University of Virginia Library

Dear E——. There is one privilege which I enjoy here which I think few cockneyesses have ever had experience of, that of hearing my own extemporaneous praises chanted bard-fashion by our negroes, in rhymes as rude and to measures as simple as ever any illustrious female of the days of King Brian Boroihme listened to. Rowing yesterday evening through a beautiful sunset into a more beautiful moonrise, my two sable boatmen entertained themselves and me with alternate strophe and anti-strophe of poetical description of my personal attractions, in which my ‘wire waist’ recurred repeatedly, to my intense amusement. This is a charm for the possession of which M—— (my white nursemaid) is also invariably celebrated; and I suppose that the fine round natural proportions of the uncompressed waists of the sable beauties of these regions appear less symmetrical to eyes accustomed to them than our stay-cased figures, since ‘nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.’ Occasionally I am celebrated in these rowing chants as ‘Massa’s darling,’ and S—— comes in for endless glorification on account of the brilliant beauty of her complexion; the other day, however, our poets made a diversion from the personal to the moral qualities of their small mistress, and after the usual tribute to her roses and lilies came the following rather significant couplet:—

At which all the white teeth simultaneously lightened from the black visages, while the subject of this equivocal commendation sat with infantine solemnity (the profoundest, I think, that the human countenance is capable of), surveying her sable dependants with imperturbable gravity.

Yesterday morning I amused myself with an exercise of a talent I once possessed, but have so neglected that my performance might almost be called an experiment. I cut out a dress for one of the women. My education in France—where, in some important respects, I think girls are better trained than with us—had sent me home to England, at sixteen, an adept in the female mystery of needlework. Not only owing to the Saturday’s discipline of clothes mending by all the classes—while l’Abbe Millot’s history (of blessed, boring memory) was being read aloud, to prevent ‘vain babblings,’ and ensure wholesome mental occupation the while—was I an expert patcher and mender, darner and piecer (darning and marking were my specialities), but the white cotton embroidery of which every French woman has always a piece under her hand pour les momens perdus, which are thus anything but perdus, was as familiar to us as to the Irish cottagers of the present day, and cutting out and making my dresses was among the more advanced branches of the female accomplishment to which I attained.[1] The luxury of a lady’s

maid of my own, indulged in ever since the days of my ‘coming out,’ has naturally enough caused my right hand to forget its cunning, and regret and shame at having lost any useful lore in my life made me accede, for my own sake, to the request of one of our multitudinous Dianas and innumerable Chloes to cut out dresses for each of them, especially as they (wonderful to relate) declared themselves able to stitch them if I would do the cutting. Since I have been on the plantation I have already spent considerable time in what the French call ‘confectioning’ baby bundles, i.e. the rough and very simple tiny habiliments of coarse cotton and scarlet flannel which form a baby’s layette here, and of which I have run up some scores; but my present task was far more difficult. Chloe was an ordinary mortal negress enough, but Diana might have been the Huntress of the Woods herself, done into the African type. Tall, large, straight, well-made, profoundly serious, she stood like a bronze statue, while I, mounted on a stool, (the only way in which I could attain to the noble shoulders and bust of my lay figure), pinned and measured, and cut and shaped, under the superintendence of M——, and had the satisfaction of seeing the fine proportions of my black goddess quite becomingly clothed in a high tight fitting body of the gayest chintz, which she really contrived to put together quite creditably.

I was so elated with my own part of this performance

that I then and there determined to put into execution a plan I had long formed of endowing the little boat in which I take what the French call my walks on the water, with cushions for the back and seat of the benches usually occupied by myself and Mr. ——; so putting on my large straw hat, and plucking up a paper of pins, scissors, and my brown holland, I walked to the steps, and jumping into the little canoe, began piecing, and measuring, and cutting the cushions, which were to be stuffed with the tree moss by some of the people who understand making a rough kind of mattress. My inanimate subject, however, proved far more troublesome to fit than my living lay figure, for the little cockle-shell ducked, and dived, and rocked, and tipped, and curtseyed, and tilted, as I knelt first on one side and then on the other fitting her, till I was almost in despair; however, I got a sort of pattern at last, and by dint of some pertinacious efforts—which, in their incompleteness, did not escape some sarcastic remarks from Mr. —— on the capabilities of ‘women of genius’ applied to common-place objects—the matter was accomplished, and the little Dolphin rejoiced in very tidy back and seat cushions, covered with brown holland, and bound with green serge. My ambition then began to contemplate an awning, but the boat being of the nature of a canoe—though not a real one, inasmuch as it is not made of a single log—does not admit of supports for such an edifice.

I had rather a fright the other day in that same small craft, into which I had taken S——, with the intention of paddling myself a little way down the river and back. I used to row tolerably well, and was very fond of it, and frequently here take an oar, when the men are rowing me in the long boat, as some sort of equivalent for my riding, of which, of course, I am entirely deprived on this little dykeland of ours; but paddling is a perfectly different process,

and one that I was very anxious to achieve. My first strokes answered the purpose of sending the boat off from shore, and for a few minutes I got on pretty well; but presently I got tired of shifting the paddle from side to side, a manoeuvre which I accomplished very clumsily and slowly, and yet, with all my precautions, not without making the boat tip perilously. The immense breadth and volume of the river suddenly seized my eyes and imagination as it were, and I began to fancy that if I got into the middle of the stream I should not be able to paddle myself back against it—which, indeed, might very well have proved the case. Then I became nervous, and paddled all on one side, by which means, of course, I only turned the boat round. S—— began to fidget about, getting up from where I had placed her, and terrifying me with her unsteady motions and the rocking of the canoe. I was now very much frightened, and saw that I must get back to shore before I became more helpless than I was beginning to feel; so laying S—— down in the bottom of the boat as a preliminary precaution, I said to her with infinite emphasis, ‘Now lie still there, and don’t stir, or you’ll be drowned,’ to which, with her clear gray eyes fixed on me, and no sign whatever of emotion, she replied deliberately, ‘I shall lie still here, and won’t stir, for I should not like to be drowned,’ which, for an atom not four years old, was rather philosophical. Then I looked about me, and of course having drifted, set steadily to work and paddled home, with my heart in my mouth almost till we grazed the steps, and I got my precious freight safe on shore again, since which I have taken no more paddling lessons without my slave and master, Jack.

We have had a death among the people since I last wrote to you. A very valuable slave called Shadrach was seized with a disease which is frequent, and very apt to

be fatal here—peri-pneumonia; and in spite of all that could be done to save him, sank rapidly, and died after an acute illness of only three days. The doctor came repeatedly from Darien, and the last night of the poor fellow’s life —— himself watched with him. I suppose the general low diet of the negroes must produce some want of stamina in them; certainly, either from natural constitution or the effect of their habits of existence, or both, it is astonishing how much less power of resistance to disease they seem to possess than we do. If they are ill, the vital energy seems to sink immediately. This rice cultivation, too, although it does not affect them as it would whites—to whom, indeed, residence on the rice plantation after a certain season is impossible—is still, to a certain degree, deleterious even to the negroes. The proportion of sick is always greater here than on the cotton plantation, and the invalids of this place are not unfrequently sent down to St. Simon’s to recover their strength, under the more favorable influences of the sea air and dry sandy soil of Hampton Point.

Yesterday afternoon the tepid warmth of the air and glassy stillness of the river seemed to me highly suggestive of fishing, and I determined, not having yet discovered what I could catch with what in these unknown waters, to try a little innocent paste bait—a mystery his initiation into which caused Jack much wonderment. The only hooks I had with me, however, had been bought in Darien—made, I should think, at the North expressly for this market; and so villainously bad were they that, after trying them and my patience a reasonable time, I gave up the attempt and took a lesson in paddling instead. Amongst other items Jack told me of his own fishing experience was, that he had more than once caught those most excellent creatures Altamaha shad by the fish themselves leaping out of the water and landing, as Jack expressed it, to

escape from the porpoises, which come in large schools up the river to a considerable distance, occasioning, evidently, much emotion in the bosoms of the legitimate inhabitants of these muddy waters. Coasting the island on our return home we found a trap, which the last time we examined it was tenanted by a creature called a mink, now occupied by an otter. The poor beast did not seem pleased with his predicament; but the trap had been set by one of the drivers, and, of course, Jack would not have meddled with it except upon my express order, which, in spite of some pangs of pity for the otter, I did not like to give him, as in the extremely few resources of either profit or pleasure possessed by the slaves I could not tell at all what might be the value of an otter to his captor.

Yesterday evening the burial of the poor man Shadrach took place. I had been applied to for a sufficient quantity of cotton cloth to make a winding-sheet for him, and just as the twilight was thickening into darkness I went with Mr. —— to the cottage of one of the slaves whom I may have mentioned to you before—a cooper of the name of London, the head of the religious party of the inhabitants of the island, a Methodist preacher of no small intelligence and influence among the people—who was to perform the burial service. The coffin was laid on trestles in front of the cooper’s cottage, and a large assemblage of the people had gathered round, many of the men carrying pine-wood torches, the fitful glare of which glanced over the strange assembly, where every pair of large white-rimmed eyes turned upon —— and myself; we two poor creatures on this more solemn occasion, as well as on every other when these people encounter us, being the objects of admiration and wonderment, on which their gaze is immovably riveted. Presently the whole congregation uplifted their voices in a hymn, the first high wailing notes of which—sung all in unison, in the midst of these unwonted surroundings—

sent a thrill through all my nerves. When the chant ceased, cooper London began a prayer, and all the people knelt down in the sand, as I did also. Mr. —— alone remained standing in the presence of the dead man, and of the living God to whom his slaves were now appealing. I cannot tell you how profoundly the whole ceremony, if such it could be called, affected me, and there was nothing in the simple and pathetic supplication of the poor black artisan to check or interfere with the solemn influences of the whole scene. It was a sort of conventional Methodist prayer, and probably quite as conventional as all the rest was the closing invocation of God’s blessing upon their master, their mistress, and our children; but this fairly overcame my composure, and I began to cry very bitterly; for these same individuals, whose implication in the state of things in the midst of which we are living, seemed to me as legitimate a cause for tears as for prayers. When the prayer was concluded we all rose, and the coffin being taken up, proceeded to the people’s burial-ground, when London read aloud portions of the funeral service from the prayer-book—I presume the American Episcopal version of our Church service, for what he read appeared to be merely a selection from what was perfectly familiar to me; but whether he himself extracted what he uttered I did not enquire. Indeed I was too much absorbed in the whole scene, and the many mingled emotions it excited of awe and pity, and an indescribable sensation of wonder at finding myself on this slave soil, surrounded by MY slaves, among whom again I knelt while the words proclaiming to the living and the dead the everlasting covenant of freedom, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ sounded over the prostrate throng, and mingled with the heavy flowing of the vast river sweeping, not far from where we stood, through the darkness by which we were now encompassed (beyond the immediate circle of our torch-bearers). There was something painful to me in ——’s standing while we all knelt on the earth, for though in any church in Philadelphia he would have stood during the praying of any minister, here I wished he would have knelt, to have given his slaves some token of his belief that—at least in the sight of that Master to whom we were addressing our worship—all men are equal. The service ended with a short address from London upon the subject of Lazarus, and the confirmation which the story of his resurrection afforded our hopes. The words were simple and rustic, and of course uttered in the peculiar sort of jargon which is the habitual negro speech; but there was nothing in the slightest degree incongruous or grotesque in the matter or manner, and the exhortations not to steal, or lie, or neglect to work well for massa, with which the glorious hope of immortality was blended in the poor slave preacher’s closing address, was a moral adaptation, as wholesome as it was touching, of the great Christian theory to the capacities and consciences of his hearers. When the coffin was lowered the grave was found to be partially filled with water—naturally enough, for the whole island is a mere swamp, off which the Altamaha is only kept from sweeping by the high dykes all round it. This seemed to shock and distress the people, and for the first time during the whole ceremony there were sounds of crying and exclamations of grief heard among them. Their chief expression of sorrow, however, when Mr. —— and myself bade them good night at the conclusion of the service, was on account of my crying, which appeared to affect them very much, many of them mingling with their ‘Farewell, good night, massa and missis,’ affectionate exclamations of ‘God bless you, missis; don’t cry!’ ‘Lor, missis, don’t you cry so!’ Mr. —— declined the assistance of any of the torch-bearers home, and bade them all go quietly to their quarters; and as soon as they had dispersed, and we had got beyond the fitful and unequal glaring of the torches, we found the shining of the stars in the deep blue lovely night sky quite sufficient to light our way along the dykes. I could not speak to ——, but continued to cry as we walked silently home; and whatever his cogitations were, they did not take the unusual form with him of wordy demonstration, and so we returned from one of the most striking religious ceremonies at which I ever assisted. Arrived at the door of the house we perceived that we had been followed the whole way by the naked noiseless feet of a poor half-witted creature, a female idiot, whose mental incapacity, of course, in no respect unfits her for the life of toil, little more intellectual than that of any beast of burden, which is her allotted portion here. Some small gratification was given to her, and she departed gibbering and muttering in high glee. Think, E——, of that man London—who, in spite of all the bitter barriers in his way, has learnt to read, has read his Bible, teaches it to his unfortunate fellows, and is used by his owner and his owner’s agents, for all these causes, as an effectual influence for good over the slaves of whom he is himself the despised and injured companion. Like them, subject to the driver’s lash; like them, the helpless creature of his master’s despotic will, without a right or a hope in this dreary world. But though the light he has attained must show him the terrible aspects of his fate hidden by blessed ignorance from his companions, it reveals to him also other rights, and other hopes—another world, another life—towards which he leads, according to the grace vouchsafed him, his poor fellow-slaves. How can we keep this man in such a condition? How is such a cruel sin of injustice to be answered? Mr. ——, of course, sees and feels none of this as I do, and I should think must regret that he ever brought me here, to have my abhorrence of the theory of slavery deepened, and strengthened every hour of my life, by what I see of its practice.

This morning I went over to Darien upon the very female errands of returning visits and shopping. In one respect (assuredly in none other) our life here resembles existence in Venice; we can never leave home for any purpose or in any direction but by boat—not, indeed, by gondola, but the sharp cut, well made, light craft in which we take our walks on the water is a very agreeable species of conveyance. One of my visits this morning was to a certain Miss ——, whose rather grandiloquent name and very striking style of beauty exceedingly well became the daughter of an ex-governor of Georgia. As for the residence of this princess, it was like all the planters’ residences that I have seen, and such as a well-to-do English farmer would certainly not inhabit. Occasional marks of former elegance or splendor survive sometimes in the size of the rooms, sometimes in a little carved wood-work about the mantelpieces or wainscotings of these mansions; but all things have a Castle Rackrent air of neglect, and dreary careless untidiness, with which the dirty bare-footed negro servants are in excellent keeping. Occasionally a huge pair of dazzling shirt gills, out of which a black visage grins as out of some vast white paper cornet, adorns the sable footman of the establishment, but unfortunately without at all necessarily indicating any downward prolongation of the garment; and the perfect tulip bed of a head handkerchief with which the female attendants of these ‘great families’ love to bedizen themselves, frequently stands them instead of every other most indispensable article of female attire.

As for my shopping, the goods or rather ‘bads,’ at which I used to grumble, in your village emporium at Lenox, are what may be termed ‘first rate,’ both in excellence and elegance, compared with the vile products of

every sort which we wretched southerners are expected to accept as the conveniences of life in exchange for current coin of the realm. I regret to say, moreover, that all these infamous articles are Yankee made—expressly for this market, where every species of thing (to use the most general term I can think of), from list shoes to pianofortes, is procured from the North—almost always New England, utterly worthless of its kind, and dearer than the most perfect specimens of the same articles would be anywhere else. The incredible variety and ludicrous combinations of goods to be met with in one of these southern shops beats the stock of your village omnium-gatherum hollow to be sure, one class of articles, and that probably the most in demand here, is not sold over any counter in Massachusetts—cow-hides, and man-traps, of which a large assortment enters necessarily into the furniture of every southern shop.

In passing to-day along the deep sand road, calling itself the street of Darien, my notice was attracted by an extremely handsome and intelligent-looking poodle, standing by a little wizen-looking knife-grinder, whose features were evidently European, though he was nearly as black as a negro who, strange to say, was discoursing with him in very tolerable French. The impulse of curiosity led me to accost the man at the grindstone, when his companion immediately made off. The itinerant artisan was from Aix in Provence; think of wandering thence to Darien in Georgia! I asked him about the negro who was talking to him; he said he knew nothing of him, but that he was a slave belonging to somebody in the town. And upon my expressing surprise at his having left his own beautiful and pleasant country for this dreary distant region, he answered, with a shrug and a smile, ‘Oui, madame, c’est vrai; c’est un joli pays, mais dans ce pays-la, quand un homme n’a rien, c’est rien pour toujours.’ A property

which many no doubt have come hither, like the little French knife-grinder, to increase, without succeeding in the struggle much better than he appeared to have done.