Part 11

The thermometer, for these three days past, has risen over ninety every day. No white man that we know of dares stay in the fields later than ten o'clock: then he retires under shade to take some other and less-exposing work. The fine white sand is blistering hot: one might fancy that an egg would cook, as on Mt. Vesuvius, by simply burying it in the sand. Yet the black laborers whom we leave in the field pursue their toil, if any thing, more actively, more cheerfully, than during the cooler months. The sun awakes all their vigor and all their boundless jollity. When their nooning time comes, they sit down, not in the shade, but in some good hot place in the sand, and eat their lunch, and then stretch out, hot and comfortable, to take their noon siesta with the full glare of the sun upon them. Down in the swamp-land near our house we have watched old Simon as from hour to hour he drove his wheelbarrow, heavy with blocks of muck, up a steep bank, and deposited it. "Why, Simon!" we say: "how _can_ you work so this hot weather?"

The question provokes an explosion of laughter. "Yah, hah, ho, ho, ho, misse! It be hot; dat so: ho, ho, ho!"

"How _can_ you work so? I can't even think how you can do such hard work under such a sun."

"Dat so: ho, ho! Ladies can't; no, dey can't, bless you, ma'am!" And Simon trundles off with his barrow, chuckling in his might; comes up with another load, throws it down, and chuckles again. A little laugh goes a great way with Simon; for a boiling spring of animal content is ever welling up within.

One tremendously hot day, we remember our steamer stopping at Fernandina. Owing to the state of the tide, the wharf was eight or ten feet above the boat; and the plank made a steep inclined plane, down which a mountain of multifarious freight was to be shipped on our boat. A gang of negroes, great, brawny, muscular fellows, seemed to make a perfect frolic of this job, which, under such a sun, would have threatened sunstroke to any white man. How they ran and shouted and jabbered, and sweated their shirts through, as one after another received on their shoulders great bags of cotton-seed, or boxes and bales, and ran down the steep plane with them into the boat! At last a low, squat giant of a fellow, with the limbs and muscles of a great dray-horse, placed himself in front of a large truck, and made his fellows pile it high with cotton-bags; then, holding back with a prodigious force, he took the load steadily down the steep plane till within a little of the bottom, when he dashed suddenly forward, and landed it half across the boat. This feat of gigantic strength he repeated again and again, running up each time apparently as fresh as if nothing had happened, shouting, laughing, drinking quarts of water, and sweating like a river-god. Never was harder work done in a more jolly spirit.

Now, when one sees such sights as these, one may be pardoned for thinking that the negro is the natural laborer of tropical regions. He is immensely strong; he thrives and flourishes physically under a temperature that exposes a white man to disease and death.

The malarial fevers that bear so hard on the white race have far less effect on the negro: it is rare that they have what are called here the "shakes;" and they increase and multiply, and bear healthy children, in situations where the white race deteriorate and grow sickly.

On this point we had an interesting conversation with a captain employed in the Government Coast Survey. The duties of this survey involve much hard labor, exposure to the fiercest extremes of tropical temperature, and sojourning and travelling in swamps and lagoons, often most deadly to the white race. For this reason, he manned his vessel with a crew composed entirely of negroes; and he informed us that the result had been perfectly satisfactory. The negro constitution enabled them to undergo with less suffering and danger the severe exposure and toils of the enterprise; and the gayety and good nature which belonged to the race made their toils seem to sit lighter upon them than upon a given number of white men. He had known them, after a day of heavy exposure, travelling through mud and swamps, and cutting saw-grass, which wounds like a knife, to sit down at evening, and sing songs and play on the banjo, laugh and tell stories, in the very best of spirits. He furthermore valued them for their docility, and perfect subjection to discipline. He announced strict rules, forbidding all drunkenness and profanity; and he never found a difficulty in enforcing these rules: their obedience and submission were perfect. When this gentleman was laid up with an attack of fever in St. Augustine, his room was beset by anxious negro mammies, relations of his men, bringing fruits, flowers, and delicacies of their compounding for "the captain."

Those who understand and know how to treat the negroes seldom have reason to complain of their ingratitude.

But it is said, by Northern men who come down with Northern habits of labor, that the negro is inefficient as a laborer.

It is to be conceded that the influence of climate and constitution, and the past benumbing influences of slavery, do make the habits of Southern laborers very different from the habits of Northern men, accustomed, by the shortness of summer and the length of winter, to set the utmost value on their working-time.

In the South, where growth goes on all the year round, there really is no need of that intense, driving energy and vigilance in the use of time that are needed in the short summers of the North: an equal amount can be done with less labor.

But the Northern man when he first arrives, before he has proved the climate, looks with impatient scorn on what seems to him the slow, shilly-shally style in which both black and white move on. It takes an attack of malarial fever or two to teach him that he cannot labor the day through under a tropical sun as he can in the mountains of New Hampshire. After a shake or two of this kind, he comes to be thankful if he can hire Cudjo or Pompey to plough and hoe in his fields through the blazing hours, even though they do not plough and hoe with all the alacrity of Northern farmers.

It is also well understood, that, in taking negro laborers, we have to take men and women who have been educated under a system the very worst possible for making good, efficient, careful, or honest laborers. Take any set of white men, and put them for two or three generations under the same system of work without wages, forbid them legal marriage and secure family ties, and we will venture to predict that they would come out of the ordeal a much worse set than the Southern laborers are.

We have had in our own personal experience pretty large opportunities of observation. Immediately after the war, two young New-England men hired the Mackintosh Plantation, opposite to Mandarin, on the west bank of the St. John's River. It was, in old times, the model plantation of Florida, employing seven hundred negroes, raising sugar, rice, Sea-Island cotton. There was upon it a whole village of well-built, comfortable negro houses,--as well built and comfortable as those of any of the white small farmers around. There was a planter's house; a schoolhouse, with chambers for the accommodation of a teacher, who was to instruct the planter's children. There were barns, and a cotton-gin and storehouse, a sugar-house, a milk and dairy house, an oven, and a kitchen; each separate buildings. There were some two or three hundred acres of cleared land, fit for the raising of cotton. This whole estate had been hired by these young men on the principle of sharing half the profits with the owner. After they had carried it on one year, some near relatives became partners; and then we were frequent visitors there. About thirty laboring families were employed upon the place. These were from different, more northern States, who had drifted downward after the Emancipation Act to try the new luxury of being free to choose their own situation, and seek their own fortune. Some were from Georgia, some from South and some from North Carolina, and some from New Orleans; in fact, the _débris_ of slavery, washed together in the tide of emancipation. Such as they were, they were a fair specimen of the Southern negro as slavery had made and left him.

The system pursued with them was not either patronizing or sentimental. The object was to put them at once on the ground of free white men and women, and to make their labor profitable to their employers. They were taught the nature of a contract; and their agreements with their employers were all drawn up in writing, and explained to them. The terms were a certain monthly sum of money, rations for the month, rent of cottage, and privileges of milk from the dairy. One of the most efficient and intelligent was appointed to be foreman of the plantation; and he performed the work of old performed by a driver. He divided the hands into gangs; appointed their places in the field; settled any difficulties between them; and, in fact, was an overseer of the detail. Like all uneducated people, the negroes are great conservatives. They clung to the old ways of working,--to the gang, the driver, and the old field arrangements,--even where one would have thought another course easier and wiser.

In the dim gray of the morning, Mose blew his horn; and all turned out and worked their two or three hours without breakfast, and then came back to their cabins to have corn-cake made, and pork fried, and breakfast prepared. We suggested that the New-England manner of an early breakfast would be more to the purpose; but were met by the difficulty, nay, almost impossibility, of making the negroes work in any but the routine to which they had been accustomed. But in this routine they worked honestly, cheerfully, and with a will. They had the fruits of their labors constantly in hand, in the form either of rations or wages; and there appeared to be much sober content therewith.

On inquiry, it was found, that, though living in all respectability in families, the parties were, many of them, not legally married; and an attempt was made to induce them to enter into holy orders. But the men seemed to regard this as the imposing of a yoke beyond what they could bear. Mose said he had one wife in Virginny, and one in Carliny; and how did he know which of 'em he should like best? Mandy, on the female side, objected that she could not be married yet for want of a white lace veil, which she seemed to consider essential to the ceremony. The survey of Mandy in her stuff gown and cow-hide boots, with her man's hat on, following the mule with the plough, brought rather ludicrous emotions in connection with this want of a white veil.

Nevertheless, the legal marriages were few among them. They lived faithfully in their respective family relations; and they did their work, on the whole, effectively and cheerfully. Their only amusement, after working all day, seemed to be getting together, and holding singing and prayer meetings, which they often did to a late hour of the night. We used to sit and hear them, after ten or eleven o'clock, singing and praying and exhorting with the greatest apparent fervor. There were one or two of what are called preachers among them,--men with a natural talent for stringing words together, and with fine voices. As a matter of curiosity, we once sat outside, when one of these meetings was going on, to hear what it was like.

The exhortation seemed to consist in a string of solemn-sounding words and phrases, images borrowed from Scripture, scraps of hymns, and now and then a morsel that seemed like a Roman-Catholic tradition about the Virgin Mary and Jesus. The most prominent image, however, was that of the angel, and the blowing of the last trumpet. At intervals, amid the flying cloud of images and words, came round something about Gabriel and the last trump, somewhat as follows: "And He will say, 'Gabriel, Gabriel, blow your trump: take it cool and easy, cool and easy, Gabriel: dey's all bound for to come.'"

This idea of taking even the blowing of the last trump cool and easy seemed to be so like the general negro style of attending to things, that it struck me as quite refreshing. As to singing, the most doleful words with the most lugubrious melodies seemed to be in favor.

"Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound,"

was a special favorite. With eyes shut, and mouth open, they would pour out a perfect storm of minor-keyed melody on poor old Dr. Watts's hymn, mispronouncing every word, till the old doctor himself could not have told whether they were singing English or Timbuctoo.

Yet all this was done with a fervor and earnest solemnity that seemed to show that _they_ found something in it, whether we could or not: who shall say? A good old mammy we used to know found great refreshment in a hymn, the chorus of which was,--

"Bust the bonds of dust and thunder; Bring salvation from on high."

Undoubtedly the words suggested to her very different ideas from what they did to us; for she obstinately refused to have them exchanged for good English. But when the enlightened, wise, liberal, and refined for generations have found edification and spiritual profit from a service chanted in an unknown tongue, who shall say that the poor negroes of our plantation did not derive real spiritual benefit from their night services? It was at least an aspiration, a reaching and longing for something above animal and physical good, a recognition of God and immortality, and a future beyond this earth, vague and indefinite though it were.

As to the women, they were all of the class born and bred as field-hands. They were many of them as strong as men, could plough and chop and cleave with the best, and were held to be among the best field-laborers; but, in all household affairs, they were as rough and unskilled as might be expected. To mix meal, water, and salt into a hoe-cake, and to fry salt pork or ham or chicken, was the extent of their knowledge of cooking; and as to sewing, it is a fortunate thing that the mild climate requires very slight covering. All of them practised, rudely, cutting, fitting, and making of garments to cover their children; but we could see how hard was their task, after working all day in the field, to come home and get the meals, and then, after that, have the family sewing to do. In our view, woman never was made to do the work which supports the family; and, if she do it, the family suffers more for want of the mother's vitality expended in work than it gains in the wages she receives. Some of the brightest and most intelligent negro men begin to see this, and to remove their wives from field-labor; but on the plantation, as we saw it, the absence of the mother all day from home was the destruction of any home-life or improvement.

Yet, with all this, the poor things, many of them, showed a most affecting eagerness to be taught to read and write. We carried down and distributed a stock of spelling-books among them, which they eagerly accepted, and treasured with a sort of superstitious veneration; and Sundays, and evenings after work, certain of them would appear with them in hand, and earnestly beg to be taught. Alas! we never felt so truly what the loss and wrong is of being deprived of early education as when we saw how hard, how almost hopeless, is the task of acquisition in mature life. When we saw the sweat start upon these black faces, as our pupils puzzled and blundered over the strange cabalistic forms of the letters, we felt a discouraged pity. What a dreadful piece of work the reading of the English language is! Which of us would not be discouraged beginning the alphabet at forty?

After we left, the same scholars were wont to surround one of the remaining ladies. Sometimes the evening would be so hot and oppressive, she would beg to be excused. "O misse, but two of us will fan you all the time!" And "misse" could not but yield to the plea.

One of the most dreaded characters on the place was the dairy-woman and cook Minnah. She had been a field-hand in North Carolina, and worked at cutting down trees, grubbing land, and mauling rails. She was a tall, lank, powerfully-built woman, with a pair of arms like windmill-sails, and a tongue that never hesitated to speak her mind to high or low. Democracy never assumes a more rampant form than in some of these old negresses, who would say their screed to the king on his throne, if they died for it the next minute. Accordingly, Minnah's back was all marked and scored with the tyrant's answers to free speech. Her old master was accustomed to reply to her unpleasant observations by stretching her over a log, staking down her hands and feet, and flaying her alive, as a most convincing style of argument. For all that, Minnah was neither broken nor humbled: she still asserted her rights as a human being to talk to any other human being as seemed to her good and proper; and many an amusing specimen of this she gave us. Minnah had learned to do up gentlemen's shirts passably, to iron and to cook after a certain fashion, to make butter, and do some other household tasks: and so, before the wives of the gentlemen arrived on the place, she had been selected as a sort of general housekeeper and manager in doors; and, as we arrived on the ground first, we found Minnah in full command,--the only female presence in the house.

It was at the close of a day in May, corresponding to our August, that Mrs. F---- and baby and myself, with sundry bales of furniture and household stuff, arrived at the place. We dropped down in a lazy little sail-boat which had lain half the day becalmed, with the blue, hazy shores on either side melting into indefinite distance, and cast anchor far out in the stream; and had to be rowed in a smaller boat to the long wharf that stretched far out into the waters. Thence, in the thickening twilight, we ascended, passed through the belt of forest-trees that overhung the shore, and crossed the wide fields of fine white sand devoted to the raising of cotton. The planter's house was a one-story cottage, far in the distance, rising up under the shelter of a lofty tuft of Spanish oaks.

Never shall we forget the impression of weird and almost ludicrous dreariness which took possession of us as Mrs. F---- and myself sat down in the wide veranda of the one-story cottage to wait for the gentlemen, who had gone down to assist in landing our trunks and furniture. The black laborers were coming up from the field; and, as one and another passed by, they seemed blacker, stranger, and more dismal, than any thing we had ever seen.

The women wore men's hats and boots, and had the gait and stride of men; but now and then an old hooped petticoat, or some cast-off, thin, bedraggled garment that had once been fine, told the tale of sex, and had a wofully funny effect.

As we sat waiting, Minnah loomed up upon us in the twilight veranda like a gaunt Libyan sibyl, walking round and round, surveying us with apparent curiosity, and responding to all our inquiries as to who and what she was by a peculiarly uncanny chuckle. It appeared to amuse her extremely that Mr. F---- had gone off and left the pantry locked up, so that she could not get us any supper; we being faint and almost famished with our day's sail. The sight of a white baby dressed in delicate white robes, with lace and embroidery, also appeared greatly to excite her; and she stalked round and round with a curious simmer of giggle, appearing and disappearing at uncertain intervals, like a black sprite, during the mortal hour and a half that it cost our friends to land the goods from the vessel.

After a while, some supper was got for us in a wide, desolate apartment, fitted up with a small cooking-stove in the corner.

Never shall we forget the experience of endeavoring to improvise a corn-cake the next morning for breakfast.

We went into the room, and found the table standing just as we had left it the night before,--not a dish washed, not a thing done in the way of clearing. On inquiry for Minnah, she was gone out to milking. It appeared that there were sixteen cows to be milked before her return. A little colored girl stood ready to wait on us with ample good nature.

"Lizzie," said we, "have you corn-meal?"

"Oh, yes'm!" and she brought it just as the corn had been ground, with the bran unsifted.

"A sieve, Lizzie."

It was brought.

"A clean pan, Lizzie. Quick!"

"All right," said Lizzie: "let me get a pail of water." The water was to be drawn from a deep well in the yard. That done, Lizzie took a pan, went out the door, produced a small bit of rag, and rinsed the pan, dashing the contents upon the sand.

"Lizzie, haven't you any dish-cloth?"

"No'm."

"No towels?"

"No'm."

"Do you always wash dishes this way?"

"Yes'm."

"Well, then, wash this spoon and these two bake-pans."

Lizzie, good-natured and zealous as the day is long, bent over her pail, and slopped and scrubbed with her bit of rag.

"Now for a pan of sour milk," said we.

It was brought, with saleratus and other condiments; and the cake was made.

But, on examination, the flues of the little cooking-stove were so choked with the resinous soot of the "light-wood" which had been used in it, that it would scarcely draw at all; and the baking did not progress as in our nice Stuart stove in our Northern home. Still the whole experience was so weirdly original, that, considering this was only a picnic excursion, we rather enjoyed it.

When we came to unpack china and crockery and carpets, bureau and bedsteads and dressing-glass, Minnah's excitement knew no bounds. Evidently she considered these articles (cast-off remnants of our Northern home) as the height of splendor.

When our upper chamber was matted, and furnished with white curtains and shades, and bed, chairs, and dressing-glass, Minnah came in to look; and her delight was boundless.

"Dear me! O Lord, O Lord!" she exclaimed, turning round and round. "Dese yer Northern ladies--they hes every thing, and they does every thing!"

More especially was she taken with the pictures we hung on the walls. Before one of these (Raphael's Madonna of the Veil) Minnah knelt down in a kind of ecstatic trance, and thus delivered herself:--

"O good Lord! if there ain't de Good Man when he was a baby! How harmless he lies there! so innocent! And here we be, we wicked sinners, turning our backs on him, and going to the Old Boy. O Lord, O Lord! we ought to be better than we be: we sartin ought."

This invocation came forth with streaming tears in the most natural way in the world; and Minnah seemed, for the time being, perfectly subdued. It is only one of many instances we have seen of the overpowering influence of works of art on the impressible nervous system of the negro.

But it is one thing to have an amusing and picturesque specimen of a human being, as Minnah certainly was, and another to make one useful in the traces of domestic life.

As the first white ladies upon the ground, Mrs. F---- and myself had the task of organizing this barbaric household, and of bringing it into the forms of civilized life. We commenced with the washing.

Before the time of our coming, it had been customary for the gentlemen to give their washing into the hands of Minnah or Judy, to be done at such times and in such form and manner as best suited them.

The manner which _did_ suit them best was to put all the articles to soak indefinitely, in soapsuds, till such time as to them seemed good. On being pressed for some particular article, and roundly scolded by any of the proprietors, they would get up a shirt, a pair of drawers, a collar or two, with abundant promises for the rest when they had time.