Begging Crumbs From a Negro’s Table.
One morning as I went out with the stable detail, as we were passing a Negro house, a six-year-old boy came to the door with a plate full of crumbs and crusts to throw out, when we asked him to give it to us. He gleefully held it out, while we rushed for it like hungry hogs. I got a handful. Then I thought; then I hesitated—subjugated, humiliated and degraded to begging the crumbs from a Negro’s table. Then all the proud English, Irish and German blood in my veins rose up in protest, and I dashed it to the ground, though I was hungry enough to have licked all the plates in a whole Negro quarter.