Part 11

As an accompaniment to 'de beautifullest mutton de missis ever see,' we have just received from my neighbour Mr. C---- the most magnificent supply of fresh vegetables, green peas, salad, &c. He has a garden and a Scotchman's real love for horticulture, and I profit by them in this very agreeable manner.

I have been interrupted by several visits, my dear E----, among other, one from a poor creature called Judy, whose sad story and condition affected me most painfully. She had been married, she said, some years ago to one of the men called Temba, who however now has another wife, having left her because she went mad. While out of her mind she escaped into the jungle, and contrived to secrete herself there for some time, but was finally tracked and caught, and brought back and punished by being made to sit, day after day, for hours in the stocks--a severe punishment for a man, but for a woman perfectly barbarous. She complained of chronic rheumatism, and other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while labouring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she spoke to me.

She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation under Mr. K----'s overseership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valour is sufficiently accounted for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her firstborn, the son of Mr. K----, who forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound--a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy, makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor creature said, that bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple horror and misery of their bare details.

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My dearest E----. I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children flowing in the whole morning to say, 'Ha de missis!' Among others, a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages, nine of her children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in the field. She held my hands and stroked them in the most appealing way, while she exclaimed, 'Oh my missis! my missis! me neber sleep till day for de pain,' and with the day her labour must again be resumed. I gave her flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with; rest I could not give her--rest from her labour and her pain--this mother of fifteen children.

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and stripes them. I give you the woman's words; she did not speak of this as of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when I said, 'Did they do that to you when you were with child?' she simply replied, 'Yes, missis.' And to all this I listen--I, an English woman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, 'That thing shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villany shall never be known here again.' I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded by all this misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. The blessed spring is coming very fast, the air is full of delicious wild wood fragrances, and the wonderful songs of southern birds; the wood paths are as tempting as paths into Paradise, but Jack is in such deadly terror about the snakes, which are now beginning to glide about with a freedom and frequency certainly not pleasing, that he will not follow me off the open road, and twice to-day scared me back from charming wood paths I ventured to explore with his exclamations of terrified warning.

I gathered some exquisite pink blossoms, of a sort of waxen texture, off a small shrub which was strange to me, and for which Jack's only name was dye-bush; but I could not ascertain from him whether any dyeing substance was found in its leaves, bark, or blossoms.

I returned home along the river side, stopping to admire a line of noble live oaks beginning, alas! to be smothered with the treacherous white moss under whose pale trailing masses their verdure gradually succumbs, leaving them, like huge hoary ghosts, perfect mountains of parasitical vegetation, which, strangely enough, appears only to hang upon and swing from their boughs without adhering to them. The mixture of these streams of grey-white filaments with the dark foliage is extremely beautiful as long as the leaves of the tree survive in sufficient masses to produce the rich contrast of colour; but when the moss has literally conquered the whole tree, and after stripping its huge limbs bare, clothed them with its own wan masses, they always looked to me like so many gigantic Druid ghosts, with flowing robes and beards, and locks all of one ghastly grey, and I would not have broken a twig off them for the world, lest a sad voice, like that which reproached Dante, should have moaned out of it to me,

Non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?

A beautiful mass of various woodland skirted the edge of the stream, and mingled in its foliage every shade of green, from the pale stiff spikes and fans of the dwarf palmetto to the dark canopy of the magnificent ilex--bowers and brakes of the loveliest wildness, where one dare not tread three steps for fear--what a tantalisation! it is like some wicked enchantment.

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Dearest E----. I have found growing along the edge of the dreary enclosure where the slaves are buried such a lovely wild flower; it is a little like the euphrasia or eye-bright of the English meadows; but grows quite close to the turf, almost into it, and consists of clusters of tiny white flowers that look as if they were made of the finest porcelain; I took up a root of it yesterday, with a sort of vague idea that I could transplant it to the north--though I cannot say that I should care to transplant anything thither that could renew to me the associations of this place--not even the delicious wild flowers, if I could.

The woods here are full of wild plum-trees, the delicate white blossoms of which twinkle among the evergreen copses, and besides illuminating them with a faint starlight, suggest to my mind a possible liqueur like kirsch, which I should think could quite as well be extracted from wild plums as wild cherries, and the trees are so numerous that there ought to be quite a harvest from them. You may, and, doubtless, have seen palmetto plants in northern green and hot houses, but you never saw palmetto roots; and what curious things they are! huge, hard, yellowish-brown stems, as thick as my arm, or thicker, extending and ramifying under the ground in masses that seem hardly justified or accounted for by the elegant, light, spiky fans of dusky green foliage with which they fill the under part of the woods here. They look very tropical and picturesque, but both in shape and colour suggest something metallic rather than vegetable, the bronze green hue and lance-like form of their foliage has an arid hard character that makes one think they could be manufactured quite as well as cultivated. At first I was extremely delighted with the novelty of their appearance; but now I feel thirsty when I look at them, and the same with their kinsfolk the yuccas and their intimate friends, if not relations, the prickly pears, with all of which once strange growth I have grown, contemptuously familiar now.

Did it ever occur to you what a strange affinity there is between the texture and colour of the wild vegetables of these sandy southern soils, and the texture and colour of shells? The prickly pear, and especially the round little cactus plants all covered with hairy spikes, are curiously suggestive of a family of round spiked shells, with which you, as well as myself, are, doubtless, familiar; and though the splendid flame colour of some cactus blossoms never suggests any nature but that of flowers, I have seen some of a peculiar shade of yellow pink, that resembles the mingled tint on the inside of some elaborately coloured shell, and the pale white and rose flowers of another kind have the colouring and almost texture of shell, much rather than of any vegetable substance.

To-day I walked out without Jack, and in spite of the terror of snakes with which he has contrived slightly to inoculate me, I did make a short exploring journey into the woods. I wished to avoid a ploughed field, to the edge of which my wanderings had brought me; but my dash into the woodland, though unpunished by an encounter with snakes, brought me only into a marsh as full of land-crabs as an ant-hill is of ants, and from which I had to retreat ingloriously, finding my way home at last by the beach.

I have had, as usual, a tribe of visitors and petitioners ever since I came home. I will give you an account of those cases which had anything beyond the average of interest in their details. One poor woman, named Molly, came to beg that I would, if possible, get an extension of their exemption from work after child-bearing. The close of her argument was concise and forcible. 'Missis, we hab um piccaninny--tree weeks in de ospital, and den right out upon the hoe again--can we strong dat way, missis? No!' And truly I do not see that they can. This poor creature had had eight children and two miscarriages. All her children were dead but one. Another of my visitors was a divinely named but not otherwise divine Venus; it is a favourite name among these sable folk, but, of course, must have been given originally in derision. The Aphrodite in question was a dirt-coloured (convenient colour I should say for these parts) mulatto. I could not understand how she came on this property, for she was the daughter of a black woman and the overseer of an estate to which her mother formerly belonged, and from which I suppose she was sold, exchanged, or given, as the case may be, to the owners of this plantation. She was terribly crippled with rheumatism, and came to beg for some flannel. She had had eleven children, five of whom had died, and two miscarriages. As she took her departure the vacant space she left on the other side of my writing table was immediately filled by another black figure with a bowed back and piteous face, one of the thousand 'Mollies' on the estate, where the bewildering redundancy of their name is avoided by adding that of their husband; so when the question, 'Well, who are you?' was answered with the usual genuflexion, and 'I'se Molly, missis!' I, of course, went on with 'whose Molly?' and she went on to refer herself to the ownership (under Mr. ---- and heaven) of one Tony, but proceeded to say that he was not her real husband. This appeal to an element of reality in the universally accepted fiction which passes here by the title of marriage surprised me; and on asking her what she meant, she replied that her real husband had been sold from the estate for repeated attempts to run away; he had made his escape several times, and skulked starving in the woods and morasses, but had always been tracked and brought back, and flogged almost to death, and finally sold as an incorrigible runaway. What a spirit of indomitable energy the wretched man must have had to have tried so often that hideously hopeless attempt to fly! I do not write you the poor woman's jargon, which was ludicrous; for I cannot write you the sighs, and tears, and piteous looks, and gestures, that made it pathetic; of course she did not know whither or to whom her real husband had been sold; but in the meantime Mr. K----, that merciful Providence of the estate, had provided her with the above-named Tony, by whom she had had nine children, six of whom were dead; she, too, had miscarried twice. She came to ask me for some flannel for her legs, which are all swollen with constant rheumatism, and to beg me to give her something to cure some bad sores and ulcers, which seemed to me dreadful enough in their present condition, but which she said break out afresh and are twice as bad every summer.

I have let my letter lie since the day before yesterday, dear E----, having had no leisure to finish it. Yesterday morning I rode out to St. Clair's, where there used formerly to be another negro settlement and another house of Major ----'s. I had been persuaded to try one of the mares I had formerly told you of, and to be sure a more 'curst' quadruped, and one more worthy of a Petruchio for a rider I did never back. Her temper was furious, her gait intolerable, her mouth, the most obdurate that ever tugged against bit and bridle. It is not wise anywhere--here it is less wise than anywhere else in the world--to say 'Jamais de cette eau je ne boirai;' but I think I will never ride that delightful creature Miss Kate again.

I wrote you of my having been to a part of the estate called St. Clair's, where there was formerly another residence of Major ----'s; nothing remains now of it but a ruined chimney of some of the offices, which is standing yet in the middle of what has become a perfect wilderness. At the best of times, with a large house, numerous household, and paths, and drives of approach, and the usual external conditions of civilisation about it, a residence here would have been the loneliest that can well be imagined; now it is the shaggiest desert of beautiful wood that I ever saw. The magnificent old oaks stand round the place in silent solemn grandeur; and among them I had no difficulty in recognising, by the description Captain F---- had given me of it, the crumbling shattered relic of a tree called Oglethorpe's oak. That worthy valiant old governor had a residence here himself in the early days of the colony; when, under the influence of Wesley, he vainly made such strenuous efforts to keep aloof from his infant province the sore curse of slavery.

I rode almost the whole way through a grove of perfect evergreen. I had with me one of the men of the name of Hector, who has a good deal to do with the horses, and so had volunteered to accompany me, being one of the few negroes on the estate who can sit a horse. In the course of our conversation, Hector divulged certain opinions relative to the comparative gentility of driving in a carriage, and the vulgarity of walking; which sent me into fits of laughing; at which he grinned sympathetically, and opened his eyes very wide, but certainly without attaining the least insight into what must have appeared to him my very unaccountable and unreasonable merriment. Among various details of the condition of the people on the several estates in the island, he told me that a great number of the men on all the different plantations had wives on the neighbouring estates, as well as on that to which they properly belonged. 'Oh, but,' said I, 'Hector, you know that cannot be, a man has but one lawful wife.' Hector knew this, he said, and yet seemed puzzled himself, and rather puzzled me to account for the fact, that this extensive practice of bigamy was perfectly well known to the masters and overseers, and never in any way found fault with, or interfered with. Perhaps this promiscuous mode of keeping up the slave population finds favour with the owners of creatures who are valued in the market at so much per head. This was a solution which occurred to me, but which I left my Trojan hero to discover, by dint of the profound pondering into which he fell.

Not far from the house as I was cantering home, I met S----, and took her up on the saddle before me, an operation which seemed to please her better than the vicious horse I was riding, whose various demonstrations of dislike to the arrangement afforded my small equestrian extreme delight and triumph. My whole afternoon was spent in shifting my bed and bed-room furniture from a room on the ground-floor to one above; in the course of which operation, a brisk discussion took place between M---- and my boy Jack, who was nailing on the vallence of the bed; and whom I suddenly heard exclaim in answer to something she had said--'Well den, I do tink so; and dat's the speech of a man, whether um bond or free.' A very trifling incident, and insignificant speech; and yet it came back to my ears very often afterward--'the speech of a man, whether bond or free.' They might be made conscious--some of them are evidently conscious--of an inherent element of manhood superior to the bitter accident of slavery; and to which, even in their degraded condition, they might be made to refer that vital self-respect which can survive all external pressure of mere circumstance, and give their souls to that service of God, which is perfect freedom, in spite of the ignoble and cruel bondage of their bodies.

My new apartment is what I should call decidedly airy; the window, unless when styled by courtesy, shut, which means admitting of draught enough to blow a candle out, must be wide open, being incapable of any intermediate condition; the latch of the door, to speak the literal truth, does shut; but it is the only part of it that does; that is, the latch and the hinges; everywhere else its configuration is traced by a distinct line of light and air. If what old Dr. Physic used to say be true, that a draught which will not blow out a candle will blow out a man's life, (a Spanish proverb originally I believe) my life is threatened with extinction in almost every part of this new room of mine, wherein, moreover, I now discover to my dismay, having transported every other article of bed-room furniture to it, it is impossible to introduce the wardrobe for my clothes. Well, our stay here is drawing to a close, and therefore these small items of discomfort cannot afflict me much longer.

Among my visitors to-day was a poor woman named Oney, who told me her husband had gone away from her now for four years; it seems he was the property of Mr. K----, and when that gentleman went to slave-driving on his own account, and ceased to be the overseer of this estate, he carried her better half, who was his chattel, away with him, and she never expects to see him again. After her departure I had a most curious visitor, a young lad of the name of Renty, whose very decidedly mulatto tinge accounted, I suppose, for the peculiar disinvoltura of his carriage and manner; he was evidently in his own opinion a very superior creature; and yet, as his conversation with me testified, he was conscious of some flaw in the honour of his 'yellow' complexion. 'Who is your mother, Renty?' said I (I give you our exact dialogue); 'Betty, head-man Frank's wife.' I was rather dismayed at the promptness of this reply, and hesitated a little at my next question, 'Who is your father?' My sprightly young friend, however, answered, without an instant's pause, 'Mr. K----.' Here I came to a halt, and, willing to suggest some doubt to the lad, because for many peculiar reasons this statement seemed to me shocking, I said, 'What, old Mr. K----?' 'No, massa R----.' 'Did your mother tell you so?' 'No, missis, me ashamed to ask her; Mr. C----'s children told me so, and I 'spect they know it.' Renty, you see, did not take Falconbridge's view of such matters; and as I was by no means sorry to find that he considered his relation to Mr. K---- a disgrace to his mother, which is an advance in moral perception not often met with here, I said no more upon the subject.

Tuesday, March 3.--This morning, old House Molly, coming from Mr. G----'s upon some errand to me, I asked her if Renty's statement was true; she confirmed the whole story, and, moreover, added that this connection took place after Betty was married to head-man Frank. Now, he, you know, E----, is the chief man at the Rice Island, second in authority to Mr. O----, and indeed, for a considerable part of the year, absolute master and guardian during the night, of all the people and property at the rice plantation, for, after the early spring, the white overseer himself is obliged to betake himself to the mainland to sleep, out of the influence of the deadly malaria of the rice swamp, and Frank remains sole sovereign of the island, from sunset to sunrise, in short, during the whole period of his absence. Mr. ---- bestowed the highest commendations upon his fidelity and intelligence, and, during the visit Mr. R---- K---- paid us at the island, he was emphatic in his praise of both Frank and his wife, the latter having, as he declared, by way of climax to his eulogies, quite the principles of a white woman. Perhaps she imbibed them from his excellent influence over her. Frank is a serious, sad, sober-looking, very intelligent man; I should think he would not relish having his wife borrowed from him even by the white gentleman, who admired her principles so much; and it is quite clear from poor Renty's speech about his mother, that by some of these people (and if by any, then very certainly by Frank), the disgrace of such an injury is felt and appreciated much after the fashion of white men.

This old woman Molly is a wonderfully intelligent, active, energetic creature, though considerably over seventy years old; she was talking to me about her former master, Major ----, and what she was pleased to call the revelation war (i.e. revolution war), during which that gentleman, having embraced the side of the rebellious colonies in their struggle against England, was by no means on a bed of roses. He bore King George's commission, and was a major in the British army, but having married a great Carolina heiress, and become proprietor of these plantations, sided with the country of his adoption, and not that of his birth, in the war between them, and was a special object of animosity on that account to the English officers who attacked the sea-board of Georgia, and sent troops on shore and up the Altamaha, to fetch off the negroes, or incite them to rise against their owners. 'De British,' said Molly 'make old massa run about bery much in de great revelation war.' He ran effectually, however, and contrived to save both his life and property from the invader.

Molly's account was full of interest, in spite of the grotesque lingo in which it was delivered, and which once or twice nearly sent me into convulsions of laughing, whereupon she apologized with great gravity for her mispronunciation, modestly suggesting that white words were impossible to the organs of speech of black folks. It is curious how universally any theory, no matter how absurd, is accepted by these people, for anything in which the contemptuous supremacy of the dominant race is admitted, and their acquiescence in the theory of their own incorrigible baseness is so complete, that this, more than any other circumstance in their condition, makes me doubtful of their rising from it.

In order to set poor dear old Molly's notions straight with regard to the negro incapacity for speaking plain the noble white words, I called S---- to me and set her talking; and having pointed out to Molly how very imperfect her mode of pronouncing many words was, convinced the worthy old negress that want of training, and not any absolute original impotence, was the reason why she disfigured the white words, for which she had such a profound respect. In this matter, as in every other, the slaves pay back to their masters the evil of their own dealings with usury, though unintentionally. No culture, however slight, simple, or elementary, is permitted to these poor creatures, and the utterance of many of them is more like what Prospero describes Caliban's to have been, than the speech of men and women in a Christian and civilised land: the children of their owners, brought up among them, acquire their negro mode of talking;--slavish speech surely it is--and it is distinctly perceptible in the utterances of all southerners, particularly of the women, whose avocations, taking them less from home, are less favourable to their throwing off this ignoble trick of pronunciation, than the more varied occupation, and the more extended and promiscuous business relations of men. The Yankee twang of the regular down Easter is not more easily detected by any ear, nice in enunciation and accent, than the thick negro speech of the southerners: neither is lovely or melodious; but though the Puritan snuffle is the harsher of the two, the slave slobber of the language is the more ignoble, in spite of the softer voices of the pretty southern women who utter it.