Half-asleep, they thought,--but with dull questionings at work in his
brain, some queer notions about freedom, of that unknown North, mostly
mixed with his remembrance of his father, a vicious old negro, that in
Pennsylvania would have worked out his salvation in the under cell of
the penitentiary, but in Georgia, whipped into heroism, had betaken
himself into the swamp, and never returned. Tradition among the Lamar
slaves said he had got off to Ohio, of which they had as clear an idea
as most of us have of heaven. At any rate, old Kite became a mystery, to
be mentioned with awe at fish-bakes and barbecues. He was this uncouth
wretch's father,--do you understand? The flabby-faced boy, flogged in
the cotton-field for whining after his dad, or hiding away part of his
flitch and molasses for months in hopes the old man would come back, was
rather a comical object, you would have thought. Very different his,
from the feeling with which you left your mother's grave,--though as yet
we have not invented names for the emotions of those people. We'll grant
that it hurt Ben a little, however. Even the young polypus, when it is
torn from the old one, bleeds a drop or two, they say. As he grew up,
the great North glimmered through his thought, a sort of big field,--a
paradise of no work, no flogging, and white bread every day, where the
old man sat and ate his fill.

The second point in Ben's history was that he fell in love. Just as
you did,--with the difference, of course: though the hot sun, or the
perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less
fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid. It was
Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his
dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with true-love defiance of caste.
I think Nan liked him very truly. She was lame and sickly, and if Ben
was black and a picker, and stayed in the quarters, he was strong, like