CROWLEY HILL--OUR PLACE OF REFUGE DURING THE WAR
Crowley Hill, the place to which we went, was a quaint old-fashioned
house set in a great grove of oak-trees, not the big live oaks we were
accustomed to, but Spanish oaks and red oaks and scrub oaks, which are
beautiful in summer and brilliant-colored in autumn, but bare all
winter. There was quite a little farm land attached, and the place had
been lent papa by the widow of his dear friend, Nicholas Williams.
Nicholas Williams, like my uncle, James L. Petigru, was opposed to
secession, and when he found himself powerless to influence his State,
he determined to leave it and live abroad--but it killed him. He died in
New York before sailing. It is impossible to tell the kindness we
received from these friends all the time we were refugees in their
midst. Of course we were much cut off from our supplies; until mamma had
a garden planted and our dairy was got going we were stranded; but every
day came servants bringing supplies of every kind, milk, cream,
vegetables, fruit, flowers, everything we did not have. At last I said
one day to mamma:
“I cannot stand this. I hate to receive! I am accustomed to give, and so
are you! I don’t see how you stand it, saying ‘Thank you’ all the time.”
Mamma laughed and said: “My child, you are not worthy to give if you
cannot receive gracefully. It shows that you think too much of your
power to give, and it makes you feel superior! I love to give and am
thankful for the many years I have been able to help my neighbors and
others in that way; and now I receive with pleasure these evidences of
the affection and interest of my dear generous friends.”
But never did I get over the feeling of impatience at the necessity of
receiving those daily trays and baskets of delicious things. Our
household consisted only of mamma, my little sister, and myself, for
papa remained at his work on the plantation, only coming now and then
for a few days; and Charley having left the country school, Mr.
Porcher’s, to which he had gone at nine, and where he had endured much
hardship from the scarcity of food the year we were at Barhamville,
having lived for months on nothing but squash and hominy, had now gone
to the Arsenal, the military school in Columbia. We had the full force
of servants, except that William was in the army with my brother, who
was serving as colonel of the 4th Alabama Regiment in Virginia, and
Stephen, who was on the plantation with papa. Mamma at once began to
plant the farm and garden, with the house-servants, and made wonderful
crops.
I went for a month to visit my sister in Wilmington, Major Van der Horst
being on General Whiting’s staff, stationed at Wilmington. Mr. McCrea
had lent them his beautiful and convenient house, so that my sister was
delightfully situated there, and the society was very gay. The first
party I went to I made a great mistake. A very handsome man, young De
Rosset, asked me to dance as soon as he was introduced. I accepted with
pleasure, as I was devoted to dancing. As we stood preparatory to the
start, he asked: “Do you dance fast or loose?” I was confused and
stammered out, “Oh, I made a mistake. I do not dance at all!” and sat
down. I could not bear to say “fast” nor could I bear to say “loose”;
but, as I looked at the dancers, I understood what it meant, and there
was nothing to terrify me in it. One-half of the dancers held hands
crossed, as you do in skating. This was “loose,” and the rest danced in
the ordinary way which I had always been accustomed to; this was called
“fast.” This marred my pleasure in the many parties I went to while in
Wilmington; for, once having said I didn’t dance, I had to stick to it.
The price of every article of clothing was enormous, and shoes were
impossible. I thought of buying a pair of stays, but a very common pair
were fifty dollars, so I ripped up some old Paris ones and made a
beautiful pair for myself, using all the bones, etc. Mamma wrote me to
get three yards of material to make a coat to wear next winter. It was
ninety-five dollars a yard, the only stuff I could get, thick and hairy,
but not fine at all.
At Society Hill, when I returned, the loom was set up in the
wash-kitchen, and I learned to weave as well as to spin, and we knit,
knit, knit all the time. We had one of the maids to spin a fine yarn of
cotton and silk ravellings, with which we knit gloves for our own use.
All pieces of old black silk were cut into small scraps and ravelled out
and carefully mixed with the cotton, and made a very pretty gray for
gloves. We had only one caddy of tea, which was kept for sickness, and
a very little coffee. As a substitute, people used bits of dried sweet
potato parched, and Indian corn parched, also the seed of the okra; this
made a very rich drink, very full of oil. The root of the sassafras made
a very nice tea. Sugar was very scarce, so mamma planted sorghum, a kind
of sugar-cane which made very nice molasses, which Nelson boiled in the
big copper kettle. I made delicious preserves with honey, and we dried
figs, and mamma made all the vinegar we used with the fig-skins, put in
a cask and fermented. This winter there was trouble about the supplies
for the negroes. There were no blankets to be had, and papa wrote,
begging mamma to have the carpets cut up into blanket sizes, so that
those who were expecting blankets that year should not be disappointed.
The thick damask curtains were cut up for coats, as they made good
coats, thickly lined. Altogether there was so much to do that the days
were not long enough.
One day we had a visit from Julius Pringle, who was on furlough at the
house of an uncle, who was refugeeing about four miles away. This was
only the second time I saw him. Mamma and he did all the talking, while
I sewed in silence. Mamma went out of the room to order some cake and
wine, and he told me he didn’t know the way to Crowley, and had come to
a place where four roads crossed, and was puzzling how to decide which
road to take “when I saw a track of a tiny foot leading this way, and I
followed that and I knew it would bring me to you.” This made me very
angry indeed, and I got red and lost the use of my quick tongue. When
mamma came back the talk flowed on as easily and pleasantly as possible.
She told him what a fine crop of rye she had made in her calf pasture,
and what difficulty she had to find a place to put it until she thought
of the big piano box, which had helped very much, for it held so much.
All this time I sewed in silence, with flaming face. At last he asked me
to play. I declined fiercely, but mamma said: “My dear Bessie! Of course
you will play for us”--she being quite shocked at my manner. I went to
the piano and played as though I were fighting the Yankees. When I
returned to my seat Mr. Pringle thanked me, and, turning to my mother,
said:
“Mrs. Allston, apparently the piano box is of more use than the piano!”
And then they both laughed heartily.
I could have killed him without hesitation. I saw him at church after
that, only a moment. And then the day he was to leave to go back to
Virginia, mamma wanted to ask him to take a letter, and we drove to the
station. And when he shook hands with me and said good-by, the look in
his eye was a revelation and declaration of devotion that seemed to
compass me and seal me as forever his, near or far, with my own will or
without it. From that moment I knew that no other man could be anything
to me. It was so strange that in absolute silence, with not a second’s
prolonging of the hand-pressure necessary to say a proper, conventional
good-by, my whole life was altered; for up to that moment I had no idea
that he was devoted to me.
I had always longed to take part in the work going on everywhere for our
soldiers. In our little isolated corner we could do nothing but sewing
and knitting. Soldiers’ shirts made by an extraordinarily easy pattern
which some one had invented we made in quantities. All the ladies in
Columbia were cooking and meeting the soldier trains day and night, and
feeding them and asking what they needed and supplying their wants.
They took it by turns, so that no hour of the day or night could a train
come and find no one to give them hot coffee and biscuits and
sandwiches, and sometimes fried chicken, too.