Clotel; or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown

Author:William Wells Brown [Brown, William Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Classics
Published: 2021-02-01T18:30:00+00:00

17

Retaliation

“I had a dream, a happy dream;

I thought that I was free:

That in my own bright land again

A home there was for me.”

With the deepest humiliation Horatio Green saw the daughter of Clotel, his own child, brought into his dwelling as a servant. His wife felt that she had been deceived, and determined to punish her deceiver. At first Mary was put to work in the kitchen, where she met with little or no sympathy from the other slaves, owing to the fairness of her complexion. The child was white, what should be done to make her look like other Negroes, was the question Mrs. Green asked herself. At last she hit upon a plan: there was a garden at the back of the house over which Mrs. Green could look from her parlor window. Here the white slave-girl was put to work, without either bonnet or handkerchief upon her head. A hot sun poured its broiling rays on the naked face and neck of the girl, until she sank down in the corner of the garden, and was actually broiled to sleep. “Dat little nigger ain’t working a bit, missus,” said Dinah to Mrs. Green, as she entered the kitchen.

“She’s lying in the sun, seasoning; she will work better by and by,” replied the mistress. “Dees white niggers always tink dey sef good as white folks,” continued the cook. “Yes, but we will teach them better; won’t we, Dinah?” “Yes, missus, I don’t like dees mularter niggers, no how; dey always want to set dey sef up for something big.” The cook was black, and was not without that prejudice which is to be found among the Negroes, as well as among the whites of the Southern States. The sun had the desired effect, for in less than a fortnight Mary’s fair complexion had disappeared, and she was but little whiter than any other mulatto children running about the yard. But the close resemblance between the father and child annoyed the mistress more than the mere whiteness of the child’s complexion. Horatio made proposition after proposition to have the girl sent away, for every time he beheld her countenance it reminded him of the happy days he had spent with Clotel. But his wife had commenced, and determined to carry out her unfeeling and fiendish designs. This child was not only white, but she was the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, the man who, when speaking against slavery in the legislature of Virginia, said,

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. With what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriæ of the other! For if the slave can have a country in this world, it

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