For several days, indeed, throughout the holidays, Harry felt that he had left childhood far behind him, and, as he strutted about the stable yard, he now and then expectorated, in imitation of Uncle Robin, as though he had a quid in his mouth.
Aunt Polly, though far inferior to Uncle Robin in the children’s estimation, was yet a person of distinction, and no naughtiness was ever displayed when she was by to witness it.
Mammy usually enjoyed a gossip with Aunt Polly over the nursery fire. But, sometimes feelings of coolness would arise. Polly belonged to the family of the mother of the children, while Mammy came from that of the father, and between the two a slight rivalry had always existed as to the superiority of her own white children.
“’T is a pity Miss Calline’s back’s so round,” said Polly one night as the children were being undressed.
Now, if there was a feature in which Mammy took a pride, it was in the straightness of the children’s limbs and the flatness of their backs, above all the limbs and backs in the other branches of the family; so, firing up at once, she replied that she would like to see a flatter back than “this here one,” laying her hand upon Caroline’s.
“Miss Emmaline’s is a sight flatter,” Polly stoutly maintained. “She’s got as pretty shape as ever I see,—all our people’s got good shapes from old Missis down. I reckon this chile’s got her back from her pa’s fambly.” When Polly said this, Mammy felt that the gauntlet had been flung down, and, at once, with an eloquence all her own, so defended the “shapes” of her “fambly” that Polly was fairly beaten in the war of words, and was forced to admit, with many apologies, that Miss Caroline’s back was as flat as Miss Emmaline’s.
Mammy accepted the apology with some hauteur, and it was several days before entire cordiality was reëstablished; in fact, in all her after life, Mammy would, when in certain moods, hark back to “dat time when dat long-mouthed Polly had de imperdence to say dat our folks’ backs weren’t as straight as hern.”
Full of peaceful content were the lives of both whites and blacks. Merrily the Christmas went by, to be followed by others as merry, and the winters and summers came and went, turning childhood into maturity and maturity into old age. Mammy’s glory reached its zenith when, at “Miss Calline’s” grand wedding, she herself rustled about in all the grandeur of a new black silk and Polly was forever squelched. The whole world seemed full of prosperity, abundance, and careless happiness, when suddenly, like a thunderbolt, the war came.
The plantation home was abandoned very carelessly, and with light hearts the family drove away, expecting nothing but to return with the frosts of winter. They refugeed to a farmhouse upon the outskirts of a little up-country village.
Sedley, though still a beardless youth, shouldered his musket, and took his place in the ranks. Sibyl and her mother, in the little rude farmhouse, thought not of their lost splendor, but cheerfully looked for the good days sure to come when, the war over, the dear ones would come back, and the old times. Every Southern woman knows how it was when the great battles were fought and a trembling, white-lipped group of women and aged men would stand huddled together to hear what the midnight dispatches might have in store for them.