This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
‘
[135]
bought Zeke.
He'll never do you one cent's worth of good.
A bad speculation, Mr. Godwin.’
The prospect seemed rather discouraging, and the trader said, ‘Come now, suppose you buy Zeke yourself?
I'll sell him low.’
‘If I bought him, I should only have to maintain him into the bargain,’ replied the black man. ‘He's my brother, to be sure; but then he'll never be good for anything.’
‘Perhaps he would behave better if he was free,’ urged Mr. Godwin.
‘That's the only chance there is of his ever doing any better,’ responded the colored man. ‘But I'm very doubtful about it. If I should make up my mind to give him a chance, what would you be willing to sell him for?’
The speculator named one hundred and fifty dollars.
‘Poh! Poh!’
exclaimed the other.
‘I tell you Zeke will never be worth a cent to you or anybody else.
A hundred and fifty dollars, indeed!’
The parley continued some time longer, and the case seemed such a hopeless one, that Mr. Godwin finally agreed to take sixty dollars. The colored man went off, and soon returned with the required sum. Isaac T. Hopper drew up a deed of manumission, in which the purchaser requested him to insert that Zeke was now commonly called Samuel
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.