Ruth Fielding Down in Dixie; Or, Great Times in the Land of Cotton

by Alice B. Emerson

“Drive by the quarters.” She said “quahtahs.” “It will give the children a chance to see us, and Dilsey and Patrick Henry won’t want them coming to the Big House and littering up the lawn.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the coachman and swung the horses into a by-road.

All the drives were beautifully kept. If there chanced to be a piece of grass in a forest opening, it was clipped like a lawn. This end of the great plantation was kept as well as an English park. Occasionally they saw men at work amid the groves of lovely shade trees.

Suddenly there burst upon their view a sloping upland, dotted here and there with groups of outbuildings and stables, checkered by fenced pastures in which sleek cattle and horses grazed. There were truck patches, too, belonging to the quarters, where the negroes lived.

These whitewashed cabins, with their attendant chicken-runs and pig-pens—all whitewashed, too—were near at hand. As the carriage swung out of the forest, the hum of a busy village broke upon the ears of the girls, as the sight of all this rich and rolling upland burst upon their view.

The green trees and the green grass contrasted with the white cots made a delightfully cool picture for the eye.

The mistress’ equipage was sighted immediately and there boiled out of the cabins a seemingly never-ending army of children and dogs. The dogs were all of the hound breed, and the children were of one variety, too—brown, bare-legged pickaninnies, about all of a size, and most of them bow-legged.

But they were a laughing, happy crowd as they came tearing along the lane to meet the carriage. The hullabaloo of the dogs and children brought the mothers to the cabin doors, or around from their washtubs at the rear of the cabins. They, too, were smiling and—many of them—in clean frocks and new bandanas, prepared to meet “de quality.”

And there were so many of them, bowing and smiling at “Mistis,” as they called Mrs. Parsons, and bidding her welcome! It was like a village turning out to greet the feudal owner of the property. Mrs. Parsons seemed to know all of them by name, and she shook hands with the older women, and spoke particularly to some of the young women with babies in their arms. Noticeably there were no children over seven or eight years old at home; nor were there any young men or women, save the few married girls with infants. Everybody else was at work in the fields, Ruth learned. And she learned, too, in time, that the Merredith plantation was one of the largest cotton farms in the state, and one of the most productive.

A little later, however, as they rode on, the visitors learned that there was something beside cotton grown on the estate. On the upland they came to a field of corn. It extended farther than their eyes could see—a waving, black-green, waist-high sea, its blades clashing like a forest of green swords.