Mammy

THE first article of my childish creed was that mamma was the most beautiful woman in the world; the second, that Mammy was the next. But when Mammy put on the pink cashmere trimmed with black velvet that papa brought from New Orleans for Breckenridge to give her for a Christmas gift, after she nursed him through the scarlet fever, or the green barége with the apple-green ribbon bows and sash, bought with the ten-dollar gold piece grandpa sent me on my birthday, in my heart there was a lurking consciousness, never wholly acknowledged even to my most secret self, that it was really Mammy who bore off the palm. She was such a beautiful color — just like the copper kettle Rich made preserves in ; she was so tall and straight; she had such a nice thin nose, and such white teeth and black eyes, and her cheek bones stood up like those in the pictures of Uncas, and her hair was long and black, and just a wee bit crinkly, — not in hard little kinks like Sukey’s and Ben’s and Uncle Domino’s.

For Mammy had Indian blood in her veins, and in her nature, too. She was the best company in the world, and those soft, plump hands — as long as I remember she did no heavier work than occasionally to make a bed or dust a room — could make the most beautiful doll clothes and wonderful playhouses, but she was never our playfellow. We held her in awe as well as in love. Unlike her race, she was grave and taciturn, except when she forgot herself in the wild stories with which she enthralled us, and, I sometimes think, herself as well. One of my most vivid memories is a group of children, our cheeks scorching in the hot blaze of the lightwood knots that during the war served for candles in many parts of the South, our minds and hearts entranced, suspended on every word that fell from the lips of the tall, sombre figure silhouetted darkly against the nursery wall. My imagination was first fed on these stories which, I can see now, she told with dramatic power and a remarkable gift of expression, and that, I am glad to remember, were never coarse or hurtful. They might race us, panting, through dark passageways, or, if we chanced to wake in the small hours of the night, send us huddling under the bedclothes, but this was because their moral held a kernel of wholesome, primitive retribution for the wrong-doer. In Mammy’s tales the righteous never suffered unjustly and the virtuous were invariably rewarded, and though later years have not always justified her theory of Providence, it was a very safe basis upon which to found the conduct of childish life.

The superstition running through these stories, and regulating her own life, was a less healthy influence, and one I have never wholly outgrown. I still hesitate to begin a piece of work or a new enterprise on Friday, I have more than once subjected myself to serious inconvenience rather than start anywhere on that day, and I should be hopelessly depressed by breaking a looking-glass.

But if superstition laid upon my childhood arbitrary laws that I have never entirely thrown off, it peopled my world with many beautiful and noble forms. The good geni who came to the rescue of the feeble, the unfortunate, and the old, the beneficent fairy who helped little girls if they really tried to learn their lessons and control their tempers, the brave knight who gave his life for his king, or his friend, or his ladylove, and the beautiful princess who always turned from the rich and powerful prince to the poor, brave, unknown, were as real to me as Mammy herself, and owed much of their reality to her.

She was passionately fond of fairy tales and tales of adventure, and looking back I can see that they were the material out of which she wove some of her most thrilling stories. I owe it largely to her that Spenser’s Faerie Queene was as easy to me as an old shoe before I knew it as part of a school task, and that Pilgrim’s Progress was read with never a question of its literal truth. She listened and I read, — making havoc of the pronunciation, and, sometimes, I am afraid, lending to doubtful words a meaning that would make a scholar’s hair stand on end, but with a feeling for the characters and an absorption in the story which made both books a storehouse of delights and ideals, and to this day make me sorry for the student who knows them first philologically, or as a form of literary development in a set course of study.

I have often thought that one of Mammy’s tales, — one that we loved best to hear and she to tell, — a regular hotchpotch of a story, was mixed of the ingredients her untutored fancy found in the two great English allegories. There was fighting in it, I remember, and a captive princess very beautiful and very good, and cruelly oppressed by a wicked ruler, and rescued and made happy forever afterward by a knight as strong as Samson — like most negroes, Mammy worshiped physical strength — and as handsome as Prince Ahmed. I have forgotten the intervening steps, but the end, where these two beautiful and splendid creatures ruled over their own people whom the knight had rescued from all sorts of horrors, stands out vividly, for Mammy told it very slowly and with great fervor, bringing to bear the dramatic gift of which I have already spoken.

Another thing about these stories was that the good and beautiful people were always dark, with black hair and eyes, and the ugly, bad ones, fair, with blue eyes and light hair; and to this I trace a violent prejudice in favor of brunette beauty, and a curious, unorthodox color association with the ideas of good and bad which clung to me after I had passed girlhood. My anguish on overhearing my mother speak of me with pride as her blonde child and my passionate envy of a little dark-eyed, dark-haired sister are very present with me, and the shame and grief with which I so worked upon Mammy’s feelings that I wrung from her a declaration in the face of blatant fact that I was n’t very white, and that my colored hair always turned dark before people were grown up.

Though it all sounds very absurd as I write, I have never learned to see the comedy in the situation. It was deep earnest to me then, and “with understanding ” came the meaning of those good and beautiful “dark people: ” they are significant of the tragedy of Mammy’s life. For unlike most negroes she hated slavery because it was slavery, and she loved my father and mother and us not because they were her master and mistress and we their children, but in spite of it. Her loyalty was such that never by overt word or deed did she hint such a thing. Though there were days when the slaves had run away from the various plantations to seek at the “home place ” protection from cruel overseers that she went about with tight-folded lips and eyes so gloomy that we knew instinctively it was useless to ask for stories, and that it behooved us to walk softly and circumspectly if we would escape scolding for what in happier hours passed unrebuked, or only drew out the words which I never hear without a flashing vision of the dear face, “Childern will be childern. ” I doubt whether Mammy herself realized the full implication of her stories; they were just the natural expression of a heart full of bitterness and love and boiling over with pride. She held herself rather aloof from the other servants, to whom she condescended from the height of her position as the “Mammy ” of the house, the butler alone coming within her social pale. Most of my mother’s orders were given through her, and besides the under nurse, she had a girl — a bright, very bad little mulatto, about ten years old when I first remember her — who ran her errands, “kept the baby quiet, ” and “played with the children.”

There were times, however, when Mammy unbent. Of all things she dearly loved a game of cards. Poker found favor in her eyes, and she was not averse to casino, though her consuming passion was seven-up. She taught me to play, and I, proud of the honor, soon became as great an adept as she. Alice also learned quickly, and I really believe the best games of cards I ever had in my life were those played during the war in the nursery at Rocky Way, Ben making a fourth hand, with one eye on the door leading into my mother’s room, his ears cocked, ready to scuttle at the first sound, and half a dozen lightwood knots under his arm in case he should be taken unawares. These games always began the same way. Ben was the carriage driver, and part of his work was to bring in wood for the nursery fire. Usually the wood was stacked in a corner by the fireplace, under Mammy’s lofty supervision, with no unnecessary words, and if it happened to be card night the first, second, and third armfuls were brought in without more than a glance at the table. But at the fourth turn Ben lingered to look over a hand, at the fifth he could no longer keep from saying how “ he ’d play de han’ ef it wuz his’n, ” and by the sixth, still standing, and with the exculpatory sticks ready under his arm, he was Mammy’s partner, and they were winning “high, low, Jack, and the game.” There was never any betting, for Mammy guarded our morals scrupulously, and both gambling and drinking were an abomination to her; why I never knew until after she was dead.

Another thing that she delighted in was dancing, though she was already getting too stout to indulge in it often when I first remember her. The only time I ever saw her dance impressed itself upon me because her dancing was so different from that of the other servants. There had been a wedding in the quarters, and when my father and mother went back to the house Breckenridge and I so pleaded to look on a little while that Mammy volunteered to bring us back herself if we were permitted to stay. Perched on a table we watched them “cut the pigeon’s wing, ” “hoe corn,” “double shuffle,” and “Jennie put the kettle on,” our enjoyment becoming ecstatic as the dancing increased in swiftness and vigor. Finally there was a pause, and Mammy stepped out with Uncle Joshua, the butler. Which one taught the other she would never tell, but they executed a waltz of great stateliness, and of such length that the audience rose to their feet in a body and calling for quicker music drove Uncle Joshua and Mammy from the floor.

In spite of her power as a raconteur and her love of fairy tales Mammy could never learn to read. I tried my best to teach her, but either I stood in too much awe of my pupil or she in too little respect for her teacher. While Rich, the cook, soon learned to read and write, and in a little while could have taught me arithmetic, and Alice’s knowledge was of such rapid growth that like Jonah’s gourd it seemed to have sprung up in a night, Mammy, who used language which they never approached, remained to the day of her death ignorant of booklore, except what she gained through my reading aloud, and this was limited to poetry, fairy tales, allegories, stories, — everything that appealed to the imagination and nothing which did not.

It surprises me in reading stories of the days of slavery to find that in what assume to be truthful portraits of favorite servants, nurses, maids, butlers, and body servants, they are represented as speaking the dialect of the field and plantation hands. It was often the field hand who could read and the house servant who could not, for this depended upon native intelligence; but manner of speech, which is largely a matter of association, was a different thing; the house servant often used very much the same provincial, bookish language that his master and mistress did. That this language was only a matter of association, a surface overlaying the racial instincts and passions of their ruder brethren, was seen whenever their passions were aroused. Then they spoke the same jargon, interlarding it with words handed directly down from African forests. Our knowledge of this was of course instinctive, not rational, but so much was it a part of our habit of life that Alice always knew when she would get a harder whipping than usual, and we, when it was useless to try to beg off from being reported to a higher tribunal. Uncle Joshua was the only one who never forgot himself. Even Mammy when her temper was excited beyond a certain point spoke a regular jargon.

And Mammy had a temper as fierce and strong and vindictive as her religion was — we quailed before them. Both, I think, she must have drawn from the Indian blood of which she was so proud, for the negro’s religion is emotional, and his temper quick and hot, but forgiving. In the first place Mammy never “got religion ” or “got happy, ” and had a great scorn of “mourners,” “seekers,” frequenters of “the anxious bench,” and of those who “knew the Lord had saved them.” The devil she believed in was white, with green eyes and a scaly tail like a snake — only the scales were red hot — and a club foot that had sharp nails, also red hot. With his tail he whipped the damned in hell, and with his club foot drove the red-hot nails into them, and all the time those green eyes were “ charming ” them so they could not move. The things she most feared and hated were a whip, a snake, fire, and a white man, and her idea of hell was moulded out of them. She once told me that she had spent a whole night in a room with a large rattlesnake, and had seen a man burn alive, and her horror of whipping was such that when my brothers were occasionally punished — my sister and I were never touched — she lamented louder and longer than they, and spoiled them so afterwards that any good result which might have come was lost; and yet, on the other hand, I have seen her whip Alice with zeal and much apparent enjoyment. Her Saviour was a dark brown giant, who wore a gold crown and a silver brocade robe, and had no hands. Mammy said he was so strong that if he had been born with hands he might have used them to whip with when he got mad, so God said he should be born without any.

There was a woman, for a little time the cook, a handsome mulatto named Sarah, — my father always spoke of her as the “Duchess of Marlborough,” because she had such a frightful temper and was so jealous of her husband that he finally begged with tears that she might be sent to one of the plantations or sold, — whom Mammy hated so that finally my mother had to give her up, though she was noted far and wide for her cooking. And whenever my greataunt’s butler came to the house Mammy always retired to her own rooms, and on the plea of illness refused to stir from them as long as he was on the place. As aunt Joanna usually spent three or four days with us when she came this was very inconvenient, and ended eventually in her never bringing Harry to the house. It was on one of these occasions, a hot day in June, that I first heard Mammy swear. As soon as my aunt’s horses were seen coming up the drive, Mammy handed us over to the second nurse, and groaning aloud and holding her head in both hands went to her rooms. These were in a one story brick building known as “the office.” In the South, before the war “the office ” was nothing more than what would now be called bachelor quarters. The family house was so large that we rarely used this office, and after the scarlet fever swept through the household, leaving us with three empty little chairs, and Breckenridge so reduced in every way that he had to be taught to walk and talk over again just as when he was a baby, two of the best rooms, opening into each other, and newly furnished, were presented to Mammy by the children as their Christmas gift. Here she held Sunday afternoon, or, as we called them, Sunday evening levees, for she was a great belle, and, though not very popular with the women, was because of her position and privileges the object of their respectful and admiring attentions. Here too, as the greatest imaginable treat, she sometimes gave us “ a party ” of preserves, beaten biscuit, cake, — far from digestible, for Mammy was no cook, — lemonade, and sweet French chocolate with which her safe was always stored. Huyler’s most delicious marrons glacées are as the apples of Sodom compared with those brown, sweet crumbly squares whose proper place was in the chocolate pot; and years after the war, when a bride I began housekeeping, I was not satisfied until I had a pine safe painted brown, and with tin doors pricked and bored into horses, dogs, cows, and fish as unlike nature and as nearly like those on Mammy’s safe as weeks of assiduous and contradictory directions to a long suffering carpenter could achieve.

On the day of which I speak I tiptoed up the two front steps and listened, but could hear nothing. I then went up on the back porch, and hearing a groan had raised my hand to knock and ask permission to come in and minister to the sufferer, — for we children believed implicitly in these illnesses and were always more or less alarmed by them, — when the groan was cut short with a torrent of oaths so fierce, so bloodthirsty, and so blasphemous that after a moment bf stony horror I fled incontinently to my henhouse, my place of refuge when sore pressed, and sitting down on the little stool where I was in the habit of superintending the hatching and feeding of my chickens I covered my face with my hands and gave myself up to the first disappointed ideal of my life. Of course I did not know it was this — I only knew that Mammy did what she had trained me to believe was one of the worst sins, and one which I had read in the Bible was punished with hell fire. I tried to believe that what I had heard was an accident, but instinct told me such fluency could come only with practice. Those terrible words were familiar, or had at some time been familiar, on Mammy’s tongue, or she could never have used them with this vehement ease. I had heard something too besides oaths. The sobs that broke and at first made Mammy’s words unintelligible were as real as the oaths; and Mammy never cried, — I had never seen her cry but twice: once when little Lizzie died, and the other time when Breckenridge said “Mammy ” after he had had the scarlet fever, and the doctors had said he would never talk again. Mammy must be very, very sick to cry that way — maybe she was dying! I was on my feet and back at that door in less time than it takes me to write this sentence. There was not a sound — Mammy was dead! “Mammy! Mammy ! let me in, please let me in, ” I cried, beating on the door with my fists, kicking hard. When the door at last opened, and stern and frowning she would have scolded me, I threw myself into her arms with a passion of tears. “Mammy, Mammy, I thought you were dead! Mammy, I do love you, I do love you! ” I kissed her hands and held them tight, I tried to reach up to her face. I no longer minded, I think I had forgotten, her swearing. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make ? I had her back again, my own dear Mammy! I loved her just the same. She took me in her arms and kissed me, and called me her lamb, and I hope in comforting me forgot her own troubles. She told me she was better, she was almost well; she gave me a whole cake of chocolate, which I ate to the very last crumb, and had a shaking chill that night in consequence; and finally she consented to lie down and let me rub her head with my best German cologne.

Another thing about that afternoon was recalled to me after Mammy’s death. She was very fond of dress, but always wore her dresses high up around her neck, and, however the fashion changed, her sleeves full and buttoned close into a band at the wrist. Even her nightgown sleeves were made this way, and once when I asked her why she told me sharply that “childern should be seen and not heard. ” To-day she had on over her petticoat what was called a bedgown, a long sacque with half loose sleeves. While I was bathing her head the bottle fell, spilling the cologne over her face and neck, and as she jumped up her sleeves slipped back, disclosing a wide, shriveled scar reaching from just above her wrist to the elbow. My eyes fastened on it, and seeing that concealment was impossible Mammy told me a long, circumstantial lie about falling on the fender when she was a little girl. Poor, proud, unhappy Mammy! I have never blamed her for that lie. I am sure she did not want to tell it, and I should hate even now to think that I know it, if the knowing had not made me love her better and forgive in her all the things I would rather not remember. For there were times and traits which had to be forgiven: when, for instance, she switched Alice so hard that welts came out on her hands; when she pulled my hair and rapped me with the comb if I dared to stir while she was curling my hair; when she told me I was so bad I “looked like the devil,” and he would catch me if I did n’t mind. If she were the heroine of a modern story she would be called a complex character. My father and mother — to whom, by the way, she never gave their legitimate title, always addressing them and speaking of them as “Marse Albert ” and “Miss Nannie ” — and their children she loved faithfully and unreservedly; but the rest of the white race she hated with an almost religious fervor, and the closer their relationship to us the fiercer her enmity. It was as if the personal hatred that my father and mother had defrauded her of, by a course which would read like romance to me if I did not know it to be hard fact, avenged and recouped itself by pouring out in fuller tide over all who carried the same blood in their veins. Aunt Joanna’s life had been a tragic history of disappointment, loss, violence, and death; the last chapter darkened by epilepsy in its most repulsive form. She was a tiny, beautiful, feeble, stern old lady, painstakingly cheerful, with white hair, reaching the floor when she was seated, and piercing blue eyes that children and servants alike knew it was useless to try to escape or evade. We did not love her, and we could not understand the tender, compassionate reverence in which my father and mother held her. The servants, I am afraid, hated her, and she, I know, considered my mother foolishly softhearted and my father weakly under her influence. I have heard Mammy contrast with gloating delight her impoverished widowhood with the days when young and beautiful, with a handsome, devoted husband, a houseful of lovely children, and hundreds of slaves, she reigned over one of the finest plantations in the state. “The Lord’s han’ wuz surely heavy on Ole Miss, ” she would say with fierce relish. “Out uv nineteen childern the onliest ones lef’, Marse John, Marse Paul, and Miss Minnie, — remnants lef’ over, you might say, ” a sniff emphasizing the damaging nature of her estimate. Before I was seven years old. I knew the tragedy by heart, down to the day that her eldest and best beloved son was shot down, — shot all to pieces on the streets of Champagnolle. This was the beginning of the epilepsy that continued up to the month of her death. More than once I have seen Mammy watch her in one of these attacks with a gleam in her black eyes that frightened me.

Looking back upon it all, I am convinced there was never a day when she did not pray for freedom, and putting together chance words that come back to me in snatches, I am persuaded the negroes, certainly the house servants, knew far more about the political state of affairs than their masters dreamed. We were in Luray, a little village in Page County, not far from Harper’s Ferry, at the time of the John Brown raid ; and I remember as distinctly as if it were yesterday Mammy’s suppressed excitement, her enigmatical hints, her almost boisterous spirits, and the pall that settled over her after John Brown and his followers were arrested. Years after the war, when I went back to Luray, a woman, who at the time was a girl of seventeen, told me that John Brown had actually spent a night in her house, introducing himself as a Baptist preacher, and consequently with a claim upon her father’s hospitality, for the family were the most prominent Baptists in that part of the country. She was awakened very late that night or early the next morning by stealthy feet on the porch, and looking out was about to call her mother, when the moon breaking through a cloud showed her that the figures were Uncle Abraham, an old negro much loved and trusted, and the good minister who had asked a blessing at supper, who had kept her at the piano for an hour, praising her music and calling for first one familiar tune and then another, and who had made one of the most beautiful prayers she ever listened to. Seeing who it was she turned over and went comfortably to sleep again, and did not know until long afterwards that it was the famous John Brown with whom she had broken bread, and who was at that moment returning from a midnight visit to the negroes after having tried and failed to induce them to join him ; that Uncle Abraham had guided him to the meeting, had urged the negroes not to listen to him, and had conducted him safely out of town and across the mountain before anybody was up. Mammy had been dead a long time when Uncle Abraham told his story, yet I have never doubted that he spoke the truth when he said she was one of the most enthusiastic spirits at the meeting, and that, but for the fact that my father was desperately ill at the time and her loyal heart refused to leave him, she would have risked everything and followed John Brown to Harper’s Ferry.

Soon after his arrest we went back to Washington, and I suppose I should have forgotten him, but as everybody was discussing the trial, and I was very much with my father and mother, I heard all sorts of things which it would have been far better if I had known nothing about. The result was I got into a state of nervous excitement that would have been absurd if it had not been pitiful and dangerous in a child. I rushed for the morning paper before my father came down to the study, and the evening I learned the verdict I burst into the dining-room, where my father and mother were giving an official dinner, with the announcement and a flood of tears. After this John Brown was a tabooed subject. My father, wisely determining I should not know the day of the execution, exacted from me a promise that I would not read the newspapers, and my mother arranged a holiday to be spent with her.

It was a beautiful day, and we went for a long drive in the country, carrying lunch with us. When we came back late in the afternoon we stopped at Potentini’s for ice cream and cake, and then at “Harper’s” — the fashionable drygoods store of Washington in those days — to buy Mammy a little present, because I had been away from her all day. I ran up to the nursery in great glee, and with both hands behind me told her to choose which, right or left, and when she had her present I poured out an enthusiastic account of the day’s doings. She must have looked very sad, for I remember stopping in the middle of the most exciting part of my story to say she must laugh when I told her funny things.

It was at this point that brother Robert rushed into the room shouting, “John Brown’s hung! John Brown’s hung! ” I don’t think I made any fuss, — I was so sick with horror that I could not, — I could think of nothing but that dangling figure, and of how it must have hurt when they put the rope around his neck and pulled it hard enough to kill him. I tried my handkerchief when I went up to bed to see how it would feel, and brother Robert came in just then and gave it such a twist that I fell down, and Mammy was so frightened she boxed him soundly. When she asked me why I tied the handkerchief around my neck I was ashamed to tell, but late in the night I waked her up crying, and when I told her — everything — she hugged me tight and warm, and said I must not cry about John Brown any more because he was in heaven. I asked her if she was sure, and I remember the very words of her answer: “Honey, Mammy knows he’s in heaven just as well as she knows the Lord ’s goin’ to ” — She stopped a minute and said very low, “Yes, darlin’, he ’s in heaven with the Lord’s other saints.” I put up my hand and Mammy’s face was wet. From this day I date my horror of capital punishment.

Arkansas was the state of my father’s adoption ; when she seceded he resigned his seat in Congress and we went home. He raised the Third Arkansas regiment, and the day before he went to the front he called the negroes together, and told them he expected them to take care of their mistress and the children while he was away. They did. We were five miles in the country, two helpless women with half a dozen delicate children, surrounded by our slaves, and where our land ended another farm began with the same proportion of white and black, and we were as safe as if we had been guarded by an army of our own soldiers. I love to remember it. It gives me a pure thrill to know that as fiercely as Mammy hated the white race, and as ardently as she longed for freedom, she loved us and was loyal to us through everything, and that there was not one of the fifteen hundred slaves we carried out to Texas, when we refugeed there, who did not choose to come with us and did not stay with us as long as my father had any land to plant. Uncle Joshua was the only one we left in Texas. We were no longer in a position to keep an accomplished butler, who also understood French cooking, and by my father’s advice he remained in Austin, and with my father’s assistance opened a small café, in which I am glad to say he prospered.

When the Federal troops marched into Austin, Mammy in a state of wild excitement took the whole flock of children down to the square, where the best view was to be had, and as the soldiers passed tore off her bandana and waved it wildly in the air, tears streaming down her face, her lips quivering and wordless. I am very sure she was wholly unconscious of both tears and handkerchief, for when the excitement was over, and we were on our way back to the house, I ventured to remind her quietly that her bandana was in her hand instead of on her head. I was sharply assured it “wuz no such thing, ” though the next moment in much confusion she put it where it belonged.

We had a hard time of it in the nursery that night. Breckenridge and I finally went to bed in tears, leaving Pauline and Mammy in a hot encounter which ended in Mammy’s complete rout, for Polly was the baby and her idol. The next morning rose in gloom, broken by lurid flashes ; by noon Mammy could no longer contain herself. We were informed with jeers and taunts that she “wuz free,” and she knew she “could pick up her things and go any minute, an’ she wuz goin’ too.”

Dear Mammy! it was a flash in the pan, that went out in a flood of tears and protestations that she would never leave us, never, when an hour later my mother told her she was free to do what she chose and go where she pleased. Her choice and pleasure were ours. I hardly think she could have been happy away from us, and I know we would have been wretched without her. The only change in our relations was that she received regular wages. These wages were a great delight to her. Every month when she was paid she made each one of us children a present, and then squandered the rest with the utmost enjoyment and celerity. I don’t believe a single pay day ever found her with a cent left over from the last.

We were living in Louisiana when she died. It was a cholera year, and she was the first person on the plantation to take it. She was very ill from the beginning, and as a last resort, with her knowledge and consent, the doctor tried “ the calomel cure, ” which had been very successful in a number of cases on the adjoining plantation, sometimes even when collapse had occurred. I will not venture to say how many grains were given lest I should be called first cousin to Sapphira; the same treatment was successful with me two weeks later, and Mammy was relieved of the disease, but salivation in its worst form supervened, and after ten days of intense suffering she died. It was impossible to keep us away from her. My father had but one answer to the doctor’s threats and warnings.

“Let them alone, Dabbs; she nursed them through everything; I won’t tell them they shan’t stay with her now. They know the risk, and I should be ashamed of them if they were afraid to take it.”

For three days before her death she scarcely spoke. Speech had become very painful, and she was not always clear in her mind, but whenever Breckenridge and I went into the room, or she woke to find us sitting by her bed, the swollen, bleeding lips tried to smile. Her last intelligible words were to my mother. She died about daybreak; that night when mamma was trying to give her some nourishment she made a sign that she should come nearer, and after several efforts succeeded in saying with long pauses between, “ Don’ t let strange niggers touch me — no dress — wrap me in a shroud.”

The negroes came from far and wide to her funeral, among them aunt Joanna’s Harry, in his Sunday suit of black, with black lawn weepers on his hat and both arms, and flourishing an immense black lawn handkerchief. My father ordered him sternly out of his mourning and the procession, to the scarcely decorous delight of the other servants, and a day or two afterwards my mother told me Harry had been Mammy’s husband, but falling in love with Sarah, the “Duchess of Marlborough,” he had treated Mammy so brutally that papa made her leave him, and then persuaded aunt Joanna to buy him. He was the only one of our slaves that was ever sold.

I had been married some years when I heard the story of Mammy’s life. Soon after their marriage my mother and father were driving from Eldorado to Champagnolle. The buggy broke down about dusk ten miles from Champagnolle, and they had to spend the night at the house of a German physician named Heinsücher. The girl who waited on table was very dirty, half naked, and with an exceedingly bad face. That night she came to my mother’s room, threw herself on her knees at my mother’s feet, and implored her with sobs and tears to buy her. She stripped to the waist, and showed her scarred back. She pulled up her sleeves and disclosed a burn, still raw, that reached from just above the wrist to the elbow, and a half - healed gash deep and wide. She had been locked up all night in a cellar infested with snakes, and she had suffered worse things even than these, — things that cannot be told. When my father came in my mother repeated the girl’s story, and implored him to buy her. It seems that the doctor was under an obligation to my father, and when the offer was made said frankly that the girl was not worth buying, — she lied, stole, drank, ate opium when she could get it, had the temper of a demon, and had twice tried to kill herself. It was only by the most severe measures she could be kept in bounds. She was one third Indian, and my father knew what that cross with the negro meant. There was another interview with Mary — that was the girl’s name — in which she acknowledged everything but the stealing. She got drunk and she drank laudanum when she had the chance, because then she “did n’t know anything; ” she had tried to kill herself, and if they kept her there she would keep on trying. As to the stealing, she worked like a dog, and it was n’t stealing to take what you worked for; she did n’t take anything belonging to other people; and then with more sobs and tears she prayed them to kill her, but not to leave her there. The end of it was that when they started off in the afternoon Mammy — for that halfbrutalized, degraded, miserable negro was the Mammy who carried the keys to the storeroom and wine cellar, and had access to my father’s pocketbook and my mother’s purse and jewels — rode on the trunk-hold running out from the back of the buggy, and the trunk was left to be sent for next day.

But Mary did not leap at once into Mammy; the birth was a slow and painful travail. They would have despaired of her but for three things: she was rigidly virtuous, she never lied about what she had done, and she conceived a doglike affection for my father and mother. She was kept about the house until the servants declared there was no living with her, and in the field until Uncle Domino said her swearing, insubordination, and cunning about getting liquor and getting drunk whenever she had it, were ruining the other negroes. Two years after he bought her my father hired her out, and a few weeks later she ran away home beaten almost to death.

The next day the man to whom she had been hired drove over to see that my father punished her as she deserved. She had been set to watch his ill wife, had got drunk, and given a double dose of the medicine prescribed, with results that would have been fatal if a physician had not been within speedy reach. My father expressed great regret for what had happened, but refused either to have her whipped or let her go back with him; the whipping she had already received was brutally sufficient no matter what she had done. Then after a talk with my mother Mary was sent for. She had seen Mr. — drive up and drive away again, and she answered the summons ashen with fright. Afterwards she told mamma that she thought Mrs. — was dead, and that they had sent for her to tell her she was to be hanged. I was only a few weeks old at the time, and when she came in my father had me in his arms.

“Mary,” he said, “I am not going to punish you again. You have been punished enough. Your mistress and I have decided to give you another trial. Come here and see your little mistress. If we let you help Mammy Phœbe nurse her, will you try not to get drunk any more ? ”

My mother says she looked at him in a dazed way, as if she did not dare understand him; then when he held me out to her with a smile she stumbled across the room and fell at his feet and kissed them, crying, “Massa, Massa, I ’ll nebber tech unnudder drap.”

And she never did.

Julia R. Tutwiler.