The old negro was past seventy years, hostler at a country hotel. Some
of the young men were drinking, and they persuaded “Uncle Andy” to sing
us a song. He willingly sang several of his jolliest negro songs, and
then wound up with Nellie Gray. When he came to that part which concluded
the song, I saw tears stealing down his old wrinkled cheeks. I asked him
to sing the chorus over again, and when he looked into my eyes and saw
the sympathy I knew was welling up from my heart, he began again in that
peculiar cadence which belongs to the negro race alone:
“Oh, my darling Nellie Gray,
Up in heaven, there they say,
That they’ll never take you from me any more;
I’s a comin’, comin’, comin’, as the angels clear the way,
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore!”
He covered his old eyes with his black hands and sobbed aloud at the
conclusion of the song, but the noisy young men who had persuaded him to
sing were lined up against the bar for another drink, and had forgotten
all about Uncle Andy and his song. I laid my hand on his shoulder and
said:
“It was an awful thing to happen in a so-called civilized country—to
separate two loving souls and sell the woman into damnable slavery, by
a race of men who pretended to worship God and love their neighbors as
themselves. I have never suffered such a thing, and I cannot even imagine
the feelings of the man who saw his beloved wife torn from his bosom and
sold like a horse in the market.”
“You should thank God, sah, dat you-all nevah ’sperienced sich a great
sorrow,” he said, looking toward me through his tears. “I has. When I was
twenty I was married to Clarissa Beckon. Master died, and we all was sold
on de block de nex’ year. I saw her taken away and I fainted dead off.
She wor strongah than me. She walked away with her head up in defiance.
De las’ words she spoke to me was like de song, dat up in heaven we all
shud meet again, where dey cud nevah take her away any more.”
Ah, what a mockery to tell the poor, broken-hearted slaves that up in
heaven their wrongs would all be righted. If the slave wife should be
restored to her husband up in heaven, why did not those old brutalized
slave-owners restore the broken-hearted wife to her husband on earth? How
would they picture a just heaven, full of love and mercy and beauty, and
then turn around and make a cruel hell out of this world? Ah, yes, and
even asked God daily to shower his divine blessings upon this hell of
their own making.
I went to bed thinking of the outrages and violent cruelties of the old
slavery days, and fell asleep with the horrible picture of slavery in
my mind. And sleeping I dreamed that God had reversed the conditions
and changed the white men to colored slaves, and the old black slaves
were now their masters. Even in that dream I said to myself that the
proceedings were just and fair. If the black slave had been sold for the
sake of profit long ago, it was fair that he should take advantage of the
reversed order of things, and sell his old tormentors into slavery.
Suddenly the scene changed. I stood in a market place, a lad of fourteen.
The auctioneer was selling a woman. Her back was toward me, but I could
see that she was weeping. I caught the sound of her voice and it was
familiar to my ears. I had heard that voice before. Could it be the one
woman I had loved from birth—the woman whose first embrace was my first
lesson in human love? In heart-broken tones I called to her, “Mother.”
She turned and raised her face to look over the crowd. “Great God!” I
cried, “it is my own mother! And she is being sold into slavery!”
I rushed through the crowd toward the auction block, calling her name
aloud as I went. Strong men tried to catch and hold me, but I wiggled
from their grasp. I reached the block and caught hold of her dress, but
she could not stoop down to pick me up and hug me to her heart, because
her hands were tied behind her back. I could see her struggle in a mighty
effort to break the cords that bound her. Sorrow gave her the strength of
a giantess, and I saw the cords break and fall to the ground. The next
moment she had clasped me to her breast and made an attempt to run away
with me through the crowd. Blood hounds caught her by the throat and she
fell to the ground.
I was torn from her bosom by the cruel hands of the man who had bought
her, and when she reached her hands toward me the brutal man struck her
loving hands with the butt-end of his whip. Then he raised the whip to
strike me in the face, and as the blow descended I awoke. I was wet with
perspiration, and tears of agony stood on my cheeks.
Think of this—less than fifty years ago such scenes were common—to other
mothers and other sons.