Uncle Tom's Cabin
“Read a piece, anyways!” said the first woman, curiously, seeing Tom
attentively poring over it.
Tom read,—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest.”
“Them’s good words, enough,” said the woman; “who says ’em?”
“The Lord,” said Tom.
“I jest wish I know’d whar to find Him,” said the woman. “I would go;
’pears like I never should get rested again. My flesh is fairly sore,
and I tremble all over, every day, and Sambo’s allers a jawin’ at me,
’cause I doesn’t pick faster; and nights it’s most midnight ’fore I can
get my supper; and den ’pears like I don’t turn over and shut my eyes,
’fore I hear de horn blow to get up, and at it agin in de mornin’. If I
knew whar de Lor was, I’d tell him.”
“He’s here, he’s everywhere,” said Tom.
“Lor, you an’t gwine to make me believe dat ar! I know de Lord an’t
here,” said the woman; “‘tan’t no use talking, though. I’s jest gwine
to camp down, and sleep while I ken.”
The women went off to their cabins, and Tom sat alone, by the
smouldering fire, that flickered up redly in his face.
The silver, fair-browed moon rose in the purple sky, and looked down,
calm and silent, as God looks on the scene of misery and
oppression,—looked calmly on the lone black man, as he sat, with his
arms folded, and his Bible on his knee.
“Is God HERE?” Ah, how is it possible for the untaught heart to keep
its faith, unswerving, in the face of dire misrule, and palpable,
unrebuked injustice? In that simple heart waged a fierce conflict; the
crushing sense of wrong, the foreshadowing, of a whole life of future
misery, the wreck of all past hopes, mournfully tossing in the soul’s
sight, like dead corpses of wife, and child, and friend, rising from
the dark wave, and surging in the face of the half-drowned mariner! Ah,
was it easy _here_ to believe and hold fast the great password of
Christian faith, that “God IS, and is the REWARDER of them that
diligently seek Him”?
Tom rose, disconsolate, and stumbled into the cabin that had been
allotted to him. The floor was already strewn with weary sleepers, and
the foul air of the place almost repelled him; but the heavy night-dews
were chill, and his limbs weary, and, wrapping about him a tattered
blanket, which formed his only bed-clothing, he stretched himself in
the straw and fell asleep.
In dreams, a gentle voice came over his ear; he was sitting on the
mossy seat in the garden by Lake Pontchartrain, and Eva, with her
serious eyes bent downward, was reading to him from the Bible; and he
heard her read.
“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and the
rivers they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the
fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon
thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.”
Gradually the words seemed to melt and fade, as in a divine music; the
child raised her deep eyes, and fixed them lovingly on him, and rays of
warmth and comfort seemed to go from them to his heart; and, as if
wafted on the music, she seemed to rise on shining wings, from which
flakes and spangles of gold fell off like stars, and she was gone.
Tom woke. Was it a dream? Let it pass for one. But who shall say that
that sweet young spirit, which in life so yearned to comfort and
console the distressed, was forbidden of God to assume this ministry
after death?
It is a beautiful belief,
That ever round our head
Are hovering, on angel wings,
The spirits of the dead.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Cassy
“And behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no
comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but
they had no comforter.”—ECCL. 4:1
It took but a short time to familiarize Tom with all that was to be
hoped or feared in his new way of life. He was an expert and efficient
workman in whatever he undertook; and was, both from habit and
principle, prompt and faithful. Quiet and peaceable in his disposition,
he hoped, by unremitting diligence, to avert from himself at least a
portion of the evils of his condition. He saw enough of abuse and
misery to make him sick and weary; but he determined to toil on, with
religious patience, committing himself to Him that judgeth righteously,
not without hope that some way of escape might yet be opened to him.
Legree took a silent note of Tom’s availability. He rated him as a
first-class hand; and yet he felt a secret dislike to him,—the native
antipathy of bad to good. He saw, plainly, that when, as was often the
case, his violence and brutality fell on the helpless, Tom took notice
of it; for, so subtle is the atmosphere of opinion, that it will make
itself felt, without words; and the opinion even of a slave may annoy a
master. Tom in various ways manifested a tenderness of feeling, a
commiseration for his fellow-sufferers, strange and new to them, which
was watched with a jealous eye by Legree. He had purchased Tom with a
view of eventually making him a sort of overseer, with whom he might,
at times, intrust his affairs, in short absences; and, in his view, the
first, second, and third requisite for that place, was _hardness_.
Legree made up his mind, that, as Tom was not hard to his hand, he
would harden him forthwith; and some few weeks after Tom had been on
the place, he determined to commence the process.
One morning, when the hands were mustered for the field, Tom noticed,
with surprise, a new comer among them, whose appearance excited his
attention. It was a woman, tall and slenderly formed, with remarkably
delicate hands and feet, and dressed in neat and respectable garments.
By the appearance of her face, she might have been between thirty-five
and forty; and it was a face that, once seen, could never be
forgotten,—one of those that, at a glance, seem to convey to us an idea
of a wild, painful, and romantic history. Her forehead was high, and
her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straight, well-formed
nose, her finely-cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head and
neck, showed that she must once have been beautiful; but her face was
deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance.
Her complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features
sharp, and her whole form emaciated. But her eye was the most
remarkable feature,—so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long
lashes of equal darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There
was a fierce pride and defiance in every line of her face, in every
curve of the flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her eye
was a deep, settled night of anguish,—an expression so hopeless and
unchanging as to contrast fearfully with the scorn and pride expressed
by her whole demeanor.
Where she came from, or who she was, Tom did not know. The first he did
know, she was walking by his side, erect and proud, in the dim gray of
the dawn. To the gang, however, she was known; for there was much
looking and turning of heads, and a smothered yet apparent exultation
among the miserable, ragged, half-starved creatures by whom she was
surrounded.
“Got to come to it, at last,—glad of it!” said one.
“He! he! he!” said another; “you’ll know how good it is, Misse!”
“We’ll see her work!”
“Wonder if she’ll get a cutting up, at night, like the rest of us!”
“I’d be glad to see her down for a flogging, I’ll bound!” said another.
The woman took no notice of these taunts, but walked on, with the same
expression of angry scorn, as if she heard nothing. Tom had always
lived among refined, and cultivated people, and he felt intuitively,
from her air and bearing, that she belonged to that class; but how or
why she could be fallen to those degrading circumstances, he could not
tell. The woman neither looked at him nor spoke to him, though, all the
way to the field, she kept close at his side.
Tom was soon busy at his work; but, as the woman was at no great
distance from him, he often glanced an eye to her, at her work. He saw,
at a glance, that a native adroitness and handiness made the task to
her an easier one than it proved to many. She picked very fast and very
clean, and with an air of scorn, as if she despised both the work and
the disgrace and humiliation of the circumstances in which she was
placed.
In the course of the day, Tom was working near the mulatto woman who
had been bought in the same lot with himself. She was evidently in a
condition of great suffering, and Tom often heard her praying, as she
wavered and trembled, and seemed about to fall down. Tom silently as he
came near to her, transferred several handfuls of cotton from his own
sack to hers.
“O, don’t, don’t!” said the woman, looking surprised; “it’ll get you
into trouble.”
Just then Sambo came up. He seemed to have a special spite against this
woman; and, flourishing his whip, said, in brutal, guttural tones,
“What dis yer, Luce,—foolin’ a’” and, with the word, kicking the woman
with his heavy cowhide shoe, he struck Tom across the face with his
whip.
Tom silently resumed his task; but the woman, before at the last point
of exhaustion, fainted.
“I’ll bring her to!” said the driver, with a brutal grin. “I’ll give
her something better than camphire!” and, taking a pin from his
coat-sleeve, he buried it to the head in her flesh. The woman groaned,
and half rose. “Get up, you beast, and work, will yer, or I’ll show yer
a trick more!”
The woman seemed stimulated, for a few moments, to an unnatural
strength, and worked with desperate eagerness.
“See that you keep to dat ar,” said the man, “or yer’ll wish yer’s dead
tonight, I reckin!”
“That I do now!” Tom heard her say; and again he heard her say, “O,
Lord, how long! O, Lord, why don’t you help us?”
At the risk of all that he might suffer, Tom came forward again, and
put all the cotton in his sack into the woman’s.
“O, you mustn’t! you donno what they’ll do to ye!” said the woman.
“I can bar it!” said Tom, “better ’n you;” and he was at his place
again. It passed in a moment.
Suddenly, the stranger woman whom we have described, and who had, in
the course of her work, come near enough to hear Tom’s last words,
raised her heavy black eyes, and fixed them, for a second, on him;
then, taking a quantity of cotton from her basket, she placed it in
his.
“You know nothing about this place,” she said, “or you wouldn’t have
done that. When you’ve been here a month, you’ll be done helping
anybody; you’ll find it hard enough to take care of your own skin!”
“The Lord forbid, Missis!” said Tom, using instinctively to his field
companion the respectful form proper to the high bred with whom he had
lived.
“The Lord never visits these parts,” said the woman, bitterly, as she
went nimbly forward with her work; and again the scornful smile curled
her lips.
But the action of the woman had been seen by the driver, across the
field; and, flourishing his whip, he came up to her.
“What! what!” he said to the woman, with an air of triumph, “You a
foolin’? Go along! yer under me now,—mind yourself, or yer’ll cotch
it!”
A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly flashed from those black eyes;
and, facing about, with quivering lip and dilated nostrils, she drew
herself up, and fixed a glance, blazing with rage and scorn, on the
driver.
“Dog!” she said, “touch _me_, if you dare! I’ve power enough, yet, to
have you torn by the dogs, burnt alive, cut to inches! I’ve only to say
the word!”
“What de devil you here for, den?” said the man, evidently cowed, and
sullenly retreating a step or two. “Didn’t mean no harm, Misse Cassy!”
“Keep your distance, then!” said the woman. And, in truth, the man
seemed greatly inclined to attend to something at the other end of the
field, and started off in quick time.