“’Twouldn’t do for me to say so; dey was old enough, and ageable enough, to know best; but I couldn’t help tink’n sah!”
Returning to the Junction, I saw a very different type of the Virginia negro: an old man of seventy, who conversed intelligently, but in a strangely quiet and subdued tone, which bespoke long suffering and great patience. He had been a free man seven years, he told me; but he had a brother who still served the man he belonged to.
“But he, too, is free now,” I said. “Don’t he receive wages?”
The old man shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing said about wages to any of our people in this part of the country. They don’t dare to ask for them, and their owners will hold them as they used to as long as they can. They are very sharp with us now. If a man of my color dared to say what he thought, it would be all his life was worth!”
CHAPTER XI.
A VISIT TO MOUNT VERNON.
On a day of exceeding sultriness (it was the fourth of September) I left the dusty, stifled streets of Washington, and went on board the excursion steamer Wawaset, bound for Mount Vernon.
Ten o’clock, the hour of starting, had nearly arrived. No breath of air was stirring. The sun beat down with torrid fervor upon the boat’s awnings, which seemed scarce a protection against it, and upon the glassy water, which reflected it with equal intensity from below. Then suddenly the bell rang, the boat swung out in the river, the strong paddles rushed, and almost instantly a magical change took place. A delightful breeze appeared to have sprung up, increasing as the steamer’s speed increased. I sat upon a stool by the wheelhouse, drinking in all the deliciousness of that cooling motion through the air, and watching compassionately the schooners with heavy and languid sails lying becalmed in the channel,—indolent fellows, drifting with the tide, and dependent on influences from without to push them,—while our steamer, with flashing wake, flag gayly flying, and decks swept by wholesome, animating winds, resembled one of your energetic, original men, cutting the sluggish current, and overcoming the sultriness and stagnation of life by a refreshing activity.
On we sped, leaving far behind the Virginia long-boats, with their pointed sails on great poles swung aslant across the masts,—sails dingy in color and irregular in shape, looking, a little way off, like huge sweet potatoes. Our course was southward, leaving far on our right the Arlington estate embowered in foliage on the Virginia shore; and on our left the Navy Yard and Arsenal, and the Insane Asylum standing like a stern castle, half hidden by trees, on the high banks back from the river. As we departed from the wharves, a view of the city opened behind us, with its two prominent objects,—the unfinished Washington Monument, resembling in the distance a tall, square, pallid sail; and the many-pillared, beautiful Capitol, rising amid masses of foliage, with that marvellous bubble, its white and airy dome, soaring superbly in the sun.
Before us, straight in our course, was Alexandria, quaint old city, with its scanty fringe of straight and slender spars, and its few anchored ships suspended in a glassy atmosphere, as it seemed, where the river reflected the sky. We ran in to the wharves, and took on board a number of passengers; then steamed on again, down the wide Potomac, until, around a bend, high on a wooded shore, a dim red roof and a portico of slender white pillars appeared visible through the trees.
It was Mount Vernon, the home of Washington. The shores here, on both the Maryland and Virginia sides, are picturesquely hilly and green with groves. The river between flows considerably more than a mile wide: a handsome sheet, reflecting the woods and the shining summer clouds sailing in the azure over them, although broad belts of river-grass, growing between the channel and the banks like strips of inundated prairie, detract from its beauty.