Little did I think, in my pride, that I should be a slave.

I knew that I was to die, and hoped to die in battle: my skull would have been more prized than all the gold in the earth, and my skin would have been stuffed and hung up in a fetish-house--instead of which, I now boil the kettle for the young gentlemen!" "Well," replied Jack, "that's better than being killed and stuffed." "Mayhap it is," replied Mesty, "I tink very different now dan I tink den--but still, it women's work and not suit me." "They put me with others into a cave until the ship came, and then we were sent on board, put in irons, and down in the hold, where you could not sit upright--I wanted to die, but could not: others died every day, but I lived--I was landed in America, all bone, and I fetched very little money--they laughed at me, as they bid their dollars: at last a man took me away, and I was on a plantation with hundreds more, but too ill to work, and not intending to work.

The other slaves asked me if I was a fetish man; I said yes, and I would fetish any man that I did not like: one man laughed, and I held up my finger; I was too weak to get up, for my blood had long boiled with fever, and I said to him 'you shall die'; for I meant to have killed him as soon as I was well.
"He went away, and in three days he was dead.

I don't know how, but all the slaves feared me, and my master feared me, for he had seen the man die, and he, although he was a white man, believed in fetish, and he wished to sell me again, but no one would buy a fetish man, so he made friends with me; for I told him if I was beat he should die, and he believed me.

He took me into his house, and I was his chief man, and I would not let the other slaves steal and he was content.