Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
“Law sakes, Mas’r George! ye didn’t know I ’s a gwine to Louisville tomorrow!”
she said to George, as entering her cabin, he found her busy in sorting over her
baby’s clothes. “I thought I’d jis look over sis’s things, and get ’em straightened
up. But I’m gwine, Mas’r George,—gwine to have four dollars a week; and Missis is
gwine to lay it all up, to buy back my old man agin!”
“Whew!” said George, “here’s a stroke of business, to be sure! How are you
going?”
“Tomorrow, wid Sam. And now, Mas’r George, I knows you’ll jis sit down and
write to my old man, and tell him all about it,—won’t ye?”
“To be sure,” said George; “Uncle Tom’ll be right glad to hear from us. I’ll go
right in the house, for paper and ink; and then, you know, Aunt Chloe, I can tell
about the new colts and all.”
“Sartin, sartin, Mas’r George; you go ’long, and I’ll get ye up a bit o’ chicken, or
some sich; ye won’t have many more suppers wid yer poor old aunty.”
Chapter XXXI
The Middle Passage
“Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look upon iniquity:
wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy
tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”—
HAB. 1: 13.
On the lower part of a small, mean boat, on the Red River, Tom sat,—chains on
his wrists, chains on his feet, and a weight heavier than chains lay on his heart. All
had faded from his sky,—moon and star; all had passed by him, as the trees and
banks were now passing, to return no more. Kentucky home, with wife and children,
and indulgent owners; St. Clare home, with all its renements and splendors; the
golden head of Eva, with its saint-like eyes; the proud, gay, handsome, seemingly
careless, yet ever-kind St. Clare; hours of ease and indulgent leisure,—all gone! and
in place thereof, what remains?
It is one of the bitterest apportionments of a lot of slavery, that the negro,
sympathetic and assimilative, after acquiring, in a rened family, the tastes and
feelings which form the atmosphere of such a place, is not the less liable to become
the bond-slave of the coarsest and most brutal,—just as a chair or table, which once
decorated the superb saloon, comes, at last, battered and defaced, to the barroom
of some lthy tavern, or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery. The great dierence
is, that the table and chair cannot feel, and the man can; for even a legal enactment
that he shall be “taken, reputed, adjudged in law, to be a chattel personal,” cannot
blot out his soul, with its own private little world of memories, hopes, loves, fears,
and desires.
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