Capt. Helm was driving on in his milling, distillery and farming business.
He now began to see the necessity of treating his slaves better by far
than he had ever done before, and granted them greater privileges than he
would have dared to do at the South. Many of the slaves he had sold, were
getting their liberty and doing well.
CHAPTER X.
HIRED OUT TO A NEW MASTER.
While I was staying with my master at Bath, he having little necessity for
my services, hired me out to a man by the name of Joseph Robinson, for the
purpose of learning me to drive a team. Robinson lived about three miles
from the village of Bath, on a small farm, and was not only a poor man but
a very mean one. He was cross and heartless in his family, as well as
tyrannical and cruel to those in his employ; and having hired me as a
"slave boy," he appeared to feel at full liberty to wreak his brutal
passion on me at any time, whether I deserved rebuke or not; nor did his
terrible outbreaks of anger vent themselves in oaths, curses and
threatenings only, but he would frequently draw from the cart-tongue a
heavy iron pin, and beat me over the head with it, so unmercifully that he
frequently sent the blood flowing over my scanty apparel, and from that to
the ground, before he could feel satisfied.
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