Uncle Tom's Cabin
Dizzily she sat down. Her slack hands fell lifeless by her side. Her
eyes looked straight forward, but she saw nothing. All the noise and
hum of the boat, the groaning of the machinery, mingled dreamily to her
bewildered ear; and the poor, dumb-stricken heart had neither cry not
tear to show for its utter misery. She was quite calm.
The trader, who, considering his advantages, was almost as humane as
some of our politicians, seemed to feel called on to administer such
consolation as the case admitted of.
“I know this yer comes kinder hard, at first, Lucy,” said he; “but such
a smart, sensible gal as you are, won’t give way to it. You see it’s
_necessary_, and can’t be helped!”
“O! don’t, Mas’r, don’t!” said the woman, with a voice like one that is
smothering.
“You’re a smart wench, Lucy,” he persisted; “I mean to do well by ye,
and get ye a nice place down river; and you’ll soon get another
husband,—such a likely gal as you—”
“O! Mas’r, if you _only_ won’t talk to me now,” said the woman, in a
voice of such quick and living anguish that the trader felt that there
was something at present in the case beyond his style of operation. He
got up, and the woman turned away, and buried her head in her cloak.
The trader walked up and down for a time, and occasionally stopped and
looked at her.
“Takes it hard, rather,” he soliloquized, “but quiet, tho’;—let her
sweat a while; she’ll come right, by and by!”
Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had a
perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something
unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he
had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had
only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might
have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a
lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution
which an American divine[2] tells us has _“no evils but such as are
inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life_.” But
Tom, as we see, being a poor, ignorant fellow, whose reading had been
confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace
himself with views like these. His very soul bled within him for what
seemed to him the _wrongs_ of the poor suffering thing that lay like a
crushed reed on the boxes; the feeling, living, bleeding, yet immortal
_thing_, which American state law coolly classes with the bundles, and
bales, and boxes, among which she is lying.
[2] Dr. Joel Parker of Philadelphia. [Mrs. Stowe’s note.] Presbyterian
clergyman (1798-1873), a friend of the Beecher family. Mrs. Stowe
attempted unsuccessfully to have this identifying note removed from
the stereotype-plate of the first edition.
Tom drew near, and tried to say something; but she only groaned.
Honestly, and with tears running down his own cheeks, he spoke of a
heart of love in the skies, of a pitying Jesus, and an eternal home;
but the ear was deaf with anguish, and the palsied heart could not
feel.
Night came on,—night calm, unmoved, and glorious, shining down with her
innumerable and solemn angel eyes, twinkling, beautiful, but silent.
There was no speech nor language, no pitying voice or helping hand,
from that distant sky. One after another, the voices of business or
pleasure died away; all on the boat were sleeping, and the ripples at
the prow were plainly heard. Tom stretched himself out on a box, and
there, as he lay, he heard, ever and anon, a smothered sob or cry from
the prostrate creature,—“O! what shall I do? O Lord! O good Lord, do
help me!” and so, ever and anon, until the murmur died away in silence.
At midnight, Tom waked, with a sudden start. Something black passed
quickly by him to the side of the boat, and he heard a splash in the
water. No one else saw or heard anything. He raised his head,—the
woman’s place was vacant! He got up, and sought about him in vain. The
poor bleeding heart was still, at last, and the river rippled and
dimpled just as brightly as if it had not closed above it.
Patience! patience! ye whose hearts swell indignant at wrongs like
these. Not one throb of anguish, not one tear of the oppressed, is
forgotten by the Man of Sorrows, the Lord of Glory. In his patient,
generous bosom he bears the anguish of a world. Bear thou, like him, in
patience, and labor in love; for sure as he is God, “the year of his
redeemed _shall_ come.”
The trader waked up bright and early, and came out to see to his live
stock. It was now his turn to look about in perplexity.
“Where alive is that gal?” he said to Tom.
Tom, who had learned the wisdom of keeping counsel, did not feel called
upon to state his observations and suspicions, but said he did not
know.
“She surely couldn’t have got off in the night at any of the landings,
for I was awake, and on the lookout, whenever the boat stopped. I never
trust these yer things to other folks.”
This speech was addressed to Tom quite confidentially, as if it was
something that would be specially interesting to him. Tom made no
answer.
The trader searched the boat from stem to stern, among boxes, bales and
barrels, around the machinery, by the chimneys, in vain.
“Now, I say, Tom, be fair about this yer,” he said, when, after a
fruitless search, he came where Tom was standing. “You know something
about it, now. Don’t tell me,—I know you do. I saw the gal stretched
out here about ten o’clock, and ag’in at twelve, and ag’in between one
and two; and then at four she was gone, and you was a sleeping right
there all the time. Now, you know something,—you can’t help it.”
“Well, Mas’r,” said Tom, “towards morning something brushed by me, and
I kinder half woke; and then I hearn a great splash, and then I clare
woke up, and the gal was gone. That’s all I know on ’t.”
The trader was not shocked nor amazed; because, as we said before, he
was used to a great many things that you are not used to. Even the
awful presence of Death struck no solemn chill upon him. He had seen
Death many times,—met him in the way of trade, and got acquainted with
him,—and he only thought of him as a hard customer, that embarrassed
his property operations very unfairly; and so he only swore that the
gal was a baggage, and that he was devilish unlucky, and that, if
things went on in this way, he should not make a cent on the trip. In
short, he seemed to consider himself an ill-used man, decidedly; but
there was no help for it, as the woman had escaped into a state which
_never will_ give up a fugitive,—not even at the demand of the whole
glorious Union. The trader, therefore, sat discontentedly down, with
his little account-book, and put down the missing body and soul under
the head of _losses!_
“He’s a shocking creature, isn’t he,—this trader? so unfeeling! It’s
dreadful, really!”
“O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally
despised,—never received into any decent society.”
But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened,
cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the
trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make
the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and
depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better
than he?
Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and
he coarse, you talented and he simple?
In the day of a future judgment, these very considerations may make it
more tolerable for him than for you.
In concluding these little incidents of lawful trade, we must beg the
world not to think that American legislators are entirely destitute of
humanity, as might, perhaps, be unfairly inferred from the great
efforts made in our national body to protect and perpetuate this
species of traffic.
Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves, in
declaiming against the _foreign_ slave-trade. There are a perfect host
of Clarksons and Wilberforces[3] risen up among us on that subject,
most edifying to hear and behold. Trading negroes from Africa, dear
reader, is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from
Kentucky,—that’s quite another thing!
[3] Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and William Wilberforce (1759- 1833),
English philanthropists and anti-slavery agitators who helped to
secure passage of the Emancipation Bill by Parliament in 1833.
CHAPTER XIII
The Quaker Settlement
A quiet scene now rises before us. A large, roomy, neatly-painted
kitchen, its yellow floor glossy and smooth, and without a particle of
dust; a neat, well-blacked cooking-stove; rows of shining tin,
suggestive of unmentionable good things to the appetite; glossy green
wood chairs, old and firm; a small flag-bottomed rocking-chair, with a
patch-work cushion in it, neatly contrived out of small pieces of
different colored woollen goods, and a larger sized one, motherly and
old, whose wide arms breathed hospitable invitation, seconded by the
solicitation of its feather cushions,—a real comfortable, persuasive
old chair, and worth, in the way of honest, homely enjoyment, a dozen
of your plush or _brochetelle_ drawing-room gentry; and in the chair,
gently swaying back and forward, her eyes bent on some fine sewing, sat
our fine old friend Eliza. Yes, there she is, paler and thinner than in
her Kentucky home, with a world of quiet sorrow lying under the shadow
of her long eyelashes, and marking the outline of her gentle mouth! It
was plain to see how old and firm the girlish heart was grown under the
discipline of heavy sorrow; and when, anon, her large dark eye was
raised to follow the gambols of her little Harry, who was sporting,
like some tropical butterfly, hither and thither over the floor, she
showed a depth of firmness and steady resolve that was never there in
her earlier and happier days.
By her side sat a woman with a bright tin pan in her lap, into which
she was carefully sorting some dried peaches. She might be fifty-five
or sixty; but hers was one of those faces that time seems to touch only
to brighten and adorn. The snowy lisse crape cap, made after the strait
Quaker pattern,—the plain white muslin handkerchief, lying in placid
folds across her bosom,—the drab shawl and dress,—showed at once the
community to which she belonged. Her face was round and rosy, with a
healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair,
partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placid
forehead, on which time had written no inscription, except peace on
earth, good will to men, and beneath shone a large pair of clear,
honest, loving brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them,
to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever
throbbed in woman’s bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful
young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women? If
any want to get up an inspiration under this head, we refer them to our
good friend Rachel Halliday, just as she sits there in her little
rocking-chair. It had a turn for quacking and squeaking,—that chair
had,—either from having taken cold in early life, or from some
asthmatic affection, or perhaps from nervous derangement; but, as she
gently swung backward and forward, the chair kept up a kind of subdued
“creechy crawchy,” that would have been intolerable in any other chair.
But old Simeon Halliday often declared it was as good as any music to
him, and the children all avowed that they wouldn’t miss of hearing
mother’s chair for anything in the world. For why? for twenty years or
more, nothing but loving words, and gentle moralities, and motherly
loving kindness, had come from that chair;—head-aches and heart-aches