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

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P. “I’ll take good care of that, Mr. L—— and we’ll have a true story if we don’t have a big one; but I’m a thinkin’ that afore we git through we’ll have a pretty good yarn spun, as the sailors say. I always thought ’twas bad enough to tell one lie, but a man must be pretty bad to tell one in a book, for if he has ten thousand books printed, he will print ten thousand lies, and that’s lying on tu big a scale.”

A. “Well, Peter, in what age, and quarter of the world were you born?”

P. “As near as I can find out, I was born the 1st of January 1789, at Little Egg Harbour, a parish of Tuckertown, New Jersey. I was born a slave ☜—and many a time, like old Job, I’ve cussed the day I was born. My mother has often told me, that my great grandfather was born in Africa, and one day he and his little sister was by the seaside pickin’ up shells, and there come a small boat along shore with white sailors, and ketches ’em both, and they cried to go back and see mother, but they didn’t let ’em go, and they took ’em off to a big black ship that was crowded with negroes they’d stole; and there they kept ’em in a dark hole, and almost starved and choked for some weeks, they should guess, and finally landed ’em in Baltimore, and there they was sold. Grandfather used to set and tell these ’ere stories all over to mother, and set and cry and cry jist like a child, arter he’d got to be an old man, and tell how he wanted to see mother on board that ship, and how happy he and his sister was, a playing in the sand afore the ship come; and jist so mother used to set and trot me on her knee, and tell me these ’ere stories as soon as I could understand ’em—”