The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII.
I have before observed that Sunday is the slave's holiday. Where intermarriages are allowed between the slaves of different plantations, this is generally the only occasion on which the scattered branches of the same family are indulged with an opportunity of visiting each other. Many planters, who pride themselves upon the excellence of their discipline, forbid these intermarriages altogether; and if they happen to have a superabundance of men-servants, they prefer that one woman should have a half-a-dozen husbands rather than suffer their slaves to be corrupted, by gadding about among other people's plantations.
Other managers, just as good disciplinarians, and a little more shrewd than their neighbors, forbid the men only to marry away from home. They are very willing to let their women get husbands where they can. They reason in this way. When a husband goes to see his wife, who lives upon another plantation, he will not be apt to go empty-handed. He will carry something with him, probably something eatable, plundered from his master's fields, that may serve to make him welcome, and render his coming a sort of festival. Now every thing that is brought upon a plantation in this way, is so much clear gain; and so far as It goes, it amounts to feeding one's people at the expense of one's neighbors! Sunday, as I have said, is the day upon which are paid the matrimonial visits of the slave. But Sunday was no holiday to me; for I was generally obliged, on that day, to attend my master upon his ecclesiastical excursions. To make up for this, Mr Carleton allowed me Thursday afternoons, so that I was able to visit Cassy at least once a week.
The year that followed, was the happiest of my life; and with all the inevitable mortifications and miseries, which slavery, even under its least repulsive form, ever carries with it, I still look back to that year with pleasure, — a pleasure that yet has power to warm a heart, saddened and embittered by a thousand painful recollections.
Before the end' of the year, Cassy made me a father. The infant boy had all his mother's beauty; and only he who is a father, and as fond a husband too as I was, can know the feelings with which I pressed the little darling to my heart.
No! — no one can know my feelings, — no one, alas, but he, who is, as I was, the father of a slave. The father of a slave! — And is it true then, that this child of my hopes and wishes, this pledge of mutual love, this dear, dear infant of whom I am the father, is it true he is not mine?
Is it not my duty and my right, a right and duty dearer than life, to watch over his helpless infancy, and to rear him with all a father's tenderness and love, to a manhood, that will perhaps repay my care, and in turn, sustain and cherish me, a tottering weak old man?
My duty it may be; but it is not my right. A slave can have no rights. His wife, his child, his toil, his blood, his life, and every thing that gives his life a value, they are not his; he holds them all but at his master's pleasure. He can possess nothing; and if there is any thing he seems to have, it is only by a sufferance which exists but in his owner's will.
This very child, this very tender babe, may be torn from my arms, and sold to-morrow into the hands of a stranger, and I shall have no right to interfere. Or if not so; if some compassion be yielded to his infancy, and if he be not snatched from his father's embraces and his mother's bosom while he is yet all unconscious of his misery, yet what a sad, wretched, desolate fate awaits him!. Shut out from every chance or hope of any thing which it is worth one's while to live for; — bred up a slave!
A slave! — That single word, what volumes it does speak! It speaks of chains, of whips and tortures, compulsive labor, hunger and fatigues, and all the miseries our wretched bodies suffer. It speaks of haughty power, and insolent commands; of insatiate avarice; of pampered pride and purse-proud luxury; and of the cold indifference and scornful unconcern with which the oppressor looks down upon his victims. It speaks of crouching fear, and base servility; of low, mean cunning, and treacherous revenge. It speaks of humanity outraged; manhood degraded; the social charities of life, the sacred ties of. father, wife and child trampled under foot; of aspirations crushed; of hope extinguished; and the light of knowledge sacrilegiously put out. It speaks of man deprived of all that makes him amiable or makes him noble; stripped of his soul, and sunk into a beast.
And thou, my child, to this fate thou art born! May heaven have mercy*on thee, for man has none!
The first burst of instinctive and thoughtless pleasure, with which I had looked upon my infant boy, was dissipated forever, the moment I had recovered myself enough to recollect what he was born to. Various and ever changing, but always wretched and distressing were the feelings with which I gazed at him, as he slept upon his mother's bosom, or waking, smiled at her caresses. He was indeed a pretty baby; — a dear, dear child; — and for his mother's sake I loved him, how I loved him! Yet struggle as I might, I could not, for a moment, escape the bitter thought of what his fate must be. Full well I knew that did he live to be a man, he would repay my love, and justly, with curses, curses on the father who had bestowed upon him nothing but a life incumbered and made worse than worthless, by the inheritance of slavery.
I found no longer the same pleasure in Cassy's society, which it used to afford me; or rather the pleasure which I could not but take in it, was intermingled with much new
. misery. I did not love her less; but the birth of that boy had infused fresh bitterness into the cup of servitude. Whenever I looked upon him, my mind was filled with horrid images. The whole future seemed to come visibly before me. I saw him naked, chained, and bleeding under the lash; I saw him a wretched, trembling creature, cringing to escape it; I saw him utterly debased, and the spirit of manhood extinguished within him; already he appeared that worthless thing, — a slave contented with his fate!
I could not bear it. I started up in a phrensy of passion; I snatched the child from the arms of his mother, and while I loaded him with caresses, I looked about for the means of extinguishing a life, which, as it was an emanation from my existence, seemed destined to be only a prolongation of my misery.
My eyes rolled wildly, I doubt not; and the stern spirit of my determination must have been visibly marked upon my face; for gentle and unsuspicious as she was, and wholly incapable of that wild passion which tore my heart, my wife, with a mother's instinctive watchfulness, seemed to catch some glimpse of my intention. She rose up hastily, and without speaking a word, she caught the baby from my feeble and trembling grasp; and as she pressed it to her bosom, she gave a look that told me all that she feared; and told me too, that the mother's life was bound up in that of the child.
That look subdued me. My arms dropped powerless, and I sunk down in a sort of sullen stupor. I had been prevented from accomplishing my purpose, but I was not satisfied that in foregoing it, I did a father's duty to the child. The more I thought upon it — and it so engrossed me that I could scarcely, draw my thoughts away, — the more was I convinced that it were better for the boy to die. And if the deed did peril my own soul, I loved the child so well I did not shrink, even at that!
But then his mother?
I would have reasoned with her; but I knew how vain would be the labor to array a woman's judgment against a mother's feelings; and I felt, that one tear stealing down her cheek, one look of hers, like that she gave me when she snatched the child away, would, even in my own mind, far outbalance the weightiest of my arguments.
The idea of rescuing the boy, by one bold act, from all the bitter miseries that impended over him, had shot upon my mind, like some faint struggling star across the darkness of a midnight storm. But that glimmer of comfort was now extinguished. The child must live. The life I gave him, I must not take away. No! not though every day of it would draw new curses on my devoted head, — and those too, the curses of my child. This, this alas! is the barbed arrow that still is sticking in my heart; the fatal, fatal wound, that nought can heal.