Dear Félicie married Alfred Roman, adding another link of relationship to the Roman and Valcour Aime families, and the adored and only son, Gabriel Aime, died (I think Tante Lise wrote me) abroad.
I should like to know. No, I do not want to know. I already know too many wrecked homes and vanished fortunes and broken hearts. I want always to think of the Valcour Aime home and its charming hospitality, as I saw it and knew it, and loved it more than sixty years ago, when I waved a last adieu—alas! a last.
XXVI
THE OLD PLANTATION LIFE
It is almost a half century since the old plantation days. Only those who number threescore years and ten have a personal remembrance of the cares, duties and pleasures of the old plantation life. Only those who bore the cares, discharged the duties and prepared the way for the pleasures really understand the life that died and was buried fifty years ago. People who know so much about that fanatic John Brown and the fantastic “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are asking what one fought and bled for (did he bleed?) and what the other was written for. Some of those inquiring souls are over fifty years old, and what is more, their fathers were slave owners. The few of us tottering around who can tell of the old plantation life are threescore years and ten, and if we do not hasten to tell the story it may never be told. It is well to leave a record of a life that has passed beyond resurrection, a glorified record it may appear, for as we stand beside the bier of a loved and lifelong friend, we recall only his virtues. So as I look back on the old plantation life only the comforts and pleasures troop before me. It had its duties, but they were not onerous; its cares, but they were not burdensome, nor were its pleasures excessive. What we planned and accomplished for our slaves afforded us more satisfaction than any man of the present day can feel for his grand stables of hunters and roadsters and racers, that absorb his time and means....
Booker Washington, in that very interesting volume, “Up from Slavery,” tells of his early life when his mother (he never knew his father, and thinks he was a white man) was the slave of a well-to-do Virginia farmer, and the slave quarters had dirt floors. That may have been in the clay hills of Virginia, but I never saw a cabin, unless it was a pig pen, with a dirt floor. I am no apologist for slavery; the whites suffered more from its demoralizing influence than the blacks, but we were born to it, grew up with it, lived with it, and it was our daily life. We did well by it; no people could have done better. It is past now. When I tell of my own home it is to tell of the plantation homes of everybody I knew. We did not differ or vary to any extent in our modes of life and management.
Arlington Plantation on the Mississippi.
Slaves were comfortably housed. Their cabins were elevated above the ground, two rooms in each building, a chimney between, a porch in front and windows on two sides. The slaves were well fed and well clothed in osnaburgs and linseys cut and made in the sewing room of the “big house.” Though the hook worm theory was not at that time exploited they were well shod. There were drones; I guess there were hook worms too, but we did not know it. The old and infirm had light tasks. Men pottered around the woodpile, or tended the cows on their promenades over the levee, and the women sewed a little and quarreled, as idly disposed old folks will, among themselves (we who visit almshouses now know how that is) or fussed with the frolicking children. I never saw in those days a negro with spectacles, or one who seemed to need them.
There was an infirmary for the sick, and a day nursery for the babies, under the charge of a granny, a well-ventilated room with a spacious fireplace, where pots and kettles were always on hand, mush and herb teas always on tap; there the babies were deposited in cribs all day while the mothers were at work in the fields. No woman went to work until her child was a month old. A large diary folio record was kept by the overseer of all the incidents of the plantation; when a woman was confined, when she was sent again to the field, who was ill in the hospital, if doctor was summoned, what part of the canefield was being cultivated day by day, when sugar-making began, when finished, what the yield of the various “cuts,” how many hogsheads and barrels of molasses shipped and by what boats; all these items and ever so many more were recorded. A doctor was employed at $600 per annum. He came only in extreme cases. Headaches and stomach aches, earaches, toothaches and backaches, all these minor ills came under the care of the overseer and “Gunn’s Domestic Medicine,” a formidable volume of instruction. The lady, the “mistis” of the big house, made frequent visits to the quarter lot, saw that things were kept tidy and ministered to the sick.