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

of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes. Just as the pursuers crossed the high draw for the passage of sloops, soon after entering upon the bridge, they beheld three men slowly approaching from the Virginia side. They immediately called to them to arrest the fugitive, whom they proclaimed a runaway slave. True to their Virginian instincts as she came near, they formed in line across the narrow bridge, and prepared to seize her. Seeing escape impossible in that quarter, she stopped suddenly, and turned upon her pursuers. On came the profane and ribald crew, faster than ever, already exulting in her capture, and threatening punishment for her flight. For a moment she looked wildly and anxiously around to see if there was no hope of escape. On either hand, far down below, rolled the deep foamy waters of the Potomac, and before and behind the rapidly approaching step and noisy voices of pursuers, showing how vain would be any further effort for freedom. Her resolution was taken. She clasped her hands convulsively, and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been denied her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge, and sunk forever beneath the waves of the river!

Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.

Had Clotel escaped from oppression in any other land, in the disguise in which she fled from the Mississippi to Richmond, and reached the United States, no honour within the gift of the American people would have been too good to have been heaped upon the heroic woman. But she was a slave, and therefore out of the pale of their sympathy. They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for “poor Ireland”; they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of the brave.” They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty”; if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death. The body of Clotel was picked up from the bank of the river, where it had been washed by the strong current, a hole dug in the sand, and there deposited, without either inquest being held over it, or religious service being performed. Such was the life and such the death of a woman whose virtues and goodness of heart would have done honour to one in a higher station of life, and who, if she had been born in any other land but that of slavery, would have been honoured and loved. A few days after the death of Clotel, the following poem appeared in one of the newspapers:

Now, rest for the wretched! the long day is past,
And night on yon prison descendeth at last.
Now lock up and bolt! Ha, jailor, look there!
Who flies like a wild bird escaped from the snare?
A woman, a slave⁠—up, out in pursuit.
While linger some gleams of day!
Let thy call ring out!⁠—now a rabble rout
Is at thy heels⁠—speed away!

A bold race for freedom!⁠—On, fugitive, on!
Heaven help but the right, and thy freedom is won.
How eager she drinks the free air of the plains;
Every limb, every nerve, every fibre she strains;
From Columbia’s glorious capitol,
Columbia’s daughter flees
To the sanctuary God has given⁠—
The sheltering forest trees.

Now she treads the Long Bridge⁠—joy lighteth her eye⁠—
Beyond her the dense wood and darkening sky⁠—
Wild hopes thrill her heart as she neareth the shore:
O, despair! there are men fast advancing before!
Shame, shame on their manhood! they hear, they heed
The cry, her flight to stay,
And like demon forms with their outstretched arms,
They wait to seize their prey!

She pauses, she turns! Ah, will she flee back?
Like wolves, her pursuers howl loud on their track;
She lifteth to Heaven one look of despair⁠—
Her anguish breaks forth in one hurried prayer⁠—
Hark! her jailor’s yell! like a bloodhound’s bay
On the low night wind it sweeps!
Now, death or the chain! to the stream she turns,
And she leaps! O God, she leaps!

The dark and the cold, yet merciful wave,
Receives to its bosom the form of the slave:
She rises⁠—earth’s scenes on her dim vision gleam,
Yet she struggleth not with the strong rushing stream:
And low are the death-cries her woman’s heart gives,
As she floats adown the river,
Faint and more faint grows the drowning voice,
And her cries have ceased for ever!

Now back, jailor, back to thy dungeons, again,
To swing the red lash and rivet the chain!
The form thou would’st fetter⁠—returned to its God;
The universe holdeth no realm of night
More drear than her slavery⁠—
More merciless fiends than here stayed her flight⁠—
Joy! the hunted slave is free!

That bond-woman’s corse⁠—let Potomac’s proud wave
Go bear it along by our Washington’s grave,
And heave it high up on that hallowed strand,
To tell of the freedom he won for our land.
A weak woman’s corse, by freemen chased down;
Hurrah for our country! hurrah!
To freedom she leaped, through drowning and death⁠—
Hurrah for our country! hurrah!

XXVI The Escape

No refuge is found on our unhallowed ground,
For the wretched in Slavery’s manacles bound;
While our star-spangled banner in vain boasts to wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

We left Mary, the daughter of Clotel, in the capacity of a servant in her own father’s house, where she had been taken by her mistress for the ostensible purpose of plunging her husband into the depths of humiliation. At first the young girl was treated with great severity; but after finding that Horatio Green had lost all feeling for his child, Mrs. Green’s own heart became touched for the offspring