- While Tom is groaning in agony from his recent beating, Cassy comes to tend his wounds.
- Cassy tells him that his kindness is useless. Legree will beat it out of him.
- But Tom’s determined never to give up.
- Cassy says the problem is that Legree can do whatever he wants to Tom and nobody is going to stop him.
- In anguish, Tom asks Cassy for his Bible. Then he reads the words Christ speaks before he dies: "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Tom prays that he will be strong enough to refrain from sin, no matter how badly he’s tempted by Legree’s cruel treatment.
- Cassy tells Tom her story: her father was a rich white man, and she was bought up in luxury. When she was fourteen, she was sold to a man whom she loved. They had children together, though they didn’t marry. Finally, he fell in love with a white woman and sold Cassy and the children away.
- She was bought by a man who used her as a concubine and sold her children. When she saw her son on the streets one day, sold to another, she ran home and tried to kill her master. When she woke up, she was in another room. She was sold to yet another gentleman who did try to find her children. They had a son together, but she killed the boy because she was unwilling to let her child live a life of misery and slavery.
- Eventually, that master died and she was sold to Simon Legree, where life has been one endless misery after another.
- Cassy says to Tom, "You tell me…that there is a God, – a God that looks down and sees all these things. May be it’s so. The sisters in the convent used to tell me of a day of judgment, when everything is coming to light; – won’t there be vengeance, then!"
- Tom wishes that he could help Cassy see that God loves her and is with her, but she just tells Tom that he should sleep now.