A few short years that seem as days, and “Little Miss” smoothes the folds of “Mammy’s” black silk, “saved against her burying,” and pins, through blinding tears, a white rose above the still heart, and “Mammy’s” daughter, fat and gentle, with “Mammy’s” own soft, crooning voice, takes up the cradle song.
They romped together, these two, beneath the self-same oaks—“Little Miss” and “Mammy’s” daughter—but “Little Miss” now wears a cap (she is “Ole Miss,” too, to some down in the “Quarters”), and the folds of the other’s turban are as full of comfortable dignity as the dusky mother’s were.
“Little Miss,” still sweet and dainty in her dimity, smiles over her netting and slips the beads upon the scarlet threads or sorts her crewels in the shady porch, for at the other end, just out of sight, the old split-bottomed hickory chair resumes its familiar “thump” to the music of a negro voice.
Again it is “the dark of the moon,” and Satan is abroad in the “Quarters,” and the good hoodoo who must beat the devil at his own game is working wonders against him as he “splits the wind.” “Ole Cinder Cat” sits by the hearth nightly, and the “devil’s little fly” buzzes audibly in wondering childish ears.
The same old stories, ever witching, ever new, to the same old chorus—“Tell another, Mammy!”
Another chorus calls to answering silence, for she is gone. The swaying form, crooning in low rich voice, like some bronze Homer blind to letters, a weird primeval lore into the ears of future orators, is shut within the feudal past of the old plantation days, for the brown breast that pillowed its brain and beauty is still forever, and that South too is dead.
The worn split-bottomed chair is empty, filled with dust and years, for it is we who seek to conjure with it now—we who have heard unwitting at that shrine a classic that America may call her own.
OLD CINDER CAT
Solon and Juno had quarrelled. Now a quarrel was not an unusual occurrence in the Quarters, but Solon and Juno had been exemplars of conjugal felicity for nearly eighteen years, and had been held up to their dusky world as patterns to be zealously copied.