Stories in Verse | Page 5

do so for a day,?Just to hear my neighbors say:?"Lo! the spirit he immures?Is as fragrant as a flower;?It will wither in an hour;?Surely he has stol'n the bliss,?For we know the odor is
Heliotrope."
Have you love and have you fear,
Heliotrope??Has a dew-drop been thy tear??Has the south-wind been thy sigh??Let thy soul make mine reply,?By some sense, on brain or hand,?Let me know and understand,
Heliotrope.
In thy native land, Peru,
Heliotrope,?There are worshippers of light--?They might better worship you;?But they worship not as I.?You must tell her what I say,?When I take you 'cross the way,?For to-night your petals prove?The Devotion of my love,
Heliotrope.
'Tis time we go, breath o' bee,
Heliotrope.?All the house is lit for me;?Here's the room where we may dwell,?Filled with guests delectable.?Hark! I hear the silver bell?Ever tinkling at her throat.?I have thought it was a boat,?By the Graces put afloat,?On the billows of her heart.?I have thought it was a boat?With a bird in it, whose part?Was a solitary note.?Now I know 'tis Heliotrope?That the moonlight, bursting ope,?Changed to silver on her throat.?Let us watch the dancers go;?_She_ is dancing in the row.?Sweetest flower that ever was,?I shall give you as I pass,
Heliotrope.
KARAGWE, AN AFRICAN.
PART FIRST.
This is his story as I gathered it;?The simple story of a plain, true man.?I cling with Abraham Lincoln to the fact,?That they who make a nation truly great?Are plain men, scattered in each walk of life.?To them, my words. And if I cut, perchance.?Against the rind of prejudice, and disclose?The fruit of truth, it is for the love of truth;?And truth, I hold with Joubert, to consist?In seeing things and persons as God sees.
I.
An African, thick lipped, and heavy heeled,?With woolly hair, large eyes, and even teeth,?A forehead high, and beetling at the brows?Enough to show a strong perceptive thought?Ran out beyond the eyesight in all things--?A negro with no claim to any right,?A savage with no knowledge we possess?Of science, art, or books, or government--?Slave from a slaver to the Georgia coast,?His life disposed of at the market rate;?Yet in the face of all, a plain, true man--?Lowly and ignorant, yet brave and good,?Karagwe, named for his native tribe.
His buyer was the planter, Dalton Earl,?Of Valley Earl, an owner of broad lands,?Whose wife, in some gray daybreak of the past,?Had tarried with the night, and passed away;?But left him, as the marriage ring of death?Was slipped upon her finger, a fair child.?He called this daughter Coralline. To him?She was a spray of whitest coral, found?Upon the coast where death's impatient sea?Hems in the narrow continent of life.
II.
Each day brought health and strength to Karagwe.?Each day he worked upon the cotton-field,?And every boll he picked had thought in it.?He labored, but his mind was otherwhere;?Strange fancies, faced with ignorance and doubt,?Came peering in, each jostling each aside,?Like men, who in a crowded market-place,?Push 'gainst the mob, to see some pageant pass.
All things were new and wonderful to him.?What were the papers that his owner read??The marks and characters, what could they mean??If speech, what then the use of oral speech??At last by digging round the spreading roots?Of this one thought, he found the treasure out--?Knowledge: this was the burden which was borne?By these black, busy, ant-like characters.
But how acquire the meaning of the signs??He found a scrap of paper in the lane,?And put it by, and saved it carefully,?Till once, when all alone, he drew it forth,?And gazed at it, and strove to learn its sense.?But while he studied, Dalton Earl rode by,?And angered at the indication shown,?Snatched rudely at the paper in his hand,?And tore it up, commanding that the slave?Have fifty lashes for this breach of law.
Long on his sentence pondered Karagwe.?Against the law? Who then could make a law?Decreeing knowledge to a certain few,?To others ignorance? Surely not God;?For God, the white-haired negro with a text?Had said loved justice, and was friend to all.?If man, then the authority was null.
The fifty lashes scourged the slave's bare back,?The red blood running down at every stroke,?The dark skin clinging ghastly to the lash.?No moan escaped him at the stinging pain.?Tremblingly he stood, and patiently bore all;?His heart indignant, shaking his broad breast,?Strong as the heart that Hippodamia wept,?Which with the cold, intrusive brass thrust through,?Shook even the Greek spear's extremity.
III.
And so the negro's energy, made strong?By the one vile argument of the lash,?Was given to learn the secret of the books.?He studied in the woods, and by the fall?Which shoots down like an arrow from the cliff,?Feathered with spray and barbed with hues of flint.?His books were bits of paper printed on,?Found here and there, brought thither by the wind.?Once standing near the bottom of the fall?And gazing up, he saw upon the verge?Of the dark cliff above him, gathering flowers,?His master's child, sweet Coralline; she leaned?Out over the blank abyss,