Uncle Tom's Cabin
hand on her shoulder, “we’re almost home!”
When Legree scolded and stormed, Emmeline was terrified; but when he
laid his hand on her, and spoke as he now did, she felt as if she had
rather he would strike her. The expression of his eyes made her soul
sick, and her flesh creep. Involuntarily she clung closer to the
mulatto woman by her side, as if she were her mother.
“You didn’t ever wear ear-rings,” he said, taking hold of her small ear
with his coarse fingers.
“No, Mas’r!” said Emmeline, trembling and looking down.
“Well, I’ll give you a pair, when we get home, if you’re a good girl.
You needn’t be so frightened; I don’t mean to make you work very hard.
You’ll have fine times with me, and live like a lady,—only be a good
girl.”
Legree had been drinking to that degree that he was inclining to be
very gracious; and it was about this time that the enclosures of the
plantation rose to view. The estate had formerly belonged to a
gentleman of opulence and taste, who had bestowed some considerable
attention to the adornment of his grounds. Having died insolvent, it
had been purchased, at a bargain, by Legree, who used it, as he did
everything else, merely as an implement for money-making. The place had
that ragged, forlorn appearance, which is always produced by the
evidence that the care of the former owner has been left to go to utter
decay.
What was once a smooth-shaven lawn before the house, dotted here and
there with ornamental shrubs, was now covered with frowsy tangled
grass, with horseposts set up, here and there, in it, where the turf
was stamped away, and the ground littered with broken pails, cobs of
corn, and other slovenly remains. Here and there, a mildewed jessamine
or honeysuckle hung raggedly from some ornamental support, which had
been pushed to one side by being used as a horse-post. What once was a
large garden was now all grown over with weeds, through which, here and
there, some solitary exotic reared its forsaken head. What had been a
conservatory had now no window-shades, and on the mouldering shelves
stood some dry, forsaken flower-pots, with sticks in them, whose dried
leaves showed they had once been plants.
The wagon rolled up a weedy gravel walk, under a noble avenue of China
trees, whose graceful forms and ever-springing foliage seemed to be the
only things there that neglect could not daunt or alter,—like noble
spirits, so deeply rooted in goodness, as to flourish and grow stronger
amid discouragement and decay.
The house had been large and handsome. It was built in a manner common
at the South; a wide verandah of two stories running round every part
of the house, into which every outer door opened, the lower tier being
supported by brick pillars.
But the place looked desolate and uncomfortable; some windows stopped
up with boards, some with shattered panes, and shutters hanging by a
single hinge,—all telling of coarse neglect and discomfort.
Bits of board, straw, old decayed barrels and boxes, garnished the
ground in all directions; and three or four ferocious-looking dogs,
roused by the sound of the wagon-wheels, came tearing out, and were
with difficulty restrained from laying hold of Tom and his companions,
by the effort of the ragged servants who came after them.
“Ye see what ye’d get!” said Legree, caressing the dogs with grim
satisfaction, and turning to Tom and his companions. “Ye see what ye’d
get, if ye try to run off. These yer dogs has been raised to track
niggers; and they’d jest as soon chaw one on ye up as eat their supper.
So, mind yerself! How now, Sambo!” he said, to a ragged fellow, without
any brim to his hat, who was officious in his attentions. “How have
things been going?”
“Fust rate, Mas’r.”
“Quimbo,” said Legree to another, who was making zealous demonstrations
to attract his attention, “ye minded what I telled ye?”
“Guess I did, didn’t I?”
These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation.
Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically
as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty,
brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities. It is
a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against
the character of the race, that the negro overseer is always more
tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the
negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white. It is no
more true of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over.
The slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.
Legree, like some potentates we read of in history, governed his
plantation by a sort of resolution of forces. Sambo and Quimbo
cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all,
cordially hated them; and, by playing off one against another, he was
pretty sure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get
informed of whatever was on foot in the place.
Nobody can live entirely without social intercourse; and Legree
encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse familiarity
with him,—a familiarity, however, at any moment liable to get one or
the other of them into trouble; for, on the slightest provocation, one
of them always stood ready, at a nod, to be a minister of his vengeance
on the other.
As they stood there now by Legree, they seemed an apt illustration of
the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals. Their coarse,
dark, heavy features; their great eyes, rolling enviously on each
other; their barbarous, guttural, half-brute intonation; their
dilapidated garments fluttering in the wind,—were all in admirable
keeping with the vile and unwholesome character of everything about the
place.
“Here, you Sambo,” said Legree, “take these yer boys down to the
quarters; and here’s a gal I’ve got for _you_,” said he, as he
separated the mulatto woman from Emmeline, and pushed her towards
him;—“I promised to bring you one, you know.”
The woman gave a start, and drawing back, said, suddenly,
“O, Mas’r! I left my old man in New Orleans.”
“What of that, you—; won’t you want one here? None o’ your words,—go
long!” said Legree, raising his whip.
“Come, mistress,” he said to Emmeline, “you go in here with me.”
A dark, wild face was seen, for a moment, to glance at the window of
the house; and, as Legree opened the door, a female voice said
something, in a quick, imperative tone. Tom, who was looking, with
anxious interest, after Emmeline, as she went in, noticed this, and
heard Legree answer, angrily, “You may hold your tongue! I’ll do as I
please, for all you!”
Tom heard no more; for he was soon following Sambo to the quarters. The
quarters was a little sort of street of rude shanties, in a row, in a
part of the plantation, far off from the house. They had a forlorn,
brutal, forsaken air. Tom’s heart sunk when he saw them. He had been
comforting himself with the thought of a cottage, rude, indeed, but one
which he might make neat and quiet, and where he might have a shelf for
his Bible, and a place to be alone out of his laboring hours. He looked
into several; they were mere rude shells, destitute of any species of
furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt, spread confusedly
over the floor, which was merely the bare ground, trodden hard by the
tramping of innumerable feet.
“Which of these will be mine?” said he, to Sambo, submissively.
“Dunno; ken turn in here, I spose,” said Sambo; “spects thar’s room for
another thar; thar’s a pretty smart heap o’ niggers to each on ’em,
now; sure, I dunno what I ’s to do with more.”
It was late in the evening when the weary occupants of the shanties
came flocking home,—men and women, in soiled and tattered garments,
surly and uncomfortable, and in no mood to look pleasantly on
new-comers. The small village was alive with no inviting sounds;
hoarse, guttural voices contending at the hand-mills where their morsel
of hard corn was yet to be ground into meal, to fit it for the cake
that was to constitute their only supper. From the earliest dawn of the
day, they had been in the fields, pressed to work under the driving
lash of the overseers; for it was now in the very heat and hurry of the
season, and no means was left untried to press every one up to the top
of their capabilities. “True,” says the negligent lounger; “picking
cotton isn’t hard work.” Isn’t it? And it isn’t much inconvenience,
either, to have one drop of water fall on your head; yet the worst
torture of the inquisition is produced by drop after drop, drop after
drop, falling moment after moment, with monotonous succession, on the
same spot; and work, in itself not hard, becomes so, by being pressed,
hour after hour, with unvarying, unrelenting sameness, with not even
the consciousness of free-will to take from its tediousness. Tom looked
in vain among the gang, as they poured along, for companionable faces.
He saw only sullen, scowling, imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged
women, or women that were not women,—the strong pushing away the
weak,—the gross, unrestricted animal selfishness of human beings, of
whom nothing good was expected and desired; and who, treated in every
way like brutes, had sunk as nearly to their level as it was possible
for human beings to do. To a late hour in the night the sound of the
grinding was protracted; for the mills were few in number compared with
the grinders, and the weary and feeble ones were driven back by the
strong, and came on last in their turn.
“Ho yo!” said Sambo, coming to the mulatto woman, and throwing down a
bag of corn before her; “what a cuss yo name?”
“Lucy,” said the woman.
“Wal, Lucy, yo my woman now. Yo grind dis yer corn, and get _my_ supper
baked, ye har?”
“I an’t your woman, and I won’t be!” said the woman, with the sharp,
sudden courage of despair; “you go long!”
“I’ll kick yo, then!” said Sambo, raising his foot threateningly.
“Ye may kill me, if ye choose,—the sooner the better! Wish’t I was
dead!” said she.
“I say, Sambo, you go to spilin’ the hands, I’ll tell Mas’r o’ you,”
said Quimbo, who was busy at the mill, from which he had viciously
driven two or three tired women, who were waiting to grind their corn.
“And, I’ll tell him ye won’t let the women come to the mills, yo old
nigger!” said Sambo. “Yo jes keep to yo own row.”
Tom was hungry with his day’s journey, and almost faint for want of
food.
“Thar, yo!” said Quimbo, throwing down a coarse bag, which contained a
peck of corn; “thar, nigger, grab, take car on ’t,—yo won’t get no
more, _dis_ yer week.”
Tom waited till a late hour, to get a place at the mills; and then,
moved by the utter weariness of two women, whom he saw trying to grind
their corn there, he ground for them, put together the decaying brands
of the fire, where many had baked cakes before them, and then went
about getting his own supper. It was a new kind of work there,—a deed
of charity, small as it was; but it woke an answering touch in their
hearts,—an expression of womanly kindness came over their hard faces;
they mixed his cake for him, and tended its baking; and Tom sat down by
the light of the fire, and drew out his Bible,—for he had need for
comfort.
“What’s that?” said one of the woman.
“A Bible,” said Tom.
“Good Lord! han’t seen un since I was in Kentuck.”
“Was you raised in Kentuck?” said Tom, with interest.
“Yes, and well raised, too; never ’spected to come to dis yer!” said
the woman, sighing.
“What’s dat ar book, any way?” said the other woman.
“Why, the Bible.”
“Laws a me! what’s dat?” said the woman.
“Do tell! you never hearn on ’t?” said the other woman. “I used to har
Missis a readin’ on ’t, sometimes, in Kentuck; but, laws o’ me! we
don’t har nothin’ here but crackin’ and swarin’.”