everything that had life came flocking to the
house from all quarters; and not only the men, and the women, and the
children, but, "by a bland assimilation," the hogs, and the dogs, and
the geese, and the fowls, and the turkeys, all came hurrying along by
instinct, to see what could possibly be the matter, and seemed to be
afraid of arriving too late. Whether the pleasure of the negroes was
sincere may be doubted; but certainly it was the loudest that I ever
witnessed: they all talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and, in the
violence of their gesticulations, tumbled over each other, and rolled
about upon the ground. Twenty voices at once enquired after uncles, and
aunts, and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers of mine, who had been
buried long before I was in existence, and whom, I verily believe, most
of them only knew by tradition. One woman held up her little naked black
child to me, grinning from ear to ear, "Look, Massa, look here! him nice
lilly neger for Massa!" Another complained, "So long since none come see
we, Massa; good Massa, come at last." As for the old people, they were
all in one and the same story: now they had lived once to see Massa,
they were ready for dying tomorrow, "them no care."

The shouts, the gaiety, the wild laughter, their strange and sudden
bursts of singing and dancing, and several old women, wrapped up in
large cloaks, their heads bound round with different-colored
handkerchiefs, leaning on a staff, and standing motionless in the middle
of the hubbub, with their eyes fixed upon the portico which I occupied,
formed an exact counterpart of the festivity of the witches in Macbeth.
Nothing could be more odd or more novel than the whole scene; and yet
there was something in it by which I could not help being affected;
perhaps it was the consciousness that all these human beings were my
_slaves_;--to be sure, I never saw people look more happy in my life;
and I believe their condition to be much more comfortable than that of
the laborers of Great Britain; and, after all, slavery, in _their_ case,
is but another name for servitude, now that no more negroes can be
forcibly carried away from Africa and subjected to the horrors of the
voyage and of the seasoning after their arrival; but still I had already
experienced, in the morning, that Juliet was wrong in saying "What's in
a name?" For soon after my reaching the lodging-house at Savannah la
Mar, a remarkably clean-looking negro lad pres