LEARNING TO READ.
City annoyances--Plantation regrets--My mistress--Her history--
Her kindness--My master--His sourness--My comforts--Increased
sensitiveness--My occupation--Learning to read--Baneful effects
of slaveholding on my dear, good mistress--Mr. Hugh forbids Mrs.
Sophia to teach me further--Clouds gather on my bright prospects--
Master Auld’s exposition of the Philosophy of Slavery--City slaves--
Country slaves--Contrasts--Exceptions--Mr. Hamilton’s two slaves--
Mrs. Hamilton’s cruel treatment of them--Piteous aspect presented by
them--No power to come between the slave and slaveholder.
Established in my new home in Baltimore, I was not very long in
perceiving that in picturing to myself what was to be my life there,
my imagination had painted only the bright side; and that the reality
had its dark shades as well as its light ones. The open country which
had been so much to me, was all shut out. Walled in on every side by
towering brick buildings, the heat of the summer was intolerable to me,
and the hard brick pavements almost blistered my feet. If I ventured
out on to the streets, new and strange objects glared upon me at every
step, and startling sounds greeted my ears from all directions. My
country eyes and ears were confused and bewildered. Troops of hostile
boys pounced upon me at every corner. They chased me, and called me
“Eastern-Shore man,” till really I almost wished myself back on the
Eastern Shore. My new mistress happily proved to be all she had seemed,
and in her presence I easily forgot all outside annoyances. Mrs. Sophia
was naturally of an excellent disposition--kind, gentle, and cheerful.
The supercilious contempt for the rights and feelings of others, and
the petulence and bad humor which generally characterized slaveholding
ladies, were all quite absent from her manner and bearing toward me.
She had never been a slaveholder--a thing then quite unusual at the
South--but had depended almost entirely upon her own industry for
a living. To this fact the dear lady no doubt owed the excellent
preservation of her natural goodness of heart, for slavery could change
a saint into a sinner, and an angel into a demon. I hardly knew how to
behave towards “Miss Sopha,” as I used to call Mrs. Hugh Auld. I could
not approach her even as I had formerly approached Mrs. Thomas Auld.
Why should I hang down my head, and speak with bated breath, when there
was no pride to scorn me, no coldness to repel me, and no hatred to
inspire me with fear? I therefore soon came to regard her as something
more akin to a mother than a slaveholding mistress. So far from deeming
it impudent in a slave to look her straight in the face, she seemed
ever to say, “look up, child; don’t be afraid.” The sailors belonging
to the sloop esteemed it a great privilege to be the bearers of parcels
or messages to her, for whenever they came, they were sure of a most
kind and pleasant reception. If little Thomas was her son, and her most
dearly loved child, she made me something like his half-brother in
her affections. If dear Tommy was exalted to a place on his mother’s
knee, “Feddy” was honored by a place at the mother’s side. Nor did the
slave-boy lack the caressing strokes of her gentle hand, soothing him
into the consciousness that, though motherless, he was not friendless.
Mrs. Auld was not only kind-hearted, but remarkably pious; frequent
in her attendance of public worship, much given to reading the Bible,
and to chanting hymns of praise when alone. Mr. Hugh was altogether a
different character. He cared very little about religion; knew more of
the world and was more a part of the world, than his wife. He set out
doubtless to be, as the world goes, a respectable man, and to get on by
becoming a successful ship-builder, in that city of ship-building. This
was his ambition, and it fully occupied him. I was of course of very
little consequence to him, and when he smiled upon me, as he sometimes
did, the smile was borrowed from his lovely wife, and like all
borrowed light, was transient, and vanished with the source whence it
was derived. Though I must in truth characterize Master Hugh as a sour
man of forbidding appearance, it is due to him to acknowledge that he
was never cruel to me, according to the notion of cruelty in Maryland.
During the first year or two, he left me almost exclusively to the
management of his wife. She was my law-giver. In hands so tender as
hers, and in the absence of the cruelties of the plantation, I became
both physically and mentally much more sensitive, and a frown from my
mistress caused me far more suffering than had Aunt Katy’s hardest
cuffs. Instead of the cold, damp floor of my old master’s kitchen, I
was on carpets; for the corn bag in winter, I had a good straw bed,
well furnished with covers; for the coarse corn meal in the morning, I
had good bread and mush occasionally; for my old tow-linen shirt, I had
good clean clothes. I was really well off. My employment was to run of
errands, and to take care of Tommy; to prevent his getting in the way
of carriages, and to keep him out of harm’s way generally. So for a
time everything went well. I say for a time, because the fatal poison
of irresponsible power, and the natural influence of slave customs,
were not very long in making their impression on the gentle and loving
disposition of my excellent mistress. She regarded me at first as a
child, like any other. This was the natural and spontaneous thought;
afterwards, when she came to consider me as property, our relations
to each other were changed, but a nature so noble as hers could not
instantly become perverted, and it took several years before the
sweetness of her temper was wholly lost.
[Illustration: MRS. AULD LEARNING HIM TO READ.]
The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible aloud, for she
often read aloud when her husband was absent, awakened my curiosity in
respect to this _mystery_ of reading, and roused in me the desire to
learn. Up to this time I had known nothing whatever of this wonderful
art, and my ignorance and inexperience of what it could do for me,
as well as my confidence in my mistress, emboldened me to ask her
to teach me to read. With an unconsciousness and inexperience equal
to my own, she readily consented, and in an incredibly short time,
by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet and could spell
words of three or four letters. My mistress seemed almost as proud of
my progress as if I had been her own child, and supposing that her
husband would be as well pleased, she made no secret of what she was
doing for me. Indeed, she exultingly told him of the aptness of her
pupil, and of her intention to persevere in teaching me, as she felt
her duty to do, at least to read the Bible. And here arose the first
dark cloud over my Baltimore prospects, the precursor of chilling
blasts and drenching storms. Master Hugh was astounded beyond measure,
and probably for the first time proceeded to unfold to his wife the
true philosophy of the slave system, and the peculiar rules necessary
in the nature of the case to be observed in the management of human
chattels. Of course he forbade her to give me any further instruction,
telling her in the first place that to do so was unlawful, as it was
also unsafe; “for,” said he, “if you give a nigger an inch he will take
an ell. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns
to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave. He should
know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it. As to
himself, learning will do him no good, but a great deal of harm, making
him disconsolate and unhappy. If you teach him how to read, he’ll want
to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with
himself.” Such was the tenor of Master Hugh’s oracular exposition; and
it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and
the requirements of the relation of master and slave. His discourse
was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my
lot to listen. Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of what he said,
and like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction
indicated by him. The effect of his words _on me_ was neither slight
nor transitory. His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy
weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not
soon to be allayed. This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a
painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled,
and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the
enslavement of the black man. “Very well,” thought I. “Knowledge unfits
a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition,
and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to
freedom. It was just what I needed, and it came to me at a time and
from a source whence I least expected it. Of course I was greatly
saddened at the thought of losing the assistance of my kind mistress,
but the information so instantly derived to some extent compensated
me for the loss I had sustained in this direction. Wise as Mr. Auld
was, he underrated my comprehension, and had little idea of the use
to which I was capable of putting the impressive lesson he was giving
to his wife. He wanted me to be a slave; I had already voted against
that on the home plantation of Col. Lloyd. That which he most loved I
most hated; and the very determination which he expressed to keep me in
ignorance only rendered me the more resolute to seek intelligence. In
learning to read, therefore, I am not sure that I do not owe quite as
much to the opposition of my master as to the kindly assistance of my
amiable mistress. I acknowledge the benefit rendered me by the one, and
by the other, believing that but for my mistress I might have grown up
in ignorance.