In going over many events of the past in the half-waking hours at night—a habit I have long been prone to—I have felt, often, my heart-beats quicken, and more than once I have scarce restrained an inclination to speak or to cry aloud in accordance with my feelings. Perhaps the placing of all this upon paper may reduce the intensity with which I relive a life that is gone. And thus, to begin:
My earliest childhood's recollection is of a warm summer's day. I know it was warm, because the sand in which I was playing sparkled and shone as it ran through my fingers, and the long stretch of beach, whose whiteness dazzled my eyes, was hot to the touch of my bare feet. A great brown curly dog playing up and down the water's edge makes part of the picture, and an old colored mammy, crooning softly to herself, was shading my head with the green branch of a tree. Then a tall man with gray hair came and lifted me on his shoulder and carried me through a wood whose trees seemed to touch the clouds; then out of the shadows, by a path through a meadow (in which were some great fierce hogs that frightened me most dreadfully), up to a large house, where a beautiful woman took me in her arms and kissed me and called me pet names that I was glad to hear. This, I say, is the first day of all my life that I can remember—which is beginning at the beginning, and no mistake.
Gradually it came to me, so that I can remember it, that I began to love things. I loved my beautiful mother, who spoke to me in a language very different from that of the three old colored people whom I saw every day, namely, Aunt Sheba, Ann Martha, and Ol' Peter; and I loved them also, and I loved the dog.
I seemed to understand the two kinds of speaking very well (my mother's and the rest of the world's, I mean), although I did not know that one was French and the other darky English pure and simple.
The tall man, whom I sometimes called "père," and at others "daddy," was not always with us. Very often it was long months between his visits, and he generally remarked how I had grown and how much heavier I had become since last he had lifted me up on his shoulder.
Then came the time when I began to think—strange thoughts that were never answered, because for the most part I confided them to no one except, maybe, to the brown curly dog, who was called "Maréchal" by my mother, and "Maa'shal" by the colored people. Like myself, he seemed to understand either language perfectly, and replied to each in his own fashion.
I well remember the day I first began to wonder at the vastness of the world. It was upon an occasion when my father and Ol' Peter took me for a sail in a tremendous boat that they afterwards hauled up on the beach out at the mouth of the river—this is very clear in my mind—and the next morning after this excursion I went down with my mother to the end of the little wharf, and lo and behold! a great ship was lying at anchor in the broad stretch of water beyond the reedy point of land. My mother was crying softly, and my father kissed her, and me, too, over and over again. Then he stepped in a boat rowed by dark men with beards on their faces, and put off to the ship, spread her sails like a great bird and swept out into the bay.
When she had gone beyond the point, and we could no longer see a tall figure standing on the after-deck waving his hat, my mother burst out crying harder than ever, and we went back to the house. I never saw my father again.
I call him "my father," in thus looking back at the great spring-time, because I always think of him as such, and because I bear his name. Long years afterwards I learned much that this story will tell, if it goes on to the end, but it is now too early to indulge in explanations—I must relate things as they come to me.
Well, when I was six or seven years of age—when these first days I have touched on were even then but a memory—I began to enjoy life in new ways. I had never a play-mate but the dog, who had grown too old for romping; but my mother would read long and wonderful stories to me in her beautiful low voice, in French, of course, and I, listening, pictured the outside world as something strange and beautiful, and just waiting and yearning for my coming to see it and enjoy it.