like gossamer in
the tempest before the mute, living picture of wretchedness presented by
that group."

Brought up amid such surroundings, one would not know much about his
ancestry, if anything at all. A great planter gave no more heed to the
pedigree of his slaves than he did to that of his cattle; all alike were
bought and sold in the open market, and neither one nor the other had
any rights or privileges apart from the will of their owners. The cabin
of the slave family was, in a very literal sense, what its name
implied--a cabin and nothing more. The household was not supposed to
need more than one room; the furniture was, of course, as rude as the
hovel itself, and, though the apartment would be well ventilated, glass
windows were not considered necessary. A pallet on the earthern floor
was the only sleeping accommodation. It was one-room life under one of
its worst phases; and, in addition to other drawbacks, the inmates
suffered from cold and draughts in winter and from heat in summer. It is
almost needless to say that under such conditions and amid such
surroundings a lad like Booker Washington fared neither better nor worse
than tens of thousands of his fellows; his earliest days were not
cheered by any of the sunshine of childhood. As a rule, the children of
the slave-cabin knew nothing of those ordinary sports and pastimes which
relieve and give variety to the early days of the young under happier
circumstances. Of course, he was not more than a child when slavery came
to an end, but in the case of such a child slave, at a very early age
indeed, his possible service was found to be commercially too valuable
to be altogether dispensed with. He could do duty as a messenger or as a
porter between the great house--a sumptuous palace in comparison with
the slave-cabins--and the fields where his elders were at work. With a
horse he could also go on more distant errands, some of which, along
lonely roads, were not unattended with danger. Thus the dense, dark
woods through which he might have to pass, when taking corn to be ground
at a distant mill, would be haunted by imaginary spectres; and, besides,
there were said to be deserters from the Confederate Army hidden in
those recesses who, by way of sport, would relieve any negro lad of his
ears if they chanced to meet with him. Such were the last repellent
phases of that phase of that now obsolete world of slavery in Old
Virginia as Booker Washington remembers them