CHAPTER VI
“That’s just right, Rhoda.” Charlotte nodded at herself in the mirror and smiled with satisfaction as she turned this way and that, surveying her reflection at different angles. “I hope you won’t marry Jeff Delavan, for then I’d have to learn how to do this myself.”
“You ought to learn how to make your own clothes, anyway,” her mother commented reprovingly. The three of them were in an upstairs chamber used as a sewing-room, Rhoda fitting upon her sister the bodice of a white gown and Mrs. Ware, between stitches as she darned a three-cornered tear in the muslin window curtain which the kitten had just made, looking on and making suggestions.
Charlotte tossed her head and tilted her hoopskirts as she did some dancing steps in front of the mirror. “Oh, what’s the use, as long as Rhoda likes to sew and I don’t! You couldn’t, mother, when you were my age. I hope she won’t marry anybody as long as I’m at home. You’re an awful goose, Rhoda. Suppose Jeff Delavan is a slaveholder—what do you care about a pack of dirty niggers? They’re better off as slaves, anyway. Billy Saunders has lived in South Carolina and he says you couldn’t find anybody anywhere more contented and happy than the nigger slaves down South and that they’re no more fit to be free and take care of themselves than so many babies.”
“Yes,” assented Mrs. Ware, “it has always seemed to me that they need white masters to provide for their welfare. They really are not competent to take care of themselves.”
Rhoda listened to their talk as she adjusted a ruffled fichu about her sister’s shoulders, but made no comment. Nobody but she knew how wistfully, during these days, she was hearkening to arguments in favor of slavery.
Charlotte surveyed herself critically in the glass once more and patted the fichu with approval. “It’s lovely, Rhoda, and I’m so glad you’re a Black Abolitionist! No good-looking young slaveholder would need to ask me more than once—that is, he wouldn’t need to if he knew it, but it’s more interesting to make them ask several times—didn’t you use to think so, mother? The more slaves he had the better I’d like him—and the more times I’d let him propose. Oh, la! How lovely it would be to have a dozen or so slaves ready to come the minute you call, and every time you look out of a window to see droves of them, all working for you! That would just suit us, wouldn’t it, Bully Brooks?” And she caught up the kitten from the floor in time to save the curtain, swaying in the breeze, from another attack.
“It’s perfectly silly of you, Rhoda,” she went on, as she tilted out of the room, the kitten on her shoulder, “to care any more about Jeff Delavan’s having a lot of slaves than you would if they were so many horses. Isn’t it, Bully Brooks?”
The kitten gave quick and loud response and Mrs. Ware, with a frown in her voice, called after her, “Charlotte!” But she heard in reply from down the hall only a merry laugh and the whistled strains of “Comin’ through the Rye.”
“Charlotte is not sympathetic,” said her mother fondly, putting an arm around Rhoda and pressing her cheek to her daughter’s, “but her ideas are certainly correct. And any one will tell you so, dear, who has lived in the South and knows what slavery really is. You’ve no right, Rhoda, as I’ve already told you, to set yourself up in judgment on a subject you know nothing about, and against those who know all about it. Why can’t you trust your mother, honey?”