Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 3.

‘[p. 162] picturesque for reality. Beings of all tints and complexions, between the light Spanish olive and the jetty black of Africa, seemed crowded to gaze on our arrival; arrayed in clean white garments, they looked as if prepared for a festival. The day was warm, but not oppressive. The castles, Moro and Punto, rose gilded with the sun on each side, and about the dark ledges of the wave-worn cliffs that support them, stood men and boys angling, as if for past time, in the waters of the bay beneath them. Their unsoiled linen dresses were relieved by the color of the rocks, and the whole seemed like a sketch from the vivid fancy of some painter.’

Mrs. Brooks seemed not to have had the spirit of the reformer. Living in the early days of Abolition, she looked upon the movement as harmful to black and white alike, calculated to ‘deface with barbarism the fairest countries.’ ‘As regards the jetty African of Cuba,’ she says, ‘provide plentifully for his meals, give him the female he prefers, let him have means to procure a few trinkets and ornaments, and above all, exact no task beyond his strength or capacity. Thus provided for, the brilliant rows of ivory between his pouting lips are disclosed by as much happiness as he is capable of tasting.’ ‘The limbs of the negroes that passed to and fro among the trees were round and glossy with health, their labors were light and cheerful, and their far native land forgotten; singing in low hum rude songs of their own composing, they lived all day among the flowers of an eternal spring, plucking the red berries of the coffee-fields, or trimming broad hedges of lime-trees.’ Ripe fruits were their nightly repast; their sports music and dancing. The few wants they knew in a state so near to that nature were promptly and easily supplied, and they lived careless of tomorrow, as the birds that feasted on their orange-trees.

Idomen's uncle grows cold because she refuses offers