A silence is within my walls,
A darkness round my hearth,’—
father got up and walked the floor, and before I could finish the song, he said, ‘O Ruth! Don’t sing any more; it is too sad!’”[[80]]
At the same time his thrifty careful attention to minutiæ did not desert him. He keeps his eye on North Elba even after his wife and part of the family returned to Akron and writes: “The colored families appear to be doing well, and to feel encouraged. They all send much love to you. They have constant preaching on the Sabbath; and intelligence, morality and religion appear to be all on the advance.”[[81]]
His daughter says: “He did not lose interest in the colored people of North Elba, and grieved over the sad fate of one of them, Mr. Henderson, who was lost in the woods in the winter of 1852 and perished with the cold. Mr. Henderson was an intelligent and good man, and was very industrious and father thought much of him.”[[82]]
Once we find him saying: “If you find it difficult for you to pay for Douglass’ paper, I wish you would let me know, as I know I took liberty in ordering it continued. You have been very kind in helping me and I do not mean to make myself a burden.” And again he writes: “I am much rejoiced at the news of a religious kind in Ruth’s letter and would be still more rejoiced to learn that all the sects who hear the Christian name would have no more to do with that mother of all abominations—man-stealing.”[[83]]
And the sects were thinking. All men were thinking. A great unrest was on the land. It was not merely moral leadership from above—it was the push of physical and mental pain from beneath;—not simply the cry of the Abolitionist but the up-stretching of the slave. The vision of the damned was stirring the western world and stirring black men as well as white. Something was forcing the issue—call it what you will, the Spirit of God or the spell of Africa. It came like some great grinding ground swell,—vast, indefinite, immeasurable but mighty, like the dark low whispering of some infinite disembodied voice—a riddle of the Sphinx. It tore men’s souls and wrecked their faith. Women cried out as cried once that tall black sibyl, Sojourner Truth:
“Frederick, is God dead?”
“No,” thundered the Douglass, towering above his Salem audience. “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”