Theodore Goodridge Roberts

“ Her sympathy had lightened Griffon's spiritual and mental darkness; and then Big Tom, who had been bought to replace the deceased free mulatto, had shown him surreptitious kindness.
Griffon leaned forward and grasped one of his attentive host's thin wrists with his clawlike right hand. His eyes glowed.
"Stave accused me of robbing him!" he exclaimed in a hate bitten whisper. "I was within a few days of my freedom. A lie, to save himself and damn me! Another double trick, to save himself and enslave me forever! But I was helpless. Who will believe a slave? ”

“ He had been set to the most humiliating, the most degrading tasks, thwacked and jeered at by his master and the Spanish mulatto foreman. So nearly had his courage been broken that he had once tried to take his own life. His shaking hand had saved him. He had been doctored for the wound, fed back to a degree of strength, and then whipped to unconsciousness. That had taught him a lesson—and his next effort with the knife had been directed against the Spanish mulatto. ”

“ Stave had made a mistake. He had purchased three years of Griffon's indentured slavery under the misapprehension that he was acquiring the expert services of one Grissin, a cutpurse and housebreaker. Upon learning that his servant had never cut a purse or picked a lock, he had heaped indignities and cruelties on him, at the same time leading others to believe that the poor devil was in reality the ruffian whom he himself had thought and hoped him to be at the time of the purchase. ”