She was to run late that evening, make her way back to the apartment house, knock at my window, which was on the ground floor, and be admitted. I would have clothes for her by then, and we'd make our way to the levee and go aboard the Missouri as Mr and Mrs James B. Montague, of Baton Rouge, travelling north. In the dark it should be simple enough.
"If I do not come — wait," says she. "I will come in the end. If I don't come by tomorrow, I'll be dead, and you will be able to go where you will. But until then I hold you to your word — your pledged promise, remember?"
"I remember, I remember!" says I, jittering. "But suppose you can't run — suppose he chains you up, or something. What then?"
"He won't," says she, cahnly. "Be assured, I can run. There is nothing hard about running — any slave can do it. But to stay free — that is the impossible part, unless you have a refuge, a protector. I have you."
Well, I've been called a few things in my time, but these were new. If she'd known me better she'd have thought different, no doubt, but she was desperate, and I was her only hope-a hellish pickle for a girl to be in, you'll agree. I strove to calm my fluttering bowels, and presently we set out for the slave market.
If you've never seen a slave auction, I can tell you it's no different from an ordinary cattle sale. The market was a great low shed, with sawdust on the floor, a block at one end for the slaves and auctioneer, and the rest of the space taken up with the buyers and spectators — wealthy traders on seats at the front, very much at ease, casual buyers behind, and more than half the whole crew just spectators, loafers, bumarees and sightseers, spitting and gossiping and haw-hawing. The place was noisy and stank like the deuce, with clouds of baccy smoke and esprit de corps hanging under the beams.
I'd been scared stiff that when I entered Cassy for sale there would be all sorts of questions, cross-examination, and the like, which I wouldn't be able to answer convincingly, but I had been fretting unduly. I believe if you entered a Swedish albino at a Memphis sale and swore he was a nigger, they'd stick him on the block, no questions asked. That auctioneer would have sold his own grandfather, and probably had. He was a small, furious, redbearded man with a slouch hat, a big cigar, and a quart bottle of forty-rod in his coat pocket which he sucked at in between accusing his assistants of swindling him and bawling to everyone to give him some sellin' room.
When I entered Cassy he hardly glanced at her bill of sale, but spat neatly between my feet and asked me aggressively if I was an underground railroad agent who'd thought better of convoying a nigger to Canada and decided to sell her off for private gain.
The crowd round him all haw-hawed immensely at this, and said he was a prime case, which relieved my momentary horror at his question, and the auctioneer said he didn't give a damn, anyhow, and where the hell was Eli Bowles's nigger's papers, because he hadn't got them, and they'd drive a man out of his mind in this country, what with their finickin' regulations, and would they get the hell out of his way so he could start the sale? No, he wouldn't put up Jackson's buck Perseus, because he was rotten with pox, and everyone knew it; Jackson had better put him out to stud over in Arkansas, where nobody noticed such things. No, he wouldn't take notes of hand from any but dealers he knew — he'd enough tarnation paper as it was, and his clerk just used it to confuse him and line his own pockets, and he knew all about it, and one of these days wouldn't he make that clerk's ass warm for him. And, strike him dumb, but his bottle was half empty and he hadn't even started the sale yet — would they git out from under his feet or did they want to be still biddin' their bollix off at two in the morning?
And more of the same, all of which was mighty reassuring. I left Cassy to be herded off with the other niggers, and got a place by the wall to watch the sale, which the little auctioneer conducted as if he was a ring-master, pattering away incessantly, and keeping up his style of irascible confusion all the time. The crowd loved it, and he was good, too, taking an occasional swill at his bottle and firing his comments at the lots while the bids came in.
"See this here old wench of Masterson's, who died last week. Masterson died, that is, not her. Not a day over forty, an' a prime cook. Well, y'only had to look at the belly Masterson had on him; that's testimony enough, I reckon. Yes sir, it was her fine cookin' that kilt him — now then, what say? Eight hurinert to start — nine, for the best vittles-slinger 'tween Evansville an' the Gulf." Or again: "This buck of Tomkins, he sired more saplin's than Methuselah — that's why they call him George, after George Washington, the father of his country. Why, 'thout this boy, the nigger pop'lation'd be only half what it is — we wouldn't hardly be havin' this sale today, but for this randy little hero. There was talk of a syndicate to send him back to Afriky to keep the numbers up — now then, who'll say a thousand?"
But there was someone there who knew more about raising prices than even he did, and that was Cassy. When she took the block, after a whispered conference with the auctioneer, he went on about how she spoke French, and could embroider and 'tend to growing children or be a lady's maid or governess and play the piano and paint — but it was all sham. He knew what she would be sold for, and the mob kept chorusing "Shuck her down! Let's get a look at her!" while she stood, very demure, with her hands folded in front of her and her head bowed. She was pale, and I could see the strain in her face, but she knew what to do, and presently when the auctioneer spoke to her she took off her shoes and then let down her hair, very carefully, so that it hung down her back almost to her waist.
That wasn't what they wanted, of course; they yelled and stamped and whistled, but the auctioneer got the bidding up to seventeen hundred before he nodded to her, and without a change of expression she shrugged her shoulders out of the dress, let it slip down, and stepped out as bare as a babe. By gad, I was proud of her as she stood there like a pale golden statue, in the dim light under the beams, with the mob goggling and roaring approval; the price ran up to twenty-five hundred dollars in less than a minute.
At that there were only two bidders left, a fancy-weskitted young dandy in a stove-pipe hat with his mouth open, and a grey-bearded planter in the front row with a red face and big panama hat, who had a little nigger boy behind his seat to fan him. I reckon Cassy got another thousand dollars out of those two, all on her own. She put one hand on her hip — twenty-seven hundred; then she put her hands behind her head — three thousand; she stirred her rump at the dandy — thirty-two hundred, and the planter shook his head, his face sweating. She looked straight down at him, grave-faced, and winked, the crowd yelled and cheered, and the dirty old goat slapped his thigh and bid thirtyfour. The dandy swore and looked sulky, but that was the bottom of his poke, evidently, for he turned away, and Cassy was knocked down to the other, amidst whoops and cries of obscene advice to him; he'd better send his wife away to visit her folks in Nashville for a spell, they shouted, and when she came back she could give him a decent burial, for he'd have killed himself by then, haw-haw.
"Wish I'd a wench like that every day," says the little auctioneer, at paying-out time — you never saw such a heap of gold coin on one dirty deal table. "I'd make my fortune. Say, if you'd given me time to advertise proper, we'd ha' had four, mebbe five thousand. Where d'you git her, Mr — eh — Howard?"
"As you said, she was a lady's maid — at my academy for gentlewomen," says I gravely, and the crowd in his office roared and clapped me on the back and offered me swigs from their bottles; I was a card, they said.