the letter.

When I finally walked out of that hotel and out of menial service
forever, I felt as though, in a field of flowers, my nose had been held
unpleasantly long to the worms and manure at their roots.

* * * * *

"Cursed be Canaan!" cried the Hebrew priests. "A servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren." With what characteristic complacency did
the slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their
"brethren" white? Are not Negroes servants? _Ergo_! Upon such spiritual
myths was the anachronism of American slavery built, and this was the
degradation that once made menial servants the aristocrats among colored
folk. House servants secured some decencies of food and clothing and
shelter; they could more easily reach their master's ear; their personal
abilities of character became known and bonds grew between slave and
master which strengthened from friendship to love, from mutual service
to mutual blood.

Naturally out of this the West Indian servant climbed out of slavery
into citizenship, for few West Indian masters--fewer Spanish or
Dutch--were callous enough to sell their own children into slavery. Not
so with English and Americans. With a harshness and indecency seldom
paralleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland sold
their mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their own
wives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands.
They originated a special branch of slave-trading for this trade and the
white aristocrats of Virginia and the Carolinas made more money by this
business during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in any
other way.

The clang of the door of opportunity thus knelled in the ears of the
colored house servant whirled the whole face of Negro advancement as on
some great pivot. The movement was slow, but vast. When emancipation
came, before and after 1863, the house servant still held advantages. He
had whatever education the race possessed and his white father, no
longer able to sell him, often helped him with land and protection.
Notwithstanding this the lure of house service for the Negro was gone.
The path of salvation for the emancipated host of black folk lay no
longer through the kitchen door, with its wide hall and pillared veranda
and flowered yard beyond. It lay, as every Negro soon knew and knows, in
escape from menial serfdom.

In 1860, 98 per cent of the Negroes were