The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
I was about seventeen years old, when my mother was attacked. by a fever, which proved fatal to her. She ear! had a presentiment of her fate; and before the disorder had made any great progress, she sent me word that she desired to see me. I found her in bed. She begged the woman who nursed her, to leave us together, and bade me sit down by her bed-side. Having told me that she feared she was going to die, she could not think it kind to me, she said, to leave the world, without first telling me a secret, which possibly, I might find hereafter of some consequence. I begged her to go on, and waited with impatience for the promised information. She began with a short account of her own life. Her mother was a slave; her father was a certain colonel Randolph — a scion of one of the great Virginian families. She had been raised as a lady's maid, and on the marriage of colonel Moore, had been purchased by him and presented to his wife. She was then quite a girl. As she grew older and her beauty became more noticeable, she found much favor in the eyes of her master. She had a neat little house, with a double set of rooms — an arrangement, as much for colonel Moore's convenience as her own; and though some light tasks of needle-work were sometimes required of her, yet as nobody chose to quarrel with master's favorite, she lived, henceforward, a very careless, indolent, but as she told me, a very unhappy life.
For a part of this unhappiness she was indebted to herself. The air of superiority she assumed in her intercourse with the other servants, made them all hate her, and induced them to improve every opportunity of vexing and mortifying her; — and to all sorts of feminine mortifications she was as sensitive as any belle that ever existed. But though vain of her beauty and her master's favor, she was not ill-tempered; and the foolish pride from which she suffered, sprung in her, as a similar feeling did in me, from a groundless, though common prejudice. Indeed our situation was so superior to that of most of the other slaves, that we naturally imagined ourselves, in some sort, a superior race. It was doubtless under the influence of this feeling, that my mother, having told me who my father was, observed with a smile and a self-complacent air, which even the tremors of her fever did not prevent from being apparent, that both on the father's and the mother's side, I had running in my veins, the best blood of Virginia — the blood, she added, of the Moores and the Randolphs!
Alas! she did not seem to recollect that though I might count all the nobles of Virginia among my ancestors, one drop of blood imported from Africa — though that too, might be the blood of kings and chieftains, — would be enough to taint the whole pedigree, and to condemn me to perpetual slavery, even in the house of my own father!
The information which my mother communicated, made little impression upon me at the moment. My principal anxiety was for her; for she had always been the tenderest and most affectionate of parents. The progress of her disorder was rapid, and on the third day she ceased to live. I lamented her with the sincerest grief. The sharpness of my sorrow was soon over; but my spirits did not seem to regain their former tone. 'The thoughtless gaiety, which till now had shed a sort of sunshine over my life, seemed to desert me. My thoughts began to recur very frequently, to the information which my mother had communicated. I hardly know how to describe the effect which it seemed to have upon me. Nor is it easy to tell what were its actual effects, or what ought to be ascribed to other and more general causes. Perhaps that revolution of feeling, which I now experienced, should be attributed in a great measure, to the change from boyhood to manhood, through which I was passing. Hitherto things had seemed to happen like the events of a dream, without touching me deeply or affecting me permanently. I was sometimes vexed and dissatisfied; I had my occasional sorrows and complaints. But those sorrows were soon over, and as after summer showers the sun shines out the brighter, so my transient sadness was soon succeeded by a more lively gaiety, which, as soon as immediate grievances were forgotten, burst forth, unsubdued either reflections on the past, or anxieties for the future. In that gaiety there was indeed scarcely anything of substantial pleasure; it originated rather in a careless insensibility. It was like the glare of the moon-beams, bright, but cold. Such as it was however, it was far more comfortable, than the state of feeling by which it now began to be succeeded. My mind seemed to be filled with indefinite anxieties, of which I could divine neither the causes nor the cure. There was, as it were, a heavy weight upon my bosom, an unsatisfied craving for something, I knew not what, a longing which 1 could do nothing to satisfy, because I could not tell its object. I would be often lost in thought, but my mind did not seem to fix itself to any certain aim, and after hours of apparently the deepest meditation, I should have been very much at a loss to tell about what I had been thinking.
But sometimes my reflections would take a more definite shape. I would begin to consider what I was and what I had to anticipate. The son of a freeman, yet born a slave ! Endowed by nature with abilities, which I should never be permitted to exercise; possessed of knowledge, which already, I found it expedient to conceal! ‘The slave of my own father, the servant of my own brother, a bounded, limited, confined, and captive creature, who did not dare to go out of sight of his master’s house without a written permission to do so! Destined to be the sport, of I knew not whose caprices; forbidden m anything to act for myself, or to.consult my own happiness ; compelled to labor all my life at another’s bidding ; and liable every hour and instant, to oppressions the most outrageous, and degradations the most humiliating !
These reflections soon grew so bitter that I struggled hard to suppress them. But that was not always in my power. Again and again, in spite of all. my efforts, these hateful ideas would start up and sting me into anguish.
My young master still continued kind as ever. I was changing to a man, but he still remained a boy. His protracted ill health, which had checked his growth, appeared also to retard his mental maturity. He seemed every day to fall more and more under my influence ; and every day my attachment to him grew stronger. He was in fact, my sole hope. While I remained with him, I might reasonably expect to escape the utter bitterness of slavery. In his eyes, I was not a mere servant. He regarded me rather as a loved and trusted companion. Indeed, though he had the name and prerogatives of master, I was much less under his control than he was under mine. There was between us, something of a brotherly affection, at least of that kind, which may exist between foster brothers, though neither of us ever alluded to our actual relationship, and he probably, was ignorant of it.
I loved master James as well as ever; but towards colonel Moore, my feelings underwent a rapid and a radical change. While I considered myself merely as his slave, his apparent kindness had gained my affections, and there was nothing I would not have done or suffered, for so good natured and condescending a master. But after I had learned to look upon myself as his son, I began to feel that I might justly claim as a right, what I had till now regarded as a pure gratuity. I began to feel that I might claim much more, — even an equal birth-right with my brethren. Occasionally, I had read the bible; and I now turned with new interest to the story of Hagar, the bond-woman, and Ishmael her son; and as I read how an angel came to their relief, when the hard-hearted Abraham had driven them into the wilderness, there seemed to grow up within me, a wild, strange, uncertain hope, that in some accident, I knew not what, I too might find succor and relief. At the same time, with this irrational hope, a new spirit of bitterness burst in upon my soul. Unconsciously I clenched my hands, and set my teeth, and fancied myself, as it were, another Ishmael, wandering in the wilderness, every man's hand against me, and my hand against every man. The injustice of my unnatural parent, stung me deeper and deeper, and all my love for him was turned into hate. The atrocity of those laws which made me a slave — a slave in the house of my own father — seemed to glare before my too prophetic eyes in letters of blood. Young as I was, and as yet untouched, I trembled for the future, and cursed the country and the hour that gave me birth!
I endeavored as much as possible, to conceal these new 
I was now about to lose this kind master, in whose tenderness and affection I found the sole palliative that could make slavery tolerable. His health which had always been bad, grew rapidly worse, and confined him first to his chamber and then to his bed. I nursed him during his whole illness with a mother's tenderness and assiduity. Never was master more faithfully served; — but it was the friend, not the slave, who rendered these attentions. He was not insensible to my services; he did not seem to like that any one but I should be about him, and it was only from my hand that he would take his physic or his food. But it was not in the power of physician or of nurse to save him. He wasted daily, and grew weaker every hour. The fatal crisis soon came. His weeping friends were collected about his bed, — but the tears'they shed were not as bitter as mine. Almost with his last breath he recommended me to the good graces of his father; but the man who had closed his heart to the promptings of paternal tenderness, was not likely to give much weight to the requests of a dying son. He bade his friends farewell, — he pressed my hand in his; and, with a gentle sigh, he expired in my arms.