When this tribe had dispersed itself, a very old woman with a remarkably intelligent, nice-looking young girl, came forward and claimed my attention. The old woman, who must, I think, by her appearance, have been near seventy, had been one of the house servants on St. Simon's Island in Major ——'s time, and retained a certain dignified courtesy and respectfulness of manner which is by no means an uncommon attribute of the better class of slaves, whose intercourse with their masters, while tending to expand their intelligence, cultivates, at the same time, the natural turn for good manners which is, I think, a distinctive peculiarity of negroes, if not in the kingdom of Dahomey, certainly in the United States of America. If it can be for a moment attributed to the beneficent influence of slavery on their natures (and I think slaveowners are quite likely to imagine so), it is curious enough that there is hardly any alloy whatever of cringing servility, or even humility, in the good manners of the blacks, but a rather courtly and affable condescension which, combined with their affection for, and misapplication of, long words, produces an exceedingly comical effect. Old-house Molly, after congratulating herself, with many thanks to heaven, for having spared her to see 'massa's' wife and children, drew forward her young companion, and informed me she was one of her numerous grandchildren. The damsel, ycleped Louisa, made rather a shame-faced obeisance, and her old grandmother went on to inform me that she had only lately been forgiven by the overseer for an attempt to run away from the plantation. I enquired the cause of her desire to do so—a 'thrashing' she had got for an unfinished task—'but lor, missis,' explained the old woman, 'taint no use—what use nigger run away?—de swamp all round; dey get in dar, an dey starve to def, or de snakes eat em up—massa's nigger, dey don't neber run away;' and if the good lady's account of their prospects in doing so is correct (which, substituting biting for eating, on the part of the snakes, it undoubtedly is), one does not see exactly what particular merit the institution of slavery as practised on Mr. ——'s plantation derives from the fact that his 'nigger don't neber run away.'
After dismissing Molly and her grand-daughter, I was about to re-enter the house, when I was stopped by Betty, head-man Frank's wife, who came with a petition that she might be baptised. As usual with all requests involving anything more than an immediate physical indulgence, I promised to refer the matter to Mr. ——, but expressed some surprise that Betty, now by no means a young woman, should have postponed a ceremony which the religious among the slaves are apt to attach much importance to. She told me she had more than once applied for this permission to Massa K—— (the former overseer), but had never been able to obtain it, but that now she thought she would ask 'de missis.'[[2]]
Yesterday afternoon I received a visit from the wife of our neighbour Dr. T——. As usual, she exclaimed at my good fortune in having a white woman with my children when she saw M——, and, as usual, went on to expatiate on the utter impossibility of finding a trustworthy nurse anywhere in the South, to whom your children could be safely confided for a day or even an hour; as usual too, the causes of this unworthiness or incapacity for a confidential servant's occupation were ignored, and the fact laid to the natural defects of the negro race. I am sick and weary of this cruel and ignorant folly. This afternoon I went out to refresh myself with a row on the broad Altamaha and the conversation of my slave Jack, which is, I assure you, by no means devoid of interest of various kinds, pathetic and humorous. I do not know that Jack's scientific information is the most valuable in the world, and I sometimes marvel with perhaps unjust incredulity at the facts in natural history which he imparts to me; for instance, to-day he told me as we rowed past certain mud islands, very like children's mud puddings on a rather larger scale than usual, that they were inaccessible, and that it would be quite impossible to land on one of them even for the shortest time. Not understanding why people who did not mind being up to their knees in mud should not land there if they pleased, I demurred to his assertion, when he followed it up by assuring me that there were what he called sand-sinks under the mud, and that whatever was placed on the surface would not only sink through the mud, but also into a mysterious quicksand of unknown depth and extent below it. This may be true, but sounds very strange, although I remember that the frequent occurrence of large patches of quicksand was found to be one of the principal impediments in the way of the canal speculators at Brunswick. I did not, however, hear that these sinks, as Jack called them, were found below a thick stratum of heavy mud.
In remonstrating with him upon the want of decent cleanliness generally among the people, and citing to him one among the many evils resulting from it, the intolerable quantity of fleas in all the houses, he met me full with another fact in natural history which, if it be fact and not fiction, certainly gave him the best of the argument: he declared, with the utmost vehemence, that the sand of the pine woods on the mainland across the river literally swarmed with fleas—that in the uninhabited places the sand itself was full of them, and that so far from being a result of human habitation, they were found in less numbers round the negro huts on the mainland than in the lonely woods around them.
The ploughing is at length fairly inaugurated, and there is a regular jubilee among the negroes thereat. After discoursing fluently on the improvements likely to result from the measure, Jack wound up by saying he had been afraid it would not be tried on account of the greater scarcity, and consequently greater value, of horses over men in these parts—a modest and slave-like conclusion.
Dearest E——. I walked up to-day, February 14th, to see that land of promise the ploughed field: it did not look to me anything like as heavy soil as the cold wet sour stiff clay I have seen turned up in some of the swampy fields round Lenox; and as for the cypress roots which were urged as so serious an impediment, they are not much more frequent, and certainly not as resisting, as the granite knees and elbows that stick out through the scanty covering of the said clay, which mother earth allows herself as sole garment for her old bones in many a Berkshire patch of corn. After my survey, as I walked home, I came upon a gang of lusty women, as the phrase is here for women in the family-way; they were engaged in burning stubble, and I was nearly choked while receiving the multitudinous complaints and compliments with which they overwhelmed me. After leaving them, I wandered along the river side on the dyke homeward, rejoicing in the buds and green things putting forth their tender shoots on every spray, in the early bees and even the less amiable wasps busy in the sunshine with flowers—(weeds I suppose they should be called), already opening their sweet temptations to them, and giving the earth a spring aspect, such as it does not wear with you in Massachusetts till late in May.
In the afternoon I took my accustomed row: there had been a tremendous ebb tide, the consequence of which was to lay bare portions of the banks which I had not seen before. The cypress roots form a most extraordinary mass of intertwined wood-work, so closely matted and joined together, that the separate roots, in spite of their individual peculiarities, appeared only like divisions of a continuous body; they presented the appearance in several places of jagged pieces of splintered rock, with their huge teeth pointing downward into the water. Their decay is so slow that the protection they afford the soft spongy banks against the action of the water, is likely to be prolonged until the gathering and deposit of successive layers of alluvium will remove them from the margin of which they are now most useful supports. On my return home, I was met by a child (as she seemed to me) carrying a baby, in whose behalf she begged me for some clothes. On making some enquiry, I was amazed to find that the child was her own: she said she was married and fourteen years old, she looked much younger even than that, poor creature. Her mother, who came up while I was talking to her, said she did not herself know the girl's age;—how horridly brutish it all did seem, to be sure.
The spring is already here with her hands full of flowers. I do not know who planted some straggling pyrus japonica near the house, but it is blessing my eyes with a hundred little flame-like buds, which will presently burst into a blaze; there are clumps of narcissus roots sending up sheaves of ivory blossoms, and I actually found a monthly rose in bloom on the sunny side of one of the dykes; what a delight they are in the slovenly desolation of this abode of mine! what a garden one might have on the banks of these dykes, with the least amount of trouble and care!