PART FIRST.
This is his story as I gathered it;
The simple story of a plain, true man.
I cling with Abraham Lincoln to the fact,
That they who make a nation truly great
Are plain men, scattered in each walk of life.
To them, my words. And if I cut, perchance.
Against the rind of prejudice, and disclose
The fruit of truth, it is for the love of truth;
And truth, I hold with Joubert, to consist
In seeing things and persons as God sees.
I.
An African, thick lipped, and heavy heeled,
With woolly hair, large eyes, and even teeth,
A forehead high, and beetling at the brows
Enough to show a strong perceptive thought
Ran out beyond the eyesight in all things—
A negro with no claim to any right,
A savage with no knowledge we possess
Of science, art, or books, or government—
Slave from a slaver to the Georgia coast,
His life disposed of at the market rate;
Yet in the face of all, a plain, true man—
Lowly and ignorant, yet brave and good,
Karagwe, named for his native tribe.
His buyer was the planter, Dalton Earl,
Of Valley Earl, an owner of broad lands,
Whose wife, in some gray daybreak of the past,
Had tarried with the night, and passed away;
But left him, as the marriage ring of death
Was slipped upon her finger, a fair child.
He called this daughter Coralline. To him
She was a spray of whitest coral, found
Upon the coast where death's impatient sea
Hems in the narrow continent of life.
II.
Each day brought health and strength to Karagwe.
Each day he worked upon the cotton-field,
And every boll he picked had thought in it.
He labored, but his mind was otherwhere;
Strange fancies, faced with ignorance and doubt,
Came peering in, each jostling each aside,
Like men, who in a crowded market-place,
Push 'gainst the mob, to see some pageant pass.
All things were new and wonderful to him.
What were the papers that his owner read?
The marks and characters, what could they mean?
If speech, what then the use of oral speech?
At last by digging round the spreading roots
Of this one thought, he found the treasure out—
Knowledge: this was the burden which was borne
By these black, busy, ant-like characters.
But how acquire the meaning of the signs?
He found a scrap of paper in the lane,
And put it by, and saved it carefully,
Till once, when all alone, he drew it forth,
And gazed at it, and strove to learn its sense.
But while he studied, Dalton Earl rode by,
And angered at the indication shown,
Snatched rudely at the paper in his hand,
And tore it up, commanding that the slave
Have fifty lashes for this breach of law.
Long on his sentence pondered Karagwe.
Against the law? Who then could make a law
Decreeing knowledge to a certain few,
To others ignorance? Surely not God;
For God, the white-haired negro with a text
Had said loved justice, and was friend to all.
If man, then the authority was null.