with the added risk of having to answer a lot of questions,
whereas this planter was so pleased with Roxy that he
asked next to none at all. Besides, the planter insisted that
Roxy wouldn’t know where she was, at first, and that by the time
she found out she would already have been contented.
So Tom argued with himself that it was an immense advantaged
for Roxy to have a master who was pleased with her, as this
planter manifestly was. In almost no time his flowing reasonings
carried him to the point of even half believing he was doing Roxy
a splendid surreptitious service in selling her “down the river.”
And then he kept diligently saying to himself all the time:
“It’s for only a year. In a year I buy her free again;
she’ll keep that in mind, and it’ll reconcile her.” Yes; the little
deception could do no harm, and everything would come out right
and pleasant in the end, anyway. By agreement, the conversation
in Roxy’s presence was all about the man’s “up-country” farm,
and how pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there;
so poor Roxy was entirely deceived; and easily, for she was not
dreaming that her own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who,
in voluntarily going into slavery–slavery of any kind,
mild or severe, or of any duration, brief or long–was making a
sacrifice for him compared with which death would have been a
poor and commonplace one. She lavished tears and loving caresses
upon him privately, and then went away with her owner–
went away brokenhearted, and yet proud to do it.
Tom scored his accounts, and resolved to keep to the very
letter of his reform, and never to put that will in jeopardy
again. He had three hundred dollars left. According to his
mother’s plan, he was to put that safely away, and add her half
of his pension to it monthly. In one year this fund would buy
her free again.
For a whole week he was not able to sleep well, so much the
villainy which he had played upon his trusting mother preyed upon
his rag of conscience; but after that he began to get comfortable again,
and was presently able to sleep like any other miscreant.
The boat bore Roxy away from St. Louis at four in the afternoon,
and she stood on the lower guard abaft the paddle box
and watched Tom through a blur of tears until he melted into the
throng of people and disappeared; then she looked no more,
but sat there on a coil of cable crying till far into the night.
When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between the
clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the
morning, and, waiting, grieve.
It had been imagined that she “would not know,” and would
think she was traveling upstream. She! Why, she had been
steamboating for years. At dawn she got up and went listlessly
and sat down on the cable coil again. She passed many a snag
whose “break” could have told her a thing to break her heart,
for it showed a current moving in the same direction that the boat
was going; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she did not notice.
But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than
usual brought her out of her torpor, and she looked up,
and her practiced eye fell upon that telltale rush of water.
For one moment her petrified gaze fixed itself there.
Then her head dropped upon her breast, and she said:
“Oh, de good Lord God have mercy on po’ sinful me–
I’S SOLE DOWN DE RIVER!”
CHAPTER 17
The Judge Utters Dire Prophesy
Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first,
you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by,
you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.
–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
JULY 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day
than in all the other days of the year put together.
This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of