"Then you are glad the Yankees are here?"
"O chile! I can't bress de Lord enough; but I doesn't call you Yankees."
"What do you call us?"
"I call you Jesus's aids, and I call you head man de Messiah." She burst out into a rhapsody of hallelujah and thanksgivings. "I can't bress de Lord enough; and bress you, chile: I can't love you enough for comin."
"Were you not afraid, Aunty, when the shells fell into the town?"
She straightened up, raised her eyes, and with a look of triumphant joy, exclaimed,—
"When Mr. Gillmore fired de big gun and I hear de shell a-rushin ober my head, I say, Come dear Jesus, and I feel nearer to Heaben dan I eber feel before!"
My laundress at Port Royal was Rosa, a young colored woman, who escaped from Charleston in 1862, with her husband and four other persons, in a small boat. On that occasion Rosa dressed herself in men's clothes, and the whole party early one morning rowed past Sumter, and made for the gunboats.
"If you go to Charleston I wish you would see if my mother is there," said Rosa. "Governor Aiken's head man knows where she lives."
We went up King Street to Governor Aiken's. We found his "head man" in the yard,—a courteous black, who, as soon as he learned that we were Yankees, and had a message from Rosa to her mother, dropped all work and started with us, eager to do anything for a Yankee. A walk to John Street, an entrance through a yard to the rear of a dwelling-house, brought us to the mother, in a small room, cluttered with pots, kettles, tables, and chairs. She was sitting on a stool before the fire, cooking her scanty breakfast of corn-cake. She had a little rice meal in a bag given her by a Rebel officer. She was past sixty years of age,—a large, strong woman, with a wide, high forehead and intellectual features. She was clothed in a skirt of dingy negro cloth, a sack of old red carpeting, and poor, thin canvas shoes of her own make. Such an introduction!