After they had eaten she threw a crimson paper flower, ragged and dirty, upon his knee, and, drawing her chair close, she lighted her pipe from his, for she knew that her woes were ended.
“A KINGDOM FOR MICAJAH”
“So you want your freedom, Micajah?”
The negro who had shambled up to the broad veranda dropped his eyes and shuffled uneasily, for there was a world of wonderment and kindliness in the master’s tone.
“And this is the meaning of all the devilment I’ve heard of lately—all this talking among the negroes?”
“I reckon so, sar.”
“At your age, Micajah, when you’ve been a self-respecting negro all your life, to go cutting up and making mischief among the other negroes because you want your freedom—that’s a fine way to get it! Haven’t you always gotten all you asked for? If you wanted freedom, why didn’t you come and ask for it?”
The master lifted his glasses to his forehead and looked reproachfully into the queer black face before him.
“Didn’t ’low, Ole Marse, as how you’d gib hit ter me,” said the negro, humbly, but persistently.
Judge Naylor looked from the rose-twined piazza across the spacious lawn, under whose oaks his own father had romped, and beyond whose limits had joyously hunted with another Micajah, as small and as black as the one before him. He had never dreamed of freedom. Was this the innate craving of the human for something higher, or only a reflection of an external picture? The Judge resolved upon an experiment.