Uncle Tom's Cabin
story!” and, as if satisfied with his examination, he walked out and
looked, and stood with his hands in his pocket, his cigar in his mouth,
and his hat cocked on one side, ready for action.
“What think of ’em?” said a man who had been following Haley’s
examination, as if to make up his own mind from it.
“Wal,” said Haley, spitting, “I shall put in, I think, for the
youngerly ones and the boy.”
“They want to sell the boy and the old woman together,” said the man.
“Find it a tight pull;—why, she’s an old rack o’ bones,—not worth her
salt.”
“You wouldn’t then?” said the man.
“Anybody ’d be a fool ’t would. She’s half blind, crooked with rheumatis,
and foolish to boot.”
“Some buys up these yer old critturs, and ses there’s a sight more wear
in ’em than a body ’d think,” said the man, reflectively.
“No go, ’t all,” said Haley; “wouldn’t take her for a
present,—fact,—I’ve _seen_, now.”
“Wal, ’t is kinder pity, now, not to buy her with her son,—her heart
seems so sot on him,—s’pose they fling her in cheap.”
“Them that’s got money to spend that ar way, it’s all well enough. I
shall bid off on that ar boy for a plantation-hand;—wouldn’t be
bothered with her, no way, not if they’d give her to me,” said Haley.
“She’ll take on desp’t,” said the man.
“Nat’lly, she will,” said the trader, coolly.
The conversation was here interrupted by a busy hum in the audience;
and the auctioneer, a short, bustling, important fellow, elbowed his
way into the crowd. The old woman drew in her breath, and caught
instinctively at her son.
“Keep close to yer mammy, Albert,—close,—dey’ll put us up togedder,”
she said.
“O, mammy, I’m feard they won’t,” said the boy.
“Dey must, child; I can’t live, no ways, if they don’t” said the old
creature, vehemently.
The stentorian tones of the auctioneer, calling out to clear the way,
now announced that the sale was about to commence. A place was cleared,
and the bidding began. The different men on the list were soon knocked
off at prices which showed a pretty brisk demand in the market; two of
them fell to Haley.
“Come, now, young un,” said the auctioneer, giving the boy a touch with
his hammer, “be up and show your springs, now.”
“Put us two up togedder, togedder,—do please, Mas’r,” said the old
woman, holding fast to her boy.
“Be off,” said the man, gruffly, pushing her hands away; “you come
last. Now, darkey, spring;” and, with the word, he pushed the boy
toward the block, while a deep, heavy groan rose behind him. The boy
paused, and looked back; but there was no time to stay, and, dashing
the tears from his large, bright eyes, he was up in a moment.
His fine figure, alert limbs, and bright face, raised an instant
competition, and half a dozen bids simultaneously met the ear of the
auctioneer. Anxious, half-frightened, he looked from side to side, as
he heard the clatter of contending bids,—now here, now there,—till the
hammer fell. Haley had got him. He was pushed from the block toward his
new master, but stopped one moment, and looked back, when his poor old
mother, trembling in every limb, held out her shaking hands toward him.
“Buy me too, Mas’r, for de dear Lord’s sake!—buy me,—I shall die if you
don’t!”
“You’ll die if I do, that’s the kink of it,” said Haley,—“no!” And he
turned on his heel.
The bidding for the poor old creature was summary. The man who had
addressed Haley, and who seemed not destitute of compassion, bought her
for a trifle, and the spectators began to disperse.
The poor victims of the sale, who had been brought up in one place
together for years, gathered round the despairing old mother, whose
agony was pitiful to see.
“Couldn’t dey leave me one? Mas’r allers said I should have one,—he
did,” she repeated over and over, in heart-broken tones.
“Trust in the Lord, Aunt Hagar,” said the oldest of the men,
sorrowfully.
“What good will it do?” said she, sobbing passionately.
“Mother, mother,—don’t! don’t!” said the boy. “They say you ’s got a
good master.”
“I don’t care,—I don’t care. O, Albert! oh, my boy! you ’s my last baby.
Lord, how ken I?”
“Come, take her off, can’t some of ye?” said Haley, dryly; “don’t do no
good for her to go on that ar way.”
The old men of the company, partly by persuasion and partly by force,
loosed the poor creature’s last despairing hold, and, as they led her
off to her new master’s wagon, strove to comfort her.
“Now!” said Haley, pushing his three purchases together, and producing
a bundle of handcuffs, which he proceeded to put on their wrists; and
fastening each handcuff to a long chain, he drove them before him to
the jail.
A few days saw Haley, with his possessions, safely deposited on one of
the Ohio boats. It was the commencement of his gang, to be augmented,
as the boat moved on, by various other merchandise of the same kind,
which he, or his agent, had stored for him in various points along
shore.
The La Belle Riviere, as brave and beautiful a boat as ever walked the
waters of her namesake river, was floating gayly down the stream, under
a brilliant sky, the stripes and stars of free America waving and
fluttering over head; the guards crowded with well-dressed ladies and
gentlemen walking and enjoying the delightful day. All was full of
life, buoyant and rejoicing;—all but Haley’s gang, who were stored,
with other freight, on the lower deck, and who, somehow, did not seem
to appreciate their various privileges, as they sat in a knot, talking
to each other in low tones.
“Boys,” said Haley, coming up, briskly, “I hope you keep up good heart,
and are cheerful. Now, no sulks, ye see; keep stiff upper lip, boys; do
well by me, and I’ll do well by you.”
The boys addressed responded the invariable “Yes, Mas’r,” for ages the
watchword of poor Africa; but it’s to be owned they did not look
particularly cheerful; they had their various little prejudices in
favor of wives, mothers, sisters, and children, seen for the last
time,—and though “they that wasted them required of them mirth,” it was
not instantly forthcoming.
“I’ve got a wife,” spoke out the article enumerated as “John, aged
thirty,” and he laid his chained hand on Tom’s knee,—“and she don’t
know a word about this, poor girl!”
“Where does she live?” said Tom.
“In a tavern a piece down here,” said John; “I wish, now, I _could_ see
her once more in this world,” he added.
Poor John! It _was_ rather natural; and the tears that fell, as he
spoke, came as naturally as if he had been a white man. Tom drew a long
breath from a sore heart, and tried, in his poor way, to comfort him.
And over head, in the cabin, sat fathers and mothers, husbands and
wives; and merry, dancing children moved round among them, like so many
little butterflies, and everything was going on quite easy and
comfortable.
“O, mamma,” said a boy, who had just come up from below, “there’s a
negro trader on board, and he’s brought four or five slaves down
there.”
“Poor creatures!” said the mother, in a tone between grief and
indignation.
“What’s that?” said another lady.
“Some poor slaves below,” said the mother.
“And they’ve got chains on,” said the boy.
“What a shame to our country that such sights are to be seen!” said
another lady.
“O, there’s a great deal to be said on both sides of the subject,” said
a genteel woman, who sat at her state-room door sewing, while her
little girl and boy were playing round her. “I’ve been south, and I
must say I think the negroes are better off than they would be to be
free.”
“In some respects, some of them are well off, I grant,” said the lady
to whose remark she had answered. “The most dreadful part of slavery,
to my mind, is its outrages on the feelings and affections,—the
separating of families, for example.”
“That _is_ a bad thing, certainly,” said the other lady, holding up a
baby’s dress she had just completed, and looking intently on its
trimmings; “but then, I fancy, it don’t occur often.”
“O, it does,” said the first lady, eagerly; “I’ve lived many years in
Kentucky and Virginia both, and I’ve seen enough to make any one’s
heart sick. Suppose, ma’am, your two children, there, should be taken
from you, and sold?”
“We can’t reason from our feelings to those of this class of persons,”
said the other lady, sorting out some worsteds on her lap.
“Indeed, ma’am, you can know nothing of them, if you say so,” answered
the first lady, warmly. “I was born and brought up among them. I know
they _do_ feel, just as keenly,—even more so, perhaps,—as we do.”
The lady said “Indeed!” yawned, and looked out the cabin window, and
finally repeated, for a finale, the remark with which she had
begun,—“After all, I think they are better off than they would be to be
free.”
“It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race
should be servants,—kept in a low condition,” said a grave-looking
gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. “‘Cursed be
Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be,’ the scripture says.”[1]
[1] Gen. 9:25. his is what Noah says when he wakes out of drunkenness
and realizes that his youngest son, Ham, father of Canaan, has seen
him naked.
“I say, stranger, is that ar what that text means?” said a tall man,
standing by.
“Undoubtedly. It pleased Providence, for some inscrutable reason, to
doom the race to bondage, ages ago; and we must not set up our opinion
against that.”
“Well, then, we’ll all go ahead and buy up niggers,” said the man, “if
that’s the way of Providence,—won’t we, Squire?” said he, turning to
Haley, who had been standing, with his hands in his pockets, by the
stove and intently listening to the conversation.
“Yes,” continued the tall man, “we must all be resigned to the decrees
of Providence. Niggers must be sold, and trucked round, and kept under;
it’s what they’s made for. ’Pears like this yer view ’s quite
refreshing, an’t it, stranger?” said he to Haley.
“I never thought on ’t,” said Haley, “I couldn’t have said as much,
myself; I ha’nt no larning. I took up the trade just to make a living;
if ’tan’t right, I calculated to ’pent on ’t in time, ye know.”
“And now you’ll save yerself the trouble, won’t ye?” said the tall man.
“See what ’t is, now, to know scripture. If ye’d only studied yer
Bible, like this yer good man, ye might have know’d it before, and
saved ye a heap o’ trouble. Ye could jist have said, ‘Cussed be’—what’s
his name?—‘and ’t would all have come right.’” And the stranger, who
was no other than the honest drover whom we introduced to our readers
in the Kentucky tavern, sat down, and began smoking, with a curious
smile on his long, dry face.
A tall, slender young man, with a face expressive of great feeling and
intelligence, here broke in, and repeated the words, “‘All things
whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto
them.’ I suppose,” he added, “_that_ is scripture, as much as ‘Cursed
be Canaan.’”
“Wal, it seems quite _as_ plain a text, stranger,” said John the
drover, “to poor fellows like us, now;” and John smoked on like a
volcano.
The young man paused, looked as if he was going to say more, when
suddenly the boat stopped, and the company made the usual steamboat
rush, to see where they were landing.
“Both them ar chaps parsons?” said John to one of the men, as they were
going out.
The man nodded.
As the boat stopped, a black woman came running wildly up the plank,
darted into the crowd, flew up to where the slave gang sat, and threw
her arms round that unfortunate piece of merchandise before
enumerate—“John, aged thirty,” and with sobs and tears bemoaned him as
her husband.
But what needs tell the story, told too oft,—every day told,—of
heart-strings rent and broken,—the weak broken and torn for the profit