“‘Extra Billy!’ He knows less of Latin than of Choctaw!”
The worthy functionary had earned the _sobriquet_ by superdiligence
in the matter of extra baggage while in the service of a stage-coach
company, and as he was a Democrat we never forgot it.
“Let that pass!” said Mea, impatiently. “We can’t get away from the
fact that where there is so much smoke there must be a little fire.
Some evil business is on foot, and all the servants know what it is,
whether we do or not.”
I felt that she was right when Mary Anne and “Mammy,” Gilbert, Tom, his
assistant, and my little maid Paulina, with black Molly, Percy’s nurse,
trooped in, one after the other, to welcome “Miss Firginny” home. They
had done the like ever since I was born. I should have felt hurt and
angry had they failed in the ceremony. My sharpened senses detected
something that was overdone in manner and speech. They were too glad to
see me, and while they protested, I discerned sarcasm in their grins, a
sinister roll in lively eyeballs.
We talked fast over the supper-table, and of all manner of things
irrelevant to the topic uppermost in our thoughts. Once, while Gilbert
and his half-grown subaltern were out of the room, I ventured a hasty
whisper to my father, at whose right I sat:
“Father, have we any arms in the house if they should come?”
Without turning his head, he saw, out of the tail of his eye, Gilbert
on the threshold, a plate of hot waffles in hand, and Tom at his heels
bearing a pitcher of fresh water. My father reached out a deliberate
hand for a slice of bread from a plate near his elbow.
“All that I have to say, my daughter” (his speech as deliberate as his
hand, and every syllable sharp and clear), “is that we are prepared for
them, come when and how they may.”
A perceptible shiver, as when one catches breath after an electric
shock, ran around the table. All felt that he had thrown down the
gauntlet, and was ready to take the consequences. My heart leaped up as
an elastic bough from the weight that had bowed it to the earth. It was
no effort after that to be gay. I told stories of my country sojourn,
retailed the humors of the visit to our old neighborhood, mimicking
this and that rustic, telling of comical sayings of the colored people
who pressed me with queries as to town life—in short, unbottled a
store of fun and gossip that lasted until bedtime. Then, as I told my
correspondent, I went to bed and slept the sleep of youth, health, and
an easy mind.
And this because he who never lied to me had said that he was
“prepared” for the assassins, come when they might.
A week later, when the fireless smoke had vanished quite from the
horizon, and we dared jest at the “scare,” I asked my mother what
arsenal my father had had in reserve that he could speak so confidently
of preparation for midnight attack and domestic treachery.
“Nothing more formidable than a carving-knife,” she answered, merrily,
“and courage that has always served him in the hour of peril. He was
not alarmed. I believe he would face a hundred negroes with no other
weapon than his bare hands.”
I am often asked why, if our family servants were really and warmly
attached to us, we should have let the “bugbear” poison our pleasures
and haunt our midnight visions. To the present hour I am conscious of a
peculiar stricture of the heart that stops my breath for a second, at
the sudden blast of a hunter’s horn in the country. Before I was eight
years old I had heard the tale of Gabriel’s projected insurrection,
and of the bloodier outbreak of murderous fury led by Nat Turner, the
petted favorite of a trusting master. Heard that the signal of attack
in both cases was to be “a trumpet blown long and loud.” Again and
again, on my visits to country plantations, I have been thrown into
a paroxysm of terror when awakened from sleep in the dead of night,
by the sound of the horns carried by “coon hunters” in their rounds
of the woods nearest us. I could not have been over ten, when, on a
visit to “Lethe,” a homestead occupied for a while by Uncle Carus, I
was rambling in the garden soon after sunrise, picking roses, and let
them fall from nerveless fingers at the ringing blast of a “trumpet
blown long and loud”, from the brow of a neighboring hill. As it pealed
louder and longer, until the blue welkin above me repeated the sound,
I fled as fast as my freezing feet would carry me, to the deepest
recesses of the graveyard at the foot of the garden, and hid in a
tangle of wild raspberry bushes higher than my head. There I lay, wet
with the dews of the past night, and my face and hands scratched to
bleeding, until the winding horn grew faint and fainter, and the bay of
a pack of hounds told me what a fool panic had made of me. We always
thought of the graveyard as an asylum in the event of a rising. No
negro would venture to enter it by day or night.
In any ordinary period of danger or distress, I would have trusted my
life in the hands of the men and women who had been born on the same
plantation with my mother, and the younger generation, to whom she had
been a faithful and benignant friend from their cradles. In fire and
flood and tempest; in good report and evil report; in sickness and in
health; in poverty, as in riches—they would have stood with, and for
us to the death. We knew them to be but children of a larger growth,
passionate and unreasoning, facile and impulsive, and fanatical beyond
anything conceivable by the full-blooded white. The superstitious
savagery their ancestors had brought from barbarous and benighted
Africa, was yet in their veins. We had heard how Gabriel, a leader
in prayer-meetings, and encouraged by the whites to do Christian
evangelization among his own race, had deliberately meditated and
written down, as sections of the code to be put into practice, when he
should come into his kingdom of Lower Virginia—a plan of murder of all
male whites, and a partition of the women and girl-children among his
followers, together with arson and tortures exceeding the deviltries
of the red Indians. We had heard from the lips of eyewitnesses, scenes
succeeding the Southampton massacre of every white within the reach
of the murderous horde howling at the heels of the negro preacher
whom his master had taught to read and write—how the first victim of
the uprising, in the name of God and freedom, was that master as he
lay asleep at his wife’s side. Of how coolly—even complacently—Turner
recorded: “He sprang up, calling his wife’s name. It was his last word.
A single blow was sufficient to kill him. We forgot a baby that was
asleep in the cradle, but Hark went back and dispatched it.”
In every plan of rising against their masters, Religion was a potent
element. It was, to their excitable imaginations, a veritable Holy War,
from which there would be no discharge. The “Mammy” who had nursed her
mistress’s baby at her own bosom, would brain it, with the milk yet wet
upon its lips, if bidden by the “prophet” to make the sacrifice. Nat
Turner split with his axe the skull of a boy he had carried in his arms
scores of times, and stayed not his hand, although the little fellow
met him with a happy laugh and outstretched arms and the cry, “Uncle
Nat, you have come to give me a ride! Haven’t you?”
I repeat, we knew with what elements we should have to deal if the
“rising” ever took an organized form. This ever-present knowledge
lay at the root of the hatred of the “abolition movement.” To the
Northerner, dwelling at ease among his own people, it was—except to the
leaders—an abstract principle. “All men are created free and equal”—a
slaveholder had written before his Northern brother emancipated his
unprofitable serfs. Ergo, reasoned the Northern brother, in judicial
survey of the increasing race, whose labor was still gainful to tobacco
and wheat planter, the negro slave had a right to “liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.”
He did not count the cost of a consummation devoutly to be desired. He
had no occasion to meditate upon the bloody steps by which the enslaved
and alien race would climb to the height the Abolitionist would
stimulate him to attain.
So well was it understood that a mother ran dangerous risks if she put
her child into the care of the colored woman who complained that she
“was tired of that sort of work,” that neglect of such dislike of a
nurse’s duties was considered foolhardy. I heard a good old lady, who
owned so many servants that she hired a dozen or so to her neighbors,
lament that Mrs. Blank “did not mind what I told her about Frances’
determination not to take care of children. I hired the girl to her
as a chambermaid, and gave her fair warning that she just would _not_
be a nurse. A baby was born when Frances had been there four months,
and she was set to nurse it. You must have heard the dreadful story?
Perhaps you saw it in the papers. When the child was six months old
the wretched creature pounded glass and put it in the baby’s milk. The
child died, and the girl was hanged.”
Ugly stories, these, but so true in every particular that I cannot
leave them out of my chronicle of real life and the workings of what we
never thought, then, of calling “the peculiar institution.”
One of my most distinct recollections of the discussions of Slavery
held in my hearing is that my saintly Aunt Betsy said, sadly and
thoughtfully:
“One thing is certain—we will have to pay for the great sin of having
them here. How, or when, God alone knows.”
“We did not bring them to Virginia!” was my mother’s answer. “And I,
for one, wish they were all back in Africa. But what can we do, now
that they are on our hands?”
Before turning to other and pleasanter themes, let me say that my
father, after consultation with the wife who had brought to him eight
or ten “family servants” as part of her father’s estate, resolved to
free them and send them to Liberia at his own expense. This was in
my early childhood, yet I recollect how the scheme failed through the
obstinate refusal of the slaves to leave master, home, and country
for freedom in a strange land. They clung to my mother’s knees, and
prayed her, with wild weeping, not to let them go. They had blood
relatives and dear friends here; their children had intermarried with
men and women in different parts of the county; their grandfathers and
great-grandfathers had left them no legacy of memories that would draw
them toward the far-off country which was but the echo of an empty name
to their descendants. They were comfortable and happy here. Why send
them, for no fault of theirs, into exile?
“There is something in what they say!” my father had said to my mother,
in reviewing the scene. “I cannot see that anything is left for us to
do except to keep on as we are, and wait for further indications of the
Divine will.”
This was in the thirties, not many years after an act of gradual
emancipation was lost in the Legislature by the pitiful majority I
named in an earlier paragraph. A score of years had passed since that
momentous debate in our capitol, and our Urim and Thummin had not
signified that we could do anything better than to “keep on as we were.”
It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that
a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the
Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.