BURIAL OF AUNT MATILDA
[Mrs. R. A. Pryor’s Reminiscences.]
This precise type of a Virginia plantation will never appear again, I imagine. I wish I could describe a plantation wedding as I saw it that summer. But a funeral of one of the old servants was peculiarly interesting to me. “Aunt Matilda” had been much loved and, when she found herself dying, she had requested that the mistress and little children should attend her funeral.
“I ain’ been much to church,” she urged. “I couldn’t leave my babies. I ain’ had dat shoutin’ an’ hollerin’ religion, but I gwine to heaven jes’ de same”—a fact of which nobody who knew Aunt Matilda could have the smallest doubt.
We had a long, warm walk behind hundreds of negroes, following the rude coffin in slow procession through the woods, singing antiphonally as they went, one of those strange, weird hymns not to be caught by any Anglo-Saxon voice.
It was a beautiful and touching scene, and at the grave I longed for an artist (we had no kodaks then) to perpetuate the picture. The level rays of the sun were filtered through the green leaves of the forest, and fell gently on the dusky pathetic faces, and on the simple coffin surrounded by orphan children and relatives, very dignified and quiet in their grief.
The spiritual patriarch of the plantation presided. Old Uncle Abel said:
“I ain’ gwine keep you all long. ’Tain’ no use. We can’t do nothin’ for Sis’ Tildy. All is done fer her, an’ she done preach her own fune’al sermon. Her name was on dis church book here, but dat warn’ nothin’; no doubt ’twas on de Lamb book, too.
“Now, whiles dey fillin’ up her grave, I’d like you all to sing a hymn Sis’ Tildy uster love, but you all know I bline in one eye, an’ I dunno as any o’ you all ken do it”—and the first thing I knew, the old man had passed his well-worn book to me, and there I stood at the foot of the grave, “lining out”:
“‘Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep,
From which none ever wake to weep.’”
Words of immortal comfort to the great throng of negro mourners who caught it up line after line, on an air of their own, full of tears and tenderness,—a strange, weird tune no white person’s voice could ever follow.