The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [30]
"You know nothing about it," snapped the slave’s mistress.
"I know what we all see, that for the sake of a pair of shoes—"
"A new and expensive pair! Believe me, if I could free myself of the girl, I would. You have a smart traveling outfit on, and you and I are about the same size. I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you the girl for your dress and the hat I saw you wearing with it. Then you can give her her freedom or not, as you please."
The New York woman was much taken aback and soon realized that the rest of us had all fallen silent and were watching her. The young slave woman was watching her, too.
Finally, her face went red, and she turned her back and walked away to her stateroom. The slave owner said, "You see? She didn’t buy you. Go back down to the lower deck with Pearl; I can’t stand the sight of you anymore."
The northern woman came off at a considerable disadvantage from this, with many in the ladies’ cabin saying, "They are plenty happy to be telling us what to do, but that’s all they really care about" and "They are perfectly happy for us to be with the niggers on an equal footing, but you know, they won’t touch them" and "All you really have to do is stand up to them, just like any other bully." There was much nodding and consenting to all of this.
I didn’t say anything, but I thought that the slave-owning woman had shown considerable wit, and I only wished that the northern woman had matched her. I know what I would have done. I would have said, in a very dignified manner, "I have no desire to own slaves, but I will give you my shoes if you will set her free." You could always take off your shoes right then and there, and that would be a seizing of the advantage.
That night, when I related the incident to Thomas in the privacy of our stateroom, he was much interested, but he didn’t think as ill of the northern woman as most of the women had. "You see," he whispered, "she couldn’t even put a girl and a dress in the same category."
"The girl herself could. She was ready enough to be traded for a dress."
The thing that always struck me about these disputes was that most things most people said seemed right enough for you to agree with, but the more sentiments you agreed with, the more confused you became, I asked Thomas if he was ever confused about this issue. He said he was not.
The next morning, the slave-owning woman and her party disembarked at Lexington.
From there it was only another day’s journey to Kansas City, hardly a city, or a town, or a village, but only a high bluff above the river and a little track running along it, nothing like Saint Louis. There were bigger towns farther up the river, which some of the other passengers were going to— Leavenworth was the name of one and Weston another—but as our preliminary plan was to go to the town of Lawrence and find Thomas’s friends, we disembarked at Kansas City. There had sometimes been discussion of Kansas City as a thriving western metropolis at Horace Silk’s store, but this village was not the Kansas City they were referring to there. Nor did I see how Kansas City could ever become the populous city that Saint Louis was, for great tree-clad declivities towered above the levee, and all goods had to be hauled up them on narrow paths. They were difficult to scale, even unburdened with goods.
There were plenty of folks around, though, and here in Kansas City we saw yet another new sort of person. The place was full of men I would soon come to know and fear as Border Ruffians. These men were Missourians, and to tell the truth, they reminded me forcibly of Roland Brereton, everlastingly G— d—ing everything, everlastingly working at a plug of tobacco and spitting every minute or so. Their hair hung down, long and dirty. They went armed, even walking down the "street," a big pistol