Chapter XXXIX: A Visit of Tender Memories 320 (5)

_La Belle Creole!_ That name will bring a smile, mayhap a tear, to your grandmother, so many sweet reminiscences of her young girlhood may be associated with the little coast packet that carried her a-visiting from New Orleans to plantation homes in “the days that were,” those leisurely days when there were no rail cars tearing and crashing over the land, no express companies to forward packages, no common carriers of any sort. A boat like _La Belle Creole_ was a necessity. On her trips she stopped at every little town and country post office, like Brusle landing and Lobdell’s store; answered every signal and every hail, shuttling across the river, back and forth, touching here for a keg of _sirop de batterie_, a hamper of oranges; touching at the very next plantation to take in somebody’s carpetbag or put ashore somebody’s darky, Capt. Ure always at his post on deck to expedite every move. _La Belle Creole_ was not a freight boat, but a passenger packet, par excellence. There were boats galore to handle freight, but only one _Belle Creole_! “Steamboat ahoy!” We slow up, a gentleman rushes down from his plantation house, followed by a darky, carpetbag in hand. A plank is quickly run out, touching the shore, steadied by deckhands; passenger rushes aboard, has a handshake with Capt. Ure, and away we go to perhaps another hail. In the cabin the scene is like that of an “afternoon tea,” an “at home,” a “reception,” whatever you will, for everybody knows everybody, and everybody shakes hands with everybody, and thus the newcomer is welcomed to the social atmosphere of a circle of Creole friends. “_Comment ça va?_” “_Aye! quel chance! c’est toi_,” are heard on every side, for some of these people rarely meet except in transit. And so, we sail along; the simple little craft is glorified by the magnetic influence of its passengers.

M. Champomier is on board. Everybody knows _le vieux_ Champomier. He mingles with all, conspicuously carries his memorandum book and pencil, and we all know he is “on business bent,” getting from any and every available source statistics of the year’s crop of sugar. Whether he acted for a corporation, or it was his individual enterprise, I never knew, but he visited the planters, traveled up and down and all around the sugar region, and in the spring compiled and computed and published in a small, paper-covered book (price $5) the name and address of every planter and the amount of sugar made on each individual estate. “Champomier’s report” was considered as authentic as need be for the planter to know what his neighbor’s crop actually amounted to, and the city merchant to adjust his mortgages and loans on a safe basis.

It was after midnight when the plank was thrown out to touch the levee of the Valcour Aime plantation; midnight in late March, 1847. Deckhands steadied the wabbling plank till three persons and their little baggage were safely landed ashore. A tram (as it is called to-day) was awaiting the doctor, Tante Lise and myself, then a girl of fifteen. Darkies with torches preceded and followed us to the house, not so far away, only a short walk, but Tante Lise must not be permitted to walk at that hour of the night. The tram was nothing more than a flat car, fitted for the occasion with seats, on a short railroad leading to the sugar refinery, which I believe was the first in the state. A dusky housekeeper received us at the house. Not knowing at what hour we might appear, the family had retired. _Belle Creole_, as may be supposed, had no fixed schedule of arrivals or departures. Fires were already alight in our rooms, affording a cheery welcome. Before we were ready for bed basins of hot water were brought for the inevitable foot bath of the Creole. Something warm to drink, a _tisane_ probably—I remember I thought it might be ambrosia, fit for the gods, it was so deliciously refreshing. Then I was tenderly tucked into bed, and told to “_dormez bien_,” which I straightway proceeded to do.

The sun was already proclaiming a bright spring day when I inhaled the odor, and opened my eyes to a full-blown rose on my pillow; and gracious, how good! a steaming cup of _café au lait_. On our descent to the breakfast room we received an effusive and cordial greeting from M. and Mme. Valcour, and their daughter Félicie, a girl of my own age. The air was redolent of the delicious odor of roses, the windows open to the floor upon the garden, the floor of the room not one step higher than the garden walks. The Valcour Aime house was a two-story structure. The long, main building faced, of course, the roadway and the river; there was a long L at each end, running back, thus forming three sides of a square court. A broad and partly jalousied balcony extended entirely around the three sides of the building, fronting the court. This balcony afforded the entrances to a seemingly endless series of living and sleeping rooms, the whole house being, so to say, one room deep only. The first floor, flush with the ground, was entirely paved with square blocks of stone or brick. There were to be found the small and the grand dining rooms, the master’s office and den and the various and sundry domestic departments. The salon opened on the second floor balcony. The paved court below was protected by the deep balconies and an awning. The assemblage of all the family and the favorite resort of their multitudinous guests, madame’s basket, mademoiselle’s embroidery frame, the box of cigars, the comfortable lounging chairs, were to be found in that entrancing court.

M. Valcour, tall and graceful, was at that time in the prime of life, and was my (romantic) ideal of a French marquis; Mme. Valcour, inclined to _embonpoint_ and vivacious, kissed me and called me “_ma petite_,” though I was quite her height. But the charm of my visit to that incomparable mansion, the like of which is not to be found on the Mississippi River to-day, was the daughter, Félicie, who at once took me under her wing and entertained me as only a well-bred young girl can. She showed me all over the premises, opening door after door, that I could see how adequate the accommodations for the guests who frequently filled the house; into the salon that I might see and listen to the chimes of the gilt clock Gabie had sent from Paris. Gabriel Aime, the only son, was then in Europe. Sweet Félicie never tired of talking of Gabie and showing me the pretty trifles from abroad (so far away then) he had sent home from time to time. She sent for the key, and opened the door of Gabie’s room, that I might see how he had left it, and, “Mamma won’t have a thing changed; she wants him to find his gun and boots and cap just where he left them.” Girl-like, she confided to me that she would be a young lady when Gabie came, and they would have a house in the city and a box at the opera, for Gabie loved music.

By this time a number of the Roman family arrived. M. Valcour’s oldest daughter had married Gov. Roman’s son, and a flock of Roman grandchildren came with their parents to welcome the doctor and Tante Lise, and incidentally the young girl with them. The Valcours and Romans were closely related, independent of the marriage of their children. Both families being related to Tante Lise also, there was a great reunion and rejoicing when the tante made her annual visit. The governess, a New England woman, was accorded a holiday, in which Félicie participated. Years after, perhaps as many as forty years, I met and renewed acquaintance with that governess in her New England town. Only recently she passed away, having outlived, I understand, all the little pupils who clustered around “Dear Miss Goddard.”

Félicie and I, with a whole escort of followers, explored the spacious grounds, considered the finest in Louisiana. There was a miniature river, meandering in and out and around the beautifully kept parterres, the tiny banks of which were an unbroken mass of blooming violets. A long-legged man might have been able to step across this tiny stream, but it was spanned at intervals by bridges of various designs, some rustic, some stone, but all furnished with parapets, so one would not tumble in and drown, as a little Roman remarked. If it had not been before Perry’s expedition to Japan, at any rate before his report was printed and circulated, one might have supposed M. Valcour received his inspiration in landscape gardening from the queer little Eastern people. There were summer houses draped with strange, foreign-looking vines; a pagoda on a mound, the entrance of which was reached by a flight of steps. It was an octagonal building, with stained-glass windows, and it struck my inexperienced eye as a very wonderful and surprising bit of architecture. Further on was—a mountain! covered from base to top with beds of blooming violets. A narrow, winding path led to the summit, from which a comprehensive view was obtained of the extensive grounds, bounded by a series of conservatories. It was enchanting. There I saw for the first time the magnolia frascati, at that date a real rarity.

Another day, doctor, Tante Lise, Félicie and I were rowed in a skiff across the river to Sacré Cœur Convent to see tante’s adopted daughter, Marie. I recall spending the day there, the kindly nuns showing the little heretic all through the building, and being rowed back to the plantation at sunset.

Next morning the _Belle Creole_ was due, and our visit to fairyland was drawing to a close. The call, “_la Vapeur_,” rushed us to the landing in the tram, the “whole pack in full cry” of the Roman children running by the side and calling adieu to dear Tante Lise. We gingerly walked the plank, in single file. The boat backed out to get her leeway, and once more for a moment we were in full view of the house. Two figures fluttered handkerchiefs from the balcony, Mme. Valcour and Félicie waving a last adieu—alas! a last. On entering the cabin, behold the ubiquitous M. Champomier, with his everlasting book and pencil. As he greeted the doctor I heard (in French, of course), “Can you tell me the exact amount of——?” I fled, and at the rear end of the boat I had one more last glimpse of Valcour Aime’s plantation. Alas! the last.

A month later I was on a clipper ship, the _Silas Holmes_, bound for a New England school. That Yankee, _Silas Holmes_, was a transport during the war, and like many a war relic has long been out of commission, if not out of existence. And the dainty _Belle Creole_, gone too! like thousands of Belles Creoles of her day and date.

Dear Félicie married Alfred Roman, adding another link of relationship to the Roman and Valcour Aime families, and the adored and only son, Gabriel Aime, died (I think Tante Lise wrote me) abroad.

I should like to know. No, I do not want to know. I already know too many wrecked homes and vanished fortunes and broken hearts. I want always to think of the Valcour Aime home and its charming hospitality, as I saw it and knew it, and loved it more than sixty years ago, when I waved a last adieu—alas! a last.

XXVI

THE OLD PLANTATION LIFE

It is almost a half century since the old plantation days. Only those who number threescore years and ten have a personal remembrance of the cares, duties and pleasures of the old plantation life. Only those who bore the cares, discharged the duties and prepared the way for the pleasures really understand the life that died and was buried fifty years ago. People who know so much about that fanatic John Brown and the fantastic “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are asking what one fought and bled for (did he bleed?) and what the other was written for. Some of those inquiring souls are over fifty years old, and what is more, their fathers were slave owners. The few of us tottering around who can tell of the old plantation life are threescore years and ten, and if we do not hasten to tell the story it may never be told. It is well to leave a record of a life that has passed beyond resurrection, a glorified record it may appear, for as we stand beside the bier of a loved and lifelong friend, we recall only his virtues. So as I look back on the old plantation life only the comforts and pleasures troop before me. It had its duties, but they were not onerous; its cares, but they were not burdensome, nor were its pleasures excessive. What we planned and accomplished for our slaves afforded us more satisfaction than any man of the present day can feel for his grand stables of hunters and roadsters and racers, that absorb his time and means....

Booker Washington, in that very interesting volume, “Up from Slavery,” tells of his early life when his mother (he never knew his father, and thinks he was a white man) was the slave of a well-to-do Virginia farmer, and the slave quarters had dirt floors. That may have been in the clay hills of Virginia, but I never saw a cabin, unless it was a pig pen, with a dirt floor. I am no apologist for slavery; the whites suffered more from its demoralizing influence than the blacks, but we were born to it, grew up with it, lived with it, and it was our daily life. We did well by it; no people could have done better. It is past now. When I tell of my own home it is to tell of the plantation homes of everybody I knew. We did not differ or vary to any extent in our modes of life and management.

Slaves were comfortably housed. Their cabins were elevated above the ground, two rooms in each building, a chimney between, a porch in front and windows on two sides. The slaves were well fed and well clothed in osnaburgs and linseys cut and made in the sewing room of the “big house.” Though the hook worm theory was not at that time exploited they were well shod. There were drones; I guess there were hook worms too, but we did not know it. The old and infirm had light tasks. Men pottered around the woodpile, or tended the cows on their promenades over the levee, and the women sewed a little and quarreled, as idly disposed old folks will, among themselves (we who visit almshouses now know how that is) or fussed with the frolicking children. I never saw in those days a negro with spectacles, or one who seemed to need them.

There was an infirmary for the sick, and a day nursery for the babies, under the charge of a granny, a well-ventilated room with a spacious fireplace, where pots and kettles were always on hand, mush and herb teas always on tap; there the babies were deposited in cribs all day while the mothers were at work in the fields. No woman went to work until her child was a month old. A large diary folio record was kept by the overseer of all the incidents of the plantation; when a woman was confined, when she was sent again to the field, who was ill in the hospital, if doctor was summoned, what part of the canefield was being cultivated day by day, when sugar-making began, when finished, what the yield of the various “cuts,” how many hogsheads and barrels of molasses shipped and by what boats; all these items and ever so many more were recorded. A doctor was employed at $600 per annum. He came only in extreme cases. Headaches and stomach aches, earaches, toothaches and backaches, all these minor ills came under the care of the overseer and “Gunn’s Domestic Medicine,” a formidable volume of instruction. The lady, the “mistis” of the big house, made frequent visits to the quarter lot, saw that things were kept tidy and ministered to the sick.

We did not have “made-over” dishes, cold meats nor stale bread on our tables; little darkies were sent by the half sick and aged for “left overs.” Children were not bottlefed or spoonfed; they consumed pot liquor and mush and molasses as soon as they were weaned. Corn, cowpeas and turnips were cultivated for the slaves, and when there was an overplus of garden vegetables it was sent to the quarter kitchen. Their meat was pickled pork—it was called “clear sides”—shipped from Kentucky or Missouri. All their cooking was done by two cooks in a big kitchen, but every cabin had a fireplace, with a pot or skillet, of course, for we all know how the darky dotes on little messes of her own doing. All the doors had locks, and the women went to the field with the key hung around their necks.

Each spring at house-cleaning, cabins were whitewashed inside and out; also the stables and other plantation buildings, the fences and trees as high up as a long pole or brush could reach. From Saturday noon till Monday was holiday, when the enterprising men chopped wood, for which they were paid, and the drones sunned themselves on the porch steps, and the women washed their clothes. I knew of only one planter who made his negroes work on Sundays. He was an Englishman who married into a plantation. The indignant neighbors called the attention of the grand jury in that case, with success, too. During sugar-making everybody worked day and night, but the season was short, terminating in December.

I cannot recall more than three deaths in ten years. I have no record to refer to (I guess that plantation folio afforded some information to the Union army). There was a burial ground for the slaves. One of them, the engineer, by the way, and a mighty good negro, too, acted as preacher. He married and buried and in all ways ministered to the spiritual needs of his flock. I recall teaching Lewis to sing “Canaan.” He wanted to learn a hymn, and had a lusty bass voice, while I did not have any at all. Lewis was not the only accomplished negro. We did not have white labor. There were slave carpenters, coopers, masons and sugar makers; women who cut and made all clothing, shirts, coats, pantaloons, dresses.

By law no child under ten years of age could be sold from its mother. I suppose that law is obsolete now! It happened a negro child born in the penitentiary of a convict mother, named Alroy, had to remain ten years in confinement; he was taught reading and writing, probably all the Rs, by the convicts, while he imbibed in such surroundings a good many less desirable accomplishments. Hon. Mr. Alroy represented his native parish in the Louisiana Legislature of reconstruction times. He was better fitted probably than some of his dusky colleagues, for he could read the laws; some of them could not. That is also of the dead past, thank God, and has no bearing on the old plantation life, except as an illustration of the law regarding slaves.

The “big house” had no fastenings on the front and back doors. In the absence of my husband one time I was awakened, in the dead hour of night, by a touch on my shoulder. “It’s me, mistis; de levee’s broke.” A crevasse! Without taking time to put on an extra gown, I was an hour giving orders and dispatching men to the planters, even twenty miles off, for assistance.

For a week thereafter, day and night, I fairly lived on horseback at the levee, superintending the repair work in place of my absent husband and our inefficient overseer. Each planter affected by the crevasse came, or sent an overseer with a force of slaves, who worked in hour shifts, to their waists in the water, driving piles and heaping sand bags. As the shifts changed the men were given a dram and hot soup or coffee, and sent to a huge bonfire nearby to dry themselves.

Another time I landed from a boat at the witching hour between midnight and dawn. The boat’s bell and whistle sounded to attract some light sleeper. By the time I was fairly ashore a glimmering light of a lantern was seen. I was escorted to the house by the coachman, but if any other negro had responded I should have felt quite as safe.

Mammy Charlotte was supreme in the domestic department. The little cupbearers from the quarters reported to her for the “dreenings” of the coffee pot or the left-over soup. The visitor by the library fire called to her for a glass of wine or a “finger” of whisky. I called Charlotte to ask what we were going to have for dinner. She was the busy one, and every plantation had just such a mammy. Charlotte and I belonged to the same church. When there was a vacant seat in the carriage Sunday morning she was called to occupy it.

One of our neighbors, that a New Englander would call a “near” man, owned a few acres adjoining ours, but too remote from his plantation to be advantageously cultivated. He would not fence his property nor work his road, nor keep his levee in repair (it was just there we had the crevasse); however, it afforded good pasturage for Uncle Billy’s cow, and for us, a supply of mushrooms. Billy’s nets and lines supplied us with shrimp and fish, small catfish that William cooked _à la pompano_, not a poor imitation of that delectable Gulf dainty. I heard Charlotte berating Billy for not bringing in some more of those fine shrimp, when he knew, too, there was company in the house. Imagine my consternation at Billy’s reply, “Dey done gorn; dat ole drowned mule is floated away.”

Col. Hicky was our nearest neighbor, on Hope estate. When the dear old man was eighty and I was twenty-five we were great chums. He never passed in his buggy if I was visible on the lawn or porch without stopping for a chat. There was frequent interchange of neighborly courtesies. He had fine large pecans, and we didn’t; we had celery and he didn’t, so there was much flitting back and forth of baskets. If we were having an unusual occasion, like the dinner my husband gave in honor of Messrs. Slidell and Benjamin, when they were elected to the United States Senate, a big basket came from Hope estate. Didn’t the dear old gentleman send a capon turkey which was too big for any dish we had, and didn’t we have to borrow the Hicky dish?

Col. Hicky had a birthday dinner, when he was eighty-two, and a grand dinner it was, to be sure. Sam Moore—I never knew just who he was, or why he was so essential at every function—sat at the host’s right. The Colonel was too deaf to hear all the _bon mots_, and Sam interpreted for him, and read in a loud voice all the toasts, some of which were very original and bright. Anyone remembering Col. Winthrop, or better still, Judge Avery, can understand there was no lack of wit and sparkle in any toast they might make.

XXVII

PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED

I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or, “People I Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I Have Entertained.” Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied life, I find myself dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since departed to the “House of Many Mansions,” guests who came and stayed, and went, some of whom I had never seen before, and some I never heard from after, but there are guests and guests, as every housewife knows. Particularly country house guests come, whose city houses are not open to what a neighbor of mine calls “trunk visitors.” In the days of which I write, every house, especially every plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string outside the door. I amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied assortment of visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to rest their mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about the gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffee pot, or the lady who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the innocence of their hearts.

The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal. Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent parish where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a young girl. With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the citadel, and to continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was put to flight. Now he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest, and salve his wounds at our home. I was amazed when my housemaid told me he had not only brought his valet, but his own linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood then why he was not an acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee pot would scare any prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he had committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans, a few years ago.

Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-president. The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were Buchanan and Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her husband mount to the top of the ladder of preferment, and did no little engineering in his behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was charming, a delightful visitor, a relative by marriage to us, but so remote, that if she had not been so lovely and the vice-president so distinguished, the dim connection would never have been thought of. Her aspirations were not realized, and he was tail to another presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did not meet Mrs. Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I saw her husband he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”

During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on the opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his grandiloquent flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to our house to stay till their _lares et penates_ were settled in their new home. The man, in the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style, accepted. When I asked how many there were in the family, my hospitable husband replied that he only heard mention of a wife. In due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever so much turning and backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as if to announce a surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at our levee, and a whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path to the house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged mother and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a darky with the baby in arms!

One guest room had been made ready, but three additional chambers were at once put in commission. By the time wraps had been removed and fresh fires made all over the house—it was mid-winter—I was ten times more breathless than my unexpected crowd. Every day for over a week the man and his wife were conveyed to their new home in our carriage, and there they stayed from morn to dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my special care. She was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed, all of us were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him to his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices, to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels carpets, all hours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse spanked it, and I didn’t care.

One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very diverting. They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered chair in the library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with hairpin and nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted mantel, till it looked like it had been taken from some buried city of Egypt. Thank goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of time the family moved into the new home, and gave a house-warming ball within the next week—_vive la bagatelle_!

Reading with great interest a newly published book, “The Circuit Rider’s Wife,” brings vividly to mind a visitor we once had. She was one of the sweetest and loveliest of women. She was a Methodist, the only one in a wide acquaintance I ever met, who claimed to have “the gift of sanctification.” I do not believe one possesses the power within oneself to resist sin, nor do I mean to inject religious views and doctrines in these remarks about “People I Have Entertained,” but I do say, if there ever was a really sanctified woman it was this Mrs. Abe Smith of Mississippi. She was our guest one short, happy, glorified week. She read her Bible chapter to us every morning, and prayed with and for us all day long, if we wanted, and we generally did, for surely she had the gift of prayer. I never listened to such uplifting prayers as dear Mrs. Smith could utter; her very voice was an inspiration. She was highly connected and highly cultivated and had a vocal training that comprised very intricate music, but with “The Coming of the Lord” she confined her voice entirely to psalms and hymns. Her mission was to pray and sing, but no doubt when the harvest was waiting, in some meeting house, she could exhort with an eloquence equal to the most earnest itinerant in the pulpit. We had one strange glorification and sanctification, but it was interrupted by the coming of a Methodist preacher, who claimed to having sought, in vain, the gift of sanctification. The last few days of lovely Sister Smith’s visit were spent in the library with closed doors, wrestling with the halting soul of Brother Camp.

These were the expiring days of the old “Peace which passeth understanding.” After that came the war, which sorely tried the heart of the glorified woman, and she proved faithful to her gift of sanctification even unto the bitter end....

One November day I entered my library with an open letter of introduction in my hand, to say to the young man, placidly warming himself at the fire, that the letter was not meant for my husband, who was not at home, but for his brother. He replied he understood the brother was not in Louisiana, and he took the liberty of transferring the introductory epistle to the next of kin. He was a young doctor, threatened with lung trouble, who had come South to spend some time in somebody’s sugar house. I frankly told him that our sugar house was not by any means a suitable place for an invalid, but (I glanced out of the door and saw his vehicle had departed and his trunk was on the porch) I would be pleased to have him remain my guest until my husband returned to see what could be devised to further the invalid’s plan. Northern and Western people, who never had been in a sugar house and inhaled the warm fumes of boiling cane juice, night and day, and incidentally submitted to the discomforts of an open building, not intended for sleeping quarters, thought that the treatment, as they chose to call it, was a cure for tuberculosis. My guest found himself quite comfortable, and remained in our home five months. Nothing more was said about sugar house treatment. By spring, like a butterfly, he emerged into the sunlight, strong and well and ready to fly to pastures new, which he did. We did not even hear from that doctor again. He was a physician in good practice in Galveston during the war, and told Gen. Magruder he thought he had met us years before!

Every planter in my day entertained strangers who came and went, like a dream. Some were grateful for their entertainment, some did not so much as write “bread and butter” notes, after their departure.

Queer, inquisitive folks lighted upon us now and then. I recall a party of Philadelphians who arrived at the adjacent town with a note of introduction to the president of the bank. They said they wanted to visit a plantation and see the working thereof. That hospitable husband of mine happened to be passing; he was called in and introduced to the party, and he invited them for the whole of the next day. They came, they saw, I don’t know if they thought they conquered. We thought so, for they were on a tour of observation. They were delightfully informal and interesting people. We accompanied them to the canefield—the negroes happened to be at work quite near the house—into some of the cabins, the infirmary, where they were surprised to find not one inmate, into the nursery where the babies were sleeping in cribs, and the older children eating mush and molasses. They had to taste the food, had to talk to the granny about her babies, had to ask after her health. Meeting a negro man, walking as brisk as anybody, with a hoe over his shoulder, they had to inquire as to his condition, and must have been surprised to hear what an awful misery he had in his back. They had to see where the plantation sewing, and the cooking, were done. I began to think before it was all over we were superintendents of some penal institution and were enduring a visit from the committee of inspection. However, they were very attractive, naïve visitors, surprised at everything. After luncheon, waited upon by a negro boy on a broad grin—it was all so very funny to him—they took their departure, and my husband and I had a merry laugh over the incidents of the day. It was rather an interesting interlude in our quiet life, and remoteness from the abolition storm that was hovering over the land.

All the people I entertained were not queer. We had a house full always of gay, young people, young girls from the North that were my schoolmates in New Haven, girls who were my play-mates, and the friends of my young ladyhood in New Orleans, fresh, bright, happy girls, who rode horseback, sang and danced and made merry all through the house. All are gone now. Only the sweet memory of them comes to me in my solitary day-dreams.

XXVIII

A MONUMENT TO MAMMIES

Let us have a memorial, before the last of us who had a black mammy passes away. We who still linger would love to see a granite monument to the memory of the dear mammy who fostered our childhood. Our grandchildren, indeed our children, will never know the kind of mammies their ancestors were blessed with.

I know of two only of the old stock of nurses and housekeepers left. They were grown women when Sherman marched through Georgia, destroying their old homes, laying waste the land, and Butler sat down in New Orleans, wreaking vengeance on their hapless masters, and scattering their little bands of servants to the four winds. These two mammies I wot of remained with their own white folks. The Georgia one lived in a family I visited, a faithful old woman, doing her utmost to fill a gap (and gaps were of constant occurrence) in any branch of household duty. Mammy was a supernumerary after the children grew up, but when the new-fangled housemaid swept her trailing skirts out of the premises, mammy filled her place till another of that same half-educated sort came. When cook flared up and refused to do her duty in the way to which she was called, mammy descended into the deserted kitchen.

One day I overheard the son of that family, who was about to start to a Northern college, say: “Mammy, put on your Sunday black silk; I want you to go down the street with me; I am going to have your picture taken.” “What fur, son?” “I want it with the rest of my family to put on my bureau at college.” “Lord! son, you ought’en to hav’ my black face to show to dem Yankees; den you’ll tell ’em I’se your mammy.” However, the pleased old darky, as black as her Sunday silk, had her picture taken just like “son” wanted. I have a copy of it now. God bless her!

A family from the extreme South comes every summer to a quiet place in Connecticut and brings mammy to take care of the little ones. I doubt if they feel they could come without her. Mammy is pure black; no adulterated blood under that skin—black, flat-nosed and homely, but the children adore her, and she “makes them mind, too,” she proudly tells you. Every boarder in that big house knows mammy, but I doubt if one of them knows her name; I do not. It warms my heart to shake hands with those two remnants of a dear past civilization, the only two I ever met.

When a child I made frequent visits to my cousin, Judge Chinn’s plantation, in West Baton Rouge. I believe that hospitable house has long since vanished into the river, with its store of pleasant memories. How I always, when I arrived there, had to run find mammy first thing, and how she folded me in her warm embrace and delighted my ears with, “How dis chile do grow.” Every visitor at that grand, hospitable home knew mammy. She always stood back of the judge’s chair, and with signals directed the young girls how to wait at table. She managed after the children grew up, married and settled (some of them settled, Creole fashion, in the home nest too) that whole big and mixed household, where another generation of babies came to claim a portion of her love and care. Nobody thought to go to the judge or his wife for anything. “All applications,” to use an office phrase, “made to mammy.” She was always ready to point the way or to help one through it.

Casually meeting Mrs. Chinn and inquiring of the various members of her family that from long absence I had lost sight of, “And mammy,” I said. The dear old lady burst into tears. Mammy had died holding the hand of the sorrowing mistress, her last words, “My work is done. I tried to do my best,” and God knows she did.

We had a mammy in my mother’s house when I was a wee little thing, and we children loved her right along all the week till Saturday night, when the ponderous woman brought the big washtub upstairs and two pails of hot water. We hated mammy then, for she had a heavy hand and a searching eye, and a rough wash rag full of soapsuds. Not a fold in the ear, nor a crease in the plump body escaped her vigilance. I really think we were glad when we outgrew need of her assistance at those dreaded Saturday night’s baths, and she went to other little lambs, in pastures new.

When I went a bride to my husband’s home, Charlotte, his old mammy, met us and proudly escorted us within doors, where were fresh flowers and a blazing fire (it was long past midnight, and dreadfully stormy too), and every comfort prepared and ready for “the coming of the bride.” I felt then and there mammy would be a comfort for me and a real help, and so she proved, in all my sunny life in the plantation home and in the dark days of the war, too. My Mammy Charlotte had complete charge of everything about the house. She had been thoroughly trained by my husband’s mother. She made the jellies and the pickles, the ice cream, the cakes, doing a little of everything to make our home comfortable and happy. And often she remarked that no one in the house did more and had less to show for it at night than she did. That is a truth about many households, one does all the neglected things, and picks up all the loose threads. Guests were made to understand if they required anything, from a riding horse to a fresh stick on the fire, from a mint julep to a bedroom candle, they had only to call Charlotte. She was never beyond the reach of a summons, day or night. She was mammy to all the children of the house, and all the other children that floated in from other people’s houses. It was Mammy Charlotte who hurriedly secreted the spoons (!) when a Federal cavalry company came prancing down the road toward our gates. It was mammy who ran to my bedside to whisper, “Don’t you get skeered, they does look like gentlemen;” and after they had taken a drink of water and trotted off again it was mammy back to say, “It’s all right; they didn’t say nothin’ ’bout spoons.” Even at that early date and that remote spot from Butler’s headquarters the matter of spoons had been so freely and laughingly discussed that the sable crowd of witnesses that surrounded every household must have taken the idea that collecting spoons was “the chief end of man.”

I pity the little ones of to-day with no black mammy of their very own to cuddle them to her warm bosom and comfort them, and tell them funny rhymes about “The Monkey and the Baboon’s Sister,” to make them forget their griefs in a merry laugh. The high-falutin’ nurses they have now, here to-day, gone to-morrow, without any anchorage in our hearts and homes, are not and never could be made mammies like we of threescore years and ten were blessed with.

Who of us that lived within a day’s journey of Col. Hicky but remembers his Milly, the mammy of that grand, big household? The dear Colonel lived to see great-grandchildren grow up, and Milly mammied at least three generations at “Hope Estate.” She was a famous nurse. Mind you, this was decades before trained nurses arrived on the stage. How many of us remember how tenderly and untiringly Milly nursed some of our invalids to health! Her services were tendered, and oh! how gratefully accepted. With a sad heart I recall a sick baby I nursed until Milly came and put me to bed and took the ailing child in her tender arms. For two days and nights unto the end she watched the little flickering spark.

When Mr. Sidell removed his family to Washington after his election to the United States Senate, I traveled in their company several days. The children had their colored mammy to care for them. She had been raised in the Deslonde family, a trusted servant. I was struck with the system and care with which she managed her little charges from Mathilde, a girl in her teens, down to baby Johnny. She lived with them during those troublous times in Washington, she accompanied the family to Paris, and I presume died there. Always dressed in a neat calico gown, a fichu and _tignon_, even in Paris she did not alter her dress nor wear another headgear than her own bandana. There’s a mammy to immortalize!

Then let us raise a monument to the mammies of the days that were. Quickly, too, before the last one of us who were crowned with such a blessing shall have passed away “’mid the shadows that flee in the night.”

XXIX

MARY ANN AND MARTHA ANN

The story of Mary Ann and Martha Ann and the red bonnet has been so often retold to my children and grandchildren that every detail has been retained, and in its completeness as I give it here, it is a bit of authentic family history “dressed up” as its hearers love it.

“What kin we do, Ma’y Ann? I dun hear Miss Liza talkin’ ’bout it agin, and ’lowin’ it got to be found.” The two little negroes sat under a wide-spreading pecan tree that scattered its shade and its late autumn nuts over the grassy lawn of a spacious Southern mansion. They crouched closely together, heads touching, voices whispering and faces turned to the river road, their scanty linsey skirts drawn tightly over little black legs, so that no searching eye from the broad veranda could spy them. Mary Ann looked anxiously around, and, drawing her knotty, kinky head closer still to Martha’s softer locks, whispered: “Marm Charlotte gwine to clean out de L, and you know she’ll go in dat room fust thing.”

Marthy sprang back with dilated eyes.

“Ma’y Ann, it carnt stay dar; it’s gotten to cum outen dar, oh Lordy! What did you put it dar in the fust place fur?”

“I didn’t put it dar.” Ma’y Ann’s eyes flashed. “You fotch it dar your own self, unner your apern; you sed it was yourn and Miss Ellen giv it to you.”

Marthy sprang to her feet. “Miss Ellen never giv me nothin’ in her whole life.” She shook her clenched fist in Ma’y Ann’s face, then burst into tears. The stolen conference, like many another that had preceded it, was opened in a spirit of mutual conciliation, but as the interview progressed and interest waxed, the poor little negroes became fierce in their alarm, fast losing sight of the turpitude of the deed committed in common in the over-mastering anxiety of each one to shift the entire blame on the other.

“Hush, gal, set down; I hear Marm Charlotte dis bery minit; she mustn’t kotch me under dis here pecon tree agin. I was down here yisterday, tryin’ to dig a hole where we’s settin’ now! I want ter berry de rotten thing. Marm Charlotte kotch’d me here, and she ax’d what I doin’ and I ’low’d I was gitten pecons fur de turkeys, and she ’sponded she low’d ter tell me when to feed de turkeys.”

Marthy Ann slowly resumed her seat, taking care to get well behind the pecan tree. She was nervously sobbing, “She’s kept me—a—lookin’ fur it—till I feared to go in—our—room—feared to find it—a settin’ on de baid—Oh, Ma’y Ann, what made you take hit?”

Ma’y Ann’s eyes flashed fire. She was of the heroic sort, and by no wise melted by Marthy’s lamentations and tears.

“I didn’t take hit; you tuck hit, and you know you did; you’s de biggest rascal on de place. You does a thing, den you goes whinin’ and cryin’ ’bout hit. I does a thing, I jist ’sponds fur hit and sticks hit out.”

Marthy wiped her eyes on the linsey skirt and tried to imbibe some of her companion’s courage.

“Well, Ma’y Ann, you put it whar tis and ghostes cum out ev’ry night and ties me wid de long, red strings.”

“No ghostes cum arter me,” said Ma’y Ann, bridling up. “Dat shows you put it dar your own self.”

“We ain’t got no time ter talk and fuss; we got ter find a place to put hit now. God knows it cums atter me ev’y night, and las’ night de debbel had it on, Ma’y Ann. I seed him; he jist strutted all around de room wid it on his haid and de ribbons was tied to his horns.”

“Oh, Lordy, Marthy, is he got hit now?” The terrified child sprang to her feet and gazed distractedly up the tree. “Marthy, we kin fling hit up in dis tree; won’t de debbil let hit stay in de crotch?”

The strained eyes eagerly searched for a sheltering limb that would catch and conceal the thing, the ghost of which would not lay, day or night. Marm Charlotte had never relaxed in her search, in bureaus, and armchairs, behind hanging dresses, in the big cedar chest, among the blankets, upon top shelves, in old bandboxes, in trunks, over bed testers, downstairs in china closets, among plates and dishes, under parlor sofas and over library bookcases. Ma’y Ann and Marthy Ann had no rest. They made believe to search the garden, after the house had been pulled to pieces, going down among the artichoke bushes and the cherokee rose hedge that smothered the orchard fence, wishing and praying somebody might find it in one of those impossible places all torn by squirrels or made into nests by birds.

* * * * *

Christmas, with its turkeys and capons fattened on pecan nuts, its dances and flirtations in the wide halls of the big house, its weddings and breakdowns in the negro quarters, had come and gone. The whirr of the ponderous mill had ceased; the towering chimney of the sugar house no longer waved its plume of smoke by day nor scattered its showers of sparks by night. Busy spiders spun nets over big, dusty kettles, and hung filmy veils from the tall rafters. Keen-eyed mice scampered over the floors and scuffled in the walls of the deserted building whence the last hogshead of sugar and barrel of molasses had been removed, and the key turned in the great door of the sugar house. Tiny spears of cane were sprouting up all over the newly plowed fields. Drain and ditches were bubbling over, and young crawfish darting back and forth in their sparkling waters. The balmy air of early summer, freighted with odors of honeysuckle and cape jessamine, and melodious with the whistle and trill of mocking birds, floated into the open windows and doors of the plantation dwelling. The shadowy crepe myrtle tree scattered crimpy pink blossoms over the lawn. Lady Banks rose vines festooned the trellises and scrambled in wild confusion over the roof of the well house, waving its golden radiance in the soft, sunny air. Cherokee and Chickasaw hedges, with prodigal luxuriance, covered the rough wooden fences, holding multitudes of pink and white blossoms in thorny embrace, and sheltering the secret nests of roaming turkey hens and their wild-eyed broods.

“Well, Levi, you’se dun your job, and it wus a big one, too.”

“Yes, William, I whitewashed as much as ten miles o’ fencing, and all de trees in de stable lot, besides de cabins and de chicken houses.”

“Ten miles o’ fencing,” replied William doubtfully. “I didn’t ’low dere wuz dat much on de whole plantation. Why, dey call hit ten miles from here to Manchac, and ’bout ten from here to Cohite.”

“I mean ten miles in and out; about five miles one side de fence and five miles de odder.”

“Oh! that-a-way,” said William dubiously. “Charlotte, give Mr. Stucker another dodger.”

The speakers were two negro men, one in the shirt sleeves and long apron that betokened the household cook, the other in the shiny, shabby “store clothes” of the town darky. They sat at the kitchen table, in front of a window commanding a view of newly whitewashed fences and trees. Etiquette required that William should play the rôle of host, on this, the last morning of the whitewasher’s stay. Charlotte had laid the cloth and placed the plates and knives for two, and served the fried bacon and hot corn dodgers to Mr. Levi Stucker, a free man, who had a house of his own and a wife to wait on him and in view of this dignity and state was deemed entitled to unusual consideration.