Not long thereafter a number of us paroled soldiers made a mess, and cooked for ourselves at the room of one of them.
On one of these indeterminate days—dates had become nothing to me—I saw a dapper young man sketching about the ruins. I spoke to him, and mentioned that his had been my profession. This acquaintance was the beginning of hope.
I showed the young man places of interest, gave him points about a good many things, and at last fell to making sketches to help him out. They were perfectly satisfactory and liberally paid for. With this capital I set myself up in another place, which had a north light—by-the-way, I had been dispossessed of the asylum where I first found shelter, as the previous tenant returned. I was able to purchase material and apparel. But what was I to paint, and where to sell the product? My hand was out, I discovered, so I set to studying still life, and painting those of my friends who had the patience to sit.
I would have gone back to my old haunts in New York but for the material reason that my funds were too low, and the sentimental one that I not only was not in the humor for appealing to citizens of that section for patronage, but was not sure that it would not be withheld, from an analogous state of mind towards me.
Summer ran into fall. Mammy's visits increased in frequency, and her conversation drifted towards the difficulties of living.
I had long ago discharged all of her claims for material and repairs, but I noticed a tendency on her part to prepare my mind for a regular subsidy. I ignored these hints because it was impossible for me to carry out Mammy's plan, and painful for me to say so.
She approached the matter in a different way finally, and said, one day:
“Mahs William, you been cayin' on yo' fif' for some time now. Doan you think it's time for some of the yothers to look after them?”
I suggested that the whole family was about on a parity financially; that one brother was drifting in the trans-Mississippi, another living more precariously than I was. Suddenly a thought struck me, and I proposed that Mammy should apply to my married sister in the country, who could at least give her a home.
Mammy was very nearly indignant in her rejection of the proposition.