THE BURIAL.
The death of Dred fell like a night of despair on the hearts of the
little fugitive circle in the swamps--on the hearts of multitudes in the
surrounding plantations, who had regarded him as a prophet and a
deliverer. He in whom they trusted was dead! The splendid, athletic
form, so full of wild vitality, the powerful arm, the trained and
keen-seeing eye, all struck down at once! The grand and solemn voice
hushed, and all the splendid poetry of olden time, the inspiring symbols
and prophetic dreams, which had so wrought upon his own soul, and with
which he had wrought upon the souls of others, seemed to pass away with
him, and to recede into the distance and become unsubstantial, like the
remembered sounds of mighty winds, or solemn visions of evening clouds,
in times long departed.
On that night, when the woods had ceased to reverberate the brutal
sounds of baying dogs, and the more brutal profanity of drunken men;
when the leaves stood still on the trees, and the forest lay piled up in
the darkness like black clouds, and the morning star was standing like a
calm angelic presence above them, there might have been heard in the
little clearing a muffled sound of footsteps, treading heavily, and
voices of those that wept with a repressed and quiet weeping, as they
bore the wild chieftain to his grave beneath the blasted tree. Of the
undaunted circle who had met there at the same hour many evenings
before, some had dared to be present to-night; for, hearing the report
of the hunt, they had left their huts on the plantations by stealth when
all were asleep, and, eluding the vigilance of the patrols, the night
watch which commonly guards plantations, had come to the forest to learn
the fate of their friends; and bitter was the dismay and anguish which
filled their souls when they learned the result. It is melancholy to
reflect, that among the children of one Father an event which excites
in one class bitterness and lamentation should in another be cause of
exultation and triumph. But the world has been thousands of years and
not yet learned the first two words of the Lord's Prayer; and not until
all tribes and nations have learned these will his kingdom come, and his
will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.
Among those who stood around the grave, none seemed more bowed down and
despairing than one whom we have before introduced to the reader, under
the name of Hannibal. He was a tall and splendidly formed negro, whose
large head, high forehead, and marked features, indicated resolution and
intellectual ability. He had been all his life held as the property of
an uneducated man, of very mean and parsimonious character, who was
singularly divided in his treatment of him, by a desire to make the most
of his energies and capabilities as a slave, and a fear lest they should
develop so fast as to render him unfit for the condition of slavery.
Hannibal had taught himself to read and write, but the secret of the
acquisition was guarded in his own bosom, as vigilantly as the traveller
among thieves would conceal in his breast an inestimable diamond; for he
well knew that, were these acquisitions discovered, his master's fears
would be so excited as to lead him to realize at once a present sum upon
him, by selling him to the more hopeless prison-house of the far south,
thus separating him from his wife and family.
Hannibal was generally employed as the keeper of a ferryboat by his
master, and during the hours when he was waiting for passengers found
many opportunities for gratifying, in an imperfect manner, his thirst
for knowledge.
Those who have always had books about them more than they could or would
read know nothing of the passionate eagerness with which a repressed and
starved intellect devours in secret its stolen food.
In a little chink between the logs of his ferry-house there was secreted
a Bible, a copy of Robinson Crusoe, and an odd number of a northern
newspaper which had been dropped from the pocket of a passenger; and
when the door was shut and barred at night, and his bit of pine knot
lighted, he would take these out and read them hour by hour. There he
yearned after the wild freedom of the desolate island. He placed his
wife and children, in imagination, in the little barricaded abode of
Robinson. He hunted and made coats of skin, and gathered strange fruits
from trees with unknown names, and felt himself a free man.
Over a soul so strong and so repressed it is not to be wondered at that
Dred should have acquired a peculiar power. The study of the Bible had
awakened in his mind that vague tumult of aspirations and hopes which it
ever excites in the human breast; and he was prompt to believe that the
Lord who visited Israel in Egypt had listened to the sighings of their
captivity, and sent a prophet and a deliverer to his people.
Like a torch carried in a stormy night, this hope had blazed up within
him; but the cold blast of death had whistled by, and it was
extinguished forever.
Among the small band that stood around the dead, on the edge of the
grave, he stood, looking fixedly on the face of the departed. In the
quaint and shaggy mound to which Dred had attached that strange, rugged,
oriental appellation, _Jegar Sahadutha_, or the "heap of witness," there
was wildly flaring a huge pine-knot torch, whose light fell with a red,
distinct glare on the prostrate form that lay there like a kingly cedar
uprooted, no more to wave its branches in air, yet mighty in its fall,
with all the shaggy majesty of its branches around. Whatever might have
been the strife and struggle of the soul once imprisoned in that form,
there was stamped upon the sombre face an expression of majestic and
mournful tranquillity, as if that long-suffering and gracious God, to
whose judgment he had made his last appeal, had rendered that judgment
in mercy. When the statesmen and mighty men of _our_ race die, though
they had the weaknesses and sins of humanity, they want not orators in
the church to draw the veil gently, to speak softly of their errors and
loudly of their good, and to predict for them, if not an abundant
entrance, yet at least a safe asylum among the blessed; and something
not to be rebuked in our common nature inclines to join in a hopeful
amen. It is not easy for us to believe that a great and powerful soul
can be lost to God and itself forever.
But he who lies here so still and mournfully in this flickering
torch-light had struggling within him the energies which make the
patriot and the prophet. Crushed beneath a mountain of ignorance, they
rose blind and distorted; yet had knowledge enlightened and success
crowned them, his name might have been, with that of Toussaint,
celebrated in mournful sonnet by the deepest thinking poet of the age:--
"Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
The weight of so great an affliction seemed to have repressed the usual
vivacity with which the negro is wont to indulge the expression of
grief. When the body was laid down by the side of the grave, there was
for a time a silence so deep that the rustling of the leaves, and the
wild, doleful clamor of the frogs and turtles in the swamps, and the
surge of the winds in the pine-tree tops, were all that met the ear.
Even the wife of the dead stood with her shawl wrapped tightly about
her, rocking to and fro, as if in the extremity of grief.
An old man in the company, who had officiated sometimes as preacher
among the negroes, began to sing a well-known hymn very commonly used at
negro funerals, possibly because its wild and gloomy imagery has
something exciting to their quick imaginations. The words rose on the
night air:--
"Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound,
My ears attend the cry;
Ye living men, come view the ground
Where you must shortly lie."
During the singing of this verse Hannibal stood silent, with his arms
gloomily folded, his eyes fixed on the lifeless face. Gradually the
sentiment seemed to inspire his soul with a kind of serene triumph; he
lifted his head, and joined his deep bass voice in the singing of the
second verse:--
"Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must lie as low as ours."
"Yes," he said, "brethren, that will be the way of it. They triumph and
lord it over us now, but their pomp will be brought down to the grave,
and the noise of their viols. The worm shall be spread under them, and
the worm shall cover them; and when we come to stand together at the
judgment seat, our testimony will be took there if it never was afore;
and the Lord will judge atween us and our oppressors,--that's one
comfort. Now, brethren, let's jest lay him in the grave, and he that's a
better man, or would have done better in his place, let him judge him if
he dares."
They lifted him up and laid him into the grave; and in a few moments all
the mortal signs by which that soul had been known on earth had
vanished, to appear no more till the great day of judgment and decision.