“I had had many a time of thinkin’ afore, but I had never before _felt_ master’s _cruelty_ as I felt it now. Here he was, a rich man; and I had slaved myself to death for him, and been a thousand times more faithful in his business than I have ever been in my own; and yit I must _starve_. I felt the _natur’ of injustice most keenly_, and _I bust into tears_, for I felt kind’a broken-hearted and desolate. But I thought _tears wouldn’t ever do the work_! ☜ I axed myself if I warn’t a _man_—a human bein’—one of God’s crutters: and I riz up, detarmined to have justice! ☜ ‘And now,’ says I, ‘I may as well die for an old sheep as a lamb; and if there is any thing in this house that can satisfy my starvation, I’ll have it, if it costs me my life.’
“So I starts for the cupboard, and finds it locked, and I up with one of my feet and staves one of the panels through in the door, and there was every thing good to eat; and so I eat till I got my _fill_ of beef, and pork, and cabbage, and turnips and ‘taters; and then I laid into the nicknacks, sich as pies, cakes, cheese and sich like. Well, arter I’d done and come out, and set down by the fire, master opens his bedroom door and sings out, ‘away with you to bed, you black infernal nigger you, and I’ll settle with you in the mornin’, and he ripped out some oaths that fairly made my wool rise on end, and then shets the door. Well, thinks I, if I am to die, and I expected he’d kill me in the mornin’, I’ll go the length of my rope, and die on a full stomach. So I goes to an old-fashioned tray of nut-cakes, and stuffs my bosom full on ’em, and carries ’em up stairs, and puts ’em in my old straw bed, and I knew nobody ever touched that but Pete Wheeler, and I crawled in and I had a plenty of time to think. ☜
“In the mornin’ the old man gits up and makes up a fire, a thing he hadn’t done afore in all winter, and then comes to the head of the stairs, and calls for ‘his nigger;’ and I hears a crackin’ in the fire,—and he’d cut a parcel of _withes_—walnut, of course, and run ’em into the ashes, and wythed the eends on ’em under his feet, and takes ’em along,—and a large rope,—and hits me a cut and says, ‘out to the barn with me, nigger;’ and so I follows him along.