Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful n*****, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced.
– Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck wrestles with his conscience over the fate of runaway slave Jim, who has been sold back into captivity by the two conmen.