Mom Bi was very much interested in the maneuvers of the Rifle Rangers. She watched them with a scornful and a critical eye. Even in their uniforms, which were of the holiday pattern, their appearance was the reverse of soldierly. They were hollow-chested and round-shouldered, and exceedingly awkward in all their movements. Their maneuvers on the outskirts of the village, accompanied by the music of fife and drum, always drew a crowd of idlers, and among these interested spectators Mom Bi was usually to be found.
“Dee gwine fight,” she would say to the Waynecroft children, in her loud and rasping voice. “Dee gwine kill folks right un left. Look at um! I done git skeer’d myse’f, dee look so ’vigrous. Ki! dee gwine eat dem Yankee up fer true. I sorry fer dem Yankee, un I skeer’d fer myse’f! When dee smell dem vittle what dem Yankee got, ’tis good-by, Yankee! Look at um, honey! dee gwine fight fer rich folks’ nigger.”
The drilling and mustering went on, however, and Mom Bi was permitted to say what she pleased. Some laughed at her, others regarded her with something like superstitious awe, while a great many thought she was merely a harmless simpleton. Above all, she was Judge Waynecroft’s family servant, and this fact was an ample apology in Fairleigh and its environs for anything that she might say.
The mustering of the “sandhillers” irritated Mom Bi; but when the family returned to Charleston in the winter, the preparations for war that she saw going on made a definite and profound impression on her. At night she would go into her mistress’s room, sit on the hearth in a corner of the fire-place, and watch the fire in the grate. Nursing her withered arm, she would sit silent for an hour at a time, and when she did speak it seemed as if her tongue had lost something of its characteristic asperity.
“I think,” said Mrs. Waynecroft, on one occasion, “that Mom Bi is getting religion.”
“Well, she’ll never get it any younger,” the Judge replied.
Mom Bi, sitting in her corner, pretended not to hear, but after a while she said: “Ef de Lord call me in de chu’ch, I gwine; ef he no call I no gwine—enty? I no yerry him call dis long time.”
“Well,” remarked the Judge, “something has cooled you off and toned you down, and I was in hopes you were in the mourners’ seat.”
“Huh!” exclaimed Mom Bi. “How come I gwine go in mourner seat? What I gwine do in dey?” Then pointing to a portrait of Gabriel Waynecroft hanging over the mantel, she cried out: “Wey he bin gone at?”