also the stables and other plantation buildings, the fences and trees
as high up as a long pole or brush could reach. From Saturday noon till
Monday was holiday, when the enterprising men chopped wood, for which
they were paid, and the drones sunned themselves on the porch steps,
and the women washed their clothes. I knew of only one planter who made
his negroes work on Sundays. He was an Englishman who married into a
plantation. The indignant neighbors called the attention of the grand
jury in that case, with success, too. During sugar-making everybody
worked day and night, but the season was short, terminating in December.
I cannot recall more than three deaths in ten years. I have no record to
refer to (I guess that plantation folio afforded some information to the
Union army). There was a burial ground for the slaves. One of them, the
engineer, by the way, and a mighty good negro, too, acted as preacher. He
married and buried and in all ways ministered to the spiritual needs of
his flock. I recall teaching Lewis to sing “Canaan.” He wanted to learn a
hymn, and had a lusty bass voice, while I did not have any at all. Lewis
was not the only accomplished negro. We did not have white labor. There
were slave carpenters, coopers, masons and sugar makers; women who cut
and made all clothing, shirts, coats, pantaloons, dresses.
By law no child under ten years of age could be sold from its mother. I
suppose that law is obsolete now! It happened a negro child born in the
penitentiary of a convict mother, named Alroy, had to remain ten years
in confinement; he was taught reading and writing, probably all the Rs,
by the convicts, while he imbibed in such surroundings a good many less
desirable accomplishments. Hon. Mr. Alroy represented his native parish
in the Louisiana Legislature of reconstruction times. He was better
fitted probably than some of his dusky colleagues, for he could read the
laws; some of them could not. That is also of the dead past, thank God,
and has no bearing on the old plantation life, except as an illustration
of the law regarding slaves.
The “big house” had no fastenings on the front and back doors. In the
absence of my husband one time I was awakened, in the dead hour of
night, by a touch on my shoulder. “It’s me, mistis; de levee’s broke.”
A crevasse! Without taking time to put on an extra gown, I was an hour
giving orders and dispatching men to the planters, even twenty miles off,
for assistance.
For a week thereafter, day and night, I fairly lived on horseback at the
levee, superintending the repair work in place of my absent husband and
our inefficient overseer. Each planter affected by the crevasse came, or
sent an overseer with a force of slaves, who worked in hour shifts, to
their waists in the water, driving piles and heaping sand bags. As the
shifts changed the men were given a dram and hot soup or coffee, and sent
to a huge bonfire nearby to dry themselves.
Another time I landed from a boat at the witching hour between midnight
and dawn. The boat’s bell and whistle sounded to attract some light
sleeper. By the time I was fairly ashore a glimmering light of a lantern
was seen. I was escorted to the house by the coachman, but if any other
negro had responded I should have felt quite as safe.
Mammy Charlotte was supreme in the domestic department. The little
cupbearers from the quarters reported to her for the “dreenings” of the
coffee pot or the left-over soup. The visitor by the library fire called
to her for a glass of wine or a “finger” of whisky. I called Charlotte
to ask what we were going to have for dinner. She was the busy one, and
every plantation had just such a mammy. Charlotte and I belonged to the
same church. When there was a vacant seat in the carriage Sunday morning
she was called to occupy it.
One of our neighbors, that a New Englander would call a “near” man,
owned a few acres adjoining ours, but too remote from his plantation to
be advantageously cultivated. He would not fence his property nor work
his road, nor keep his levee in repair (it was just there we had the
crevasse); however, it afforded good pasturage for Uncle Billy’s cow, and
for us, a supply of mushrooms. Billy’s nets and lines supplied us with
shrimp and fish, small catfish that William cooked _à la pompano_, not a
poor imitation of that delectable Gulf dainty. I heard Charlotte berating
Billy for not bringing in some more of those fine shrimp, when he knew,
too, there was company in the house. Imagine my consternation at Billy’s
reply, “Dey done gorn; dat ole drowned mule is floated away.”
Col. Hicky was our nearest neighbor, on Hope estate. When the dear old
man was eighty and I was twenty-five we were great chums. He never passed
in his buggy if I was visible on the lawn or porch without stopping for
a chat. There was frequent interchange of neighborly courtesies. He had
fine large pecans, and we didn’t; we had celery and he didn’t, so there
was much flitting back and forth of baskets. If we were having an unusual
occasion, like the dinner my husband gave in honor of Messrs. Slidell
and Benjamin, when they were elected to the United States Senate, a big
basket came from Hope estate. Didn’t the dear old gentleman send a capon
turkey which was too big for any dish we had, and didn’t we have to
borrow the Hicky dish?
Col. Hicky had a birthday dinner, when he was eighty-two, and a grand
dinner it was, to be sure. Sam Moore—I never knew just who he was, or
why he was so essential at every function—sat at the host’s right. The
Colonel was too deaf to hear all the _bon mots_, and Sam interpreted for
him, and read in a loud voice all the toasts, some of which were very
original and bright. Anyone remembering Col. Winthrop, or better still,
Judge Avery, can understand there was no lack of wit and sparkle in any
toast they might make.
XXVII
PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED
I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or, “People I
Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I Have Entertained.”
Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied life, I find myself
dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since departed to the “House
of Many Mansions,” guests who came and stayed, and went, some of whom
I had never seen before, and some I never heard from after, but there
are guests and guests, as every housewife knows. Particularly country
house guests come, whose city houses are not open to what a neighbor
of mine calls “trunk visitors.” In the days of which I write, every
house, especially every plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string
outside the door. I amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied
assortment of visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to
rest their mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about
the gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffee pot, or the lady
who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the
last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor
will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the
innocence of their hearts.
The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a
distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim
full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal.
Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent parish
where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a young girl.
With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the citadel, and to
continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was put to flight. Now
he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest, and salve his wounds at
our home. I was amazed when my housemaid told me he had not only brought
his valet, but his own linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood
then why he was not an acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee
pot would scare any prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he
had committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old
gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans, a few
years ago.
Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-president.
The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were Buchanan and
Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her husband mount to the
top of the ladder of preferment, and did no little engineering in his
behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was charming, a delightful visitor,
a relative by marriage to us, but so remote, that if she had not been so
lovely and the vice-president so distinguished, the dim connection would
never have been thought of. Her aspirations were not realized, and he was
tail to another presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did
not meet Mrs. Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I
saw her husband he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without
incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”
During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a
plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on the
opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his grandiloquent
flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to our house to stay
till their _lares et penates_ were settled in their new home. The man, in
the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style, accepted. When I asked how many
there were in the family, my hospitable husband replied that he only
heard mention of a wife. In due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever
so much turning and backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as
if to announce a surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at
our levee, and a whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path
to the house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as
they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged mother
and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a darky with
the baby in arms!
One guest room had been made ready, but three additional chambers were
at once put in commission. By the time wraps had been removed and fresh
fires made all over the house—it was mid-winter—I was ten times more
breathless than my unexpected crowd. Every day for over a week the man
and his wife were conveyed to their new home in our carriage, and there
they stayed from morn to dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my
special care. She was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed,
all of us were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him
to his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices,
to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels
carpets, all hours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse spanked
it, and I didn’t care.
One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very diverting.
They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered chair in the
library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with hairpin and
nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted mantel, till it
looked like it had been taken from some buried city of Egypt. Thank
goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of time the family
moved into the new home, and gave a house-warming ball within the next
week—_vive la bagatelle_!
Reading with great interest a newly published book, “The Circuit Rider’s
Wife,” brings vividly to mind a visitor we once had. She was one of
the sweetest and loveliest of women. She was a Methodist, the only one
in a wide acquaintance I ever met, who claimed to have “the gift of
sanctification.” I do not believe one possesses the power within oneself
to resist sin, nor do I mean to inject religious views and doctrines
in these remarks about “People I Have Entertained,” but I do say, if
there ever was a really sanctified woman it was this Mrs. Abe Smith of
Mississippi. She was our guest one short, happy, glorified week. She
read her Bible chapter to us every morning, and prayed with and for us
all day long, if we wanted, and we generally did, for surely she had the
gift of prayer. I never listened to such uplifting prayers as dear Mrs.
Smith could utter; her very voice was an inspiration. She was highly
connected and highly cultivated and had a vocal training that comprised
very intricate music, but with “The Coming of the Lord” she confined her
voice entirely to psalms and hymns. Her mission was to pray and sing,
but no doubt when the harvest was waiting, in some meeting house, she
could exhort with an eloquence equal to the most earnest itinerant in
the pulpit. We had one strange glorification and sanctification, but it
was interrupted by the coming of a Methodist preacher, who claimed to
having sought, in vain, the gift of sanctification. The last few days of
lovely Sister Smith’s visit were spent in the library with closed doors,
wrestling with the halting soul of Brother Camp.
These were the expiring days of the old “Peace which passeth
understanding.” After that came the war, which sorely tried the
heart of the glorified woman, and she proved faithful to her gift of
sanctification even unto the bitter end....
One November day I entered my library with an open letter of introduction
in my hand, to say to the young man, placidly warming himself at the
fire, that the letter was not meant for my husband, who was not at
home, but for his brother. He replied he understood the brother was not
in Louisiana, and he took the liberty of transferring the introductory
epistle to the next of kin. He was a young doctor, threatened with lung
trouble, who had come South to spend some time in somebody’s sugar house.
I frankly told him that our sugar house was not by any means a suitable
place for an invalid, but (I glanced out of the door and saw his vehicle
had departed and his trunk was on the porch) I would be pleased to have
him remain my guest until my husband returned to see what could be
devised to further the invalid’s plan. Northern and Western people, who
never had been in a sugar house and inhaled the warm fumes of boiling
cane juice, night and day, and incidentally submitted to the discomforts
of an open building, not intended for sleeping quarters, thought that
the treatment, as they chose to call it, was a cure for tuberculosis.
My guest found himself quite comfortable, and remained in our home five
months. Nothing more was said about sugar house treatment. By spring,
like a butterfly, he emerged into the sunlight, strong and well and ready
to fly to pastures new, which he did. We did not even hear from that
doctor again. He was a physician in good practice in Galveston during the
war, and told Gen. Magruder he thought he had met us years before!
Every planter in my day entertained strangers who came and went, like a
dream. Some were grateful for their entertainment, some did not so much
as write “bread and butter” notes, after their departure.
Queer, inquisitive folks lighted upon us now and then. I recall a party
of Philadelphians who arrived at the adjacent town with a note of
introduction to the president of the bank. They said they wanted to visit
a plantation and see the working thereof. That hospitable husband of mine
happened to be passing; he was called in and introduced to the party, and
he invited them for the whole of the next day. They came, they saw, I
don’t know if they thought they conquered. We thought so, for they were
on a tour of observation. They were delightfully informal and interesting
people. We accompanied them to the canefield—the negroes happened to be
at work quite near the house—into some of the cabins, the infirmary,
where they were surprised to find not one inmate, into the nursery where
the babies were sleeping in cribs, and the older children eating mush and
molasses. They had to taste the food, had to talk to the granny about
her babies, had to ask after her health. Meeting a negro man, walking
as brisk as anybody, with a hoe over his shoulder, they had to inquire
as to his condition, and must have been surprised to hear what an awful
misery he had in his back. They had to see where the plantation sewing,
and the cooking, were done. I began to think before it was all over we
were superintendents of some penal institution and were enduring a visit
from the committee of inspection. However, they were very attractive,
naïve visitors, surprised at everything. After luncheon, waited upon by a
negro boy on a broad grin—it was all so very funny to him—they took their
departure, and my husband and I had a merry laugh over the incidents of
the day. It was rather an interesting interlude in our quiet life, and
remoteness from the abolition storm that was hovering over the land.
All the people I entertained were not queer. We had a house full always
of gay, young people, young girls from the North that were my schoolmates
in New Haven, girls who were my play-mates, and the friends of my young
ladyhood in New Orleans, fresh, bright, happy girls, who rode horseback,
sang and danced and made merry all through the house. All are gone now.
Only the sweet memory of them comes to me in my solitary day-dreams.
XXVIII
A MONUMENT TO MAMMIES
Let us have a memorial, before the last of us who had a black mammy
passes away. We who still linger would love to see a granite monument
to the memory of the dear mammy who fostered our childhood. Our
grandchildren, indeed our children, will never know the kind of mammies
their ancestors were blessed with.
I know of two only of the old stock of nurses and housekeepers left. They
were grown women when Sherman marched through Georgia, destroying their
old homes, laying waste the land, and Butler sat down in New Orleans,
wreaking vengeance on their hapless masters, and scattering their
little bands of servants to the four winds. These two mammies I wot of
remained with their own white folks. The Georgia one lived in a family I
visited, a faithful old woman, doing her utmost to fill a gap (and gaps
were of constant occurrence) in any branch of household duty. Mammy was
a supernumerary after the children grew up, but when the new-fangled
housemaid swept her trailing skirts out of the premises, mammy filled
her place till another of that same half-educated sort came. When cook
flared up and refused to do her duty in the way to which she was called,
mammy descended into the deserted kitchen.
One day I overheard the son of that family, who was about to start to a
Northern college, say: “Mammy, put on your Sunday black silk; I want you
to go down the street with me; I am going to have your picture taken.”
“What fur, son?” “I want it with the rest of my family to put on my
bureau at college.” “Lord! son, you ought’en to hav’ my black face to
show to dem Yankees; den you’ll tell ’em I’se your mammy.” However, the
pleased old darky, as black as her Sunday silk, had her picture taken
just like “son” wanted. I have a copy of it now. God bless her!
A family from the extreme South comes every summer to a quiet place in
Connecticut and brings mammy to take care of the little ones. I doubt
if they feel they could come without her. Mammy is pure black; no
adulterated blood under that skin—black, flat-nosed and homely, but the
children adore her, and she “makes them mind, too,” she proudly tells
you. Every boarder in that big house knows mammy, but I doubt if one of
them knows her name; I do not. It warms my heart to shake hands with
those two remnants of a dear past civilization, the only two I ever met.
When a child I made frequent visits to my cousin, Judge Chinn’s
plantation, in West Baton Rouge. I believe that hospitable house has long
since vanished into the river, with its store of pleasant memories. How I
always, when I arrived there, had to run find mammy first thing, and how
she folded me in her warm embrace and delighted my ears with, “How dis
chile do grow.” Every visitor at that grand, hospitable home knew mammy.
She always stood back of the judge’s chair, and with signals directed the
young girls how to wait at table. She managed after the children grew up,
married and settled (some of them settled, Creole fashion, in the home
nest too) that whole big and mixed household, where another generation of
babies came to claim a portion of her love and care. Nobody thought to
go to the judge or his wife for anything. “All applications,” to use an
office phrase, “made to mammy.” She was always ready to point the way or
to help one through it.
Casually meeting Mrs. Chinn and inquiring of the various members of her
family that from long absence I had lost sight of, “And mammy,” I said.
The dear old lady burst into tears. Mammy had died holding the hand of
the sorrowing mistress, her last words, “My work is done. I tried to do
my best,” and God knows she did.
We had a mammy in my mother’s house when I was a wee little thing, and
we children loved her right along all the week till Saturday night, when
the ponderous woman brought the big washtub upstairs and two pails of
hot water. We hated mammy then, for she had a heavy hand and a searching
eye, and a rough wash rag full of soapsuds. Not a fold in the ear, nor a
crease in the plump body escaped her vigilance. I really think we were
glad when we outgrew need of her assistance at those dreaded Saturday
night’s baths, and she went to other little lambs, in pastures new.
When I went a bride to my husband’s home, Charlotte, his old mammy, met
us and proudly escorted us within doors, where were fresh flowers and
a blazing fire (it was long past midnight, and dreadfully stormy too),
and every comfort prepared and ready for “the coming of the bride.” I
felt then and there mammy would be a comfort for me and a real help,
and so she proved, in all my sunny life in the plantation home and in
the dark days of the war, too. My Mammy Charlotte had complete charge
of everything about the house. She had been thoroughly trained by my
husband’s mother. She made the jellies and the pickles, the ice cream,
the cakes, doing a little of everything to make our home comfortable and
happy. And often she remarked that no one in the house did more and had
less to show for it at night than she did. That is a truth about many
households, one does all the neglected things, and picks up all the loose
threads. Guests were made to understand if they required anything, from a
riding horse to a fresh stick on the fire, from a mint julep to a bedroom
candle, they had only to call Charlotte. She was never beyond the reach
of a summons, day or night. She was mammy to all the children of the
house, and all the other children that floated in from other people’s
houses. It was Mammy Charlotte who hurriedly secreted the spoons (!) when
a Federal cavalry company came prancing down the road toward our gates.
It was mammy who ran to my bedside to whisper, “Don’t you get skeered,
they does look like gentlemen;” and after they had taken a drink of
water and trotted off again it was mammy back to say, “It’s all right;
they didn’t say nothin’ ’bout spoons.” Even at that early date and that
remote spot from Butler’s headquarters the matter of spoons had been so
freely and laughingly discussed that the sable crowd of witnesses that
surrounded every household must have taken the idea that collecting
spoons was “the chief end of man.”
I pity the little ones of to-day with no black mammy of their very own
to cuddle them to her warm bosom and comfort them, and tell them funny
rhymes about “The Monkey and the Baboon’s Sister,” to make them forget
their griefs in a merry laugh. The high-falutin’ nurses they have now,
here to-day, gone to-morrow, without any anchorage in our hearts and
homes, are not and never could be made mammies like we of threescore
years and ten were blessed with.
Who of us that lived within a day’s journey of Col. Hicky but remembers
his Milly, the mammy of that grand, big household? The dear Colonel lived
to see great-grandchildren grow up, and Milly mammied at least three
generations at “Hope Estate.” She was a famous nurse. Mind you, this
was decades before trained nurses arrived on the stage. How many of us
remember how tenderly and untiringly Milly nursed some of our invalids to
health! Her services were tendered, and oh! how gratefully accepted. With
a sad heart I recall a sick baby I nursed until Milly came and put me to
bed and took the ailing child in her tender arms. For two days and nights
unto the end she watched the little flickering spark.