Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/571

Rh have always felt, too, that I had on my side all the invisible forces of the moral government of the universe. Happily for me I have had the wit to distinguish between what is merely artificial and transient and what is fundamental and permanent; and resting on the latter, I could cheerfully encounter the former. "How do you feel," said a friend to me, "when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color?" "I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody," was my answer.

I have been greatly helped to bear up under unfriendly conditions, too, by a constitutional tendency to see the funny sides of things, which has enabled me to laugh at follies that others would soberly resent. Besides, there were compensations as well as drawbacks in my relations to the white race. A passenger on the deck of a Hudson river steamer, covered with a shawl, well-worn and dingy, I was addressed by a remarkably-religiously-missionary-looking man in black coat and white cravat, who took me for one of the noble red men of the far West, with "From away back?" I was silent, and he added, "Indian, Indian?" "No, no," I said; "I am a negro." The dear man seemed to have no missionary work with me, and retreated with evident marks of disgust.

On another occasion, traveling by a night train on the New York Central railroad, when the cars were crowded and seats were scarce, and I was occupying a whole seat, the only luxury my color afforded me in traveling, I had laid down, with my head partly covered, thinking myself secure in my possession, when a well dressed man approached and wished to share the seat with me. Slightly rising, I said, "Don't sit down here, my friend, I am a nigger." "I don't care who the devil you are," he said, "I mean to sit with you." "Well, if it must be so," I said, "I can stand it if you can," and we at once fell into a very pleasant conversation, and passed the hours on the