They Were Endeavoring To Direct His Attention To What They
Considered The Wholesome Spectacle Before Him.
"_Mira, mira, no te harda
dano_"[6] said the men, but the boy steadily refused to look in that
direction, though he was evidently terrified by some threat of punishment
and his eyes filled with tears.
Finding him obstinate, they desisted from
their purpose, and I was quite edified to see the little fellow continue
to look away from the spectacle which attracted all other eyes but his.
The white boy now came forward, touched the hat of the little black, and
goodnaturedly saying "_pontelo, pontelo_"[7] made him put it on his head.
The crowd now began to disperse, and in twenty minutes the place was
nearly solitary, except the sentinels pacing backward and forward. Two
hours afterward the sentinels were pacing there yet, and the dead man, in
his white dress and iron collar, was still in his seat on the platform.
It is generally the natives of Africa by whom these murders are
committed; the negroes born in the country are of a more yielding temper.
They have better learned the art of avoiding punishment, and submit to it
more patiently when inflicted, having understood from their birth that it
is one of the conditions of their existence. The whip is always in sight.
"Nothing can be done without it," said an Englishman to me, who had lived
eleven years on the island, "you can not make the negroes work by the mild
methods which are used by slaveholders in the United States; the blacks
there are far more intelligent and more easily governed by moral means."
Africans, the living witnesses of the present existence of the
slave-trade, are seen everywhere; at every step you meet blacks whose
cheeks are scarred with parallel slashes, with which they were marked in
the African slave-market, and who can not even speak the mutilated Spanish
current in the mouths of the Cuba negroes.
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