But it almost seems as though I was meant to give it up. The rice-planting, which for years gave me the exhilaration of making a good income myself, is a thing of the past now—the banks and trunks have been washed away, and there is no money to replace them. The experiment of planting cotton has not been a success with me. The cotton grew luxuriantly and bore well, but others gathered it, and I got but little. I cannot sit idle in the midst of all this fertile soil. But I must wait, and watch, and listen, in silence, for the still, small voice, which comes after the storm and the earthquake, and brings the message from above.
Some Gullah words and their meanings:—
| unna | you all |
| een | in |
| ne | in the |
| fremale | female |
| tissic | asthma |
| tetta | potatoes |
| fai' | fairly, actually |
| bittle | food, victuals |
| castle | coffin, casket |
From an Editorial in the "New York Sun"
We print to-day a South Carolina lady's story of her experiences as a rice planter on her own account, as the actual manager of two large plantations in that State. It is a story which is all the more interesting and instructive because it is told in a manner of charming simplicity and without a trace of self-consciousness or self-assertion. Independently of the information it conveys it has attraction for every reader by reason of that manner and as a revelation of a feminine character in which are manifested tender susceptibility and womanly sympathy no less than rugged courage in assuming an arduous task and persistency in overcoming heavy practical obstacles.
Mrs. Pennington is of the type of Southern womanhood which reflected so great honor on that part of this country during the period of slavery and may be said to have been a generation peculiar to the social system at the base of which slavery lay. The executive and administrative experience acquired by Southern ladies at the head of households on the great plantations gave them a distinction among American ladies which since the overthrow of slavery has been demonstrated by many of them in the practical management of large estates like that presided over by Mrs. Pennington and in other fields of enterprise usually believed to be beyond the sphere of feminine ability. The mistress of a plantation, with many negro slaves, usually so far removed from considerable social centres that in its superintendence individual resource was taxed to the utmost, was loaded with a multiplicity of practical details and duties of administration, and in the discharge of these she received an education as an executive officer which distinguished her among her American sisters.
Accordingly, when the Civil War, with its incident of negro emancipation, left the South impoverished and its social system upturned, some of the most efficient and most important agents in developing the new prosperity now so abundant were Southern women who had passed through that severe school of training, had been reared under its influences or been moulded by its traditions—resourceful, courageous, well-poised women, accustomed to command, tactful and self-reliant, yet at the same time endowed with the gentlest feminine graces and the most engaging feminine qualities of character and disposition.
The readiness with which Mrs. Pennington assumed the heavy practical responsibilities, the risks, the vexations, and the cares involved in her rice-planting ventures, and the sagacity, practical skill, and indomitable persistence with which she has pursued them, are not less impressive than the beautiful spirit of womanly humanity and religious devotion to duty which is exhibited so unconsciously, so spontaneously, in her simple narrative. No trace of resentment against the negroes from whose shortcomings she has suffered so grievously appears in the story. The feeling she manifests is rather sympathetic in its tender consideration of moral defects apparently inseparable from their inheritance as a race and from the conditions produced by the sudden revolution in their relations to those employing them. It is to such a spirit as Mrs. Pennington's that the welfare of the negro race of the South can best be trusted.
Mrs. Pennington closes her story with the expression of a fear that "this is a dull letter"; but she may be sure that every one of the thousands of people who will read her story will find in it a human document of touching interest, and will see in it a revelation of a character in which are illustrated the best and highest virtues and graces of womanhood.