Minnies Sacrifice | Page 5

eyes the intelligent faces of the operatives, as they plied with
ready fingers their daily tasks. Sometimes she would contrast their
appearance with the laborers she had seen wending their way into their
lowly huts; and then her face would grow sober even to sadness. A
puzzled expression would flit over her countenance, as if she were
trying to solve a problem which was inexplicable to her.
One day on the hunt for some new excitement, her father passed down
Tremont St., and saw advertised, in large letters, on the entrance to
Tremont Temple, "Anti Slavery Meeting;" and never having been in
such a place before he entered, impelled by a natural curiosity to hear
what could be said against a system in which he had been involved
from his earliest recollections, without taking the pains to examine it.
The first speaker was a colored man. This rather surprised him. He had
been accustomed to colored men all the days of his life; and as such, he
had known some of them to be intelligent, shrewd, and wide awake; but
this was a new experience. The man had been a slave, and recounted in
burning words the wrongs which had been heaped upon him. He told
that he had been a husband and a father: that his wife had possessed
(for a slave) the "fatal gift of beauty;" that a trader, from whose
presence her soul had recoiled with loathing, had marked her as his
prey. Then he told how he had knelt at his master's feet, and implored
him not to sell her, but it was all in vain. The trader was rich in
sin-cursed gold; and he was poor and weak. He next attempted to
describe his feelings when he saw his wife and children standing on the
auction block; and heard the coarse jests of the spectators, and the

fierce competition of the bidders.
The speaker made a deep impression upon the minds of the audience;
and even Le Croix, who had been accustomed to slavery all his life, felt
a sense of guilt passing over him for his complicity in the system;
whilst Camilla grew red and pale by turns, and clutching her little
hands nervously together, said, "Father, let us go home."
Le Croix saw the deep emotion on his daughter's face, and the nervous
twitchings of her lips, and regretted that he had introduced her to such
an exciting scene.
When they were seated in their private parlor, Le Croix said: "Birdie, I
am sorry that we attended that meeting this morning. I didn't believe a
word that nigger said; and yet these people all drank it down as if every
word were gospel truth. They are a set of fanatics, calculated to keep
the nation in hot water. I hope that you will never enter such a place
again. Did you believe one word that negro said?"
"Why, yes, Pa, I did, because our Isaac used to tell me just such a story
as that. If I had shut my eyes, I could have imagined that it was Isaac
telling his story."
"Isaac! What business had Isaac telling you any such stories?"
"Oh, Pa, don't get angry with Isaac. It wasn't his fault; it was mine.
"You know when you brought him home to drive the carriage, he used
to look so sorrowful, and I said to him one day, Isaac, what makes you
so sad? Why don't you laugh and talk, like Jerry and Sam?
"And he said, 'Oh Missus, I can't! Ise got a mighty heap of trouble on
my mind.' And he looked so down-hearted when he said this, I wanted
to know what was the matter; but he said, 'It won't do, for a little lady
like you to know the troubles of we poor creatures,' but one day, when
Sam came home from New Orleans he brought him a letter from his
wife, and he really seemed to be overjoyed, and he kissed the letter, and
put it in his bosom, and I never saw him look half so happy before. So

the next day when I asked him to get the pony ready, he asked me if I
wouldn't read it for him. He said he had been trying to make it out, but
somehow he could not get the hang of the words, and so I sat down and
read it to him. Then he told me about his wife, how beautiful she was;
and how a trader, a real mean man, wanted to buy her, and that he had
begged his master not to sell her; but it was no use. She had to go; but
he was glad of one thing; the trader was dead, and his wife had got a
place in the city with