“Dat so, Marse Billy. How we old people does forgit, to-be-sho!”
I may remark, here, that before the late war it was very gratifying to a middle-aged negro to be thought old. There was on every farm a considerable proportion of the ladies and gentlemen of color who had voted themselves too old or too infirm to labor. Their diseases,—they were all diseased,—while masking their malignity behind such empirical euphemisms as rheumatiz or misery in de chist, baffled all diagnosis, and were invariably incurable; for who can minister to a mind diseased with that most obstinate of ailments, an aversion, to wit, to putting in movement the muscles of one’s own body? There was, so to speak, an Hôpital des Invalides on every farm; and on my grandfather’s the emeriti and emeritæ were in strong force.
And truly it was a pleasant sight, provided you were not a political economist or a philanthropist, to walk among the cabins, on a bright autumn afternoon, and see the good souls sitting, sunning themselves, and hear the serene murmur of their prattle, broken, ever and anon, by some mellow burst of careless laughter.
It was tranquillity such as this, I fancy, that Homer must have observed in the old men of his day. Don’t you remember when there was a truce, and Priam was standing upon the battlements,—what book was it?—but no matter,—and he sent for Helen to come and point out to him the various Greek heroes who stood beneath the walls; and how she had to pass by a knot of ancient men, and how she amazed them by her beauty? The days of toil and sweat and wounds, for them, at least, were past; and they, too, had come to catch, from the turrets, a glimpse of wide-ruling Agamemnon and Ulysses of many wiles; of the brawn of Ajax; and of Diomede, equal to the immortal gods. And there they sat, hobnobbing and a-twittering—so the master says—low and sweet as so many cicadas—let us say katydids—from greenwood tree.
“No wonder,” they chirped, “the Greeks and Trojans” (they were no longer either Greeks or Trojans,—they were aged men, merely) “have ceaselessly contended, for now nearly ten years, about her,—for she is divinely beautiful!”
I think it must have been my childhood’s experiences of plantation life that caused me to be so profoundly touched by this masterly passage; for hardly elsewhere, in this grimly struggling world of ours, could just such scenes have been witnessed. Just think of it, for a moment! Here, throughout Virginia, there were, in those days, on every farm, three or four, or a dozen, or a score of servants, who had rested from their labors at an age when one may say the struggle glows fiercest with the European races. A roof was over their heads, a bright fire crackled on their hearths. Their food, if plain, was abundant. And there was not a possibility that these things should ever fail them. No wonder they used to rival the ἄσβεστος γέλως that burst from the ever-serene gods, when lame Vulcan, with his ungainly hobble, went to and fro among them, officiously passing the nectar.
That sonorous mellowness of unalloyed laughter we shall never hear again. But never mind,—let it pass!
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Yes, let it pass. There was music in that laughter, doubtless, but it cost us too dear. I think we Virginians[[1]] are agreed as to that,—more than agreed,—yet we cannot bring ourselves to look as others do, upon the state of things which rendered it possible. As one man, we rejoice that slavery is dead; but even the victors in the late struggle—the magnanimous among them, at least—will hardly find fault with us if we drop a sentimental tear, as it were, upon its tomb. A reasonable man is glad that an aching tooth is well out of his mouth; but to the autocratic dentist who should pull it out by force, his gratitude would not be boisterous; and then, after all, it leaves a void. But cheer up, brother Virginians, listen to your Bushwhackerish bard while he chaunts you a lay. He would have his say; but he will be good and kind. He would not willingly bore you; and hence, ever thoughtful and considerate, he serves up his rhetoric in a separate course. Skip this chapter, then, if you will. You will find the story continued in the next.
Yes, it is all true enough, I admit. It was but the other day, so to speak, that the first shipload of negroes was landed on the shores of a continent peopled by a race which, after all has been said, remain the most interesting of savages, and who, if not heroes, have easily become heroic under the magicians’ wands of Cooper and of Longfellow. That shipload and its successors have become millions; while the genius of a Barnum scarce suffices to bring together enough Redskins to make a Knickerbocker holiday. The descendant of the naked black, whose tribe, on the Gold Coast, still trembles before a Fetish, rustles, beneath fretted ceilings, in the robes of a bishop; while some chief of the kindred, perhaps, of Tecumseh, shivers on the wind-swept plains, under the fluttering rags of a contract blanket. His half-naked squaw hugs her pappoose to her bosom, and flees before the sabres of our cavalry; but her more deeply-tinted sister struts, beflounced, the spouse of a senator. In one word, the race which the Anglo-Saxons found on this continent remained free, and perished; the people they imported and enslaved, multiplied and flourished. I do not feel myself the Œdipus to solve this riddle of modern morals; but, with my people, I fail to see the consistency of Victor Hugo[[2]] for example, who could whine over the fate of John Brown,—hanged for an attempt to achieve the liberty of the negro through murder,—but who, when Captain Jack stood at the foot of the gallows, made no sign. Captain Jack, he too, through murder, sought to maintain his ancestral right to independence—nay, existence—and a few acres of wretched lava-beds. The distempered fancy of the first saw, as he gazed upon the corpses of the fellow-citizens of Washington, of Jefferson, and of Henry, countless dusky legions rushing to his rescue,—the clear eye of the other showed him forty millions pouring down upon his less than a hundred braves, to avenge the death of Canby; and yet he slew him. John Brown is a hero, his name is a legend, his tomb a shrine; but where are thy wretched bones slung away, poor Jack? Hadst thou been fair, and dwelt in Lacedæmon, in Xerxes’ days, the name of Leonidas shone not now in solitary glory adown the ages; wert thou living now, and of sable hue, thou mightest be sitting at the desk of Calhoun. Alas! alas! that thou shouldst have been of neutral shade; for how couldst thou be a man and a brother, being only copper-colored?