Palmetto-Leaves

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Now, we had heard of this settlement up Julington some two or three years before. A party of negroes from South Carolina and Georgia had been induced to come into Florida, and take up a tract of government land. Some white man in whom they all put confidence had undertaken for them the task of getting their respective allotments surveyed and entered for them, so that they should have a solid basis of land to work upon. Here, then, they settled down; and finding, accidentally, that a small central lot was not enclosed in any of the allotments, they took it as an indication that there was to be their church, and accordingly erected there a prayer-booth, where they could hold those weekly prayer-meetings which often seem with the negroes to take the place of all other recreations. The neighboring farmers were not particularly well disposed towards the little colony. The native Floridian farmer is a quiet, peaceable being, not at all disposed to infringe the rights of others, and mainly anxious for peace and quietness. But they supposed that a stampede of negroes from Georgia and Carolina meant trouble for them, meant depredations upon their cattle and poultry, and regarded it with no friendly eye; yet, nevertheless, they made no demonstration against it. Under these circumstances, the new colony had gone to work with untiring industry. They had built log-cabins and barns; they had split rails, and fenced in their land; they had planted orange-trees; they had cleared acres of the scrub-palmetto: and any one that ever has seen what it is to clear up an acre of scrub-palmetto will best appreciate the meaning of that toil. Only those black men, with sinews of steel and nerves of wire,—men who grow stronger and more vigorous under those burning suns that wither the white men,—are competent to the task.

But old Cudjo had at last brought his land from the wild embrace of the snaky scrub-palmetto to the point of bearing a bale of cotton like the one on the wharf. He had subdued the savage earth, brought her under, and made her tributary to his will, and demonstrated what the soil of East Florida might, could, and would do, the cotton-worm to the contrary notwithstanding.

And yet this morning he stood by his cotton, drooping and dispossessed. The white man that had engaged to take up land for these colonists had done his work in such a slovenly, imperfect manner, that another settler, a foreigner, had taken up a tract which passed right through old Cudjo's farm, and taken the land on which he had spent four years of hard work,—taken his log-cabin and barn and young trees, and the very piece that he had just brought to bearing that bale of cotton. And there he stood by it, mournful and patient. It was only a continuation of what he had always experienced,—always oppressed, always robbed and cheated. Old Cudjo was making the best of it in trying to ship his bale of cotton, which was all that was left of four years' toil.

"What!" said the Professor to him, "are you the old man that has been turned out by that foreigner?"

"Yes, sah!" he said, his little black eyes kindling, and quivering from head to foot with excitement. "He take ebry t'ing, ebry t'ing,—my house I built myself, my fences, and more'n t'ree t'ousand rails I split myself: he take 'em all!"

There is always some bitter spot in a great loss that is sorer than the rest. Those rails evidently cut Cudjo to the heart. The "t'ree t'ousand rails" kept coming in in his narrative as the utter and unbearable aggravation of injustice.

"I split 'em myself, sah; ebry one, t'ree t'ousand rails! and he take 'em all!"

"And won't he allow you any thing?"

"No, sah: he won't 'low me not'ing. He say, 'Get along wid you! don't know not'ing 'bout you! dis yer land mine.' I tell him, 'You don't know old Cudjo; but de Lord know him: and by'm by, when de angel Gabriel come and put one foot on de sea, and t'odder on de land, and blow de trumpet, he blow once for old Cudjo! You mind now!'"

This was not merely spoken, but acted. The old black kindled, and stepped off in pantomime. He put, as it were, one foot on the sea, and the other on the land; he raised his cane trumpetwise to his mouth. It was all as vivid as reality to him.