A steam ferry-boat sets passengers, once an hour, across the Mississippi, from Natchez-under-the-hill. A pleasant drive for a few miles down the levee, (passing but two plantations on the way—one to a mile of river front is a small allowance here,) brought me to the plantations I had come to visit. They lay beside each other, and belonged to the same man; but each had its separate set of quarters and gang of negroes, and the work on each had always been kept distinct. The levee formed the boundary of their arable land. Outside this were two or three hundred acres, thickly set in Bermuda grass,[[70]] and fringed with a dense growth of young willows. This was covered with water when the Mississippi rose to its highest point, but at all other seasons it furnished pasturage for the mules and other stock of the plantations. A negro on each, enjoying the title and dignity of “stock-minder,” was charged with the duty of “carrying out,” daily, all the stock not in use, and herding it on this open common.
A lane led down between an old gin-house on one hand, and an old stable on the other, to the broad-porched, many-windowed, one-story “mansion.” China and pecan trees surrounded it. On one hand was a garden, several acres in extent, to which the labors of two negroes were steadily devoted; and on the other were the quarters—a double-row of frame, one-story houses, fronting each other, each with two rooms, and a projecting roof, with posts, shutting in an earthen porch floor. Down the middle of the street were two or three brick cisterns; at the foot of it stood the church. Back of each cabin was a little garden, jealously fenced off from all the rest with the roughest of cypress pickets, and carefully fastened with an enormous padlock. “Niggers never trust one another about their gardens or hen-houses,” explained the overseer.
Back of the house and quarters stretched a broad expanse of level land, gently sloping down to the cypress swamp, which, a mile and a half in the rear, shut in the view. Not a stump, tree, or fence broke the smooth monotony of the surface; but half-a-dozen wide, open ditches led straight to the swamp; and were crossed at no less than seven places by back levees, each a little higher than the one beyond it. The lands were entirely above overflow from the Mississippi in their front; but the back-water from the swamp, when swelled by the overflows from crevasses above, almost every year crept up on the land nearest the swamp—coming sometimes before the planting had begun; sometimes not till the first of June. Then began the “fight with the water,” as the planters quaintly called it. An effort was made to “catch it at the back levee.” Failing in this, the negro forces retreated to the next levee, a hundred and fifty yards further up; closed the leading ditches, and went to work trying to raise this levee to a hight sufficient to check the sluggish, scarcely moving, muddy sheet of water that, inch by inch, and day by day, crept nearer to it. The year before they had failed here, and at every levee till they came to the one nearest the river. On the two plantations, out of twelve or fourteen hundred acres of cotton land, they saved less than three hundred. The rest was planted in the ooze, as the waters receded, late in June; the negroes following close behind, men and women knee-deep in the alluvial mud, drilling in the cotton-seed, and covering it by rubbing along the row the flat sides of their hoes. “Ten or twelve barrels of whisky got it done,” the overseer explained. But the crop, like all late ones in this region, was attacked by the worms; the grass got ahead of the plows, and less than a quarter of a bale to the acre was realized on lands that had been made to produce a bale and a half.
Along the inner levee, at which the water had been finally “caught,” led a fine, beaten wagon-road down to the quarters on the other plantation. These differed in no way from those already described, except that they were less regularly arranged. Instead of a “mansion,” there was at the front only a double cabin, which in old times served as the overseer’s house. Now both plantations were managed by the same overseer; and at this lower place were eighty-five field negroes, besides children and old people, without a white man nearer to them than at the house on the upper place, a mile off. “They get along nearly as well as if they were watched,” said the overseer. “We have about as much trouble at the upper place as here.”
By the inner levee were, at points about three-quarters of a mile apart, the ruins of the two steams-gins that had once been the pride of the plantations. The boilers were still in their places; and fragments of the engines and machinery strewed the ground for many yards in each direction. One was lost by the carelessness of an unaccustomed negro engineer; the other had been destroyed by the guerrillas. From this point, for a distance of thirty miles down the river, nearly all the steam-gins were burnt. The guerrillas were determined, they said, that the Yankees, or men that would stay at home and be friendly with the Yankees, shouldn’t make money out of them. A few had been rebuilt; but, in most cases, the planters were relying upon clumsy horse-power arrangements for ginning out the next crop.
We rode out to see the negroes at work. They were back half-way between the river and the swamp. Two gangs made up the working force on each plantation; and each was under its own negro-driver, who rode about on his horse and occasionally gave sharp, abrupt directions.
The plow-gang, containing fifteen plows, each drawn by a pair of scrawny mules, with corn-husk collars, gunny-bag back-bands, and bed-cord plow-lines, was moving across the land, after a fashion which would have broken the heart of a Northern farmer, at the rate of about eighteen acres a day. They had been at work since the middle of January, and would continue plowing, without interruption, till the first of April, by which time they hoped to reach the swamp. The land was plowed in beds; each occupying about five feet. Each plowman started down, what had been the “middle,” between last year’s cotton rows; returning, he threw another furrow up to meet the one he had turned going down. Two more furrows were then thrown on each side, and the bed was completed, ready for planting. On one of the plantations, however, they were only “four-furrowing” the land; i. e., throwing up two furrows on each side, but leaving the middles still unbroken. “If we done gits behine, we’s plant on dem beds, and knock de middles out afterwards;” so the plow-driver answered my question about his object for leaving part of the work undone. Two or three women were plowing, and were said to be among the best hands in the gang.
A quarter of a mile ahead of the plows a picturesque sight presented itself. Fifty women and children, with only a few weakly men among them, were scattered along the old cotton rows, chopping up weeds, gathering together the trash that covered the land, firing little heaps of it, singing an occasional snatch of some camp-meeting hymn, and keeping up an incessant chatter. “Gib me some ’backey please;” was the first salutation as the overseer rode among them. These were the “trash-gang.” After the cotton is planted, they become the hoe-gang, following the plows, thinning out the cotton, and cutting down the grass and weeds which the plows can not reach. Most of them were dressed in a stout blue cottonade; the skirts drawn up till they scarcely reached below the knee, and reefed in a loose bunch about the waist; heavy brogans of incredible sizes on their feet, and gay-checkered handkerchiefs wound about their heads. As evening approached the work moved more slowly, and the sharp remonstrances of the energetic driver grew more frequent and personal. The moment the sun disappeared every hoe was shouldered. Some took up from the levee, where they had been lying through the heat of the day, army blouses or stout men’s overcoats and drew them on;[[71]] others gathered fragments of bark or dry lightwood to kindle their evening fires and balanced them nicely on their heads. In a moment the whole noisy row was filing across the field toward the quarters, joining the plow-gang, pleading for rides on the mules, and looking as much like a caravan crossing the desert as a party of weary farm-laborers.