Everything was brand-new to her.
She had never before traveled in a sleeping-car. It delighted her to
watch the deft porter make up the berths; she decided that the
peculiar etiquette of sleeping-cars required that all travelers,
male and female, should be driven to bed by lordly colored men in
white jackets, and there left in cramped misery with nothing but an
uncertain, rustling curtain between them and the world; this, too,
at an hour when nobody is sleepy. Nancy wondered to see free white
citizens meekly obey their dusky tyrant. She got into her own lower
berth, grateful that she hadn't to climb like a cat into an upper.
She lay there staring, while the train whizzed through the night.
This had been the most momentous day of her life. That morning she
had been the hopeless slavey in the Baxter kitchen, an unpaid drudge
with her hand against every man and every man's hand against her.
She had been bullied and beaten, she had eaten leavings, and worn
cast-offs. Since her mother's death she had known the life of an
uncared-for child, the minimum of care measured against the maximum
of labor squeezed out of it.
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