“Because, Miss Polly, Mr. Johnson wants to buy me, and he got me to come to see you and ask you if you would sell me.”
“Do you want me to sell you, King? Would you rather belong to Mr. Johnson than me?”
“Now, Miss Polly, you come to the point, and I am going to try to answer it. I love you, and you have always been a good mistuss to us all, and I don’t think there is one of us that would rather belong to some one else; but I tell you how it is, Miss Polly, and you musn’t get mad with me for saying it; when this war is over none of us are going to belong to you. We’ll all be free, and I would a great deal rather Mr. Johnson would lose me than you. He is always bragging about what he will do; hear him talk, you would think he was a bigger man than Mr. Lincoln is, and had more to back him; but I think he’s a mighty little man myself, and I want him to lose me. He says he’ll give you his little old store on Peachtree street for me. It don’t mean much, I know, but, much or little, it’s going to be more than me after the war.”
And thus this unlettered man, who in the ordinary acceptation of the term had never known what it was to be free, argued with his mistress the importance of the exchange of property of which he himself was a part, for her benefit and that of her children.
“Remember, Miss Polly,” he said, “that when Marse Thomie comes out of the war, it will be mighty nice for him to have a store of his own to commence business in, and if I was in your place I would take it for me, for I tell you again, Miss Polly, when the war’s over we’ll all be free.”
But the good mistress, who had listened in silence to these arguments, was unmoved. She saw before her a man who had been born a slave in her family, and who had grown to man’s estate under the fostering care of slavery, whose high sense of honor and gratitude constrained him to give advice intelligently, which, if followed, would rescue her and her children from impending adversity; but she determined not to take it. She preferred rather to trust their future well-being into the hands of Providence. Her beautiful faith found expression in this consoling passage of Scripture: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” And this blessed assurance must have determined her to pursue the course she did, else it would have been reckless and improvident. She told King that when our people became convinced that the troubles between the South and North had to be settled by the sword, that she, in common with all good citizens, staked her all upon the issues of the war, and that she would not now, like a coward, flee from them, or seek to avert them by selling a man, or men and women who had endeared themselves to her by service and fidelity.
CHAPTER XI.
A PERILOUS TRUST.