Nelse had listened to him with close attention, and at the end of his harangue he said, “You hadn’t ought to be so hard on your own people; they mean well enough.”
“My own people!” the stranger flashed back. “My people are the people of the South,—the people who have in their veins the warm, generous blood of Dixie!”
“I don’t see what you stay in the North fur ef you don’t like the people.”
“I am not staying; I’m getting away from it as fast as I can. I only came because I thought, like a lot of other poor fools, that the North had destroyed my fortunes and it might restore them; but five years of fruitless struggle in different places out of Dixie have shown me that it isn’t the place for a man with blood in his veins. I thought that I was reconstructed; but I’m not. My State didn’t need it, but I did.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Kentucky; and there’s where I’m bound for now. I want to get back where people have hearts and sympathies.”
The coloured man was silent. After a while he said, and his voice was tremulous as he thought of the past, “I’m from Kintucky, myself.”
“I knew that you were from some place in the South. There’s no mistaking our people, black or white, wherever you meet them. Kentucky’s a great State, sir. She didn’t secede; but there were lots of her sons on the other side. I was; and I did my duty as clear as I could see it.”
“That’s all any man kin do,” said Nelse; “an’ I ain’t a-blamin’ you. I lived with as good people as ever was. I know they wouldn’t ’a’ done nothin’ wrong ef they’d ’a’ knowed it; an’ they was on the other side.”
“You’ve been a slave, then?”