“Buy me, mistress!” “You’ll see how I can work, master!” “You’ll never be sorry, mistress!” of the others.  The negro-trader—­like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted by nature for their profession—­it came into his head—­he had no heart, not even a negro-trader’s heart—­that it would be more judicious to seclude her during these shopping visits, so to speak.  She could not have had any hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations.

That auction-block, that executioner’s block, about which so much has been written—­Jacob’s ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and down—­well, perhaps Jacob’s angels were his hopes, too.

At times she determined to depreciate her usefulness, mar her value, by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose.  For days she would tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner, strangling her impulses.  She even malingered, refused food, became dumb.  And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to maintain her role long enough.  But some woman or baby always was falling into some emergency of pain and illness.

How it might have ended one does not like to think.  Fortunately, one does not need to think.

There came a night.  She sat alone in the vast, dark caravansary—­alone for the first time in her life.  Empty rags and blankets lay strewn over the floor, no snoring, no tossing in them more.  A sacrificial sale that day had cleared the counters.  Alarm-bells rang in the streets, but she did not know them for alarm-bells; alarm brooded in the dim space around her, but she did not even recognize that.  Her protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind to all but one peradventure.

Once or twice she forgot herself, and limped over to some heap to relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper.  Morning came.  She had dozed.  She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still as corpses.  The alarm-bells had ceased.  She looked to see a new gang enter the far door.  She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices in the next room, around the auction-block.  She waited for the trader.  She waited for the janitor.  At nightfall a file of soldiers entered.  They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of the negro-trader.  That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of incomprehensibility about her.  She hobbled through the auction-room.  Posters, advertisements, papers, lay on the floor, and in the torch-light glared from the wall.  Her Jacob’s ladder, her stepping-stone to her hopes, lay overturned in a corner.

You divine it.  The negro-trader’s trade was abolished, and he had vanished in the din and smoke of a war which he had not been entirely guiltless of producing, leaving little Mammy locked up behind him.  Had he forgotten her?  One cannot even hope so.  She hobbled out into the street, leaning on her nine-year-old broomstick (she had grown only slightly beyond it; could still use it by bending over it), her head tied in a rag kerchief, a rag for a gown, a rag for an apron.