“Oh, my darling Nellie Gray,
Up in heaven, there they say,
That they’ll never take you from me any more;
I’s a comin’, comin’, comin’, as the angels clear the way,
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore!”
He covered his old eyes with his black hands and sobbed aloud at the conclusion of the song, but the noisy young men who had persuaded him to sing were lined up against the bar for another drink, and had forgotten all about Uncle Andy and his song. I laid my hand on his shoulder and said:
“It was an awful thing to happen in a so-called civilized country—to separate two loving souls and sell the woman into damnable slavery, by a race of men who pretended to worship God and love their neighbors as themselves. I have never suffered such a thing, and I cannot even imagine the feelings of the man who saw his beloved wife torn from his bosom and sold like a horse in the market.”
“You should thank God, sah, dat you-all nevah ’sperienced sich a great sorrow,” he said, looking toward me through his tears. “I has. When I was twenty I was married to Clarissa Beckon. Master died, and we all was sold on de block de nex’ year. I saw her taken away and I fainted dead off. She wor strongah than me. She walked away with her head up in defiance. De las’ words she spoke to me was like de song, dat up in heaven we all shud meet again, where dey cud nevah take her away any more.”
Ah, what a mockery to tell the poor, broken-hearted slaves that up in heaven their wrongs would all be righted. If the slave wife should be restored to her husband up in heaven, why did not those old brutalized slave-owners restore the broken-hearted wife to her husband on earth? How would they picture a just heaven, full of love and mercy and beauty, and then turn around and make a cruel hell out of this world? Ah, yes, and even asked God daily to shower his divine blessings upon this hell of their own making.
I went to bed thinking of the outrages and violent cruelties of the old slavery days, and fell asleep with the horrible picture of slavery in my mind. And sleeping I dreamed that God had reversed the conditions and changed the white men to colored slaves, and the old black slaves were now their masters. Even in that dream I said to myself that the proceedings were just and fair. If the black slave had been sold for the sake of profit long ago, it was fair that he should take advantage of the reversed order of things, and sell his old tormentors into slavery.