University of Virginia Library

30. CHAPTER XXX.
THE BURIAL.

The death of Dred fell like a night of despair on the hearts
of the little fugitive circle in the swamps — on the hearts of
multitudes in the surrounding plantations, who had regarded
him as a prophet and a deliverer. He in whom they trusted
was dead! The splendid, athletic form, so full of wild
vitality, the powerful arm, the trained and keen-seeing eye,
all struck down at once! The grand and solemn voice
hushed, and all the splendid poetry of olden time, the inspiring
symbols and prophetic dreams, which had so wrought
upon his own soul, and with which he had wrought upon
the souls of others, seemed to pass away with him, and to
recede into the distance and become unsubstantial, like the
remembered sounds of mighty winds, or solemn visions of
evening clouds, in times long departed.

On that night, when the woods had ceased to reverberate
the brutal sounds of baying dogs, and the more brutal profanity
of drunken men; when the leaves stood still on the
trees, and the forest lay piled up in the darkness like black
clouds, and the morning star was standing like a calm
angelic presence above them, there might have been heard
in the little clearing a muffled sound of footsteps, treading
heavily, and voices of those that wept with a repressed and
quiet weeping, as they bore the wild chieftain to his grave
beneath the blasted tree. Of the undaunted circle who had
met there at the same hour many evenings before, some had
dared to be present to-night; for, hearing the report of the
hunt, they had left their huts on the plantations by stealth,

when all were asleep, and, eluding the vigilance of the
patrols, the night watch which commonly guards plantations,
had come to the forest to learn the fate of their
friends; and bitter was the dismay and anguish which filled
their souls when they learned the result. It is melancholy
to reflect, that among the children of one Father an event
which excites in one class bitterness and lamentation should
in another be cause of exultation and triumph. But the
world has been thousands of years and not yet learned the
first two words of the Lord's prayer; and not until all tribes
and nations have learned these will his kingdom come, and
his will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

Among those who stood around the grave, none seemed
more bowed down and despairing than one whom we have
before introduced to the reader, under the name of Hannibal.
He was a tall and splendidly formed negro, whose
large head, high forehead, and marked features, indicated
resolution and intellectual ability. He had been all his life
held as the property of an uneducated man, of very mean
and parsimonious character, who was singularly divided in
his treatment of him, by a desire to make the most of his
energies and capabilities as a slave, and a fear lest they
should develop so fast as to render him unfit for the condition
of slavery.

Hannibal had taught himself to read and write, but the
secret of the acquisition was guarded in his own bosom, as
vigilantly as the traveller among thieves would conceal in
his breast an inestimable diamond; for he well knew that,
were these acquisitions discovered, his master's fears would
be so excited as to lead him to realize at once a present sum
upon him, by selling him to the more hopeless prison-house
of the far South, thus separating him from his wife and
family.

Hannibal was generally employed as the keeper of a ferryboat
by his master, and during the hours when he was
waiting for passengers found many opportunities for gratifying,
in an imperfect manner, his thirst for knowledge.

Those who have always had books about them more than
they could or would read know nothing of the passionate
eagerness with which a repressed and starved intellect
devours in secret its stolen food.

In a little chink between the logs of his ferry-house there
was secreted a Bible, a copy of Robinson Crusoe, and an
odd number of a Northern newspaper which had been
dropped from the pocket of a passenger; and when the door
was shut and barred at night, and his bit of pine knot
lighted, he would take these out and read them hour by
hour. There he yearned after the wild freedom of the desolate
island. He placed his wife and children, in imagination,
in the little barricaded abode of Robinson. He hunted and
made coats of skin, and gathered strange fruits from trees
with unknown names, and felt himself a free man.

Over a soul so strong and so repressed it is not to be
wondered at that Dred should have acquired a peculiar
power. The study of the Bible had awakened in his mind
that vague tumult of aspirations and hopes which it ever
excites in the human breast; and he was prompt to believe
that the Lord who visited Israel in Egypt had listened to
the sighings of their captivity, and sent a prophet and a
deliverer to his people.

Like a torch carried in a stormy night, this hope had
blazed up within him; but the cold blast of death had
whistled by, and it was extinguished forever.

Among the small band that stood around the dead, on
the edge of the grave, he stood, looking fixedly on the
face of the departed. In the quaint and shaggy mound
to which Dred had attached that strange, rugged, oriental
appellation, Jegar Sahadutha, or the “heap of witness,” there
was wildly flaring a huge pine-knot torch, whose light fell
with a red, distinct glare on the prostrate form that lay
there like a kingly cedar uprooted, no more to wave its
branches in air, yet mighty in its fall, with all the shaggy
majesty of its branches around. Whatever might have been
the strife and struggle of the soul once imprisoned in that

form, there was stamped upon the sombre face an expression
of majestic and mournful tranquillity, as if that long-suffering
and gracious God, to whose judgment he had made his last
appeal, had rendered that judgment in mercy. When the
statesmen and mighty men of our race die, though they had
the weaknesses and sins of humanity, they want not orators
in the church to draw the veil gently, to speak softly of
their errors and loudly of their good, and to predict for
them, if not an abundant entrance, yet at least a safe asylum
among the blessed; and something not to be rebuked
in our common nature inclines to join in a hopeful amen.
It is not easy for us to believe that a great and powerful
soul can be lost to God and itself forever.

But he who lies here so still and mournfully in this flickering
torch-light had struggling within him the energies
which make the patriot and the prophet. Crushed beneath
a mountain of ignorance, they rose blind and distorted; yet
had knowledge enlightened and success crowned them, his
name might have been, with that of Toussaint, celebrated
in mournful sonnet by the deepest thinking poet of the age.

The weight of so great an affliction seemed to have repressed
the usual vivacity with which the negro is wont to
indulge the expression of grief. When the body was laid
down by the side of the grave, there was for a time a silence
so deep that the rustling of the leaves, and the wild, doleful
clamor of the frogs and turtles in the swamps, and the surge
of the winds in the pine-tree tops, were all that met the ear.
Even the wife of the dead stood with her shawl wrapped
tightly about her, rocking to and fro, as if in the extremity
of grief.

An old man in the company, who had officiated sometimes

as preacher among the negroes, began to sing a well-known
hymn very commonly used at negro funerals, possibly because
its wild and gloomy imagery has something exciting
to their quick imaginations. The words rose on the night
air:

During the singing of this verse Hannibal stood silent,
with his arms gloomily folded, his eyes fixed on the lifeless
face. Gradually the sentiment seemed to inspire his soul
with a kind of serene triumph; he lifted his head, and joined
his deep bass voice in the singing of the second verse:

“Yes,” he said, “brethren, that will be the way of it.
They triumph and lord it over us now, but their pomp will
be brought down to the grave, and the noise of their viols.
The worm shall be spread under them, and the worm shall
cover them; and when we come to stand together at the
judgment seat, our testimony will be took there if it never
was afore; and the Lord will judge atween us and our oppressors,
— that 's one comfort. Now, brethren, let 's jest
lay him in the grave, and he that 's a better man, or would
have done better in his place, let him judge him if he
dares.”

They lifted him up and laid him into the grave; and in a
few moments all the mortal signs by which that soul had
been known on earth had vanished, to appear no more till
the great day of judgment and decision.