Minnie's Sacrifice

by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

"Thee is welcome to S.," said the cheerful voice of Thomas Carpenter, as Josiah Collins alighted, bringing with him his charge; "and is this the little child thee wrote me about? I am heartily glad thee has rescued her from that dreadful system!"

"Anna," said he, turning to his wife, who had just entered the room, "here is our friend, Josiah Collins, and the little girl I told thee about."

"I am glad thee has come," said Anna, "sit down and make thyself at home. And this is the little girl thee wrote Thomas about. She is a beautiful child," continued Anna, gazing admiringly at the child. "I hope she will be contented. Does she fret about her mother?"

"Not much; she would sometimes ask, 'where is mamma?' But the ladies in the cars were very kind to her, and she was quite at home with them. I told them I was taking her North; that I thought the North would better agree with her; and that it was not convenient for her mother to come on just now. I was really amused with the attention she received from the Southern ladies; knowing how they would have shrunk from such offices if they had known that one drop of the outcast blood ran in her veins."

"Why, Josiah," said Anna, "I have always heard that there was more prejudice against the colored people in the North than in the South. There is a difference in the manifestations of this feeling, but I do not think there is as much prejudice here as there. [Here?] we have a prejudice which is [formed from?] traditional ideas. We see in many parts of the North a very few of the colored people, and our impressions of them have received their coloring more or less from what the slaveholders have said of them."

"We have been taught that they are idle, improvident, and unfitted for freedom, and incapable of progression; and when we see them in the cities we see them overshadowed by wealth, enterprise, and activity, so that our unfavorable impressions are too often confirmed. Still if one of that class rises above this low mental condition, we know that there are many who are willing to give such a one a healthy recognition."

"I know that there are those that have great obstacles to overcome, but I think that while Southerners may have more personal likings for certain favorite servants, they have stronger prejudices than even we have, or if they have no more than we have, they have more self-restraint, and show it more virulently."

"But I [think?] they do not seem to have any horror of personal contact."

"Of course not; constant familiarity with the race has worn away all sense of physical repulsion but there is a prejudice which ought to be an American feeling; it is a prejudice against their rising in the scale of humanity. A prejudice which virtually says you are down, and I mean to keep you down. As a servant I tolerate you; you are useful as you are valuable, but rise one step in the scale of being, and I am ready to put you down. I see this in the treatment that the free colored people receive in parts of the South; they seem to me to be the outcasts of an outcast race. They are denied the right to walk in certain public places accessible to every class unless they go as nurses, and are forbidden to assemble in evening meetings, and forced to be in the house unless they have passes, by an early hour in the night, and in fact they are hampered or hemmed in on every side; subject to insults from any rude, coarse or brutal white, and in case of outrages, denied their testimony. Prejudiced as we are in Pennsylvania, we do not go that far."

"But, Josiah, we have much to blush for in Pennsylvania; colored people are denied the privilege of riding in our street cars. Only last week when I was in Philadelphia I saw a very decent-looking colored woman with a child, who looked too feeble to walk, and the child too heavy for her to carry. She beckoned to a conductor, but he swept by and took no more heed of her than if she had been a dog. There was a young lady sitting in the car, who remarked to her mother, as a very filthy-looking white man entered, 'See, they will let that filthy creature ride and prohibit a decent respectable colored person!' The mother quietly assented.