Project Gutenberg's Minnie's Sacrifice, by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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Title: Minnie's Sacrifice

Author: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11053]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note: This document is the text of Minnie's Sacrifice. Any
bracketed notations such as [Text missing], [?], and
those inserting letters or other comments are from
the original text.

Transcriber's Note About the Author:
Francis Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born to free parents in
Baltimore, Maryland. Orphaned at three, she was raised by her uncle, a
teacher and radical advocate for civil rights. She attended the Academy
for Negro Youth and was educated as a teacher. She became a professional
lecturer, activist, suffragette, poet, essayist, novelist, and the author
of the first published short story written by an African-American. Her
work spanned more than sixty years.

MINNIE'S SACRIFICE

A Rediscovered Novel by

Frances E.W. Harper

Edited By Frances Smith Foster

Chapter I

Miriam sat in her lowly cabin, painfully rocking her body to and fro;
for a great sorrow had fallen upon her life. She had been the mother of
three children, two had died in their infancy, and now her last, her
loved and only child was gone, but not like the rest, who had passed
away almost as soon as their little feet had touched the threshold of
existence. She had been entangled in the mazes of sin and sorrow; and
her sun had gone down in darkness. It was the old story. Agnes, fair,
young and beautiful, had been a slave, with no power to protect herself
from the highest insults that brutality could offer to innocence. Bound
hand and foot by that system, which has since gone down in wrath, and
blood, and tears, she had fallen a victim to the wiles and power of her
master; and the result was the introduction of a child of shame into a
world of sin and suffering; for herself an early