A year or two ago, as I was staying at the summer home of my brother, Professor Hopkins, on Owasco Lake, Harriet came up to see us; it was after lunch, and my brother ordered a table to be set for her on the broad shaded piazza and waited on her himself, bringing her cups of tea and other good things, as if it were a pleasure and an honor to serve her.
There is a quiet dignity about Harriet that makes her superior or indifferent to all surrounding circumstances; whether seated at the hospitable board of Gerrit Smith or any other white gentleman, as she often was, or sent to the kitchen, where the white domestics refused to eat with a "nigger," it was all the same to Harriet; she was never elated, or humiliated; she took everything as it came, making no comments or complaints.
And so she sat quietly eating her lunch, and talking with us. After the lunch was over, as we sat on the piazza waiting for the steamboat to take her back to Auburn, she said:
"I often think, Missus, of things I wish I had told you before you wrote de book. Now, as I come up on de boat I thought of one thing thet happened to me when I was very little.
"I was only seven years old when I was sent away to take car' of a baby. I was so little dat I had to sit down on de flo' and hev de baby put in my lap. An' dat baby was allus in my lap 'cept when it was asleep, or its mother was feedin' it.
"One mornin' after breakfast she had de baby, an' I stood by de table waitin' till I was to take it; just by me was a bowl of lumps of white sugar. My Missus got into a great quarrel wid her husband; she had an awful temper, an' she would scole an' storm, an' call him all sorts of names. Now you know, Missus, I never had nothing good; no sweet, no sugar, an' dat sugar, right by me, did look so nice, an' my Missus's back was turned to me while she was fightin' wid her husband, so I jes' put my fingers in de sugar bowl to take one lump, an' maybe she heard me, an' she turned an' saw me. De nex' minute she had de raw hide down; I give one jump out of de do', an' I saw dey came after me, but I jes' flew, and dey didn't catch me. I ran, an' I ran, an' I run, I passed many a house, but I didn't dar' to stop, for dey all knew my Missus an' dey would send me back. By an' by, when I was clar tuckered out, I come to a great big pig-pen. Dar was an ole sow dar, an' perhaps eight or ten little pigs. I was too little to climb into it, but I tumbled ober de high board, an' fell in on de ground; I was so beat out I couldn't stir.
"An' dere, Missus, I stayed from Friday till de nex' Chuesday, fightin' wid dose little pigs for de potato peelin's an" oder scraps dat came down in de trough. De ole sow would push me away when I tried to git her chillen's food, an' I was awful afeard of her. By Chuesday I was so starved I knowed I'd got to go back to my Missus, I hadn't got no whar else to go, but I knowed what was comin.' So I went back."
"And she gave you an awful flogging, I suppose, Harriet?"
"No, Missus, but he did."
This was all that was said, but probably that flogging left some of those scars which cover her neck and back to this day.