The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 56
The new mistress — into whose hands, by the humane interference of Mr Colter, Cassy had passed from the slave pen of those pious and respectable gentlemen, Gouge and McGrab — was, as I knew already, from Colter's account of the matter, the newly-married New England wife of Mr. Thomas, a Mississippi cotton planter.
Born on a little New Hampshire farm, the child of poor parents, but, like so many other New England girls, anxious to.do something for herself, the new Mrs ‘Thomas, when she first became acquainted with her future husband, had been employed as one of the teachers at a fashionable boarding school, at which he had placed, for their education, two young daughters of his by a former wife.
The current idea in New England of a southern cotton planter is very much that which prevails, or used to prevail, in Great Britain of a West Indian. He is imagined to be a fine, bold, dashing young fellow, elegant and accomplished, amiable and charming, with plenty of money, and nothing to do but to amuse himself and his friends — an idea formed from a few specimens to be seen at watering-places, who, for the sake of dashing away for a few weeks at the north, run after by all the young women, and old ones too, with marriageable daughters on their hands, and stared at by all the greenhorns — are willing to starve, pinch, and be dunned at home, with now and then a visit from the sheriff, for all the rest of the year.
The young Mrs Thomas that was to be, as yet Miss Jemima Devens, delighted at the idea of having captivated a southern planter, and of passing suddenly from poverty to riches, hastened to accept the offer of his heart and fortune, which Mr Thomas made her after a week's acquaintance, in the course of which they had met three times. Unfortunately she did not stop to consider that, southern planter or not, Mr Thomas was old enough to be her father, had a vulgar, stupid, sleepy look, could not speak English grammatically, and was an enormous consumer of tobacco and brandy; his affection, even during his courtship, divided pretty equally, to all appearances, between chewing, smoking, mint juleps, and Miss Devens, notwithstanding his frequent protestations that he cared for nothing in the world but her.
That he was really in love with her, so far as it was possible for such an oyster to be in love, was no doubt true; and for a young lady without connections or money, dependent:on her own efforts, with no charms or accomplishments beyond those possessed by a thousand other competitors, and beginning, also, to verge to the age when the sinking into old maidhood comes to be considered as a possible, however awful contingency, — for such a young lady to be fallen in love with, even though it be by an oyster in the similitude of a man, is a thing not to be despised; and the said human oyster having the reputation of being rich, and able to support her in idleness and luxury, what proportion of girls of the age and in the position of Miss Devens, whether in New England or Old, or elsewhere, would refuse to accept him for a husband?
Miss Devens did confess to some little misgiving on one point. She had a great horror of negroes — a natural antipathy, as she thought; though she did remember, that when a very little girl, they used to frighten her into good behavior by threatening to give her away to an old black woman, the only black person any where in the neighborhood of the village in which she was born, who lived all alone by herself, in a little hut surrounded by woods, where she sold root beer in the summer time to the passers by, dealt in all sorts of herbs, as to which she was reported to be wondrous knowing, and had, besides, at least among the children, the reputation of being a witch.
The idea of going to live upon a plantation where she would have nobody about her hardly but black people did stagger her resolution a little; till Mr Thomas reassured her by suggesting how comfortable it was to own one's own servants, whom one could make do just as one pleased, and by the information that there were plenty of light-colored people among the slaves, and that she should have a maid of her own as near white as possible — a promise on the strength of which Cassy had been bought for her, as already mentioned.
The new Mrs Thomas had pictured to herself, as her destined future home, an elegant villa, splendidly furnished, surrounded with beautiful and fragrant tropical shrubbery, except the inevitable nuisance of the negroes, — to which she hoped to accustom herself in time, or for which she was willing to accept the orange blossoms as an antidote, — a perfect southern paradise. Mr Thomas, it is true, good easy man, had never promised her any thing of the sort; but as young ladies often will, she had taken it all for granted as a matter of course. Judge, then, of her disappointment, when, on reaching Mount Flat, — for that was the name which Mr Thomas had given to his plantation, determined, as he said, to stick to the truth, and yet not to be outdone by any of the Mount Pleasants, Monticellos, and other high-sounding names of the neighborhood, — judge of her surprise to find her expected villa in the shape of four log houses, connected together by a floored and covered passage, without carpets, paper-hangings, or even plaster, and with roofs so imperfect that in every heavy storm of rain, every room of the four, except only that used as her bed-room, was completely afloat. Some detached log houses, at a little distance on either side, served as additional sleeping rooms, and others, a little in the rear, as kitchen and storehouses; and still farther back, but still in sight of the principal mansion, was a long string of miserable little huts, the town, as they called it, occupied by the plantation slaves. As to shrubbery, there were no enclosures at all about the house, except one, half decayed, of what seemed to have been intended as a garden, but which was now quite grown up with weeds and bushes. The hogs, the mules, a few half-starved cows, and a whole bevy of naked negro children, ranged freely about the house; and though there seemed once to have been some attempts at shrubbery, that was now all ruined and destroyed.
The former Mrs Thomas, belonging, as she always took pains to let the company know, to one of the first families of Virginia, was in fact a very notable woman, whose masculine temper and active spirit had counterbalanced, so far as domestic affairs were concerned, the dozy disposition of her husband. By dint of bustling, scolding, and the free use of the cowhide, which she wielded with a grace and dexterity hardly to be attained except by those females who have had the advantage of a thoroughly southern education in the best families, she had contrived to keep things in tolerable order; but shortly after her death, some six years before, the man whom she had employed to keep the garden and the grounds about the house, had been taken off and placed in the cotton field, and every thing in the house and around it had since been left to take care of itself; and with the results that might have been expected, there not being in the house a whole piece of furniture of any description, and the entire aspect of things as untidy, uncomfortable, neglected, and dilapidated as can well be imagined.
To complete the dismay of Mrs Thomas, and what gave a good deal of a shock to her New England ideas, among the black children whom she found running and romping in front of the house at the moment of her arrival — the whole group having, in fact, assembled.to welcome home master and the new mistress — were quite a number of boys and girls eight or ten years old, naked as they were born, or with only some fragment of a tattered and filthy shirt hanging about them, begrimmed with dirt, and shouting and chattering, as she said to Cassy, like so many imps of the evil one himself.
But within the house a still more disagreeable reception awaited her. She found the keys and the general direction of affairs under the management of a tall, portly, middle-aged black woman, commonly called aunt Emma, of formidable size and strength, who, having been a favorite upper servant, and sort of prime minister, of the late Mrs Thomas, had succeeded, on her death, to the general control of the household. In the kitchen ruled supreme aunt Dinah, another big black woman, whose face plainly enough betrayed the irritability of her temper, stimulated from time to time by pretty free draughts of whiskey. It is not necessary to mention the other servants, who were in complete subordination to those two, but all of whom, with aunts Emma and Dinah at their head, it soon appeared, were parties to a conspiracy to set at nought the authority of the new Mrs Thomas, and to make her a mere cipher in her own house.
By some means or other, probably from one of Mr Thomas's daughters, whom the new-married pair had brought home with them, they soon got hold of the information that the new mistress was nothing but the daughter of a poor man, who worked for his living with his own hands, and herself only a poor schoolma'am; nor could a contempt more sovereign of such humble, plebeian, pitiful origin be evinced by the daintiest female aristocrat that ever wore white kid slippers, than by the black housekeeper and the black coals, "Pretty times these, indeed! very fine times, certainly!" exclaimed aunt Emma, with a most ominous shake of the head, and imitating, with great exactness, the tone, manner, and words of her deceased mistress, the first Mrs Thomas, whose representative and successor she seemed to consider herself to be, and equally bound to look out for the honor of the family, — "fine times these, aunt Dinah! that you and I, raised in one of the first families of Virginia, should have one of these good-for-nothing, no account, poor folks put over our heads, — and a Yankee too! O, aunt Dinah, who would a-thought it, that two quality niggers like you and I, raised in one of the first families of Virginia, and always accustomed to decent society, should have to take up with a Yankee mistress? What in heavens and earth could possess poor Massa Thomas, that, having once had such a wife as old mistress was, belonging to one of the first families of Virginia, he must needs go and bring home this little Yankee nobody, to disgrace us and him too?" Such was one of a great number of similar outbursts, which Cassy, and indeed Mrs Thomas herself, could hardly fail to overhear, since the discontented housekeeper made very little privacy of her griefs.
So far, indeed, did she carry it, that when the new Mrs Thomas, after being in the house for three or four weeks, intimated to aunt Emma her intention to assume in person the position of housekeeper, and called upon her to give up the keys, she snapped her fingers with significant contempt in the face of her new mistress, and absolutely refused. Her old mistress — no poor body, but born of one of the first families of Virginia — had brought her into Massa Thomas's family, and had made her housekeeper, and on her death bed had made her husband promise that he would never sell her, but that she always should be housekeeper; and housekeeper she meant to be in spite of all the Yankee women and poor white folks in creation. Missis might be content to manage those servants she had brought in herself. She had brought in one, to be sure, though, according to all accounts, poor dear Massa Thomas had to buy her with his own money, and to pay a pretty round price too. But what right had she to come in and undertake to domineer over old mistress's servants? And here aunt Emma burst out into a loud laugh, partly in defiance, and partly in derision, at being called upon to give up the keys by such a poverty-stricken Yankee interloper; — she, — so she wound up, folding her arms, and drawing herself up to her full height, exactly as the late Mrs Thomas used to do, — she who had been raised in one of the first families i Virginia! But aunt Emma soon sunk down from this high pitch, subsiding into a flood of tears at the thought, as she expressed it, of what poor dear, dead mistress would say, she, born in one of the first families of Virginia, who hated a Yankee as she did a toad or a snake, always speaking of them as in fact no better than a set of free niggers, — an opinion in which aunt Emma seemed very cordially to join, — to come back, and find her turned out, and the keys in the hands of a Yankee!
There is nothing like a strong will, and by virtue of it the slave may sometimes usurp the place of the master. The new Mrs Thomas made grievous complaints to her husband, insisting that aunt Emma should be whipped and sent into the field. But the good-natured, easy old gentleman was so accustomed to be himself managed by her, and so tickled at the idea of aunt Emma's contempt for the Yankees, which he himself more than half shared, that he showed a strong disposition to take her part; nor was it till after a six months' struggle, and a long series of curtain lectures, in which particular the wife had the advantage of the housekeeper, that she finally succeeded in getting possession of the keys, and aunt Emma fairly out of the house. She insisted very strenuously upon having her sent down the river and sold; or at least that she should be set to work in the field; and especially that she should have a sound flogging for her insolence; but Mr Thomas would consent to neither. Mrs Thomas was welcome to flog aunt Emma as much as she pleased. The late Mrs Thomas did sometimes use the cowskin on her, he believed; but during the six years that she had been housekeeper for him, he never had had occasion to do it, and he shouldn't begin now. The most he could be persuaded to do, was to put her out of Mrs Thomas's sight by hiring her out somewhere in the neighborhood, — poor Mrs Thomas complaining, in a sort of prophetic' spirit, that he wanted to keep her near by, when she, his poor wife, was dead and gone, as she soon should be, to have her for his housekeeper again.
But, though the black housekeeper was thus at last got rid of, the black cook proved a more formidable enemy. Aunt Dinah's skill in cookery was by no means contemptible, and Mr Thomas, who was something of an epicure, had become so accustomed to her particular dishes, that nobody else could suit him. All poor Mrs Thomas's efforts to dislodge aunt Dinah from the kitchen proved, in consequence, unavailing. She had nothing to do — so Mr Thomas told her — but to keep out of the kitchen, and let aunt Dinah alone. But that Mrs Thomas could not do. She had a great passion for bustling, managing, meddling, fretting and scolding, and scarcely a day passed without an encounter between her and aunt Dinah, whom she accused, not altogether without reason, of not having the slightest idea either of order or neatness — accusations which aunt Dinah was accustomed. to retort by a sort of growling observations to herself, that poor folks couldn't be expected to understand or duly value the kitchen management of quality cooks.
So far did this feud go, that Mrs Thomas declared at last her apprehension of being poisoned, and for some months would eat nothing except what Cassy prepared for her, with her own hands; though whether it was aunt Dinah's dirt, or something more fatal, that she dreaded, Cassy could never clearly make out.
In the midst of all these tribulations, which, as she complained, were wearing her out by inches, and bringing her fast to the grave, aggravating the fever and ague by which she constantly suffered, poor Mrs Thomas had no confidant or consoler except only Cassy. The nearest neighbors were three or four miles off. The ladies of these establishments, where there were any, — for several of the neighboring planters preferred a slave housekeeper to a white wife, — were from Virginia and Kentucky, holding Yankees in almost as much contempt as aunt Dinah did — a prejudice which Mrs Thomas had too little force of character, or power of making herself either useful or agreeable, to be able to overcome. Her husband was pretty poor company at best. However it might have been in the days of his courtship, his wife had long since ceased to compete, in his affections, with his more favorite cigar, mint julep, and chaw of tobacco; and to get rid, as he said, of her eternal complaints about nothing, he kept out of her way as much as possible. Her step-daughter, a girl of fourteen, seemed to be in the conspiracy with aunt Dinah against her, as were the washerwoman, seamstress, and all the rest of the house servants; and such was the state of nervous uneasiness in which they kept her, breaking out occasionally into exhibitions by no means very lovely, that she expressed one day to Cassy her apprehensions lest these ugly black creatures would not only be the destruction of her health and good looks, which suffered a good deal under the effects of the ague, but the ruin of her soul also. She was sure that living on a plantation was no place to fit folks for heaven.;
Cassy was impressed with a strong feeling of gratitude towards her unfortunate mistress. She greatly pitied, as well the infirmities of her temper, soured by sickness and disappointment, and failure in every thing, as the miserable loneliness and substantial state of slavery into which she had sold herself; a state all the more disagreeable to her naturally busy and bustling temperament, since the post assigned her seemed to be, though bearing the name of mistress, to do nothing and to be nobody. Exerting herself by every means to calm, comfort, and divert her, — an office for which she was well fitted by her own uniform, sweet, and sunny disposition, — Cassy became entirely indispensable to her suffering mistress. This placed her in a rather delicate position as to the other servants, who were inclined to include her in their hostility and antipathy to Mrs Thomas. But her sweet temper and friendly disposition soon overcame all that. Some little favors and judicious compliments — since she always took a decided pleasure in making others happy — secured for her even the good will of the formidable aunt Dinah herself, into whose dominions she was thus able to venture with an impunity never vouchsafed to the mistress.
Little as there was, any way, of Mrs Thomas, either of intellect or heart, this assiduity and good will on the part of Cassy, though even she was not safe from occasional bursts of impatience and ill temper, were by no means thrown away upon her. Finding that Cassy had never been taught to read, — an accomplishment which none of her former kind mistresses had thought necessary, — she volunteered to teach her, and her little boy also; and she persevered in it, notwithstanding the occasional jocular threats' of Mr Thomas to have her prosecuted under the act against teaching slaves to read. Indeed, she seemed to take so much consolation in having at last found something to do, that, besides teaching Cassy various kinds of needlework, in which she was an adept, she also gave her lessons on a piano, which Mr Thomas had bought at the north, at the time of his marriage, and which came round by water. Nor was it long before Cassy's correct ear for music made her a greater proficient than her mistress, which, indeed, was not saying much. So things passed away during three or four years, till a bilious fever, which carried off Mrs Thomas, exposed Cassy to new vicissitudes. She was no longer needed at Mount Flat, and in hopes to get back the large sum he had paid for her, Mr Thomas sent her off with her child to New Orleans to be sold.
Among the purchasers who there presented themselves was a Mr Curtis, as Cassy afterwards learnt, a native of Boston, and well connected there. Like many others from the same city, he had come to New Orleans while still quite young. Afterwards entering into business himself, and succeeding in it, instead of marrying, he had, as is customary enough with the northern adventurers in that city, fallen into the habits of the place, and formed a connection with a handsome, young, light-colored slave, whom he had purchased, and for whom he entertained so strong an affection as to have felt very seriously her recent death, leaving behind her a little daughter some three or four years younger than our boy Montgomery.
Being of a domestic disposition, and desirous of filling up this break in his household establishment, Mr Curtis, when his grief was a little assuaged, had become a visitant, with that view, of the slave warehouses; and Cassy having at once very decidedly struck his fancy, he made a purchase of her and of her child. I relate all this very coolly; but imagine, reader, if you can, how I must have felt, when, ignorant of the event, I first heard the story from Cassy's own lips!; arsed installed in the superintendence of Mr Curtis's household, which at this time was on a small and modest scale, and in the care of his little daughter, it was not long before Mr Curtis intimated to her, in a very delicate way, — for he was thoroughly amiable, and in every respect a gentleman, — his disposition to place the relation between them on a more intimate footing.;
He appeared a good deal surprised, contrasting, it is probable, Cassy's behavior with his former experience, at the coolness with which his advances were received, and her attempts to seem not to understand them; but as he prided himself — and not without reason — on his personal attractions and winning ways with the women, and was, besides, so much more a man of sentiment than of passion, as to prize the possession of a woman's heart, however humble, far beyond that of her person, this only piqued his vanity, and made him the more resolved to make a conquest of her.
Nor, indeed, when the master condescends to make love to the slave, the man of the superior class to the woman of the inferior one, a king to a subject, a nobleman to a peasant, or even, if he takes the fancy, to the wife of a citizen, are such conquests in general very difficult. In the case of the slave woman, however transient the connection, it still. for the moment elevates her from her own humble level to that of her lover; and in so doing, does more to raise her in her own eyes, and those of her class, than any. connection she can possibly form within that class — a connection called marriage perhaps, but only by courtesy; since it is not so any more than the other; being, like that other, in the eye of the law, but a transient cohabitation, creating no rights of any sort, giving no paternity to the children, and dissoluble not only at the caprice of the man, but at that also of the master and his creditors.
That very same pride, in fact, which impels the woman of the superior class to shrink with a horror, which seems to her instinctive, from any connection with the men of the inferior class, as a degradation from her own level, a sentiment: not regulated by color, but by condition, — since a white woman of refinement and education would just as soon think of marrying a negro as one of your newly-imported Irish clod-hoppers, even though he might be an Apollo in figure, and, when the dirt was washed off, a perfect Adonis in complexion; — that same pride impels the slave woman readily to throw herself into the arms of any man of the superior class who condescends to honor her with his notice; that very desire for a standing in the world which makes the free woman so coy and reserved, making the slave woman yielding and easy; since — looked at merely with that eye of prudence by which, more than by choice, sentiment, or passion, the conduct of women in this behalf is every where regulated — a left-handed marriage with any man of the superior rank is every way more advantageous than any thing to be hoped from any right-handed marriage — even if that were possible, which it is not — with a person of her own degraded condition.
There was, indeed, nothing but Cassy's affection for me, — exposed now to a test such as female constancy, in civilized countries, is seldom tried by, — and a romantic idea which she had taken up that, sooner or later, we should certainly again find each other, that could have made her proof against the efforts of Mr Curtis to win her affections; efforts, as he laughingly told her, enough to have made him husband of half the white girls in New Orleans or Boston either.
Besides being a man of sentiment of a delicacy not to be extinguished even by a residence in an atmosphere so corrupt as that of New Orleans, Mr Curtis had also a good deal of romance in his composition. He could not but applaud a constancy and tenderness of which he desired himself to become the object; but he begged Cassy not to throw away her youth and her charms in an unavailing widowhood, — since the separation between her and me was in all respects equivalent to death, — nor, out of a mere fancy, to persist in refusing a position for herself and her child the best that she could hope; since he promised, in fact, to reward her compliance by a gift of freedom, in due time, to herself and the boy.
If she had any repugnance or dislike to him, he would not push the matter; but ought she, out of a mere fanciful caprice, to refuse this gratification to him, and provision for herself?
Finding that she was a Methodist, he even promised to call in a minister of that persuasion to consecrate their union, if she had scruples on that score; and he strongly advised her to ask the counsel of the one at whose chapel she usually attended.
Though the Methodists hold that a marriage between two slaves, celebrated by one of their ministers, is, in the eye of God, every way complete and binding on the parties, — who, according to Methodist ideas, have souls to be saved as well as white people, — yet, notwithstanding the famous text, "Whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder," they have been obliged, in the slave states of America, to concede the supremacy of man; and to admit that parties separated by the command of a master, or the operation of the slave trade, may rightly enough marry again, even though they know their former partners to be living. They excuse this by saying, that they do it of necessity; since the people, having little taste for celibacy, will form new connections; and they may as well sanction what they cannot help; the same excuse which they give for allowing their church members to hold slaves, — the pious brethren will do it whether or no; — a policy, in both cases, seeming to look rather to the numbers than to the purity of the church, and perhaps partaking something more of the wisdom of the serpent than of the harmlessness of the dove. But upon this high point of ecclesiastical policy I shall not venture to express a decided opinion.
The Methodist clergyman, whom Cassy consulted on this occasion, strongly urged her to accept of Mr Curtis's offers, which he assured her she might do — considering all the circumstances of the case — with a perfectly safe conscience, especially if he was called in to consecrate this new connection, which would thus become a perfect marriage in the eye of Heaven, however human laws might not so regard it. But spite of the urgency of Mr Curtis, and the advice of the minister, still, every time that she pressed our boy to her bosom, the image of her lost husband rose up before her, and something said in her heart, He lives! He loves you! Do not give him up!
So things went on for a year or more, Mr. Curtis still patiently waiting the effects of time and perseverance, when he was seized by a violent attack of yellow fever, which brought him to death's door, and from which he recovered only after a tedious and protracted convalescence. It was now Cassy's turn to show her sense of the kindness and delicacy with which she had been treated, and of the favor with which her master had regarded her. Night and day she was his constant and most assiduous nurse; and the physicians, of whom, at different times, three or four had been called in, all agreed that it was nothing but her tender care — all that a sister, a mother, a wife could have bestowed — to which he was indebted for his life.
Having been religiously educated:in his childhood, the near prospect of death, and the leisure and solitude of his tedious and painful recovery, served to recall many ideas which the tumult of business, the gayety of youth, the gross, sensual, worldly atmosphere in which he had so long lived, had well nigh extinguished. It was plain, indeed, that Mr Curtis rose from his sick bed — whether from the effect of physical or moral causes, or of both combined — in many respects an altered man; as if, indeed, twenty years or more had suddenly been added to his age: not less amiable or genial, but graver, and with thoughts less bent on himself; though he could never, at any time, have been accused of being a selfish man.
One of the first things he did, when he was recovered enough to sit up, was to execute a duplicate deed of manumission for Cassy and her child, to go into effect as soon as the law would allow, she meanwhile to superintend his household, receiving a certain monthly allowance: He also, as Cassy understood, executed at the same time a deed of manumission of his little daughter Eliza, who still remained under Cassy's care, growing up a nice companion and playmate for our little Montgomery.
When the children arrived at the proper age, Mr Curtis had sent them to New England for an education; first Montgomery, and afterwards Eliza, who was sent on to the care of Mr Curtis's brother Agrippa, and placed by him, at Boston, in a select, fashionable, aristocratic female school.
Montgomery, having spent two or three years at a New England academy, had been afterwards placed in a counting house in New York, and had lately, through the patronage of his kind benefactor, been established there in a business for himself connected with the New Orleans trade.
Cassy's monthly allowance in the way of wages having, in the course of years, and with the addition of interest, which Mr Curtis scrupulously allowed her, accumulated to a considerable sum, he had lately invested it for her in the purchase of a small house and garden, in the suburbs of the city, to which — as Mr Curtis contemplated travelling at the north and in Europe for his health — she had some time before removed.
Every thing thus, she said, had gone well with her, as if she had been a chosen favorite of Providence; except, indeed, the long-deferred fulfilment of her still.cherished hope of again finding me. But this long course of singular prosperity had at length been suddenly and most frightfully overcast.
News came that Mr Curtis, while on his way to Boston, in ascending the Ohio River, had been seriously injured by the bursting of a boiler; and this was followed, not long after, by information of his death. When this occurred, which was only a few weeks previous, Montgomery was employed in his business at New York, and Eliza was still at school at Boston. She was a beautiful and elegant girl; her liquid dark eyes, long black hair, and brunette complexion, in strong contrast to the prevailing type of beauty in those regions in which light hair, light eyes, and blond complexions so generally predominate. She had, besides, a grace and elegance of movement very seldom seen in New England, — where every body is more or less awkward, — and all the freedom and vivacity of a bird, without the least touch either of that blunt, masculine rudeness, or of that embarrassed self-consciousness which spoils the address of so many of the Boston women. These, by the way, are Eliza's criticisms, not mine; and I shall, therefore, not hold myself answerable for their correctness.
She passed for the only daughter of Mr Curtis, the rich merchant of New Orleans, by a Spanish creole wife of his who had died many years ago; and as the reputation of an heiress was thus added to her personal attractions, you may be sure that she received a great many attentions; nor was she without offers even of marriage from some young sprigs of the Boston aristocracy; but to these she paid no sort of attention, as she and Montgomery had been promised to each other from early childhood.
On receiving information of the accident to his brother, Mr Agrippa Curtis had set off for Pittsburg, where he was; and in three or four weeks, he returned with news of his brother's death.
While mourning with all the energetic grief natural to her age and origin over this sad news, Eliza found herself strangely neglected by her late fond school companions, not one of whom came near her; and while she was wondering what the matter could be, she received a note from the teacher, with the information that he could not allow her in his school any longer. It seems that a report had suddenly spread, that Eliza had African blood in her veins; that she was not Mr Curtis's lawful child, nor his heir, but only the daughter of a slave woman.
Most fierce was the indignation expressed by the mothers of Eliza's school companions; especially by the daughter of a drunken tallow-chandler, who had married in her youth the keeper of a small grocery and grog shop, but whose husband, having gone into the business of distilling, had acquired a great fortune, had bought a house in Beacon Street, and being, like his wife, of a pushing and aspiring disposition, had, by a liberal expenditure of money, placed her at the head of the fashion in Boston. This aristocratic lady thought it a most scandalous shame — and she found many sympathizers — that people of good family should be so shockingly imposed upon, as to have such a colored trollop insinuated into the same school with their well-born daughters. Wasn't there a school down in Belknap Street especially intended for colored folks, and why hadn't she been sent there? This sketch of this Mrs Highflyer — for that was the name of this fashionable Boston lady — I must also credit to Eliza, who, to confess the truth, was a good deal of a rogue and a mimic, with an eye to the ridiculous, and a little tendency to caricature.
Nobody seemed to sympathize more completely with Mrs Highflyer than Mr Agrippa Curtis himself, though he had known perfectly well Eliza's origin from the beginning, and had been himself the person to introduce her into Boston society and the fashionable school she had attended. His relation to his deceased brother, of whose property he gave himself out as the heir, made it improper for him, he said, to express himself freely as to his singular conduct, in the introduction into the fashionable society and respectable families of Boston of such a low person; though, in fact, his brother was a strange, unaccountable man in many respects, and to him quite unfathomable. But he did not hesitate to express himself in the most decided terms to poor Eliza, when she called upon him for protection and advice, going so far as actually to order her out of his house, as a vile cheat and impostor.
The keeper of the fashionable boarding house where she lodged was prompt to imitate these aristocratic examples; in fact, the boarders themselves were all up in arms, especially the women, — for the men did not seem to have so much objection to her, — threatening to leave if she were not turned out; and the poor girl might, perhaps, have been obliged to sleep in the street, had not a little milliner, to whom she had formerly shown some kindnesses, taken her home even at the risk of offending all her fashionable customers.
She wrote at once to Montgomery, at New York, who came on immediately to her assistance. Happening to meet Mr Agrippa Curtis in State Street, about the time of high change, he expressed to him, in pretty plain terms, his sense of his conduct. That gentleman — he passed for such in Boston, notwithstanding a prevailing rumor that the mercantile firm of Curtis, Sawin, Byrne, and Co., to which he belonged, had laid the foundation of their fortune by an underhand connection with the Brazilian slave trade — retorted, in great dudgeon, that he was not to be lectured by any cursed runaway nigger, the son of a a ; a polite allusion to Montgomery's descent, a circumstance with which Mr Grip Curtis had become well acquainted, in visits to his brother at New Orleans. Montgomery replied by knocking the scoundrel down on the spot; and one of the bystanders having the good nature to hand him a stick, — for Mr Agrippa Curtis, though highly respectable, was not very popular, — as the fellow rose up my boy proceeded to, give him a severe caning, to the great apparent satisfaction of at least half of the assembled merchants, some of whom made a ring around them, in order, as they said, to have fair play; perhaps, too, for the better chance of enjoying Mr Grip's capers and contortions, which, as Montgomery wrote to his mother, were highly ridiculous. }
Mr Agrippa Curtis immediately made a complaint at the Police Court, before which Montgomery was had up and fined twenty dollars. He also commenced a private suit, laying his damages at ten thousand dollars, in hopes to prevent Montgomery's getting bail, in which, however, he did not succeed.
As Montgomery, so soon as he had got bail in Mr Grip Curtis's suit, was preparing to take Eliza with him to New York, a letter to her arrived from a Mr Gilmore, a lawyer in New Orleans, who had all along, been the confidential adviser and law agent of Mr Curtis, informing her of Mr Curtis's death, and that certain business affairs indispensably required her immediate presence at New Orleans, and enclosing a draft to pay her passage and expenses. On reaching New York a similar letter was found there for Montgomery. Neither of the young people had any reason to imagine that these letters were not written in perfect good faith. They knew Mr Gilmore as a portly, round-faced, smiling, benevolent-looking, white-haired, oldish gentleman, of whom Mr James Curtis thought very highly; and as they had abundant reasons for supposing that he had made some provision for them by will, it seemed reasonable enough that their presence at New Orleans might be necessary. But some business arrangements required Montgomery's previous attention, and sending on Eliza by packet, he proposed to follow himself as soon as he could.
Arriving safely at New Orleans much about the same time that I did, Eliza had gone directly to Cassy's house, who, in a day or two, had waited on Mr Gilmore to inform him of her arrival. The deceased Mr Curtis had several times assured Cassy, and particularly just before he left New Orleans the last time, that he bad in his will remembered her and Montgomery, and had provided handsomely for Eliza. She made some inquiries of Mr Gilmore on this subject; but the lawyer answered her evasively, telling her that it would be necessary for Eliza to call at his house at a certain hour the next day.
She went; but did not return. Cassy passed a sleepless night of anxiety and alarm, and was preparing the next morning to go to Mr Gilmore's in pursuit of her, when, by the hand of a black boy, she received a little crumpled note from Eliza, written, apparently in great haste, with a pencil on a blank leaf torn from some book, stating that she was held as prisoner in Mr Gilmore's house, as his slave, bought, as he pretended, of Mr Agrippa Curtis, who had just arrived from Boston, claiming the entire inheritance of his brother's property, and herself as a part of it! Cassy was horror-struck at this terrible news; but while she was considering whom to apply to and what could be done, Mr Agrippa Curtis, accompanied by his Boston lawyer, by Mr Gilmore, and two or three black servants, entered her house, claiming to take possession of that and her, as his property; and it was as a sequel to this seizure that she had been exposed for sale in the auction room where I had so providentially found her, and but for which, spite of her protestations to claims of freedom, — which she had no means to substantiate, since the very person in whose hands her free papers were, had proved traitor and kidnapper, — she would doubtless have been sold into some new bondage.
Such was the story of which, at our first interview, Cassy gave me a brief and hasty outline, the particulars of which I afterwards learnt more at length.
Thank God, I pressed her to my heart once more, my own; my own true wife!
But my boy, my son, and her whom Cassy claimed and wept for as her dear, dear daughter, — what should be done for Eliza and Montgomery, the one already betrayed and entrapped, the other in great danger to be so?:
Again I called Colter into our council, and again I found him prompt to sympathize, and ready to act; quite delighted indeed, as he said, to help in counterworking these two Yankee scoundrels, who had no doubt conspired together to destroy Mr Curtis's will, and to divide the estate between them; seeking to reduce Cassy and Eliza, and probably Montgomery too, to slavery; not so much for the sake of what they would sell for, — he didn't suppose that even these cursed skinflint Boston kidnappers, mean opin-— ion as he had of Yankees generally, from what he had seen of them at the south, were quite mean enough for that, — but because that would be the most convenient way to dispose of them; for if allowed to retain their freedom, they might yet make trouble, especially if some unexpected duplicate of the will should ever happen to turn up.
As to Montgomery, indeed, it seemed that Mr Grip Curtis had a special grudge against him. In fact, as we afterwards heard, he had bought, immediately after his arrival at New Orleans, an immense cowhide, in order, when the young man was once in his power, and securely tied up, to take satisfactory revenge upon him for his State Street beating.
With respect to Eliza, it afterwards turned out, that the very respectable and pious Mr Gilmore had been so captivated at first sight by her personal charms and Boston accomplishments, as to have come at once to the conclusion to appropriate her and them to his own use, under pretence of ownership, and by the rights which the law gives a master. I say pious Mr Gilmore, for during a visit to New York some two or three years before, he had been converted to Unitarian Christianity by the preaching of that same eloquent Dr Dewey, whose patriotic zeal I have already had occasion to refer to; and he had since exerted himself with so much zeal to get up a Unitarian society at New Orleans, as to have acquired the nickname of the Deacon, by which he was generally known among his lighter-minded acquaintances.