might be put to some other than field labour. Supposing she felt herself
unequal to it, I asked her some questions, but the principal reason she
urged for her promotion to some less laborious kind of work was, that
hoeing in the field was so hard to her on '_account of her colour_,' and
she therefore petitions to be allowed to learn a trade. I was much puzzled
at this reason for her petition, but was presently made to understand that
being a mulatto, she considered field labour a degradation; her white
bastardy appearing to her a title to consideration in my eyes. The
degradation of these people is very complete, for they have accepted the
contempt of their masters to that degree that they profess, and really
seem to feel it for themselves, and the faintest admixture of white blood
in their black veins appears at once, by common consent of their own race,
to raise them in the scale of humanity. I had not much sympathy for this
petition. The woman's father had been a white man who was employed for
some purpose on the estate. In speaking upon this subject to Mrs. G----,
she said that, as far as her observation went, the lower class of white
men in the south lived with coloured women precisely as they would at the
north with women of their own race; the outcry that one hears against
amalgamation appears therefore to be something educated and acquired,
rather than intuitive. I cannot perceive in observing my children, that
they exhibit the slightest repugnance or dislike to these swarthy
dependents of theirs, which they surely would do if, as is so often
pretended, there is an inherent, irreconcilable repulsion on the part of
the white towards the negro race. All the southern children that I have
seen seem to have a special fondness for these good-natured childish human
beings, whose mental condition is kin in its simplicity and proneness to
impulsive emotion to their own, and I can detect in them no trace of the
abhorrence and contempt for their dusky skins which all questions of
treating them with common justice is so apt to elicit from American men
and women.
To-day, for the first time since I left the Rice Island, I went out
fishing, but had no manner of luck. Jack rowed me up Jones's Creek, a
small stream which separates St. Simon's from the main, on the opposite
side from the great waters of the Altamaha. The day was very warm. It is
becoming almost too hot to remain here much longer, at least for me, who
dread and suffer from heat so much. The whole summer, however, is passed
by many members of the Georgia families on their estates by the sea. When
the heat is intense, the breeze from the ocean and the salt air, I
suppose, prevent it from being intolerable or hurtful. Our neighbour Mr.
C---- and his family reside entirely, the year round, on their plantations
here without apparently suffering in their health from the effects of the
climate. I suppose it is the intermediate region between the sea-board and
the mountains that becomes so pestilential when once the warm weather sets
in. I remember the Belgian minister, M. de ----, telling me that the
mountain country of Georgia was as beautiful as paradise, and that the
climate, as far as his experience went, was perfectly delicious. He was,
however, only there on an exploring expedition, and, of course, took the
most favourable season of the year for the purpose.
I have had several women with me this afternoon more or less disabled by
chronic rheumatism. Certainly, either their labour or the exposure it
entails must be very severe, for this climate is the last that ought to
engender rheumatism. This evening I had a visit from a bright young woman,
calling herself Minda, who came to beg for a little rice or sugar. I
enquired from which of the settlements she had come down, and found that
she has to walk three miles every day to and from her work. She made no
complaint whatever of this, and seemed to think her laborious tramp down
to the Point after her day of labour on the field well-rewarded by the
pittance of rice and sugar she obtained. Perhaps she consoled herself for
the exertion by the reflection which occurred to me while talking to her,
that many women who have borne children, and many women with child, go the
same distance to and from their task ground--that seems dreadful!
I have let my letter lie from a stress of small interruptions. Yesterday,
Sunday 3rd, old Auber, a stooping, halting hag, came to beg for flannel
and rice. As usual, of course, I asked various questions concerning her
condition, family, &c.; she told me she had never been married, but had
had five children, two of whom were dead. She complained of flooding, of
intolerable back-ache, and said that with all these ailments, she
considered herself quite recovered, having suffered horribly from an
abscess in her neck, which was now nearly well. I was surprised to hear of
her other complaints, for she seemed to me like quite an old woman; but
constant child-bearing, and the life of labour, exposure, and privation
which they lead, ages these poor creatures prematurely.
Dear E----, how I do defy you to guess the novel accomplishment I have
developed within the last two days; what do you say to my turning
butcher's boy, and cutting up the carcase of a sheep for the instruction
of our butcher and cook, and benefit of our table? You know, I have often
written you word, that we have mutton here--thanks to the short salt grass
on which it feeds--that compares with the best south down or _pré salé_;
but such is the barbarous ignorance of the cook, or rather the butcher who
furnishes our kitchen supplies, that I defy the most expert anatomist to
pronounce on any piece (joints they cannot be called) of mutton brought to
our table to what part of the animal sheep it originally belonged. I have
often complained bitterly of this, and in vain implored Abraham the cook
to send me some dish of mutton to which I might with safety apply the
familiar name of leg, shoulder, or haunch. These remonstrances and
expostulations have produced no result whatever, however, but an increase
of eccentricity in the _chunks_ of sheeps' flesh placed upon the table;
the squares, diamonds, cubes, and rhomboids of mutton have been more
ludicrously and hopelessly unlike anything we see in a Christian butcher's
shop, with every fresh endeavour Abraham has made to find out 'zackly wot
de missis do want;' so the day before yesterday, while I was painfully
dragging S---- through the early intellectual science of the alphabet and
first reading lesson, Abraham appeared at the door of the room brandishing
a very long thin knife, and with many bows, grins, and apologies for
disturbing me, begged that I would go and cut up a sheep for him. My first
impulse of course was to decline the very unusual task offered me with
mingled horror and amusement. Abraham, however, insisted and besought,
extolled the fineness of his sheep, declared his misery at being unable
to cut it as I wished, and his readiness to conform for the future to
whatever _patterns_ of mutton 'de missis would only please to give him.'
Upon reflection I thought I might very well contrive to indicate upon the
sheep the size and form of the different joints of civilised mutton, and
so for the future save much waste of good meat; and moreover the lesson
once taught would not require to be repeated, and I have ever held it
expedient to accept every opportunity of learning to do anything, no
matter how unusual, which presented itself to be done; and so I followed
Abraham to the kitchen, when, with a towel closely pinned over my silk
dress, and knife in hand, I stood for a minute or two meditating
profoundly before the rather unsightly object which Abraham had pronounced
'de beautifullest sheep de missis eber saw.' The sight and smell of raw
meat are especially odious to me, and I have often thought that if I had
had to be my own cook, I should inevitably become a vegetarian, probably,
indeed, return entirely to my green and salad days. Nathless, I screwed my
courage to the sticking point, and slowly and delicately traced out with
the point of my long carving-knife two shoulders, two legs, a saddle, and
a neck of mutton; not probably in the most thoroughly artistic and
butcherly style, but as nearly as my memory and the unassisted light of
nature would enable me; and having instructed Abraham in the various
boundaries, sizes, shapes and names of the several joints, I returned to
S---- and her belles-lettres, rather elated upon the whole at the
creditable mode in which I flattered myself I had accomplished my unusual
task, and the hope of once more seeing roast mutton of my acquaintance. I
will confess to you, dear E----, that the _neck_ was not a satisfactory
part of the performance, and I have spent some thoughts since in trying to
adjust in my own mind its proper shape and proportions.
As an accompaniment to 'de beautifullest mutton de missis ever see,' we
have just received from my neighbour Mr. C---- the most magnificent supply
of fresh vegetables, green peas, salad, &c. He has a garden and a
Scotchman's real love for horticulture, and I profit by them in this very
agreeable manner.
I have been interrupted by several visits, my dear E----, among other, one
from a poor creature called Judy, whose sad story and condition affected
me most painfully. She had been married, she said, some years ago to one
of the men called Temba, who however now has another wife, having left her
because she went mad. While out of her mind she escaped into the jungle,
and contrived to secrete herself there for some time, but was finally
tracked and caught, and brought back and punished by being made to sit,
day after day, for hours in the stocks--a severe punishment for a man, but
for a woman perfectly barbarous. She complained of chronic rheumatism, and
other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while
labouring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work
lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she
spoke to me.
She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation
under Mr. K----'s overseership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely
difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valour is sufficiently accounted
for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her firstborn,
the son of Mr. K----, who forced her, flogged her severely for having
resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five
Pound--a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the
slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently
atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor
people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy,
makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor
creature said, that bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken
that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal
swamp of Five Pound.
I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them
to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in
which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to
say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple
horror and misery of their bare details.
* * * * *
My dearest E----. I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children
flowing in the whole morning to say, 'Ha de missis!' Among others, a poor
woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her
limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages, nine of her
children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a
cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in
the field. She held my hands and stroked them in the most appealing way,
while she exclaimed, 'Oh my missis! my missis! me neber sleep till day for
de pain,' and with the day her labour must again be resumed. I gave her
flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with; rest I could
not give her--rest from her labour and her pain--this mother of fifteen
children.
Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was
Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had
four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy
burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be
lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said
their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and
sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to
a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their
clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and
stripes them. I give you the woman's words; she did not speak of this as
of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when
I said, 'Did they do that to you when you were with child?' she simply
replied, 'Yes, missis.' And to all this I listen--I, an English woman, the
wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, 'That thing
shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villany shall never be known
here again.' I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came
to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after
they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.
I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression
which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded by all this
misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. The blessed
spring is coming very fast, the air is full of delicious wild wood
fragrances, and the wonderful songs of southern birds; the wood paths are
as tempting as paths into Paradise, but Jack is in such deadly terror
about the snakes, which are now beginning to glide about with a freedom
and frequency certainly not pleasing, that he will not follow me off the
open road, and twice to-day scared me back from charming wood paths I
ventured to explore with his exclamations of terrified warning.
I gathered some exquisite pink blossoms, of a sort of waxen texture, off a
small shrub which was strange to me, and for which Jack's only name was
dye-bush; but I could not ascertain from him whether any dyeing substance
was found in its leaves, bark, or blossoms.
I returned home along the river side, stopping to admire a line of noble
live oaks beginning, alas! to be smothered with the treacherous white moss
under whose pale trailing masses their verdure gradually succumbs, leaving
them, like huge hoary ghosts, perfect mountains of parasitical vegetation,
which, strangely enough, appears only to hang upon and swing from their
boughs without adhering to them. The mixture of these streams of
grey-white filaments with the dark foliage is extremely beautiful as long
as the leaves of the tree survive in sufficient masses to produce the rich
contrast of colour; but when the moss has literally conquered the whole
tree, and after stripping its huge limbs bare, clothed them with its own
wan masses, they always looked to me like so many gigantic Druid ghosts,
with flowing robes and beards, and locks all of one ghastly grey, and I
would not have broken a twig off them for the world, lest a sad voice,
like that which reproached Dante, should have moaned out of it to me,
Non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?
A beautiful mass of various woodland skirted the edge of the stream, and
mingled in its foliage every shade of green, from the pale stiff spikes
and fans of the dwarf palmetto to the dark canopy of the magnificent
ilex--bowers and brakes of the loveliest wildness, where one dare not
tread three steps for fear--what a tantalisation! it is like some wicked
enchantment.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. I have found growing along the edge of the dreary enclosure
where the slaves are buried such a lovely wild flower; it is a little like
the euphrasia or eye-bright of the English meadows; but grows quite close
to the turf, almost into it, and consists of clusters of tiny white
flowers that look as if they were made of the finest porcelain; I took up
a root of it yesterday, with a sort of vague idea that I could transplant
it to the north--though I cannot say that I should care to transplant
anything thither that could renew to me the associations of this
place--not even the delicious wild flowers, if I could.
The woods here are full of wild plum-trees, the delicate white blossoms of
which twinkle among the evergreen copses, and besides illuminating them
with a faint starlight, suggest to my mind a possible liqueur like kirsch,
which I should think could quite as well be extracted from wild plums as
wild cherries, and the trees are so numerous that there ought to be quite
a harvest from them. You may, and, doubtless, have seen palmetto plants in
northern green and hot houses, but you never saw palmetto roots; and what
curious things they are! huge, hard, yellowish-brown stems, as thick as my
arm, or thicker, extending and ramifying under the ground in masses that
seem hardly justified or accounted for by the elegant, light, spiky fans
of dusky green foliage with which they fill the under part of the woods
here. They look very tropical and picturesque, but both in shape and
colour suggest something metallic rather than vegetable, the bronze green
hue and lance-like form of their foliage has an arid hard character that
makes one think they could be manufactured quite as well as cultivated. At
first I was extremely delighted with the novelty of their appearance; but
now I feel thirsty when I look at them, and the same with their kinsfolk
the yuccas and their intimate friends, if not relations, the prickly
pears, with all of which once strange growth I have grown, contemptuously
familiar now.
Did it ever occur to you what a strange affinity there is between the
texture and colour of the wild vegetables of these sandy southern soils,
and the texture and colour of shells? The prickly pear, and especially the
round little cactus plants all covered with hairy spikes, are curiously
suggestive of a family of round spiked shells, with which you, as well as
myself, are, doubtless, familiar; and though the splendid flame colour of
some cactus blossoms never suggests any nature but that of flowers, I have
seen some of a peculiar shade of yellow pink, that resembles the mingled
tint on the inside of some elaborately coloured shell, and the pale white
and rose flowers of another kind have the colouring and almost texture of
shell, much rather than of any vegetable substance.
To-day I walked out without Jack, and in spite of the terror of snakes
with which he has contrived slightly to inoculate me, I did make a short
exploring journey into the woods. I wished to avoid a ploughed field, to
the edge of which my wanderings had brought me; but my dash into the
woodland, though unpunished by an encounter with snakes, brought me only
into a marsh as full of land-crabs as an ant-hill is of ants, and from
which I had to retreat ingloriously, finding my way home at last by the
beach.
I have had, as usual, a tribe of visitors and petitioners ever since I
came home. I will give you an account of those cases which had anything
beyond the average of interest in their details. One poor woman, named
Molly, came to beg that I would, if possible, get an extension of their
exemption from work after child-bearing. The close of her argument was
concise and forcible. 'Missis, we hab um piccaninny--tree weeks in de
ospital, and den right out upon the hoe again--_can we strong_ dat way,
missis? No!' And truly I do not see that they can. This poor creature had
had eight children and two miscarriages. All her children were dead but
one. Another of my visitors was a divinely named but not otherwise divine
Venus; it is a favourite name among these sable folk, but, of course, must
have been given originally in derision. The Aphrodite in question was a
dirt-coloured (convenient colour I should say for these parts) mulatto. I
could not understand how she came on this property, for she was the
daughter of a black woman and the overseer of an estate to which her
mother formerly belonged, and from which I suppose she was sold,
exchanged, or given, as the case may be, to the owners of this plantation.
She was terribly crippled with rheumatism, and came to beg for some
flannel. She had had eleven children, five of whom had died, and two
miscarriages. As she took her departure the vacant space she left on the
other side of my writing table was immediately filled by another black
figure with a bowed back and piteous face, one of the thousand 'Mollies'
on the estate, where the bewildering redundancy of their name is avoided
by adding that of their husband; so when the question, 'Well, who are
you?' was answered with the usual genuflexion, and 'I'se Molly, missis!'
I, of course, went on with 'whose Molly?' and she went on to refer herself
to the ownership (under Mr. ---- and heaven) of one Tony, but proceeded to
say that he was not her _real_ husband. This appeal to an element of
reality in the universally accepted fiction which passes here by the title
of marriage surprised me; and on asking her what she meant, she replied
that her real husband had been sold from the estate for repeated attempts
to run away; he had made his escape several times, and skulked starving in
the woods and morasses, but had always been tracked and brought back, and
flogged almost to death, and finally sold as an incorrigible runaway. What
a spirit of indomitable energy the wretched man must have had to have
tried so often that hideously hopeless attempt to fly! I do not write you
the poor woman's jargon, which was ludicrous; for I cannot write you the
sighs, and tears, and piteous looks, and gestures, that made it pathetic;
of course she did not know whither or to whom her _real_ husband had been
sold; but in the meantime Mr. K----, that merciful Providence of the
estate, had provided her with the above-named Tony, by whom she had had
nine children, six of whom were dead; she, too, had miscarried twice. She
came to ask me for some flannel for her legs, which are all swollen with
constant rheumatism, and to beg me to give her something to cure some bad
sores and ulcers, which seemed to me dreadful enough in their present
condition, but which she said break out afresh and are twice as bad every
summer.
I have let my letter lie since the day before yesterday, dear E----,
having had no leisure to finish it. Yesterday morning I rode out to St.
Clair's, where there used formerly to be another negro settlement and
another house of Major ----'s. I had been persuaded to try one of the
mares I had formerly told you of, and to be sure a more 'curst' quadruped,
and one more worthy of a Petruchio for a rider I did never back. Her
temper was furious, her gait intolerable, her mouth, the most obdurate
that ever tugged against bit and bridle. It is not wise anywhere--here it
is less wise than anywhere else in the world--to say 'Jamais de cette eau
je ne boirai;' but I _think_ I will never ride that delightful creature
Miss Kate again.
I wrote you of my having been to a part of the estate called St. Clair's,
where there was formerly another residence of Major ----'s; nothing
remains now of it but a ruined chimney of some of the offices, which is
standing yet in the middle of what has become a perfect wilderness. At the
best of times, with a large house, numerous household, and paths, and
drives of approach, and the usual external conditions of civilisation
about it, a residence here would have been the loneliest that can well be
imagined; now it is the shaggiest desert of beautiful wood that I ever
saw. The magnificent old oaks stand round the place in silent solemn
grandeur; and among them I had no difficulty in recognising, by the
description Captain F---- had given me of it, the crumbling shattered
relic of a tree called Oglethorpe's oak. That worthy valiant old governor
had a residence here himself in the early days of the colony; when, under
the influence of Wesley, he vainly made such strenuous efforts to keep
aloof from his infant province the sore curse of slavery.
I rode almost the whole way through a grove of perfect evergreen. I had
with me one of the men of the name of Hector, who has a good deal to do
with the horses, and so had volunteered to accompany me, being one of the
few negroes on the estate who can sit a horse. In the course of our
conversation, Hector divulged certain opinions relative to the comparative
gentility of driving in a carriage, and the vulgarity of walking; which
sent me into fits of laughing; at which he grinned sympathetically, and
opened his eyes very wide, but certainly without attaining the least
insight into what must have appeared to him my very unaccountable and
unreasonable merriment. Among various details of the condition of the
people on the several estates in the island, he told me that a great
number of the men on all the different plantations had _wives_ on the
neighbouring estates, as well as on that to which they properly belonged.
'Oh, but,' said I, 'Hector, you know that cannot be, a man has but one
lawful wife.' Hector knew this, he said, and yet seemed puzzled himself,
and rather puzzled me to account for the fact, that this extensive
practice of bigamy was perfectly well known to the masters and overseers,
and never in any way found fault with, or interfered with. Perhaps this
promiscuous mode of keeping up the slave population finds favour with the
owners of creatures who are valued in the market at so much per head. This
was a solution which occurred to me, but which I left my Trojan hero to
discover, by dint of the profound pondering into which he fell.