Chapter I: Introduction

While the influences and mechanisms of the present world tend to make all parts of it alike in thought and in costume, the various nooks and corners of our own country are gradually losing their original highly accentuated characteristics, and are merging into a general similarity. Most of what you hear and see any morning in the towns of Massachusetts you will hear and see in Omaha, Denver, Seattle, or anywhere else, because the department stores advertise and sell the same kind of clothes everywhere at the same time, and the same news is everywhere published in the daily papers.

Our American literature is therefore very lucky to have produced its Jewetts, Wilkinses, Cables, Craddocks, Pages, and Harrises, who have well set down for our perpetual interest and instruction the evaporating charm of their chosen fields.

Here is another book belonging to this valuable indigenous shelf of ours, a shelf where stand the volumes that tell of people and events that could have been met with nowhere in the world save upon our own native soil. Although it is not fiction, but a record of personal experience, it should prove to many readers as entertaining as our best fiction.

It is about the South, a particular part of the South, the rice-plantation coast of South Carolina. In this region, field and water and forest intermingle to form a strange, haunting scene, full of character and mystery. To dine with a neighbor here, one needs both the horse and the boat; travel has to be amphibious. And in this region, too, the marks that were made by the old days have been by the new days obliterated less than in most parts of our country. The Massachusetts, the New York, the Pennsylvania of fifty years ago, have been swept into albums and libraries; shelves and cabinets are their resting-place. Would you know how yonder large mills looked in 1860? No mills were there then, the spot was a pond, with a country road and a farm-house about half a mile down the road; perhaps somebody has a photograph or a wood-cut showing it as it used to be. That is what most of us in the North and East have to do—pull down old books, pull open old drawers—if we would see the former aspect of our neighborhood.

Not so is it in the country of the rice. The Southerner of to-day can still trace the fields and woods of old. His house may be roofless, his garden walks a tangle, but the avenue of live oaks still stands, the chimney of his mill still rises above a pile of crumbled bricks, at the doors of the cabins the negroes still sit, clad in a fashion not yet changed beyond recognition. The fields themselves may have had their banks cut and dissolved away by unresisted freshets, but still they are visible, still the unchanged river pours between and around them, and still the boat loads of people creep and prowl through the cuts.

True it is that no longer are these people well-to-do neighbors going to visit each other, rowed by an ebony crew in uniform that chants plantation songs in rhythm to the strokes of its oars—those neighbors are most of them lying in the graveyard of St. Michael's, Charleston, or in the lovely enclosures surrounding the little silent country churches upon which one sometimes emerges during a long ride through the woods. They who go in the boats to-day are apt to be less prosperous, whatever their color, and when they are black they may very likely be poachers who do not sing. But in spite of these differences, the general scene is the same.

Thus the mark of the old days remains visible; emancipation has by no means obliterated it; emancipation has merely brought to a close the old days themselves, without building on top of them anything new; it is Time that gently and silently and slowly is strewing its leaves upon that ended era.

But certain Southerners, loving their old land and custom, have struggled to keep alive the rice-planting, to mend their roofs and doors, to guard the flame upon their old hearths, and to teach good conduct and Christian faith to the young negroes unshackled from slavery indeed, but flung into space without master, or law, or guide. Once engulfed by the towns, these hapless blacks become a prey to every primitive and every sophisticated vice.

Struggle is too pale a word for the decades of efforts and obstacles that these courageous Southerners have known, particularly since rice has come to be grown so successfully elsewhere; and when the devoted planter happens to be a woman, the measure of daily indomitableness is full and runs over.

Such a life of such a woman is described in these pages; with its humor and it poignancy mingling at every turn, with the performances of the negroes, the performances of the animals, and the ceaseless and miscellaneous distractions and dangers of the mistress, all told with perfect vividness and simplicity. As the narrative proceeds, the reader gradually perceives that he has met with a Southern picture unsurpassed, and that it makes a native document of permanent historic value. It should be the companion volume to that admirable account of Eliza Pinckney written by Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel; together, these two books record the South Carolina lady and her plantation, first in the days of her prosperity and then in the later days. Now and then one meets some one with a natural gift of style so complete that it flows from the pen as song from a wild bird; but most rare is it to find this gift and the experiences it portrays united in the same person.

OWEN WISTER.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The sheaves are beaten with flails Frontispiece

PAGE

"Cherokee"—my father's place 4

Bonaparte 7

Each field has a small flood-gate, called a "trunk" 9

Marcus began work on the breaks 10

"The girls shuffled the rice about with their feet until
it was clayed" 11

Near the bridge two negro women are fishing 14

A request from Wishy's mother, Annette, for something to
stop bleeding 17

Green thought it was folly and fussiness 27

She picked her usual thirty-five pounds alone 31

To-day the hands are "toting" the rice into the flats 34

"You see a stack of rice approaching, and you perceive a pair
of legs, or a skirt, as the case may be, peeping from
beneath" 35

Chloe 40

Front porch—Casa Bianca 42

Elihu was a splendid boatman 51

My little brown maid Patty is a new acquisition and a great
comfort,for she is very bright 53

The roughness and plainness of the pineland house 54

The yearly powwow at Casa Bianca 60

"Four young girls who are splendid workers" 62

She promised not to war any more 65

"Myself, ma'am, bin most stupid" 66

A rice field "flowed" 72

The hoe they considered purely a feminine implement 79

The back steps to the pineland house 84

"A very large black hat" 87

Her husband brought her in an ox cart 93

"Old Maum Mary came to bring me a present of sweet potatoes" 98

"Pa dey een 'e bald" 102

One or two hands in the barn-yard 107

A corner of Casa Bianca 109

"Chaney" 112

Five children asked me to let them "hunt tetta" 120

"It is tied into sheaves, which the negroes do very
skilfully, with a wisp of the rice itself" 122

"The field with its picturesque workers" 124

"The Ferry" 132

His wife was very stirring 136

Day after day I met Judy coming out of her patch 138

"Old Florinda, the plantation nurse" 144

"Miss Patience, le' me len' yer de money" 150

"Jus' shinin' um up wid de knife-brick" 159

Aphrodite spread a quilt and deposited the party upon it 164

"Then he could talk a-plenty" 171

Chloe is devoted to the chicks—feeds them every two hours 174

Prince Frederick's Pee Dee 178

Prince George Winyah 180

"Eh, eh, I yere say yu cry 'bout chicken" 187

The summer kitchen at Cherokee 188

The winter kitchen at Cherokee 189

The string of excited children 190

I got Chloe off to make a visit to her daughter 198

I really do not miss ice, now that my little brown jug is
swung in the well 200

Patty came in 210

"Plat eye!" 216

Goliah cried and sobbed 225

Had Eva to sow by hand a little of the inoculated seed 232

Her little log cottage was as clean as possible 236

The sacred spot with its heavy live oak shadows 242

"I met Dab on the road" 249

Cherokee steps 250

The smoke-house at Cherokee for meat curing 260

Sol's wife, Aphrodite, is a specimen of maternal health
and vigor 262

I saw a raft of very fine poplar logs being made 263

Cypress trees 265

She was a simple, faithful soul—always diligent 270

Winnowing house for preparation of seed rice 272

"Patty en Dab en me all bin a eat" 276

Chloe began: "W'en I bin a small gal" 288

I took Chloe to Casa Bianca to serve luncheon 299

"I read tell de kumfut kum to me" 309

"Up kum Maum Mary wid de big cake een de wheelbarrer" 311

Gibbie and the oxen 313

In the field—sowing 317

How to lay the breakfast table 321

Joy unspeakable 326

The church in Peaceville 331

Chloe was a great success at the North 338

My old summer home at Pawleys Island 349

The roof of the house on Pawleys Island—from the sand-hills 352

"En de 'omans mek answer en say: 'No, ma'am; we neber steal
none'" 356

"Dem all stan' outside de fence" 367

Fanning and pounding rice for household use 375

Pounding rice 376

The rice-fields looked like a great lake 399

Casa Bianca 422

Rice-fields from the highlands 439

"You see I didn't tell no lie" 442

A WOMAN RICE PLANTER