coming here, dear E----, for, not being afraid of a rearing stallion, I
can ride; but, on the other hand, my aquatic diversions are all likely, I
fear, to be much curtailed. Well may you, or any other Northern
Abolitionist, consider this a heaven-forsaken region,--why? I cannot even
get worms to fish with, and was solemnly assured by Jack this morning that
the whole 'point,' i.e. neighbourhood of the house, had been searched in
vain for these useful and agreeable animals. I must take to some more
sportsman-like species of bait; but in my total ignorance of even the kind
of fish that inhabit these waters, it is difficult for me to adapt my
temptations to their taste.
Yesterday evening I had a visit that made me very sorrowful--if anything
connected with these poor people can be called more especially sorrowful
than their whole condition; but Mr. ----'s declaration that he will
receive no more statements of grievances or petitions for redress through
me, makes me as desirous now of shunning the vain appeals of these
unfortunates as I used to be of receiving and listening to them. The
imploring cry, 'Oh missis!' that greets me whichever way I turn, makes me
long to stop my ears now; for what can I say or do any more for them? The
poor little favours--the rice, the sugar, the flannel--that they beg for
with such eagerness, and receive with such exuberant gratitude, I can, it
is true, supply, and words and looks of pity and counsel of patience and
such instruction in womanly habits of decency and cleanliness, as may
enable them to better, in some degree, their own hard lot; but to the
entreaty, 'Oh missis, you speak to massa for us! Oh missis, you beg massa
for us! Oh missis, you tell massa for we, he sure do as you say!'--I
cannot now answer as formerly, and I turn away choking and with eyes full
of tears from the poor creatures, not even daring to promise any more the
faithful transmission of their prayers.
The women who visited me yesterday evening were all in the family-way, and
came to entreat of me to have the sentence (what else can I call it?)
modified, which condemns them to resume their labour of hoeing in the
fields three weeks after their confinement. They knew, of course, that I
cannot interfere with their appointed labour, and therefore their sole
entreaty was that I would use my influence with Mr. ---- to obtain for
them a month's respite from labour in the field after child-bearing. Their
principal spokeswoman, a woman with a bright sweet face, called Mary, and
a very sweet voice, which is by no means an uncommon excellence among
them, appealed to my own experience; and while she spoke of my babies, and
my carefully tended, delicately nursed, and tenderly watched confinement
and convalescence, and implored me to have a kind of labour given to them
less exhausting during the month after their confinement, I held the table
before me so hard in order not to cry that I think my fingers ought to
have left a mark on it. At length I told them that Mr. ---- had forbidden
me to bring him any more complaints from them, for that he thought the
ease with which I received and believed their stories only tended to make
them discontented, and that, therefore, I feared I could not promise to
take their petitions to him; but that he would be coming down to 'the
point' soon, and that they had better come then some time when I was with
him, and say what they had just been saying to me: and with this, and
various small bounties, I was forced, with a heavy heart, to dismiss them,
and when they were gone, with many exclamations of, 'Oh yes, missis, you
will, you will speak to massa for we; God bless you, missis, we sure you
will!' I had my cry out for them, for myself, for us. All these women had
had large families, and _all_ of them had lost half their children, and
several of them had lost more. How I do ponder upon the strange fate which
has brought me here, from so far away, from surroundings so curiously
different--how my own people in that blessed England of my birth would
marvel if they could suddenly have a vision of me as I sit here, and how
sorry some of them would be for me!
I am helped to bear all that is so very painful to me here by my constant
enjoyment of the strange wild scenery in the midst of which I live, and
which my resumption of my equestrian habits gives me almost daily
opportunity of observing. I rode to-day to some new cleared and ploughed
ground that was being prepared for the precious cotton crop. I crossed a
salt marsh upon a raised causeway that was perfectly alive with
land-crabs, whose desperately active endeavours to avoid my horse's hoofs
were so ludicrous that I literally laughed alone and aloud at them. The
sides of this road across the swamp were covered with a thick and close
embroidery of creeping moss or rather lichens of the most vivid green and
red: the latter made my horse's path look as if it was edged with an
exquisite pattern of coral; it was like a thing in a fairy tale, and
delighted me extremely.
I suppose, E----, one secret of my being able to suffer as acutely as I do
without being made either ill or absolutely miserable, is the childish
excitability of my temperament, and the sort of ecstacy which any
beautiful thing gives me. No day, almost no hour, passes without some
enjoyment of the sort this coral-bordered road gave me, which not only
charms my senses completely at the time, but returns again and again
before my memory, delighting my fancy, and stimulating my imagination. I
sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of
emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many
things can really be said to feel anything; but I generally recover from
this perplexity, by remembering whither invariably every impression of
beauty leads my thoughts, and console myself for my contemptible facility
of impression by the reflection that it is, upon the whole, a merciful
system of compensation by which my whole nature, tortured as it was last
night, can be absorbed this morning, in a perfectly pleasurable
contemplation of the capers of crabs and the colour of mosses as if
nothing else existed in creation. One thing, however, I think, is equally
certain, and that is, that I need never expect much sympathy; and perhaps
this special endowment will make me, to some degree, independent of it;
but I have no doubt that to follow me through half a day with any species
of lively participation in my feelings would be a severe breathless moral
calisthenic to most of my friends,--what Shakspeare calls 'sweating
labour.' As far as I have hitherto had opportunities of observing,
children and maniacs are the only creatures who would be capable of
sufficiently rapid transitions of thought and feeling to keep pace with
me.
And so I rode through the crabs and the coral. There is one thing,
however, I beg to commend to your serious consideration as a trainer of
youth, and that is, the expediency of cultivating in all the young minds
you educate an equal love of the good, the beautiful, and the absurd
(not an easy task, for the latter is apt in its developement to
interfere a little with the two others): doing this, you command all the
resources of existence. The love of the good and beautiful of course you
are prepared to cultivate--that goes without saying, as the French say;
the love of the ludicrous will not appear to you as important, and yet
you will be wrong to undervalue it. In the first place, I might tell you
that it was almost like cherishing the love of one's
fellow-creatures--at which no doubt you shake your head reprovingly;
but, leaving aside the enormous provision for the exercise of this
natural faculty which we offer to each other, why should crabs scuttle
from under my horse's feet in such a way as to make me laugh again every
time I think of it, if there is not an inherent propriety in laughter,
as the only emotion which certain objects challenge--an emotion
wholesome for the soul and body of man? After all, _why_ are we
contrived to laugh at all, if laughter is not essentially befitting and
beneficial? and most people's lives are too lead-coloured to afford to
lose one sparkle on them, even the smallest twinkle of light gathered
from a flash of nonsense. Hereafter point out for the 'appreciative'
study of your pupils all that is absurd in themselves, others, and the
universe in general; 't is an element largely provided, of course, to
meet a corresponding and grateful capacity for its enjoyment.
After my crab and coral causeway I came to the most exquisite thickets of
evergreen shrubbery you can imagine. If I wanted to paint paradise I would
copy this undergrowth, passing through which I went on to the settlement
at St. Annie's, traversing another swamp on another raised causeway. The
thickets through which I next rode were perfectly draped with the
beautiful wild jasmine of these woods. Of all the parasitical plants I
ever saw, I do think it is the most exquisite in form and colour, and its
perfume is like the most delicate heliotrope.
I stopped for some time before a thicket of glittering evergreens, over
which hung, in every direction, streaming garlands of these fragrant
golden cups, fit for Oberon's banqueting service. These beautiful
shrubberies were resounding with the songs of mocking birds. I sat there
on my horse in a sort of dream of enchantment, looking, listening, and
inhaling the delicious atmosphere of those flowers; and suddenly my eyes
opened, as if I had been asleep, on some bright red bunches of spring
leaves on one of the winter-stripped trees, and I as suddenly thought of
the cold northern skies and earth, where the winter was still inflexibly
tyrannising over you all, and, in spite of the loveliness of all that was
present, and the harshness of all that I seemed to see at that moment, no
first tokens of the spring's return were ever more welcome to me than
those bright leaves that reminded me how soon I should leave this scene of
material beauty and moral degradation, where the beauty itself is of an
appropriate character to the human existence it surrounds: above all,
loveliness, brightness, and fragrance; but below! it gives one a sort of
melusina feeling of horror--all swamp and poisonous stagnation, which the
heat will presently make alive with venomous reptiles.
I rode on, and the next object that attracted my attention was a very
startling and by no means agreeable one--an enormous cypress tree which
had been burnt stood charred and blackened, and leaning towards the road
so as to threaten a speedy fall across it, and on one of the limbs of this
great charcoal giant hung a dead rattlesnake. If I tell you that it looked
to me at least six feet long you will say you only wonder I did not say
twelve; it was a hideous-looking creature, and some negroes I met soon
after told me they had found it in the swamp, and hung it dead on the
burning tree. Certainly the two together made a dreadful trophy, and a
curious contrast to the lovely bowers of bloom I had just been
contemplating with such delight.
This settlement at St. Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation,
and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid,
filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here--certainly the condition
of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable
than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the extremely
unhealthy nature of the rice cultivation makes it absolutely necessary
that the physical condition of the labourers should be maintained at its
best to enable them to abide it; and yet it seems to me that even the
process of soaking the rice can hardly create a more dangerous miasma than
the poor creatures must inhale who live in the midst of these sweltering
swamps, half sea, half river slime. Perhaps it has something to do with
the fact that the climate on St. Simon's is generally considered
peculiarly mild and favourable, and so less protection of clothes and
shelter is thought necessary here for the poor residents; perhaps, too, it
may be because the cotton crop is now, I believe, hardly as valuable as
the rice crop, and the plantation here, which was once the chief source of
its owner's wealth, is becoming a secondary one, and so not worth so much
care or expense in repairing and constructing negro huts and feeding and
clothing the slaves. More pitiable objects than some of those I saw at the
St. Annie's settlement to-day I hope never to see: there was an old crone
called Hannah, a sister, as well as I could understand what she said, of
old house Molly, whose face and figure seamed with wrinkles and bowed and
twisted with age and infirmity really hardly retained the semblance of
those of a human creature, and as she crawled to me almost half her naked
body was exposed through the miserable tatters that she held on with one
hand, while the other eagerly clutched my hand, and her poor blear eyes
wandered all over me as if she was bewildered by the strange aspect of any
human being but those whose sight was familiar to her. One or two forlorn
creatures like herself, too old or too infirm to be compelled to work, and
the half-starved and more than half-naked children apparently left here
under their charge, were the only inmates I found in these wretched
hovels.
I came home without stopping to look at anything, for I had no heart any
longer for what had so charmed me on my way to this place. Galloping along
the road after leaving the marshes, I scared an ox who was feeding
leisurely, and to my great dismay saw the foolish beast betake himself
with lumbering speed into the 'bush:' the slaves will have to hunt after
him, and perhaps will discover more rattlesnakes six or twelve feet long.
After reaching home I went to the house of the overseer to see his wife, a
tidy, decent, kind-hearted, little woman, who seems to me to do her duty
by the poor people she lives among, as well as her limited intelligence
and still more limited freedom allow. The house her husband lives in is
the former residence of Major ----, which was the great mansion of the
estate. It is now in a most ruinous and tottering condition, and they
inhabit but a few rooms in it; the others are gradually mouldering to
pieces, and the whole edifice will, I should think, hardly stand long
enough to be carried away by the river, which in its yearly inroads on the
bank on which it stands has already approached within a perilous proximity
to the old dilapidated planter's palace. Old Molly, of whom I have often
before spoken to you, who lived here in the days of the prosperity and
grandeur of 'Hampton,' still clings to the relics of her old master's
former magnificence and with a pride worthy of old Caleb of Ravenswood
showed me through the dismantled decaying rooms and over the remains of
the dairy, displaying a capacious fish-box or well, where, in the good old
days, the master's supply was kept in fresh salt water till required for
table. Her prideful lamentations over the departure of all this quondam
glory were ludicrous and pathetic; but while listening with some amusement
to the jumble of grotesque descriptions through which her impression of
the immeasurable grandeur and nobility of the house she served was the
predominant feature, I could not help contrasting the present state of the
estate with that which she described, and wondering why it should have
become, as it undoubtedly must have done, so infinitely less productive a
property than in the old Major's time.
Before closing this letter, I have a mind to transcribe to you the
entries for to-day recorded in a sort of daybook, where I put down very
succinctly the number of people who visit me, their petitions and
ailments, and also such special particulars concerning them as seem to me
worth recording. You will see how miserable the physical condition of many
of these poor creatures is; and their physical condition, it is insisted
by those who uphold this evil system, is the only part of it which is
prosperous, happy, and compares well with that of northern labourers.
Judge from the details I now send you; and never forget, while reading
them, that the people on this plantation are well off, and consider
themselves well off, in comparison with the slaves on some of the
neighbouring estates.
_Fanny_ has had six children, all dead but one. She came to beg to have
her work in the field lightened.
_Nanny_ has had three children, two of them are dead; she came to implore
that the rule of sending them into the field three weeks after their
confinement might be altered.
_Leah_, Caesar's wife, has had six children, three are dead.
_Sophy_, Lewis' wife, came to beg for some old linen; she is suffering
fearfully, has had ten children, five of them are dead. The principal
favour she asked was a piece of meat, which I gave her.
_Sally_, Scipio's wife, has had two miscarriages and three children born,
one of whom is dead. She came complaining of incessant pain and weakness
in her back. This woman was a mulatto daughter of a slave called Sophy, by
a white man of the name of Walker, who visited the plantation.
_Charlotte_, Renty's wife, had had two miscarriages, and was with child
again. She was almost crippled with rheumatism, and showed me a pair of
poor swollen knees that made my heart ache. I have promised her a pair of
flannel trowsers, which I must forthwith set about making.
_Sarah_, Stephen's wife,--this woman's case and history were, alike,
deplorable, she had had four miscarriages, had brought seven children into
the world, five of whom were dead, and was again with child. She
complained of dreadful pains in the back, and an internal tumour which
swells with the exertion of working in the fields; probably, I think, she
is ruptured. She told me she had once been mad and ran into the woods,
where she contrived to elude discovery for some time, but was at last
tracked and brought back, when she was tied up by the arms and heavy logs
fastened to her feet, and was severely flogged. After this she contrived
to escape again, and lived for some time skulking in the woods, and she
supposes mad, for when she was taken again she was entirely naked. She
subsequently recovered from this derangement, and seems now just like all
the other poor creatures who come to me for help and pity. I suppose her
constant child-bearing and hard labour in the fields at the same time may
have produced the temporary insanity.
_Sukey_, Bush's wife, only came to pay her respects. She had had four
miscarriages, had brought eleven children into the world, five of whom are
dead.
_Molly_, Quambo's wife, also only came to see me; hers was the best
account I have yet received; she had had nine children, and six of them
were still alive.
This is only the entry for to-day, in my diary, of the people's complaints
and visits. Can you conceive a more wretched picture than that which it
exhibits of the conditions under which these women live? Their cases are
in no respect singular, and though they come with pitiful entreaties that
I will help them with some alleviation of their pressing physical
distresses, it seems to me marvellous with what desperate patience (I
write it advisedly, patience of utter despair) they endure their
sorrow-laden existence. Even the poor wretch who told that miserable story
of insanity and lonely hiding in the swamps and scourging when she was
found, and of her renewed madness and flight, did so in a sort of low,
plaintive, monotonous murmur of misery, as if such sufferings were all 'in
the day's work.'
I ask these questions about their children because I think the number they
bear as compared with the number they rear a fair gauge of the effect of
the system on their own health and that of their offspring. There was
hardly one of these women, as you will see by the details I have noted of
their ailments, who might not have been a candidate for a bed in an
hospital, and they had come to me after working all day in the fields.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. When I told you in my last letter of the encroachments
which the waters of the Altamaha are daily making on the bank at Hampton
Point and immediately in front of the imposing-looking old dwelling of the
former master, I had no idea how rapid this crumbling process has been of
late years; but to-day, standing there with Mrs. G----, whom I had gone to
consult about the assistance we might render to some of the poor creatures
whose cases I sent you in my last letter, she told me that within the
memory of many of the slaves now living on the plantation, a grove of
orange trees had spread its fragrance and beauty between the house and the
river. Not a vestige remains of them. The earth that bore them was
gradually undermined, slipped, and sank down into the devouring flood, and
when she saw the astonished incredulity of my look she led me to the
ragged and broken bank, and there, immediately below it and just covered
by the turbid waters of the in-rushing tide, were the heads of the poor
drowned orange trees, swaying like black twigs in the briny flood which
had not yet dislodged all of them from their hold upon the soil which had
gone down beneath the water wearing its garland of bridal blossom. As I
looked at those trees a wild wish rose in my heart that the river and the
sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this
accursed property of ours. I am afraid the horror of slavery with which I
came down to the south, the general theoretic abhorrence of an
Englishwoman for it, has gained, through the intensity it has acquired, a
morbid character of mere desire to be delivered from my own share in it. I
think so much of these wretches that I see, that I can hardly remember any
others, and my zeal for the general emancipation of the slave, has almost
narrowed itself to this most painful desire that I and mine were freed
from the responsibility of our share in this huge misery,--and so I
thought:--'Beat, beat, the crumbling banks and sliding shores, wild waves
of the Atlantic and the Altamaha! Sweep down and carry hence this evil
earth and these homes of tyranny, and roll above the soil of slavery, and
wash my soul and the souls of those I love clean from the blood of our
kind!' But I have no idea that Mr. ---- and his brother would cry amen to
any such prayer. Sometimes, as I stand and listen to the roll of the great
ocean surges on the further side of little St. Simon's Island, a small
green screen of tangled wilderness that interposes between this point and
the Atlantic, I think how near our West Indian islands and freedom are to
these unfortunate people, many of whom are expert and hardy boatmen, as
far as the mere mechanical management of a boat goes; but unless
Providence were compass and steersman too it avails nothing that they
should know how near their freedom might be found, nor have I any right to
tell them if they could find it, for the slaves are not mine, they are
Mr. ----'s.