Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/291

Rh Soon after my return from Savannah, an affair of a very melancholy character took place in the neighborhood of my master's plantation. About two miles from our residence lived a gentleman who was a bachelor, and who had for his housekeeper a mulatto woman, The master was a young man, not more than twenty-five years old, and the housekeeper must have been at least forty. She had children grown up, one of whom had been sold by her master, the father of the bachelor, since I lived here, and carried away to the West. This woman had acquired a most unaccountable influence over her young master, who lived with her as his wife, and gave her the entire command of his house, and of every thing about it. Before he came to live where he now did, and whilst he still resided with his father, to whom the woman then belonged, the old gentleman perceiving the attachment of his son to this female, had sold her to a trader, who was on his way to the Mississippi river, in the absence of the young man; but when the latter returned home, and learned what had been done, he immediately set off in pursuit of the purchaser, overtook him somewhere in the Indian territory, and bought the woman of him, at an advanced price. He then brought her back, and put her, as his housekeeper, on the place where he now lived, left his father, and came to reside in person with the woman.