“Big what?” Adah asked, and Sam replied, “Big scar or mark kinder purple, on his forrid, right clus to the har.”
Adah shuddered, for the one she knew as her guardian was marked in that way, and she asked Sam to tell her more of the man with the splot.
Delighted to tell the story which he never tired of telling, Sam, in his own peculiar dialect, related how four years before, a man calling himself Sullivan had appeared in the neighborhood of his former master’s plantation ingratiating himself into the good graces of the negroes and secretly offering to conduct any to the land of freedom who would put themselves under his protection.
“I had an idee,” Sam said, “that freedom was sweet as bumble bees’ honey and I hankered to get a taste, so me and two more fools steal away from the old cabin one rainy night, and go with Mas’r Sullivan, who strut round mighty big, with his three niggers, tellin’ us not to say one word ef we not want to be cotched. We thinks he’s takin’ a bee line for Canada, when fust we knows we’s in ole Virginny, and de villain not freein’ us at all. He sells us. Me he most give away, ’case I was old, and the mas’r who buy some like Mas’r Hugh, he sorry for ole shaky nigger. Sam tell him on his knees how he comed from Kaintuck, but Mas’r Sullivan say he bought ’em far, and that the right mas’r sell ’em sneakin like to save raisin a furse, and he show a bill of sale. They believe him spite of dis chile, and so Sam ’long to anodder mas’r.
“Mas’r Fitzhugh live on big plantation—and one day she comed, with great trunk, a visitin’. She’d been to school with Miss Mabel, Mas’r Fitzhugh’s daughter.
“They all think heap of Miss Ellis, and I hear de blacks tellin’ how she berry rich, and comed from way off thar whar white niggers live—Masser-something.”
“Massachusetts,” suggested Adah.
“Yes; that’s the very mas’r. I’se got mizzable memory, and I disremembers her last name. The folks call her Ellis, and the blacks Miss Ellis.”
“A queer name for a first one,” Adah thought, while Sam continued,
“She jest like a bright angel, in her white gownds and dem long curls, and Sam like her so much. She talk to Sam, too, and her voice so sweet, just like falling water when the moon is shining on it. Sam very sick, want to go home so much, and lie all day in his little cabin, when she come in, holdin’ up her skirts so dainty like, and set right down with me. Ki, wasn’t her little hand soft though when she put it on my head and said, ‘Poor Sam, Ellis is sorry.’ Sam cry berry much then; cry so loud Miss Mabel hear, and come in, tellin’ Miss Ellis, ‘Pooh he’s only homesick; says he was stole from Kentucky but papa don’t believe him. Do come out of this hole,’ but Miss Ellis not go. She say, ‘Then he needs comforting,’ and she do that very thing. She talk so good, she ax Sam all ’bout it, and Sam feel she b’lieve him. She promise to write to Mas’r Brown and tell him whar I is. I didn’t cry loud then—heart too full. I cry whimperin’ like, and she cry too. Then she tell me about God, and Sam listen, oh, listen so much, for that’s what he want to hear so long. Miss Nancy, in Kentuck, be one of them that reads her pra’rs o’ Sundays, and ole mas’r one that hollers ’em. Sam liked that way best, seemed like gettin’ along and make de Lord hear, but it don’t show Sam the way, and when the ministers come in, he listen, but them that reads and them that hollers only talk about High and Low—Jack and the Game, or something, Sam misremembers so bad; got mizzable memory. He only knows he not find the way, till Miss Ellis tell him of Jesus, once a man and always God. It’s very queer, but Sam believe it and then she sing, ‘Come unto me.’