Southern silhouettes

Front matter

SKETCHES OF NORTHERN VILLAGE LIFE AND CHARACTER.

VILLAGE PHOTOGRAPHS.

By AUGUSTA LARNED.

Contents

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. The Colonel, ...... i

II. Unreconstructed, .... 15

Chapter I. The Colonel

HE was a sort of potentate in his way before the war. He has been a sort of Oracle in his way since. Not that either eminence was of his own seeking, nor that he ever shows any offensive consciousness of his own exaltation above neighboring and younger planters. His position has been the gradual outcome of circumstances, and he accepts it as he does his gray hairs and his rheumatic leg, simply as something that the years have brought him unsolicited. His grandfather " opened up " the first plantation in the county, the very same that he still cultivates, and the family name is perpetuated in Sims's Bayou, Sims's Landing, Sims's Lake, and Sims's Ferry. It is a comfortable reflection to the Colonel that the name will not be buried with him when they lay him away in one of the brick-oven affairs that have from time to time been erected in that corner of the flower-garden known as the family burying-ground, where several generations of Simses sleep peacefully under the jessamine and japonica bushes. He has never quite gotten used to regarding himself as the last of the Simses, for there had been Fred and Albert, who, in the course of nature, should have taken his place at the helm when death relieved him from duty; but one of his boys fell at Manassas and the other at Shiloh, and the Colonel has not even the satisfaction of knowing that they are lying out there in the garden under the star jessamines, waiting for him. Not that he wastes much time in fruitless retrospection. He is too wellbalanced for that, and was never gne of those unwise mortals who petulantly refuse to accept the compensations time invariably offers us as a salve for our many sores and bruises.

The Colonel came straight to the plantation from the classic atmosphere of Harvard. He was graduated there with high honors in the class of '35. During the time of his college life, if any soaring ambitions or lofty intentions intruded themselves into the plan of his future, he wisely laid them all aside with his Greek and Latin grammars when he settled into the groove to which he had been predestined from birth. If it ever occurred to him that a classic collegiate course was incongruous with the practical duties awaiting him, no one was made the recipient of the reflection, and he ran his course as industriously as if a professorship was the ultimate destiny awaiting him. The practical duties that faced him, when he passed from heirship into actual possession of the " old Sims place " were responsible but not onerous, and, looking back, he believed he could fairly claim to have performed them to the best of his ability. He had always made humanity and a sense of justice prime essentials in his selection of an overseer, and, paying liberal salaries, secured the very best. Having installed an efficient prime minister at the head of affairs, his sense of personal responsibility was reduced to a minimum. If the Colonel had been light-minded, he might have given his young manhood up to those allurements that appeal so strongly to the rich and leisurely class. But he never had been light-minded, and quietly shelving his literary and classic proclivities, he applied himself industriously to the task of making his plantation the " brag place " of the county.

He promptly recognized two absolute needs in the* furtherance of this object — a good wife and a better gin-house. A bachelor establishment on the plantation would just fall short of the disreputable, and the old horse-power gin of his father's reign must give place to a steam gin. The selection of a wife and the building of a new gin were occupations enough for any one year in an average man's life. The Colonel accomplished both to his own entire satisfaction and the envy of his neighbors. It was a matter of pride with him that the smoke-stack of his gin should be at least two feet higher than any other gin stack in the county. He revised, and supervised, and pondered the architectural plans for the structure with absorbing interest, taking care to locate it so that whether he was lolling in the big Spanish-leather chair that formed part of the front gallery furniture year in and year out, or swinging in the Mexican hammock out under the mulberry tree, or industriously overseeing the reconstruction of his asparagus bed, it should always be visible ; and when the

Stately, sky-piercing shaft stood complete, the Colonel felt that another monument had been reared to the name of Sims, and complacently regarded it as an exponent of his own good taste and progressive views. Not that he was Colonel Sims in those days. He was plain Benny Sims when he married his wife and built his gin. His title was simply another one of those accretions that came with the years and had no especial reference to deeds of valor performed by him at any juncture of his existence. It fitted him well, though, and he became it admirably, for the Colonel was tall and erect and his bearing was marked with a certain rigid punctilio that might well have been acquired in a military camp. No one ever heard the Colonel enter any demurrer against being brevetted Colonel beyond a mild '' Pish ! " or two, which were nullified by his prompt acceptance of the honor.

As the years go on the Colonel exhibits increasing inclination to draw sharp contrasts between the new and the old order of things, and in his capacity of general adviser to the younger planters about him never fails to make honorable mention of his own life-long habit of doing every thing systematically.

" You may think, boys " (the Colonel is spokesman), " that life was all a frolic on the plantation before the war, because we owned the hands and could work 'em to please ourselves. There's where you're out. There used to be lines of work on the place that you don't know any thing about, and hard lines at that. In those days you'd begin working in January, with no prospect of a let-up until Christmas came to give you a breathing-spell." Then, not without pardonable gusto, the Colonel would indulge in a little game of comparison with his auditors, in which the past of his own active days always came out winner. " January meant hard work on the plantation in those days. It meant log-rolling and brush-burning and fence-mending and rail-splitting and roadpatching. When a dead tree fell down in a field in those days, niggers didn't plow 'round it year after year until it had time to rot out of sight. No, sirs, log-rolling meant piling up every stump and fallen log and dead limb and making bonfires of *em. And last year's cotton stalks and corn-stubble weren't knocked down and plowed under, in the slap-dash fashion of to-day — no, sirs ; they were raked up, and piled up, and set fire to, and a thousand-acre field, with a blazing bonfire about every ten feet or so, and young darkies feeding the fires like so many sprightly little devils imported for the occasion, wasn't a bad sight of a dark night. It was fun all round. And December ! What does December mean to you boys ? It means a lot of sulky freedmen sitting around in their cabins cussing you and the store-keepers and the commission merchants for their penniless condition, while they keep their heels warm with your fence-rails. It used to mean hog-killing time, and by the time eighty or a hundred fat hogs were hanging up in my smoke-house frozen stiff, the whole quarter lot was reveling in crackling bread, and backbones, and chitlings."

The Colonel never fails to bring his audience back to the present, with the pathetic admission that, *' what was to be was to be, and he supposes it is all for the best." His ambitions since the war are few and meager. Before the war they were many and laudable, never soaring into the realms of the unattainable. It was a point of honor with him that his " team " should go through the entire hauling season without breaking down. This is no idle boast with the planter. Mammoth cotton bales, weighing each 500 or 600 pounds, are to be hauled, piled toppling high on strong wagon bodies, to the shipping point, miles away, over roads that become almost impassable during the winter season ; and the eight mules that are selected for this responsible undertaking are pampered and coddled months beforehand. The Colonel will recall for you now the name and pedigree of each one of the nobie beasts of burden which bore this test without flinching, in the days when his crop numbered its thousands of bales. " There are no such teams left in the county now," he will tell you, with another one of his patient sighs, ** because the teamsters and trainers belong to another school." One corner of the Colonel's hall is quite encumbered with guns of all sizes and descriptions. And across the rafters, under the roof of the back gallery, is an accumulation of fishing-rods that date back to the first ones '* Fred " and " Al " ever tried to cope with. Before the war the Colonel asked no better sport than to hunt within the boundaries of his own estate.

Then, as soon as the crop was picked out and the fields could not be injured, it was his delight to have a lot of good fellows out from town for partridge, snipe, and duck-shooting. The partridges nested all over his fields, then, and every man came with his own trained setter or pointer. A fair field and no favor. The man who shot a partridge before it was flushed was relegated to the dishonorable ranks of ** pothunters " — " on the wing " or not at all. The Colonel had been very proud of his swampy bit of snipe-ground — the best in the whole State — and the guest who would tackle his duck pond and come back to the house without at least ten brace, was scarcely considered worth inviting another season. His room had better be given to a better man. But time has changed all that, and since the Colonel has had to contend for his own game with a multitude of boors who boast the possession of cheap guns and yellow curs, he has ceased inviting " good fellows " out from town to show their prowess on his snipe-ground and duck-pond, and his pleasures in that line are purely reminiscent.

It is pleasant to hear the Colonel talk of old times with the loquacity of increasing years. His reminiscences are impersonal and entertaining, and embrace the social, commercial, and political status of the county from the time when he first took charge of his plantation. His most violent dissipation then, as now, was his annual trip to New Orleans, made, generally, promptly on the heels of his first shipment of cotton to his commission merchants. It was a good time to visit one's merchant if the crop was turning out unexpectedly well, for a little bragging would be safe under the circumstances, and would have a mellowing effect on the merchant. It was an equally good time to visit him if the crop threatened failure, for what ** advances " were to be extracted from him must be secured before the shortage became apparent. If the merchant proves propitious, the Colonel is apt to wax a little reckless in expenditure. He will go to *' the city " with a long list of necessaries, prepared in solemn family conclave, ranging widely from a new riding horse for self and a Jersey cow for wife, down to a red plaid shawl for " Mammy's " Christmas gift. Mammy's name is never omitted from the list made out in family conclave. The children are all grown up, and the boys have all *' passed over," but Mammy still holds sinecure office at the big house. The Colonel always enjoys his three or four days' stay in New Orleans with zest born of long abstinence. His mornings will be consumed in shopping and making arrangements for next year with his commission merchant, these arrangements, as a rule, consisting of promises on his part predicated on the uncertain issue of a crop unplanted, and on the merchant's side of reluctant concessions to palpable necessities. His afternoons will be spent at the race-course, for the Colonel, like all of his class, is a lover of horseflesh and interested in turf matters. His evenings he will devote to doing the theaters industriously. He will go back to the plantation as fresh as a boy after a holiday, carrying with him sundry boxes and barrels containing the materialized family list with supplement of his own compiling, together with food for' animated converse for weeks, touching what he saw, said, and did while in the city. Events do not crowd so thickly into the Colonel's life as to dwarf this annual pilgrimage into a thing of no moment, and every detail of it is deemed worthy of being retailed circumstantially to the small but select audience that composes his home circle.

Not that he has no sources of entertainment more solid than this imported gossip. All his life he has been a rapid and omnivorous reader. He gets the '' weeklies " from all the large cities, and you will always find on the book-table which stands in the great hall that divides his home into hemispheres, the Philadelphia Times, The Nation, the New Orleans Times^ all of as late date as is possible in his locality, together with the leading magazines of the world. He does not skim them ; he reads them, and is better informed on the tariff and the Eastern question than many of the Congressmen who air their ignorance at the Capitol. The labors of his day close absolutely with the ringing of the six o'clock bell that calls in the field hands, and as public entertainments are not included in his plan of existence, his lamp-lit hours find him obliterating all the cares of the day in silent communion with some magnate of the kingdom of letters.

In one corner of the big central hall you will find a high, old-fashioned book-case and writing-desk combined. In the lower part of it the Colonel stows his "accounts of sales " and his few business letters. He keeps no books ; wouldn't be bothered with them. In the shelves above are the volumes, bound in sober colors, that keep the Colonel's mind fresh and alert in the best sense of the word, even if they do not sharpen his wits for contact with sharpers.

lo THE COLONEL.

There are certain plantation observances which the Colonel still holds by, although the significance of them has departed forever. One of these observances is the bringing around of his horse Billy, saddled, every morning at precisely the same hour, and the hitching of him to the horse-rack under the Cottonwood tree, just outside the front gate. This performance has been gone through with every morning (unless the Colonel was in the city) since he came into possession of the place. Billy, like the Colonel himself, is gray and old, but the two Imderstand each other very thoroughly, and as neither of them is as fiery as he used to be, they get along together admirably. Billy has an equine sense of the ludicrousness of the Colonel's thinking this regular morning round can possibly affect the status of the crops being worked by freedmen, but it is a groove he and the Colonel have fallen into, and he's not going to be the one to shirk ; so he stolidly nibbles the top rail of the horse-rack until he sees the Colonel come out of the front door with his slouch hat worn a trifle far back on his gray locks, with his trowsers tucked jauntily into his top-boots, and with his cowhide whip stuck under his arm while he draws on his buckskin gauntlets. The Colonel will have to be more thoroughly reconstructed than he is yet, before he can bring himself to ride around the place bare-handed. The entire white family will stand on the front gallery to watch his departure, quite as if he were going on a long journey rather than doing what he has done every morning from time immemorial, and he would feel as if a

THE COLONEL. Ii

serious slight were being put upon him if he should glance back from Billy's back and see only the weather-beaten front of the house, which, like Billy and himself, is also gray and old. It is a work of supererogation for him to hold the reins over Billy's neck, for the programme of their route is such an ancient and well-established one that any departure from it would astonish the Colonel himself scarcely less than Billy. They will go first through the quarter lot, where the cabins stand in two long rows, and where with the keen inspection of a landlord the Colonel will take in every new sign of decadence about the premises, with a hopeless sigh over his own inability either to stay or to cover up the ravages of time. He will dispense a few words of mild admonition to an irresponsible and thriftless tenantry before riding on, which will serve no other end than transient relief to the Colonel's righteous wrath. They, he and Billy, will pass systematically from squad to squad, watching the operations of plowing, planting, or picking, as the case may be, from which occupation the Colonel will turn away presently with a growing sense of his own insignificance. Time was when the, pleasantest part of the morning's programme was the riding across his own boundary line, marked by the Willow Slough, into " Levison's field" on one side, or *' Old Billy Scott's " on the other, to compare his own crops with those of his nearest neighbors, not in unkindly competition, but with a community of interest.

But Levison moved to the city after the war, and there's nobody on his place but a lot of darkies, and Scott, poor old fellow, is dead, and things have changed so on both places that the Colonel seldom cares to ride beyond the boundaries of his own place nowadays, unless it is mail-day, and then he and Billy will turn off through the chain-gate and ride a mile or two through the woods, where the low-hanging Spanish moss, as gray as his beard, smites him softly on the cheek, and the birds sing carelessly overhead in the trees, just as if this were a world where sorrow and change were quite unknown. If the mail-packet has arrived at the landing before him, the Colonel will gather his share and ride promptly back through the sweet-smelling woods, but if it has not, he will hitch old Billy alongside a waiting dozen or so of other horses, and seat himself composedly on one of the whittled wooden benches that support Sheldon's store gallery, and do what the other fellows are doing — wait and gossip. The pleasure has gone out of the waiting and the spice has gone out of the gossip of mail-day for the Colonel. His set has pretty much passed away, and the boys that have taken their places seem crude and pert to the Colonel. But to the boy planters he is an object of profoundest esteem and consideration. He knows so much, you know, and has such an affable way of imparting his information. A trifle grandiloquent, perhaps, but then the Colonel belongs to the old school. He is always in demand for the settlement of arguments, and in the matter of precedents he stands unrivaled.

What was once the Colonel's reproach is now his boast. He was not an original secessionist ; but when the thing was forced upon him he shouldered his share of the pain and responsibility like the hero that he

TitE COLONEL. 13

Was. Not even when Fred's and Al's names stared at him from the ghastly Hst of the killed, that reached him in a ragged newspaper printed on wall-paper, did he flinch. He had leaned toward gradual emancipation, but witnessed the flight of his entire body of slaves with grim - visaged composure. He lived through the war with stolid endurance, coming to regard coffee and flour as among the superfluous luxuries demanded by an effete civilization, and emerged from the horrors of the carpet-bag era with the dignity of a Roman senator. In politics, it is needless to say that the Colonel is a Democrat, but he is so inured to defeat that his party's repeated discomfiture does not stir his pulse into higher activity.

The Colonel feels assured of a few things only in these latter days. Among them is the conviction that his own day is past. He looks backward without shame and forward without trepidation. He spends more time in the Spanish-leather chair on the front gallery than he used to do, and he always faces it toward the gin-stack. The gin-stack is one of the few things that have not changed. He looks forward with composure to the time when another brick vault will be needed in the flower-garden, and has had a certain corner recently cleared of encroaching brambles.

He likes to advise yet, and expends his most earnest efforts in that line on a young man who has bought the plantation just on the other side of Scott's. He would like this young man to perpetuate the Sims views and the Sims traditions in the county, and likes to think that since no son of his own loins will inherit

14 TiiE coLoMeL

them, Mamie has selected so sensible a son-in-law for him. It will not be, after all, total annihilation for the Colonel's memory when he shall have joined the great caravan, and fear of that has been his chief cause of sorrow since Fred and Al left him. Pride of place will abide with the Colonel as long as he lingers above ground, and when they lay him under the starjessamines, another type will have perished from off the earth.

Chapter II. Unreconstructed

" T TNRECONSTRUCTED " is what all the nelgh- U bors call her, but that terrible word is generally accompanied by pitying smiles that carry with them full and free condonation for all of pride, stubbornness, unreasonableness, and ill-blood that can possibly be conveyed in its five syllables. Looking at her from an archaeologist's point of view, one feels quite content that no reconstruction is ever likely to take place, she is such a rare specimen of the highbred, high-principled, fastidious lady of the old school, the exclusive product of her own times. Even physically, she has the value of an old-time painting, whose lights and shadows have been laid on by a cunning hand, whose every soft curve, fold of drapery, pose, fashion of -bodice, quaint coiffure, all have historic interest to the student of an era already become a thing of memories and traditions. By the aid of such finished specimens of Time's handicraft as the Widow Somers, and the study of her life experience, one is able to reconstruct for himself the social and political period to which she belongs. Locally she is regarded with that sort of pride usually inspired by any tradition or landmark that carries with it a guarantee of respectability, and is cherished with the fostering care one bestows on a rare old antique, which it would be impossible to replace. Indeed, with the delicate pink of her soft withered cheeks, where the fine grain cf the skin is still traceable, with the clean-cut lines of her nose, ears, and lips ; with the blue-veined tracery of temple and hand, and the sculpturesque folds of her black dress, she is very apt to make one recall a fine old cameo in some art collection. She is one of the few things in her neighborhood that have not undergone radical and pathetic changes since the war, and the muddy current of to-day's events sweeps by her door as unnoticed and uncared-for as if the great old rambling house, that can be seen only by glimpses from the public road through occasional lapses of foliage in the sheltering trees, were an enchanted palace, holding her, its sleeping princess, locked in oblivion.

Women are not good at ethical abstractions. Things are either good or bad, as they appeal to their own personality agreeably or otherwise, or as they affect the welfare of dearer objects than self. Neither the social nor political ethics of slavery had ever occupied the Widow Somers's mind for half a second. It was as much a matter-of-course that there should be slaves and slave-owners, she took it, as that there should be black men and white men, and as she had herself come of a long line of slave-owners (to doubt whose goodness and wisdom being a species of treachery she was utterly incapable of), she frowned down any ante-bellum discussion of this question as an unpardonable impertinence. The slaves, who loved her loyally and served her faithfully, were hers to have and to hold until death did them part, and whosoever

U^RMcdNStRUC7'Ei>. i1

should undertake to usurp death's prerogative in this matter was an object of her most withering condemnation. It was Hke usurping the prerogative of Omnipotence, you see. She and " her people" had belonged to each other in mutual dependency forever and forever, it seemed to her, and she could conceive of no possibility of comfort for either side under a different state of affairs. There was Mammy (who still lives, a superannuated cumberer of the earth, sure of her physical comfort so long as " old Miss is 'bove ground"). Why, Mammy had been present at the birth of every one of her children, and together they had mingled their tears over more than one small mound, yonder under the clump of tall dark cedars in the corner of the orchard. Mammy had lived in the best cabin in the quarters for nearly all her life, and had been served with her meals from the family table ; what would become of her, turned loose in her helpless old age, to worry and skirmish over every mouthful of food she ate, and every stick of wood she burned ? No such horrible fate should ever befall Mammy so long as she could fend it off. And there was Puss, who had been about her ever since she could crawl up the front steps on all fours direct from the kitchen, where her mother was making things " hot" for something besides her culinary utensils, to take shelter behind '' Miss's" skirts, fleeing from the wrath she was too young to comprehend — Puss, so handy and so hideous, whose cavernous mouth expanded so gratefully when her mistress praised her clear-starching, or her floor-scrubbing, or her increased conscientiousness in the matter of cobwebs and dauber-nests.

Of course it would be possible for Puss to make a livelihood as a free woman out of the many accomplishments she had herself taught her, but who else (certainly no Northern woman) would consent to have such a physical monstrosity near her on terms of such close intimacy ? For Puss, intensely black, squat of form, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, was to be found of winter evenings crouching close in the chimney-corner of her mistress's sitting-room, gazing into the fire with wide-open eyes, as she dumbly absorbed "w'ite folks' talk." Would she, Mrs. Somers, be the only loser if those intermeddling abolitionists should ever succeed in carrying their wildly chimerical plans into execution ? And John, her dining-room servant, whom she had trained to such a degree of perfection that her slightest nod conveyed a whole volume of directions. And Adelaide, her seamstress, who was such an adept in fitting and fashioning. Weren't they all just as happy as they could possibly be ? What expense or responsibility rested on them ? And when John and Adelaide had concluded to get married, didn't she dress Adelaide herself in her own white silk grenadine that she hadn't worn a dozen times, and put the veil and wreath on with her own hands, and have the wedding supper set down stairs in the basement, and ice the wedding cake herself, and have the Rev. Dr. Robinson out from town to see that the knot was tied decently and in order ? Was any one going to take all that trouble for people who did not belong to them, and would not be with them for always ? And there were the medicines and the flannels and the " Christmas gifts." Plainly, in Mrs.

Somers's estimation, all that was necessary to convert the most blatant freedom-shrieker to a firm belief in the beneficence of the Institution was that its workings should be fully understood and fairly investigated.

It is possible to keep the gaze fixed. so firmly on one spot that every thing around and about that central object shall become blurred and obscured. Mrs. Somers had gazed upon the Institution from a proslavery point of view so long and so fixedly that the moral atmosphere which surrounded it was dense with confused and confusing mists. But she spent no thought on the mists nor on the menacing cloud into which they slowly but surely resolved themselves. Why should she ? It would be as if one purposely marred the pleasure of smooth and rapid transit over an unobstructed railroad by horrible forebodings of possible smash-ups before the journey's end. The smash-up might come through somebody's blunder, but it was scarcely likely to come in her time, and there was a great deal to be enjoyed meanwhile on her exceedingly smooth-running line.