I minded the deprivation less after I converted the playhouse into a family chapel, and held services there on stay-at-home Sundays. My audience comprised all the small negroes on the place,—about twenty in number,—and they were willing attendants. A barrel was set, the whole head up, at the upper end of the room; upon this was my chair. I sat in it during the singing, and mounted upon it while reading and exhorting. Subtle reverence, which I could not analyze, held me back from "offering prayer." What we were doing was only "making believe" after all, and belief in the All-seeing Eye, the All-hearing Ear, the Judge of idle words and blasphemous thoughts, was as old as my knowledge of my own being. But sing we could and did, and I read from the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments, usually from the narrative portions, with a psalm or two to "beat the upward flame" in our hearts.
And then I would preach a sermon.
Our chapel had been in good running order for over two months, when on a certain drizzly Sunday early in March, I arose discreetly upon my ticklish pulpit to announce through my nose, "We will commence our services by singing the three-hundredth-and-thirty-third hymn—'Come thou Fount of every blessing.'"
As mine was the only hymn-book in the assembly, the mention of the number was a bit of supererogatory business. The omission of the formula would have been a breach of chapel etiquette. I raised the tune, and every other pair of lungs there joined in without fear of criticism or favor of his neighbors' ears. Some of the duller and lesser children smothered or decapitated a word here and there in the main body of the hymn. All knew the chorus, and it shook the unceiled roof:—
"Away, away, away to glory!
My name's written on the throne.
My home's in yonder worl' o' glory,
Where my Redeemer reigns alone."
Warmed by the vigorous preliminary, I read the sixth chapter of Revelation, still through my nose, catching my breath audibly at the end of each clause. This oratorical touch was copied with ludicrous accuracy from Rev. Wesley Greene, a circuit-rider who had conducted an "arbor-meeting" at Fine Creek meeting-house last summer. Our negroes were all Baptists, and considered themselves remiss, as devout hearers of aught that partook of the nature of a religious service, if they did not respond at intervals with groans and pious ejaculations. Their children, as gravely imitative as juvenile Simiæ, came up nobly to their parts in our exercises.
The acknowledged leader in the responses, and my Grand Vizier in the ordering of my small kingdom, my stage-manager and lieutenant-general, was a girl of twelve, Mariposa by name. She received the fanciful title from a young visitor to the plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted the compliment to her newly born daughter. The mother and her mates called her "Mary Posy." The mistress, who was fond of the madcap sponsor, retained the original pronunciation.
Mariposa was as black as tar, and to-day was clothed in a yellow homespun frock. Her hair was twisted and bound into two upright tags that projected above her temples. Altogether, she was not unlike a gigantic black-and-tan moth, a resemblance heightened by the aforementioned antennæ, albeit lessened by the baby she always carried on some portion of her wiry frame. She was the toughest, most supple, and most versatile creature I ever saw, of any color or clime. The baby was disposed decorously across her knees on this occasion, and she was one of the five auditors who had brought along their own crickets or chairs. She had confiscated some older woman's splint-bottomed rocking-chair and lugged it to the very front, as she had a right to do.
I had heard Mam' Chloe say of one of Rev. Wesley Greene's sermons, "I tell you, Miss Ma'y, the Sperrit struck him that day, an' he jes' r'arred!"
Something struck my worthy lieutenant during my reading of the white, red, black, and pale horses of the Apocalypse and their awesome riders, and the others following her lead, my voice was drowned by the "Hum-hums!" and "Glorys!" and "Hallelujahs!" and "Bless de Lords!" arising from all sides.