Orphan of Creation Read Online Free

that his own vile prejudices were the law and word of God.
So much and no more will I write concerning the general condition of my own background. Much has already been written by more skilled hands who came from similar circumstance, and it would be in vain for me to attempt any improvement upon such accounts.
I shall instead relate the unique experiences of my life, which I believe have no model in the written word, for I have been many other things than a Slave, and done many other things than bale Cotton.
    <>
    Barbara smiled at that, and closed the book for a moment. On an impulse, she threw the covers back off, got out of bed, drew on her slippers and robe, and stepped out into the upstairs hallway, taking the book with her. She still knew the secret children’s folklore of this house, legacy of the many times she had sneaked downstairs after hours with her cousins. She knew her way around the house in the dark, knew which boards creaked, knew the quietest, safest way to go downstairs without alerting the grownups. With no other light but the far off, flickering lightning, she made her way downstairs by the old servants’ stairs. Zebulon himself must have trod these stairs, in the old days before he bought the place out from under Colonel Gowrie.
    She opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and found herself in the kitchen, now spotlessly clean after all the day’s good cooking and eating. She went through the doorway to the dining room, out into the foyer, and through the wide entrance of the front parlor.
    There was the portrait, over the mantel, dimly seen in the flickering gloom of the storm. She flicked up the wall switch, and the darkness was thrown back by warm yellow light.
    She walked to the center of the room and regarded Zebulon’s face—a good, strong, lean, dark-skinned face, solemn without seeming stuffy. The portrait had been made in later life; his thick shock of hair was snow white, the face weathered and mature. He was dressed in a trim frock coat and waistcoat that showed a form still slender and vigorous. His right hand held the lapel of his coat, and his left was holding a book. The artist had captured well the power and grace of those long-fingered, work-hardened hands. This was the man.
    She reached up and touched the frame, the edge of the painting, then turned and sat down on the stiff old claw-foot sofa and continue her reading in the presence of the author’s image. She opened the journal, flipped the pages back and forth, a few words here and there jumping out at her as the phrases fluttered past her eyes. The fire in the cotton field burned for two terrible days . . . Though Gowrie prided himself on keeping a slave husband and wife together, he thought nothing of selling their children . . . I was twelve before I wore a pair of shoes, and those were crude, splintering wooden clogs cast off by another . . . certain strangely formed Creatures appeared on the Gowrie plantation . . . . Barbara stopped at that last, frowned, and read it again. Creatures? She started again from the beginning of the passage.
    <>
. . .One of the strangest episodes in my life as a Slave began in what I now suppose to be the summer of 1850 or ’51 (at the time I was almost wholly innocent of dates and calendars). It was at that time that certain strangely formed Creatures appeared on the Gowrie plantation, supposedly to serve as a new breed of Slave.
I made no sense of the incident at all when it transpired, and could not understand why these Beasts were brought to us, but now I think I understand what was happening: the old slavers, the cruel men who carried their miserable cargoes of captured Africans across the horrible Middle Passage of the Atlantic, were making one last attempt to revive their gruesome trade.
For centuries, as many Negroes died on those voyages as survived, and at length, the traffic was banned by all civilized nations. In 1808 the United States made the importation of slaves illegal