The Maine bugle ... campaign; 1-5 Jan. 1894-Oct. 1898 - Maine.gov

PRISON LIFE AND ESCAPE. 331
driver used to make him take care of the field women's babies
they would be carried to the field and all left together under a
tree where they would have a fire to cook their dinners. One
day old Aunty heard her baby scream and broke away from the
field work and ran to see what was the matter. She arrived to
see this boy put a shovel of hot embers into the child's face,
eyes and mouth. She went at the boy with a wild yell ; he ran
away and she caught the child up but it was too late to save it.
It died sometime in the night in horrible agony. The boy
laughed about it. He had to be sold and sent away or the infu-
riated mother would surely have killed him. So much for the
result of the " Divine Institution." I heard many such stories
of barbarity but this is enough. According to the negroes'
stories and the subsequent Ku Klux atrocities it seems that the
white people were about as barbarous as it is possible for
humans to be, and their savage cruelty was of every day occurrence
and caused no great excitement, it was so common.
One night while we were in a swamp called the " Colawakee "
one of our colored friends came to us and said :
" Dey say dis
yere Confederacy is done bust up 'n' ole Mis' has had all de
bacon 'n' all de corn hauled out in de woods 'n' hid, 'n' dey say
de Yankees'll be here right off." We doubted it but thought
something had happened. We were staying with a runaway
slave who had been " runaway " about two years. He said his
father was an Indian. His hair stood out straight from his head
about eight inches, and he was a wild looking specimen of
humanity. He and I went out that night after a pig and he
said there was corn under a persimon tree in a four hundred
acre field called the old ocean. We went to the tree and found
corn as he said all scattered around. Then I realized that our
time in prisons or swamps was about over. We took corn and
caught our porker and went into camp. My comrade Saylor
and I held a consultation right off and decided to go to Albany
and find out what was up. We started the next night and
arrived at the Pace plantation within two or three miles of the'
city. We camped in a swamp in the back lots during the fol-