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Updated: May 1, 2025
In prison, when I used to mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when I counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days I had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison library of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when I saw you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of your house in Virginia I had but one thought, and that was the look in your face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of your body."
On the 14th the head of the Fifteenth Corps, Charles R. Woods's division, approached the Little Congaree, a broad, deep stream, tributary to the Main Congaree; six or eight miles below Columbia. On the opposite side of this stream was a newly-constructed fort, and on our side a wide extent of old cotton-fields, which, had been overflowed, and was covered with a deep slime.
Leaving the spring behind us, we pass up the long lane between two cotton-fields of a hundred acres each, in which the blackened stalks are still standing, as are the dried cornstalks and gray pea-vines in the field beyond.
The cotton-fields look like great flower-gardens. As the blossoms die they are replaced by the young bolls, or pods, which contain the seeds. From the seeds grow long vegetable hairs, which form white locks in the pods. These fibres are the cotton. When the pods become ripe and open, the cotton bursts out and covers them with a puff of soft, white down.
They spent the money they did not earn like princes; they held their heads high; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; they received the homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North.
When once her temper arose it was quite as impossible to check it as it was when she was a willful, revengeful, spoiled child. "Another man as rich as you are would have taken their daughter to Washington for a season, and in the summer to Long Branch or Newport somewhere, anywhere, away from the detestable waving cotton-fields. When you die I shall have it all set on fire."
Ben leaned, half-asleep, against the wall, some old thoughts creeping out of their hiding-places through the torpor, like rats to the sunshine: the boatman's slang had been hot and true enough to rouse them in his brain. "So, Ben," said his master, as he passed once, "your friend has been persuading you to exchange the cotton-fields at Cedar Creek for New-York alleys, eh?"
If it was really ugliness, he would be whipped; but, of course, whipping won't cure disease; so the masters consider it incurable, and sell the slave to go South to work in the rice-swamps and cotton-fields. They, perhaps, think a change of climate will do more for the patient than any other means.
He leaned against the door-way, putting his hand to his brow like one who had received a heavy blow; and the bare walls seemed to take up the cry and echo, mockingly, "Gone!" The blow was so sudden and unexpected he was completely bewildered; his brain was in a whirl. He saw a laborer crossing the cotton-fields and called to him. "I was looking for John Brooks," said Rex.
Nothing could have been more striking than to cast one's eye thus over the wide cotton-fields for one associates cotton with the New and find them cultivated by these bare-legged and breech-clouted peasants of the Douab, with ploughs which consisted substantially of a crooked stick shod with iron at the end, and with other such farming-implements out of the time that one thinks of as forty centuries back.
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