Finally, I believe in Patience--patience with the weakness of the Weak
and the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and the
ignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and the
mad chastening of Sorrow.




I

THE SHADOW OF YEARS


I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five
years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, with
clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five
rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious
strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the
Berkshire Hills, owned all this--tall, thin, and black, with golden
earrings, and given to religious trances. We were his transient tenants
for the time.

My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years before,
Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the Hudson with his
Dutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt," sullen in his slavery and achieving
his freedom by volunteering for the Revolution at a time of sudden
alarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman, who never became
reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her knees and rocked and
crooned: