“No, father, I shall not try to be free.”
“Why then do you sow corn and dig our ground for us? If you get money, why will you not pay it to be free?”
“I sow corn that you may have as good food as when you were young and could dig like me. I get money because others do so; but, unless it were many times as much, it does little good to me, for I shall never be free. The Englishmen, over the sea, tell us that they wish us to be free, and bid us try to buy our ransom; and when we have nearly done so, they put a higher price upon us, and laugh when we give up.”
“How can people so far off raise our price?”
“They raise the price of sugars because our masters ask them, and then our masters raise our price. Hector once hoped to buy his freedom; and it made him happy to see his master look sad, because then he knew that his master could not sell his sugar, and did not want his slaves so much, and Hector hoped that no more sugar would be sold till his master had taken his ransom and let him go. But one day the overseer told him that his ransom was too low and he must not go yet. It was because his master wanted to make sugar again; and he wanted to make sugar because the people in England pitied our masters, and made sugar dearer that they might be rich.”
“If the whites in England pitied us,” said Nell, “they would make sugar cheaper that we might be free.”
“Till they do,” said Willy, folding his arms, “I will be as I am, I will work no more than I cannot help. I will sleep all I can, that I may forget. I will love my father till he dies, and Nell and Becky till they have husbands that will love them more than I. Then, since I cannot love, I will hate; and I will call to the hurricane to bury me under my roof and set me free.”
“You will love our young master, Willy? He did not forget you while he was beyond the sea, and he is a kind master now he has come back.”
“I did not forget him,” said Willy. “I remember how he made me play with him when we were both boys; but I did not love him then, because he was oftener my master than my play-fellow; and I do not love him now, because he will be my master again. Don’t ask me, father, to love anybody. Slaves cannot love.”
Willy looked round for his sisters; but Nell was gone to Harry’s cottage to tell him she would marry him, thus taking advantage of her brother’s mention of husbands for herself and Becky. Becky had followed to see how Harry would take the communication. So Willy threw himself down on his mat as if going to sleep, while his father, whose ideas had been carried back to his young days, sat at the door of the hut, singing to himself the song with which he had courted his long-buried wife.