I was very tired myself, now, very tired, indeed, and gladly would I have stopped, but those negro houses seen by the light of a flickering, evil-smelling lamp were impossible; besides I realised it would be very bad to give in to my men. Finally we left the last little village behind, and before us lay a long, crescent-shaped bay, with a twinkling point of light at the farther horn—Elmina, I guessed. It was quite dark now, sea and sky mingled, a line of white marked the breakers where the water met the sands, and on my left was the low shore hardly rising twenty feet above the sea-level, and covered with short, wiry sea-grasses, small shrubs, and the creeping bean. The men who were carrying me staggered along, stumbling over every inequality of the ground, and I remembered my youthful reading in “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and felt I very much resembled Legree. There was, too, a modicum of sympathy growing up in my mind for Legree and all slave-drivers. Perhaps there was something to be said for them; they certainly must have had a good deal to put up with. Presently my men dropped the hammock, and I scrambled out and looked at them angrily. The carriers were behind, the policeman—my protection and my dignity—was nowhere to be seen, my two servants were just behind, where they ought to have been, and my four hammock-boys looked at me in sullen misery.
“We no be fit.”
The case was beyond all words at my command, and I set my face to the east, and began to walk in the direction of the feeble little light I could see twinkling in the far distance, and which I concluded rightly, as it turned out, must be Elmina.
My servants overtook me, and Grant, who had been a most humble person when first I engaged him, who had been crushed with a sense of his own unworthiness the night before, now felt it incumbent upon himself to protest.
“You no walk, Ma. It no be fit.”
How sick I was of that “no be fit.”
“Grant,” I said with dignity, at least I hope it was with dignity, abandoning pigeon English, “there is no other way. Tell those boys if I walk to Elmina they get no pay,” and I stalked on, wishing at the bottom of my heart I knew something of the manners and customs of the African snake. In my own country I should have objected strongly to walking in such grass, when I could not see my way, and it just shows the natural selfishness of humanity that this thought had never occurred to me while my hammock-boys were carrying me. I don't suppose I had gone half a mile when Grant and the boys overtook me.
“Ma,” said Grant with importance, the way he achieved importance that day was amazing, “you get in. They carry you now.”
“They no be fit.”
“They carry you,” declared he emphatically.