NEW FASHIONS: A LITTLE BONNET AND AN ALPACA SKIRT
The confessions of Matoaca:
"I will never forget how queer we thought the dress of the Northern
ladies. A great many came to Richmond, and Military Headquarters was very
gay. Band answered band in the neighbourhood of Clay and Twelfth Streets,
and the sound of music and dancing feet reached us through our closed
shutters.
"Some ladies wore on the streets white petticoats, braided with black,
under their dresses, which were looped up over these. Their gowns were
short walking length, and their feet could be seen quite plainly. That
style would be becoming to us, we said to ourselves, thinking of our small
feet--at least I said so to myself. Up to that time we had considered it
immodest to show our feet, our long dresses and hoop-skirts concealing
them. We had been wearing coal-scuttle bonnets of plaited straw, trimmed
with corn-shuck rosettes. I made fifteen one spring, acquired a fine name
as a milliner, and was paid for my work.
"I recall one that was quite stunning. I got hold of a bit of much-worn
white ribbon and dyed it an exquisite shade of green, with a tea made of
coffee-berries. Coffee-berries dye a lovely green; you might remember that
if you are ever in a war and blockaded. Our straw-and-shuck bonnets were
pretty. How I wish I had kept mine as a souvenir--and other specimens of
my home-made things! But we threw all our home-made things away--we were
so tired of make-shifts!--and got new ones as soon as we could. How eager
we were to see the fashions! We had had no fashions for a long time.
"When the Northern ladies appeared on the streets, they did not seem to
have on any bonnets at all. They wore tiny, three-cornered affairs tied on
with narrow strings, and all their hair showing in the back. We thought
them the most absurd and trifling things! But we made haste to get some.
How did we see the fashions when we kept our blinds closed? Why, we could
peep through the shutters, of course. Remember, we had seen no fashions
for a long time. Then, too, after the earlier days, we did not keep our
windows shut.
"I began braiding me a skirt at once. The Yankees couldn't teach me
anything about braid! To the longest day I live, I will remember the reign
of skirt-braid during the Confederacy! There was quite a while when we had
no other trimming, yet had that in abundance, a large lot having been run
through the blockade; it came to the Department. The Department got to be
a sort of Woman's Exchange. Prices were absurd. I paid $75 for a paper of
pins and thought it high, but before the war was over, I was thankful to
get a paper for $100. I bought, once, a cashmere dress for the price of a
calico, $25 a yard, because it was a little damaged in running the
blockade. At the same time, Mrs. Jefferson Davis bought a calico dress
pattern for $500 and a lawn for $1,000; one of my friends paid $1,400 for
a silk, another, $1,100 for a black merino. Mine was the best bargain. It
lasted excellently. I made it over in the new fashion after the
evacuation. One of the styles brought by the Northern ladies was black
alpaca skirts fringed. I got one as soon as I could.
"The Yankees introduced some new fashions in other things besides clothes
that I remember vividly, one being canned fruit. I had never seen any
canned fruit before the Yankees came. Perhaps we had had canned fruit, but
I do not remember it. Pleasant innovations in food were like to leave
lasting impressions on one who had been living on next to nothing for an
indefinite period."
The mystery of her purchase of the alpaca skirt and the little bonnet is
solved by her journal:
"I am prospering with my needlework. I sew early and late. My friends who
are better off give me work, paying me as generously as they can. Mammy
Jane has sold some of my embroideries to Northern ladies. Many ladies,
widows and orphans, are seeking employment as teachers. The great trouble
is that so few people are able to engage them or to pay for help of any
kind. Still, we all manage to help each other somehow.
"Nannie, our young bride, is raising lettuce, radish, nasturtiums, in her
back yard for sale. She is painting her house herself (with her husband's
help). She is going to give the lettuce towards paying the church debt.
She has nothing else to give. I think I will raise something to buy
window-panes for this house. Window-panes patched with paper are all the
fashion in this town.
"The weather is very hot now. After supper, we go up on Gamble's Hill, our
fashionable cooling-off resort, to get a breath of fresh air; then come
back and work till late in the night. O, for a glimpse of the mountains! a
breath of mountain air! But I can only dream of the Greenbrier White and
the Old Sweet Springs!
"Last night, on Gamble's Hill, we observed near us a party whom we
recognized by accent and good clothes as Northerners. One of the ladies,
looking down on our city, said: 'Behold the fruits of secession!' Below us
in the moonlight lay Richmond on her noble river, beautiful in spite of
her wounds. A gentleman spoke: 'Massachusetts thought of seceding once. I
am sorry for these people.' How I wanted to shout: 'Behold the fruits of
invasion!' But, of course, I did not. I thanked our advocate with my
eyes."
A few had a little store laid up previous to the evacuation. A short time
before that, the Confederate Government was selling some silver coin at $1
for $60 in notes; at Danville, it was sold for $70; and thrifty ones who
could, bought.
Women who had been social queens, who had had everything heart could wish,
and a retinue of servants happy to obey their behests and needing nothing,
now found themselves reduced to harder case than their negroes had ever
known, and gratefully and gracefully availed themselves of the lowliest
tasks by which they might earn enough to buy a dress for the baby, a pair
of shoes for little bare feet, coffee or tea or other luxury for an
invalid dear one, or a bit of any sort of food to replenish a nearly empty
larder.
The first greenbacks were brought to one family by a former dining-room
servant. His mistress, unable to pay him wages, had advised him to seek
employment elsewhere. At the end of a week, he returned, saying: "Mistiss,
here is five dollahs. I'm makin' twenty dollahs a month, an' rations,
waitin' on one uh de Yankee officers. I'll bring you my wages evvy week."
"John," she said, "I don't know how to take it, for I don't see how I can
ever pay it back." He knew she was in dire straits. "You took care uh me
all my life, Mistiss, an' learnt me how to work. I orter do whut I kin
fuh you." Seeing her still hesitate: "You got property, you kin raise
money on presen'y. Den you kin pay me back, but I'd be proud ef you
wouldn' bother yo'se'f." Could her son have done more? The Old South had
many negroes as good and true. Was the system altogether wrong that
developed such characters?
Some of our people had Northern friends and relatives who contrived money
to them. Mrs. Gracebridge was one of the fortunate; and everybody was
glad. No one deserved better of fate or friends. She had entertained many
refugees, was the most hospitable soul in the world. Had her table been
large enough to seat the world, the world would have been welcome. From
her nephew, living in New York, an officer of the United States Navy came
with a message and money.
She had a way of addressing everybody as "my dear friend." Her household
teasingly warned her that she was going to call this messenger "my dear
friend." "Never!" she exclaimed. "Never in the world will I call a Yankee,
'my dear friend!' Never! How can you say such a thing to me! I am
surprised, astonished, at the suggestion!" They listened, and before she
and her guest had exchanged three sentences, heard her calling him "my
dear friend," in spite of the insistent evidence of his gorgeous blue
uniform, gold lace and brass buttons, that he was decidedly a Yankee.
It was a custom, rooted and grounded in her being, to offer refreshments
to guests; when nothing else was left with which to show good feeling, she
would bring in some lumps of white sugar, a rarity and a luxury, and pass
this around. Never will spying intimates forget the expression of that
naval officer's countenance when, at her call, a little black hand-maid
presented on an old-fashioned silver salver, in an exquisite saucer, a
few lumps of white sugar! He looked hard at it; then grasped the
situation and a lump, glancing first at her, then at the sugar, as if he
did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
She was a delightful woman. She and her two little darkeys afforded her
friends no end of diversion. She had never managed her negroes in
slavery-time. After the war, everybody's darkeys did as they pleased; hers
did a little more so. At this pair, she constantly exclaimed, in great
surprise: "They don't mind a word I say!" "My dear lady!" she was
reminded, "you must expect that. They are free. They don't belong to you
now."
And she would ask: "If they don't belong to me, whose are they?" That was
to her a hopeless enigma. They had to belong to somebody. It was out of
decency and humanity that they should have nobody to belong to! They would
stand behind her chair, giggling and bubbling over with merriment.
THE GENERAL IN THE CORNFIELD