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meekness, saying nothing and not showing in his face or
manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this
for fifty years. It carried me instantly back to my boy-
hccd and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was
the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was
able to remember that the method seemed to me right and
natural in those days. I being born to it and unaware
that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also
able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me
sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. My
father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave,
rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright
man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of
religious matters and had no part or lot in the pious joys
of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from
this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment
only twice in his life and then not heavily: once for telling
a lie, which surprised me and showed me how unsus-
picious he was, for I knew I had told him a million before
that. He punished me only those two times and never any
other member of the family at all, yet he commonly cuffed
our harmless slave boy Lewis for any little blunder or
awkwardness and even gave him a lashing now and then
which terrified the poor thing nearly out of his wits. My
father had passed his life among his slaves, from his cradle
up, and his cuffings proceeded from the customs of the
times, not from his nature. When I was ten I saw a man
fling a lump of iron ore at his slaveman in anger—for
merely doing something awkwardly, as if that were a
crime. It bounded from his skull and the man fell and
never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the
man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet
it seemed a pitiful thing, and somehow wrong, though
why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had
been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of
that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

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