Clotel - William Wells Brown (good books to read for beginners txt) 📗

down the fiddle and the bow,
We’ll dance and sing,
And make the forest ring,
With the fiddle and the old banjo.

The song was not half finished before Carlton regretted that he had caused the young lady to remain and hear what to her must be anything but pleasant reflections upon her deceased parent. “I think we will walk,” said he, at the same time extending his arm to Georgiana.

“No,” said she; “let’s hear them out. It is from these unguarded expressions of the feelings of the negroes, that we should learn a lesson.”

At its conclusion they walked towards the house in silence: as they were ascending the steps, the young man said, “They are happy, after all. The negro, situated as yours are, is not aware that he is deprived of any just rights.”

“Yes, yes,” answered Georgiana: “you may place the slave where you please; you may dry up to your utmost the fountains of his feelings, the springs of his thought; you may yoke him to your labour, as an ox which liveth only to work, and worketh only to live; you may put him under any process which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being; you may do this, and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality; it is the ethereal part of his nature, which oppression cannot reach; it is a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of Deity, and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man.”

On reaching the drawing-room, they found Sam snuffing the candles, and looking as solemn and as dignified as if he had never sung a song or laughed in his life. “Will Miss Georgy have de supper got up now?” asked the negro.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Well,” remarked Carlton, “that beats anything I ever met with. Do you think that was Sam we heard singing?”

“I am sure of it,” was the answer.

“I could not have believed that that fellow was capable of so much deception,” continued he.

“Our system of slavery is one of deception; and Sam, you see, has only been a good scholar. However, he is as honest a fellow as you will find among the slave population here. If we would have them more honest, we should give them their liberty, and then the inducement to be dishonest would be gone. I have resolved that these creatures shall all be free.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Carlton.

“Yes, I shall let them all go free, and set an example to those about me.”

“I honour your judgment,” said he. “But will the state permit them to remain?”

“If not, they can go where they can live in freedom. I will not be unjust because the state is.”

XVII Retaliation

I had a dream, a happy dream;
I thought that I was free:
That in my own bright land again
A home there was for me.

With the deepest humiliation Horatio Green saw the daughter of Clotel, his own child, brought into his dwelling as a servant. His wife felt that she had been deceived, and determined to punish her deceiver. At first Mary was put to work in the kitchen, where she met with little or no sympathy from the other slaves, owing to the fairness of her complexion. The child was white, what should be done to make her look like other negroes, was the question Mrs. Green asked herself. At last she hit upon a plan: there was a garden at the back of the house over which Mrs. Green could look from her parlour window. Here the white slave-girl was put to work, without either bonnet or handkerchief upon her head. A hot sun poured its broiling rays on the naked face and neck of the girl, until she sank down in the corner of the garden, and was actually broiled to sleep. “Dat little nigger ain’t working a bit, missus,” said Dinah to Mrs. Green, as she entered the kitchen.

“She’s lying in the sun, seasoning; she will work better by and by,” replied the mistress.

“Dees white niggers always tink dey sef good as white folks,” continued the cook.

“Yes, but we will teach them better; won’t we, Dinah?”

“Yes, missus, I don’t like dees mularter niggers, no how: dey always want to set dey sef up for something big.” The cook was black, and was not without that prejudice which is to be found among the negroes, as well as among the whites of the Southern States.

The sun had the desired effect, for in less than a fortnight Mary’s fair complexion had disappeared, and she was but little whiter than any other mulatto children running about the yard. But the close resemblance between the father and child annoyed the mistress more than the mere whiteness of the child’s complexion. Horatio made proposition after proposition to have the girl sent away, for every time he beheld her countenance it reminded him of the happy days he had spent with Clotel. But his wife had commenced, and determined to carry out her unfeeling and fiendish designs. This child was not only white, but she was the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, the man who, when speaking against slavery in the legislature of Virginia, said,

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. With what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriæ of the other! For if the slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another; in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature,