Mother Tyler was putting breakfast on the table. She suddenly paused and listened. Something was the matter. There were cries that betokened trouble. She hastened to the house, followed her husband and the boys on to gra'mammy's room, and there on the bed, in peaceful contrast to all this wailing and sorrow, lay dear old gra'mammy, dead. The happiest smile glorified the kind old withered face, and the wrinkled hands lay crossed and still on her breast. She had truly met the husband of her youth, and God had opened in death the eyes so darkened in life.
MY FIFTH IN MAMMY
BY WILLIAM LUDWELL SHEPPARD
I never knew a time in which I did not know Mammy. She was simply a part of my consciousness; it seems to me now a more vivid one in my earliest years than that of the existence of my parents. We five, though instructed by an elder sister in the rudiments of learning, spent many more of our waking hours with Mammy; and whilst we drew knowledge from one source, we derived the greater part of our pleasure from the other—that is, outside of our playmates.
The moments just preceding bedtime, in which we were undergoing the process of disrobing at the hands of Mammy, were periods of dreadful pleasure to us. As I look back upon them, I wonder that we got any sleep at all after some of her recitals. They were not always sanguinary or ghostly, and of course when I scan them in the light of later years, it is apparent that Mammy, like the majority of people, “without regard to color or previous condition of servitude,” suffered her walk and conversation to be influenced by her state of health, mental and bodily. Her walk—I am afraid I must admit, as all biographers seem privileged to deal with the frailties of their victims as freely as with their virtues—her walk, viewed through the medium already alluded to, did not owe its occasional uncertainty to “very coarse veins,” though that malady, with a slight phonetic difference, Mammy undoubtedly suffered from, in common with the facts. She was a great believer in “dram” as a remedial agent, and homoeopathic practice was unknown with us at that period.
Mammy's code of laws for our moral government was one of threats of being “repoated to ole mahster,” tempered by tea of her own making dulcified by brown sugar of fascinating sweetness, anecdote, and autobiography.
The anecdotal part consisted almost exclusively of the fascinating répertoire of Uncle Remus. Indeed, to know the charm of that chronicle is reserved to the man or woman whose childhood dates from the ante bellum period, and who had a Mammy.
In the autobiographical part Mammy spread us a chilling feast of horrors, varied by the supernatural. Long years after this period I read a protest in some Southern paper against this practice in the nursery, with its manifest consequences on the minds of children. It set me to wondering how it was that the consequences in my day seemed inappreciable. I do not understand it now. Some of Mammy's stories would have been bonanzas to a police reporter of today; others would have bred emulation in Edgar Poe. And yet I do not recall any subsequent terrors.