"That was in my boy days, General, when I was sowing my wild oats."
"Don't apologize, Sir," answered the General, "don't apologize; for I see that to your youthful habit of going to negro shindies we owe your truthful pictures of negro life."
And the General was right. Every man and woman who has essayed to depict the slave character has miserably failed, unless inoculated with the genuine spirit of the negro; and even those who have succeeded best have done only moderately well, because they have not had the negro nature. It is reserved to some black Shakspeare or Dickens to lay open the wonderful humor, pathos, poetry, and power which slumber in the negro's soul, and which now and then flash out like the fire from a thunder-cloud.
I do not mean to say that this black prophet has come in this narrative. He has not. This man is a doer, not a writer; though he gives us--particularly in the second part--touches of Nature, and little bits of description, which are perfectly inimitable. The prophet is still to come; and he _will_ come. God never gives great events without great historians; and for all the patience and valor and heroic fortitude and self-sacrifice and long-suffering of the black man in this war, there will come a singer--and a black singer--who shall set his deeds to a music that will thrill the nations.
But I am holding the reader at the threshold.
The author of this narrative--of every line in it--is William Parker. He was an escaped slave, and the principal actor in the Christiana riot,--an occurrence which cost the Government of the United States fifty thousand dollars, embittered the relations of two "Sovereign States," aroused the North to the danger of the Fugitive-Slave Law, and, more than any other event, except the raid of John Brown, helped to precipitate the two sections into the mighty conflict which has just been decided on the battle-field.
Surely the man who aided towards such results must be a man, even if his complexion be that of the ace of spades; and what he says in relation to the events in which he was an actor, even if it have no romantic interest,--which, however, it has to an eminent degree,--must be an important contribution to the history of the time.