“I can tell you how you can break a nigger of running away, certain,” said another. “There was an old fellow I used to know in Georgia, that always cured his so. If a nigger ran away, when he caught him, he would bind his knee over a log, and fasten him so he couldn’t stir; then he’d take a pair of pincers and pull one of his toe-nails out by the roots; and tell him that if he ever run away again, he would pull out two of them, and if he run away again after that, he told them he’d pull out four of them, and so on, doubling each time. He never had to do it more than twice—it always cured them.”
One of the company then said that he was at the present time in pursuit of a negro. He had bought him of a relative in Mississippi, and had been told that he was a great runaway. He had, in fact, run away from his relative three times, and always when they caught him he was trying to get back to Illinois;[1] that was the reason he sold him. “He offered him to me cheap,” he continued, “and I bought him because he was a first-rate nigger, and I thought perhaps I could break him of running away by bringing him down to this new country. I expect he’s making for Mexico now. I am a-most sure I saw his tracks on the road about twelve miles back, where he was a-coming on this way. Night before last I engaged with a man who’s got some first-rate nigger dogs to meet me here to-night; but I suppose the cold keeps him back.” He then asked us to look out for him as we went on west, and gave us a minute description of him that we might recognize him. He was “a real black nigger,” and carried off a double-barrelled gun with him. Another man, who was going on by another road westward, offered to look for him that way, and to advertise him. Would he be likely to defend himself with the gun if he should try to secure him? he asked. The owner said he had no doubt he would. He was as humble a nigger when he was at work as ever he had seen; but he was a mighty resolute nigger—there was no man had more resolution. “Couldn’t I induce him to let me take the gun by pretending I wanted to look at it, or something? I’d talk to him simple; make as if I was a stranger, and ask him about the road, and so on, and finally ask him what he had got for a gun, and to let me look at it.” The owner didn’t believe he’d let go of the gun; he was a “nigger of sense—as much sense as a white man; he was not one of your kinkey-headed niggers.” The chances of catching him were discussed. Some thought they were good, and some that the owner might almost as well give it up, he’d got such a start. It was three hundred miles to the Mexican frontier, and he’d have to make fires to cook the game he would kill, and could travel only at night; but then every nigger or Mexican he could find would help him, and if he had so much sense, he’d manage to find out his way pretty straight, and yet not have white folks see him.
We slept in a large upper room, in a company of five, with a broken window at the head of our bed, and another at our side, offering a short cut to the norther across our heads.
We were greatly amused to see one of our bed-room companions gravely spit in the candle before jumping into bed, explaining to some one who made a remark, that he always did so, it gave him time to see what he was about before it went out.
The next morning the ground was covered with sleet, and the gale still continued (a pretty steady close-reefing breeze) during the day.
We wished to have a horse shod. The blacksmith, who was a white man, we found in his shop, cleaning a fowling-piece. It was too d——d cold to work, he said, and he was going to shoot some geese; he, at length, at our urgent request, consented to earn a dollar; but, after getting on his apron, he found that we had lost a shoe, and took it off again, refusing to make a shoe while this d——d norther lasted, for any man. As he had no shoes ready made, he absolutely turned us out of the shop, and obliged us to go seventy-five miles further, a great part of the way over a pebbly road, by which the beast lost three shoes before he could be shod.
This respect for the north wind is by no means singular here. The publication of the week’s newspaper in Bastrop was interrupted by the norther, the editor mentioning, as a sufficient reason for the irregularity, the fact that his printing-office was in the north part of the house.
Austin.—Before leaving Eastern Texas behind us, I must add a random note or two, the dates of which it would have been uncivil to indicate.
We stopped one night at the house of a planter, now twenty years settled in Eastern Texas. He was a man of some education and natural intelligence, and had, he told us, an income, from the labour of his slaves, of some $4,000. His residence was one of the largest houses we had seen in Texas. It had a second story, two wings and a long gallery. Its windows had been once glazed, but now, out of eighty panes that originally filled the lower windows, thirty only remained unbroken. Not a door in the house had been ever furnished with a latch or even a string; when they were closed, it was necessary to claw or to ask some one inside to push open. (Yet we happened to hear a neighbour expressing serious admiration of the way these doors fitted.) The furniture was of the rudest description.