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I had endured what a freeman would indeed call hard fare; but my lot, on
the whole, had been a favored one for a slave. It is known that there is a
wide difference in the situations of what are termed house servants, and
plantation hands. I, though sometimes employed upon the plantation,
belonged to the former, which is the favored class. My master, too, was
esteemed a kind and humane man; and altogether I fared quite differently
from many poor fellows whom it makes my blood run chill to think of,
confined to the plantation, with not enough of food and that little of the
coarsest kind, to satisfy the gnawings of hunger,--compelled oftentimes,
to hie away in the night-time, when worn down with work, and _steal_, (if
it be stealing,) and privately devour such things as they can lay their
hands upon,--made to feel the rigors of bondage with no cessation,--torn
away sometimes from the few friends they love, friends doubly dear because
they are few, and transported to a climate where in a few hard years they
die,--or at best conducted heavily and sadly to their resting place under
the sod, upon their old master's plantation,--sometimes, perhaps,
enlivening the air with merriment, but a forced merriment, that comes from
a stagnant or a stupified heart.
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