28. CHAPTER XXVIII.
FAREWELL TO AMERICA.
Three months had elapsed, from the time the fugitive commenced
work for Mr. Streeter, when that gentleman returned from his Southern
research, and informed Jerome that Parson Wilson had sold Clotelle,
and that she had been sent to the New Orleans slave-market.
This intelligence fell with crushing weight upon the heart of Jerome,
and he now felt that the last chain which bound him to his native land
was severed. He therefore determined to leave America forever. His
nearest and dearest friends had often been flogged in his very presence,
and he had seen his mother sold to the negro-trader. An only sister had
been torn from him by the soul-driver; he had himself been sold and
resold, and been compelled to submit to the most degrading and humiliating
insults; and now that the woman upon whom his heart doted,
and without whom life was a burden, had been taken away forever, he
felt it a duty to hate all mankind.
If there is one thing more than another calculated to make one hate
and detest American slavery, it is to witness the meetings between fugitives
and their friends in Canada. Jerome had beheld some of these
scenes. The wife who, after years of separation, had escaped from her
prison-house and followed her husband had told her story to him. He
had seen the newly-arrived wife rush into the arms of the husband,
whose dark face she had not looked upon for long, weary years. Some
told of how a sister had been ill-used by the overseer; others of a husband's
being whipped to death for having attempted to protect his wife.
He had sat in the little log-hut, by the fireside, and heard tales that
caused his heart to bleed; and his bosom swelled with just indignation
when he thought that there was no remedy for such atrocious acts. It
was with such feelings that he informed his employer that he should
leave him at the expiration of a month.
In vain did Mr. Streeter try to persuade Jerome to remain with him;
and late in the month of February, the latter found himself on board a
small vessel loaded with pine-lumber, descending the St. Lawrence,
bound for Liverpool. The bark, though an old one, was, nevertheless,
considered seaworthy, and the fugitive was working his way out. As
the vessel left the river and gained the open sea, the black man appeared
to rejoice at the prospect of leaving a country in which his right
to manhood had been denied him, and his happiness destroyed.
The wind was proudly swelling the white sails, and the little craft
plunging into the foaming waves, with the land fast receding in the distance,
when Jerome mounted a pile of lumber to take a last farewell of
his native land. With tears glistening in his eyes, and with quivering
lips, he turned his gaze toward the shores that were fast fading in the
dim distance, and said,—
“Though forced from my native land by the tyrants of the South, I
hope I shall some day be able to return. With all her faults, I love my
country still.”
