y of an English gentleman at
Port au Prince is not to be bought for money), but she often developed
its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day, with a great show
of reluctance, and many protests that no personal slight was meant,
let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended
from Gehaz, the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the
latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. "And he
went out from his presence a leper as white as snow," said Mrs.
Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy, leprosy," she
added thoughtfully,--"nothing but leprosy bleached you out."

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint
and degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite
idea that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness
and slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable
approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit
of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of
her elder and wholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said, she
always went to a white church, though while with us I am bound to say
she never went to any. She professed to read her Bible in her bedroom
on Sundays; but we suspected, from certain sounds and odors which used
to steal out of this sanctuary, that her piety more commonly found
expression in dozing and smoking.

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim
honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her own
family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must
endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from
the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when I
thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin,
and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every
other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for
covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so
pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and
try, in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant
generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been
very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter
of question. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her
Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--it is im