Jane did not know how old she was. She was probably sixty or seventy.
She fled to keep from being sold. She had been "whipt right smart,"
poorly fed and poorly clothed, by a certain Roger McZant, of the New
Market District, Eastern Shore of Maryland. His wife was a "bad woman
too." Just before escaping, Jane got a whisper that her "master" was
about to sell her; on asking him if the rumor was true, he was silent.
He had been asking "one hundred dollars" for her.
Remembering that four of her children had been snatched away from her
and sold South, and she herself was threatened with the same fate, she
was willing to suffer hunger, sleep in the woods for nights and days,
wandering towards Canada, rather than trust herself any longer under the
protection of her "kind" owner. Before reaching a place of repose she
was _three weeks in the woods_, almost wholly without nourishment.
Jane, doubtless, represented thousands of old slave mothers, who, after
having been worn out under the yoke, were frequently either offered for
sale for a trifle, turned off to die, or compelled to eke out their
existence on the most stinted allowance.
* * * * *