BACK IN POWHATAN—OLD VIRGINIA HOUSEWIFERY—A SINGING-CLASS IN THE
FORTIES—THE SIMPLE LIFE?
MY father’s “ways” were so well known by his neighbors it was taken
for granted that the education of his daughters would not be conducted
along conventional lines after we returned home. Mr. Howison had
completed his theological course in the seminary, and there were
other plans on foot, known as yet to my parents alone, which made the
engagement of another tutor inexpedient.
It did not seem odd to us then, but I wonder now over the routine laid
down by our father, and followed steadily by us during the next winter
and summer. A room in the second story was fitted up as a “study” for
the two girls. Each had her desk and her corner. Thither we repaired at
9 o’clock A.M. for five days of the week, and sat us down to work. When
problem, French exercise, history, and rhetoric lessons were prepared,
we gravely and dutifully recited them to each other; wrote French
exercises as carefully as if Mr. Howison’s eye were to scan them; and
each corrected that of her fellow to the best of her ability. We read
history and essays upon divers topics aloud, and discussed them freely.
The course of study was marked out for us by our beloved ex-tutor, who
wrote to us from time to time, in the midst of other and engrossing
cares, in proof of continued remembrance and interest in his whilom
pupils.
We girls wrought faithfully and happily until one o’clock at our
lessons. The rest of the day was our own, except afternoon hours which
were passed with our mother, and in occupations directed by her. She
had inherited from her mother taste and talent for dainty needlework,
and, as all sewing was done by hand, her hands were always full,
although her own maid was an expert seamstress. The Virginian matron of
_antebellum_ days never wielded broom or duster. She did not make beds
or stand at wash-tub or ironing-table. Yet she was as busy in her line
of housewifely duty as her “Yankee” sister.
Provisions were bought by the large quantity, and kept in the spacious
store-room, which was an important section of the dwelling. Every
morning the cook was summoned as soon as breakfast was fairly over,
appearing with a big wooden tray under her elbow, sundry empty
“buckets” slung upon her arm, and often a pail on her head, carried
there because every other available portion of her person was occupied.
The two went together to the store-room, and materials for the daily
food of white and black households were measured into the various
vessels. The notable housewife knew to a fraction how much of the raw
products went to the composition of each dish she ordered. So much
flour was required for a loaf of rolls, and so much for a dozen beaten
biscuits; a stated quantity of butter was for cake or pudding; sugar
was measured for the kitchen-table and for that at which the mistress
would sit with her guests. Molasses was poured into one bucket, lard
measured by the great spoonful into another; “bacon-middling” was cut
off by the chunk for cooking with vegetables and for the servants’
eating; hams and shoulders were laid aside from the supply in the
smoke-house, to which the pair presently repaired. Dried fruits
in the winter, spices, vinegar—the scores of minor condiments and
flavoring that were brought into daily use in the lavish provision
for appetites accustomed to the fat of the land—were “given out” as
scrupulously as staples. If wine or brandy were to be used in sauces,
the mistress would supply them later. It was not right, according to
her code, to put temptation of that sort in the way of her dependants.
It was certainly unsafe. Few colored women drank. I do not now recall
a solitary instance of that kind in all my experience with, and
observation of negro servants, before or after the war. I wish I could
say the same for Scotch, Irish, and German cooks whom I have employed
during a half-century of active housewifery.
Negro men were notoriously weak in that direction. The most honest
could not resist the sight and smell of liquor. The failing would
seem to be racial. It is an established fact that when the solid
reconstructed South “went dry” in certain elections, it was in the hope
of keeping ardent spirits out of the way of the negroes.
To return to our housekeeper of the mid-nineteenth century: The second
stage in the daily round appointed to her by custom and necessity was
to superintend the washing of breakfast china, glass, and silver. In
seven cases out of ten she did the work herself, or deputed it to her
daughters. One of my earliest recollections is of standing by my mother
as she washed the breakfast “things,” and allowed me to polish the
teaspoons with a tiny towel just the right size for my baby hands.
Her own hands were very beautiful, as were her feet. To preserve
her taper fingers from the hot water in which silver and glass were
washed, she wore gloves, cutting off the tips of the fingers. The
proper handling of “fragiles” was a fine art, and few colored servants
arose to the right practice of it. I have in my memory the picture
of one stately gentlewoman, serene of face and dignified of speech,
who retained her seat at the table when the rest of us had finished
breakfast. To her, then, in dramatic parlance, the butler, arrayed
in long, white apron, sleeves rolled to the elbow, bearing a pail
of cedar-wood with bright brass hoops, three-quarters full of hot
water. This he set down upon a small table brought into the room for
the purpose, and proceeded to wash plates, cups, glass, silver, etc.,
collected from the board at which madam still presided, a bit of fancy
knitting or crocheting in hand, which did not withdraw her eyes from
vigilant attention to his movements.
Like surveillance was exercised over each branch of housework. Every
part of the establishment was visited by the mistress before she sat
down to the sewing, which was her own especial task. Her daughters were
instructed in the intricacies of backstitch, fell-seams, overcasting,
hemstitching, herringbone, button-holes, rolled and flat hems, by
the time they let down their frocks and put up their hair. The girl
who had not made a set of chemises for herself before she reached
her fourteenth birthday was accounted slow to learn what became a
gentlewoman who expected to have a home of her own to manage some
day. Until I was ten years old I knit my own stockings of fine,
white cotton, soft as wool. Gentlemen of the old school refused to
wear socks and stockings bought over a counter. In winter they had
woollen, in summer cotton foot-gear, home-knit by wives or aunts or
daughters. We embroidered our chemise bands and the ruffles of skirts,
the undersleeves that came in with “Oriental sleeves,” and the broad
collars that accompanied them.
Reading aloud more often went with the sewing-circle found in every
home, than gossip. My father set his fine, strong face like a flint
against neighborhood scandal and tittle-tattle. “‘They say’ is next
door to a lie,” was one of the sententious sayings that silenced
anecdotes dealing with village characters and doings. A more effectual
quietus was: “_Who says_ that? Never repeat a tale without giving the
author’s name. That is the only honorable thing to do.”
I do not know that the exclusion of chit-chat of our friends drove
us to books for entertainment, when miles of seams and gussets and
overcasting lay between us and springtime with its outdoor amusements
and occupations. I do say that we did not pine for evening “functions,”
for luncheons and matinées, when we had plenty of books to read aloud
and congenial companions with whom to discuss what we read. Once a
week we had a singing-class, which met around our dining-table. My
father led this, giving the key with his tuning-fork, and now and then
accompanying with his flute a hymn in which his tenor was not needed.
Have I ever spoken of the singular fact that he had “no ear for music,”
yet sang tunefully and with absolute accuracy, with the notes before
him? He could not carry the simplest air without the music-book. It was
a clear case of a lack of co-ordination between ear and brain. He was
passionately fond of music, and sang well in spite of it, playing the
flute correctly and with taste—always by note. Take away the printed or
written page, and he was all at sea.
Those songful evenings were the one dissipation of the week. A
singing-master, the leader of a Richmond choir, had had a school at
the Court House the winter before, and _The Boston Academy_ was in
every house in the village. I could run glibly over the names of the
regular attendants on the Tuesday evenings devoted to our _musicale_.
George Moody, my father’s good-looking ward, now seventeen, and already
in love up to his ears with Effie D., my especial crony, who was a
month my junior; Thaddeus Ivey, a big blond of the true Saxon type,
my father’s partner, and engaged to be married to a pretty Lynchburg
girl; James Ivey, a clerk in the employ of Hawes & Ivey—nice and quiet
and gentlemanly, and in love with nobody that we knew of—these were
the bassos. Once in a while, “Cousin Joe,” who was busily engaged in
a seven years’ courtship of a fair villager, Effie’s sister, joined us
and bore our souls and voices aloft with the sonorous “brum! brum!”
of a voice at once rich and well-trained. There were five sopranos—we
called it “the treble” then—and two women sang “the second treble.” One
weak-voiced neighbor helped my father out with the tenor. Until a year
or two before the singing-master invaded the country, women sang tenor,
and the alto was known as “counter.”
The twentieth century has not quite repudiated the tunes we delighted
in on those winter nights, when
“The fire, with hickory logs supplied,
Went roaring up the chimney wide,”
and we lined both sides of the long table, lighted by tall sperm-oil
lamps, and bent seriously happy faces over _The Boston Academy_,
singing with the spirit and, to the best of our ability, with the
understanding—“Lanesboro’” and “Cambridge” and “Hebron” and “Boyleston”
and “Zion,” and learning, with puckered brows and steadfast eyes glued
to the notes, such new tunes as “Yarmouth,” “Anvern,” and “Zerah.”
“Sing _at_ it!” my father would command in heartsome tones, from his
stand at the top of the double line. “You will never learn it if you do
not make the first trial.”
I arose to my feet the other day with the rest of the congregation of a
fashionable church for a hymn which “everybody” was enjoined from the
pulpit to “sing.”