And she wiped away her own tears, and tried to find poor comfort in the thought that so many wuz worse off than herself.
She had Felix and Ned left, and her pretty home.
But in the little black settlement of Cedar Hill, not fur away, where her mother’s relations lived, destitution wuz reignin’.
For on one pretext or another their crops that they worked so hard for wuz taken from them. The most infamous laws wuz made whereby the white man could take the black man’s earnings.
The negro had the name of bein’ a freedman, but in reality he wuz a worse slave than ever, for in the old times he had but one master who did in most cases take tolerable care of him, for selfishness’ sake, if no other, and protected him from the selfishness of other people.
But now every one who could take advantage of his ignorance of law did so, and on one pretext or another robbed him of his hard-earned savings.
And it wuz not considered lawful and right by these higher powers for a nigger to get much property. It wuz looked upon as an insult to the superior race about him who had nuthin’, and it wuz considered dangerous to the old-established law of Might over Right.
It wuz a dangerous precedent, and not to be condoned. So it wuz nuthin’ oncommon if a colored man succeeded by hard work and economy in gettin’ a better house, and had good crops and stock, for a band of masked men to surround the house at midnight and order its inhabitants, on pain of death, to leave it all and flee out of the country before daylight.
And if they appealed to the law, it wuz a slender reed indeed to lean upon, and would break under the slightest pressure.
Indeed, what good could law do, what would decrees and enactments avail in the face of this terrible armed power, secret but invincible, that closed round this helpless race like the waves of the treacherous whirlpool about a twig that wuz cast into its seethin’ waters?