WE went home at Christmas!
Twenty years were to elapse before I should spend another Christmas
week in the country. We did not know this then. Not a hitch impeded
the smooth unrolling of the weeks of expectation and the days of
preparation for the holidays. We were to set out on Monday. On Friday,
Spotswood drove up to our door, and Mary Anne, my mother’s own maid,
alighted. That evening James Ivey reported for escort duty. Even
elderly women seldom travelled alone at that date. About young girls
were thrown protective parallels that would widen our college-woman’s
mouth with laughter and her eyes with amazement. There were no footpads
on the stage-road from Richmond to Powhatan, and had these gentry
abounded in the forests running down to the wheel-tracks, stalwart
Spotswood and a shot-gun would have kept them at bay. Maid and outrider
were the outward sign of unspoken and unwritten conventions rooted in
love of womankind. The physical weakness of the sex was their strength;
their dependence upon stronger arms and tender hearts their warrant for
any and every demand they chose to make upon their natural protectors.
We had none of these things in mind that joyful Monday morning when
Uncle Carus, on one hand, and James Ivey on the other, helped us into
the carriage. Carriage-steps were folded up, accordion-wise, and
doubled back and down upon the floor of the vehicle when not in use.
The clatter, as the coach-door was opened and the steps let down,
was the familiar accompaniment of successive arrivals of guests at
hospitable homes, and worshippers at country churches.
The trim flight fell with a merry rattle for the two happiest girls
in the State, and we sprang in, followed by Mary Anne. We were wedged
snugly in place by parcels that filled every corner and almost touched
the roof. Presents we had been buying for a month with our own
pocket-money and making in our few spare hours, were bound into bundles
and packed in boxes. The wells under the cushioned seats were crammed
with fragiles and confectionery, the like of which our lesser sisters
and brothers had never tasted.
Uncle Carus prophesied a snow-storm. My mother used to say that he
was a wise weather-prophet. We stubbornly discredited the prediction
until we had left the city spires five miles behind us, and James
Ivey’s overcoat and leggings (some called them “spatter-dashes”) were
dotted with feathery flakes. Whereupon we discovered that there was
nothing in the world jollier than travelling in a snow-storm, and grew
wildly hilarious in the prospect. The snow fell steadily and in grim
earnest. By the time we got to Flat Rock, where we were to have the
horses and ourselves fed, the wheels churned up, at every revolution,
mud that was crushed strawberry in color, topped with whiteness that
might have been whipped cream; for the roads were heavy by reason of
an open winter. This was Christmas snow. We exulted in it as if we had
had a hand in the making. Our gallant outrider, albeit a staid youth
of three-and-twenty, fell in with our humor. He made feeble fun of his
own appearance as each wrinkle in his garments became a drift, and his
dark hair was like a horsehair wig such as we had seen in pictures of
English barristers. His bay horse was a match to our iron-grays, and
the twelve hoofs were ploughing through a level fall of six inches
before we espied the tremulous sparks we recognized as village windows.
Our throats ached with laughing and our hearts with great swelling
waves of happiness, as we tumbled out of our seats—and our bundles
after us—at the gate of the long, low house that might have been mean
in eyes accustomed to rows of three-storied brick “residences” on city
streets. Every door was flung wide; every window was red with fire and
lamp light.
We had fried chicken and waffles, hot rolls, ham, beaten biscuits,
honey, three kinds of preserves, and, by special petition of all the
children, a mighty bowl of snow and cream, abundantly sweetened, for
supper. This dispatched, and at full length, the journey having made
us hungry, and the sight of us having quickened the appetites of the
rest, we sat about the fire in the great “chamber” on the first floor,
that was the throbbing heart of the home, and talked until ten o’clock.
The faithful clock that hung above the mantel did not vary five minutes
from the truth in that number of years; but it was dumbly discreet,
never obtruding an audible reminder of the flight of hours. I saw one
of the same pattern in a curio shop last week. The salesman asked fifty
dollars for it.
The chimney in “the chamber” drew better than any other in the house.
A fire was kindled on that hearth, night and morning, for nine months
in the year. My mother maintained that the excellent health of her
young family was due in part to that fact. A little blaze dispelled the
lingering dampness of the morning and the gathering fogs of night. She
knew nothing of germs, benevolent and malevolent, but she appreciated
the leading fact that cold and humidity signify danger, heat and
dryness go with health.
I coveted no girl’s home and apparel, as Mea and I snuggled down
under our blankets on the mattress my father was so far in advance
of his times as to insist should be substituted for a feather-bed in
each bedroom occupied by a child. The “whim” was one of the “notions”
that earned for him the reputation of eccentricity with conservative
neighbors.
Our windows were casements, and rattled sharply in blasts that had
thrashed the snow-storm into a tempest. The wind pounded, as with
hammers, upon the sloping roof over our happy heads. Longfellow had not
yet written
“My little ones are folded like the flocks,”
but I know my mother felt it.
She came near saying it when I told her at the breakfast-table that I
fell asleep, saying to myself:
“He’ll go into the barn and keep himself warm
And hide his head under his wing.”
“I could think of nothing, whenever I awoke, but the mother sheep with
her lambs all with her in the fold,” was her answer. “And of ‘the
hollow of His hand.’ We have much to make us thankful this Christmas.”
“To make us thankful!” She was ever on the watch for that. Like Martin
Luther’s little bird, she “sat on her twig, content, and let God take
care.”
A bright sun left little of what had promised to be a deep snow, by
Christmas Day. Four Christmas-guns were fired at midnight of Christmas
Eve in four different quarters of the village. That is, holes were
drilled with a big auger into the heart of a stout oak or hickory, and
stuffed with powder. At twelve o’clock a torch was applied by a fast
runner, who took to his heels on the instant to escape the explosion.
The detonation was that of a big cannon. Sometimes, the tree was rent
apart. That was a matter of small moment in a region where acres of
forest-lands were cleared for tobacco fields by the primitive barbarism
of girdling giant trees that had struck their roots into the virgin
soil and lifted strong arms to heaven for centuries. From midnight
to sunrise the sound of “pop-crackers” and pistol-shots was hardly
intermitted by a minute’s silence. With the awakening of quieter,
because older folk, the air rang with shouts of “Christmas gift!”
addressed impartially to young and old, white and black.
The salutation was a grievous puzzle and positive annoyance to our
New-England grandmother, the first Christmas she passed with us. By the
time she was ready for breakfast she had emptied her pocket of loose
coins, and bestowed small articles of dress and ornament upon three or
four of the (to her apprehension) importunate claimants. When she made
known the grievance—which she did in her usual imperious fashion—my
father shouted with laughter. With difficulty he drilled into her mind
that the greeting was not a petition, still less a demand. From that
day he forbade any of us to say “Christmas gift!” to “Old Mistis,” as
the servants called her. We children wished her, “A merry Christmas.”
The servants never learned the unaccustomed form. The old lady did
not enter into the real significance of the words that offended her.
Nor, for that matter, did one out of a hundred of those who had used
it all their lives, as each Christmas rolled around. It never dawned
upon me until I heard how Russian peasants and Russian nobility alike
greet every one they meet on Easter morning with—“The Lord is risen,”
receiving the answer, “He is risen indeed!” The exultant cry of
“Christmas gift!” was a proclamation of the best thing that ever came
into the world. The exchange of holiday offerings at the festal season
commemorates the same. All over Christendom it is an act of grateful,
if too often blind, obedience to the command—“Freely ye have received,
freely give.”
There were twelve servants in our family—eight adults and four
children. Not one was overlooked in the distribution of presents
that followed breakfast and family prayers. The servants were called
in to morning and evening prayers as regularly as the white members
were assembled for the service. The custom was universal in town and
country, and was, without doubt, borrowed from English country life—the
model for Virginian descendants. Men and women took time to pray,
and made haste to do nothing. We prate long and loudly now of deep
breathing. We _practised_ it in that earlier generation.
On Christmas night we had a “molasses stew.” We have learned to say
“candy-pull” since then. A huge cauldron of molasses was boiled in the
kitchen—a detached building of a story-and-a-half, standing about fifty
feet from “the house.” Gilbert—the dining-room servant, who would be “a
butler” now—brought it into the dining-room when it was done to a turn,
and poured it into great buttered platters arranged around the long
table. All of us, girls and boys, had pinned aprons or towels over our
festive garments, and put back our cuffs from our wrists. My mother set
the pace in the pulling. She had a reputation for making the whitest
and most spongy candy in the county, and she did it in the daintiest
way imaginable. Buttering the tips of her fingers lightly, she drew
carefully from the surface of the platter enough of the cooling mixture
for a good “pull.” In two minutes she had an amber ribbon, glossy and
elastic, that bleached fast to cream-color under her rapid, weaving
motion, until she coiled or braided completed candy—brittle, dry, and
porous—upon a dish lined with paper. She never let anybody take the
other end of the rope; she did not butter her fingers a second time,
and used the taper tips alone in the work, and she had the candy on
the dish before any of the others had the sticky, scalding mass in
working order. We dipped our fingers again and again in butter and,
when hard bestead, into flour, which last resort my mother scorned as
unprofessional, and each girl had a boy at the other end of her rope.
It was graceful work when done _secundum artem_. The fast play of
hands; the dexterous toss and exchange of the ends of shining strands
that stiffened too soon if not handled aright; the strain upon bared
wrists and strong shoulders as the great ropes hardened; the laughing
faces bent over the task; the cries of feigned distress as the immature
confectionery became sticky, or parted into strings, under careless
manipulation; the merry peals of laughter at defeat or success—made the
Christmas frolic picturesque and gay. I wondered then, and I have often
asked since, why no painter has ever chosen as a subject this one of
our national pastimes.
A homelier, but as characteristic an incident of that Christmas—the
last we were to have in the country home—was hog-killing.
The “hog and hominy,” supposed by an ignorant reading-public to have
formed the main sustenance of the Virginian planter and his big family,
are as popularly believed to have been raised upon his own farm or
farms. Large herds of pigs were born and brought up on Virginia lands.
Perhaps one-half of the pork cured into bacon by country and by village
folk, was bought from Kentucky drovers. Early in the winter—before the
roads became impassable—immense droves of full-grown hogs crowded the
routes leading over mountain and valley into the sister State. We had
notice of the approach of one of these to our little town before it
appeared at the far end of the main street, by the hoarse grunting that
swelled into hideous volume—unmistakable and indescribable—a continuous
rush of dissonance, across which were projected occasional squeals.
A drove had entered the village a week before Christmas, and rested
for the night in the wide “old field” back of the Bell Tavern.
Citizens of the Court House and from the vicinity had bought freely
from the drovers. More than twenty big-boned grunters were enclosed
in a large pen at the foot of our garden, and fed lavishly for ten
days, to recover them from the fatigue of the journey that left them
leaner than suited the fancy of the purchaser. On the morning of the
cold day appointed for the “killing,” they were driven to a near-by
“horse-branch” and washed. At noon they were slaughtered at a spot so
distant from the house that no sound indicative of the deed reached our
ears. Next day the carcasses were duly cut up into hams, shoulders,
middlings (or sides of bacon), chines, and spareribs.
Lean leavings from the dissection were apportioned for sausage-meat;
the heads and feet would be made into souse (headcheese); even the
tails, when roasted in the embers, were juicy tidbits devoured
relishfully by children, white and black.
Not an edible atom of the genial porker went to waste in the household
of the notable housewife. The entrails, cleaned and scalded into
“chitterlings,” were accounted a luscious delicacy in the kitchen.
They rarely appeared upon the table of “white folks.” I never saw them
dished for ourselves, or our friends. Yet I have heard my father tell
of meeting John Marshall, then Chief Justice of the United States, in
the Richmond streets one morning, as the great man was on his way home
from the Old Market. He had a brace of ducks over one arm, and a string
of chitterlings swung jauntily from the other.
And why not? Judge Marshall had “Hudibras” at his tongue’s end, and
could have quoted:
“His warped ear hung o’er the strings,
Which was but souse to chitterlings.”
The Virginia house-mother had classic precedent for the utilization of
what her granddaughter accounts but offal. I once heard a celebrated
divine say, unctuously:
“‘Hog-killing time’ is to me the feast of the year.”
And nobody stared, or smiled, or said him “Nay.” Chine, sparerib,
and sausage, such as titillated our palates in the first half of the
nineteenth century, are not to be had now for love or money. The base
imitations sold to us in the shambles are the output of “contract
work.”