Chapter 13

It looked like some blasted region lying under an enchanter's ban, such as one reads of in old stories. Nothing lived or moved throughout the loathsome solitude, and the sunbeams themselves seemed to sicken and grow pale as they glided like ghosts through these watery woods. Into this wilderness it seems impossible that the hand of human industry, or the foot of human wayfaring should ever penetrate; no wholesome growth can take root in its slimy depths; a wild jungle chokes up parts of it with a reedy, rattling covert for venomous reptiles; the rest is a succession of black ponds, sweltering under black cypress boughs,--a place forbid.

The wood which is cut upon its borders is obliged to be felled in winter, for the summer, which clothes other regions with flowers, makes this pestilential waste alive with rattlesnakes, so that none dare venture within its bounds, and I should even apprehend that, traveling as rapidly as one does on the railroad, and only skirting this district of dismay, one might not escape the fetid breathings it sends forth when the warm season has quickened its stagnant waters and poisonous vegetation.

After passing this place, we entered upon a country little more cheerful in its aspect, though the absence of the dark swamp water was something in its favor,--apparently endless tracts of pine-forest, well called by the natives, Pine-Barrens. The soil is pure sand; and, though the holly, with its coral berries, and the wild myrtle grow in considerable abundance, mingled with the pines, these preponderate, and the whole land presents one wearisome extent of arid soil and gloomy vegetation. Not a single decent dwelling did we pass: here and there, at rare intervals, a few miserable negro huts squatting round a mean framed building, with brick chimneys built on the outside, the residence of the owner of the land and his squalid serfs, were the only evidences of human existence in this forlorn country.

Towards four o'clock, as we approached the Roanoke, the appearance of the land improved; there was a good deal of fine soil well farmed, and the river, where we crossed it, although in all the naked unadornment of wintry banks, looked very picturesque and refreshing as it gushed along, broken by rocks and small islands into rapid reaches and currents. Immediately after crossing it, we stopped at a small knot of houses, which, although christened Weldon, and therefore pretending to be a place, was rather the place where a place was intended to be. Two or three rough-pine warerooms, or station-houses, belonging to the railroad; a few miserable dwellings, which might be either not half built up, or not quite fallen down, on the banks of a large mill-pond; one exceedingly dirty-looking old wooden house, whither we directed our steps as to the inn; but we did not take our ease in it, though we tried as much as we could.

However, one thing I will say for North Carolina--it has the best material for fire, and the noblest liberality in the use of it, of any place in the world. Such a spectacle as one of those rousing pine-wood chimneyfuls is not to be described, nor the revivification it engenders even in the absence of every other comfort or necessary of life. They are enough to make one turn Gheber,--such noble piles of fire and flame, such hearty, brilliant life--full altars of light and warmth. These greeted us upon our entrance into this miserable inn, and seemed to rest and feed, as well as warm us. We (the women) were shown up a filthy flight of wooden stairs into a dilapidated room, the plastered walls of which were all smeared and discolored, the windows begrimed and darkened with dirt. Upon the three beds, which nearly filled up this wretched apartment, lay tattered articles of male and female apparel; and here we drew round the pine-wood fire, which blazed up the chimney, sending a ruddy glow of comfort and cheerfulness even through this disgusting den. We were to wait here for the arrival of the cars from a branch railroad, to continue our route; and in the mean time a so-called dinner was provided for us, to which we were presently summoned. Of the horrible dirt of everything at this meal, from the eatables themselves to the table-cloth, and the clothes of the negroes who waited upon us, it would be impossible to give any idea. The poultry, which formed here, as it does all through the South, the chief animal part of the repast (except the consumers, always understood), were so tough that I should think they must have been alive when we came into the house, and certainly died very hard. They were swimming in black grease, and stuffed with some black ingredient that was doubt and dismay to us uninitiated; but, however, knowledge would probably have been more terrible in this case than ignorance. We had no bread but lumps of hot dough, which reminded me forcibly of certain juvenile creations of my brothers, yclept dumps. I should think they would have eaten very much alike.

I was amused to observe that while our tea was poured out, and handed to us by a black girl of most disgustingly dirty appearance, no sooner did the engine drivers, and persons connected with the railroads and coaches, sit down to their meal, than the landlady herself, a portly dame, with a most dignified carriage, took the head of the table, and did the honors with all the grace of a most accomplished hostess. Our male fellow-travelers no sooner had dispatched their dinner than they withdrew in a body to the other end of the apartment, and large rattling folding-doors being drawn across the room, the separation of men and women, so rigidly observed by all traveling Americans, took place. This is a most peculiar and amusing custom, though sometimes I have been not a little inclined to quarrel with it, inasmuch as it effectually deprives one of the assistance of the men under whose protection one is traveling, as well as all the advantages or pleasure of their society. Twice during this southward trip of ours my companion has been most peremptorily ordered to withdraw from the apartment where he was conversing with me, by colored cabin-girls, who told him it was against the rules for any gentleman to come into the ladies' room. This making rules by which ladies and gentlemen are to observe the principles of decorum and good-breeding may be very necessary, for aught I can tell, but it seems rather sarcastical, I think, to have them enforced by servant-girls.

The gentlemen, on their side, are intrenched in a similar manner; and if a woman has occasion to speak to the person with whom she is traveling, her entrance into the male den, if she has the courage to venture there, is the signal for a universal stare and whisper. But, for the most part, the convenient result of this arrangement is, that such men as have female companions with them pass their time in prowling about the precincts of the "ladies' apartment"; while their respective ladies pop their heads first out of one door and then out of another, watching in decorous discomfort the time when "their man" shall come to pass. Our sole resource on the present occasion was to retire again to the horrible hole above stairs, where we had at first taken refuge and here we remained until summoned down again by the arrival of the expected train. My poor little children, overcome with fatigue and sleep, were carried, and we walked from the _hotel_ at Weldon to the railroad, and by good fortune obtained a compartment to ourselves.

It was now between eight and nine o'clock, and perfectly dark. The carriages were furnished with lamps, however, and, by the rapid glance they cast upon the objects which we passed, I endeavored in vain to guess at the nature of the country through which we were traveling; but, except the tall shafts of the everlasting pine trees, which still pursued us, I could descry nothing, and resigned myself to the amusing contemplation of the attitudes of my companions, who were all fast asleep. Between twelve and one o'clock the engine stopped, and it was announced to us that we had traveled as far upon the railroad as it was yet completed, and that we must transfer ourselves to stage-coaches; so in the dead middle of the night we crept out of the train, and taking our children in our arms, walked a few yards into an open space in the woods, where three four-horse coaches stood waiting to receive us. A crowd of men, principally negroes, were collected here round a huge fire of pine-wood, which, together with the pine-torches, whose resinous glare streamed brilliantly into the darkness of the woods, created a ruddy blaze, by the light of which we reached our vehicles in safety, and, while they were adjusting the luggage, had leisure to admire our jetty torch-bearers, who lounged round in a state of tattered undress, highly picturesque,--the staring whites of their eyes, and glittering ranges of dazzling teeth exhibited to perfection by the expression of grinning amusement in their countenances, shining in the darkness almost as brightly as the lights which they reflected. We had especially requested that we might have a coach to ourselves, and had been assured that there would be one for the use of our party. It appeared, however, that the outside seat of this had been appropriated by some one, for our coachman, who was traveling with us, was obliged to take a seat inside with us; and though it then contained five grown persons and two children, it seems that the coach was by no means considered full. The horrors of that night's journey I shall not easily forget. The road lay almost the whole way through swamps, and was frequently itself under water. It was made of logs of wood (a corduroy road), and so dreadfully rough and unequal, that the drawing a coach over it at all seemed perfectly miraculous. I expected every moment that we must be overturned into the marsh, through which we splashed, with hardly any intermission, the whole night long. Their drivers in this part of the country deserve infinite praise both for skill and care; but the road-makers, I think, are beyond all praise for their noble confidence in what skill and care can accomplish.

You will readily imagine how thankfully I saw the first whitening of daylight in the sky. I do not know that any morning was ever more welcome to me than that which found us still surrounded by the pine-swamps of North Carolina, which, brightened by the morning sun, and breathed through by the morning air, lost something of their dreary desolateness to my senses....

Not long after daybreak we arrived at a place called Stantonsborough. I do not know whether that is the name of the district, or what; for I saw no village,--nothing but the one lonely house in the wood at which we stopped. I should have mentioned that the unfortunate individual who took our coachman's place outside, towards daybreak became so perished with cold, that an exchange was effected between them, and thus the privacy (if such it could be called) of our carriage was invaded, in spite of the promise which we had received to the contrary. As I am nursing my own baby, and have been compelled to travel all day and all night, of course this was a circumstance of no small annoyance; but as our company was again increased some time after, and subsequently I had to travel in a railroad carriage that held upwards of twenty people, I had to resign myself to this, among the other miseries of this most miserable journey.

As we alighted from our coach, we encountered the comical spectacle of the two coach-loads of gentlemen who had traveled the same route as ourselves, with wrist-bands and coat-cuffs turned back, performing their morning ablutions all together at a long wooden dresser in the open air, though the morning was piercing cold. Their toilet accommodations were quite of the most primitive order imaginable, as indeed were ours. We (the women) were all shown into one small room, the whole furniture of which consisted of a chair and wooden bench: upon the latter stood one basin, one ewer, and a relic of soap, apparently of great antiquity. Before, however, we could avail ourselves of these ample means of cleanliness, we were summoned down to breakfast; but as we had traveled all night, and all the previous day, and were to travel all the ensuing day and night, I preferred washing to eating, and determined, if I could not do both, at least to accomplish the first. There was neither towel, nor glass for one's teeth, nor hostess or chambermaid to appeal to. I ran through all the rooms on the floor, of which the doors were open; but though in one I found a magnificent veneered chest of drawers, and large looking-glass, neither of the above articles were discoverable. Again the savage passion for ornament occurred to me as I looked at this piece of furniture, which might have adorned the most luxurious bedroom of the wealthiest citizen in New York--here in this wilderness, in a house which seemed but just cut out of the trees, where a tin pan was brought to me for a basin, and where the only kitchen, of which the window of our room, to our sorrow, commanded an uninterrupted prospect, was an open shed, not fit to stable a well-kept horse in. As I found nothing that I could take possession of in the shape of towel or tumbler, I was obliged to wait on the stairs, and catch one of the dirty black girls who were running to and fro serving the breakfast-room. Upon asking one of these nymphs for a towel, she held up to me a horrible cloth, which, but for the evidence to the contrary which its filthy surface presented, I should have supposed had been used to clean the floors. Upon my objecting to this, she flounced away, disgusted, I presume, with my fastidiousness, and appeared no more. As I leaned over the bannisters in a state of considerable despondency, I espied a man who appeared to be the host himself and to him I ventured to prefer my humble petition for a clean towel. He immediately snatched from the dresser, where the gentlemen had been washing themselves, a wet and dirty towel, which lay by one of the basins, and offered it to me. Upon my suggesting that that was not a _clean_ towel, he looked at me from head to foot with ineffable amazement, but at length desired one of the negroes to fetch me the unusual luxury.

Of the breakfast at this place no words can give any idea. There were plates full of unutterable-looking things, which made one feel as if one should never swallow food again. There were some eggs, all begrimed with smoke, and powdered with cinders; some unbaked dough, cut into little lumps, by way of bread; and a white, hard substance, calling itself butter, which had an infinitely nearer resemblance to tallow. The mixture presented to us by way of tea was absolutely undrinkable; and when I begged for a glass of milk, they brought a tumbler covered with dust and dirt, full of such sour stuff that I was obliged to put it aside, after endeavoring to taste it. Thus _refreshed_, we set forth again through the eternal pine-lands, on and on, the tall stems rising all round us for miles and miles in dreary monotony, like a spell-land of dismal enchantment, to which there seemed no end....

North Carolina is, I believe, the poorest State in the Union: the part of it through which we traveled should seem to indicate as much. From Suffolk to Wilmington we did not pass a single town,--scarcely anything deserving the name of a village. The few detached houses on the road were mean and beggarly in their appearance; and the people whom we saw when the coach stopped had a squalid, and at the same time fierce air, which at once bore witness to the unfortunate influences of their existence. Not the least of these is the circumstance that their subsistence is derived in great measure from the spontaneous produce of the land, which, yielding without cultivation the timber and turpentine, by the sale of which they are mainly supported, denies to them all the blessings which flow from labor. How is it that the fable ever originated of God's having cursed man with the doom of toil? How is it that men have ever been blind to the exceeding profitableness of labor, even for its own sake, whose moral harvest alone--industry, economy, patience, foresight, knowledge--is in itself an exceeding great reward, to which add the physical blessings which wait on this universal law--health, strength, activity, cheerfulness, the content that springs from honest exertion, and the lawful pride that grows from conquered difficulty? How invariably have the inhabitants of southern countries, whose teeming soil produced, unurged, the means of life, been cursed with indolence, with recklessness, with the sleepy slothfulness which, while basking in the sunshine, and gathering the earth's spontaneous fruits, satisfied itself with this animal existence, forgetting all the nobler purposes of life in the mere ease of living? Therefore, too, southern lands have always been the prey of northern conquerors; and the bleak regions of Upper Europe and Asia have poured forth from time to time the hungry hordes, whose iron sinews swept the nerveless children of the gardens of the earth from the face of their idle paradises: and, but for this stream of keener life and nobler energy, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete race of lotus-eaters than would now cumber the fairest regions of the earth.

Doubtless it is to counteract the enervating effects of soil and climate that this northern tide of vigorous life flows forever towards the countries of the sun, that the races may be renewed, the earth reclaimed, and the world, and all its various tribes, rescued from disease and decay by the influence of the stern northern vitality, searching and strong, and purifying as the keen piercing winds that blow from that quarter of the heavens. To descend to rather a familiar illustration of this, it is really quite curious to observe how many New England adventurers come to the Southern States, and bringing their enterprising, active character to bear upon the means of wealth, which in the North they lack, but which abound in these more favored regions, return home after a short season of exertion, laden with the spoils of the indolent southerners. The southern people are growing poorer every day, in the midst of their slaves and their vast landed estates: whilst every day sees the arrival amongst them of some penniless Yankee, who presently turns the very ground he stands upon into wealth, and departs a lord of riches at the end of a few years, leaving the sleepy population, among whom he has amassed them, floated still farther down the tide of dwindling prosperity....

At a small place called Waynesborough, ... I asked for a glass of milk, and they told me they had no such thing. Upon entering our new vehicle, we found another stranger added to our party, to my unspeakable annoyance. Complaint or remonstrance, I knew, however, would be of no avail, and I therefore submitted in silence to what I could not help. At a short distance beyond Waynesborough we were desired to alight, in order to walk over a bridge, which was in so rotten a condition as to render it very probable that it would give way under our weight. This same bridge, whose appearance was indeed most perilous, is built at a considerable height over a broad and rapid stream, called the Neuse, the color of whose water we had an excellent opportunity of admiring through the numerous holes in the plankage, over which we walked as lightly and rapidly as we could, stopping afterwards to see our coach come at a foot's pace after us. This may be called safe and pleasant traveling. The ten miles which followed were over heavy sandy roads, and it was near sunset when we reached the place where we were to take the railroad. The train, however, had not arrived, and we sat still in the coaches, there being neither town, village, nor even a road-side inn at hand, where we might take shelter from the bitter blast which swept through the pine-woods by which we were surrounded; and so we waited patiently, the day gradually drooping, the evening air becoming colder, and the howling wilderness around us more dismal every moment.

In the mean time the coaches were surrounded by a troop of gazing boors, who had come from far and near to see the hot-water carriages come up for only the third time into the midst of their savage solitude. A more forlorn, fierce, poor, and wild-looking set of people, short of absolute savages, I never saw. They wandered round and round us, with a stupid kind of dismayed wonder. The men clothed in the coarsest manner, and the women also, of whom there were not a few, with the grotesque addition of pink and blue silk bonnets, with artificial flowers, and imitation-blonde veils. Here the gentlemen of our party informed us that they observed, for the first time, a custom prevalent in North Carolina, of which I had myself frequently heard before--the women chewing tobacco, and that, too, in a most disgusting and disagreeable way, if one way can be more disgusting than another. They carry habitually a small stick, like the implement for cleaning the teeth, usually known in England by the name of a root,--this they thrust away in their glove, or their garter-string, and, whenever occasion offers, plunge it into a snuff-box, and begin chewing it. The practice is so common that the proffer of the snuff-box, and its passing from hand to hand, is the usual civility of a morning visit among the country-people; and I was not a little amused at hearing the gentlemen who were with us describe the process as they witnessed it in their visit to a miserable farm-house across the fields, whither they went to try to obtain something to eat.

It was now becoming dark, and the male members of our caravan held council round a pine fire as to what course had better be adopted for sheltering themselves and us during the night, which we seemed destined to pass in the woods. After some debate, it was recollected that one Colonel ----, a man of some standing in that neighborhood, had a farm about a mile distant, immediately upon the line of the railroad; and thither it was determined we should all repair, and ask quarters for the night. Fortunately, an empty truck stood at hand upon the iron road, and to this the luggage and the women and children of the party, were transferred. A number of negroes, who were loitering about, were pressed into the service, and pushed it along; and the gentlemen, walking, brought up the rear. I don't know that I ever in my life felt so completely desolate as during that half-hour's slow progress. We sat cowering among the trunks, my faithful Margery and I, each with a baby in our arms, sheltering ourselves and our poor little burthens from the bleak northern wind that whistled over us.