“Dey ain’t another nigger in dis town dat’s as high-bawn as you is. Now den, go ’long! En jes you hold yo’ head up as high as you want to—you has de right, en dat I kin swah.”
[CHAPTER X.]
The Nymph Revealed.
All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.
Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden wakings out of his sleep, and his first thought was, “Oh, joy, it was all a dream!” Then he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan and the muttered words, “A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!”
He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep. He began to think. Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were. They wandered along something after this fashion:
“Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference made between white and black? … How hard the nigger’s fate seems, this morning!—yet until last night such a thought never entered my head.”