Читать книгу Chains and Freedom: or, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, a Colored Man Yet Living онлайн

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‘FOR SALE,

‘A plantation well stocked with oxen, horses, sheep, hogs, fowls, &c.—and ☞ one young, smart nigger, sound every way. ☜’

“You see they put me on the stock-list!! Well, when the day came that I was to be sold, oh! how I felt! I knew it warn’t right, but what could I do? I was a black boy. They sold one thing, and then another, and bim’bye they made me mount a table, and then the auctioneer cries out:—

‘Here’s a smart, active, sound, well trained, young nigger—he’s a first rate body servant, good cook, and all that; now give us a bid:’ and one man bid $50, and another $60; and so they went on. Sister Hagar, she was four years older than me, come up and got on to the table with me, (they dassent sell her,) and she began to cry, and sob, and pity me, and says she, ‘oh Peter, you ain’t agoin’ way off, be ye, ‘mong the wild Ingens at the west, be ye?’ You see there was some talk, that a man would buy me, who was a goin’ out into York State, and you know there was a sight of Ingens here then, and folks was as ‘fraid to go to York State then, as they be now to go to Texas—and so Hagar put her arms round my neck, and oh! how she cried; $95 cries out one man; $100 cries another, and so they kept a bidden’ while Hagar and I kept a cryin’ and finally, ☞ GIDEON MOREHOUSE ☜ (oh! it fairly makes my blood run cold, to speak that name, to this day,) well, he bid $110, and took me—master made him promise to school me three quarters, or he’d not give him a bill of sale; so he promised to do it, and I was his ☞ Property. ☜ And that’s all a slaveholder’s word is good for, for he never sent me to school a day in his life. Now, how could that man get any right to me, when he bought me as stolen property; or how could any body have even a legal right to me? why no more as I see than you would have to my cow, if you should buy her of a man that stole her out of my barn. And yit that’s the way that every slaveholder gits his right to every slave, for a body must know that a feller owns himself. But I gin up long ago all idee of slavery folks thinkin’ any thing ’bout law. ☜