It was about an hour after nightfall when we took our way to the burial-ground. The moon had risen, but the clouds which gathered when the sun went down, covered its face, and were fast spreading their thick, black shadows over the little collection of negro-houses. Near two new-made graves were gathered some two hundred men and women, as dark as the night that was setting around them. As we entered the circle the old preacher pointed to seats reserved for us, and the sable crowd fell back a few paces, as if, even in the presence of death, they did not forget the difference between their race and ours.
Scattered here and there among the trees, torches of lightwood threw a wild and fitful light over the little cluster of graves, revealing the long, straight boxes of rough pine that held the remains of the two negroes, and lighting up the score or two of russet mounds where slept the dusky kinsmen who had gone before them.
The simple head-boards that marked these humble graves chronicled no bad biography or senseless rhyme, and told no false tales of lives that might better not have been, but "Sam, age 22;" "Pompey;" "Jake's Eliza;" "Aunt Sue;" "Aunt Lucy's Tom;" "Joe;" and other like inscriptions, scratched in rough characters on the unplaned boards, were all the records there. The rude tenants had passed away and "left no sign;" their birth, their age, their deeds, were alike unknown—unknown, but not forgotten! for are they not written in the book of His remembrance—and when he counteth up his jewels, may not some of them be there?
The queer, grotesque dress, and sad, earnest looks of the black group; the red, fitful glare of the blazing pine, and the white faces of the tapped trees, gleaming through the gloom like so many sheeted ghosts gathered to some death-carnival, made up a strange, wild scene—the strangest and the wildest I had ever witnessed.
The covers of the rude coffins were not yet nailed down, and when we arrived, the blacks were, one by one, taking a last look at the faces of the dead. Soon, Junius, holding his weeping wife by the hand, approached the smaller of the two boxes, which held all that was left of their first-born. The mother, kneeling by its side, kissed again and again the cold, shrunken lips, and sobbed as if her heart would break; and the strong frame of the father shook convulsively, as he choked down the great sorrow which welled up in his throat, and turned away from his boy forever. As he did so, old Pompey said:
"Don't grebe, June, he'm whar de wicked cease from trubling, whar de weary am at rest."
"I knows it; I knows it, Uncle. I knows de Lord am bery good to take 'im 'way; but why did he take de young chile, and leab de ole man har?"
"De little sapling dat grow in de shade may die while it'm young; de great tree dat grow in de sun must lib till he'm rotted down."
These words were the one drop wanting to make the great grief which was swelling in the negro's heart overflow. Giving one low, wild cry, he folded his wife in his arms, and burst into a paroxysm of tears.
"Come now, my chil'ren," said the old preacher, kneeling down, "let us pray."