On a part of the old plantation which I have attempted to describe has lived for the past thirty years, free of rent, the leading Negro politician in the upper end of Hanover County. His wife, Hannah, was my mother’s old maid, who, after the war, as before it, served us with a fidelity and zeal of which I can give no conception. It may, however, illustrate it to state that, although she lived a mile and a quarter from the house and had to cross a creek, through which, in times of high water, she occasionally had to wade almost to her waist, she for thirty years did not miss being at her post in the morning more than a half-score times.
Hannah has gone to her long home, and it may throw some light on the old relation between mistress and servant to say that on the occasion of the golden wedding of her old master and mistress, as Hannah was at that time too ill to leave her home, they took all the presents in the carriage and carried them over to show them to her. Indeed, Hannah’s last thought was of her old mistress. She died suddenly one morning, and just before her death she said to her husband, “Open the do’, it’s Miss ——.” The door was opened, but the mistress was not there, except to Hannah’s dying gaze. To her, she was standing by her bedside, and her last words were addressed to her.
It is a continual cause of surprise among those who do not know the South intimately that Southerners should be so fond of the old Negroes and yet should be so intolerant of things which Northerners would regard with indifference. It is a matter which can hardly be explained, but if anyone goes and lives at the South, he will quickly find himself falling into Southern ways. Let one go on the plantations where the politician is absent and the “bloody-shirt” newspaper is unknown, and he will find something of the old relation still existing.
I have seen a young man (who happened to be a lieutenant in a volunteer company) kiss his old mammy on the parade ground in sight of the whole regiment.
Some years ago, while General Fitzhugh Lee was Governor of Virginia, a wedding took place in the executive mansion at Richmond. At the last moment, when the company were assembled and all had taken their places, waiting for the bride to appear, it was discovered that mammy Celia, the bride’s mammy, had not come in, and no less a person than General Lee, the Governor of Virginia, went and fetched her in on his arm to take her place beside the mother of the bride.
VII
Unhappily, whatever the future may produce, the teachings of doctrinaires and injudicious friends have lost the Negroes of the present generation their manners and cost them much of the friendship of the Whites.
None of us knows what relation the future may produce between the two races in the South, but possibly when the self-righteous shall be fewer than they are now and the teachings which have estranged the races shall become more sane, the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is dominant, and the Negro race, which is amiable, if not subservient, will adjust their differences more in accordance with the laws which must eventually prevail, and the old feeling of kindliness, which seems, under the stress of antagonism, to be dying away, will once more reassert itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] The name “driver” was unknown in Virginia, whatever it may have been in the South. And the “driver” of slave-horror novels was as purely the creature of the imagination as Cerberus, or the Chimera.