Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/33

 slave in Richmond by a master who could not write, and I was in the habit of showing it as an illustration of the vileness of the system until I also became the possessor of a like paper executed by one of my own people along the Schuylkill, in which a black girl, Parthenia, in the early day, was sold by her mistress and, lo! the mistress could not write. Throwing stones at the wickedness of other people often leads to complications. Her father, Joseph Whitaker, born in 1789, in a one-story log house, in a poor stony region near Hopewell Furnace, so near the line between Berks and Chester counties that the family could not be quite sure in which county they lived, was five feet eight inches in height, full-blooded, with thick curly hair, which he never lost, and thin chin whiskers but no beard. He was sometimes described as a “little big man” and measured forty-four inches around the chest without clothing. His will power was immense and there were few men who could withstand him. He ruled over his household and pretty much everybody else who came within his influence. If he did not want the women to plant hollyhocks in the garden he pulled them up and threw them over the fence. In his younger days he kicked a clerk out of the office and down the stairs, and when seventy-five years of age he applied a whip to some young fellows from the canal who exposed themselves naked before women, and he broke his cane over the head of a young man who trampled his wheat and was impertinent about it. He was careful, but provided necessary things bountifully. He was proud and ruggedly honest. Through the vicissitudes of a long career in the iron business no contract of his was ever broken and no note ever went to protest. He loved to play checkers, the principles of which he never understood, but his opponent either had to stay up all night or lose a game. He never learned to swim. Having only such school training as came from a few nights spent at a night school, he could measure the hay in a barn and keep a set of books. Rh