at St. Clair's, but unsuccessfully: it was impossible to penetrate through
the charred and blackened thickets. In the afternoon I walked round the
point, and visited the houses of the people who are our nearest
neighbours. I found poor Edie in sad tribulation at the prospect of
resuming her field labour. It is really shameful treatment of a woman just
after child labour. She was confined exactly three weeks ago to-day, and
she tells me she is ordered out to field work on Monday. She seems to
dread the approaching hardships of her task-labour extremely. Her baby was
born dead, she thinks in consequence of a fall she had while carrying a
heavy weight of water. She is suffering great pain in one of her legs and
sides, and seems to me in a condition utterly unfit for any work, much
less hoeing in the fields; but I dare not interfere to prevent this
cruelty. She says she has already had to go out to work three weeks after
her confinement with each of her other children, and does not complain of
it as anything special in her case. She says that is now the invariable
rule of the whole plantation, though it used not to be so formerly.
I have let my letter lie since I wrote the above, dear E----; but as mine
is a story without beginning, middle, or end, it matters extremely little
where I leave it off or where I take it up; and if you have not, between
my wood rides and sick slaves, come to Falstaff's conclusion that I have
'damnable iteration,' you are patient of sameness. But the days are like
each other; and the rides and the people, and, alas! their conditions, do
not vary.
To-day, however, my visit to the infirmary was marked by an event which
has not occurred before--the death of one of the poor slaves while I was
there. I found on entering the first ward,--to use a most inapplicable
term for the dark, filthy, forlorn room I have so christened,--an old
negro called Friday lying on the ground. I asked what ailed him, and was
told he was dying. I approached him, and perceived, from the glazed eyes
and the feeble rattling breath, that he was at the point of expiring.
His tattered shirt and trousers barely covered his poor body; his
appearance was that of utter exhaustion from age and feebleness; he had
nothing under him but a mere handful of straw that did not cover the
earth he was stretched on; and under his head, by way of pillow for his
dying agony, two or three rough sticks just raising his skull a few
inches from the ground. The flies were all gathering around his mouth,
and not a creature was near him. There he lay,--the worn-out slave,
whose life had been spent in unrequited labour for me and mine,--without
one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy, to
cheer him in his extremity,--panting out the last breath of his wretched
existence, like some forsaken, over-worked, wearied-out beast of
burthen, rotting where it falls! I bent over the poor awful human
creature in the supreme hour of his mortality; and while my eyes,
blinded with tears of unavailing pity and horror, were fixed upon him,
there was a sudden quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw,--and
he was free. I stood up, and remained long lost in the imagination of
the change that creature had undergone, and in the tremendous
overwhelming consciousness of the deliverance God had granted the soul
whose cast-off vesture of decay lay at my feet. How I rejoiced for
him--and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from
the inner room, whence they could see me as I stood contemplating the
piteous object, I wished they all were gone away with him, the
delivered, the freed by death from bitter bitter bondage. In the next
room, I found a miserable, decrepid, old negress, called Charity, lying
sick, and I should think near too to die; but she did not think her work
was over, much as she looked unfit for further work on earth; but with
feeble voice and beseeching hands implored me to have her work lightened
when she was sent back to it from the hospital. She is one of the oldest
slaves on the plantation, and has to walk to her field labour, and back
again at night, a distance of nearly four miles. There were an unusual
number of sick women in the room to-day; among them quite a young girl,
daughter of Boatman Quash's, with a sick baby, who has a father, though
she has no husband. Poor thing! she looks like a mere child herself. I
returned home so very sad and heart-sick that I could not rouse myself
to the effort of going up to St. Annie's with the presents I had
promised the people there. I sent M---- up in the wood wagon with them,
and remained in the house with my thoughts, which were none of the
merriest.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. On Friday, I rode to where the rattlesnake was found, and
where I was informed by the negroes there was a _nest_ of them--a pleasing
domestic picture of home and infancy that word suggests, not altogether
appropriate to rattlesnakes, I think. On horseback I felt bold to
accomplish this adventure, which I certainly should not have attempted on
foot; however, I could discover no sign of either snake or nest--(perhaps
it is of the nature of a mare's nest, and undiscoverable); but, having
done my duty by myself in endeavouring to find it, I rode off and coasted
the estate by the side of the marsh, till I came to the causeway. There I
found a new cleared field, and stopped to admire the beautiful appearance
of the stumps of the trees scattered all about it, and wreathed and
garlanded with the most profuse and fantastic growth of various
plants--wild roses being among the most abundant. What a lovely aspect one
side of nature presents here, and how hideous is the other!
In the afternoon, I drove to pay a visit to old Mrs. A----, the lady
proprietress whose estate immediately adjoins ours. On my way thither, I
passed a woman called Margaret walking rapidly and powerfully along the
road. She was returning home from the field, having done her task at three
o'clock; and told me, with a merry beaming black face, that she was going
'to clean up de house, to please de missis.' On driving through my
neighbour's grounds, I was disgusted more than I can express with the
miserable negro huts of her people; they were not fit to shelter
cattle--they were not fit to shelter anything, for they were literally in
holes, and, as we used to say of our stockings at school, too bad to darn.
To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own
habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting. What
would one of your Yankee farmers say to such abodes? When I think of the
white houses, the green blinds, and the flower plots, of the villages in
New England, and look at these dwellings of lazy filth and inert
degradation, it does seem amazing to think that physical and moral
conditions so widely opposite should be found among people occupying a
similar place in the social scale of the same country. The Northern
farmer, however, thinks it no shame to work, the Southern planter does;
and there begins and ends the difference. Industry, man's crown of honour
elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degradation; and so comes all by
which I am here surrounded--pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty,
cowardice, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement.
When I returned home, I found that Mrs. F---- had sent me some magnificent
prawns. I think of having them served singly, and divided as one does a
lobster--their size really suggests no less respect.
_Saturday, 31st._--I rode all through the burnt district and the bush to
Mrs. W----'s field, in making my way out of which I was very nearly
swamped, and, but for the valuable assistance of a certain sable Scipio
who came up and extricated me, I might be floundering hopelessly there
still. He got me out of my Slough of Despond, and put me in the way to a
charming wood ride which runs between Mrs. W----'s and Colonel H----'s
grounds. While going along this delightful boundary of these two
neighbouring estates, my mind not unnaturally dwelt upon the terms of
deadly feud in which the two families owning them are living with each
other. A horrible quarrel has occurred quite lately upon the subject of
the ownership of this very ground I was skirting, between Dr. H---- and
young Mr. W----; they have challenged each other, and what I am going to
tell you is a good sample of the sort of spirit which grows up among
slaveholders. So read it, for it is curious to people who have not lived
habitually among savages. The terms of the challenge that has passed
between them have appeared like a sort of advertisement in the local
paper, and are to the effect that they are to fight at a certain distance
with certain weapons--firearms, of course; that there is to be on the
person of each a white paper, or mark, immediately over the region of the
heart, as a point for direct aim; and whoever kills the other is to have
the privilege of _cutting off his head, and sticking it up on a pole on
the piece of land which was the origin of the debate_; so that, some fine
day, I might have come hither as I did to-day and found myself riding
under the shadow of the gory locks of Dr. H---- or Mr. W----, my peaceful
and pleasant neighbours.
I came home through our own pine woods, which are actually a wilderness
of black desolation. The scorched and charred tree trunks are still
smoking and smouldering; the ground is a sort of charcoal pavement, and
the fire is still burning on all sides, for the smoke was rapidly rising
in several directions on each hand of the path I pursued. Across this
dismal scene of strange destruction, bright blue and red birds, like
living jewels, darted in the brilliant sunshine. I wonder if the fire
has killed and scared away many of these beautiful creatures. In the
afternoon I took Jack with me to clear some more of the wood paths; but
the weather is what I call hot, and what the people here think warm, and
the air was literally thick with little black points of insects, which
they call sand flies, and which settle upon one's head and face
literally like a black net; you hardly see them or feel them at the
time, but the irritation occasioned by them is intolerable, and I had to
relinquish my work and fly before this winged plague as fast as I could
from my new acquaintance the rattlesnakes. Jack informed me, in the
course of our expedition, that the woods on the island were sometimes
burnt away in order to leave the ground in grass for fodder for the
cattle, and that the very beautiful ones he and I had been clearing
paths through were not unlikely to be so doomed, which strikes me as a
horrible idea.
In the evening, poor Edie came up to the house to see me, with an old
negress called Sackey, who has been one of the chief nurses on the island
for many years. I suppose she has made some application to Mr. G---- for a
respite for Edie, on finding how terribly unfit she is for work; or
perhaps Mr. ----, to whom I represented her case, may have ordered her
reprieve; but she came with much gratitude to me (who have, as far as I
know, had nothing to do with it), to tell me that she is not able to be
sent into the field for another week. Old Sackey fully confirmed Edie's
account of the terrible hardships the women underwent in being thus driven
to labour before they had recovered from child-bearing. She said that old
Major ---- allowed the women at the rice island five weeks, and those here
four weeks, to recover from a confinement, and then never permitted them
for some time after they resumed their work to labour in the fields before
sunrise or after sunset; but Mr. K---- had altered that arrangement,
allowing the women at the rice island only four weeks, and those here only
three weeks, for their recovery; 'and then, missis,' continued the old
woman, 'out into the field again, through dew and dry, as if nothing had
happened; that is why, missis, so many of the women have falling of the
womb, and weakness in the back; and if he had continued on the estate, he
would have utterly destroyed all the breeding women.' Sometimes, after
sending them back into the field, at the expiration of their three weeks,
they would work for a day or two, she said, and then fall down in the
field with exhaustion, and be brought to the hospital almost at the point
of death.
Yesterday, Sunday, I had my last service at home with these poor people;
nearly thirty of them came, all clean, neat, and decent, in their dress
and appearance. S---- had begged very hard to join the congregation, and
upon the most solemn promise of remaining still she was admitted; but in
spite of the perfect honour with which she kept her promise, her presence
disturbed my thoughts not a little, and added much to the poignancy of the
feeling with which I saw her father's poor slaves gathered round me. The
child's exquisite complexion, large grey eyes, and solemn and at the same
time eager countenance, was such a wonderful piece of contrast to their
sable faces, so many of them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions,
and yet all of them so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression
of patient suffering and religious fervour; their eyes never wandered from
me and my child, who sat close by my knee, their little mistress, their
future providence, my poor baby! Dear E----, bless God that you have never
reared a child with such an awful expectation: and at the end of the
prayers, the tears were streaming over their faces, and one chorus of
blessings rose round me and the child--farewell blessings, and prayers
that we would return; and thanks so fervent in their incoherency, it was
more than I could bear, and I begged them to go away and leave me to
recover myself. And then I remained with S----, and for quite a long while
even her restless spirit was still in wondering amazement at my bitter
crying. I am to go next Sunday to the church on the island, where there is
to be service; and so this is my last Sunday with the people.
When I had recovered from the emotion of this scene, I walked out with
S---- a little way, but meeting M---- and the baby, she turned home with
them, and I pursued my walk alone up the road, and home by the shore. They
are threatening to burn down all my woods to make grass land for the
cattle, and I have terrified them by telling them that I will never come
back if they destroy the woods. I went and paid a visit to Mrs. G----;
poor little, well-meaning, helpless woman! what can she do for these poor
people, where I who am supposed to own them can do nothing? and yet how
much may be done, is done, by the brain and heart of one human being in
contact with another! We are answerable for incalculable opportunities of
good and evil in our daily intercourse with every soul with whom we have
to deal; every meeting, every parting, every chance greeting, and every
appointed encounter, are occasions open to us for which we are to account.
To our children, our servants, our friends, our acquaintances,--to each
and all every day, and all day long, we are distributing that which is
best or worst in existence,--influence: with every word, with every look,
with every gesture, something is given or withheld of great importance it
may be to the receiver, of inestimable importance to the giver.
Certainly the laws and enacted statutes on which this detestable system is
built up are potent enough; the social prejudice that buttresses it is
almost more potent still; and yet a few hearts and brains well bent to do
the work, would bring within this almost impenetrable dungeon of
ignorance, misery, and degradation, in which so many millions of human
souls lie buried, that freedom of God which would presently conquer for
them their earthly liberty. With some such thoughts I commended the
slaves on the plantation to the little overseer's wife; I did not tell my
thoughts to her, they would have scared the poor little woman half out of
her senses. To begin with, her bread, her husband's occupation, has its
root in slavery; it would be difficult for her to think as I do of it. I
am afraid her care, even of the bodily habits and sicknesses of the people
left in Mrs. G----'s charge, will not be worth much, for nobody treats
others better than they do themselves; and she is certainly doing her best
to injure herself and her own poor baby, who is two and a-half years old,
and whom she is still suckling.
This is, I think, the worst case of this extraordinary delusion so
prevalent among your women that I have ever met with yet; but they all
nurse their children much longer than is good for either baby or mother.
The summer heat, particularly when a young baby is cutting teeth, is, I
know, considered by young American mothers an exceedingly critical time,
and therefore I always hear of babies being nursed till after the second
summer; so that a child born in January would be suckled till it was
eighteen or nineteen months old, in order that it might not be weaned till
its second summer was over. I am sure that nothing can be worse than this
system, and I attribute much of the wretched ill health of young American
mothers to over nursing; and of course a process that destroys their
health and vigour completely must affect most unfavourably the child they
are suckling. It is a grievous mistake. I remember my charming friend
F---- D---- telling me that she had nursed her first child till her second
was born--a miraculous statement, which I can only believe because she
told it me herself. Whenever anything seems absolutely impossible, the
word of a true person is the only proof of it worth anything.
* * * * *
Dear E----. I have been riding into the swamp behind the new house; I had
a mind to survey the ground all round it before going away, to see what
capabilities it afforded for the founding of a garden, but I confess it
looked very unpromising. Trying to return by another way, I came to a
morass, which, after contemplating, and making my horse try for a few
paces, I thought it expedient not to attempt. A woman called Charlotte,
who was working in the field, seeing my dilemma and the inglorious retreat
I was about to make, shouted to me at the top of her voice, 'You no turn
back, missis! if you want to go through, send, missis, send! you hab slave
enough, nigger enough, let 'em come, let 'em fetch planks, and make de
bridge; what you say dey must do,--send, missis, send, missis!' It seemed
to me, from the lady's imperative tone in my behalf, that if she had been
in my place, she would presently have had a corduroy road through the
swamp of prostrate 'niggers,' as she called her family in Ham, and ridden
over the same dry-hoofed; and to be sure, if I pleased, so might I, for,
as she very truly said, 'what you say, missis, they must do.' Instead of
summoning her sooty tribe, however, I backed my horse out of the swamp,
and betook myself to another pretty woodpath, which only wants widening to
be quite charming. At the end of this, however, I found swamp the second,
and out of this having been helped by a grinning facetious personage, most
appropriately named Pun, I returned home in dudgeon, in spite of what dear
Miss M---- calls the 'moral suitability' of finding a foul bog at the end
of every charming wood path or forest ride in this region.
In the afternoon, I drove to Busson Hill, to visit the people there. I
found that both the men and women had done their work at half-past three.
Saw Jema with her child, that ridiculous image of Driver Bran, in her
arms, in spite of whose whitey brown skin she still maintains that its
father is a man as black as herself--and she (to use a most extraordinary
comparison I heard of a negro girl making with regard to her mother) is as
black as 'de hinges of hell.' Query: Did she really mean hinges--or
angels? The angels of hell is a polite and pretty paraphrase for devils,
certainly. In complimenting a woman, called Joan, upon the tidy condition
of her house, she answered, with that cruel humility that is so bad an
element in their character, 'Missis no 'spect to find coloured folks'
house clean as white folks.' The mode in which they have learned to accept
the idea of their own degradation and unalterable inferiority, is the most
serious impediment that I see in the way of their progress, since
assuredly, 'self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.' In the
same way yesterday, Abraham the cook, in speaking of his brother's theft
at the rice island, said 'it was a shame even for a coloured man to do
such things.' I labour hard, whenever any such observation is made, to
explain to them that the question is one of moral and mental culture,--not
the colour of an integument,--and assure them, much to my own comfort,
whatever it may be to theirs, that white people are as dirty and as
dishonest as coloured folks, when they have suffered the same lack of
decent training. If I could but find one of these women, on whose mind the
idea had dawned that she was neither more nor less than my equal, I think
I should embrace her in an ecstacy of hopefulness.
In the evening, while I was inditing my journal for your edification, Jema
made her appearance with her Bran-brown baby, having walked all the way
down from Busson Hill to claim a little sugar I had promised her. She had
made her child perfectly clean, and it looked quite pretty. When I asked
her what I should give her the sugar in, she snatched her filthy
handkerchief off her head; but I declined this sugar basin, and gave it
to her in some paper. Hannah came on the same errand.
After all, dear E----, we shall not leave Georgia so soon as I expected;
we cannot get off for at least another week. You know, our movements are
apt to be both tardy and uncertain. I am getting sick in spirit of my stay
here; but I think the spring heat is beginning to affect me miserably, and
I long for a cooler atmosphere. Here, on St. Simon's, the climate is
perfectly healthy, and our neighbours, many of them, never stir from their
plantations within reach of the purifying sea influence. But a land that
grows magnolias is not fit for me--I was going to say magnolias and
rattlesnakes; but I remember K----'s adventure with her friend the
rattlesnake of Monument Mountain, and the wild wood-covered hill half-way
between Lenox and Stockbridge, which your Berkshire farmers have
christened Rattlesnake Mountain. These agreeable serpents seem, like the
lovely little humming birds which are found in your northernmost as well
as southernmost States, to have an accommodating disposition with regard
to climate.
Not only is the vicinity of the sea an element of salubrity here; but the
great masses of pine wood growing in every direction indicate lightness of
soil and purity of air. Wherever these fragrant, dry, aromatic fir forests
extend, there can be no inherent malaria, I should think, in either
atmosphere or soil. The beauty and profusion of the weeds and wild
flowers in the fields now is something, too, enchanting. I wish I could
spread one of these enamelled tracts on the side of one of your
snow-covered hills now--for I daresay they are snow-covered yet.
I must give you an account of Aleck's first reading lesson, which took
place at the same time that I gave S---- hers this morning. It was the
first time he had had leisure to come, and it went off most successfully.
He seems to me by no means stupid. I am very sorry he did not ask me to do
this before; however, if he can master his alphabet before I go, he may,
if chance favour him with the occasional sight of a book, help himself on
by degrees. Perhaps he will have the good inspiration to apply to Cooper
London for assistance; I am much mistaken if that worthy does not contrive
that Heaven shall help Aleck, as it formerly did him--in the matter of
reading.
I rode with Jack afterwards, showing him where I wish paths to be cut
and brushwood removed. I passed the new house, and again circumvented it
meditatingly to discover its available points of possible future
comeliness, but remained as convinced as ever that there are absolutely
none. Within the last two days, a perfect border of the dark blue
Virginicum has burst into blossom on each side of the road, fringing it
with purple as far as one can look along it; it is lovely. I must tell
you of something which has delighted me greatly. I told Jack yesterday,
that if any of the boys liked, when they had done their tasks, to come
and clear the paths that I want widened and trimmed, I would pay them a
certain small sum per hour for their labour; and behold, three boys have
come, having done their tasks early in the afternoon, to apply for
_work_ and _wages_: so much for a suggestion not barely twenty-four
hours old, and so much for a prospect of compensation!
In the evenings I attempted to walk out when the air was cool, but had to
run precipitately back into the house to escape from the clouds of
sand-flies that had settled on my neck and arms. The weather has suddenly
become intensely hot; at least, that is what it appears to me. After I had
come in I had a visit from Venus and her daughter, a young girl of ten
years old, for whom she begged a larger allowance of food as, she said,
what she received for her was totally inadequate to the girl's proper
nourishment. I was amazed, upon enquiry, to find that three quarts of
grits a week--that is not a pint a day--was considered a sufficient supply
for children of her age. The mother said her child was half-famished on
it, and it seemed to me terribly little.