Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 June 1885 — Aunt Ellen’s Idea of Freedom. [ARTICLE]

Aunt Ellen’s Idea of Freedom.

My father (writes a correspondent) was a slave-owner in the South before the war, and I was brought up largely by colored nurses, to whom I naturally became very much attached. After the war the blacks were scattered more or less, and but a few of my father’s former slaves remained in our neighborhood. Among those who did remain, however, was one of my old nurses, a woman of about forty-five or fifty years of age, who lived onVhelarm of a man who had never owned slaves, and who took no further interest in the blacks than to get work out of them. Returning on one occasion to visit my home, I received word that “Aunt” Ellen wanted me to come to see her, and of course I was glad to go. I found her living very meanly, faring, apparently, much worse than she ever had done when a slave. Her husband was a drunken, worthless fellow, whom she had to support; she had poor health, and a houseful of poorly clad, poorly fed children to care for. Brought up in the midst of slavery, and being at the time a very young man, I had never realized the cruelty of that institution, and as I looked about my old nurse’s cabin I could but contrast her surroundings with what they had been when I was a child and she was a slave. So I said to her, “Aunt Ellen, don’t you think you fared much better when you were a slave? Then you had a better house to live in, plenty to eat, plenty to wear, no doctor’s bills, and never any thought or care about such things.” “Dat’s so, Mas’ John,” she replied. “I did hab mo’ to eat, an’ mo’ to wah, an’ none o’ dis here kin’ o’ trouble; but den, de Lawd bless you, ho'ney, afta all,da’s de feelin’s’!”— Editor’s Drawer, in Harper's Magazine.