One day he left me twenty-five bushels of coal to draw. By being broken of my rest the night previous, engaged in watching the coal pit, I was tired and sleepy. When I had drawn all the coal out, supposing I had put the fire out, I laid down to rest my weary limbs. The coal burned up. Mr. Gardner came into the woods where I lay asleep, hallooed and scared me up; he struck me with the shovel, and cut my head so that I knew nothing for two days. I was so weak from the loss of blood, that he was compelled to carry me home on his shoulders, covering himself with blood. His wife was very much alarmed. We were about a mile from home, and he told me not to speak of it.
At another time, he cut my head with a hoe handle, so that altogether I was sick for a long time. Mr. Gardner had a very quick temper, and would strike me with anything he happened to have in his hand, reckless of consequences.
One day, Eliza (a slave girl of his,) and myself, went into the water-melon patch, procured a melon and ate it. We were compelled to this by the promptings of hunger, for the living had not altered since the death of Mr. Bradford. Eliza was about eighteen years of age. For that offence, our cruel master stripped us and tied us both up together, and whipped us till the blood ran down on the ground in a puddle.
When I was sick, he used to send me into the place where they smoked meat, for fear I should vomit on the floor. On Wednesdays, there were meetings in the meeting-house, and Mr. Gardner used to make me stay away from the house, for the minister would come home with him, and he was fearful I should tell him of his cruel treatment. He did not say as Hagar of old--“Thou, God, seest me.”
One day he sent me to drive the horse from the peach tree. The horse kicked me in the head, and I was laid up six months. My head was sewed up; and I also received a great many knocks in the side, from the effects of which I have not yet recovered! On one occasion, he struck me in the mouth with an iron-toothed rake, which knocked out one of my front teeth. All this time, my more fortunate reader, I was a poor slave boy, with no one to pity me, with no parents to take my part. I had no father; no mother! But God pitied me. The eye of the all-merciful God, without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the ground, was upon me. He it was that bore my feeble spirit up, when my lacerated and quivering frame was writhing under the God-defying curse of slavery.