rabbits which they have contrived to catch. They seemed to me slightly
different from our English bunnies; and Captain F----, who called to-day,
gave me a long account of how they differed from the same animal in the
northern States. I did not like to mortify my small workmen by refusing
their present; but the poor little things must be left to run wild again,
for we have no conveniences for pets here, besides we are just weighing
anchor ourselves. I hope these poor little fluffy things will not meet any
rattlesnakes on their way back to the woods.
I had a visit for flannel from one of our Dianas to-day,--who had done her
task in the middle of the day, yet came to receive her flannel,--the most
horribly dirty human creature I ever beheld, unless indeed her child, whom
she brought with her, may have been half a degree dirtier.
The other day, Psyche (you remember the pretty under nurse, the poor thing
whose story I wrote you from the rice plantation) asked me if her mother
and brothers might be allowed to come and see her when we are gone away. I
asked her some questions about them, and she told me that one of her
brothers, who belonged to Mr. K----, was hired by that gentleman to a Mr.
G---- of Darien, and that, upon the latter desiring to purchase him, Mr.
K---- had sold the man without apprising him or any one member of his
family that he had done so--a humane proceeding that makes one's blood
boil when one hears of it. He had owned the man ever since he was a boy.
Psyche urged me very much to obtain an order permitting her to see her
mother and brothers. I will try and obtain it for her, but there seems
generally a great objection to the visits of slaves from neighbouring
plantations, and, I have no doubt, not without sufficient reason. The more
I see of this frightful and perilous social system, the more I feel that
those who live in the midst of it must make their whole existence one
constant precaution against danger of some sort or other.
I have given Aleck a second reading lesson with S----, who takes an
extreme interest in his newly acquired alphabetical lore. He is a very
quick and attentive scholar, and I should think a very short time would
suffice to teach him to read; but, alas! I have not even that short time.
When I had done with my class, I rode off with Jack, who has become quite
an expert horseman, and rejoices in being lifted out of the immediate
region of snakes by the length of his horse's legs. I cantered through the
new wood paths, and took a good sloping gallop through the pine land to
St. Annie's. The fire is actually still burning in the woods. I came home
quite tired with the heat, though my ride was not a long one.
Just as I had taken off my habit and was preparing to start off with
M----and the chicks for Jones's, in the wood wagon, old Dorcas, one of
the most decrepid, rheumatic, and miserable old negresses from the
further end of the plantation, called in to beg for some sugar. She had
walked the whole way from her own settlement, and seemed absolutely
exhausted then, and yet she had to walk all the way back. It was not
otherwise than slightly meritorious in me, my dear E----, to take her up
in the wagon and endure her abominable dirt and foulness in the closest
proximity, rather than let her drag her poor old limbs all that way
back; but I was glad when we gained her abode and lost her company. I am
mightily reminded occasionally in these parts of Trinculo's soliloquy
over Caliban. The people at Jones's had done their work at half-past
three. Most of the houses were tidy and clean, so were many of the
babies. On visiting the cabin of an exceedingly decent woman called
Peggy, I found her, to my surprise, possessed of a fine large bible. She
told me her husband, Carpenter John, can read, and that she means to
make him teach her. The fame of Aleck's literature has evidently reached
Jones's, and they are not afraid to tell me that they can read or wish
to learn to do so. This poor woman's health is miserable; I never saw a
more weakly sickly looking creature. She says she has been broken down
ever since the birth of her last child. I asked her how soon after her
confinement she went out into the field to work again. She answered very
quietly, but with a deep sigh: 'Three weeks, missis; de usual time.' As
I was going away, a man named Martin came up, and with great vehemence
besought me to give him a prayer-book. In the evening, he came down to
fetch it, and to show me that he can read. I was very much pleased to
see that they had taken my hint about nailing wooden slats across the
windows of their poor huts, to prevent the constant ingress of the
poultry. This in itself will produce an immense difference in the
cleanliness and comfort of their wretched abodes. In one of the huts I
found a broken looking-glass; it was the only piece of furniture of the
sort that I had yet seen among them. The woman who owned it was, I am
sorry to say, peculiarly untidy and dirty, and so were her children: so
that I felt rather inclined to scoff at the piece of civilized vanity,
which I should otherwise have greeted as a promising sign.
I drove home, late in the afternoon, through the sweet-smelling woods,
that are beginning to hum with the voice of thousands of insects. My troop
of volunteer workmen is increased to five; five lads working for my wages
after they have done their task work; and this evening, to my no small
amazement, Driver Bran came down to join them for an hour, after working
all day at Five Pound, which certainly shows zeal and energy.
Dear E----, I have been riding through the woods all the morning with
Jack, giving him directions about the clearings, which I have some faint
hope may be allowed to continue after my departure. I went on an exploring
expedition round some distant fields, and then home through the St.
Annie's woods. They have almost stripped the trees and thickets along the
swamp road since I first came here. I wonder what it is for: not fuel
surely, nor to make grass land of, or otherwise cultivate the swamp. I do
deplore these pitiless clearings; and as to this once pretty road, it
looks 'forlorn,' as a worthy Pennsylvania farmer's wife once said to me of
a pretty hill-side from which her husband had ruthlessly felled a
beautiful grove of trees.
I had another snake encounter in my ride this morning. Just as I had
walked my horse through the swamp, and while contemplating ruefully its
naked aspect, a huge black snake wriggled rapidly across the path, and I
pulled my reins tight and opened my mouth wide with horror. These
hideous-looking creatures are, I believe, not poisonous, but they grow to
a monstrous size, and have tremendous _constrictive_ power. I have heard
stories that sound like the nightmare, of their fighting desperately with
those deadly creatures, rattlesnakes. I cannot conceive, if the black
snakes are not poisonous, what chance they have against such antagonists,
let their squeezing powers be what they will. How horrid it did look,
_slithering_ over the road! Perhaps the swamp has been cleared on account
of its harbouring these dreadful worms.
I rode home very fast, in spite of the exquisite fragrance of the wild
cherry blossoms, the carpets and curtains of wild flowers, among which a
sort of glorified dandelion glowed conspicuously; dandelions such as I
should think grew in the garden of Eden, if there were any at all there. I
passed the finest magnolia that I have yet seen; it was magnificent, and
I suppose had been spared for its beauty, for it grew in the very middle
of a cotton field; it was as large as a fine forest tree, and its huge
glittering leaves shone like plates of metal in the sun; what a spectacle
that tree must be in blossom, and I should think its perfume must be smelt
from one end of the plantation to the other. What a glorious creature!
Which do you think ought to weigh most in the scale, the delight of such a
vegetable, or the disgust of the black animal I had just met a few minutes
before? Would you take the one with the other? Neither would I.
I have spent the whole afternoon at home; my 'gang' is busily at work
again. Sawney, one of them, came to join it nearly at sun-down, not having
got through his day's task before. In watching and listening to these
lads, I was constantly struck with the insolent tyranny of their demeanour
towards each other. This is almost a universal characteristic of the
manner of the negroes among themselves. They are diabolically cruel to
animals too, and they seem to me as a rule hardly to know the difference
between truth and falsehood. These detestable qualities, which I
constantly hear attributed to them as innate and inherent in their race,
appear to me the direct result of their condition. The individual
exceptions among them are, I think, quite as many as would be found under
similar circumstances, among the same number of white people.
In considering the whole condition of the people on this plantation, it
appears to me that the principal hardships fall to the lot of the women;
that is, the principal physical hardships. The very young members of the
community are of course idle and neglected; the very very old, idle and
neglected too; the middle-aged men do not appear to me over-worked, and
lead a mere animal existence, in itself not peculiarly cruel or
distressing, but involving a constant element of fear and uncertainty, and
the trifling evils of unrequited labour, ignorance the most profound, (to
which they are condemned by law); and the unutterable injustice which
precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits of voluntary
exertion, and the progress that results from it. If they are absolutely
unconscious of these evils, then they are not very ill-off brutes, always
barring the chance of being given or sold away from their mates or their
young--processes which even brutes do not always relish. I am very much
struck with the vein of melancholy, which assumes almost a poetical tone
in some of the things they say. Did I tell you of that poor old decrepid
creature Dorcas, who came to beg some sugar of me the other day? saying as
she took up my watch from the table and looked at it, 'Ah? I need not look
at this, I have almost done with time!' Was not that striking from such a
poor old ignorant crone?
* * * * *
Dear E----. This is the fourth day that I have had a 'gang' of lads
working in the woods for me after their task hours, for pay; you cannot
think how zealous and energetic they are; I daresay the novelty of the
process pleases them almost as much as the money they earn. I must say
they quite deserve their small wages.
Last night I received a present from Mrs. F---- of a drum fish, which
animal I had never beheld before, and which seemed to me first cousin to
the great Leviathan. It is to be eaten, and is certainly the biggest fish
food I ever saw; however, everything is in proportion, and the prawns that
came with it are upon a similarly extensive scale; this magnificent
piscatorial bounty was accompanied by a profusion of Hamilton green peas,
really a munificent supply.
I went out early after breakfast with Jack hunting for new paths; we rode
all along the road by Jones's Creek, and most beautiful it was. We skirted
the plantation burial ground, and a dismal place it looked; the cattle
trampling over it in every direction--except where Mr. K---- had had an
enclosure put up round the graves of two white men who had worked on the
estate. They were strangers, and of course utterly indifferent to the
people here; but by virtue of their white skins, their resting-place was
protected from the hoofs of the cattle, while the parents and children,
wives, husbands, brothers and sisters, of the poor slaves, sleeping
beside them, might see the graves of those they loved trampled upon and
browsed over, desecrated and defiled, from morning till night. There is
something intolerably cruel in this disdainful denial of a common humanity
pursuing these wretches even when they are hid beneath the earth.
The day was exquisitely beautiful, and I explored a new wood path, and
found it all strewed with a lovely wild flower not much unlike a primrose.
I spent the afternoon at home. I dread going out twice a-day now, on
account of the heat and the sand flies. While I was sitting by the window,
Abraham, our cook, went by with some most revolting looking 'raw material'
(part I think of the interior of the monstrous drum fish of which I have
told you). I asked him with considerable disgust what he was going to do
with it, he replied, 'Oh! we coloured people eat it, missis;' said I, 'Why
do you say we coloured people?' 'Because, missis, white people won't touch
what we too glad of.' 'That,' said I, 'is because you are poor, and do not
often have meat to eat, not because you are coloured, Abraham; rich white
folks will not touch what poor white folks are too glad of; it has nothing
in the world to do with colour, and if there were white people here worse
off than you (amazing and inconceivable suggestion, I fear), they would be
glad to eat what you perhaps would not touch.' Profound pause of
meditation on the part of Abraham, wound up by a considerate 'Well,
missis, I suppose so.' After which he departed with the horrid looking
offal.
To-day--Saturday--I took another ride of discovery round the fields by
Jones's. I think I shall soon be able to survey this estate, I have ridden
so carefully over it in every direction; but my rides are drawing to a
close and even were I to remain here this must be the case unless I got up
and rode under the stars in the cool of the night. This afternoon I was
obliged to drive up to St. Annie's: I had promised the people several
times that I would do so. I went after dinner and as late as I could, and
found very considerable improvement in the whole condition of the place;
the houses had all been swept, and some of them actually scoured. The
children were all quite tolerably clean; they had put slats across all
their windows, and little chicken gates to the doors to keep out the
poultry. There was a poor woman lying in one of the cabins in a wretched
condition. She begged for a bandage, but I do not see of what great use
that can be to her, as long as she has to hoe in the fields so many hours
a day, which I cannot prevent.
Returning home, Israel undertook to pilot me across the cotton fields into
the pine land; and a more excruciating process than being dragged over
that very uneven surface in that wood wagon without springs I did never
endure, mitigated and soothed though it was by the literally fascinating
account my charioteer gave me of the rattlesnakes with which the place we
drove through becomes infested as the heat increases. I cannot say that
his description of them, though more demonstrative as far as regarded his
own horror of them, was really worse than that which Mr. G---- was giving
me of them yesterday. He said they were very numerous, and were found in
every direction all over the plantation, but that they did not become
really vicious until quite late in the summer; until then, it appears that
they generally endeavour to make off if one meets them, but during the
intense heats of the latter part of July and August they never think of
escaping, but at any sight or sound which they may consider inimical, they
instantly coil themselves for a spring. The most intolerable proceeding on
their part, however, that he described, was their getting up into the
trees, and either coiling themselves in or depending from the branches.
There is something too revolting in the idea of serpents looking down upon
one from the shade of the trees to which one may betake oneself for
shelter in the dreadful heat of the southern midsummer; decidedly I do not
think the dog-days would be pleasant here. The mocassin snake, which is
nearly as deadly as the rattlesnake, abounds all over the island.
In the evening, I had a visit from Mr. C---- and Mr. B----, who officiates
to-morrow at our small island church. The conversation I had with these
gentlemen was sad enough. They seem good and kind and amiable men, and I
have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of slaveholders; but to
one who has lived outside this dreadful atmosphere, the whole tone of
their discourse has a morally muffled sound, which one must hear to be
able to conceive. Mr. B---- told me that the people on this plantation not
going to church was the result of a positive order from Mr. K----, who had
peremptorily forbidden their doing so, and of course to have infringed
that order would have been to incur severe corporal chastisement. Bishop
B----, it seems, had advised that there should be periodical preaching on
the plantations, which, said Mr. B----, would have obviated any necessity
for the people of different estates congregating at any given point at
stated times, which might perhaps be objectionable, and at the same time
would meet the reproach which was now beginning to be directed towards the
southern planters as a class, of neglecting the eternal interest of their
dependents. But Mr. K---- had equally objected to this. He seems to have
held religious teaching a mighty dangerous thing--and how right he was! I
have met with conventional cowardice of various shades and shapes in
various societies that I have lived in; but anything like the pervading
timidity of tone which I find here on all subjects, but above all on that
of the condition of the slaves, I have never dreamed of. Truly slavery
begets slavery, and the perpetual state of suspicion and apprehension of
the slaveholders is a very handsome offset, to say the least of it,
against the fetters and the lash of the slaves. Poor people, one and all,
but especially poor oppressors of the oppressed! The attitude of these men
is really pitiable; they profess (perhaps some of them strive to do so
indeed) to consult the best interests of their slaves, and yet shrink back
terrified from the approach of the slightest intellectual or moral
improvement which might modify their degraded and miserable existence. I
do pity these deplorable servants of two masters more than any human
beings I have ever seen--more than their own slaves a thousand times!
To-day is Sunday, and I have been to the little church on the island. It
is the second time since I came down to the south that I have been to a
place of worship. A curious little incident prefaced my going thither this
morning. I had desired Israel to get my horse ready and himself to
accompany me, as I meant to ride to church; and you cannot imagine
anything droller than his horror and dismay when he at length comprehended
that my purpose was to attend divine service in my riding habit. I asked
him what was the trouble, for though I saw something was creating a
dreadful convulsion in his mind, I had no idea what it was till he told
me, adding, that he had never seen such a thing on St. Simon's in his
life--as who should say, such a thing was never seen in Hyde Park or the
Tuileries before. You may imagine my amusement, but presently I was
destined to shock something much more serious than poor Israel's sense of
_les convénances et bienséances_, and it was not without something of an
effort that I made up my mind to do so. I was standing at the open window
speaking to him about the horses, and telling him to get ready to ride
with me, when George, another of the men, went by with a shade or visor to
his cap exactly the shape of the one I left behind at the north, and for
want of which I have been suffering severely from the intense heat and
glare of the sun for the last week. I asked him to hand me his cap,
saying, 'I want to take the pattern of that shade.' Israel exclaimed, 'Oh
missis, not to-day; let him leave the cap with you to-morrow, but don't
cut pattern on de Sabbath day!' It seemed to me a much more serious matter
to offend this scruple than the prejudice with regard to praying in a
riding habit; still it had to be done. 'Do you think it wrong, Israel,'
said I, 'to work on Sunday?' 'Yes, missis, parson tell we so.' 'Then,
Israel, be sure you never do it. Did your parson never tell you that your
conscience was for yourself and not for your neighbours, Israel?' 'Oh yes,
missis, he tell we that too.' 'Then mind that too, Israel.' The shade was
cut out and stitched upon my cap, and protected my eyes from the fierce
glare of the sun and sand as I rode to church.
On our way, we came to a field where the young corn was coming up. The
children were in the field--little living scarecrows--watching it, of
course, as on a weekday, to keep off the birds. I made Israel observe
this, who replied, 'Oh missis, if de people's corn left one whole day not
watched, not one blade of it remain to-morrow; it must be watched,
missis.' 'What, on the Sabbath day, Israel?' 'Yes, missis, or else we lose
it all.' I was not sorry to avail myself of this illustration of the
nature of works of necessity, and proceeded to enlighten Israel with
regard to what I conceive to be the genuine observance of the Sabbath.
You cannot imagine anything wilder or more beautiful than the situation of
the little rustic temple in the woods where I went to worship to-day, with
the magnificent live oaks standing round it and its picturesque burial
ground. The disgracefully neglected state of the latter, its broken and
ruinous enclosure, and its shaggy weed-grown graves, tell a strange story
of the residents of this island, who are content to leave the
resting-place of their dead in so shocking a condition. In the tiny little
chamber of a church, the grand old litany of the Episcopal Church of
England was not a little shorn of its ceremonial stateliness; clerk there
was none, nor choir, nor organ, and the clergyman did duty for all, giving
out the hymn and then singing it himself, followed as best might be by the
uncertain voices of his very small congregation, the smallest I think I
ever saw gathered in a Christian place of worship, even counting a few of
the negroes who had ventured to place themselves standing at the back of
the church--an infringement on their part upon the privileges of their
betters--as Mr. B---- generally preaches a second sermon to them after the
_white_ service, to which as a rule they are not admitted.
On leaving the church, I could not but smile at the quaint and original
costumes with which Israel had so much dreaded a comparison for my
irreproachable London riding habit. However, the strangeness of it was
what inspired him with terror; but, at that rate, I am afraid a Paris gown
and bonnet might have been in equal danger of shocking his prejudices.
There was quite as little affinity with the one as the other in the
curious specimens of the 'art of dressing' that gradually distributed
themselves among the two or three indescribable machines (to use the
appropriate Scotch title) drawn up under the beautiful oak trees, on which
they departed in various directions to the several plantations on the
island.
I mounted my horse, and resumed my ride and my conversation with Israel.
He told me that Mr. K----'s great objection to the people going to church
was their meeting with the slaves from the other plantations; and one
reason, he added, that he did not wish them to do that was, that they
trafficked and bartered away the cooper's wares, tubs, piggins, &c., made
on the estate. I think, however, from everything I hear of that gentleman,
that the mere fact of the Hampton people coming in contact with the slaves
of other plantations would be a thing he would have deprecated. As a
severe disciplinarian, he was probably right.