| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: opinion of their best friends, that they should quit
America as speedily as possible, and seek an asylum
in England! Oh! shame, shame upon us, that
Americans, whose fathers fought against Great Bri-
tain, in order to be FREE, should have to acknow-
ledge this disgraceful fact! God gave us a fair and
goodly heritage in this land, but man has cursed it
with his devices and crimes against human souls
and human rights. Is America the 'land of the
free, and the home of the brave?' God knows it
is not; and we know it too. A brave young man
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: to trade or shoot. Then I knew that the drift was straight ahead
of us, and called to Anscombe to flog up the weary horses.
We reached the river just before the dawn. To my horror it was
very full, so full that the drift looked dangerous, for it had
been swollen by the thunder-rain of the previous night. Indeed
some wandering Swazis on the further bank shouted to us that we
should be drowned if we tried to cross.
"Which means that the only thing to do is to stay until the water
runs down," I said to Anscombe, for the two women, tired out,
were asleep.
"I suppose so," he answered, "unless those Basutos--"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: from my elders how England had for years taunted us with our tolerance of
slavery while we boasted of being the Land of the Free--and then, when we
arose to abolish slavery, how she "jack-knived" and gave aid and comfort
to the slave power when it had its fingers upon our throat. Many of that
generation of my elders never wholly got over the rage and the wound.
They hated all England for the sake of less than half England. They
counted their enemies but never their friends. There's nothing unnatural
about this, nothing rare. On the contrary, it's the usual, natural,
unjust thing that human nature does in times of agony. It's the Henry
Ward Beechers that are rare. In times of agony the average man and woman
see nothing but their agony. When I look over some of the letters that I
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