sojourner Truth was below, and
requested an interview. Knowing nothing of her but her singular name, I
went down, prepared to make the interview short, as the pressure of many
other engagements demanded.

When I went into the room, a tall, spare form arose to meet me. She was
evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many
hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which
in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone as
Cumberworth's celebrated statuette of the Negro Woman at the Fountain.
Indeed, she so strongly reminded me of that figure, that, when I recall
the events of her life, as she narrated them to me, I imagine her as a
living, breathing impersonation of that work of art.

I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had
more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence
than this woman. In the modern Spiritualistic phraseology, she would
be described as having a strong sphere. Her tall form, as she rose up
before me, is still vivid to my mind. She was dressed in some stout,
grayish stuff, neat and clean, though dusty from travel. On her head,
she wore a bright Madras handkerchief, arranged as a turban, after
the manner of her race. She seemed perfectly self-possessed and at her
ease,--in fact, there was almost an unconscious superiority, not unmixed
with a solemn twinkle of humor, in the odd, composed manner in which she
looked down on me. Her whole air had at times a gloomy sort of drollery
which impressed one strangely.

"So this is YOU," she said.

"Yes," I answered.

"Well, honey, de Lord bless ye! I jes' thought I'd like to come an' have
a look at ye. You's heerd o' me, I reckon?" she added.

"Yes, I think I have. You go about lecturing, do you not?"

"Yes, honey, that's what I do. The Lord has made me a sign unto this
nation, an' I go round a'testifyin', an' showin' on 'em their sins agin
my people."

So saying, she took a seat, and, stooping over and crossing her arms
on her knees, she looked down on the floor, and appeared to fall into a
sort of reverie. Her great gloomy eyes and her dark face seemed to work
with some undercurrent of feeling; she sighed deeply, and occasionally
broke out,--

"O Lord! O Lord! Oh, the tears, an' the groans, an' the moans! O Lord!"

I should have said that she was accompanied by a little grandson of ten
years,--the fattest, jolliest woolly-headed little specimen of Africa
that one can imagine. He was grinning and showing his glistening white
teeth in a state of perpetual merriment, and at this moment broke out
into an audible giggle, which disturbed the reverie into which his
relative was falling.

She looked at him with an indulgent sadness, and then at me.

"Laws, Ma'am, HE don't know nothin' about it--HE don't. Why, I've
seen them poor critters, beat an' 'bused an' hunted, brought in all
torn,--ears hangin' all in rags, where the dogs been a'bitin' of 'em!"

This set off our little African Puck into another giggle, in which he
seemed perfectly convulsed.

She surveyed him soberly, without the slightest irritation.

"Well, you may bless the Lord you CAN laugh; but I tell you, 't wa'n't
no laughin' matter."

By this time I thought her manner so original that it might be worth
while to call down my friends; and she seemed perfectly well pleased
with the idea. An audience was what she wanted,--it mattered not whether
high or low, learned or ignorant. She had things to say, and was ready
to say them at all times, and to any one.

I called down Dr. Beecher, Professor Allen, and two or three other
clergymen, who, together with my husband and family, made a roomful. No
princess could have received a drawing-room with more composed dignity
than Sojourner her audience. She stood among them, calm and erect, as
one of her own native palm-trees waving alone in the desert. I presented
one after another to her, and at last said,--

"Sojourner, this is Dr. Beecher. He is a very celebrated preacher."

"IS he?" she said, offering her hand in a condescending manner, and
looking down on his white head. "Ye dear lamb, I'm glad to see ye! De
Lord bless ye! I loves preachers. I'm a kind o' preacher myself."

"You are?" said Dr. Beecher. "Do you preach from the Bible?"

"No, honey, can't preach from de Bible,--can't read a letter."

"Why, Sojourner, what do you preach from, then?"

Her answer was given with a solemn power of voice, peculiar to herself,
that hushed every one in the room.

"When I preaches, I has jest one text to preach from, an' I always
preaches from this one. MY text is, 'WHEN I FOUND JESUS.'"

"Well, you couldn't have a better one," said one of the ministers.

She paid no attention to him, but stood and seemed swelling with her own
thoughts, and then began this narration:--

"Well, now, I'll jest have to go back, an' tell ye all about it. Ye see,
we was all brought over from Africa, father an' mother an' I, an' a lot
more of us; an' we was sold up an' down, an' hither an' yon; an' I can
'member, when I was a little thing, not bigger than this 'ere," pointing
to her grandson, "how my ole mammy would sit out o' doors in the
evenin', an' look up at the stars an' groan. She'd groan an' groan, an'
says I to her,--

"'Mammy, what makes you groan so?'

"an' she'd say,--

"'Matter enough, chile! I'm groanin' to think o' my poor children: they
don't know where I be, an' I don't know where they be; they looks up at
the stars, an' I looks up at the stars, but I can't tell where they be.

"'Now,' she said, 'chile, when you're grown up, you may be sold away
from your mother an' all your ole friends, an' have great troubles come
on ye; an' when you has these troubles come on ye, ye jes' go to God,
an' He'll help ye.'

"An' says I to her,--

"'Who is God, anyhow, mammy?'

"An' says she,--

"'Why, chile, you jes' look up DAR! It's Him that made all DEM!"

"Well, I didn't mind much 'bout God in them days. I grew up pretty
lively an' strong, an' could row a boat, or ride a horse, or work round,
an' do 'most anything.

"At last I got sold away to a real hard massa an' missis. Oh, I tell
you, they WAS hard! 'Peared like I couldn't please 'em, nohow. An' then
I thought o' what my old mammy told me about God; an' I thought I'd got
into trouble, sure enough, an' I wanted to find God, an' I heerd some
one tell a story about a man that met God on a threshin'-floor, an' I
thought, 'Well an' good, I'll have a threshin'-floor, too.' So I went
down in the lot, an' I threshed down a place real hard, an' I used to go
down there every day, an' pray an' cry with all my might, a-prayin' to
the Lord to make my massa an' missis better, but it didn't seem to do no
good; an' so says I, one day,--

"'O God, I been a-askin' ye, an' askin' ye, an' askin' ye, for all this
long time, to make my massa an' missis better, an' you don't do it, an'
what CAN be the reason? Why, maybe you CAN'T. Well, I shouldn't wonder
ef you couldn't. Well, now, I tell you, I'll make a bargain with you.
Ef you'll help me to git away from my massa an' missis, I'll agree to
be good; but ef you don't help me, I really don't think I can be. Now,'
says I, 'I want to git away; but the trouble's jest here: ef I try to
git away in the night, I can't see; an' ef I try to git away in the
daytime, they'll see me, an' be after me.'

"Then the Lord said to me, 'Git up two or three hours afore daylight,
an' start off.'

"An' says I, 'Thank 'ee, Lord! that's a good thought.'

"So up I got, about three o'clock in the mornin', an' I started an'
travelled pretty fast, till, when the sun rose, I was clear away from
our place an' our folks, an' out o' sight. An' then I begun to think I
didn't know nothin' where to go. So I kneeled down, and says I,--

"'Well, Lord, you've started me out, an' now please to show me where to
go.'

"Then the Lord made a house appear to me, an' He said to me that I was
to walk on till I saw that house, an' then go in an' ask the people to
take me. An' I travelled all day, an' didn't come to the house till
late at night; but when I saw it, sure enough, I went in, an' I told the
folks that the Lord sent me; an' they was Quakers, an' real kind they
was to me. They jes' took me in, an' did for me as kind as ef I'd been
one of 'em; an' after they'd giv me supper, they took me into a room
where there was a great, tall, white bed; an' they told me to sleep
there. Well, honey, I was kind o' skeered when they left me alone with
that great white bed; 'cause I never had been in a bed in my life. It
never came into my mind they could mean me to sleep in it. An' so I jes'
camped down under it, on the floor, an' then I slep' pretty well. In the
mornin', when they came in, they asked me ef I hadn't been asleep; an' I
said, 'Yes, I never slep' better.' An' they said, 'Why, you haven't been
in the bed!' An' says I, 'Laws, you didn't think o' such a thing as my
sleepin' in dat 'ar' BED, did you? I never heerd o' such a thing in my
life.'

"Well, ye see, honey, I stayed an' lived with 'em. An' now jes' look
here: instead o' keepin' my promise an' bein' good, as I told the Lord
I would, jest as soon as everything got a'goin' easy, I FORGOT ALL ABOUT
GOD.

"Pretty well don't need no help; an' I gin up prayin.' I lived there two
or three years, an' then the slaves in New York were all set free, an'
ole massa came to our home to make a visit, an' he asked me ef I didn't
want to go back an' see the folks on the ole place. An' I told him I
did. So he said, ef I'd jes' git into the wagon with him, he'd carry me
over. Well, jest as I was goin' out to git into the wagon, I MET GOD!
an' says I, 'O God, I didn't know as you was so great!' An' I turned
right round an' come into the house, an' set down in my room; for 't was
God all around me. I could feel it burnin', burnin', burnin' all around
me, an' goin' through me; an' I saw I was so wicked, it seemed as ef it
would burn me up. An' I said, 'O somebody, somebody, stand between God
an' me! for it burns me!' Then, honey, when I said so, I felt as it
were somethin' like an amberill [umbrella] that came between me an' the
light, an' I felt it was SOMEBODY,--somebody that stood between me an'
God; an' it felt cool, like a shade; an' says I, 'Who's this that stands
between me an' God? Is it old Cato?' He was a pious old preacher; but
then I seemed to see Cato in the light, an' he was all polluted an'
vile, like me; an' I said, 'Is it old Sally?' an' then I saw her, an'
she seemed jes' so. An' then says I, 'WHO is this?' An' then, honey, for
a while it was like the sun shinin' in a pail o' water, when it moves up
an' down; for I begun to feel 't was somebody that loved me; an' I tried
to know him. An' I said, 'I know you! I know you! I know you!'--an' then
I said, 'I don't know you! I don't know you! I don't know you!' An' when
I said, 'I know you, I know you,' the light came; an' when I said, 'I
don't know you, I don't know you,' it went, jes' like the sun in a
pail o' water. An' finally somethin' spoke out in me an' said, 'THIS IS
JESUS!' An' I spoke out with all my might, an' says I, 'THIS IS JESUS!
Glory be to God!' An' then the whole world grew bright, an' the trees
they waved an' waved in glory, an' every little bit o' stone on the
ground shone like glass; an' I shouted an' said, 'Praise, praise, praise
to the Lord!' An' I begun to feel such a love in my soul as I never felt
before,--love to all creatures. An' then, all of a sudden, it stopped,
an' I said, 'Dar's de white folks, that have abused you an' beat you an'
abused your people,--think o' them!' But then there came another rush
of love through my soul, an' I cried out loud,--'Lord, Lord, I can love
EVEN DE WHITE FOLKS!'

"Honey, I jes' walked round an' round in a dream. Jesus loved me! I
knowed it,--I felt it. Jesus was my Jesus. Jesus would love me always. I
didn't dare tell nobody; 't was a great secret. Everything had been got
away from me that I ever had; an' I thought that ef I let white folks
know about this, maybe they'd get HIM away,--so I said, 'I'll keep this
close. I won't let any one know.'"

"But, Sojourner, had you never been told about Jesus Christ?"

"No, honey. I hadn't heerd no preachin',--been to no meetin'. Nobody
hadn't told me. I'd kind o' heerd of Jesus, but thought he was like
Gineral Lafayette, or some o' them. But one night there was a Methodist
meetin' somewhere in our parts, an' I went; an' they got up an' begun
for to tell der 'speriences; an' de fust one begun to speak. I started,
'cause he told about Jesus. 'Why,' says I to myself, 'dat man's found
him, too!' An' another got up an' spoke, an I said, 'He's found him,
too!' An' finally I said, 'Why, they all know him!' I was so happy! An'
then they sung this hymn": (Here Sojourner sang, in a strange, cracked
voice, but evidently with all her soul and might, mispronouncing the
English, but seeming to derive as much elevation and comfort from bad
English as from good):--


     'There is a holy city,
       A world of light above,
      Above the stairs and regions,*
       Built by the God of Love.

     "An Everlasting temple,
       And saints arrayed in white
      There serve their great Redeemer
       And dwell with him in light.

     "The meanest child of glory
       Outshines the radiant sun;
      But who can speak the splendor
       Of Jesus on his throne?

     "Is this the man of sorrows
       Who stood at Pilate's bar,
      Condemned by haughty Herod
       And by his men of war?

     "He seems a mighty conqueror,
       Who spoiled the powers below,
      And ransomed many captives
       From everlasting woe.

     "The hosts of saints around him
       Proclaim his work of grace,
      The patriarchs and prophets,
       And all the godly race,

     "Who speak of fiery trials
       And tortures on their way;
      They came from tribulation
       To everlasting day.

     "And what shall be my journey,
       How long I'll stay below,
      Or what shall be my trials,
       Are not for me to know.

     "In every day of trouble
       I'll raise my thoughts on high,
      I'll think of that bright temple
       And crowns above the sky."

   * Starry regions.


I put in this whole hymn, because Sojourner, carried away with her own
feeling, sang it from beginning to end with a triumphant energy that
held the whole circle around her intently listening. She sang with
the strong barbaric accent of the native African, and with those
indescribable upward turns and those deep gutturals which give such a
wild, peculiar power to the negro singing,--but above all, with such an
overwhelming energy of personal appropriation that the hymn seemed to
be fused in the furnace of her feelings and come out recrystallized as a
production of her own.

It is said that Rachel was wont to chant the "Marseillaise" in a manner
that made her seem, for the time, the very spirit and impersonation of
the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic
oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to
impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations,
but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred
hands towards the glory to be revealed.

"Well, den ye see, after a while, I thought I'd go back an' see de folks
on de ole place. Well, you know, de law had passed dat de culled folks
was all free; an' my old missis, she had a daughter married about dis
time who went to live in Alabama,--an' what did she do but give her my
son, a boy about de age of dis yer, for her to take down to Alabama?
When I got back to de ole place, they told me about it, an' I went right
up to see ole missis, an' says I,--

"'Missis, have you been an' sent my son away down to Alabama?'

"'Yes, I have,' says she; 'he's gone to live with your young missis.'

"'Oh, Missis,' says I, 'how could you do it?'

"'Poh!' says she, 'what a fuss you make about a little nigger! Got more
of 'em now than you know what to do with.'

"I tell you, I stretched up. I felt as tall as the world!

"'Missis,' says I, 'I'LL HAVE MY SON BACK AGIN!'

"She laughed.

"'YOU will, you nigger? How you goin' to do it? You ha'n't got no
money."

"'No, Missis,--but GOD has,--an' you'll see He'll help me!'--an' I
turned round an' went out.

"Oh, but I WAS angry to have her speak to me so haughty an' so scornful,
as ef my chile wasn't worth anything. I said to God, 'O Lord, render
unto her double!' It was a dreadful prayer, an' I didn't know how true
it would come.

"Well, I didn't rightly know which way to turn; but I went to the Lord,
an' I said to Him, 'O Lord, ef I was as rich as you be, an' you was as
poor as I be, I'd help you,--you KNOW I would; and, oh, do help me!' An'
I felt sure then that He would.

"Well, I talked with people, an' they said I must git the case before
a grand jury. So I went into the town when they was holdin' a court, to
see ef I could find any grand jury. An' I stood round the
court-house, an' when they was a-comin' out, I walked right up to the
grandest-lookin' one I could see, an' says I to him,--

"'Sir, be you a grand jury?'

"An' then he wanted to know why I asked, an' I told him all about it;
an' he asked me all sorts of questions, an' finally he says to me,--

"'I think, ef you pay me ten dollars, that I'd agree to git your son for
you.' An' says he, pointin' to a house over the way, 'You go 'long an'
tell your story to the folks in that house, an' I guess they'll give you
the money.'

"Well, I went, an' I told them, an' they gave me twenty dollars; an'
then I thought to myself, 'Ef ten dollars will git him, twenty dollars
will git him SARTIN.' So I carried it to the man all out, an' said,--

"'Take it all,--only be sure an' git him.'

"Well, finally they got the boy brought back; an' then they tried to
frighten him, an' to make him say that I wasn't his mammy, an' that he
didn't know me; but they couldn't make it out. They gave him to me,
an' I took him an' carried him home; an' when I came to take off his
clothes, there was his poor little back all covered with scars an' hard
lumps, where they'd flogged him.

"Well, you see, honey, I told you how I prayed the Lord to render unto
her double. Well, it came true; for I was up at ole missis' house not
long after, an' I heerd 'em readin' a letter to her how her daughter's
husband had murdered her,--how he'd thrown her down an' stamped the life
out of her, when he was in liquor; an' my ole missis, she giv a screech,
an' fell flat on the floor. Then says I, 'O Lord, I didn't mean all
that! You took me up too quick.'

"Well, I went in an' tended that poor critter all night. She was out of
her mind,--a-cryin', an' callin' for her daughter; an' I held her poor
ole head on my arm, an' watched for her as ef she'd been my babby. An'
I watched by her, an' took care on her all through her sickness after
that, an' she died in my arms, poor thing!"

"Well, Sojourner, did you always go by this name?"

"No, 'deed! My name was Isabella; but when I left the house of bondage,
I left everything behind. I wa'n't goin' to keep nothin' of Egypt on me,
an' so I went to the Lord an' asked Him to give me a new name. And the
Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an' down the land,
showin' the people their sins, an' bein' a sign unto them. Afterwards
I told the Lord I wanted another name, 'cause everybody else had two
names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to
the people.

"Ye see some ladies have given me a white satin banner," she said,
pulling out of her pocket and unfolding a white banner, printed with
many texts, such as, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof," and others of like nature. "Well," she said,
"I journeys round to camp-meetins, an' wherever folks is, an' I sets up
my banner, an' then I sings, an' then folks always comes up round me,
an' then I preaches to 'em. I tells 'em about Jesus, an' I tells 'em
about the sins of this people. A great many always comes to hear me; an'
they're right good to me, too, an' say they want to hear me agin."

We all thought it likely; and as the company left her, they shook hands
with her, and thanked her for her very original sermon; and one of the
ministers was overheard to say to another, "There's more of the gospel
in that story than in most sermons."

Sojourner stayed several days with us, a welcome guest. Her conversation
was so strong, simple, shrewd, and with such a droll flavoring of humor,
that the Professor was wont to say of an evening, "Come, I am dull,
can't you get Sojourner up here to talk a little?" She would come up
into the parlor, and sit among pictures and ornaments, in her simple
stuff gown, with her heavy travelling-shoes, the central object of
attention both to parents and children, always ready to talk or to sing,
and putting into the common flow of conversation the keen edge of some
shrewd remark.

"Sojourner, what do you think of Women's Rights?"

"Well, honey, I's ben to der meetins, an' harked a good deal. Dey wanted
me for to speak. So I got up. Says I,--'Sisters, I a'n't clear what
you'd be after. Ef women want any rights more 'n dey's got, why don't
dey jes' TAKE 'EM, an' not be talkin' about it?' Some on 'em came round
me, an' asked why I didn't wear Bloomers. An' I told 'em I had Bloomers
enough when I was in bondage. You see," she said, "dey used to weave
what dey called nigger-cloth, an' each one of us got jes' sech a strip,
an' had to wear it width-wise. Them that was short got along pretty
well, but as for me"--She gave an indescribably droll glance at her long
limbs and then at us, and added,--"Tell YOU, I had enough of Bloomers in
them days."

Sojourner then proceeded to give her views of the relative capacity of
the sexes, in her own way.

"S'pose a man's mind holds a quart, an' a woman's don't hold but a pint;
ef her pint is FULL, it's as good as his quart."

Sojourner was fond of singing an extraordinary lyric, commencing,--


   "I'm on my way to Canada,
     That cold, but happy land;
    The dire effects of Slavery
     I can no longer stand.
    O righteous Father,
     Do look down on me,
    And help me on to Canada,
     Where colored folks are free!"


The lyric ran on to state, that, when the fugitive crosses the Canada
line,


   "The Queen comes down unto the shore,
     With arms extended wide,
    To welcome the poor fugitive
     Safe onto Freedom's side."


In the truth thus set forth she seemed to have the most simple faith.

But her chief delight was to talk of "glory," and to sing hymns whose
burden was,--


   "O glory, glory, glory,
     Won't you come along with me?"

and when left to herself, she would often hum these with great delight,
nodding her head.

On one occasion, I remember her sitting at a window singing and
fervently keeping time with her head, the little black Puck of a
grandson meanwhile amusing himself with ornamenting her red-and-yellow
turban with green dandelion-curls, which shook and trembled with her
emotions, causing him perfect convulsions of delight.

"Sojourner," said the Professor to her, one day, when he heard her
singing, "you seem to be very sure about heaven."

"Well, I be," she answered, triumphantly.

"What makes you so sure there is any heaven?"

"Well, 'cause I got such a hankerin' arter it in here," she
said,--giving a thump on her breast with her usual energy.

There was at the time an invalid in the house, and Sojourner, on
learning it, felt a mission to go and comfort her. It was curious to see
the tall, gaunt, dusky figure stalk up to the bed with such an air of
conscious authority, and take on herself the office of consoler
with such a mixture of authority and tenderness. She talked as from
above,--and at the same time, if a pillow needed changing or any office
to be rendered, she did it with a strength and handiness that inspired
trust. One felt as if the dark, strange woman were quite able to take
up the invalid in her bosom, and bear her as a lamb, both physically and
spiritually. There was both power and sweetness in that great warm soul
and that vigorous frame.

At length, Sojourner, true to her name, departed. She had her mission
elsewhere. Where now she is I know not; but she left deep memories
behind her.

To these recollections of my own I will add one more anecdote, related
by Wendell Phillips.

Speaking of the power of Rachel to move and bear down a whole audience
by a few simple words, he said he never knew but one other human being
that had that power, and that other was Sojourner Truth. He related a
scene of which he was witness. It was at a crowded public meeting in
Faneuil Hall, where Frederick Douglas was one of the chief speakers.
Douglas had been describing the wrongs of the black race, and as he
proceeded, he grew more and more excited, and finally ended by saying
that they had no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope
except in their own right arms. It must come to blood; they must fight
for themselves, and redeem themselves, or it would never be done.

Sojourner was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat, facing the
platform; and in the hush of deep feeling, after Douglas sat down, she
spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the house,--

"Frederick, IS GOD DEAD?"

The effect was perfectly electrical, and thrilled through the whole
house, changing as by a flash the whole feeling of the audience. Not
another word she said or needed to say; it was enough.

It is with a sad feeling that one contemplates noble minds and bodies,
nobly and grandly formed human beings, that have come to us cramped,
scarred, maimed, out of the prison-house of bondage. One longs to know
what such beings might have become, if suffered to unfold and expand
under the kindly developing influences of education.

It is the theory of some writers, that to the African is reserved,
in the later and palmier days of the earth, the full and harmonious
development of the religious element in man. The African seems to seize
on the tropical fervor and luxuriance of Scripture imagery as something
native; he appears to feel himself to be of the same blood with those
old burning, simple souls, the patriarchs, prophets, and seers, whose
impassioned words seem only grafted as foreign plants on the cooler
stock of the Occidental mind.

I cannot but think that Sojourner with the same culture might have
spoken words as eloquent and undying as those of the African Saint
Augustine or Tertullian. How grand and queenly a woman she might have
been, with her wonderful physical vigor, her great heaving sea of
emotion, her power of spiritual conception, her quick penetration, and
her boundless energy! We might conceive an African type of woman so
largely made and moulded, so much fuller in all the elements of life,
physical and spiritual, that the dark hue of the skin should seem only
to add an appropriate charm,--as Milton says of his Penseroso, whom he
imagines


        "Black, but such as in esteem
     Prince Memnon's sister might beseem,
     Or that starred Ethiop queen that strove
     To set her beauty's praise above
     The sea-nymph's."


But though Sojourner Truth has passed away from among us as a wave of
the sea, her memory still lives in one of the loftiest and most original
works of modern art, the Libyan Sibyl, by Mr. Story, which attracted
so much attention in the late World's Exhibition. Some years ago, when
visiting Rome, I related Sojourner's history to Mr. Story at a breakfast
at his house. Already had his mind begun to turn to Egypt in search of
a type of art which should represent a larger and more vigorous
development of nature than the cold elegance of Greek lines. His
glorious Cleopatra was then in process of evolution, and his mind was
working out the problem of her broadly developed nature, of all that
slumbering weight and fulness of passion with which this statue seems
charged, as a heavy thunder-cloud is charged with electricity.

The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the
deeper recesses of the African nature,--those unexplored depths of being
and feeling, mighty and dark as the gigantic depths of tropical forests,
mysterious as the hidden rivers and mines of that burning continent
whose life-history is yet to be. A few days after, he told me that
he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan
Sibyl. Two years subsequently, I revisited Rome, and found the gorgeous
Cleopatra finished, a thing to marvel at, as the creation of a new
style of beauty, a new manner of art. Mr. Story requested me to come and
repeat to him the history of Sojourner Truth, saying that the conception
had never left him. I did so; and a day or two after, he showed me the
clay model of the Libyan Sibyl. I have never seen the marble statue; but
am told by those who have, that it was by far the most impressive work
of art at the Exhibition.

A notice of the two statues from the London "Athenaeum" must supply a
description which I cannot give.


"The Cleopatra and the Sibyl are seated, partly draped, with the
characteristic Egyptian gown, that gathers about the torso and falls
freely around the limbs; the first is covered to the bosom, the second
bare to the hips. Queenly Cleopatra rests back against her chair in
meditative ease, leaning her cheek against one hand, whose elbow the
rail of the seat sustains; the other is outstretched upon her knee,
nipping its forefinger upon the thumb thoughtfully, as though some firm,
wilful purpose filled her brain, as it seems to set those luxurious
features to a smile as if the whole woman 'would.' Upon her head is
the coif, bearing in front the mystic uraeus, or twining basilisk of
sovereignty, while from its sides depend the wide Egyptian lappels, or
wings, that fall upon her shoulders. The Sibilla Libica has crossed her
knees,--an action universally held amongst the ancients as indicative
of reticence or secrecy, and of power to bind. A secret-keeping looking
dame she is, in the full-bloom proportions of ripe womanhood, wherein
choosing to place his figure the sculptor has deftly gone between the
disputed point whether these women were blooming and wise in youth, or
deeply furrowed with age and burdened with the knowledge of centuries,
as Virgil, Livy, and Gellius say. Good artistic example might be quoted
on both sides. Her forward elbow is propped upon one knee; and to keep
her secrets close, for this Libyan woman is the closest of all the
Sibyls, she rests her shut mouth upon one closed palm, as if holding
the African mystery deep in the brooding brain that looks out through
mournful, warning eyes, seen under the wide shade of the strange horned
(ammonite) crest, that bears the mystery of the Tetragrammaton upon its
upturned front. Over her full bosom, mother of myriads as she was, hangs
the same symbol. Her face has a Nubian cast, her hair wavy and plaited,
as is meet."


We hope to see the day when copies both of the Cleopatra and the Libyan
Sibyl shall adorn the Capitol at Washington.




RECONSTRUCTION by Frederick Douglass


The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress may
very properly be made the occasion of a few earnest words on the already
much-worn topic of reconstruction.

Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude more
intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent. There are the best
of reasons for this profound interest. Questions of vast moment, left
undecided by the last session of Congress, must be manfully grappled
with by this. No political skirmishing will avail. The occasion demands
statesmanship.

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously
ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent
results,--a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,--a
strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to
liberty or civilization,--an attempt to re-establish a Union by force,
which must be the merest mockery of a Union,--an effort to bring under
Federal authority States into which no loyal man from the North may
safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate
with daggers and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their
deadly hate of the country that conquered them; or whether, on the other
hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason, have
a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social
antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be
determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.
The last session really did nothing which can be considered final as to
these questions. The Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill
and the proposed constitutional amendments, with the amendment already
adopted and recognized as the law of the land, do not reach the
difficulty, and cannot, unless the whole structure of the government is
changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central
government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of
States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will. While there
remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its own local
affairs,--an idea, by the way, more deeply rooted in the minds of men
of all sections of the country than perhaps any one other political
idea,--no general assertion of human rights can be of any practical
value. To change the character of the government at this point is
neither possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to
make the government consistent with itself, and render the rights of the
States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.

The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to
protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States.
They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go
unprotected, spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon
the national statute-book.

Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths
of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own
conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it
favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong that
it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom,
manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South;
and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the
intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the
conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which
it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless
the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State
authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This,
of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way
and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with
itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise,--a right
and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for
his protection.

One of the invaluable compensations of the late Rebellion is the
highly instructive disclosure it made of the true source of danger to
republican government. Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and
despotic governments, no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged
class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to
maintain them. What was theory before the war has been made fact by the
war.

There is cause to be thankful even for rebellion. It is an impressive
teacher, though a stern and terrible one. In both characters it has come
to us, and it was perhaps needed in both. It is an instructor never a
day before its time, for it comes only when all other means of progress
and enlightenment have failed. Whether the oppressed and despairing
bondman, no longer able to repress his deep yearnings for manhood,
or the tyrant, in his pride and impatience, takes the initiative, and
strikes the blow for a firmer hold and a longer lease of oppression, the
result is the same,--society is instructed, or may be.

Such are the limitations of the common mind, and so thoroughly
engrossing are the cares of common life, that only the few among men can
discern through the glitter and dazzle of present prosperity the dark
outlines of approaching disasters, even though they may have come up to
our very gates, and are already within striking distance. The yawning
seam and corroded bolt conceal their defects from the mariner until
the storm calls all hands to the pumps. Prophets, indeed, were abundant
before the war; but who cares for prophets while their predictions
remain unfulfilled, and the calamities of which they tell are masked
behind a blinding blaze of national prosperity?

It is asked, said Henry Clay, on a memorable occasion, Will slavery
never come to an end? That question, said he, was asked fifty years ago,
and it has been answered by fifty years of unprecedented prosperity.
Spite of the eloquence of the earnest Abolitionists,--poured out against
slavery during thirty years,--even they must confess, that, in all the
probabilities of the case, that system of barbarism would have continued
its horrors far beyond the limits of the nineteenth century but for
the Rebellion, and perhaps only have disappeared at last in a fiery
conflict, even more fierce and bloody than that which has now been
suppressed.

It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason
prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion
is the thing that causes rebellion. What that thing is, we have been
taught to our cost. It remains now to be seen whether we have the needed
courage to have that cause entirely removed from the Republic. At
any rate, to this grand work of national regeneration and entire
purification Congress must now address Itself, with full purpose that
the work shall this time be thoroughly done. The deadly upas, root and
branch, leaf and fibre, body and sap, must be utterly destroyed. The
country is evidently not in a condition to listen patiently to pleas for
postponement, however plausible, nor will it permit the responsibility
to be shifted to other shoulders. Authority and power are here
commensurate with the duty imposed. There are no cloud-flung shadows to
obscure the way. Truth shines with brighter light and intenser heat at
every moment, and a country torn and rent and bleeding implores relief
from its distress and agony.

If time was at first needed, Congress has now had time. All the
requisite materials from which to form an intelligent judgment are now
before it. Whether its members look at the origin, the progress, the
termination of the war, or at the mockery of a peace now existing, they
will find only one unbroken chain of argument in favor of a radical
policy of reconstruction. For the omissions of the last session, some
excuses may be allowed. A treacherous President stood in the way; and it
can be easily seen how reluctant good men might be to admit an apostasy
which involved so much of baseness and ingratitude. It was natural that
they should seek to save him by bending to him even when he leaned to
the side of error. But all is changed now. Congress knows now that
it must go on without his aid, and even against his machinations. The
advantage of the present session over the last is immense. Where that
investigated, this has the facts. Where that walked by faith, this may
walk by sight. Where that halted, this must go forward, and where that
failed, this must succeed, giving the country whole measures where that
gave us half-measures, merely as a means of saving the elections in a
few doubtful districts. That Congress saw what was right, but distrusted
the enlightenment of the loyal masses; but what was forborne in distrust
of the people must now be done with a full knowledge that the people
expect and require it. The members go to Washington fresh from the
inspiring presence of the people. In every considerable public
meeting, and in almost every conceivable way, whether at court-house,
school-house, or cross-roads, in doors and out, the subject has been
discussed, and the people have emphatically pronounced in favor of a
radical policy. Listening to the doctrines of expediency and compromise
with pity, impatience, and disgust, they have everywhere broken into
demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been
spoken in favor of equal rights and impartial suffrage. Radicalism, so
far from being odious, is not the popular passport to power. The
men most bitterly charged with it go to Congress with the largest
majorities, while the timid and doubtful are sent by lean majorities, or
else left at home. The strange controversy between the President and the
Congress, at one time so threatening, is disposed of by the people. The
high reconstructive powers which he so confidently, ostentatiously,
and haughtily claimed, have been disallowed, denounced, and utterly
repudiated; while those claimed by Congress have been confirmed.

Of the spirit and magnitude of the canvass nothing need be said. The
appeal was to the people, and the verdict was worthy of the tribunal.
Upon an occasion of his own selection, with the advice and approval
of his astute Secretary, soon after the members of the Congress had
returned to their constituents, the President quitted the executive
mansion, sandwiched himself between two recognized heroes,--men whom
the whole country delighted to honor,--and, with all the advantage which
such company could give him, stumped the country from the Atlantic to
the Mississippi, advocating everywhere his policy as against that of
Congress. It was a strange sight, and perhaps the most disgraceful
exhibition ever made by any President; but, as no evil is entirely
unmixed, good has come of this, as from many others. Ambitious,
unscrupulous, energetic, indefatigable, voluble, and plausible,--a
political gladiator, ready for a "set-to" in any crowd,--he is beaten
in his own chosen field, and stands to-day before the country as a
convicted usurper, a political criminal, guilty of a bold and persistent
attempt to possess himself of the legislative powers solemnly secured to
Congress by the Constitution. No vindication could be more complete, no
condemnation could be more absolute and humiliating. Unless reopened by
the sword, as recklessly threatened in some circles, this question is
now closed for all time.

Without attempting to settle here the metaphysical and somewhat
theological question (about which so much has already been said
and written), whether once in the Union means always in the
Union,--agreeably to the formula, Once in grace always in grace,--it
is obvious to common sense that the rebellious States stand to-day,
in point of law, precisely where they stood when, exhausted, beaten,
conquered, they fell powerless at the feet of Federal authority. Their
State governments were overthrown, and the lives and property of
the leaders of the Rebellion were forfeited. In reconstructing the
institutions of these shattered and overthrown States, Congress should
begin with a clean slate, and make clean work of it. Let there be
no hesitation. It would be a cowardly deference to a defeated and
treacherous President, if any account were made of the illegitimate,
one-sided, sham governments hurried into existence for a malign purpose
in the absence of Congress. These pretended governments, which were
never submitted to the people, and from participation in which four
millions of the loyal people were excluded by Presidential order,
should now be treated according to their true character, as shams and
impositions, and supplanted by true and legitimate governments, in the
formation of which loyal men, black and white, shall participate.

It is not, however, within the scope of this paper to point out the
precise steps to be taken, and the means to be employed. The people
are less concerned about these than the grand end to be attained.
They demand such a reconstruction as shall put an end to the present
anarchical state of things in the late rebellious States,--where
frightful murders and wholesale massacres are perpetrated in the very
presence of Federal soldiers. This horrible business they require shall
cease. They want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black
and white, in their persons and property; such a one as will cause
Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow
into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in
Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic. No Chinese wall can now be
tolerated. The South must be opened to the light of law and liberty,
and this session of Congress is relied upon to accomplish this important
work.

The plain, common-sense way of doing this work, as intimated at the
beginning, is simply to establish in the South one law, one government,
one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the
elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great
measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks,
and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the
place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.

Men denounce the negro for his prominence in this discussion; but it is
no fault of his that in peace as in war, that in conquering Rebel armies
as in reconstructing the rebellious States, the right of the negro is
the true solution of our national troubles. The stern logic of events,
which goes directly to the point, disdaining all concern for the color
or features of men, has determined the interests of the country as
identical with and inseparable from those of the negro.

The policy that emancipated and armed the negro--now seen to have been
wise and proper by the dullest--was not certainly more sternly demanded
than is now the policy of enfranchisement. If with the negro was success
in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the
nation must fall or flourish with the negro.

Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction
between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any
difference between a citizen of a State and a citizen of the United
States. Citizenship evidently includes all the rights of citizens,
whether State or national. If the Constitution knows none, it is clearly
no part of the duty of a Republican Congress now to institute one. The
mistake of the last session was the attempt to do this very thing, by
a renunciation of its power to secure political rights to any class of
citizens, with the obvious purpose to allow the rebellious States to
disfranchise, if they should see fit, their colored citizens. This
unfortunate blunder must now be retrieved, and the emasculated
citizenship given to the negro supplanted by that contemplated in the
Constitution of the United States, which declares that the citizens of
each State shall enjoy all the rights and immunities of citizens of the
several States,--so that a legal voter in any State shall be a legal
voter in all the States.




AN APPEAL TO CONGRESS FOR IMPARTIAL SUFFRAGE by Frederick Douglas


A very limited statement of the argument for impartial suffrage, and for
including the negro in the body politic, would require more space than
can be reasonably asked here. It is supported by reasons as broad as the
nature of man, and as numerous as the wants of society. Man is the only
government-making animal in the world. His right to a participation
in the production and operation of government is an inference from his
nature, as direct and self-evident as is his right to acquire property
or education. It is no less a crime against the manhood of a man, to
declare that he shall not share in the making and directing of the
government under which he lives, than to say that he shall not acquire
property and education. The fundamental and unanswerable argument in
favor of the enfranchisement of the negro is found in the undisputed
fact of his manhood. He is a man, and by every fact and argument by
which any man can sustain his right to vote, the negro can sustain his
right equally. It is plain that, if the right belongs to any, it belongs
to all. The doctrine that some men have no rights that others are bound
to respect, is a doctrine which we must banish as we have banished
slavery, from which it emanated. If black men have no rights in the
eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the
blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper
human relations.

But suffrage for the negro, while easily sustained upon abstract
principles, demands consideration upon what are recognized as the urgent
necessities of the case. It is a measure of relief,--a shield to break
the force of a blow already descending with violence, and render it
harmless. The work of destruction has already been set in motion all
over the South. Peace to the country has literally meant war to the
loyal men of the South, white and black; and negro suffrage is the
measure to arrest and put an end to that dreadful strife.

Something then, not by way of argument, (for that has been done by
Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and
other able men,) but rather of statement and appeal.

For better or for worse, (as in some of the old marriage ceremonies,)
the negroes are evidently a permanent part of the American population.
They are too numerous and useful to be colonized, and too enduring and
self-perpetuating to disappear by natural causes. Here they are, four
millions of them, and, for weal or for woe, here they must remain. Their
history is parallel to that of the country; but while the history of
the latter has been cheerful and bright with blessings, theirs has
been heavy and dark with agonies and curses. What O'Connell said of the
history of Ireland may with greater truth be said of the negro's. It may
be "traced like a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood." Yet the
negroes have marvellously survived all the exterminating forces of
slavery, and have emerged at the end of two hundred and fifty years
of bondage, not morose, misanthropic, and revengeful, but cheerful,
hopeful, and forgiving. They now stand before Congress and the country,
not complaining of the past, but simply asking for a better future.
The spectacle of these dusky millions thus imploring, not demanding, is
touching; and if American statesmen could be moved by a simple appeal to
the nobler elements of human nature, if they had not fallen, seemingly,
into the incurable habit of weighing and measuring every proposition of
reform by some standard of profit and loss, doing wrong from choice, and
right only from necessity or some urgent demand of human selfishness, it
would be enough to plead for the negroes on the score of past services
and sufferings. But no such appeal shall be relied on here. Hardships,
services, sufferings, and sacrifices are all waived. It is true that
they came to the relief of the country at the hour of its extremest
need. It is true that, in many of the rebellious States, they were
almost the only reliable friends the nation had throughout the
whole tremendous war. It is true that, notwithstanding their alleged
ignorance, they were wiser than their masters, and knew enough to be
loyal, while those masters only knew enough to be rebels and traitors.
It is true that they fought side by side in the loyal cause with
our gallant and patriotic white soldiers, and that, but for their
help,--divided as the loyal States were,--the Rebels might have
succeeded in breaking up the Union, thereby entailing border wars and
troubles of unknown duration and incalculable calamity. All this and
more is true of these loyal negroes. Many daring exploits will be told
to their credit. Impartial history will paint them as men who deserved
well of their country. It will tell how they forded and swam rivers,
with what consummate address they evaded the sharp-eyed Rebel pickets,
how they toiled in the darkness of night through the tangled marshes
of briers and thorns, barefooted and weary, running the risk of losing
their lives, to warn our generals of Rebel schemes to surprise and
destroy our loyal army. It will tell how these poor people, whose rights
we still despised, behaved to our wounded soldiers, when found cold,
hungry, and bleeding on the deserted battle-field; how they assisted our
escaping prisoners from Andersonville, Belle Isle, Castle Thunder,
and elsewhere, sharing with them their wretched crusts, and otherwise
affording them aid and comfort; how they promptly responded to the
trumpet call for their services, fighting against a foe that denied them
the rights of civilized warfare, and for a government which was without
the courage to assert those rights and avenge their violation in
their behalf; with what gallantry they flung themselves upon Rebel
fortifications, meeting death as fearlessly as any other troops in the
service. But upon none of these things is reliance placed. These facts
speak to the better dispositions of the human heart; but they seem of
little weight with the opponents of impartial suffrage.

It is true that a strong plea for equal suffrage might be addressed to
the national sense of honor. Something, too, might be said of national
gratitude. A nation might well hesitate before the temptation to betray
its allies. There is something immeasurably mean, to say nothing of the
cruelty, in placing the loyal negroes of the South under the political
power of their Rebel masters. To make peace with our enemies is all well
enough; but to prefer our enemies and sacrifice our friends,--to exalt
our enemies and cast down our friends,--to clothe our enemies, who
sought the destruction of the government, with all political power, and
leave our friends powerless in their hands,--is an act which need not be
characterized here. We asked the negroes to espouse our cause, to be our
friends, to fight for us, and against their masters; and now, after
they have done all that we asked them to do,--helped us to conquer their
masters, and thereby directed toward themselves the furious hate of the
vanquished,--it is proposed in some quarters to turn them over to the
political control of the common enemy of the government and of the
negro. But of this let nothing be said in this place. Waiving humanity,
national honor, the claims of gratitude, the precious satisfaction
arising from deeds of charity and justice to the weak and
defenceless,--the appeal for impartial suffrage addresses itself with
great pertinency to the darkest, coldest, and flintiest side of
the human heart, and would wring righteousness from the unfeeling
calculations of human selfishness.

For in respect to this grand measure it is the good fortune of the negro
that enlightened selfishness, not less than justice, fights on his side.
National interest and national duty, if elsewhere separated, are firmly
united here. The American people can, perhaps, afford to brave the
censure of surrounding nations for the manifest injustice and meanness
of excluding its faithful black soldiers from the ballot-box, but
it cannot afford to allow the moral and mental energies of rapidly
increasing millions to be consigned to hopeless degradation.

Strong as we are, we need the energy that slumbers in the black man's
arm to make us stronger. We want no longer any heavy-footed, melancholy
service from the negro. We want the cheerful activity of the quickened
manhood of these sable millions. Nor can we afford to endure the
moral blight which the existence of a degraded and hated class must
necessarily inflict upon any people among whom such a class may exist.
Exclude the negroes as a class from political rights,--teach them that
the high and manly privilege of suffrage is to be enjoyed by white
citizens only,--that they may bear the burdens of the state, but that
they are to have no part in its direction or its honors,--and you at
once deprive them of one of the main incentives to manly character and
patriotic devotion to the interests of the government; in a word, you
stamp them as a degraded caste,--you teach them to despise themselves,
and all others to despise them. Men are so constituted that they largely
derive their ideas of their abilities and their possibilities from the
settled judgments of their fellow-men, and especially from such as they
read in the institutions under which they live. If these bless them,
they are blest indeed; but if these blast them, they are blasted indeed.
Give the negro the elective franchise, and you give him at once a
powerful motive for all noble exertion, and make him a man among men.
A character is demanded of him, and here as elsewhere demand favors
supply. It is nothing against this reasoning that all men who vote are
not good men or good citizens. It is enough that the possession and
exercise of the elective franchise is in itself an appeal to the nobler
elements of manhood, and imposes education as essential to the safety of
society.

To appreciate the full force of this argument, it must be observed, that
disfranchisement in a republican government based upon the idea of
human equality and universal suffrage, is a very different thing from
disfranchisement in governments based upon the idea of the divine right
of kings, or the entire subjugation of the masses. Masses of men can
take care of themselves. Besides, the disabilities imposed upon all are
necessarily without that bitter and stinging element of invidiousness
which attaches to disfranchisement in a republic. What is common to
all works no special sense of degradation to any. But in a country
like ours, where men of all nations, kindred, and tongues are freely
enfranchised, and allowed to vote, to say to the negro, You shall not
vote, is to deal his manhood a staggering blow, and to burn into his
soul a bitter and goading sense of wrong, or else work in him a stupid
indifference to all the elements of a manly character. As a nation, we
cannot afford to have amongst us either this indifference and stupidity,
or that burning sense of wrong. These sable millions are too powerful
to be allowed to remain either indifferent or discontented. Enfranchise
them, and they become self-respecting and country-loving citizens.
Disfranchise them, and the mark of Cain is set upon them less mercifully
than upon the first murderer, for no man was to hurt him. But this
mark of inferiority--all the more palpable because of a difference of
color--not only dooms the negro to be a vagabond, but makes him the prey
of insult and outrage everywhere. While nothing may be urged here as
to the past services of the negro, it is quite within the line of this
appeal to remind the nation of the possibility that a time may come when
the services of the negro may be a second time required. History is said
to repeat itself, and, if so, having wanted the negro once, we may want
him again. Can that statesmanship be wise which would leave the negro
good ground to hesitate, when the exigencies of the country required his
prompt assistance? Can that be sound statesmanship which leaves millions
of men in gloomy discontent, and possibly in a state of alienation
in the day of national trouble? Was not the nation stronger when
two hundred thousand sable soldiers were hurled against the Rebel
fortifications, than it would have been without them? Arming the negro
was an urgent military necessity three years ago,--are we sure that
another quite as pressing may not await us? Casting aside all thought
of justice and magnanimity, is it wise to impose upon the negro all the
burdens involved in sustaining government against foes within and foes
without, to make him equal sharer in all sacrifices for the public good,
to tax him in peace and conscript him in war, and then coldly exclude
him from the ballot-box?

Look across the sea. Is Ireland, in her present condition, fretful,
discontented, compelled to support an establishment in which she does
not believe, and which the vast majority of her people abhor, a source
of power or of weakness to Great Britain? Is not Austria wise in
removing all ground of complaint against her on the part of Hungary? And
does not the Emperor of Russia act wisely, as well as generously, when
he not only breaks up the bondage of the serf, but extends him all the
advantages of Russian citizenship? Is the present movement in England in
favor of manhood suffrage--for the purpose of bringing four millions of
British subjects into full sympathy and co-operation with the British
government--a wise and humane movement, or otherwise? Is the existence
of a rebellious element in our borders--which New Orleans, Memphis, and
Texas show to be only disarmed, but at heart as malignant as ever, only
waiting for an opportunity to reassert itself with fire and sword--a
reason for leaving four millions of the nation's truest friends with
just cause of complaint against the Federal government? If the doctrine
that taxation should go hand in hand with representation can be appealed
to in behalf of recent traitors and rebels, may it not properly be
asserted in behalf of a people who have ever been loyal and faithful
to the government? The answers to these questions are too obvious to
require statement. Disguise it as we may, we are still a divided nation.
The Rebel States have still an anti-national policy. Massachusetts
and South Carolina may draw tears from the eyes of our tender-hearted
President by walking arm in arm into his Philadelphia Convention, but a
citizen of Massachusetts is still an alien in the Palmetto State. There
is that, all over the South, which frightens Yankee industry, capital,
and skill from its borders. We have crushed the Rebellion, but not its
hopes or its malign purposes. The South fought for perfect and permanent
control over the Southern laborer. It was a war of the rich against the
poor. They who waged it had no objection to the government, while they
could use it as a means of confirming their power over the laborer. They
fought the government, not because they hated the government as such,
but because they found it, as they thought, in the way between them and
their one grand purpose of rendering permanent and indestructible their
authority and power over the Southern laborer. Though the battle is
for the present lost, the hope of gaining this object still exists, and
pervades the whole South with a feverish excitement. We have thus
far only gained a Union without unity, marriage without love, victory
without peace. The hope of gaining by politics what they lost by the
sword, is the secret of all this Southern unrest; and that hope must be
extinguished before national ideas and objects can take full possession
of the Southern mind. There is but one safe and constitutional way to
banish that mischievous hope from the South, and that is by lifting the
laborer beyond the unfriendly political designs of his former master.
Give the negro the elective franchise, and you at once destroy the
purely sectional policy, and wheel the Southern States into line with
national interests and national objects. The last and shrewdest turn
of Southern politics is a recognition of the necessity of getting into
Congress immediately, and at any price. The South will comply with
any conditions but suffrage for the negro. It will swallow all the
unconstitutional test oaths, repeal all the ordinances of Secession,
repudiate the Rebel debt, promise to pay the debt incurred in conquering
its people, pass all the constitutional amendments, if only it can have
the negro left under its political control. The proposition is as modest
as that made on the mountain: "All these things will I give unto thee if
thou wilt fall down and worship me."

But why are the Southerners so willing to make these sacrifices? The
answer plainly is, they see in this policy the only hope of saving
something of their old sectional peculiarities and power. Once
firmly seated in Congress, their alliance with Northern Democrats
re-established, their States restored to their former position inside
the Union, they can easily find means of keeping the Federal government
entirely too busy with other important matters to pay much attention
to the local affairs of the Southern States. Under the potent shield of
State Rights, the game would be in their own hands. Does any sane man
doubt for a moment that the men who followed Jefferson Davis through the
late terrible Rebellion, often marching barefooted and hungry, naked and
penniless, and who now only profess an enforced loyalty, would plunge
this country into a foreign war to-day, if they could thereby gain their
coveted independence, and their still more coveted mastery over the
negroes? Plainly enough, the peace not less than the prosperity of this
country is involved in the great measure of impartial suffrage. King
Cotton is deposed, but only deposed, and is ready to-day to reassert all
his ancient pretensions upon the first favorable opportunity. Foreign
countries abound with his agents. They are able, vigilant, devoted. The
young men of the South burn with the desire to regain what they call
the lost cause; the women are noisily malignant towards the Federal
government. In fact, all the elements of treason and rebellion are there
under the thinnest disguise which necessity can impose.

What, then, is the work before Congress? It is to save the people of the
South from themselves, and the nation from detriment on their account.
Congress must supplant the evident sectional tendencies of the South by
national dispositions and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and
objects to take the lead and control the politics of those States. It
must cease to recognize the old slave-masters as the only competent
persons to rule the South. In a word, it must enfranchise the negro, and
by means of the loyal negroes and the loyal white men of the South build
up a national party there, and in time bridge the chasm between North
and South, so that our country may have a common liberty and a common
civilization. The new wine must be put into new bottles. The lamb may
not be trusted with the wolf. Loyalty is hardly safe with traitors.

Statesmen of America! beware what you do. The ploughshare of rebellion
has gone through the land beam-deep. The soil is in readiness, and the
seed-time has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they
sow. The dreadful calamities of the past few years came not by accident,
nor unbidden, from the ground. You shudder to-day at the harvest of
blood sown in the spring-time of the Republic by your patriot fathers.
The principle of slavery, which they tolerated under the erroneous
impression that it would soon die out, became at last the dominant
principle and power at the South. It early mastered the Constitution,
became superior to the Union, and enthroned itself above the law.

Freedom of speech and of the press it slowly but successfully banished
from the South, dictated its own code of honor and manners to the
nation, brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over Congressional
debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs
of patriotism, blotted out the testimonies of the fathers against
oppression, padlocked the pulpit, expelled liberty from its literature,
invented nonsensical theories about master-races and slave-races of men,
and in due season produced a Rebellion fierce, foul, and bloody.

This evil principle again seeks admission into our body politic. It
comes now in shape of a denial of political rights to four million loyal
colored people. The South does not now ask for slavery. It only asks for
a large degraded caste, which shall have no political rights. This
ends the case. Statesmen, beware what you do. The destiny of unborn and
unnumbered generations is in your hands. Will you repeat the mistake
of your fathers, who sinned ignorantly? or will you profit by the
blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever expel every vestige of
the old abomination from our national borders? As you members of the
Thirty-ninth Congress decide, will the country be peaceful, united, and
happy, or troubled, divided, and miserable.




THE NEGRO EXODUS by James B. Runnion


A recent sojourn in the South for a few weeks, chiefly in Louisiana and
Mississippi, gave the writer an opportunity to inquire into what has
been so aptly called "the negro exodus." The emigration of blacks to
Kansas began early in the spring of this year. For a time there was a
stampede from two or three of the river parishes in Louisiana and
as many counties opposite in Mississippi. Several thousand negroes
(certainly not fewer than five thousand, and variously estimated as high
as ten thousand) had left their cabins before the rush could be stayed
or the excitement lulled. Early in May most of the negroes who had quit
work for the purpose of emigrating, but had not succeeded in getting
off, were persuaded to return to the plantations, and from that time on
there have been only straggling families and groups that have watched
for and seized the first opportunity for transportation to the North.
There is no doubt, however, that there is still a consuming desire among
the negroes of the cotton districts in these two States to seek new
homes, and there are the best reasons for believing that the exodus will
take a new start next spring, after the gathering and conversion of the
growing crop. Hundreds of negroes who returned from the river-banks for
lack of transportation, and thousands of others infected with the ruling
discontent, are working harder in the fields this summer, and practicing
more economy and self-denial than ever before, in order to have the
means next winter and spring to pay their way to the "promised land."

"We've been working for fourteen long years," said an intelligent negro,
in reply to a question as to the cause of the prevailing discontent,
"and we ain't no better off than we was when we commenced." This is the
negro version of the trouble, which is elaborated on occasion into a
harrowing story of oppression and plunder.

"I tell you it's all owing to the radical politicians at the North,"
explained a representative of the type known as the Bourbons; "they've
had their emissaries down here, and deluded the 'niggers' into a
very fever of emigration, with the purpose of reducing our basis of
representation in Congress and increasing that of the Northern States."

These are the two extremes of opinion at the South. The first is
certainly the more reasonable and truthful, though it implies that all
the blame rests upon the whites, which is not the case; the second,
preposterous as it will appear to Northern readers, is religiously
believed by large numbers of the "unreconciled." Between these two
extremes there is an infinite variety of theories, all more or less
governed by the political faction to which the various theorizers
belong; there are at least a dozen of these factions, such as the
Bourbons, the conservatives, the native white republicans, the
carpet-bag republicans, the negro republicans, etc. There is a political
tinge in almost everything in the extreme Southern States. The
fact seems to be that the emigration movement among the blacks was
spontaneous to the extent that they were ready and anxious to go. The
immediate notion of going may have been inculcated by such circulars,
issued by railroads and land companies, as are common enough at emigrant
centres in the North and West, and the exaggeration characteristic of
such literature may have stimulated the imagination of the negroes far
beyond anything they are likely to realize in their new homes. Kansas
was naturally the favorite goal of the negro emigre, for it was
associated in his mind with the names of Jim Lane and John Brown, which
are hallowed to him. The timid learned that they could escape what they
have come to regard as a second bondage, and they flocked together to
gain the moral support which comes from numbers.

Diligent inquiry among representative men, of all classes and from
all parts of Louisiana, who were in attendance at the constitutional
convention in New Orleans, and careful observation along the river among
the land owners and field hands in both Louisiana and Mississippi, left
a vivid impression of some material and political conditions which fully
account for the negro exodus. I have dropped the social conditions out
of the consideration, because I became convinced that the race troubles
at the South can be solved to the satisfaction of both whites and blacks
without cultivating any closer social relations than those which now
prevail. The material conditions which I have in mind are less familiar
than the political conditions; they are mainly the land-tenure and
credit systems, and mere modifications (scarcely for the better) of the
peculiar plantation system of slavery days.

The cotton lands at the South are owned now, as they were before the
war, in large tracts. The land was about all that most of the Southern
whites had left to them after the war, and they kept it when they could,
at the first, in the hope that it would yield them a living through the
labor of the blacks; of late years they have not been able to sell their
plantations at any fair price, if they desired to do so. The white men
with capital who went to the South from the North after the war seemed
to acquire the true Southern ambition to be large land owners and
planters; and when the ante-bellum owners lost their plantations the
land usually went in bulk to the city factors who had made them advances
from year to year, and had taken mortgages on their crops and broad
acres. As a consequence, the land has never been distributed among
the people who inhabit and cultivate it, and agricultural labor in the
Southern States approaches the condition of the factory labor in England
and the Eastern States more nearly than it does the farm labor of the
North and West. Nearly every agricultural laborer north of Mason and
Dixon's line, if not the actual possessor of the land he plows, looks
forward to owning a farm some time; at the South such an ambition is
rare, and small ownership still more an exception. The practice of
paying day wages was first tried after the war; this practice is still
in vogue in the sugar and rice districts, where laborers are paid from
fifty to seventy cents per day, with quarters furnished and living
guaranteed them at nine or ten cents a day. In sections where the wages
system prevails, and where there have been no political disturbances,
the negroes seem to be perfectly contented; at all events, the
emigration fever has not spread among them. But it was found
impracticable to maintain the wage system in the cotton districts. The
negroes themselves fought against it, because it reminded them too much
of the slave-gang, driven out at daybreak and home at sundown. In many
cases the planters were forced to abandon it, because they had not the
means to carry on such huge farming, and they could not secure the same
liberal advances from capitalists as when they were able to mortgage
a growing "crop of niggers." Then the system of working on shares was
tried. This was reasonably fair, and the negro laborers were satisfied
as long as it lasted. The owners of the land, under this system, would
furnish the indispensable mule and the farming implements, and take one
half the product. The planters themselves relinquished this system. Some
of them contend that the laziness and indifference of the negro made the
partnership undesirable; many others admit that they were not able to
advance the negro tenant his supplies pending the growth of the year's
crop, as it was necessary they should do under the sharing system.
Now the renting system is almost universal. It yields the land owner a
certainty, endangered only by the death, sickness, or desertion of the
negro tenant; but it throws the latter upon his own responsibility, and
frequently makes him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity
of the white man. The rent of land, on a money basis, varies from six to
ten dollars an acre per year, while the same land can be bought in
large quantities all the way from fifteen to thirty dollars per acre,
according to location, clearing, improvement, richness, etc. When paid
in product, the rent varies from eighty to one hundred pounds of lint
cotton per acre for land that produces from two hundred to four hundred
pounds of cotton per acre; the tenant undertakes to pay from one quarter
to one half--perhaps an average of one third--of his crop for the use
of the land, without stock, tools, or assistance of any kind. The land
owners usually claim that they make no money even at these exorbitant
figures. If they do not, it is because only a portion of their vast
possessions is under cultivation, because they do no work themselves,
and in some cases because the negroes do not cultivate and gather as
large a crop as they could and ought to harvest. It is very certain that
the negro tenants, as a class, make no money; if they are out of debt at
the end of a season, they have reason to rejoice.

The credit system, which is as universal as the renting system, is even
more illogical and oppressive. The utter viciousness of both systems in
their mutual dependence is sufficiently illustrated by the single fact
that, after fourteen years of freedom and labor on their own account,
the great mass of the negroes depend for their living on an advance of
supplies (as they need food, clothing, or tools during the year) upon
the pledge of their growing crop. This is a generic imitation of the
white man's improvidence during the slavery times; then the planters
mortgaged their crops and negroes, and where one used the advances to
extend his plantation, ten squandered the money. The negro's necessities
have developed an offensive race, called merchants by courtesy, who keep
supply stores at the cross-roads and steamboat landings, and live upon
extortion. These people would be called sharks, harpies, and vampires in
any Northwestern agricultural community, and they would not survive more
than one season. The country merchant advances the negro tenant such
supplies as the negro wants up to a certain amount, previously fixed
by contract, and charges the negro at least double the value of every
article sold to him. There is no concealment about the extortion; every
store-keeper has his cash price and his credit price, and in nearly all
cases the latter is one hundred per cent. higher than the former. The
extortion is justified by those who practice it on the ground that
their losses by bad debts, though their advances are always secured by
mortgage on the growing crop, overbalance the profits; this assertion is
scarcely borne out by the comparative opulence of the "merchant" and
the pitiful poverty of the laborer. Some of the largest and wealthiest
planters have sought to protect their tenants from the merciless
clutches of the contrary merchant, who is more frequently than not an
Israelite, by advancing supplies of necessary articles at reasonable
prices. But the necessities of the planter, if not his greed, often
betray him into plundering the negro. The planter himself is generally a
victim to usury. He still draws on the city factor to the extent of ten
dollars a bale upon his estimated crop. He pays this factor two and one
half per cent. commission for the advance, eight per cent. interest for
the money, two and one half per cent. more for disposing of the crop
when consigned to him, and sometimes still another commission for the
purchase of the supplies. The planter who furnishes his tenants with
supplies on credit is usually paying an interest of fifteen to eighteen
per cent. himself, and necessarily takes some risk in advancing upon
an uncertain crop and to a laborer whom he believes to be neither
scrupulous nor industrious; these conditions necessitate more than the
ordinary profit, and in many cases suggest exorbitant and unreasonable
charges. But whether the negro deals with the merchant or the land
owner, his extravagance almost invariably exhausts his credit, even if
it be large. The negro is a sensuous creature, and luxurious in his way.
The male is an enormous consumer of tobacco and whisky; the female
has an inordinate love for flummery; both are fond of sardines, potted
meats, and canned goods generally, and they indulge themselves without
any other restraint than the refusal of their merchant to sell to them.
The man who advances supplies watches his negro customers constantly;
if they are working well and their crop promises to be large, he will
permit and even encourage them to draw upon him liberally; it is only a
partial failure of the crop, or some intimation of the negro's intention
to shirk his obligations, that induces his country factor to preach the
virtue of self-restraint, or moralize upon the advantages of economy.

The land owner's rent and the merchant's advances are both secured by a
chattel mortgage on the tenant's personal property, and by a pledge of
the growing crop. The hired laborer (for it is common for negroes to
work for wages for other negroes who rent lands) has also a lien upon
the growing crops second only to the land owner's; but as the law
requires that the liens shall be recorded, which the ignorant laborer
usually neglects and the shrewd merchant never fails to do, the former
is generally cheated of his security. Among those who usually work for
hire are the women, who are expert cotton pickers, and the loss of wages
which so many of them have suffered by reason of the prior lien gained
by landlord and merchant has helped to make them earnest and effective
advocates of emigration. The Western farmer considers it hard enough to
struggle under one mortgage at a reasonable interest; the negro tenant
begins his season with three mortgages, covering all he owns, his labor
for the coming year, and all he expects to acquire during that period.
He pays one third his product for the use of the land; he pays double
the value of all he consumes; he pays an exorbitant fee for recording
the contract by which he pledges his pound of flesh; he is charged two
or three times as much as he ought to pay for ginning his cotton;
and, finally, he turns over his crop to be eaten up in commissions, if
anything still be left to him. It is easy to understand why the negro
rarely gets ahead in the world. This mortgaging of future services,
which is practically what a pledge of the growing crop amounts to, is in
the nature of bondage. It has a tendency to make the negro extravagant,
reckless, and unscrupulous; he has become convinced from previous
experience that nothing will be coming to him on the day of settlement,
and he is frequently actuated by the purpose of getting as much as
possible and working as little as possible. Cases are numerous in which
the negro abandons his own crop at picking time, because he knows that
he has already eaten up its full value; and so he goes to picking for
wages on some other plantation. In other cases, where negroes have
acquired mules and farming implements upon which a merchant has secured
a mortgage in the manner described, they are practically bound to that
merchant from year to year, in order to retain their property; if he
removes from one section to another, they must follow him, and rent
and cultivate lands in his neighborhood. It is only the ignorance,
the improvidence, and the happy disposition of the negro, under the
influence of the lazy, drowsy climate, to which he is so well adapted
physically, that have enabled him to endure these hardships so long.
And, though the negro is the loser, the white man is not often the
gainer, from this false plantation and mercantile system. The incidental
risk may not be so large as the planter and merchant pretend, but the
condition of the people is an evidence that the extortion they practice
yields no better profit in the long run than would be gained by
competition in fair prices on a cash system; and in leading up to a
general emigration of the laboring population the abuses described will
eventually ruin and impoverish those who have heretofore been the only
beneficiaries thereof. The decay of improvements inevitable under annual
rentings, the lack of sufficient labor to cultivate all the good land,
and the universal idleness of the rural whites have kept the land
owners comparatively poor; the partial failure of crops and the
unscrupulousness of the negro debtor, engendered by the infamous
exactions of his creditor, have prevented the merchants, as a class,
from prospering as much as might be supposed; and, finally, the uniform
injustice to the laborers induces them to fly to ills they know not of,
rather than bear those they have. It is a blessing to the negro that
the laws do not yet provide for a detention of the person in the case of
debt, or escape would be shut off entirely; as it is, various influences
and circumstances appertaining to the system in vogue have been used
to prevent the easy flight of those who desire to go, and have detained
thousands of blacks for a time who are fretting to quit the country.

Political oppression has contributed largely to the discontent which
is the prime cause of the exodus. "Bulldozing" is the term by which
all forms of this oppression are known. The native whites are generally
indisposed to confess that the negroes are quitting the country on
account of political injustice and persecution; even those who freely
admit and fitly characterize the abuses already described seek to deny,
or at least belittle, the political abuses. The fact that a large number
of negroes have emigrated from Madison Parish, Louisiana, where there
has never been any bulldozing, and where the negroes are in full
and undisputed political control, is cited as proof that political
disturbances cut no figure in the case. But the town of Delta, in
Madison Parish, is at once on the river and the terminus of a railroad
that runs back through the interior of the State; thus Madison Parish
would furnish the natural exit for the fugitives from the adjoining
counties, where there have been political disturbances. It would be just
as reasonable to contend that the plundering of the negroes has had no
influence in driving them away, since many of those who have emigrated
were among the most prosperous of the blacks, as to deny the agency
of political persecution. Families that had been able to accumulate
a certain amount of personal property, in spite of the extortionate
practices, sold their mules, their implements, their cows, their
pigs, their sheep, and their household goods for anything they would
bring,--frequently as low as one sixth of their value,--in order that
they might improve an immediate opportunity to go away; it is evident
that there must have been some cause outside of extortion in their case.
There are candid native whites who do not deny, but justify, the violent
methods which have been employed to disfranchise the negroes, or compel
them to vote under white dictation, in many parts of Louisiana and
Mississippi, on the ground that the men who pay the taxes should vote
them and control the disbursement of the public moneys. The gentlemen
who advance this argument seem to ignore the fact that the very
Northerner whom they are seeking to convert to "the Mississippi plan"
may himself be a taxpayer in some Northern city, where public affairs
are controlled by a class of voters in every way as ignorant and
irresponsible as the blacks, but where bulldozing has never yet
been suggested as a remedy. For the rest, the evidences of political
oppression are abundant and convincing. The bulldozers as a class are
more impecunious and irresponsible than the negroes, and, unlike the
negroes, they will not work. There has been more of the "night-riding,"
the whippings, the mysterious disappearances, the hangings, and the
terrorism comprehended in the term bulldozing than has been reported
by those "abstracts and brief chronicles of the time," the Southern
newspapers, which are now all of one party, and defer to the ruling
sentiment among the whites. The exodus has wrung from two or three of
the more candid and independent journals, however, a virtual confession
of the fiendish practices of bulldozing in their insistance that these
practices must be abandoned. The non-resident land owners and the
resident planters, the city factors and the country merchants of means
and respectability, have taken no personal part in the terrorizing of
the negro, but they have tolerated it, and sometimes encouraged it, in
order to gratify their preference for "white government." The negroes
have suffered the more because they have not resisted and defended
themselves; now they have begun to convince those who have persecuted
them that, if they will not strike back, they can and will run away.
No one who is at all familiar with the freedman can doubt that the
abridgment of his political rights has been one of the main causes of
the exodus. Voting is widely regarded at the North as a disagreeable
duty, but the negro looks upon it as the highest privilege in life; to
be frightened out of the exercise of this privilege, or compelled to
exercise it in conflict with his convictions and preferences, is to
suffer from a cruel injustice, which the negro will now try to escape,
since he has learned that escape is possible. The women, though free
from personal assaults, suffer from the terrorism that prevails in
certain districts as much as the men. "We might as well starve or freeze
to death in Kansas," they say, "as to be shot-gunned here." If they talk
to you in confidence, they declare that the ruling purpose is to escape
from the "slaughter-pens" of the South. Political persecution, and not
the extortion they suffer, is the refrain of all the speakers at negro
meetings that are held in encouragement and aid of the emigration. It is
idle to deny that the varied injustice which the negroes have suffered
as voters is accountable for a large part of their universal yearning
for new homes, and it will be folly for the responsible classes at the
South to ignore this fact.

As it is the negroes who are fleeing from the South, it is natural to
look among the dominant class for the injustice which is driving them
away; but it would be unfair to conclude that the blame rests entirely
upon the whites, and still more so to leave the impression that there
is no extenuation for the mistakes and abuses for which the whites are
responsible. Much of the intimidation of the blacks has been tolerated,
if not suggested, by a fear of negro uprisings. The apprehension is a
legacy from the days of slavery, and is more unreasonable now than
it was then; but still it exists. This is not an excuse, but an
explanation. The Pharaohs of the time of Moses were in constant dread
lest the Hebrews under their rule should go over to their enemies, and
their dread doubtless increased the cruelty of the Egyptians; but, while
this dread was an extenuation in the eyes of the persecutors, it did
not prevent the Hebrews from fleeing the persecution. So the blacks are
going without regard to the justification which the whites may set up
for their treatment; the only difference between the old and new exodus
is that, as the writer heard one negro speaker express it, "every black
man is his own Moses in this exodus." The negro may be lazy; it seems
impossible to be otherwise in the Southern climate. He may not be
willing to work on Saturdays, no matter how urgent the necessity; the
indulgence in holidays is said to be one of the chief drawbacks to the
advancement of the emancipated serfs of Russia. The blacks are certainly
extravagant in their way, though the word seems to be almost misused in
connection with a race who live largely on pork and molasses, and rarely
wear more than half a dollar's worth of clothes at one time. They have
not the instinct of home as it prevails among the whites, but incline
to a crude and unsystematic communism; the negro quarters of the old
plantations are all huddled together in the centre, and, except where
the land owners have interfered to encourage a different life, there is
still too much promiscuousness in the relation of the sexes. The negro,
as a rule, has no ambition to become a land owner; he prefers to invest
his surplus money, when he has any, in personal and movable property.
In most cases where the blacks have been given the opportunity of buying
land on long time, and paying yearly installments out of the proceeds of
their annual crops, they have tired of the bargain after a year or two,
and abandoned the contract. The negro politicians and preachers are not
all that reformers and moralists would have them; the imitative faculty
of the African has betrayed the black politician into many of the
vicious ways of the white politician, and the colored preacher is
frequently not above "the pomps and vanity of this wicked world." All
this is the more unfortunate, as the blacks have a child-like confidence
in their chosen leaders, founded partly on their primitive character,
and partly on their distrust of the native whites. Both their
politicians and their preachers have given abundant evidence of their
insincerity during the excitement of emigration by blowing hot and
blowing cold; by talking to the negroes one way, and to the whites
another; and even to the extent, in some instances, of taking money to
use their influence for discouraging and impeding emigration. These are
some of the faults and misfortunes on the part of the blacks which enter
into the race troubles. The chief blame which attaches to the whites
is the failure to make a persistent effort, by education and kind
treatment, to overcome the distrust and cure the faults of the
negroes. The whites control, because they constitute the "property and
intelligence" of the South, to use the words of a democratic statesman;
this power should have been used to gain the confidence of the blacks.
Had such a course been taken, there would not have been the fear of
reenslavement, which actually prevails to a considerable extent among
the negroes. So long as a portion of the whites entertain the conviction
that the war of the sections will be renewed within a few years, as is
the case, the negroes will suspect and dread the class who would treat
them as enemies in case the war should come, and will seek to escape to
a section of the country where they would not be so treated. Perhaps,
too, there would have been a voluntary political division among the
black voters, had the whites used more pacific means to bring it about,
and had they themselves set the example. And last, but not least, in
making up the sum of blame that the whites must bear, is their own
unwillingness to labor, which gives the rural population too much time
for mischief and too little sympathy with the working classes.

As we have traced the causes that have led to the exodus, and described
the conditions which warrant the belief that there will be a renewal of
the emigration on a more extended scale next spring, and endeavored to
distribute the responsibility for the troubles equitably among whites
and blacks, remedies have naturally suggested themselves to the reader;
in fact, they are more easily to be thought out than accomplished. A
few general reflections may be added, however, in order to indicate
the probable solution of the race troubles that have brought about the
exodus, if, indeed, the whites and blacks of the South are ever going to
live together in peace.

(1.) It is certain that negro labor is the best the South can have, and
equally certain that the climate and natural conditions of the South
are better suited to the negro than any others on this continent.
The alluvial lands, which many persons believe the negroes alone can
cultivate, on account of climatic conditions, are so rich that it might
literally be said it is only necessary to tickle them with a hoe to make
them laugh back a harvest. The common prosperity of the country--the
agricultural interests of the South and the commercial interests of the
North--will be best served, therefore, by the continued residence and
labor of the blacks in the cotton States.

(2.) The fact stated in the foregoing paragraph is so well understood at
the North that the Southern people should dismiss the idea that there is
any scheming among the Northern people, political or otherwise, to draw
the black labor away from its natural home. The same fact should also
influence the people at the North not to be misled by any professional
philanthropists who may have some self-interest in soliciting aid to
facilitate negro emigration from the South. The duty of the North in
this matter is simply to extend protection and assure safe-conduct
to the negroes, if the Southern whites attempt to impede voluntary
emigration by either law or violence. Any other course might be cruel
to the negro in encouraging him to enter on a new life in a strange
climate, as well as an injustice to the white land owners of the South.

(3.) There is danger that the Southern whites will, as a rule,
misinterpret the meaning of the exodus. Many are inclined to underrate
its importance, and those who appreciate its significance are apt to
look for temporary and superficial remedies. The vague promises made at
the Vicksburg convention, which was controlled by the whites, and called
to consider the emigration movement, have had no influence with
the negroes, because they have heard such promises before. Had the
convention adopted some definite plan of action, such as ex-Governor
Foote, of Mississippi, submitted, its session might not have been in
vain. This plan was to establish a committee in every county, composed
of men who have the confidence of both whites and blacks, that should
be auxiliary to the public authorities, listen to complaints, and
arbitrate, advise, conciliate, or prosecute, as each case should demand.
It is short-sighted for the Southern people to make mere temporary
concessions, such as have been made in some cases this year, for that
course would establish an annual strike. It is folly for them to suppose
they can stem the tide of emigration by influencing the regular lines of
steamboats not to carry the refugees, for the people of the North will
see that the blacks shall not be detained in the South against their
will. It is unwise for them to devise schemes for importing Chinese,
or encouraging the immigration of white labor as a substitute for negro
labor, when they may much better bestir themselves to make the present
effective labor content.

(4.) Education will be the most useful agent to employ in the permanent
harmonizing of the two races, and the redemption of both from the faults
and follies which constitute their troubles. It is not the education of
the negro alone, whose ambition for learning is increasing notably with
every new generation, but the education of the mass of the young whites,
that is needed to inculcate more tolerance of color and opinion, to give
them an aspiration beyond that of riding a horse and hanging a "nigger,"
and to enable them to set a better example to the imitative blacks in
the way of work and frugality. The blacks need the education to protect
them from designing white men; the whites need it to teach them that
their own interests will be best served by abandoning bulldozing of all
kinds.

(5.) Reform in the land tenure, by converting the plantation monopolies
into small holdings; abolition of the credit system, by abandoning the
laws which sustain it; a diversification of crops; and attention to
new manufacturing, maritime, and commercial enterprises,--these are the
material changes that are most needed. They can be secured only through
the active and earnest efforts of the whites. The blacks will be found
responsive.

(6.) The hope of the negro exodus at its present stage, or even if it
shall continue another season, is that the actual loss of the valuable
labor that has gone, and the prospective loss of more labor that is
anxious to go, will induce the intelligent and responsible classes
at the South to overcome their own prejudices, and to compel the
extremists, irreconcilables, and politicians generally, of all parties,
to abandon agitation, and give the South equal peace and equal chance
for black and white.




MY ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY by Frederick Douglass


In the first narrative of my experience in slavery, written nearly forty
years ago, and in various writings since, I have given the public what I
considered very good reasons for withholding the manner of my escape. In
substance these reasons were, first, that such publication at any time
during the existence of slavery might be used by the master against the
slave, and prevent the future escape of any who might adopt the same
means that I did. The second reason was, if possible, still more binding
to silence: the publication of details would certainly have put in peril
the persons and property of those who assisted. Murder itself was not
more sternly and certainly punished in the State of Maryland than that
of aiding and abetting the escape of a slave. Many colored men, for
no other crime than that of giving aid to a fugitive slave, have, like
Charles T. Torrey, perished in prison. The abolition of slavery in my
native State and throughout the country, and the lapse of time, render
the caution hitherto observed no longer necessary. But even since the
abolition of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle
curiosity by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons
for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to
exist, there was no reason for telling it. I shall now, however, cease
to avail myself of this formula, and, as far as I can, endeavor to
satisfy this very natural curiosity. I should, perhaps, have yielded to
that feeling sooner, had there been anything very heroic or thrilling
in the incidents connected with my escape, for I am sorry to say I
have nothing of that sort to tell; and yet the courage that could risk
betrayal and the bravery which was ready to encounter death, if need be,
in pursuit of freedom, were essential features in the undertaking. My
success was due to address rather than courage, to good luck rather than
bravery. My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who
were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery.

It was the custom in the State of Maryland to require the free colored
people to have what were called free papers. These instruments they were
required to renew very often, and by charging a fee for this writing,
considerable sums from time to time were collected by the State. In
these papers the name, age, color, height, and form of the freeman were
described, together with any scars or other marks upon his person which
could assist in his identification. This device in some measure defeated
itself--since more than one man could be found to answer the same
general description. Hence many slaves could escape by personating the
owner of one set of papers; and this was often done as follows: A
slave, nearly or sufficiently answering the description set forth in the
papers, would borrow or hire them till by means of them he could escape
to a free State, and then, by mail or otherwise, would return them to
the owner. The operation was a hazardous one for the lender as well as
for the borrower. A failure on the part of the fugitive to send back the
papers would imperil his benefactor, and the discovery of the papers
in possession of the wrong man would imperil both the fugitive and his
friend. It was, therefore, an act of supreme trust on the part of a
freeman of color thus to put in jeopardy his own liberty that another
might be free. It was, however, not unfrequently bravely done, and was
seldom discovered. I was not so fortunate as to resemble any of my free
acquaintances sufficiently to answer the description of their papers.
But I had a friend--a sailor--who owned a sailor's protection, which
answered somewhat the purpose of free papers--describing his person,
and certifying to the fact that he was a free American sailor. The
instrument had at its head the American eagle, which gave it the
appearance at once of an authorized document. This protection, when in
my hands, did not describe its bearer very accurately. Indeed, it called
for a man much darker than myself, and close examination of it would
have caused my arrest at the start.

In order to avoid this fatal scrutiny on the part of railroad officials,
I arranged with Isaac Rolls, a Baltimore hackman, to bring my baggage to
the Philadelphia train just on the moment of starting, and jumped upon
the car myself when the train was in motion. Had I gone into the station
and offered to purchase a ticket, I should have been instantly and
carefully examined, and undoubtedly arrested. In choosing this plan
I considered the jostle of the train, and the natural haste of the
conductor, in a train crowded with passengers, and relied upon my skill
and address in playing the sailor, as described in my protection, to do
the rest. One element in my favor was the kind feeling which prevailed
in Baltimore and other sea-ports at the time, toward "those who go
down to the sea in ships." "Free trade and sailors' rights" just then
expressed the sentiment of the country. In my clothing I was rigged out
in sailor style. I had on a red shirt and a tarpaulin hat, and a black
cravat tied in sailor fashion carelessly and loosely about my neck. My
knowledge of ships and sailor's talk came much to my assistance, for
I knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and
could talk sailor like an "old salt." I was well on the way to Havre de
Grace before the conductor came into the negro car to collect tickets
and examine the papers of his black passengers. This was a critical
moment in the drama. My whole future depended upon the decision of this
conductor. Agitated though I was while this ceremony was proceeding,
still, externally, at least, I was apparently calm and self-possessed.
He went on with his duty--examining several colored passengers before
reaching me. He was somewhat harsh in tome and peremptory in manner
until he reached me, when, strange enough, and to my surprise and
relief, his whole manner changed. Seeing that I did not readily produce
my free papers, as the other colored persons in the car had done, he
said to me, in friendly contrast with his bearing toward the others:

"I suppose you have your free papers?"

To which I answered:

"No sir; I never carry my free papers to sea with me."

"But you have something to show that you are a freeman, haven't you?"

"Yes, sir," I answered; "I have a paper with the American Eagle on it,
and that will carry me around the world."

With this I drew from my deep sailor's pocket my seaman's protection, as
before described. The merest glance at the paper satisfied him, and he
took my fare and went on about his business. This moment of time was one
of the most anxious I ever experienced. Had the conductor looked closely
at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for
a very different-looking person from myself, and in that case it would
have been his duty to arrest me on the instant, and send me back to
Baltimore from the first station. When he left me with the assurance
that I was all right, though much relieved, I realized that I was still
in great danger: I was still in Maryland, and subject to arrest at any
moment. I saw on the train several persons who would have known me in
any other clothes, and I feared they might recognize me, even in my
sailor "rig," and report me to the conductor, who would then subject me
to a closer examination, which I knew well would be fatal to me.

Though I was not a murderer fleeing from justice, I felt perhaps quite
as miserable as such a criminal. The train was moving at a very high
rate of speed for that epoch of railroad travel, but to my anxious mind
it was moving far too slowly. Minutes were hours, and hours were days
during this part of my flight. After Maryland, I was to pass through
Delaware--another slave State, where slave-catchers generally awaited
their prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its
borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active. The
border lines between slavery and freedom were the dangerous ones for the
fugitives. The heart of no fox or deer, with hungry hounds on his trail
in full chase, could have beaten more anxiously or noisily than did mine
from the time I left Baltimore till I reached Philadelphia. The passage
of the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace was at that time made by
ferry-boat, on board of which I met a young colored man by the name of
Nichols, who came very near betraying me. He was a "hand" on the boat,
but, instead of minding his business, he insisted upon knowing me, and
asking me dangerous questions as to where I was going, when I was coming
back, etc. I got away from my old and inconvenient acquaintance as soon
as I could decently do so, and went to another part of the boat. Once
across the river, I encountered a new danger. Only a few days before,
I had been at work on a revenue cutter, in Mr. Price's ship-yard in
Baltimore, under the care of Captain McGowan. On the meeting at this
point of the two trains, the one going south stopped on the track just
opposite to the one going north, and it so happened that this Captain
McGowan sat at a window where he could see me very distinctly, and
would certainly have recognized me had he looked at me but for a second.
Fortunately, in the hurry of the moment, he did not see me; and the
trains soon passed each other on their respective ways. But this was not
my only hair-breadth escape. A German blacksmith whom I knew well was on
the train with me, and looked at me very intently, as if he thought he
had seen me somewhere before in his travels. I really believe he knew
me, but had no heart to betray me. At any rate, he saw me escaping and
held his peace.

The last point of imminent danger, and the one I dreaded most,
was Wilmington. Here we left the train and took the steam-boat for
Philadelphia. In making the change here I again apprehended arrest, but
no one disturbed me, and I was soon on the broad and beautiful Delaware,
speeding away to the Quaker City. On reaching Philadelphia in the
afternoon, I inquired of a colored man how I could get on to New York.
He directed me to the William-street depot, and thither I went, taking
the train that night. I reached New York Tuesday morning, having
completed the journey in less than twenty-four hours.

My free life began on the third of September, 1838. On the morning of
the fourth of that month, after an anxious and most perilous but safe
journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a FREE MAN--one
more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves of the
troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway.
Though dazzled with the wonders which met me on every hand, my thoughts
could not be much withdrawn from my strange situation. For the moment,
the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely
fulfilled. The bonds that had held me to "old master" were broken. No
man now had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I
was in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with
the rest of its busy number. I have often been asked how I felt when
first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my
experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A
new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick
round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave
life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely
describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York,
I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry
lions." Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but
gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.
During ten or fifteen years I had been, as it were, dragging a heavy
chain which no strength of mine could break; I was not only a slave, but
a slave for life. I might become a husband, a father, an aged man, but
through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I had
felt myself doomed. All efforts I had previously made to secure my
freedom had not only failed, but had seemed only to rivet my fetters the
more firmly, and to render my escape more difficult. Baffled, entangled,
and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question, May not my
condition after all be God's work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and
if so, Is not submission my duty? A contest had in fact been going on
in my mind for a long time, between the clear consciousness of right and
the plausible make-shifts of theology and superstition. The one held me
an abject slave--a prisoner for life, punished for some transgression
in which I had no lot nor part; and the other counseled me to manly
endeavor to secure my freedom. This contest was now ended; my chains
were broken, and the victory brought me unspeakable joy.

But my gladness was short-lived, for I was not yet out of the reach and
power of the slave-holders. I soon found that New York was not quite so
free or so safe a refuge as I had supposed, and a sense of loneliness
and insecurity again oppressed me most sadly. I chanced to meet on the
street, a few hours after my landing, a fugitive slave whom I had once
known well in slavery. The information received from him alarmed me. The
fugitive in question was known in Baltimore as "Allender's Jake," but in
New York he wore the more respectable name of "William Dixon." Jake, in
law, was the property of Doctor Allender, and Tolly Allender, the son
of the doctor, had once made an effort to recapture MR. DIXON, but
had failed for want of evidence to support his claim. Jake told me the
circumstances of this attempt, and how narrowly he escaped being sent
back to slavery and torture. He told me that New York was then full
of Southerners returning from the Northern watering-places; that the
colored people of New York were not to be trusted; that there were hired
men of my own color who would betray me for a few dollars; that there
were hired men ever on the lookout for fugitives; that I must trust
no man with my secret; that I must not think of going either upon the
wharves or into any colored boarding-house, for all such places were
closely watched; that he was himself unable to help me; and, in fact, he
seemed while speaking to me to fear lest I myself might be a spy and
a betrayer. Under this apprehension, as I suppose, he showed signs of
wishing to be rid of me, and with whitewash brush in hand, in search of
work, he soon disappeared.

This picture, given by poor "Jake," of New York, was a damper to my
enthusiasm. My little store of money would soon be exhausted, and since
it would be unsafe for me to go on the wharves for work, and I had no
introductions elsewhere, the prospect for me was far from cheerful. I
saw the wisdom of keeping away from the ship-yards, for, if pursued, as
I felt certain I should be, Mr. Auld, my "master," would naturally seek
me there among the calkers. Every door seemed closed against me. I was
in the midst of an ocean of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger
to every one. I was without home, without acquaintance, without money,
without credit, without work, and without any definite knowledge as to
what course to take, or where to look for succor. In such an extremity,
a man had something besides his new-born freedom to think of. While
wandering about the streets of New York, and lodging at least one
night among the barrels on one of the wharves, I was indeed free--from
slavery, but free from food and shelter as well. I kept my secret to
myself as long as I could, but I was compelled at last to seek some
one who would befriend me without taking advantage of my destitution
to betray me. Such a person I found in a sailor named Stuart, a
warm-hearted and generous fellow, who, from his humble home on Centre
street, saw me standing on the opposite sidewalk, near the Tombs prison.
As he approached me, I ventured a remark to him which at once enlisted
his interest in me. He took me to his home to spend the night, and in
the morning went with me to Mr. David Ruggles, the secretary of the New
York Vigilance Committee, a co-worker with Isaac T. Hopper, Lewis and
Arthur Tappan, Theodore S. Wright, Samuel Cornish, Thomas Downing,
Philip A. Bell, and other true men of their time. All these (save Mr.
Bell, who still lives, and is editor and publisher of a paper called the
"Elevator," in San Francisco) have finished their work on earth. Once in
the hands of these brave and wise men, I felt comparatively safe. With
Mr. Ruggles, on the corner of Lispenard and Church streets, I was hidden
several days, during which time my intended wife came on from Baltimore
at my call, to share the burdens of life with me. She was a free woman,
and came at once on getting the good news of my safety. We were
married by Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, then a well-known and respected
Presbyterian minister. I had no money with which to pay the marriage
fee, but he seemed well pleased with our thanks.

Mr. Ruggles was the first officer on the "Underground Railroad" whom I
met after coming North, and was, indeed, the only one with whom I had
anything to do till I became such an officer myself. Learning that my
trade was that of a calker, he promptly decided that the best place
for me was in New Bedford, Mass. He told me that many ships for whaling
voyages were fitted out there, and that I might there find work at my
trade and make a good living. So, on the day of the marriage ceremony,
we took our little luggage to the steamer JOHN W. RICHMOND, which, at
that time, was one of the line running between New York and Newport,
R. I. Forty-three years ago colored travelers were not permitted in the
cabin, nor allowed abaft the paddle-wheels of a steam vessel. They were
compelled, whatever the weather might be,--whether cold or hot, wet or
dry,--to spend the night on deck. Unjust as this regulation was, it
did not trouble us much; we had fared much harder before. We arrived at
Newport the next morning, and soon after an old fashioned stage-coach,
with "New Bedford" in large yellow letters on its sides, came down to
the wharf. I had not money enough to pay our fare, and stood hesitating
what to do. Fortunately for us, there were two Quaker gentlemen who were
about to take passage on the stage,--Friends William C. Taber and
Joseph Ricketson,--who at once discerned our true situation, and, in a
peculiarly quiet way, addressing me, Mr. Taber said: "Thee get in." I
never obeyed an order with more alacrity, and we were soon on our way to
our new home. When we reached "Stone Bridge" the passengers alighted
for breakfast, and paid their fares to the driver. We took no breakfast,
and, when asked for our fares, I told the driver I would make it right
with him when we reached New Bedford. I expected some objection to this
on his part, but he made none. When, however, we reached New Bedford, he
took our baggage, including three music-books,--two of them collections
by Dyer, and one by Shaw,--and held them until I was able to redeem them
by paying to him the amount due for our rides. This was soon done, for
Mr. Nathan Johnson not only received me kindly and hospitably, but, on
being informed about our baggage, at once loaned me the two dollars
with which to square accounts with the stage-driver. Mr. and Mrs. Nathan
Johnson reached a good old age, and now rest from their labors. I am
under many grateful obligations to them. They not only "took me in
when a stranger" and "fed me when hungry," but taught me how to make an
honest living. Thus, in a fortnight after my flight from Maryland, I
was safe in New Bedford, a citizen of the grand old commonwealth of
Massachusetts.

Once initiated into my new life of freedom and assured by Mr. Johnson
that I need not fear recapture in that city, a comparatively unimportant
question arose as to the name by which I should be known thereafter in
my new relation as a free man. The name given me by my dear mother was
no less pretentious and long than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.
I had, however, while living in Maryland, dispensed with the Augustus
Washington, and retained only Frederick Bailey. Between Baltimore and
New Bedford, the better to conceal myself from the slave-hunters, I had
parted with Bailey and called myself Johnson; but in New Bedford I
found that the Johnson family was already so numerous as to cause some
confusion in distinguishing them, hence a change in this name seemed
desirable. Nathan Johnson, mine host, placed great emphasis upon
this necessity, and wished me to allow him to select a name for me. I
consented, and he called me by my present name--the one by which I have
been known for three and forty years--Frederick Douglass. Mr. Johnson
had just been reading the "Lady of the Lake," and so pleased was he with
its great character that he wished me to bear his name. Since reading
that charming poem myself, I have often thought that, considering the
noble hospitality and manly character of Nathan Johnson--black man
though he was--he, far more than I, illustrated the virtues of the
Douglas of Scotland. Sure am I that, if any slave-catcher had entered
his domicile with a view to my recapture, Johnson would have shown
himself like him of the "stalwart hand."

The reader may be surprised at the impressions I had in some way
conceived of the social and material condition of the people at the
North. I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise, and
high civilization of this section of the country. My "Columbian Orator,"
almost my only book, had done nothing to enlighten me concerning
Northern society. I had been taught that slavery was the bottom fact
of all wealth. With this foundation idea, I came naturally to the
conclusion that poverty must be the general condition of the people of
the free States. In the country from which I came, a white man holding
no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man, and men
of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash." Hence I
supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must
be in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the
United States where I should have found a more striking and gratifying
contrast, not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition
of the colored people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when Mr.
Johnson told me that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of
Massachusetts that would prevent a colored man from being governor of
the State, if the people should see fit to elect him. There, too, the
black man's children attended the public schools with the white man's
children, and apparently without objection from any quarter. To impress
me with my security from recapture and return to slavery, Mr. Johnson
assured me that no slave-holder could take a slave out of New Bedford;
that there were men there who would lay down their lives to save me from
such a fate.

The fifth day after my arrival, I put on the clothes of a common
laborer, and went upon the wharves in search of work. On my way down
Union street I saw a large pile of coal in front of the house of Rev.
Ephraim Peabody, the Unitarian minister. I went to the kitchen door and
asked the privilege of bringing in and putting away this coal. "What
will you charge?" said the lady. "I will leave that to you, madam." "You
may put it away," she said. I was not long in accomplishing the
job, when the dear lady put into my hand TWO SILVER HALF-DOLLARS. To
understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money,
realizing that I had no master who could take it from me,--THAT IT WAS
MINE--THAT MY HANDS WERE MY OWN, and could earn more of the precious
coin,--one must have been in some sense himself a slave. My next job was
stowing a sloop at Uncle Gid. Howland's wharf with a cargo of oil for
New York. I was not only a freeman, but a free working-man, and no
"master" stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.

The season was growing late and work was plenty. Ships were being fitted
out for whaling, and much wood was used in storing them. The sawing
this wood was considered a good job. With the help of old Friend Johnson
(blessings on his memory) I got a saw and "buck," and went at it. When
I went into a store to buy a cord with which to brace up my saw in the
frame, I asked for a "fip's" worth of cord. The man behind the counter
looked rather sharply at me, and said with equal sharpness, "You don't
belong about here." I was alarmed, and thought I had betrayed myself.
A fip in Maryland was six and a quarter cents, called fourpence in
Massachusetts. But no harm came from the "fi'penny-bit" blunder, and I
confidently and cheerfully went to work with my saw and buck. It was new
business to me, but I never did better work, or more of it, in the same
space of time on the plantation for Covey, the negro-breaker, than I did
for myself in these earliest years of my freedom.

Notwithstanding the just and humane sentiment of New Bedford three and
forty years ago, the place was not entirely free from race and color
prejudice. The good influence of the Roaches, Rodmans, Arnolds,
Grinnells, and Robesons did not pervade all classes of its people. The
test of the real civilization of the community came when I applied for
work at my trade, and then my repulse was emphatic and decisive. It so
happened that Mr. Rodney French, a wealthy and enterprising citizen,
distinguished as an anti-slavery man, was fitting out a vessel for
a whaling voyage, upon which there was a heavy job of calking and
coppering to be done. I had some skill in both branches, and applied
to Mr. French for work. He, generous man that he was, told me he would
employ me, and I might go at once to the vessel. I obeyed him, but upon
reaching the float-stage, where others [sic] calkers were at work, I
was told that every white man would leave the ship, in her unfinished
condition, if I struck a blow at my trade upon her. This uncivil,
inhuman, and selfish treatment was not so shocking and scandalous in
my eyes at the time as it now appears to me. Slavery had inured me to
hardships that made ordinary trouble sit lightly upon me. Could I have
worked at my trade I could have earned two dollars a day, but as a
common laborer I received but one dollar. The difference was of great
importance to me, but if I could not get two dollars, I was glad to
get one; and so I went to work for Mr. French as a common laborer. The
consciousness that I was free--no longer a slave--kept me cheerful under
this, and many similar proscriptions, which I was destined to meet
in New Bedford and elsewhere on the free soil of Massachusetts. For
instance, though colored children attended the schools, and were treated
kindly by their teachers, the New Bedford Lyceum refused, till several
years after my residence in that city, to allow any colored person to
attend the lectures delivered in its hall. Not until such men as Charles
Sumner, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horace Mann refused
to lecture in their course while there was such a restriction, was it
abandoned.

Becoming satisfied that I could not rely on my trade in New Bedford to
give me a living, I prepared myself to do any kind of work that came to
hand. I sawed wood, shoveled coal, dug cellars, moved rubbish from back
yards, worked on the wharves, loaded and unloaded vessels, and scoured
their cabins.

I afterward got steady work at the brass-foundry owned by Mr. Richmond.
My duty here was to blow the bellows, swing the crane, and empty the
flasks in which castings were made; and at times this was hot and heavy
work. The articles produced here were mostly for ship work, and in the
busy season the foundry was in operation night and day. I have often
worked two nights and every working day of the week. My foreman, Mr.
Cobb, was a good man, and more than once protected me from abuse that
one or more of the hands was disposed to throw upon me. While in this
situation I had little time for mental improvement. Hard work, night and
day, over a furnace hot enough to keep the metal running like water,
was more favorable to action than thought; yet here I often nailed a
newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing
the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was
inflated and discharged. It was the pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties, and I look back to it now, after so many years, with some
complacency and a little wonder that I could have been so earnest and
persevering in any pursuit other than for my daily bread. I certainly
saw nothing in the conduct of those around to inspire me with such
interest: they were all devoted exclusively to what their hands found
to do. I am glad to be able to say that, during my engagement in this
foundry, no complaint was ever made against me that I did not do my
work, and do it well. The bellows which I worked by main strength was,
after I left, moved by a steam-engine.




THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE by Charles W. Chesnutt


About ten years ago my wife was in poor health, and our family doctor,
in whose skill and honesty I had implicit confidence, advised a change
of climate. I was engaged in grape-culture in northern Ohio, and decided
to look for a locality suitable for carrying on the same business
in some Southern State. I wrote to a cousin who had gone into the
turpentine business in central North Carolina, and he assured me that no
better place could be found in the South than the State and neighborhood
in which he lived: climate and soil were all that could be asked for,
and land could be bought for a mere song. A cordial invitation to visit
him while I looked into the matter was accepted. We found the weather
delightful at that season, the end of the summer, and were most
hospitably entertained. Our host placed a horse and buggy at our
disposal, and himself acted as guide until I got somewhat familiar with
the country.

I went several times to look at a place which I thought might suit me.
It had been at one time a thriving plantation, but shiftless cultivation
had well-night exhausted the soil. There had been a vineyard of some
extent on the place, but it had not been attended to since the war,
and had fallen into utter neglect. The vines--here partly supported
by decayed and broken-down arbors, there twining themselves among the
branches of the slender saplings which had sprung up among them--grew in
wild and unpruned luxuriance, and the few scanty grapes which they bore
were the undisputed prey of the first comer. The site was admirably
adapted to grape-raising; the soil, with a little attention, could not
have been better; and with the native grape, the luscious scuppernong,
mainly to rely upon, I felt sure that I could introduce and cultivate
successfully a number of other varieties.

One day I went over with my wife, to show her the place. We drove
between the decayed gate-posts--the gate itself had long since
disappeared--and up the straight, sandy lane to the open space where a
dwelling-house had once stood. But the house had fallen a victim to the
fortunes of war, and nothing remained of it except the brick pillars
upon which the sills had rested. We alighted, and walked about the place
for a while; but on Annie's complaining of weariness I led the way back
to the yard, where a pine log, lying under a spreading elm, formed a
shady though somewhat hard seat. One end of the log was already occupied
by a venerable-looking colored man. He held on his knees a hat full of
grapes, over which he was smacking his lips with great gusto, and a pile
of grape-skins near him indicated that the performance was no new thing.
He respectfully rose as we approached, and was moving away, when I
begged him to keep his seat.

"Don't let us disturb you," I said. "There's plenty of room for us all."

He resumed his seat with somewhat of embarrassment.

"Do you live around here?" I asked, anxious to put him at his ease.

"Yas, suh. I lives des ober yander, behine de nex' san'-hill, on de
Lumberton plank-road."

"Do you know anything about the time when this vineyard was cultivated?"

"Lawd bless yer, suh, I knows all about it. Dey ain' na'er a man in dis
settlement w'at won' tell yer ole Julius McAdoo 'uz bawn an' raise' on
dis yer same plantation. Is you de Norv'n gemman w'at's gwine ter buy de
ole vimya'd?"

"I am looking at it," I replied; "but I don't know that I shall care to
buy unless I can be reasonably sure of making something out of it."

"Well, suh, you is a stranger ter me, en I is a stranger ter you, en we
is bofe strangers ter one anudder, but 'f I 'uz in yo' place, I wouldn'
buy dis vimya'd."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, I dunner whe'r you b'lieves in cunj'in er not,--some er de w'ite
folks don't, er says dey don't,--but de truf er de matter is dat dis yer
ole vimya'd is goophered."

"Is what?" I asked, not grasping the meaning of this unfamiliar word.

"Is goophered, cunju'd, bewitch'."

He imparted this information with such solemn earnestness, and with such
an air of confidential mystery, that I felt somewhat interested, while
Annie was evidently much impressed, and drew closer to me.

"How do you know it is bewitched?" I asked.

"I wouldn' spec' fer you ter b'lieve me 'less you know all 'bout de
fac's. But ef you en young miss dere doan' min' lis'n'in' ter a ole
nigger run on a minute er two w'ile you er restin', I kin 'splain to yer
how it all happen'."

We assured him that we would be glad to hear how it all happened, and
he began to tell us. At first the current of his memory--or
imagination--seemed somewhat sluggish; but as his embarrassment wore
off, his language flowed more freely, and the story acquired perspective
and coherence. As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative,
his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his
auditors, and to be living over again in monologue his life on the old
plantation.

"Ole Mars Dugal' McAdoo bought dis place long many years befo' de wah,
en I 'member well w'en he sot out all dis yer part er de plantation
in scuppernon's. De vimes growed monst'us fas', en Mars Dugal' made a
thousan' gallon er scuppernon' wine eve'y year.

"Now, ef dey's an'thing a nigger lub, nex' ter 'possum, en chick'n,
en watermillyums, it's scuppernon's. Dey ain' nuffin dat kin stan' up
side'n de scuppernon' fer sweetness; sugar ain't a suckumstance ter
scuppernon'. W'en de season is nigh 'bout ober, en de grapes begin ter
swivel up des a little wid de wrinkles er ole age,--w'en de skin git
sof' en brown,--den de scuppernon' make you smack yo' lip en roll yo'
eye en wush fer mo'; so I reckon it ain' very 'stonishin' dat niggers
lub scuppernon'.

"Dey wuz a sight er niggers in de naberhood er de vimya'd. Dere wuz ole
Mars Henry Brayboy's niggers, en ole Mars Dunkin McLean's niggers, en
Mars Dugal's own niggers; den dey wuz a settlement er free niggers
en po' buckrahs down by de Wim'l'ton Road, en Mars Dugal' had de only
vimya'd in de naberhood. I reckon it ain' so much so nowadays, but befo'
de wah, in slab'ry times, er nigger didn' mine goin' fi' er ten mile in
a night, w'en dey wuz sump'n good ter eat at de yuther een.

"So atter a w'ile Mars Dugal' begin ter miss his scuppernon's. Co'se he
'cuse' de niggers er it, but dey all 'nied it ter de las'. Mars Dugal'
sot spring guns en steel traps, en he en de oberseah sot up nights
once't er twice't, tel one night Mars Dugal'--he 'uz a monst'us keerless
man--got his leg shot full er cow-peas. But somehow er nudder dey
couldn' nebber ketch none er de niggers. I dunner how it happen, but it
happen des like I tell yer, en de grapes kep' on a-goin des de same.

"But bimeby ole Mars Dugal' fix' up a plan ter stop it. Dey 'uz a cunjuh
'ooman livin' down mongs' de free niggers on de Wim'l'ton Road, en all
de darkies fum Rockfish ter Beaver Crick wuz feared uv her. She could
wuk de mos' powerfulles' kind er goopher,--could make people hab fits er
rheumatiz, er make 'em des dwinel away en die; en dey say she went out
ridin' de niggers at night, for she wuz a witch 'sides bein' a cunjuh
'ooman. Mars Dugal' hearn 'bout Aun' Peggy's doin's, en begun ter 'flect
whe'r er no he couldn' git her ter he'p him keep de niggers off'n de
grapevimes. One day in de spring er de year, ole miss pack' up a basket
er chick'n en poun'-cake, en a bottle er scuppernon' wine, en Mars
Dugal' tuk it in his buggy en driv ober ter Aun' Peggy's cabin. He tuk
de basket in, en had a long talk wid Aun' Peggy. De nex' day Aun' Peggy
come up ter de vimya'd. De niggers seed her slippin' 'roun', en dey soon
foun' out what she 'uz doin' dere. Mars Dugal' had hi'ed her ter goopher
de grapevimes. She sa'ntered 'roun' mongs' de vimes, en tuk a leaf fum
dis one, en a grape-hull fum dat one, en a grape-seed fum anudder one;
en den a little twig fum here, en a little pinch er dirt fum dere,--en
put it all in a big black bottle, wid a snake's toof en a speckle' hen's
gall en some ha'rs fum a black cat's tail, en den fill' de bottle wid
scuppernon' wine. W'en she got de goopher all ready en fix', she tuk 'n
went out in de woods en buried it under de root uv a red oak tree, en
den come back en tole one er de niggers she done goopher de grapevimes,
en a'er a nigger w'at eat dem grapes 'ud be sho ter die inside'n twel'
mont's.

"Atter dat de niggers let de scuppernon's 'lone, en Mars Dugal' didn'
hab no 'casion ter fine no mo' fault; en de season wuz mos' gone, w'en
a strange gemman stop at de plantation one night ter see Mars Dugal' on
some business; en his coachman, seein' de scuppernon's growin' so nice
en sweet, slip 'roun' behine de smoke-house, en et all de scuppernon's
he could hole. Nobody didn' notice it at de time, but dat night, on de
way home, de gemman's hoss runned away en kill' de coachman. W'en we
hearn de noos, Aun' Lucy, de cook, she up 'n say she seed de strange
nigger eat'n' er de scuppernon's behine de smoke-house; en den we knowed
de goopher had b'en er wukkin. Den one er de nigger chilluns runned
away fum de quarters one day, en got in de scuppernon's, en died de nex'
week. W'ite folks say he die' er de fevuh, but de niggers knowed it wuz
de goopher. So you k'n be sho de darkies didn' hab much ter do wid dem
scuppernon' vimes.

"W'en de scuppernon' season 'uz ober fer dat year, Mars Dugal' foun' he
had made fifteen hund'ed gallon er wine; en one er de niggers hearn
him laffin' wid de oberseah fit ter kill, en sayin' dem fifteen hund'ed
gallon er wine wuz monst'us good intrus' on de ten dollars he laid
out on de vimya'd. So I 'low ez he paid Aun' Peggy ten dollars fer to
goopher de grapevimes.

"De goopher didn' wuk no mo' tel de nex' summer, w'en 'long to'ds de
middle er de season one er de fiel' han's died; en ez dat lef' Mars
Dugal' sho't er han's, he went off ter town fer ter buy anudder. He
fotch de noo nigger home wid 'im. He wuz er ole nigger, er de color er
a gingy-cake, en ball ez a hoss-apple on de top er his head. He wuz a
peart ole nigger, do', en could do a big day's wuk.

"Now it happen dat one er de niggers on de nex' plantation, one er ole
Mars Henry Brayboy's niggers, had runned away de day befo', en tuk ter
de swamp, en ole Mars Dugal' en some er de yuther nabor w'ite folks had
gone out wid dere guns en dere dogs fer ter he'p 'em hunt fer de nigger;
en de han's on our own plantation wuz all so flusterated dat we fuhgot
ter tell de noo han' 'bout de goopher on de scuppernon' vimes. Co'se he
smell de grapes en see de vimes, an atter dahk de fus' thing he done
wuz ter slip off ter de grapevimes 'dout sayin' nuffin ter nobody. Nex'
mawnin' he tole some er de niggers 'bout de fine bait er scuppernon' he
et de night befo'.

"W'en dey tole 'im 'bout de goopher on de grapevimes, he 'uz dat
tarrified dat he turn pale, en look des like he gwine ter die right in
his tracks. De oberseah come up en axed w'at 'uz de matter; en w'en dey
tole 'im Henry be'n eatin' er de scuppernon's, en got de goopher on 'im,
he gin Henry a big drink er w'iskey, en 'low dat de nex' rainy day he
take 'im ober ter Aun' Peggy's, en see ef she wouldn' take de goopher
off'n him, seein' ez he didn' know nuffin erbout it tel he done et de
grapes.

"Sho nuff, it rain de nex' day, en de oberseah went ober ter Aun'
Peggy's wid Henry. En Aun' Peggy say dat bein' ez Henry didn' know 'bout
de goopher, en et de grapes in ign'ance er de quinseconces, she reckon
she mought be able fer ter take de goopher off'n him. So she fotch out
er bottle wid some cunjuh medicine in it, en po'd some out in a go'd fer
Henry ter drink. He manage ter git it down; he say it tas'e like whiskey
wid sump'n bitter in it. She 'lowed dat 'ud keep de goopher off'n him
tel de spring; but w'en de sap begin ter rise in de grapevimes he ha'
ter come en see her agin, en she tell him w'at e's ter do.

"Nex' spring, w'en de sap commence' ter rise in de scuppernon' vime,
Henry tuk a ham one night. Whar'd he git de ham? I doan know; dey wa'nt
no hams on de plantation 'cep'n' w'at 'uz in de smoke-house, but I never
see Henry 'bout de smoke-house. But ez I wuz a-sayin', he tuk de ham
ober ter Aun' Peggy's; en Aun' Peggy tole 'im dat w'en Mars Dugal' begin
ter prume de grapevimes, he mus' go en take 'n scrape off de sap whar it
ooze out'n de cut een's er de vimes, en 'n'int his ball head wid it; en
ef he do dat once't a year de goopher wouldn' wuk agin 'im long ez he
done it. En bein' ez he fotch her de ham, she fix' it so he kin eat all
de scuppernon' he want.

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way
'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him
dat summer. But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry. Up
ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de
young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes de ha'r begun ter grow
out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head
er ha'r on de plantation. Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun
de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come Henry's ha'r begun
ter quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r,
en by de time de grapes got ripe his head look des like a bunch er
grapes. Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er
Jim Crow [1], en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de
grapes 'ud be dere des de same. So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de
grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't."

[Footnote 1: A small card, resembling a curry-comb in construction, and
used by negroes in the rural districts instead of a comb.]

"But dat wa'nt de quares' thing 'bout de goopher. When Henry come ter de
plantation, he wuz gittin' a little ole an stiff in de j'ints. But
dat summer he got des ez spry en libely ez any young nigger on de
plantation; fac' he got so biggity dat Mars Jackson, de oberseah, ha'
ter th'eaten ter whip 'im, ef he didn' stop cuttin' up his didos en
behave hisse'f. But de mos' cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when
de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes. Fus', when de grapes 'uz
gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's h'ar; en w'en de
leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r begin ter drap out; en w'en de vimes
'uz b'ar, Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin
ter git ole en stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' tention ter de
gals dyoin' er de whole winter. En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on
ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young
niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton
ez Henry. But in de fall er de year his grapes begun ter straighten out,
en his j'ints ter git stiff, en his ha'r drap off, en de rheumatiz begin
ter wrastle wid 'im.

"Now, ef you'd a knowed ole Mars Dugal' McAdoo, you'd a knowed dat
it ha' ter be a mighty rainy day when he couldn' fine sump'n fer his
niggers ter do, en it ha' ter be a mighty little hole he couldn' crawl
thoo, en ha' ter be a monst'us cloudy night w'en a dollar git by him in
de dahkness; en w'en he see how Henry git young in de spring en ole
in de fall, he 'lowed ter hisse'f ez how he could make mo' money outen
Henry dan by wukkin' him in de cotton fiel'. 'Long de nex' spring, atter
de sap commence' ter rise, en Henry 'n'int 'is head en commence fer ter
git young en soopl, Mars Dugal' up 'n tuk Henry ter town, en sole 'im
fer fifteen hunder' dollars. Co'se de man w'at bought Henry didn' know
nuffin 'bout de goopher, en Mars Dugal' didn' see no 'casion fer ter
tell 'im. Long to'ds de fall, w'en de sap went down, Henry begin ter git
ole again same ez yuzhal, en his noo marster begin ter git skeered
les'n he gwine ter lose his fifteen-hunder'-dollar nigger. He sent fer
a mighty fine doctor, but de med'cine didn' 'pear ter do no good; de
goopher had a good holt. Henry tole de doctor 'bout de goopher, but de
doctor des laff at 'im.

"One day in de winter Mars Dugal' went ter town, en wuz santerin' 'long
de Main Street, when who should he meet but Henry's noo marster. Dey
said 'Hoddy,' en Mars Dugal' ax 'im ter hab a seegyar; en atter dey
run on awhile 'bout de craps en de weather, Mars Dugal' ax 'im, sorter
keerless, like ez ef he des thought of it,--

"'How you like de nigger I sole you las' spring?'

"Henry's marster shuck his head en knock de ashes off'n his seegyar.

"'Spec' I made a bad bahgin when I bought dat nigger. Henry done good
wuk all de summer, but sence de fall set in he 'pears ter be sorter
pinin' away. Dey ain' nuffin pertickler de matter wid 'im--leastways de
doctor say so--'cep'n' a tech er de rheumatiz; but his ha'r is all fell
out, en ef he don't pick up his strenk mighty soon, I spec' I'm gwine
ter lose 'im."

"Dey smoked on awhile, en bimeby ole mars say, 'Well, a bahgin's a
bahgin, but you en me is good fren's, en I doan wan' ter see you lose
all de money you paid fer dat digger [sic]; en ef w'at you say is so, en
I ain't 'sputin' it, he ain't wuf much now. I spec's you wukked him
too ha'd dis summer, er e'se de swamps down here don't agree wid de
san'-hill nigger. So you des lemme know, en ef he gits any wusser I'll
be willin' ter gib yer five hund'ed dollars fer 'im, en take my chances
on his livin'.'

"Sho nuff, when Henry begun ter draw up wid de rheumatiz en it look like
he gwine ter die fer sho, his noo marster sen' fer Mars Dugal', en Mars
Dugal' gin him what he promus, en brung Henry home ag'in. He tuk
good keer uv 'im dyoin' er de winter,--give 'im w'iskey ter rub his
rheumatiz, en terbacker ter smoke, en all he want ter eat,--'caze a
nigger w'at he could make a thousan' dollars a year off'n didn' grow on
eve'y huckleberry bush.

"Nex' spring, w'en de sap ris en Henry's ha'r commence' ter sprout, Mars
Dugal' sole 'im ag'in, down in Robeson County dis time; en he kep' dat
sellin' business up fer five year er mo'. Henry nebber say nuffin 'bout
de goopher ter his noo marsters, 'caze he know he gwine ter be tuk good
keer uv de nex' winter, w'en Mars Dugal' buy him back. En Mars Dugal'
made 'nuff money off'n Henry ter buy anudder plantation ober on Beaver
Crick.

"But long 'bout de een' er dat five year dey come a stranger ter stop
at de plantation. De fus' day he 'uz dere he went out wid Mars Dugal' en
spent all de mawnin' lookin' ober de vimya'd, en atter dinner dey spent
all de evenin' playin' kya'ds. De niggers soon 'skiver' dat he wuz a
Yankee, en dat he come down ter Norf C'lina fer ter learn de w'ite folks
how to raise grapes en make wine. He promus Mars Dugal' he cud make de
grapevimes b'ar twice't ez many grapes, en dat de noo wine-press he wuz
a-sellin' would make mo' d'n twice't ez many gallons er wine. En ole
Mars Dugal' des drunk it all in, des 'peared ter be bewitched wit dat
Yankee. W'en de darkies see dat Yankee runnin' 'roun de vimya'd en
diggin' under de grapevimes, dey shuk dere heads, en 'lowed dat dey
feared Mars Dugal' losin' his min'. Mars Dugal' had all de dirt dug away
fum under de roots er all de scuppernon' vimes, an' let 'em stan' dat
away fer a week er mo'. Den dat Yankee made de niggers fix up a mixtry
er lime en ashes en manyo, en po' it roun' de roots er de grapevimes.
Den he 'vise' Mars Dugal' fer ter trim de vimes close't, en Mars Dugal'
tuck 'n done eve'ything de Yankee tole him ter do. Dyoin' all er dis
time, mind yer, 'e wuz libbin' off'n de fat er de lan', at de big house,
en playin' kyards wid Mars Dugal' eve'y night; en dey say Mars Dugal'
los' mo'n a thousan' dollars dyoin' er de week dat Yankee wuz a runnin'
de grapevimes.

"W'en de sap ris nex' spring, ole Henry 'n'inted his head ez yuzhal,
en his ha'r commence' ter grow des de same ez it done eve'y year. De
scuppernon' vimes growed monst's fas', en de leaves wuz greener en
thicker dan dey eber be'n dyowin my rememb'ance; en Henry's ha'r growed
out thicker dan eber, en he 'peared ter git younger 'n younger, en
soopler 'n soopler; en seein' ez he wuz sho't er han's dat spring,
havin' tuk in consid'able noo groun', Mars Dugal' 'cluded he wouldn'
sell Henry 'tel he git de crap in en de cotton chop'. So he kep' Henry
on de plantation.

"But 'long 'bout time fer de grapes ter come on de scuppernon' vimes,
dey 'peared ter come a change ober dem; de leaves wivered en swivel' up,
en de young grapes turn' yaller, en bimeby eve'ybody on de plantation
could see dat de whole vimya'd wuz dyin'. Mars Dugal' tuck 'n water de
vimes en done all he could, but 't wan' no use: dat Yankee done bus' de
watermillyum. One time de vimes picked up a bit, en Mars Dugal' thought
dey wuz gwine ter come out ag'in; but dat Yankee done dug too close
unde' de roots, en prune de branches too close ter de vime, en all
dat lime en ashes done burn' de life outen de vimes, en dey des kep' a
with'in' en a swivelin'.

"All dis time de goopher wuz a-wukkin'. W'en de vimes commence' ter
wither, Henry commence' ter complain er his rheumatiz, en when de leaves
begin ter dry up his ha'r commence' ter drap out. When de vimes fresh up
a bit Henry 'ud git peart agin, en when de vimes wither agin Henry 'ud
git ole agin, en des kep' gittin' mo' en mo' fitten fer nuffin; he des
pined away, en fine'ly tuk ter his cabin; en when de big vime whar he
got de sap ter 'n'int his head withered en turned yaller en died, Henry
died too,--des went out sorter like a cannel. Dey didn't 'pear ter
be nuffin de matter wid 'im, 'cep'n de rheumatiz, but his strenk des
dwinel' away 'tel he didn' hab ernuff lef' ter draw his bref. De goopher
had got de under holt, en th'owed Henry fer good en all dat time.

"Mars Dugal' tuk on might'ly 'bout losin' his vimes en his nigger in de
same year; en he swo' dat ef he could git hold er dat Yankee he'd wear
'im ter a frazzle, en den chaw up de frazzle; en he'd done it, too, for
Mars Dugal' 'uz a monst'us brash man w'en he once git started. He sot de
vimya'd out ober agin, but it wuz th'ee er fo' year befo' de vimes got
ter b'arin' any scuppernon's.

"W'en de wah broke out, Mars Dugal' raise' a comp'ny, en went off ter
fight de Yankees. He saw he wuz mighty glad dat wah come, en he des want
ter kill a Yankee fer eve'y dollar he los' 'long er dat grape-raisin'
Yankee. En I 'spec' he would a done it, too, ef de Yankees hadn'
s'picioned sump'n, en killed him fus'. Atter de s'render ole miss move'
ter town, de niggers all scattered 'way fum de plantation, en de vimya'd
ain' be'n cultervated sence."

"Is that story true?" asked Annie, doubtfully, but seriously, as the old
man concluded his narrative.

"It's des ez true ez I'm a-settin' here, miss. Dey's a easy way ter
prove it: I kin lead de way right ter Henry's grave ober yander in de
plantation buryin'-groun'. En I tell yer w'at, marster, I wouldn' 'vise
yer to buy dis yer ole vimya'd, 'caze de goopher's on it yit, en dey
ain' no tellin' w'en it's gwine ter crap out."

"But I thought you said all the old vines died."

"Dey did 'pear ter die, but a few ov 'em come out ag'in, en is mixed in
mongs' de yuthers. I ain' skeered ter eat de grapes, 'caze I knows de
old vimes fum de noo ones; but wid strangers dey ain' no tellin' w'at
might happen. I wouldn' 'vise yer ter buy dis vimya'd."

I bought the vineyard, nevertheless, and it has been for a long time
in a thriving condition, and is referred to by the local press as a
striking illustration of the opportunities open to Northern capital in
the development of Southern industries. The luscious scuppernong holds
first rank among our grapes, though we cultivate a great many other
varieties, and our income from grapes packed and shipped to the Northern
markets is quite considerable. I have not noticed any developments of
the goopher in the vineyard, although I have a mild suspicion that our
colored assistants do not suffer from want of grapes during the season.

I found, when I bought the vineyard, that Uncle Julius had occupied a
cabin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue
from the neglected grapevines. This, doubtless, accounted for his advice
to me not to buy the vineyard, though whether it inspired the goopher
story I am unable to state. I believe, however, that the wages I pay him
for his services are more than an equivalent for anything he lost by the
sale of the vineyard.




PO' SANDY by Charles W. Chesnutt


On the northeast corner of my vineyard in central North Carolina, and
fronting on the Lumberton plank-road, there stood a small frame house,
of the simplest construction. It was built of pine lumber, and contained
but one room, to which one window gave light and one door admission. Its
weather-beaten sides revealed a virgin innocence of paint. Against one
end of the house, and occupying half its width, there stood a huge brick
chimney: the crumbling mortar had left large cracks between the bricks;
the bricks themselves had begun to scale off in large flakes, leaving
the chimney sprinkled with unsightly blotches. These evidences of decay
were but partially concealed by a creeping vine, which extended its
slender branches hither and thither in an ambitious but futile attempt
to cover the whole chimney. The wooden shutter, which had once protected
the unglazed window, had fallen from its hinges, and lay rotting in the
rank grass and jimson-weeds beneath. This building, I learned when I
bought the place, had been used as a school-house for several years
prior to the breaking out of the war, since which time it had remained
unoccupied, save when some stray cow or vagrant hog had sought shelter
within its walls from the chill rains and nipping winds of winter.

One day my wife requested me to build her a new kitchen. The house
erected by us, when we first came to live upon the vineyard, contained
a very conveniently arranged kitchen; but for some occult reason my wife
wanted a kitchen in the back yard, apart from the dwelling-house, after
the usual Southern fashion. Of course I had to build it.

To save expense, I decided to tear down the old school-house, and
use the lumber, which was in a good state of preservation, in the
construction of the new kitchen. Before demolishing the old house,
however, I made an estimate of the amount of material contained in it,
and found that I would have to buy several hundred feet of new lumber in
order to build the new kitchen according to my wife's plan.

One morning old Julius McAdoo, our colored coachman, harnessed the gray
mare to the rockaway, and drove my wife and me over to the saw-mill from
which I meant to order the new lumber. We drove down the long lane which
led from our house to the plank-road; following the plank-road for about
a mile, we turned into a road running through the forest and across the
swamp to the sawmill beyond. Our carriage jolted over the half-rotted
corduroy road which traversed the swamp, and then climbed the long hill
leading to the saw-mill. When we reached the mill, the foreman had gone
over to a neighboring farm-house, probably to smoke or gossip, and
we were compelled to await his return before we could transact our
business. We remained seated in the carriage, a few rods from the mill,
and watched the leisurely movements of the mill-hands. We had not waited
long before a huge pine log was placed in position, the machinery of
the mill was set in motion, and the circular saw began to eat its
way through the log, with a loud whirr which resounded throughout the
vicinity of the mill. The sound rose and fell in a sort of rhythmic
cadence, which, heard from where we sat, was not unpleasing, and not
loud enough to prevent conversation. When the saw started on its second
journey through the log, Julius observed, in a lugubrious tone, and with
a perceptible shudder:--

"Ugh! but dat des do cuddle my blood!"

"What's the matter, Uncle Julius?" inquired my wife, who is of a very
sympathetic turn of mind. "Does the noise affect your nerves?"

"No, Miss Annie," replied the old man, with emotion, "I ain' narvous;
but dat saw, a-cuttin' en grindin' thoo dat stick er timber, en moanin',
en groanin', en sweekin', kyars my 'memb'ance back ter ole times,
en 'min's me er po' Sandy." The pathetic intonation with which he
lengthened out the "po' Sandy" touched a responsive chord in our own
hearts.

"And who was poor Sandy?" asked my wife, who takes a deep interest in
the stories of plantation life which she hears from the lips of the
older colored people. Some of these stories are quaintly humorous;
others wildly extravagant, revealing the Oriental cast of the negro's
imagination; while others, poured freely into the sympathetic ear of a
Northern-bred woman, disclose many a tragic incident of the darker side
of slavery.

"Sandy," said Julius, in reply to my wife's question, "was a nigger w'at
useter b'long ter ole Mars Marrabo McSwayne. Mars Marrabo's place wuz
on de yuther side'n de swamp, right nex' ter yo' place. Sandy wuz a
monst'us good nigger, en could do so many things erbout a plantation, en
alluz 'ten ter his wuk so well, dat w'en Mars Marrabo's chilluns growed
up en married off, dey all un 'em wanted dey daddy fer ter gin 'em
Sandy fer a weddin' present. But Mars Marrabo knowed de res' wouldn' be
satisfied ef he gin Sandy ter a'er one un 'em; so w'en dey wuz all done
married, he fix it by 'lowin' one er his chilluns ter take Sandy fer a
mont' er so, en den ernudder for a mont' er so, en so on dat erway tel
dey had all had 'im de same lenk er time; en den dey would all take him
roun' ag'in, 'cep'n oncet in a w'ile w'en Mars Marrabo would len' 'im
ter some er his yuther kinfolks 'roun' de country, w'en dey wuz short er
han's; tel bimeby it go so Sandy didn' hardly knowed whar he wuz gwine
ter stay fum one week's een ter de yuther.

"One time w'en Sandy wuz lent out ez yushal, a spekilater come erlong
wid a lot er niggers, en Mars Marrabo swap' Sandy's wife off fer a noo
'oman. W'en Sandy come back, Mars Marrabo gin 'im a dollar, en 'lowed he
wuz monst'us sorry fer ter break up de fambly, but de spekilater had gin
'im big boot, en times wuz hard en money skase, en so he wuz bleedst ter
make de trade. Sandy tuk on some 'bout losin' his wife, but he soon seed
dey want no use cryin' ober spilt merlasses; en bein' ez he lacked de
looks er de noo 'ooman, he tuk up wid her atter she b'n on de plantation
a mont' er so.

"Sandy en his noo wife got on mighty well tergedder, en de niggers
all 'mence' ter talk about how lovin' dey wuz. W'en Tenie wuz tuk sick
oncet, Sandy useter set up all night wid 'er, en den go ter wuk in
de mawnin' des lack he had his reg'lar sleep; en Tenie would 'a done
anythin' in de worl' for her Sandy.

"Sandy en Tenie hadn' b'en libbin' tergedder fer mo' d'n two mont's
befo' Mars Marrabo's old uncle, w'at libbed down in Robeson County, sent
up ter fine out ef Mars Marrabo couldn' len' 'im er hire 'im a good han'
fer a mont' er so. Sandy's marster wuz one er dese yer easy-gwine folks
w'at wanter please eve'ybody, en he says yas, he could len' 'im Sandy.
En Mars Marrabo tole Sandy fer ter git ready ter go down ter Robeson
nex' day, fer ter stay a mont' er so.

"Hit wuz monst'us hard on Sandy fer ter take 'im 'way fum Tenie. Hit wuz
so fur down ter Robeson dat he didn' hab no chance er comin' back ter
see her tel de time wuz up; he wouldn' a' mine comin' ten er fifteen
mile at night ter see Tenie, but Mars Marrabo's uncle's plantation wuz
mo' d'n forty mile off. Sandy wuz mighty sad en cas' down atter w'at
Mars Marrabo tole 'im, en he says ter Tenie, sezee:--

"'I'm gittin monstus ti'ed er dish yer gwine roun' so much. Here I is
lent ter Mars Jeems dis mont', en I got ter do so-en-so; en ter Mars
Archie de nex' mont', en I got ter do so-en-so; den I got ter go ter
Miss Jinnie's: en hit's Sandy dis en Sandy dat, en Sandy yer en Sandy
dere, tel it 'pears ter me I ain' got no home, ner no marster, ner no
mistiss, ner no nuffin'. I can't eben keep a wife: my yuther ole 'oman
wuz sole away widout my gittin' a chance fer ter tell her good-by; en
now I got ter go off en leab you, Tenie, en I dunno whe'r I'm eber gwine
ter see yer ag'in er no. I wisht I wuz a tree, er a stump, er a rock, er
sump'n w'at could stay on de plantation fer a w'ile.'

"Atter Sandy got thoo talkin', Tenie didn' say naer word, but des sot
dere by de fier, studyin' en studyin'. Bimeby she up'n says:--

"'Sandy, is I eber tole you I wuz a cunjuh-'ooman?'

"Co'se Sandy hadn' nebber dremp' er nuffin lack dat, en he made a great
miration w'en he hear w'at Tenie say. Bimeby Tenie went on:--

"'I ain' goophered nobody, ner done no cunjuh-wuk fer fifteen yer er mo;
en w'en I got religion I made up my mine I wouldn' wuk no mo' goopher.
But dey is some things I doan b'lieve it's no sin fer ter do; en ef you
doan wanter be sent roun' fum pillar ter pos', en ef you doan wanter go
down ter Robeson, I kin fix things so yer won't haf ter. Ef you'll des
say de word, I kin turn yer ter w'ateber yer wanter be, en yer kin stay
right whar yer wanter, ez long ez yer mineter.'

"Sandy say he doan keer; he's willin' fer ter do anythin' fer ter stay
close ter Tenie. Den Tenie ax 'im ef he doan wanter be turnt inter a
rabbit.

"Sandy say, 'No, de dogs mout git atter me.'

"'Shill I turn yer ter a wolf?' sez Tenie.

"'No, eve'ybody's skeered er a wolf, en I doan want nobody ter be
skeered er me.'

"'Shill I turn yer ter a mawkin'-bird?'

"'No, a hawk mout ketch me. I wanter be turnt inter sump'n w'at'll stay
in one place.'

"'I kin turn yer ter a tree,' sez Tenie. 'You won't hab no mouf ner
years, but I kin turn yer back oncet in a w'ile, so yer kin git sump'n
ter eat, en hear w'at's gwine on.'

"Well, Sandy say dat'll do. En so Tenie tuk 'im down by de aidge er de
swamp, not fur fum de quarters, en turnt 'im inter a big pine-tree, en
sot 'im out mongs' some yuther trees. En de nex' mawnin', ez some er de
fiel' han's wuz gwine long dere, dey seed a tree w'at dey didn' 'member
er habbin' seed befo; it wuz monst'us quare, en dey wuz bleedst ter
'low dat dey hadn' 'membered right, er e'se one er de saplin's had be'n
growin' monst'us fas'.

"W'en Mars Marrabo 'skiver' dat Sandy wuz gone, he 'lowed Sandy had
runned away. He got de dogs out, but de las' place dey could track Sandy
ter wuz de foot er dat pine-tree. En dere de dogs stood en barked, en
bayed, en pawed at de tree, en tried ter climb up on it; en w'en dey wuz
tuk roun' thoo de swamp ter look fer de scent, dey broke loose en made
fer dat tree ag'in. It wuz de beatenis' thing de w'ite folks eber hearn
of, en Mars Marrabo 'lowed dat Sandy must a' clim' up on de tree en
jump' off on a mule er sump'n, en rid fur 'nuff fer ter spile de scent.
Mars Marrabo wanted ter 'cuse some er de yuther niggers er heppin Sandy
off, but dey all 'nied it ter de las'; en eve'ybody knowed Tenie sot too
much by Sandy fer ter he'p 'im run away whar she couldn' nebber see 'im
no mo'.

"W'en Sandy had be'n gone long 'nuff fer folks ter think he done got
clean away, Tenie useter go down ter de woods at night en turn 'im back,
en den dey'd slip up ter de cabin en set by de fire en talk. But dey ha'
ter be monst'us keerful, er e'se somebody would a seed 'em, en dat would
a spile de whole thing; so Tenie alluz turnt Sandy back in de mawnin'
early, befo' anybody wuz a'stirrin'.

"But Sandy didn' git erlong widout his trials en tribberlations. One day
a woodpecker come erlong en 'mence' ter peck at de tree; en de nex' time
Sandy wuz turnt back he had a little roun' hole in his arm, des lack a
sharp stick be'n stuck in it. Atter dat Tenie sot a sparrer-hawk fer ter
watch de tree; en w'en de woodpecker come erlong nex' mawnin' fer ter
finish his nes', he got gobble' up mos' fo' he stuck his bill in de
bark.

"Nudder time, Mars Marrabo sent a nigger out in de woods fer ter chop
tuppentime boxes. De man chop a box in dish yer tree, en hack' de bark
up two er th'ee feet, fer ter let de tuppentime run. De nex' time Sandy
wuz turnt back he had a big skyar on his lef' leg, des lack it be'n
skunt; en it tuk Tenie nigh 'bout all night fer ter fix a mixtry ter kyo
it up. Atter dat, Tenie sot a hawnet fer ter watch de tree; en w'en de
nigger come back ag'in fer ter cut ernudder box on de yuther side'n de
tree, de hawnet stung 'im so hard dat de ax slip en cut his foot nigh
'bout off.

"W'en Tenie see so many things happenin' ter de tree, she 'cluded she'd
ha' ter turn Sandy ter sump'n e'se; en atter studyin' de matter ober,
en talkin' wid Sandy one ebenin', she made up her mine fer ter fix up a
goopher mixtry w'at would turn herse'f en Sandy ter foxes, er sump'n,
so dey could run away en go some'rs whar dey could be free en lib lack
w'ite folks.

"But dey ain' no tellin' w'at's gwine ter happen in dis worl'. Tenie had
got de night sot fer her en Sandy ter run away, w'en dat ve'y day one
er Mars Marrabo's sons rid up ter de big house in his buggy, en say his
wife wuz monst'us sick, en he want his mammy ter len' 'im a 'ooman fer
ter nuss his wife. Tenie's mistiss say sen Tenie; she wuz a good nuss.
Young mars wuz in a tarrible hurry fer ter git back home. Tenie wuz
washin' at de big house dat day, en her mistiss say she should go right
'long wid her young marster. Tenie tried ter make some 'scuse fer ter
git away en hide tel night, w'en she would have eve'ything fix' up
fer her en Sandy; she say she wanter go ter her cabin fer ter git
her bonnet. Her mistiss say it doan matter 'bout de bonnet; her
head-hankcher wuz good 'nuff. Den Tenie say she wanter git her bes'
frock; her mistiss say no, she doan need no mo' frock, en w'en dat one
got dirty she could git a clean one whar she wuz gwine. So Tenie had ter
git in de buggy en go 'long wid young Mars Dunkin ter his plantation,
w'ich wuz mo' d'n twenty mile away; en dey want no chance er her seein'
Sandy no mo' tel she come back home. De po' gal felt monst'us bad erbout
de way things wuz gwine on, en she knowed Sandy mus' be a wond'rin' why
she didn' come en turn 'im back no mo'.

"W'iles Tenie wuz away nussin' young Mars Dunkin's wife, Mars Marrabo
tuk a notion fer ter buil' 'im a noo kitchen; en bein' ez he had lots
er timber on his place, he begun ter look 'roun' fer a tree ter hab de
lumber sawed out'n. En I dunno how it come to be so, but he happen fer
ter hit on de ve'y tree w'at Sandy wuz turnt inter. Tenie wuz gone, en
dey wa'n't nobody ner nuffin' fer ter watch de tree.

"De two men w'at cut de tree down say dey nebber had sech a time wid
a tree befo': dey axes would glansh off, en didn' 'pear ter make no
progress thoo de wood; en of all de creakin', en shakin', en wobblin'
you eber see, dat tree done it w'en it commence' ter fall. It wuz de
beatenis' thing!

"W'en dey got de tree all trim' up, dey chain it up ter a timber waggin,
en start fer de saw-mill. But dey had a hard time gittin' de log dere:
fus' dey got stuck in de mud w'en dey wuz gwine crosst de swamp, en
it wuz two er th'ee hours befo' dey could git out. W'en dey start' on
ag'in, de chain kep' a-comin' loose, en dey had ter keep a-stoppin' en
a-stoppin' fer ter hitch de log up ag'in. W'en dey commence' ter climb
de hill ter de saw-mill, de log broke loose, en roll down de hill en in
mongs' de trees, en hit tuk nigh 'bout half a day mo' ter git it haul'
up ter de saw-mill.

"De nex' mawnin' atter de day de tree wuz haul' ter de saw-mill, Tenie
come home. W'en she got back ter her cabin, de fus' thing she done wuz
ter run down ter de woods en see how Sandy wuz gittin' on. W'en she seed
de stump standin' dere, wid de sap runnin' out'n it, en de limbs layin'
scattered roun', she nigh 'bout went out'n her mine. She run ter her
cabin, en got her goopher mixtry, en den foller de track er de timber
waggin ter de saw-mill. She knowed Sandy couldn' lib mo' d'n a minute er
so ef she turn' him back, fer he wuz all chop' up so he'd a be'n bleedst
ter die. But she wanted ter turn 'im back long ernuff fer ter 'splain
ter 'im dat she hadn' went off a-purpose, en lef' 'im ter be chop' down
en sawed up. She didn' want Sandy ter die wid no hard feelin's to'ds
her.

"De han's at de saw-mill had des got de big log on de kerridge, en wuz
startin' up de saw, w'en dey seed a 'oman runnin up de hill, all out er
bref, cryin' en gwine on des lack she wuz plumb 'stracted. It wuz Tenie;
she come right inter de mill, en th'owed herse'f on de log, right in
front er de saw, a-hollerin' en cryin' ter her Sandy ter fergib her,
en not ter think hard er her, fer it wa'n't no fault er hern. Den Tenie
'membered de tree didn' hab no years, en she wuz gittin' ready fer ter
wuk her goopher mixtry so ez ter turn Sandy back, w'en de mill-hands
kotch holt er her en tied her arms wid a rope, en fasten' her to one er
de posts in de saw-mill; en den dey started de saw up ag'in, en cut de
log up inter bo'ds en scantlin's right befo' her eyes. But it wuz mighty
hard wuk; fer of all de sweekin', en moanin', en groanin', dat log
done it w'iles de saw wuz a-cuttin' thoo it. De saw wuz one er dese yer
ole-timey, up-en-down saws, en hit tuk longer dem days ter saw a log
'en it do now. Dey greased de saw, but dat didn' stop de fuss; hit kep'
right on, tel finely dey got de log all sawed up.

"W'en de oberseah w'at run de saw-mill come fum brekfas', de han's up
en tell him 'bout de crazy 'ooman--ez dey s'posed she wuz--w'at had
come runnin' in de saw-mill, a-hollerin' en gwine on, en tried ter th'ow
herse'f befo' de saw. En de oberseah sent two er th'ee er de han's fer
ter take Tenie back ter her marster's plantation.

"Tenie 'peared ter be out'n her mine fer a long time, en her marster
ha' ter lock her up in de smoke-'ouse tel she got ober her spells. Mars
Marrabo wuz monst'us mad, en hit would a made yo' flesh crawl fer ter
hear him cuss, caze he say de spekilater w'at he got Tenie fum had
fooled 'im by wukkin' a crazy 'oman off on him. Wiles Tenie wuz lock up
in de smoke-'ouse, Mars Marrabo tuk'n' haul de lumber fum de saw-mill,
en put up his noo kitchen.

"W'en Tenie got quiet' down, so she could be 'lowed ter go 'roun' de
plantation, she up'n tole her marster all erbout Sandy en de pine-tree;
en w'en Mars Marrabo hearn it, he 'lowed she wuz de wuss 'stracted
nigger he eber hearn of. He didn' know w'at ter do wid Tenie: fus' he
thought he'd put her in de po'-house; but finely, seein' ez she didn' do
no harm ter nobody ner nuffin', but des went roun' moanin', en groanin',
en shakin' her head, he 'cluded ter let her stay on de plantation
en nuss de little nigger chilluns w'en dey mammies wuz ter wuk in de
cotton-fiel'.

"De noo kitchen Mars Marrabo buil' wuzn' much use, fer it hadn' be'n put
up long befo' de niggers 'mence' ter notice quare things erbout it. Dey
could hear sump'n moanin' en groanin' 'bout de kitchen in de night-time,
en w'en de win' would blow dey could hear sump'n a-hollerin' en sweekin'
lack hit wuz in great pain en sufferin'. En hit got so atter a w'ile dat
hit wuz all Mars Marrabo's wife could do ter git a 'ooman ter stay in de
kitchen in de daytime long ernuff ter do de cookin'; en dey wa'n't naer
nigger on de plantation w'at wouldn' rudder take forty dan ter go 'bout
dat kitchen atter dark,--dat is, 'cep'n Tenie; she didn' pear ter mine
de ha'nts. She useter slip 'roun' at night, en set on de kitchen steps,
en lean up agin de do'-jamb, en run on ter herse'f wid some kine er
foolishness w'at nobody couldn' make out; fer Mars Marrabo had th'eaten'
ter sen' her off'n de plantation ef she say anything ter any er de
yuther niggers 'bout de pine-tree. But somehow er nudder de niggers
foun' out all 'bout it, en dey knowed de kitchen wuz ha'anted by Sandy's
sperrit. En bimeby hit got so Mars Marrabo's wife herse'f wuz skeered
ter go out in de yard atter dark.

"W'en it come ter dat, Mars Marrabo tuk 'n' to' de kitchen down, en use'
de lumber fer ter buil' dat ole school-'ouse w'at youer talkin' 'bout
pullin' down. De school-'ouse wuzn' use' 'cep'n' in de daytime, en on
dark nights folks gwine 'long de road would hear quare soun's en see
quare things. Po' ole Tenie useter go down dere at night, en wander
'roun' de school-'ouse; en de niggers all 'lowed she went fer ter talk
wid Sandy's sperrit. En one winter mawnin', w'en one er de boys went
ter school early fer ter start de fire, w'at should he fine but po' ole
Tenie, layin' on de flo', stiff, en cole, en dead. Dere didn' 'pear ter
be nuffin' pertickler de matter wid her,--she had des grieve' herse'f
ter def fer her Sandy. Mars Marrabo didn' shed no tears. He thought
Tenie wuz crazy, en dey wa'n't no tellin' w'at she mout do nex'; en dey
ain' much room in dis worl' fer crazy w'ite folks, let 'lone a crazy
nigger.

"Hit wa'n't long atter dat befo' Mars Marrabo sole a piece er his track
er lan' ter Mars Dugal' McAdoo,--MY ole marster,--en dat's how de ole
school-house happen to be on yo' place. W'en de wah broke out, de school
stop', en de ole school-'ouse be'n stannin' empty ever sence,--dat is,
'cep'n' fer de ha'nts. En folks sez dat de ole school-'ouse, er any
yuther house w'at got any er dat lumber in it w'at wuz sawed out'n de
tree w'at Sandy wuz turnt inter, is gwine ter be ha'nted tel de las'
piece er plank is rotted en crumble' inter dus'."

Annie had listened to this gruesome narrative with strained attention.

"What a system it was," she exclaimed, when Julius had finished, "under
which such things were possible!"

"What things?" I asked, in amazement. "Are you seriously considering the
possibility of a man's being turned into a tree?"

"Oh, no," she replied quickly, "not that;" and then she added absently,
and with a dim look in her fine eyes, "Poor Tenie!"

We ordered the lumber, and returned home. That night, after we had gone
to bed, and my wife had to all appearances been sound asleep for half an
hour, she startled me out of an incipient doze by exclaiming suddenly,--

"John, I don't believe I want my new kitchen built out of the lumber in
that old school-house."

"You wouldn't for a moment allow yourself," I replied, with some
asperity, "to be influenced by that absurdly impossible yarn which
Julius was spinning to-day?"

"I know the story is absurd," she replied dreamily, "and I am not so
silly as to believe it. But I don't think I should ever be able to
take any pleasure in that kitchen if it were built out of that lumber.
Besides, I think the kitchen would look better and last longer if the
lumber were all new."

Of course she had her way. I bought the new lumber, though not without
grumbling. A week or two later I was called away from home on business.
On my return, after an absence of several days, my wife remarked to
me,--

"John, there has been a split in the Sandy Run Colored Baptist Church,
on the temperance question. About half the members have come out from
the main body, and set up for themselves. Uncle Julius is one of the
seceders, and he came to me yesterday and asked if they might not hold
their meetings in the old school-house for the present."

"I hope you didn't let the old rascal have it," I returned, with some
warmth. I had just received a bill for the new lumber I had bought.

"Well," she replied, "I could not refuse him the use of the house for so
good a purpose."

"And I'll venture to say," I continued, "that you subscribed something
toward the support of the new church?"

She did not attempt to deny it.

"What are they going to do about the ghost?" I asked, somewhat curious
to know how Julius would get around this obstacle.

"Oh," replied Annie, "Uncle Julius says that ghosts never disturb
religious worship, but that if Sandy's spirit SHOULD happen to stray
into meeting by mistake, no doubt the preaching would do it good."




DAVE'S NECKLISS by Charles W. Chesnutt


"Have some dinner, Uncle Julius?" said my wife.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early autumn. Our two women-servants had
gone to a camp-meeting some miles away, and would not return until
evening. My wife had served the dinner, and we were just rising from
the table, when Julius came up the lane, and, taking off his hat, seated
himself on the piazza.

The old man glanced through the open door at the dinner-table, and his
eyes rested lovingly upon a large sugar-cured ham, from which several
slices had been cut, exposing a rich pink expanse that would have
appealed strongly to the appetite of any hungry Christian.

"Thanky, Miss Annie," he said, after a momentary hesitation, "I dunno ez
I keers ef I does tas'e a piece er dat ham, ef yer'll cut me off a slice
un it."

"No," said Annie, "I won't. Just sit down to the table and help
yourself; eat all you want, and don't be bashful."

Julius drew a chair up to the table, while my wife and I went out on
the piazza. Julius was in my employment; he took his meals with his own
family, but when he happened to be about our house at meal-times, my
wife never let him go away hungry.

I threw myself into a hammock, from which I could see Julius through an
open window. He ate with evident relish, devoting his attention chiefly
to the ham, slice after slice of which disappeared in the spacious
cavity of his mouth. At first the old man ate rapidly, but after the
edge of his appetite had been taken off he proceeded in a more leisurely
manner. When he had cut the sixth slice of ham (I kept count of them
from a lazy curiosity to see how much he COULD eat) I saw him lay it
on his plate; as he adjusted the knife and fork to cut it into smaller
pieces, he paused, as if struck by a sudden thought, and a tear rolled
down his rugged cheek and fell upon the slice of ham before him. But the
emotion, whatever the thought that caused it, was transitory, and in a
moment he continued his dinner. When he was through eating, he came
out on the porch, and resumed his seat with the satisfied expression of
countenance that usually follows a good dinner.

"Julius," I said, "you seemed to be affected by something, a moment ago.
Was the mustard so strong that it moved you to tears?"

"No, suh, it wa'n't de mustard; I wuz studyin' 'bout Dave."

"Who was Dave, and what about him?" I asked.

The conditions were all favorable to story-telling. There was an
autumnal languor in the air, and a dreamy haze softened the dark green
of the distant pines and the deep blue of the Southern sky. The generous
meal he had made had put the old man in a very good humor. He was not
always so, for his curiously undeveloped nature was subject to moods
which were almost childish in their variableness. It was only now and
then that we were able to study, through the medium of his recollection,
the simple but intensely human inner life of slavery. His way of looking
at the past seemed very strange to us; his view of certain sides of life
was essentially different from ours. He never indulged in any regrets
for the Arcadian joyousness and irresponsibility which was a somewhat
popular conception of slavery; his had not been the lot of the petted
house-servant, but that of the toiling field-hand. While he mentioned
with a warm appreciation the acts of kindness which those in authority
had shown to him and his people, he would speak of a cruel deed, not
with the indignation of one accustomed to quick feeling and spontaneous
expression, but with a furtive disapproval which suggested to us a doubt
in his own mind as to whether he had a right to think or to feel, and
presented to us the curious psychological spectacle of a mind enslaved
long after the shackles had been struck off from the limbs of its
possessor. Whether the sacred name of liberty ever set his soul aglow
with a generous fire; whether he had more than the most elementary ideas
of love, friendship, patriotism, religion,--things which are half, and
the better half, of life to us; whether he even realized, except in a
vague, uncertain way, his own degradation, I do not know. I fear not;
and if not, then centuries of repression had borne their legitimate
fruit. But in the simple human feeling, and still more in the undertone
of sadness, which pervaded his stories, I thought I could see a spark
which, fanned by favoring breezes and fed by the memories of the past,
might become in his children's children a glowing flame of sensibility,
alive to every thrill of human happiness or human woe.

"Dave use' ter b'long ter my ole marster," said Julius; "he wuz raise'
on dis yer plantation, en I kin 'member all erbout 'im, fer I wuz ole
'nuff ter chop cotton w'en it all happen'. Dave wuz a tall man, en
monst'us strong: he could do mo' wuk in a day dan any yuther two niggers
on de plantation. He wuz one er dese yer solemn kine er men, en nebber
run on wid much foolishness, like de yuther darkies. He use' ter go out
in de woods en pray; en w'en he hear de han's on de plantation cussin'
en gwine on wid dere dancin' en foolishness, he use' ter tell 'em 'bout
religion en jedgmen'-day, w'en dey would haf ter gin account fer eve'y
idle word en all dey yuther sinful kyarin's-on.

"Dave had l'arn' how ter read de Bible. Dey wuz a free nigger boy in
de settlement w'at wuz monst'us smart, en could write en cipher, en wuz
alluz readin' books er papers. En Dave had hi'ed dis free boy fer ter
l'arn 'im how ter read. Hit wuz 'g'in de law, but co'se none er de
niggers didn' say nuffin ter de w'ite folks 'bout it. Howsomedever, one
day Mars Walker--he wuz de oberseah--foun' out Dave could read. Mars
Walker wa'n't nuffin but a po' bockrah, en folks said he couldn' read
ner write hisse'f, en co'se he didn' lack ter see a nigger w'at knowed
mo' d'n he did; so he went en tole Mars Dugal'. Mars Dugal' sont fer
Dave, en ax' 'im 'bout it.

"Dave didn't hardly knowed w'at ter do; but he couldn' tell no lie, so
he 'fessed he could read de Bible a little by spellin' out de words.
Mars Dugal' look' mighty solemn.

"'Dis yer is a se'ious matter,' sezee; 'it's 'g'in de law ter l'arn
niggers how ter read, er 'low 'em ter hab books. But w'at yer l'arn
out'n dat Bible, Dave?'

"Dave wa'n't no fool, ef he wuz a nigger, en sezee:--

"'Marster, I l'arns dat it's a sin fer ter steal, er ter lie, er fer ter
want w'at doan b'long ter yer; en I l'arns fer ter love de Lawd en ter
'bey my marster.'

"Mars Dugal' sorter smile' en laf' ter hisse'f, like he 'uz might'ly
tickle' 'bout sump'n, en sezee:--

"'Doan 'pear ter me lack readin' de Bible done yer much harm, Dave.
Dat's w'at I wants all my niggers fer ter know. Yer keep right on
readin', en tell de yuther han's w'at yer be'n tellin' me. How would yer
lack fer ter preach ter de niggers on Sunday?'

"Dave say he'd be glad fer ter do w'at he could. So Mars Dugal' tole de
oberseah fer ter let Dave preach ter de niggers, en tell 'em w'at wuz in
de Bible, en it would he'p ter keep 'em fum stealin' er runnin' erway.

"So Dave 'mence' ter preach, en done de han's on de plantation a heap er
good, en most un 'em lef' off dey wicked ways, en 'mence' ter love ter
hear 'bout God, en religion, en de Bible; en dey done dey wuk better, en
didn' gib de oberseah but mighty little trouble fer ter manage 'em.

"Dave wuz one er dese yer men w'at didn' keer much fer de
gals,--leastways he didn' tel Dilsey come ter de plantation. Dilsey wuz
a monst'us peart, good-lookin', gingybread-colored gal,--one er dese yer
high-steppin' gals w'at hol's dey heads up, en won' stan' no foolishness
fum no man. She had b'long' ter a gemman over on Rockfish, w'at died, en
whose 'state ha' ter be sol' fer ter pay his debts. En Mars Dugal' had
b'en ter de oction, en w'en he seed dis gal a-cryin' en gwine on 'bout
bein' sol' erway fum her ole mammy, Aun' Mahaly, Mars Dugal' bid 'em
bofe in, en fotch 'em ober ter our plantation.

"De young nigger men on de plantation wuz des wil' atter Dilsey, but it
didn' do no good, en none un 'em couldn' git Dilsey fer dey junesey,[2]
'tel Dave 'mence' fer ter go roun' Aun' Mahaly's cabin. Dey wuz a
fine-lookin' couple, Dave en Dilsey wuz, bofe tall, en well-shape',
en soopl'. En dey sot a heap by one ernudder. Mars Dugal' seed 'em
tergedder one Sunday, en de nex' time he seed Dave atter dat, sezee:--

"Dave, w'en yer en Dilsey gits ready fer ter git married, I ain' got no
rejections. Dey's a poun' er so er chawin'-terbacker up at de house, en
I reckon yo' mist'iss kin fine a frock en a ribbin er two fer Dilsey.
Youer bofe good niggers, en yer neenter be feared er bein' sol' 'way fum
one ernudder long ez I owns dis plantation; en I 'spec's ter own it fer
a long time yit.'"

[Footnote 2: Sweetheart.]

"But dere wuz one man on de plantation w'at didn' lack ter see Dave en
Dilsey tergedder ez much ez ole marster did. W'en Mars Dugal' went ter
de sale whar he got Dilsey en Mahaly, he bought ernudder han', by de
name er Wiley. Wiley wuz one er dese yer shiny-eyed, double-headed
little niggers, sha'p ez a steel trap, en sly ez de fox w'at keep
out'n it. Dis yer Wiley had be'n pesterin' Dilsey 'fo' she come ter our
plantation, en had nigh 'bout worried de life out'n her. She didn' keer
nuffin fer 'im, but he pestered her so she ha' ter th'eaten ter tell her
marster fer ter make Wiley let her 'lone. W'en he come ober to our
place it wuz des ez bad, 'tel bimeby Wiley seed dat Dilsey had got ter
thinkin' a heap 'bout Dave, en den he sorter hilt off aw'ile, en purten'
lack he gin Dilsey up. But he wuz one er dese yer 'ceitful niggers, en
w'ile he wuz laffin' en jokin' wid de yuther han's 'bout Dave en Dilsey,
he wuz settin' a trap fer ter ketch Dave en git Dilsey back fer hisse'f.

"Dave en Dilsey made up dere min's fer ter git married long 'bout
Christmas time, w'en dey'd hab mo' time fer a weddin'. But 'long 'bout
two weeks befo' dat time ole mars 'mence' ter lose a heap er bacon.
Eve'y night er so somebody 'ud steal a side er bacon, er a ham, er a
shoulder, er sump'n, fum one er de smoke-'ouses. De smoke-'ouses
wuz lock', but somebody had a key, en manage' ter git in some way er
'nudder. Dey's mo' ways 'n one ter skin a cat, en dey's mo' d'n one way
ter git in a smoke-'ouse,--leastways dat's w'at I hearn say. Folks w'at
had bacon fer ter sell didn' hab no trouble 'bout gittin' rid un it. Hit
wuz 'g'in' de law fer ter buy things fum slabes; but Lawd! dat law didn'
'mount ter a hill er peas. Eve'y week er so one er dese yer big covered
waggins would come 'long de road, peddlin' terbacker en w'iskey. Dey wuz
a sight er room in one er dem big waggins, en it wuz monst'us easy
fer ter swop off bacon fer sump'n ter chaw er ter wa'm yer up in de
winter-time. I s'pose de peddlers didn' knowed dey wuz breakin' de law,
caze de niggers alluz went at night, en stayed on de dark side er de
waggin; en it wuz mighty hard fer ter tell W'AT kine er folks dey wuz.

"Atter two er th'ee hund'ed er meat had be'n stole', Mars Walker call
all de niggers up one ebenin', en tol' 'em dat de fus' nigger he cot
stealin' bacon on dat plantation would git sump'n fer ter 'member it
by long ez he lib'. En he say he'd gin fi' dollars ter de nigger
w'at 'skiver' de rogue. Mars Walker say he s'picion' one er two er de
niggers, but he couldn' tell fer sho, en co'se dey all 'nied it w'en he
'cuse em un it.

"Dey wa'n't no bacon stole' fer a week er so, 'tel one dark night w'en
somebody tuk a ham fum one er de smoke-'ouses. Mars Walker des cusst
awful w'en he foun' out de ham wuz gone, en say he gwine ter sarch all
de niggers' cabins; w'en dis yer Wiley I wuz tellin' yer 'bout up'n
say he s'picion' who tuk de ham, fer he seed Dave comin' 'cross de
plantation fum to'ds de smoke-'ouse de night befo'. W'en Mars Walker
hearn dis fum Wiley, he went en sarch' Dave's cabin, en foun' de ham hid
under de flo'.

"Eve'ybody wuz 'stonish'; but dere wuz de ham. Co'se Dave 'nied it ter
de las', but dere wuz de ham. Mars Walker say it wuz des ez he 'spected:
he didn' b'lieve in dese yer readin' en prayin' niggers; it wuz all
'pocrisy, en sarve' Mars Dugal' right fer 'lowin' Dave ter be readin'
books w'en it wuz 'g'in de law.

"W'en Mars Dugal' hearn 'bout de ham, he say he wuz might'ly 'ceived en
disapp'inted in Dave. He say he wouldn' nebber hab no mo' conferdence in
no nigger, en Mars Walker could do des ez he wuz a mineter wid Dave er
any er de res' er de niggers. So Mars Walker tuk'n tied Dave up en gin
'im forty; en den he got some er dis yer wire clof w'at dey uses fer
ter make sifters out'n, en tuk'n wrap' it roun' de ham en fasten it
tergedder at de little een'. Den he tuk Dave down ter de blacksmif-shop,
en had Unker Silas, de plantation black-smif, fasten a chain ter de ham,
en den fasten de yuther een' er de chain roun' Dave's neck. En den he
says ter Dave, sezee:--

"'Now, suh, yer'll wear dat neckliss fer de nex' six mont's; en I
'spec's yer ner none er de yuther niggers on dis plantation won' steal
no mo' bacon dyoin' er dat time.'

"Well, it des 'peared ez if fum dat time Dave didn' hab nuffin but
trouble. De niggers all turnt ag'in' 'im, caze he be'n de 'casion er
Mars Dugal' turnin' 'em all ober ter Mars Walker. Mars Dugal' wa'n't a
bad marster hisse'f, but Mars Walker wuz hard ez a rock. Dave kep' on
sayin' he didn' take de ham, but none un 'em didn' b'lieve 'im.

"Dilsey wa'n't on de plantation w'en Dave wuz 'cused er stealin' de
bacon. Ole mist'iss had sont her ter town fer a week er so fer ter
wait on one er her darters w'at had a young baby, en she didn' fine out
nuffin 'bout Dave's trouble 'tel she got back ter de plantation. Dave
had patien'ly endyoed de finger er scawn, en all de hard words w'at de
niggers pile' on 'im, caze he wuz sho' Dilsey would stan' by 'im, en
wouldn' b'lieve he wuz a rogue, ner none er de yuther tales de darkies
wuz tellin' 'bout 'im.

"W'en Dilsey come back fum town, en got down fum behine de buggy whar
she be'n ridin' wid ole mars, de fus' nigger 'ooman she met says ter
her,--

"'Is yer seed Dave, Dilsey?'

"No, I ain' seed Dave,' says Dilsey.

"'Yer des oughter look at dat nigger; reckon yer wouldn' want 'im fer
yo' junesey no mo'. Mars Walker cotch 'im stealin' bacon, en gone en
fasten' a ham roun' his neck, so he can't git it off'n hisse'f. He
sut'nly do look quare.' En den de 'ooman bus' out laffin' fit ter kill
herse'f. W'en she got thoo laffin' she up'n tole Dilsey all 'bout de
ham, en all de yuther lies w'at de niggers be'n tellin' on Dave.

"W'en Dilsey started down ter de quarters, who should she meet but
Dave, comin' in fum de cotton-fiel'. She turnt her head ter one side, en
purten' lack she didn' seed Dave.

"'Dilsey!' sezee.

"Dilsey walk' right on, en didn' notice 'im.

"'OH, Dilsey!'

"Dilsey didn' paid no 'tention ter 'im, en den Dave knowed some er de
niggers be'n tellin' her 'bout de ham. He felt monst'us bad, but he
'lowed ef he could des git Dilsey fer ter listen ter 'im fer a minute er
so, he could make her b'lieve he didn' stole de bacon. It wuz a week er
two befo' he could git a chance ter speak ter her ag'in; but fine'ly he
cotch her down by de spring one day, en sezee:--

"'Dilsey, w'at fer yer won' speak ter me, en purten' lack yer doan see
me? Dilsey, yer knows me too well fer ter b'lieve I'd steal, er do dis
yuther wick'ness de niggers is all layin' ter me,--yer KNOWS I wouldn'
do dat, Dilsey. Yer ain' gwine back on yo' Dave, is yer?'

"But w'at Dave say didn' hab no 'fec' on Dilsey. Dem lies folks b'en
tellin' her had p'isen' her min' 'g'in' Dave.

"'I doan wanter talk ter no nigger,' says she, 'w'at be'n whip' fer
stealin', en w'at gwine roun' wid sich a lookin' thing ez dat hung roun'
his neck. I's a 'spectable gal, I is. W'at yer call dat, Dave? Is dat
a cha'm fer ter keep off witches, er is it a noo kine er neckliss yer
got?'

"Po' Dave didn' knowed w'at ter do. De las' one he had 'pended on fer
ter stan' by 'im had gone back on 'im, en dey didn' 'pear ter be nuffin
mo' wuf libbin' fer. He couldn' hol' no mo' pra'r-meetin's, fer Mars
Walker wouldn' 'low 'im ter preach, en de darkies wouldn' 'a' listen'
ter 'im ef he had preach'. He didn' eben hab his Bible fer ter comfort
hisse'f wid, fer Mars Walker had tuk it erway fum 'im en burnt it up, en
say ef he ketch any mo' niggers wid Bibles on de plantation he'd do 'em
wuss'n he done Dave.

"En ter make it still harder fer Dave, Dilsey tuk up wid Wiley. Dave
could see him gwine up ter Aun' Mahaly's cabin, en settin' out on de
bench in de moonlight wid Dilsey, en singin' sinful songs en playin' de
banjer. Dave use' ter scrouch down behine de bushes, en wonder w'at de
Lawd sen' 'im all dem tribberlations fer.

"But all er Dave's yuther troubles wa'n't nuffin side er dat ham. He had
wrap' de chain roun' wid a rag, so it didn' hurt his neck; but w'eneber
he went ter wuk, dat ham would be in his way; he had ter do his task,
howsomedever, des de same ez ef he didn' hab de ham. W'eneber he went
ter lay down, dat ham would be in de way. Ef he turn ober in his sleep,
dat ham would be tuggin' at his neck. It wuz de las' thing he seed
at night, en de fus' thing he seed in de mawnin'. W'eneber he met a
stranger, de ham would be de fus' thing de stranger would see. Most
un 'em would 'mence' ter laf, en whareber Dave went he could see folks
p'intin' at him, en year 'em sayin:--

"'W'at kine er collar dat nigger got roun' his neck?' er, ef dey knowed
'im, 'Is yer stole any mo' hams lately?' er 'W'at yer take fer yo'
neckliss, Dave?' er some joke er 'nuther 'bout dat ham.

"Fus' Dave didn' mine it so much, caze he knowed he hadn' done nuffin.
But bimeby he got so he couldn' stan' it no longer, en he'd hide hisse'f
in de bushes w'eneber he seed anybody comin', en alluz kep' hisse'f shet
up in his cabin atter he come in fum wuk.

"It wuz monst'us hard on Dave, en bimeby, w'at wid dat ham eberlastin'
en etarnally draggin' roun' his neck, he 'mence' fer ter do en say quare
things, en make de niggers wonder ef he wa'n't gittin' out'n his mine.
He got ter gwine roun' talkin' ter hisse'f, en singin' corn-shuckin'
songs, en laffin' fit ter kill 'bout nuffin. En one day he tole one er
de niggers he had 'skivered a noo way fer ter raise hams,--gwine ter
pick 'em off'n trees, en save de expense er smoke-'ouses by kyoin' 'em
in de sun. En one day he up'n tole Mars Walker he got sump'n pertickler
fer ter say ter 'im; en he tuk Mars Walker off ter one side, en tole 'im
he wuz gwine ter show 'im a place in de swamp whar dey wuz a whole trac'
er lan' covered wid ham-trees.

"W'en Mars Walker hearn Dave talkin' dis kine er fool-talk, en w'en he
seed how Dave wuz 'mencin' ter git behine in his wuk, en w'en he ax'
de niggers en

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