"Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the
confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't
forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as
to be too far away."
I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a
slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years,
and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was
broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and
yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the
general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof
that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me,
without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were
not trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle,
smiling round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our
honest opinion--of anything--in place of your own."
"Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just
heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your
own maid the blackest girl you ever saw."
"And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black."
"She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy
answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything
she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as
free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas."
"We draw the line at Mingo," said uncle.
"And who is Mingo?" I inquired.
"Mingo? he's her brother; a very low and trailing branch of the family
tree."
As we neared the house I was told more of the father and mother; their
sweet content, their piety, their diligence. "If we lived in town,
where there's better chance to pick up small earnings," remarked uncle,
"those two and Sidney would have bought their freedom by now, and
Mingo's too. Silas has got nearly enough to buy his own, as it is."
Silas, my aunt explained, was a carpenter. "He hands your uncle so
much a week; all he can make beyond that he's allowed to keep." The
carriage stopped at the door; half a dozen servants came, smiling, and
I knew Sidney and Hester at a glance, they were so finely different
from their fellows.
That night the daughter and I made acquaintance. She was eighteen,
tall, lithe and as straight as an arrow. She had not one of the
physical traits that so often make her race uncomely to our eyes; even
her nose was good; her very feet were well made, her hands were slim
and shapely, the fingers long and neatly jointed, and there was nothing
inky in her amazing blackness, her red blood so enriched it. Yet she
was as really African in her strong, eager mind as in her color, and
the English language, on her tongue, was like a painter's palette and
brushes in the hands of a monkey. Her first question to me after my
last want was supplied came cautiously, after a long gaze at my lighted
lamp, from a seat on the floor. "Miss Maud, when was de conwention o'
coal-oil 'scuvvud?" And to her good night she added, in allusion to my
eventual return to the North, "I hope it be a long time afo' you make
dat repass!"
At the next bedtime she began on me with the innocent question of my
favorite flower, but I had not answered three other questions before
she had placed me where I must either say I did not believe in the
right to hold slaves, or must keep silence; and when I kept silence of
course she knew. For a long moment she dropped her eyes, and then,
with a soft smile, asked if I would tell her some Bible stories,
preferably that of "Moses in de boundaries o' Egyp'."
She listened in gloating silence, rarely interrupting; but at the
words, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, 'Let my people go,'" the
response, "Pra-aise Gawd!" rose from her lips in such volume that she
threw her hands to her mouth. After that she spoke only soft queries,
but they grew more and more significant, and I soon saw that her
supposed content was purely a pious endurance, and that her soul felt
bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives
of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness
of Sin; Sidney was trusting me; uncle and aunt were trusting me; and
between them I was getting into a narrow corner. After a meditative
silence my questioner asked:
"Miss Maud, do de Bible anywhuz capitulate dat Moses aw Aaron aw
Joshaway aw Cable _buy_ his freedom--wid money?"
Her manner was childlike, yet she always seemed to come up out of deep
thought when she asked a question; she smiled diffidently until the
reply began to come, then took on a reverential gravity, and as soon as
it was fully given sank back into thought. "Miss Maud, don't you
reckon dat ef Moses had a-save' up money enough to a-boughtened his
freedom, dat'd a-been de wery sign mos' pleasin' to Gawd dat he 'uz
highly fitten to be sot free widout paying?" To that puzzle she waited
for no answer beyond the distress I betrayed, but turned to matters
less speculative, and soon said good night.
On the third evening--my! If I could have given all the topography of
the entire country between uncle's plantation and my native city on the
margin of the Great Lakes, with full account of its every natural and
social condition, her questions would have wholly gathered them in.
She asked if our climate was very hard on negroes; what clothing we
wore in summer, and how we kept from freezing in midwinter; about
wages, the price of food, what crops were raised, and what the
"patarolers" did with a negro when they caught one at night without a
pass.
She made me desperate, and when the fourth night saw her crouched on my
floor it found me prepared; I plied her with questions from start to
finish. She yielded with a perfect courtesy; told of the poor lot of
the few free negroes of whom she knew, and of the time-serving and
shifty indolence, the thievishness, faithlessness, and unaspiring
torpidity of "some niggehs"; and when I opened the way for her to speak
of uncle and aunt she poured forth their praises with an ardor that
brought her own tears. I asked her if she believed she could ever be
happy away from them.
She smiled with brimming eyes: "Why, I dunno, Miss Maud; whatsomeveh
come, and whensomeveh, and howsomeveh de Lawd sen' it, ef us feels his
ahm und' us, us ought to be 'shame' not to be happy, oughtn't us?" All
at once she sprang half up: "I tell you de Lawd neveh gi'n no niggeh de
rights to snuggle down anywhuz an' fo'git de auction-block!"
As suddenly the outbreak passed, yet as she settled down again her
exaltation still showed through her fond smile. "You know what dat
inqui'ance o' yone bring to my 'memb'ance? Dass ow ole Canaan hymn----
"'O I mus' climb de stony hill
Pas' many a sweet desiah,
De flow'ry road is not fo' me,
I follows cloud an' fiah.'"
After she was gone I lay trying so to contrive our next conversation
that it should not flow, as all before it had so irresistibly done,
into that one deep channel of her thoughts which took in everything
that fell upon her mind, as a great river drinks the rains of all its
valleys. Presently the open window gave me my cue: the stars! the
unvexed and unvexing stars, that shone before human wrongs ever began,
and that will be shining after all human wrongs are ended--our talk
should be of them.
V
At the supper-table on the following evening I became convinced of
something which I had felt coming for two or three days, wondering the
while whether Sidney did not feel the same thing. When we rose aunt
drew me aside and with caressing touches on my brow and temples said
she was sorry to be so slow in bringing me into social contact with the
young people of the neighboring plantations, but that uncle, on his
arrival at home, had found a letter whose information had kept him, and
her as well, busy every waking hour since. "And this evening," she
continued, "we can't even sit down with you around the parlor lamp.
Can you amuse yourself alone, dear, or with Sidney, while your uncle
and I go over some pressing matters together?"