from every gentle touch and movement of the sleeping, confiding child

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?

the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days

“Who made this man my master? That’s what I want to know!” he said

Well, it is dreadful,” said Eliza; “but, after all, he is your master, you know.” “My master! and who made him my master? That’s what I think of—what right has he to me? I’m a man as much as he is. I’m a better man than he is.

The marriage was highly approved of by Mrs. Shelby, who, with a little womanly complacency in match-making, felt pleased to unite her handsome favorite with one of her own class who seemed in every way suited to her; and so they were married in her mistress’ great parlor, and her mistress herself adorned the bride’s beautiful hair with orange-blossoms, and threw over it the bridal veil, which certainly could scarce have rested on a fairer head; and there was no lack of white gloves, and cake and wine,—of admiring guests to praise the bride’s beauty, and her mistress’ indulgence and liberality.

Mrs. Shelby, being entirely ignorant of her husband’s embarrassments, and knowing only the general kindliness of his temper, had been quite sincere in the entire incredulity with which she had met Eliza’s suspicions. In fact, she dismissed the matter from her mind, without a second thought; and being occupied in preparations for an evening visit, it passed out of her thoughts entirely. CHAPTER II

Whoever visits some estates there, and witnesses the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution, and all that; but over and above the scene there broods a portentous shadow—the shadow of law. So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.

Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader

These critters ain’t like white folks,

There was something in his appearance remarkably beautiful and engaging. His black hair, fine as floss silk, hung in glossy curls about his round, dimpled face, while a pair of large dark eyes, full of fire and softness, looked out from beneath the rich, long lashes, as he peered curiously into the apartment. A gay robe of scarlet and yellow plaid, carefully made and neatly fitted, set off to advantage the dark and rich style of his beauty; and a certain comic air of assurance, blended with bashfulness, showed that he had been not unused to being petted and noticed by his master.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

breastworks,

Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen, Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks, Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie, Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near, Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding, Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh, Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds, Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out, Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery, Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees, Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs, Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon, Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the wall,

You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration! Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,

conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d, I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

tongue

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,

and the women my sisters and lovers,

These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself.

There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

belch’d

I permit to speak at every hazard,

Hoping to cease not till death.

And what I assume you shall assume,

Song of Myself

Your life is not only spared, but now you’re also caught in the middle of a hot and steamy cross-racial love triangle

All the story does is reiterate the societal bounds that women and minority groups have been trying to break.

All that mattered was that a white woman was hurt by a group of non-white people, and that there was seemingly no viable reason for it other than inherent brutality.

I have seen the extreme vanity of this world: One hour I have been in health, and wealthy, wanting nothing. But the next hour in sickness and wounds, and death, having nothing but sorrow and affliction.

They could go in great numbers over, but the English must stop. God had an over-ruling hand in all those things.

Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste.

A squaw moved it down again, at which I looked up, and she threw a handful of ashes in mine eyes. I thought I should have been quite blinded, and have never seen more, but lying down, the water run out of my eyes, and carried the dirt with it, that by the morning I recovered my sight again.

He answered me that such a time his master roasted him, and that himself did eat a piece of him, as big as his two fingers, and that he was very good meat.

I found six acorns, and two chestnuts, which were some refreshment to me.

but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste.

Placing an ear close to the open baby mouth, the chieftain and his wife, each in turn heard the voices of a great camp. The singing of men and women, the beating of the drum, the rattling of deer-hoofs strung like bells on a string, these were the sounds they heard.

"I have heard that bad spirits come as little children into a camp which they mean to destroy.

long tinkling metal fringes,

Then broke forth a rippling, laughing babble

cheat them by and by.