er this woman might not
have had lead-colored ancestors.

A pair of recalcitrant feet were now heard mounting the stair: the
flowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl knelt
down before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles of her
shoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the eyes were
softly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like this negro
girl's, that is, never until the autumn before last, when she had come
out into this neighborhood of plain farming people to teach a district
school. Whenever she was awake early enough to see this curiosity, she
never failed to renew her study of it with unflagging zest. It was such
a mysterious, careful arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and the
strangest-looking little black sticks wrapped with white packing
thread, and the whole system of coils seemingly connected with a
central mental battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now,
as the fire was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blows
of the poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audibly
to herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; how
was THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work for
her wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom come in?"

One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary
fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The
Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindling
her fire--these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood in
the American republic--were inseparably connected in that room that
morning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of the
Union, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth enveloping
her head--that detested sign of her slavery--and to arrange her hair
with ancestral taste, the true African beauty sense. As long as she had
been a slave, she had been compelled by her Anglo-Saxon mistress to
wear her head-handkerchief; as soon as she was set free, she, with all
the women of her race in the South, tore the head-handkerchief
indignantly off. In the same way, it cost the war of the Union to
enable Gabriella to teach school. She had been set free also, and the
bandage removed from her liberties. The negress had been empowered to
demand wages for her toil; the Anglo-Saxon girl had been empowered to
accept without reproach the wages for hers.

Gabri