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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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CHAPTER 2The MotherELIZA had been brought up by her mistress, from girlhood, as a petted and in- dulged favorite. The traveller in the south must often have remarked that peculiar air of refine- ment, that softness of voice and manner, which seems in many cases to be a par- ticular gift to the quadroon and mulatto women. These natural graces in the quadroon are often united with beauty of the most dazzling kind, and in almost every case with a personal appearance prepossessing and agreeable. Eliza, such as we have described her, is not a fancy sketch, but taken from remembrance, as we saw her, years ago, in Kentucky. Safe under the protecting care of her mistress, Eliza had reached maturity without those temptations which make beauty so fatal an inheritance to a slave. She had been married to a bright and talented young mu- latto man, who was a slave on a neighboring estate, and bore the name of George Harris. This young man had been hired out by his master to work in a bagging fac- tory, where his adroitness and ingenuity caused him to be considered the first hand in the place. He had invented a machine for the cleaning of the hemp, which, considering the education and circumstances of the inventor, displayed quite as much mechanical genius as Whitney’s cotton-gin. 1 |
