"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat
servants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him,"
he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah." That was
a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough.
He spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The old
man had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing."
He didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored
person at all." Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah,
he didn't miss your fault." But his servants never were "ironed." He
"didn't believe in barbarousment."
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had
not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"
was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright,"
though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "They
ain't got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do
'em no good."
I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it," he
exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I
inquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know it
that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was
too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.
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