alarm-bells had ceased. She looked to see a new gang
enter the far door. She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices
in the next room, around the auction-block. She waited for the trader.
She waited for the janitor. At nightfall a file of soldiers entered.
They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of
the negro-trader. That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of
incomprehensibility about her. She hobbled through the auction-room.
Posters, advertisements, papers, lay on the floor, and in the
torch-light glared from the wall. Her Jacob's ladder, her
stepping-stone to her hopes, lay overturned in a corner.

You divine it. The negro-trader's trade was abolished, and he had
vanished in the din and smoke of a war which he had not been entirely
guiltless of producing, leaving little Mammy locked up behind him. Had
he forgotten her? One cannot even hope so. She hobbled out into the
street, leaning on her nine-year-old broomstick (she had grown only
slightly beyond it; could still use it by bending over it), her head
tied in a rag kerchief, a rag for a gown, a rag for an apron.

Free, she was free! But she had not hoped for freedom. The plantation,
the household, the delicate ladies, the teeming children,--broomsticks
they were in comparison to freedom, but,--that was what she had asked,
what she had prayed for. God, she said, had let her drop, just as her
mother had done. More than ever she grieved, as she crept down
the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer's block. An
ownerless free negro! She knew no one whose duty it was to help her;
no one knew her to help her. In the whole world (it was all she had
asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or
gentleman (it was the extent of her dreams) beholden to her as to a
nurse. And all her innumerable black beneficiaries! Even the janitor,
whom she had tended as the others, had deserted her like his white
prototype.

She tried to find a place for herself, but she had no indorsers, no
recommenders. She dared not mention the name of the negro-trader; it
banished her not only from the households of the whites, but from
those of the genteel of her own color. And everywhere soldiers
sentineled the streets--soldiers whose tone and accent reminded her of
the negro-trader.

Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to
drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to
friendle