“After this loss, I was pretty serious. Wasn’t badly treated. My master, an educated gentleman, was absent in New Orleans most of the time. Overseer Braxton, after the big scare he got about his soul, grew to be humane, and left almost everything to me. But I felt sick of life, and wanted to die, though not before I had killed Ratcliff. One day I heard that Corinna, a quadroon girl, a slave on the plantation, had fallen into a strange state, during which she preached as no minister had ever preached before. I had known her as a very ordinary and rather stupid girl. Went to see her in one of her trances. Found that report had fallen short of the real case. Was astonished at what I saw and heard. Saw what no white man would believe, and so felt I was wiser on one point than all the white men. My interviews with Corinna soon made me forget about Ratcliff; and when she died, six weeks after my first visit, felt my mind full of things it would take me a lifetime to think out and settle. “After Corinna’s death, I stayed some months on the plantation, though I had a chance to leave. Stayed because I had an easy time and because I found I could be of use to the slaves; and further, because I had resolved, if ever I got free, it should be by freeing myself. A white man, a Mr. Vance, whose life I had saved, wanted to buy and free me. I made him spend his money so it would show for more than just the freeing of one man. But Braxton, the overseer, who was letting me have pretty much my own way, at last died; and Hawks, his successor, was of opinion that the way to get work out of niggers was to treat them like dogs; and so, one pleasant moonlight night, I made tracks for Galveston. Here, by means of false papers, I managed to get passage to New Orleans, and there hid myself on board a Yankee schooner bound for New London, Connecticut. When she was ten days out, I made my appearance on deck, much to the surprise of the crew. Fifteen days afterwards we arrived in the harbor of New London. “Old Skinner, the captain, had been playing possum with me all the voyage,—keeping dark, and pretending to be my friend, meaning all the while to have me arrested in port. No sooner had he dropped anchor than he sent on shore for the officers. But the mate tipped me the wink. ‘Darkey,’ said he, ‘do you see that little green fishing-boat yonder? Well, that belongs to old Payson, an all-fired abolitionist and friend of the nigger. Our Captain and crew are all under hatches, and now if you don’t want to be a lost nigger, jest you drop down quietly astern, swim off to Payson, and tell him who you are, and that the slave-catchers are after you. If old Payson don’t put you through after that, it will be because it isn’t old Payson.’