Miss Pinckney’s eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time.
“I don’t know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He’s just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don’t know, there’s no use in warning young folk, you may spank ’em for stealing the jam but you can’t spank ’em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl.”
Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl’s father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting.
“I always look after my own house,” said she, “and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren’t any more respected. That’s what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they’re emancipated. They’ve got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I’ll have no emancipated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence. They’ll all get a pension when they’re too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they’re working, and I’ve said to them ‘you’re no more emancipated than I am, we’re all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can’t sell you—and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there’s no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.’ Half the trouble is that people these times don’t know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don’t want to talk to them.”
She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser.
There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house.
Miss Pinckney objected to “baked meat” and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.
By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on. Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen—as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin’ close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness.
She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible.
She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.