That night I learned, as never before, that I was not only a child, but
somebody's child. I was grander on my mother's knee than a king upon
his throne. But my triumph was short. I dropped off to sleep and
waked in the morning to find my mother gone, and myself again at the
mercy of the virago in my master's kitchen."
There is no record of another meeting between mother and son. She
probably died shortly afterward, because if she had been within walking
distance, he certainly would have seen her again. Her memory in his
child's mind was always that of a real and near personality. When he
became older, and conscious of his superiority to his fellows, he was
wont to say: "I am proud to attribute my love of letters, such as I may
have, not to my presumed Anglo-Saxon father, but to my sable,
unprotected, and uncultivated mother." Thus, after his mother died,
his vivid imagination kept before him her image, as she appeared to him
that last time he saw her, through all his struggles for a fuller and
freer life for himself and his race.
With the loss of his mother and grandmother, he came more and more to
realize the peculiar relation in which he and those about him stood to
Colonel Lloyd and Captain Anthony.
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