A colored boy of seventeen--I guessed his age at
twenty-three--came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire
about the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was planted
with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting
ready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of Captain
H., paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule,
if I understood him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a long time about
one thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian River
country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was
born. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goes
smack to St. Augustine," he replied; "I ain't tried it." It was an
unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he was
right; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahassee
to St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles. With company of
my own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walk
its whole length.[1] My young man was in no haste. With the reins (made
of rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forward
axle of his cart, he seemed to have put himself entirely at my service.
He had to the full that peculiar urbanity which I began after a while to
look upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes,--a gentleness of
speech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, such
as sits well on any man, whatever the color of his skin.
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