rolled down her cheeks. She had not wept since she buried her last
child. With her it was one trouble, one weeping, no more; and her
wrinkled, hard, polished skin so far had known only the tears that
come after death. The trouble in her heart now was almost exactly like
the trouble caused by death; although she knew it was not so bad as
death, yet, when she thought of this to console herself, the tears
rolled all the faster. She took the end of the red cotton kerchief
tied over her head, and wiped them away; for the furrows in her face
did not merely run up and down--they ran in all directions, and
carried her tears all over her face at once. She could understand
death, but she could not understand this.
It came about in this way: Anne Marie and she lived in the little
red-washed cabin against which she leaned; had lived there alone with
each other for fifty years, ever since Jeanne Marie's husband had died,
and the three children after him, in the fever epidemic.
The little two-roomed cabin, the stable where there used to be a cow,
the patch of ground planted with onions, had all been bought and paid
for by the husband; for he was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had
he lived there would not have been one better off, or with a larger
family, either in that quarter or in any of the red-washed
suburbs with which Gascony has surrounded New Orleans. His women,
however,--the wife and sister-in-law,--had done their share in the
work: a man's share apiece, for with the Gascon women there is no
discrimination of sex when it comes to work.
And they worked on just the same after he died, tending the cow,
digging, hoeing, planting, watering. The day following the funeral, by
daylight Jeanne Marie was shouldering around the yoke of milk-cans to
his patrons, while Anne Marie carried the vegetables to market; and so
on for fifty years.
They were old women now,--seventy-five years old,--and, as they
expressed it, they had always been twins. In twins there is always one
lucky and one unlucky one: Jeanne Marie was the lucky one, Anne Marie
the unlucky one. So much so, that it was even she who had to catch the
rheumatism, and to lie now bedridden, months at a time, while Jeanne
Marie was as active in her sabots as she had ever been.
In spite of the age of both, and the infirmity of one, every Saturday
night there was some little thing to put under the brick in the
hearth, for taxes and license, and the never-to-be-forgotten funeral
provision. In the husband's time gold pieces used to go in, but they
had all gone to pay for the four funerals and the quadrupled doctor's
bill. The women laid in silver pieces; the coins, however, grew
smaller and smaller, and represented more and more not so much the
gain from onions as the saving from food.
It had been explained to them how they might, all at once, make a
year's gain in the lottery; and it had become their custom always, at
the end of every month, to put aside one silver coin apiece, to buy a
lottery ticket with--one ticket each, not for the great, but for the
twenty-five-cent, prizes. Anne Marie would buy hers round about the
market; Jeanne Marie would stop anywhere along her milk course and buy
hers, and they would go together in the afternoon to stand with the
little crowd watching the placard upon which the winning numbers were
to be written. And when they were written, it was curious, Jeanne
Marie's numbers would come out twice as often as Anne Marie's. Not
that she ever won anything, for she was not lucky enough to have them
come out in the order to win; they only came out here and there,
singly: but it was sufficient to make old Anne Marie cross and ugly
for a day or two, and injure the sale of the onion-basket. When she
became bedridden, Jeanne Marie bought the ticket for both, on the
numbers, however, that Anne Marie gave her; and Anne Marie had to lie
in bed and wait, while Jeanne Marie went out to watch the placard.
One evening, watching it, Jeanne Marie saw the ticket-agent write out
the numbers as they came on her ticket, in such a way that they drew
a prize--forty dollars.
When the old woman saw it she felt such a happiness; just as she used
to feel in the old times right after the birth of a baby. She thought
of that instantly. Without saying a word to any one, she clattered
over the _banquette_ as fast as she could in her sabots, to tell the
good news to Anne Marie. But she did not go so fast as not to have
time to dispose of her forty dollars over and over again. Forty
dollars! That was a great deal of money. She had often in her mind,
when she was expecting a prize, spent twenty dollars; for she had
never thought it could be more than that. But forty dollars! A new
gown apiece, and black silk kerchiefs to tie over their heads instead
of red cotton, and the little cabin new red-washed, and soup in the
pot, and a garlic sausage, and a bottle of good, costly liniment for
Anne Marie's legs; and still a pile of gold to go under the
hearth-brick--a pile of gold that would have made the eyes of the
defunct husband glisten.
She pushed open the picket-gate, and came into the room where her
sister lay in bed.
"Eh, Anne Marie, my girl," she called in her thick, pebbly voice,
apparently made purposely to suit her rough Gascon accent; "this time
we have caught it!"
[Illustration: "THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT IT!"]
"Whose ticket?" asked Anne Marie, instantly.
In a flash all Anne Marie's ill luck ran through Jeanne Marie's mind;
how her promised husband had proved unfaithful, and Jeanne Marie's
faithful; and how, ever since, even to the coming out of her lottery
numbers, even to the selling of vegetables, even to the catching of
the rheumatism, she had been the loser. But above all, as she looked
at Anne Marie in the bed, all the misery came over Jeanne Marie of her
sister's not being able, in all her poor old seventy-five years of
life, to remember the pressure of the arms of a husband about her
waist, nor the mouth of a child on her breast.
As soon as Anne Marie had asked her question, Jeanne Marie answered
it.
"But your ticket, _Coton-Maï!_"[1]
[Footnote 1: _Coton-Maï_ is an innocent oath invented by the good,
pious priest as a substitute for one more harmful.]
"Where? Give it here! Give it here!"
The old woman, who had not been able to move her back for weeks, sat
bolt upright in bed, and stretched out her great bony fingers, with
the long nails as hard and black as rake-prongs from groveling in the
earth.
Jeanne Marie poured the money out of her cotton handkerchief into
them.
Anne Marie counted it, looked at it; looked at it, counted it; and
if she had not been so old, so infirm, so toothless, the smile that
passed over her face would have made it beautiful.
Jeanne Marie had to leave her to draw water from the well to water the
plants, and to get her vegetables ready for next morning. She felt
even happier now than if she had just had a child, happier even than
if her husband had just returned to her.
"Ill luck! _Coton-Maï!_ Ill luck! There's a way to turn ill luck!"
And her smile also should have beautified her face, wrinkled and ugly
though it was.
She did not think any more of the spending of the money, only of the
pleasure Anne Marie would take in spending it.
The water was low in the well, and there had been a long drought.
There are not many old women of seventy-five who could have watered so
much ground as abundantly as she did; but whenever she thought of the
forty dollars and Anne Marie's smile she would give the thirsting
plant an extra bucketful.
The twilight was gaining. She paused. "_Coton-Maï_" she exclaimed
aloud. "But I must see the old woman smile again over her good luck."
Although it was "my girl" face to face, it was always "the old woman"
behind each other's back.
There was a knot-hole in the plank walls of the house. In spite of
Anne Marie's rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing it, they
said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie slipped her feet out of her
sabots and crept easily toward it, smiling, and saying "_Coton-Maï_!"
to herself all the way. She put her eye to the hole. Anne Marie was
not in the bed, she who had not left her bed for two months! Jeanne
Marie looked through the dim light of the room until she found her.
Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and nightsack, with bare legs
and feet, was on her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank,
hiding--peasants know hiding when they see it--hiding her money
away--away--away from whom?--muttering to herself and shaking her old
grayhaired head. Hiding her money away from Jeanne Marie!
And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned her head against the side of the
house and wept. It seemed to her that she had never known her twin
sister at all.
A CRIPPLED HOPE
You must picture to yourself the quiet, dim-lighted room of a
convalescent; outside, the dreary, bleak days of winter in a sparsely
settled, distant country parish; inside, a slow, smoldering log-fire,
a curtained bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the mother wakeful,
restless, thought-driven, as a mother must be, unfortunately,
nowadays, particularly in that parish, where cotton worms and
overflows have acquired such a monopoly of one's future.
[Illustration: "THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT."]
God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than
God seems the sick-nurse--at least in that part of the country, under
those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and
uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black,
steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing
hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step--the
flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of
the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and
thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon
it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of
balm to some woe.
She said she had, and in truth she had, no other name than "little
Mammy"; and that was the name of her nature. Pure African, but bronze
rather than pure black, and full-sized only in width, her growth
having been hampered as to height by an injury to her hip, which
had lamed her, pulling her figure awry, and burdening her with a
protuberance of the joint. Her mother caused it by dropping her when a
baby, and concealing it, for fear of punishment, until the dislocation
became irremediable. All the animosity of which little Mammy was
capable centered upon this unknown but never-to-be-forgotten mother of
hers; out of this hatred had grown her love--that is, her destiny, a
woman's love being her destiny. Little Mammy's love was for children.
The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one would
infer) took place in--it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!--took
place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader's
auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying
and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech--a
great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning
against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the
bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation
into the profits of the morrow.
The place can be pointed out now, is often pointed out; but no emotion
arises at sight of it. It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edifice
that emotion only comes afterward in thinking about it, and then in
the reflection that such an edifice could be, then as now, plain and
matter-of-fact.
For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physical
soundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged or
counterfeited. Little Mammy's good-for-nothing mother was sold as
readily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would pay
for a crippled baby. The mother herself would not have taken her as
a gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to give
away anything. Some doctoring was done,--so little Mammy heard
traditionally,--some effort made to get her marketable. There were
attempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondencies
in age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute,
at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing equaled a
negro-trader's will and power for fraud, except the hereditary
distrust and watchfulness which it bred and maintained. And so, in the
even balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained a
fixture in the stream of life that passed through that back room,
in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless,
however--rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values as
substitutes, as panaceas. She earned her nourishment, and Providence
did not let it kill the little animal before the emancipation of
weaning arrived.
[Illustration: "LITTLE MAMMY."]
How much circumstances evoked, how much instinct responded, belongs to
the secrets which nature seems to intend keeping. As a baby she had
eyes, attention, solely for other babies. One cannot say while she was
still crawling, for she could only crawl years after she should have
been walking, but, before even precocious walking-time, tradition or
the old gray-haired negro janitor relates, she would creep from baby
to baby to play with it, put it to sleep, pat it, rub its stomach (a
negro baby, you know, is all stomach, and generally aching stomach at
that). And before she had a lap, she managed to force one for some
ailing nursling. It was then that they began to call her "little
Mammy." In the transitory population of the "pen" no one stayed long
enough to give her another name; and no one ever stayed short enough
to give her another one.
Her first recollection of herself was that she could not walk--she was
past crawling; she cradled herself along, as she called sitting down
flat, and working herself about with her hands and her one strong
leg. Babbling babies walked all around her,--many walking before they
babbled,--and still she did not walk, imitate them as she might and
did. She would sit and "study" about it, make another trial, fall;
sit and study some more, make another trial, fall again. Negroes, who
believe that they must give a reason for everything even if they have
to invent one, were convinced that it was all this studying upon her
lameness that gave her such a large head.
And now she began secretly turning up the clothes of every negro
child that came into that pen, and examining its legs, and still more
secretly examining her own, stretched out before her on the ground.
How long it took she does not remember; in fact, she could not have
known, for she had no way of measuring time except by her thoughts and
feelings. But in her own way and time the due process of deliberation
was fulfilled, and the quotient made clear that, bowed or not, all
children's legs were of equal length except her own, and all were
alike, not one full, strong, hard, the other soft, flabby, wrinkled,
growing out of a knot at the hip. A whole psychological period
apparently lay between that conclusion and--a broom-handle
walking-stick; but the broomstick came, as it was bound to
come,--thank heaven!--from that premise, and what with stretching one
limb to make it longer, and doubling up the other to make it shorter,
she invented that form of locomotion which is still carrying her
through life, and with no more exaggerated leg-crookedness than many
careless negroes born with straight limbs display. This must have been
when she was about eight or nine. Hobbling on a broomstick, with, no
doubt, the same weird, wizened face as now, an innate sense of the
fitness of things must have suggested the kerchief tied around her big
head, and the burlaps rag of an apron in front of her linsey-woolsey
rag of a gown, and the bit of broken pipe-stem in the corner of her
mouth, where the pipe should have been, and where it was in after
years. That is the way she recollected herself, and that is the way
one recalls her now, with a few modifications.
The others came and went, but she was always there. It wasn't long
before she became "little Mammy" to the grown folks too; and the
newest inmates soon learned to cry: "Where's little Mammy?" "Oh,
little Mammy! little Mammy! Such a misery in my head [or my back, or
my stomach]! Can't you help me, little Mammy?" It was curious what a
quick eye she had for symptoms and ailments, and what a quick ear
for suffering, and how apt she was at picking up, remembering, and
inventing remedies. It never occurred to her not to crouch at the
head or the foot of a sick pallet, day and night through. As for the
nights, she said she dared not close her eyes of nights. The room they
were in was so vast, and sometimes the negroes lay so thick on the
floor, rolled in their blankets (you know, even in the summer they
sleep under blankets), all snoring so loudly, she would never have
heard a groan or a whimper any more than they did, if she had slept,
too. And negro mothers are so careless and such heavy sleepers. All
night she would creep at regular intervals to the different pallets,
and draw the little babies from under, or away from, the heavy, inert
impending mother forms. There is no telling how many she thus saved
from being overlaid and smothered, or, what was worse, maimed and
crippled.
Whenever a physician came in, as he was sometimes called, to look at
a valuable investment or to furbish up some piece of damaged goods,
she always managed to get near to hear the directions; and she
generally was the one to apply them also, for negroes always would
steal medicines most scurvily one from the other. And when death at
times would slip into the pen, despite the trader's utmost alertness
and precautions,--as death often "had to do," little Mammy said,--when
the time of some of them came to die, and when the rest of the
negroes, with African greed of eye for the horrible, would press
around the lowly couch where the agonizing form of a slave lay
writhing out of life, she would always to the last give medicines,
and wipe the cold forehead, and soothe the clutching, fearsome hands,
hoping to the end, and trying to inspire the hope that his or her
"time" had not come yet; for, as she said, "Our time doesn't come just
as often as it does come."
And in those sad last offices, which somehow have always been under
reproach as a kind of shame, no matter how young she was, she was
always too old to have the childish avoidance of them. On the
contrary, to her a corpse was only a kind of baby, and she always
strove, she said, to make one, like the other, easy and comfortable.
And in other emergencies she divined the mysteries of the flesh, as
other precocities divine the mysteries of painting and music, and so
become child wonders.
Others came and went. She alone remained there. Babies of her
babyhood--the toddlers she, a toddler, had nursed--were having babies
themselves now; the middle-aged had had time to grow old and die.
Every week new families were coming into the great back chamber; every
week they passed out: babies, boys, girls, buxom wenches, stalwart
youths, and the middle-aged--the grave, serious ones whom misfortune
had driven from their old masters, and the ill-reputed ones, the
trickish, thievish, lazy, whom the cunning of the negro-trader alone
could keep in circulation. All were marketable, all were bought and
sold, all passed in one door and out the other--all except her, little
Mammy. As with her lameness, it took time for her to recognize, to
understand, the fact. She could study over her lameness, she could in
the dull course of time think out the broomstick way of palliation.
It would have been almost better, under the circumstances, for God to
have kept the truth from her; only--God keeps so little of the truth
from us women. It is his system.
Poor little thing! It was not now that her master _could_ not sell
her, but he _would_ not! Out of her own intelligence she had forged
her chains; the lameness was a hobble merely in comparison. She had
become too valuable to the negro-trader by her services among his
crew, and offers only solidified his determination not to sell her.
Visiting physicians, after short acquaintance with her capacities,
would offer what were called fancy prices for her. Planters who heard
of her through their purchases would come to the city purposely to
secure, at any cost, so inestimable an adjunct to their plantations.
Even ladies--refined, delicate ladies--sometimes came to the pen
personally to back money with influence. In vain. Little Mammy was
worth more to the negro-trader, simply as a kind of insurance against
accidents, than any sum, however glittering the figure, and he was no
ignorant expert in human wares. She can tell it; no one else can for
her. Remember that at times she had seen the streets outside. Remember
that she could hear of the outside world daily from the passing
chattels--of the plantations, farms, families; the green fields,
Sunday woods, running streams; the camp-meetings, corn-shuckings,
cotton-pickings, sugar-grindings; the baptisms, marriages, funerals,
prayer-meetings; the holidays and holy days. Remember that, whether
for liberty or whether for love, passion effloresces in the human
being--no matter when, where, or how--with every spring's return.
Remember that she was, even in middle age, young and vigorous. But no;
do not remember anything. There is no need to heighten the coloring.
It would be tedious to relate, although it was not tedious to hear her
relate it, the desperations and hopes of her life then. Hardly a day
passed that she did not see, looking for purchases (rummaging among
goods on a counter for bargains), some master whom she could have
loved, some mistress whom she could have adored. Always her favorite
mistresses were there--tall, delicate matrons, who came themselves,
with great fatigue, to select kindly-faced women for nurses;
languid-looking ladies with smooth hair standing out in wide
_bandeaux_ from their heads, and lace shawls dropping from their
sloping shoulders, silk dresses carelessly held up in thumb and finger
from embroidered petticoats that were spread out like tents over huge
hoops which covered whole groups of swarming piccaninnies on the dirty
floor; ladies, pale from illnesses that she might have nursed, and
over-burdened with children whom she might have reared! And not a lady
of that kind saw her face but wanted her, yearned for her, pleaded for
her, coming back secretly to slip silver, and sometimes gold, pieces
into her hand, patting her turbaned head, calling her "little Mammy"
too, instantly, by inspiration, and making the negro-trader give them,
with all sorts of assurances, the refusal of her. She had no need for
the whispered "Buy me, master!" "Buy me, mistress!" "You'll see how I
can work, master!" "You'll never be sorry, mistress!" of the others.
The negro-trader--like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted by nature for
their profession--it came into his head--he had no heart, not even a
negro-trader's heart--that it would be more judicious to seclude her
during these shopping visits, so to speak. She could not have had any
hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations.
That auction-block, that executioner's block, about which so much has
been written--Jacob's ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that
block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and
down--well, perhaps Jacob's angels were his hopes, too.
At times she determined to depreciate her usefulness, mar her value,
by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would
tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner,
strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became
dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through
incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to
maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was
falling into some emergency of pain and illness.
How it might have ended one does not like to think. Fortunately, one
does not need to think.
There came a night. She sat alone in the vast, dark caravansary--alone
for the first time in her life. Empty rags and blankets lay strewn
over the floor, no snoring, no tossing in them more. A sacrificial
sale that day had cleared the counters. Alarm-bells rang in the
streets, but she did not know them for alarm-bells; alarm brooded in
the dim space around her, but she did not even recognize that. Her
protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind to all but one
peradventure.