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I have called my tiny community a world, and so its
isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened
common consciousness, sprung from common joy
and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common
hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above
all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and
Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together;
but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in
various languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more
years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord,"
saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound
to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of
those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood
found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and
they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank
into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
There were, however, some--such as Josie, Jim, and Ben--to
whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales,
whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school
and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content,
born without and beyond the World. And their weak
wings beat against their barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth,
of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that
opposed even a whim.
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