$150 will be given to whoever takes her in the state, and $300 if taken out of the state and delivered to me, or lodged in jail.

My children were to be brought to the plantation to be “broke in.”

I would clasp the dear boy in my arms, trusting that he would be free before he was old enough to solve the problem.

“How dare you preach to me about your infernal Bible!” he exclaimed. “What right have you, who are my negro, to talk to me about what you would like and what you wouldn’t like?

He was accused of preaching better sermons to the negroes than he did to them

Many of them are sincere, and nearer to the gate of heaven than sanctimonious Mr. Pike, and other long-faced Christians, who see wounded Samaritans, and pass by on the other side.

the church was demolished. They were permitted to attend the white churches

I might have whipped till you fell dead under the lash. But I wanted you to live

“And what were we sent for?” said the captain, bristling up to me. I evaded the question.

Mighty is the power of the torturing lash

Drums and fifes were discoursing martial music. The men were divided into companies of sixteen, each headed by a captain. Orders were given, and the wild scouts rushed in every direction, wherever a colored face was to be found.

The poor whites took their places in the ranks in every-day dress, some without shoes, some without hats.

Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.

I might have whipped till you fell dead under the lash. But I wanted you to live

It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

he had stolen food to appease his hunger. This was his crime.

What a libel upon the heavenly Father, who “made of one blood all nations of men!” And then who are Africans? Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?

my mistress, like many others, seemed to think that slaves had no right to any family ties of their own

“He not only thinks it no disgrace to be the father of those little niggers, but he is not ashamed to call himself their master. I declare, such things ought not to be tolerated in any decent society!”

If I had been on a remote plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city, I should not be a living woman at this day.

Moreover, as a married man, and a professional man, he deemed it necessary to save appearances in some degree.

Would he be bought?

“Surely, little children are true.”

By dint of kicking and fisting, William came out of the skirmish none the worse for a few scratches.

“You suffer, do you?” she exclaimed. “I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more too.”

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.”

who had been a slave merely in name, but in nature was noble and womanly

She had laid up three hundred dollars, which her mistress one day begged as a loan, promising to pay her soon

“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.”

To take them, with the ship, was the object.

occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one.

Not unaffected, Captain Delano would now have lingered; but catching the meekly admonitory eye of the servant, with a hasty farewell he descended into his boat, followed by the continual adieus of Don Benito, standing rooted in the gangway.

Instantly, by a fatality not to be withstood, his mind, responsive to the portent, swarmed with superstitious suspicions.

because since losing his officers he had made Babo (whose original office, it now appeared, had been captain of the slaves) not only his constant attendant and companion, but in all things his confidant.

have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness.”

Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block.

“master told me never mind where he was, or how engaged, always to remind him to a minute, when shaving-time comes. Miguel has gone to strike the half-hour afternoon. It is _now_, master. Will master go into the cuddy?”

bottle of cider

who, upon a legitimate occasion, so trivial, too, as it now appeared, could lose all self-command, was, with energetic iniquity, going to bring about his murder.

of all the ship’s underlings, mostly blacks; as if by the least inadvertence they feared to draw down his despotic displeasure.

I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of

Captain Delano crossed over to him, and stood in silence surveying the knot; his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to those of the hemp

With sober curiosity peering down upon him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped from his perch to an outside boom; while below the old negro, and, invisible to him, reconnoitering from a port-hole like a fox from the mouth of its den,

stray white pawns venturously involved in the ranks of the chess-men opposed.

it was no unusual thing to lure ships after them into their treacherous harbors

He paused. The sound of the hatchet-polishing fell on his ears. He cast another swift side-look at the two. They had the air of conspirators. In connection with the late questionings, and the incident of the young sailor, these things now begat such return of involuntary suspicion, that the singular guilelessness of the American could not endure it.

In short, to the Spaniard’s black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin.

That strange ceremoniousness, too, at other times evinced, seemed not uncharacteristic of one playing a part above his real level. Benito Cereno–Don Benito Cereno–a sounding name. One, too, at that period, not unknown, in the surname, to super-cargoes and sea captains trading along the Spanish Main, as belonging to one of the most enterprising and extensive mercantile families in all those provinces; several members of it having titles; a sort of Castilian Rothschild, with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great trading town of South America

“On board this ship?” echoed the Spaniard. Then, with horrified gestures, as directed against some spectre, he unconsciously fell into the ready arms of his attendant, who, with a silent appeal toward Captain Delano, seemed beseeching him not again to broach a theme so unspeakably distressing to his master.

The servant wore nothing but wide trowsers, apparently, from their coarseness and patches, made out of some old topsail; they were clean, and confined at the waist by a bit of unstranded rope, which, with his composed, deprecatory air at times, made him look something like a begging friar of St. Francis.

pacifying his more ignorant brethren, when at intervals tempted to murmurings.”

But he had hardly gone five paces, when, with a sort of eagerness, Don Benito invited him back, regretting his momentary absence of mind, and professing readiness to gratify him.

So that to have beheld this undemonstrative invalid gliding about, apathetic and mute, no landsman could have dreamed that in him was lodged a dictatorship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal.

He was rather tall, but seemed never to have been robust, and now with nervous suffering was almost worn to a skeleton. A tendency to some pulmonary complaint appeared to have been lately confirmed. His voice was like that of one with lungs half gone–hoarsely suppressed, a husky whisper. No wonder that, as in this state he tottered about, his private servant apprehensively followed him.

sorrow and affection were equally blended.

with the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime

had swept off a great part of their number, more especially the Spaniards

each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull.

ship’s general model and rig appeared to have undergone no material change from their original warlike and Froissart pattern. However, no guns were seen.

A very large, and, in its time, a very fine vessel, such as in those days were at intervals encountered along that main

, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

“Be it so, Señor.”

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.

it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour

For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.

Character teaches above our wills

To be great is to be misunderstood.

pure memory

But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar

We but half express ourselves

we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

et the subject be what it may

I long to be happy as you are

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "how hard to fly! Brightly tinted feathers are handsome, but I wish they were light enough to fly!" Just there the elder bird interrupted him. "That is the one condition. Never try to fly like other birds. Upon the day you try to fly you shall be changed into your former self."

"Oh! I am myself. My old self!" cried Iktomi, pinching himself and plucking imaginary pieces out of his jacket.