When we were fairly in the open of Major Beverly's plantation some
few torches were lit, and then I saw that we were indeed a good
hundred strong, and of the party were that old graybeard who had
played Maid Marion on Mayday, and many of the Morris dancers, and
those lusty lads and lasses, and they had been at the cider this
time as at the other, but all had their wits at their service.
Not a light was in Major Beverly's great house, not a stir in the
slave quarters. One would have sworn they were all asleep or dead.
But Captain Jaynes called a halt, and divided us into rank and file
like a company of reapers, and to work we went on the great tobacco
fields.
I trow it seemed a shame, as it ever does, to invoke that terrible
force of the world which man controls, whether to his liberty or his
slavery 'tis the question, and bring destruction upon all that fair
inflorescence of life. But sometimes death and destruction are the
means to life and immortality. Those great fields of Major Robert
Beverly's lay before us in the full moonlight, overlapping with the
lusty breadth of the new leaves gleaming with silver dew, and upon
them we fell. We hacked and cut, we tore up by the roots. In a trice
we were bedlam loosened--that is, the ruder part of us. Some of
us worked with no less fury, but still with some sense of our own
dignity as destroyers over destruction. But the rabble who had
swelled our ranks were all on fire with rage, and wasted themselves
as well as the tobacco. They filled the air with shouts and wild
screams and peals of laughter. That fiercest joy of the world, the
joy of destruction, was upon them, and sure it must have been one of
the chiefest of the joys of primitive man, for all in a second it
was as if the centuries of civilisation and Christianity had gone
for naught, and the great gulf which lies back of us to the past had
been leapt. One had doubted it not, had he seen those old men
tearing up the tobacco plants, their mouths dribbling with a slow
mutter of curses, for they had drunk much cider, and being aged, and
none too well fed, it had more hold on them than on some of the
others; and to see the women lost to all sense of decency, with
their petticoats girded high on account of the dew, striding among
the plants with high flings of stalwart legs, then slashing right
and left with an uncertainty of fury which threatened not only
themselves but their neighbours as well as the tobacco, and
shrieking now and then, regardless of who might hear, "Down with the
king!"