Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/43

 been my play-fellow, and who returned a woman, though she had left us a child, possessed a high degree of both.

I learned from one of my fellow servants, that she was the daughter of colonel Moore, by a female slave, who for a year or two had shared her master's favor jointly with my mother, but who had died many years since, leaving Cassy an infant. Her mother was said to have been a great beauty, and a very dangerous rival of mine.

So far as regarded personal charms, Cassy was not unworthy of her parentage, either on the father's or the mother's side. She was not tall, but the grace and elegance of her figure could not be surpassed; and the elastic vivacity of all her movements afforded a model, which her indolent and languid mistress, who did nothing but loll all day upon a sofa, might have imitated with advantage. The clear soft olive of her complexion, brightening in either cheek to a rich red, was certainly more pleasing than the sickly, sallow hue, so common or rather so universal, among the patrician beauties of lower Virginia; and she could boast a pair of eyes, which for brilliancy and expression, I have never seen surpassed.

At this time, I prided myself upon my color, as much as any Virginian of them all; and although I had found by a bitter experience, that a slave, whether white or black, is still a slave, and that the master, heedless of his victim's complexion, handles the whip, with perfect impartiality; — still, like my poor mother, I thought myself of a superior caste, and would have felt it a degradation, to put myself on a level with those a few shades darker than myself. This silly pride had kept me from forming intimacies with the other servants, either male or female; for I was decidedly whiter than any of them. It had too, justly enough, exposed me to an ill will, of which I had more than once felt the consequences, but which had not yet wholly cured me of my folly.

Cassy had pay? more African blood than I; but this was a point, however weighty and important I had at first esteemed it, which, as I became more acquainted with her, seemed continually of less consequence, and soon disappeared entirely from my thoughts. We were much together;