her boy.
She would mumble and mutter to herself:
"He struck me en I warn't no way to blame--struck me in de face, right
before folks. En he's al'ays callin' me nigger wench, en hussy, en all
dem mean names, when I's doin' de very bes' I kin. Oh, Lord, I done so
much for him--I lif' him away up to what he is--en dis is what I git for
it."
Sometimes when some outrage of peculiar offensiveness stung her to the
heart, she would plan schemes of vengeance and revel in the fancied
spectacle of his exposure to the world as an imposter and a slave; but in
the midst of these joys fear would strike her; she had made him too
strong; she could prove nothing, and--heavens, she might get sold down
the river for her pains! So her schemes always went for nothing, and she
laid them aside in impotent rage against the fates, and against herself
for playing the fool on that fatal September day in not providing herself
with a witness for use in the day when such a thing might be needed for
the appeasing of her vengeance-hungry heart.
And yet the moment Tom happened to be good to her, and kind--and this
occurred every now and then--all her sore places were healed, and she was
happy; happy and proud, for this was her son, her nigger son, lording it
among the whites and securely avenging their crimes against her race.
There were two grand funerals in Dawson's Landing that fall--the fall of
1845. One was that of Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, the other that of
Percy Driscoll.
On his deathbed Driscoll set Roxy free and delivered his idolized
ostensible son solemnly into the keeping of his brother, the judge, and
his wife. Those childless people were glad to get him. Childless people
are not difficult to please.
Judge Driscoll had gone privately to his brother, a month before, and
bought Chambers. He had heard that Tom had been trying to get his father
to sell the boy down the river, and he wanted to prevent the scandal--for
public sentiment did not approve of that way of treating family servants
for light cause or for no cause.
Percy Driscoll had worn himself out in trying to save his great
speculative landed estate, and had died without succeeding. He was hardly
in his grave before the boom collapsed and left his envied young devil of
an heir a pauper. But that was nothing; his uncle told him he should be
his heir and have all his fortune when he died; so Tom was comforted.
Roxy had no home now; so she resolved to go around and say good-by to her
friends and then clear out