Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/192

190 We returned to my master's plantation, and I did not see this place again until the next Sunday, when several of my fellow slaves went with me to see the remains of the dead, but we found only their bones. Great flocks of buzzards and carrion crows were assembled in the trees, giving a dismal aspect to the woods; and I hastened to abandon a place fraught with so many afflicting recollections.

The lady, who had been the innocent sacrifice of the brutality of the men, whose bones I had seen bleaching in the sun, had died on Saturday evening, and her corpse was buried on Monday, in a grave-yard on my master's plantation. I have never seen a large cotton plantation, in Carolina, without its burying ground. This burying ground is not only the place of [sic]sepulture of the family, who are the proprietors of the estate, but also of many other persons who have lived in the neighborhood. Half an acre, or an acre of ground, is appropriated as a grave-yard, on one side of which the proprietors of the estate, from age to age, are buried; whilst the other parts of the ground are open to strangers, poor people of their vicinity, and, in general, to all who choose to inter their dead within its boundaries. This custom prevails as far north as Maryland; and it seems to me to be much more consonant to the feelings of solitude and tender recollections, which we always associate with the memory of