Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's JournalPutnam, Mary Lowell
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Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal
Putnam, Mary Lowell
Diary fiction; Slavery -- United States -- Fiction
It is on this journey through France that the Mandingo learns to be
truly grateful for having been born in a civilized country. The
unfortunate land in which he now finds himself has at its head a young
prince who has robbed his own mother and sent her to prison. Such
impious guilt cannot, the African feels, fail to draw down the
vengeance of Heaven. Accordingly, when he reaches the capital, he
finds the inhabitants engaged in an indiscriminate slaughter of their
friends and neighbors. It almost seems to a stranger that the city is
built on red clay, so soaked are the principal streets with blood.
The traveller meets no one sane enough to give an explanation of this
state of things. Nor does he require one. It is plain that this people
is afflicted with a judicial madness, sent upon it for the crimes of
its chiefs. He finds his way to a street where the work seems
completed. All is quiet here, except where some wretch still struggles
with his last agony, or where one not yet wounded to death is dragging
himself stealthily along the ground towards some covert where he may
perhaps live through to a safer time. The stranger stoops
compassionately to a child that lies on its dead father; but, as he
raises it, he feels that the heaviness is not that of sleep, and lays
it back on the breast where it belongs. In a neighboring quarter the
work is still at its highest. Where he stands, he hears the yell of
fury, the sharp cry of terror, the burst of discordant laughter, rise
above the clang of weapons and the clamor of threatening and
remonstrance; while, under all, the roar of a great city in movement
deepens with curse and prayer and groan. And now a woman rushes from a
side-street, looks wildly round for refuge, then runs, shrieking, on,
until, stumbling over the dead bodies in her way, she is overtaken and
silenced forever.
He has made his way out of France, and is planning new journeys, when
he receives, through some travelling merchants, a peremptory summons
from his father, who has heard such accounts of the barbarous state of
Europe that he regrets having given him leave to go out on this
dangerous exploring expedition.
Our Mandingo did not meet the tragic fate of Bemoy, to whom the
friendship of the whites proved fatal. He returned in safety to his
country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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