As time passed on, the borders of the wood of which I have already spoken, began to be invaded by the woodman.  Rough, ragged bits were cleared, and cheap, slight, frame houses sprang up, some of them erected and owned by the workmen in the neighborhood, some of them put up by speculators, and rented to a poor class of tenants.  Playing about outside one of these shanties, a pretty child might soon be seen, a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy of five years old or thereabouts.  So regular were his features, so white his skin, it would hardly have been suspected that he had any but European blood in his veins, had it not been known that the house was occupied by colored people, to whom he seemed to belong.  An old man was said to be lying ill in the house, which was rented by two colored women, who were anxious to get work in the neighborhood, or washing and sewing to do at home.  At that time I was preparing for rather a long journey; and on inquiring for some one to sew for me, Sallie Smith was sent to me.  When she came, I learned that she was an inmate of one of the new cottages, and the grandmother of the pretty child of whom we have spoken.

Sallie Smith came and went, carrying home pieces of work, which she dispatched quickly and well.  She was a fine-looking mulatto-woman, in the prime of life, with wavy black hair and sparkling eyes, though her features preserved the negro cast.  Her manners had a warmth and geniality belonging to good specimens of her race, with a freedom that was odd and amusing, but never offensive.  When she brought home her work, with some comical expression of fatigue, she would sink upon the ground, as if utterly exhausted by the walk and the heat, and sitting at my feet, would play with the hem of my dress, as she talked over what she had done, and what still remained to be done; or related to me, in answer to my inquiries, scraps of her past history, her thoughts about her race in general, her religious experiences, and the affairs of her church in Cincinnati, of which she was an enthusiastic member.

On inquiring about the health of her old, bed-ridden husband, I learned, to my surprise, that he was a white man.

‘You see,’ she said, ’he wasn’t a gentleman at all; he was one of those mean whites down South.’  As she said this, the scornful emphasis on mean whites was something quite indescribable.  Truly, the condition of poor whites at the South must be pitiable indeed, to be regarded with such utter contempt by the very slaves themselves.

‘We lived,’ she continued, ’in a miserable little hut, in a pine wood, and I was his only slave.  I kept house, and worked for him.  He was one of the shiftless kind, and there was nothing he could do.  Oh! he was a poor, miserable creature, I tell you, always in debt!  Well, we had two children, a girl and a boy.’

‘Did he ever have any other wife?’ I inquired.

She fired up, indignantly.  ’No, indeed; I guess I’d never have stood that!  Well, he was always promising to come to a Free State; but he was always in debt, and couldn’t get the money to come, and Jane, she was growing up a very pretty girl, and when she was about seventeen, the creditors came and seized her, and sold her for a slave, to pay his debts.’