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As she lifted the candle over her head, to show me something on the wall, I saw that her pretty brown hair was white. It was awfully hard not to burst out into violent weeping. She looked so sweet, and yet so utterly brokenhearted. But as she was without emotion, apparently, it would not become me to upset her by my tears.
Next day, at noon, Hetty, mother’s old maid, brought my breakfast to my bedside. Such a breakfast it was! Delmonico could do no better. “It is ever so late, I know,” to which Hetty replied: “Yes, we would not let Molly wake you.” “What a splendid cook you have here.” “My daughter, Tenah, is Miss Sally’s cook. She’s well enough as times go, but when our Miss Mary comes to see us I does it myself,” and she courtesied down to the floor. “Bless your old soul,” I cried, and she rushed over and gave me a good hug.
She is my mother’s factotum; has been her maid since she was six years old, when she was bought from a Virginia speculator along with her own mother and all her brothers and sisters. She has been pampered until she is a rare old tyrant at times. She can do everything better than any one else, and my mother leans on her heavily. Hetty is Dick’s wife; Dick is the butler. They have over a dozen children and take life very easily.
Sally came in before I was out of bed, and began at once in the same stony way, pale and cold as ice, to tell me of the death of her children. It had happened not two weeks before. Her eyes were utterly without life; no expression whatever, and in a composed and sad sort of manner she told the tale as if it were something she had read and wanted me to hear:
“My eldest daughter, Mary, had grown up to be a lovely girl. She was between thirteen and fourteen, you know. Baby Kate had my sister’s gray eyes; she was evidently to be the beauty of the family. Strange it is that here was one of my children who has lived and has gone and you
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have never seen her at all. She died first, and I would not go to the funeral. I thought it would kill me to see her put under the ground. I was lying down, stupid with grief when Aunt Charlotte came to me after the funeral with this news: ‘Mary has that awful disease, too.’ There was nothing to say. I got up and dressed instantly and went to Mary. I did not leave her side again in that long struggle between life and death. I did everything for her with my own hands. I even prepared my darling for the grave. I went to her funeral, and I came home and walked straight to my mother and I begged her to be comforted; I would bear it all without one word if God would only spare me the one child left me now.”
Sally has never shed a tear, but has grown twenty years older, cold, hard, careworn. With the same rigidity of manner, she began to go over all the details of Mary’s illness. “I had not given up hope, no, not at all. As I sat by her side, she said: ‘Mamma, put your hand on my knees; they are so cold.’ I put my hand on her knee; the cold struck to my heart. I knew it was the coldness of death.” Sally put out her hand on me, and it seemed to recall the feeling. She fell forward in an agony of weeping that lasted for hours. The doctor said this reaction was a blessing; without it she must have died or gone mad.
While the mother was so bitterly weeping, the little girl, the last of them, a bright child of three or four, crawled into my bed. “Now, Auntie,” she whispered, “I want to tell you all about Mamie and Katie, but they watch me so. They say I must never talk about them. Katie died because she ate blackberries, I know that, and then Aunt Charlotte read Mamie a letter and that made her die, too. Maum Hetty says they have gone to God, but I know the people saved a place between them in the ground for me.”
Uncle William was in despair at the low ebb of patriotism out here. “West of the Savannah River,” said he,
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“it is property first, life next, honor last.” He gave me an excellent pair of shoes. What a gift! For more than a year I have had none but some dreadful things Armstead makes for me, and they hurt my feet so. These do not fit, but that is nothing; they are large enough and do not pinch anywhere. I have absolutely a respectable pair of shoes!!
Uncle William says the men who went into the war to save their negroes are abjectly wretched. Neither side now cares a fig for these beloved negroes, and would send them all to heaven in a hand-basket, as Custis Lee says, to win in the fight.
General Lee and Mr. Davis want the negroes put into the army. Mr. Chesnut and Major Venable discussed the subject one night, but would they fight on our side or desert to the enemy? They don’t go to the enemy, because they are comfortable as they are, and expect to be free anyway.
When we were children our nurses used to give us tea out in the open air on little pine tables scrubbed as clean as milk-pails. Sometimes, as Dick would pass us, with his slow and consequential step, we would call out, “Do, Dick, come and wait on us.” “No, little missies, I never wait on pine tables. Wait till you get big enough to put your legs under your pa’s mahogany.”
I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself, perched on his knife-board. He won’t look at me now; but looks over my head, scenting freedom in the air. He was always very ambitious. I do not think he ever troubled himself much about books. But then, as my father said, Dick, standing in front of his sideboard, has heard all subjects in earth or heaven discussed, and by the best heads in our world. He is proud, too, in his way. Hetty, his wife, complained that the other men servants looked finer in their livery. “Nonsense, old woman, a butler never demeans himself to wear livery. He is always in plain clothes.” Somewhere he had picked that up.
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He is the first negro in whom I have felt a change. Others go about in their black masks, not a ripple or an emotion showing, and yet on all other subjects except the war they are the most excitable of all races. Now Dick might make a very respectable Egyptian Sphinx, so inscrutably silent is he. He did deign to inquire about General Richard Anderson. “He was my young master once,” said he. “I always will like him better than anybody else.”
When Dick married Hetty, the Anderson house was next door. The two families agreed to sell either Dick or Hetty, whichever consented to be sold. Hetty refused outright, and the Andersons sold Dick that he might be with his wife. This was magnanimous on the Andersons’ part, for Hetty was only a lady’s-maid and Dick was a trained butler, on whom Mrs. Anderson had spent no end of pains in his dining-room education, and, of course, if they had refused to sell Dick, Hetty would have had to go to them. Mrs. Anderson was very much disgusted with Dick’s ingratitude when she found he was willing to leave them. As a butler he is a treasure; he is overwhelmed with dignity, but that does not interfere with his work at all.
My father had a body-servant, Simon, who could imitate his master’s voice perfectly. He would sometimes call out from the yard after my father had mounted his horse: “Dick, bring me my overcoat. I see you there, sir, hurry up.” When Dick hastened out, overcoat in hand, and only Simon was visible, after several obsequious “Yes, marster; just as marster pleases,” my mother had always to step out and prevent a fight. Dick never forgave her laughing.
Once in Sumter, when my father was very busy preparing a law case, the mob in the street annoyed him, and he grumbled about it as Simon was making up his fire. Suddenly he heard, as it were, himself speaking, “the Hon. S. D. Miller – Lawyer Miller,” as the colored gentleman announced himself in the dark – appeal to the gentlemen
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outside to go away and leave a lawyer in peace to prepare his case for the next day. My father said he could have sworn the sound was that of his own voice. The crowd dispersed, but some noisy negroes came along, and upon them Simon rushed with the sulky whip, slashing around in the dark, calling himself “Lawyer Miller,” who was determined to have peace.