Autobiography of a Female SlaveBrowne, Martha Griffith
History
Autobiography of a Female Slave
Browne, Martha Griffith
African American women -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Enslaved women -- Fiction; Kentucky -- Fiction; Slavery -- Fiction
When Fanny woke me to receive my unrelished breakfast, she said:
"You've forgot that this is the day of trial; you sleep as unconsarned
as though the trial was three weeks off. For my part, now that the baby
is dead, I don't kere much what becomes of me."
"My cause," I replied, "is with God. To His keeping I have confided
myself; therefore, I can sleep soundly."
"Have you got any lawyer?"
"No; I am a slave, and my master will not employ one."
After a few hours we heard the sound of a bell, that announced the
opening of court. The jailer conducted me out of the jail yard into the
Court House. It was the first time I had ever seen the interior of a
court-room, when the court was in full session, and I was not very much
edified by the sight.
The outside of the building was very tasteful and elegant, with most
ornate decorations; but the interior was shocking. In the first place it
was unfinished, and the bald, unplastered walls struck me as being
exceedingly comfortless. Then the long, redundant cobwebs were gathered
in festoons from rafter to rafter, whilst the floor was fairly
tesselated with spots of tobacco-juice, which had been most dexterously
ejected from certain _legal_ orifices, commonly known as the _mouths of
lawyers_, who, for want of opportunity to _speak_, resorted to chewing.
The judge, a lazy-looking old gentleman, sat in a time-worn arm-chair,
ready to give his decision in the case of the Commonwealth _versus_ Ann,
slave of William Summerville; and seeming to me very much as though his
opinion was made up without a hearing.
And there, ranged round his Honor, were the practitioners and members of
the bar, all of them in seedy clothes, unshorn and unshaven. Here and
there you would find a veteran of the bar, who claimed it as his
especial privilege to outrage the King's or the President's English and
common decency; and, as a matter of course, all the younger ones were
aiming to imitate him; but, as it was impossible to do that in ability,
they succeeded, to admiration, in copying his ill-manners.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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