a master to her in some ways: the only thing she could call hers in the
world was the love the clumsy boy gave her. White women feel in that
way sometimes, and it makes them very tender to men not their equals.
However, old Mrs. Lamar, before she died, gave her house-servants their
free papers, and Nan was among them. So she set off, with all the finery
little Floy could give her: went up into that great, dim North. She
never came again.

The North swallowed up all Ben knew or felt outside of his hot, hated
work, his dread of a lashing on Saturday night. All the pleasure left
him was 'possum and hominy for Sunday's dinner. It did not content him.
The spasmodic religion of the field-negro does not teach endurance. So
it came, that the slow tide of discontent ebbing in everybody's heart
towards some unreached sea set in his ignorant brooding towards that
vague country which the only two who cared for him had found. If he
forgot it through the dogged, sultry days, he remembered it when the
overseer scourged the dull tiger-look into his eyes, or when, husking
corn with the others at night, the smothered negro-soul, into which
their masters dared not look, broke out in their wild, melancholy songs.
Aimless, unappealing, yet no prayer goes up to God more keen in its
pathos. You find, perhaps, in Beethoven's seventh symphony the secrets
of your heart made manifest, and suddenly think of a Somewhere to come,
where your hope waits for you with late fulfilment. Do not laugh at Ben,
then, if he dully told in his song the story of all he had lost, or gave
to his heaven a local habitation and a name.

From the place where he stood now, as his master and Dorr walked up and
down, he could see the purplish haze beyond which the sentry had told
him lay the North. The North! Just beyond the ridge. There was a pain
in his head, looking at it; his nerves grew cold and rigid, as yours do