“OLD PICKETT”
Before the war, the low-country planters, migrating each summer to their mountain homes at Flat Rock, N. C., frequently bought horses and mules from the drovers as they passed along the Buncombe Road on their way South from the stock ranges of Kentucky and Tennessee. Sometimes beautiful ponies were brought from the Pink Beds, away back in the North Carolina mountains, others came from the nearer valleys of the French Broad, but most of the Seacoast planters supplied their needs from the Tennessee drovers as they moved down the main-traveled road.
From an old drover named Pickett, a mule was acquired to which the negroes gave the drover’s name. Although a young mule, and of the opposite sex, she was christened “Old Pickett,” and bore the name with distinction for nearly a quarter of a century. Long and low, and powerfully built, Old Pickett was a light bay in color, with the brown stripe down the back and the zebra legs which mule wranglers regard as evidence of toughness—and Old Pickett was tough.
Old Pickett came into the hands of the family late in October. A thin skin of ice had formed along the shores of the lakes. Flocks of blue-winged teal whistled through the air and splashed as they alighted on the clear waters. Chestnuts had fallen, and their green and brown burrs covered the ground under the far-spreading limbs of the big trees. Their little cousins, the chinquapins, had long been gathered and strung in necklaces, or roasted at the hearths of the glowing wood fires. The pheasant-shooting was nearly over, and Westly-Richards and Greener were cleaned and oiled and slipped into their buckskin covers, in readiness for the campaign against deer and duck and turkey in the low-country. With the first days of November, as the branches of the great oaks cracked under the weight of the roosting wild pigeons, and the sloping sides of old Pinnacle and all the lesser peaks burned with the flame-like foliage of the hickory and the ruby fires of the oaks, the family started down the mountain for Greenville, the first stop in the ten-day journey to the sea. Carriages for the ladies and the elders, saddle horses for the younger men, and comfortable covered wagons for the house servants, the cavalcade moved out, Old Pickett and her companions tethered behind the wagons to take their turn at the pole later on.
Arrived at the big plantation, Old Pickett became familiar with the plow, the cart and the Gullah negro, and for twelve years led an uneventful life, buckling to the tough “joint grass” of the uplands in summer, and bogging pastern deep in winter as the slim plowshare slid through the sticky soil of the ricefields and turned the stubble into long greasy-looking furrows. While a willing worker, Old Pickett took her time and always “gang’d her ain gait.” She was nimble, too, with her heels, and the stable boys about the mule lot could always amuse themselves by throwing sticks or light clods of earth on Old Pickett’s hindquarters to make her “kick up,” when she came in to be unharnessed after her day’s work, and she was always ready to oblige. Wearing a blind bridle, she could not see behind her, but she was strong for the uplift, and whatever touched her in the rear had to go up, whether stick, or clod or stable boy!
Then the war! In the dawn of an April morning, came the sound of the big guns in Charleston harbor thirty miles away, and, a few months later, from another direction, rolled the thunder of yet heavier and more distant guns, bombarding Port Royal, and still Old Pickett plowed and carted, and otherwise plodded in the ways of peace, but not for long. The questing eye of the Confederate Government looked approvingly on Old Pickett’s short legs, arched loins and well-sprung ribs, and, discerning an artillery mule, intimated a desire for ownership, but Old Pickett, compelling as she did the little negroes who walked behind and around her to become alert and watchful, was a plantation institution and could not be parted with permanently, but she was loaned to the Confederacy, and for a year or two hauled caissons and cannon and army wagons about the coast section wherever an attack was threatened by the invaders.
At last, the booming of cannon came nearer, an expedition having reached Willtown only seven miles away, and, as negroes from nearby plantations were “running away to the Yankees,” a farm was leased in the far away land of Abbeville, and thither, for safekeeping, went a number of slaves under Zedekiah Johnson, a kindly and reliable overseer. With this venture went Old Pickett, and here, until the end of the war, she faithfully followed the curved and crooked furrows that ran around the terraced hills, and stubbed her unshod hoofs against the flinty stones thick sown about the ruddy soil. In the up-country, women sometimes plowed, and Old Pickett, blinkered and forward-looking as she was forced to be, submitted to the indignity of being “gee’d” and “haw’d” and chevied along by a bare-footed, sun-bonneted female of the species.
Freedom came. The low-country negroes whom it overtook in Abbeville, went their ways. The wagons and mules, all save old Pickett, were sold for the pitiful greenbacks that the profiteering few who had them, were willing to pay, and old Pickett came home. A low-country freedman, wishing to return to his habitat, kindly consented to ride her the two hundred miles, cannily exchanging his fore-knowledge of the road for the use of her four legs. And what a home-coming! The “big house” at the head of the wide live-oak avenue lay in ruins, sentineled by the tall, charred trunks of “Sherman’s laurels,” the two great magnolias that sometime stood in their glossy green liveries overhanging the hospitable hearths that once glowed within. Wildcats lurked in the briar thickets now upsprung from the fertile soil where once stood the great stables. The plantation quarters, whose streets formerly resounded with jest and laughter, at the touch of the vandal’s torch had flared into flame and vanished, and among their ashes Jimpson weed and other rank growths struggled.
In a rough stable, hastily improvised of blackgum logs, Old Pickett was introduced to strange, young Western mules, new to negro ways, but, from the time of her home-coming, she seemed to grow resentful toward all the world. While still performing her tasks faithfully, she would not be hurried, and no freedman was ever able to urge her into a trot, so, by example, if not by precept, the younger mules associated with her gradually acquired somewhat of trickiness and of truculence. Old Pickett still respected the former slave-holding planters, and under one of these (she was a good saddle animal) she would still condescend to canter, but the small white boy of ten or eleven years, and the negroes of all ages, she held in utter contempt. Saddles and bridles were scarce after the war, and spurs were rare. “The Captain” had a single ante-bellum spur with which he urged recalcitrant horse or mule to such bursts of speed as a grass diet would warrant. When rallied by his hunting companions on his lack of the twin spur, he shrewdly observed that if he could make one side of his steed travel fast enough to suit him, the other could always be induced to go along, too. As this precious tool was never loaned, the small boy who aspired to equestrian exercise was forced to kick his steed in the ribs with his bare heel, to which was sometimes tied, with a piece of hickory bark, a forked stick shaped like a wishbone, usually an effective goad with which to tickle the equine flank, but Old Pickett was unresponsive. She was, in a manner of speaking, on all-fours with St. Paul. “None of these things move me,” she thought—and they didn’t. The ambitious boy who expressed a willingness to adventure a trip to the railway station, two miles away, for the mail, only for the chance to ride, was sometimes offered Old Pickett, just to chill his ardor. If he accepted the mount, he was given a plow bridle, a folded crocus bag upon which to sit, and was allotted a few hours in which to make the trip. A stout switch was permitted him, which he carried in his right-hand for style, rather than for any impression he hoped to make on Old Pickett’s tough hide. Fortunately, the kindly amenities of war had left the great avenue without a gate, or he could not have passed, as no amount of urging could have brought Old Pickett within arm’s length of the latch, so the way was clear to the old King’s Highway. The boy had plenty of time to admire the scenery as Old Pickett walked sedately along between the willow-fringed canals that flanked the approach to the “Two Bridges.” In the summer, water snakes dropped quietly into their element from the overhanging branches upon which they had been sunning themselves, terrapins slid from their floating logs, and now and then a small alligator sank slowly downward, leaving only his eyes above the water. Just beyond, where the boughs of a grove of Spanish oaks stretched above the road, squirrels sometimes played, alighting among the smaller branches with a soft “swish” as they sprang from tree to tree. Then, on to Jupiter Hill, or “Town Hill,” as the negroes called it, because it lay in the direction of Charleston. Here, with a clay hole on one side and a Colonial milestone on the other—“31 M. to C Town” cut in its brown sandstone face—the roads forked, the right-hand leading to the Village, the left to the station. Although Old Pickett’s way always led to the station, she never failed to submit the selection of the road to argument, and invariably leaned to the right. Whether the memory of the brave, hopeful, early days of the Confederacy, when she had drawn artillery or army wagons along this road, urged her to tread again the once familiar paths, or whether she sought only to match her will and her wits against the boy’s, one may not know, but, as far as the boy was concerned, the discipline was wholesome, for loss of temper availed nothing against Old Pickett. Her response to an application of the switch was to sidle up to the nearest tree or sapling, against which she would rub her rider’s bare legs, so she was seldom switched. Sometimes the boy would sit on her back ten or fifteen minutes without moving, while she drowsed and dreamed of the past, and then, when, perhaps, she had forgotten the dispute between them, he would get her started in the way she should go. At other times, however, when she could not be wheedled out of the Village road, her rider let her have her way, and, after going two or three hundred yards, would slowly turn her head into the pineland and, gradually sweeping around in a wide semi-circle to the left, would reenter the road to the station a quarter of a mile beyond. Arrived at his destination, the boy would be fortunate to find some idle negro around who would bring out the mail to him, for, once dismounted, he could not remount without assistance, Old Pickett invariably backing her ears, baring her teeth, and altogether turning toward him “an unforgiving eye and a damned disinheriting countenance.” To grown-ups Old Pickett was dangerous only at the rear, but to a dismounted boy she was loaded at both ends and—a revolver at that—she was so pivoted that head and tail could swap places with surprising facility. Old Pickett’s tracks on her way home, however, were the prints of peace. Like so many of the human race, she knew the way to the trough, and thither she was willing to be guided.
On Sundays, Old Pickett was turned into the big pasture with the other mules, for rest and recreation, but, while her companions galloped or trotted and played, she kept away from them, grazing alone until satisfied, when, withdrawing to a far corner of the field, and resting her head upon the rider of the rail fence, she would gaze into space with retrospective eyes. Sometimes the Sunday outings would be in cornfields after harvest, where the slovenly freedmen usually left bunches of rank-growing sheep burrs, having a strong affinity for the manes and tails of horses and mules. Of these, Old Pickett acquired her share. The negro who plowed her extracted without difficulty those which lodged in her mane, but the taking of them out of her tail was an event in stableyard circles. Strongly tethered in her stall with a short halter, a stout bar was run into grooves behind her, so hampering her hindquarters that she could not extend herself. Thus helpless, she was ignominiously despoiled of the burrs that clung to her tail, even the small black boys participating in the spoliation, of which they did not fail to brag later to their companions at the quarters.
“You see dis sheep buhr, enty? Uh tek’um out’uh Ole Pickett’ tail,” said one, proudly pulling a burr out of the wool about his ears.
“No, you nebbuh! You duh Gawd fuh projick ’long Old Pickett’ tail? ’E yent come out’um!”
“’E yiz, now!”
“’E yent!”
“’E yiz!”
“’E yent!” and then they fought.
Besides the burrs acquired by her mane and tail, Old Pickett sometimes got them in her ears, and then a circus act was necessary to get the bridle over her head in the morning.
One summer afternoon, crook-legged, yellow Sabey came up to the house to borrow a mule with which to drag from a distant backwater a large alligator he had just killed, offering to recompense the favor by bringing a portion of the creature’s oily flesh to be cooked for the always hungry hounds. As all the other farm animals were busy, Sabey was told that he might have Old Pickett, who grazed alone in a distant pasture. Not knowing Old Pickett intimately, the poor darkey scraped his foot gratefully, and taking a bridle from the rack, an ear of corn from the crib and a bundle of fodder from the stack, he set out as gaily and as full of faith as the small boy who, receiving from an elder his first handful of “fresh salt,” goes forth in quest of the elusive robin’s tail. Arrived at the pasture, Sabey shambled toward Old Pickett, holding the ear of corn and the blades coaxingly before him. The bridle was hidden from sight at his back, tied to a hickory bark suspender. As Sabey approached, though he looked like no Greek that ever walked, or fought, or ran, Old Pickett, appraising the provender as camouflage and fearing even the Gullah bearing gifts, raised her head and looked at him suspiciously, but, as Sabey slowed down his pace and called “coab, coab, coab” softly and appealingly, she let him come up to her and condescended to nibble at the outstretched handful of blades. The negro’s favorite method of catching a loose mule is to seize her firmly by the ear, and to this Old Pickett, without an earful of sheep burrs, might have submitted, but, as Sabey grabbed, the sharp burrs were pressed so painfully into the inner lining of her ear, that she wheeled as quick as a flash and, lashing out with heels that had lost none of their youthful vigor, would have lifted Sabey into the air had he not with quick presence of mind thrown himself flat on the ground, so that she kicked over him. When the immediate danger had passed, Sabey rose to his feet and followed her about the pasture for two hours, in the vain effort to coax her again within reach, or to drive her into a fence corner, where he might, by getting a rail behind her, so pen her up that the bridle could be slipped over her head without danger. But Old Pickett could neither be led nor driven, and, just as the sun was setting, Sabey returned alone to the house.
“Mas’ Rafe, uh bin ketch cootuh een me time, uh bin ketch alligettuh, but uh yent fuh ketch no t’unduh en’ no lightnin’, en’ da’ t’ing oonuh call Ole Pickett, him duh t’unduh en’ lightnin’ alltwo one time! Uh gone een de pastuh en’ alltwo me han’ full’up wid bittle fuh da’ mule fuh eat. Uh hab uh kin’ feelin’ een me h’aa’t fuh da’ mule ’tell uh fin’um out, but now, uh nebbuh fuh trus’um ’gen no mo’! Mas’ Rafe, da’ mule ’ceitful ez uh ’ooman! ’E nyam de bittle out me han’, en’ w’en uh graff ’e yez fuh ketch’um, please Gawd, ’e head en’ ’e yez gone, en’ me han’ duh graff ’e two hin’ foot! Uh nebbuh see shishuh swif’ hin’ foot lukkuh da’ mule got. Ef me Jedus didn’ bin tell me fuh fall flat ’puntop me belly, sukkuh alligettuh, uh would’uh dead; but w’en uh do dat, een Gawd’ mussy, de mule kick obuh me, en’ de du’t en’ t’ing wuh ’e kick up out de pastuh, gone ’way up een de ellyment, en’ w’en ’e fall ’puntop me ’e kibbuh me up same lukkuh dem t’row du’t ’puntop’uh man een ’e grabe! Mas’ Rafe, uh tengkful fuh you fuh len’ me da’ mule fuh ride, but ’fo’ uh try fuh ketch’um ’gen, uh redduh walk on me han’ en’ me foot frum yuh spang Caw Caw Swamp!”
Old Pickett had now passed her twenty-fifth year, and day by day became sadder and wiser. She accepted her daily tasks with resignation, but not with enthusiasm. The sockets above her weary eyes grew deeper, and white hairs thickened among the tawny pelage about her brow. Her ears, once so erect and responsive to all the sounds of the world about her, now flopped dejectedly like an unstarched “cracker” sunbonnet. Her lips, as pendulous as those of the bull moose that once tried to bite the Faunal Naturalist, hung lower and lower, and the hour drew near when she must shuffle off the mortal harness she had worn so long. Her eyes had looked upon smiling Peace, upon grim War, and—under Reconstruction, the once proud planters on foot and their quondam slaves on horseback—it was time to go. Turned out in the pasture to spend her last days in idleness, she walked listlessly about, cropping here and there a bunch of tender grass, while she waited for the summons. When it came, and she lay down to rise no more, a black spot, slowly circling in the sky, stooped, and, on a lower level, sailed again in narrowing circles. The keen eyes of other questing vultures, miles away, watched the drop, and followed. From the four corners of the heavens they came, and, alighting on rail fence and blasted pine, or hovering low on shadowy wings, they watched and waited, until at last Old Pickett’s glazing eyes told them that her heart and her heels were stilled forever.
A month or two later in the Autumn, when the family returned to the plantation from the pineland village, the boy indignantly reproached the negroes for not having given Old Pickett decent sepulture, and two of them were induced to gather up her whitened bones and bury them in a shallow grave at the edge of the ante-bellum “horse burying ground,” where the old family horses rested under the live-oaks. The negroes could not understand the boy’s emotion as the clods fell on the bones of the faithful old mule. “Eh, eh, buckruh boy too commikil. Him duh cry ’cause mule dead!” They did not know that the passing of Old Pickett severed a link with the golden past, and that into her grave went something of The Lost Cause!