More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She's worth the trouble, if you like a pretty face." Tryon liked one pretty face; moreover, tinted beauty had never appealed to him.
It was much as if a boat on which he had been floating smoothly down the stream of pleasure had sunk suddenly and left him struggling in deep waters.
Such a step, he felt, would have been criminal at any time; it would have been the most odious treachery at this epoch,
The town clock—which so long as it was wound up regularly recked nothing of love or hate, joy or sorrow—solemnly tolled out the hour of midnight and sounded the knell of his lost love. Lost she was, as though she had never been, as she had indeed had no right to be.
had stirred into new life all the slumbering pride of race and ancestry which characterized his caste.
the one objection which he could not overlook was, unhappily, the one that applied to the only woman who had as yet moved his heart.
With a shudder he awoke, to find the cold gray dawn of a rainy day stealing through the window.
hot, blistering letters, cold, cutting letters, scornful, crushing letters. Though none of them was sent, except this last, they had furnished a safety-valve for his emotions, and had left him in a state of mind that permitted him to write the foregoing.
while Fate is shuffling the cards for another deal,
Though degraded from its high estate, and shorn of its choicest attributes, the word "freedom" had nevertheless a cheerful sound, and described a condition that left even to colored people who could claim it some liberty of movement and some control of their own persons.
the misty colonial period, when race lines were not so closely drawn, and the population of North Carolina comprised many Indians, runaway negroes, and indentured white servants from the seaboard plantations, who mingled their blood with great freedom and small formality.
Not poverty, but wealth, is the most potent leveler.
She did not flaunt her prosperity in the world's face; she hid it discreetly behind the cedar screen. Those who wished could know of it, for there were few secrets in Patesville; those who chose could as easily ignore it.
With every inducement to do evil and few incentives to do well, and hence entitled to charitable judgment, she yet had freedom of choice, and therefore could not wholly escape blame.
she was shut out from this seeming paradise; but she liked to see the distant glow of the celestial city, and to recall the days when she had basked in its radiance.
Now, not only was her king dead, but the shield of his memory protected her no longer.
ghosts were not the mere chimeras of a sick imagination, but real though unsubstantial entities, of which it was almost disgraceful not to have seen one or two.
the mirror proved that God, the Father of all, had made him white; and God, he had been taught, made no mistakes,—having made him white, He must have meant him to be white.
the distinguished gentleman who did not give his name to Mis' Molly's children,—to whom it would have been a valuable heritage, could they have had the right to bear it.
A history of the French Revolution consorted amiably with a homespun chronicle of North Carolina, rich in biographical notices of distinguished citizens and inscriptions from their tombstones, upon reading which one might well wonder why North Carolina had not long ago eclipsed the rest of the world in wealth, wisdom, glory, and renown.
When he had read all the books,—indeed, long before he had read them all,—he too had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: contentment took its flight, and happiness lay far beyond the sphere where he was born.
Full many a lawsuit had he won, lost, or settled; many a spendthrift had he saved from ruin, and not a few families from disgrace.
Courtly in address to his social equals (superiors he had none), he was kind and considerate to those beneath him.
presenting an elaborate pro-slavery argument, based upon the hopeless intellectual inferiority of the negro, and the physical and moral degeneration of mulattoes, who combined the worst qualities of their two ancestral races,—when
Who the devil are you, sir, that wish so strange a thing as to become a lawyer—everybody's servant?" "And everybody's master, sir," replied the lad stoutly.
The merchant and his wife were both of old families which had lived in the community for several generations, and whose blood was presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks, and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight, shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look in which there was nothing of cringing. He was no darker than many a white boy bronzed by the Southern sun; his hair and eyes were black, and his features of the high-bred,
...more
Even the law, the instrument by which tyranny riveted the chains upon its victims, had revolted now and then against the senseless and unnatural prejudice by which a race ascribing its superiority to right of blood permitted a mere suspicion of servile blood to outweigh a vast preponderance of its own.
"'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,' says the poet.
One drop of black blood makes the whole man black." "Why shouldn't it be the other way, if the white blood is so much superior?" inquired the lad. "Because it is more convenient as it is—and more profitable." "It is not right," maintained the lad. "God bless me!" exclaimed the old gentleman, "he is invading the field of ethics! He will be questioning the righteousness of slavery next! I'm afraid you wouldn't make a good lawyer,
as a rule preferred not to work at all for the woman who had been practically their mistress; it made them seem less free.
When he had made the scar upon her arm, by the same token she had branded him her slave forever; when he had saved her from a watery grave, he had given his life to her.
people of our common race,—the human race, which is bigger and broader than Celt or Saxon, barbarian or Greek, Jew or Gentile, black or white; for we are all children of a common Father, forget it as we may, and each one of us is in some measure his brother's keeper.
He arrived at Patesville by an early morning train before the town was awake,
now I could never be sure. It would be borne on every wind, for aught I knew, and every rustling leaf might whisper it. The law, you said, made us white; but not the law, nor even love, can conquer prejudice.
I am not sorry that I tried it. It opened my eyes, and I would rather die of knowledge than live in ignorance.
The world is wide—there must be some place where a man could live happily with the woman he loved."
She had flowered in the sunlight; she must not pine away in the shade.
If there is anything to be done, so unjust, so despicable, so wicked that human reason revolts at it, there is always some smug hypocrite to exclaim, 'It is the will of God.'"
He made some people white, and strong, and masterful, and—heartless. He made others black and homely, and poor and weak"— "And a lot of others 'poor white' and shiftless," smiled Warwick. "He made us, too," continued Rena, intent upon her own thought, "and He must have had a reason for it. Perhaps He meant us to bring the others together in his own good time.
Why should I seek the society of people whose friendship—and love—one little word can turn to scorn?
He had seen God's heel planted for four long years upon the land which had nourished slavery. Had God ordained the crime that the punishment might follow? It would have been easier for Omnipotence to prevent the crime.
No real white person had ever given Peter a mule or a cart. He had rendered one of them unpaid service for half a lifetime, and had paid for the other half; and some of them owed him substantial sums for work performed.
Family trees not seldom have a crooked branch; or, to use a more apposite figure, many a flock has its black sheep.
her sympathies, broadened by culture and still more by her recent emotional experience, did not shrink, as would have been the case with a more selfish soul, to the mere limits of her personal sorrow, great as this seemed at the moment. She had learned to love, and when the love of one man failed her, she turned to humanity, as a stream obstructed in its course overflows the adjacent country.
With her quickened intelligence she could perceive how great was their need and how small their opportunity; and with this illumination came the desire to contribute to their help.
Her successive states of consciousness were not detachable, but united to form a single if not an entirely harmonious whole. To her sensitive spirit to-day was born of yesterday, to-morrow would be but the offspring of to day.
She had felt Rena's disappointment keenly, from the practical point of view, and, blaming herself for it, held herself all the more bound to retrieve the misfortune in any possible way.
That a woman should go single from the cradle to the grave did not accord with her experience in life of the customs of North Carolina. She respected a grief she could not entirely fathom, yet did not for a moment believe that Rena would remain unmarried.
Ef any of 'em gits onruly, jes' call on me fer he'p, an' I'll make 'em walk Spanish.
He had left Patesville under extremely painful circumstances, vowing that he would never return; and yet now the barest pretext, by which no one could have been deceived except willingly, was sufficient to turn his footsteps thither again.
