Part 10

Félicie and I, with a whole escort of followers, explored the spacious grounds, considered the finest in Louisiana. There was a miniature river, meandering in and out and around the beautifully kept parterres, the tiny banks of which were an unbroken mass of blooming violets. A long-legged man might have been able to step across this tiny stream, but it was spanned at intervals by bridges of various designs, some rustic, some stone, but all furnished with parapets, so one would not tumble in and drown, as a little Roman remarked. If it had not been before Perry’s expedition to Japan, at any rate before his report was printed and circulated, one might have supposed M. Valcour received his inspiration in landscape gardening from the queer little Eastern people. There were summer houses draped with strange, foreign-looking vines; a pagoda on a mound, the entrance of which was reached by a flight of steps. It was an octagonal building, with stained-glass windows, and it struck my inexperienced eye as a very wonderful and surprising bit of architecture. Further on was—a mountain! covered from base to top with beds of blooming violets. A narrow, winding path led to the summit, from which a comprehensive view was obtained of the extensive grounds, bounded by a series of conservatories. It was enchanting. There I saw for the first time the magnolia frascati, at that date a real rarity.

Another day, doctor, Tante Lise, Félicie and I were rowed in a skiff across the river to Sacré Cœur Convent to see tante’s adopted daughter, Marie. I recall spending the day there, the kindly nuns showing the little heretic all through the building, and being rowed back to the plantation at sunset.

Next morning the _Belle Creole_ was due, and our visit to fairyland was drawing to a close. The call, “_la Vapeur_,” rushed us to the landing in the tram, the “whole pack in full cry” of the Roman children running by the side and calling adieu to dear Tante Lise. We gingerly walked the plank, in single file. The boat backed out to get her leeway, and once more for a moment we were in full view of the house. Two figures fluttered handkerchiefs from the balcony, Mme. Valcour and Félicie waving a last adieu—alas! a last. On entering the cabin, behold the ubiquitous M. Champomier, with his everlasting book and pencil. As he greeted the doctor I heard (in French, of course), “Can you tell me the exact amount of——?” I fled, and at the rear end of the boat I had one more last glimpse of Valcour Aime’s plantation. Alas! the last.

A month later I was on a clipper ship, the _Silas Holmes_, bound for a New England school. That Yankee, _Silas Holmes_, was a transport during the war, and like many a war relic has long been out of commission, if not out of existence. And the dainty _Belle Creole_, gone too! like thousands of Belles Creoles of her day and date.

Dear Félicie married Alfred Roman, adding another link of relationship to the Roman and Valcour Aime families, and the adored and only son, Gabriel Aime, died (I think Tante Lise wrote me) abroad.

I should like to know. No, I do not want to know. I already know too many wrecked homes and vanished fortunes and broken hearts. I want always to think of the Valcour Aime home and its charming hospitality, as I saw it and knew it, and loved it more than sixty years ago, when I waved a last adieu—alas! a last.

XXVI

THE OLD PLANTATION LIFE

It is almost a half century since the old plantation days. Only those who number threescore years and ten have a personal remembrance of the cares, duties and pleasures of the old plantation life. Only those who bore the cares, discharged the duties and prepared the way for the pleasures really understand the life that died and was buried fifty years ago. People who know so much about that fanatic John Brown and the fantastic “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are asking what one fought and bled for (did he bleed?) and what the other was written for. Some of those inquiring souls are over fifty years old, and what is more, their fathers were slave owners. The few of us tottering around who can tell of the old plantation life are threescore years and ten, and if we do not hasten to tell the story it may never be told. It is well to leave a record of a life that has passed beyond resurrection, a glorified record it may appear, for as we stand beside the bier of a loved and lifelong friend, we recall only his virtues. So as I look back on the old plantation life only the comforts and pleasures troop before me. It had its duties, but they were not onerous; its cares, but they were not burdensome, nor were its pleasures excessive. What we planned and accomplished for our slaves afforded us more satisfaction than any man of the present day can feel for his grand stables of hunters and roadsters and racers, that absorb his time and means....

Booker Washington, in that very interesting volume, “Up from Slavery,” tells of his early life when his mother (he never knew his father, and thinks he was a white man) was the slave of a well-to-do Virginia farmer, and the slave quarters had dirt floors. That may have been in the clay hills of Virginia, but I never saw a cabin, unless it was a pig pen, with a dirt floor. I am no apologist for slavery; the whites suffered more from its demoralizing influence than the blacks, but we were born to it, grew up with it, lived with it, and it was our daily life. We did well by it; no people could have done better. It is past now. When I tell of my own home it is to tell of the plantation homes of everybody I knew. We did not differ or vary to any extent in our modes of life and management.

Slaves were comfortably housed. Their cabins were elevated above the ground, two rooms in each building, a chimney between, a porch in front and windows on two sides. The slaves were well fed and well clothed in osnaburgs and linseys cut and made in the sewing room of the “big house.” Though the hook worm theory was not at that time exploited they were well shod. There were drones; I guess there were hook worms too, but we did not know it. The old and infirm had light tasks. Men pottered around the woodpile, or tended the cows on their promenades over the levee, and the women sewed a little and quarreled, as idly disposed old folks will, among themselves (we who visit almshouses now know how that is) or fussed with the frolicking children. I never saw in those days a negro with spectacles, or one who seemed to need them.

There was an infirmary for the sick, and a day nursery for the babies, under the charge of a granny, a well-ventilated room with a spacious fireplace, where pots and kettles were always on hand, mush and herb teas always on tap; there the babies were deposited in cribs all day while the mothers were at work in the fields. No woman went to work until her child was a month old. A large diary folio record was kept by the overseer of all the incidents of the plantation; when a woman was confined, when she was sent again to the field, who was ill in the hospital, if doctor was summoned, what part of the canefield was being cultivated day by day, when sugar-making began, when finished, what the yield of the various “cuts,” how many hogsheads and barrels of molasses shipped and by what boats; all these items and ever so many more were recorded. A doctor was employed at $600 per annum. He came only in extreme cases. Headaches and stomach aches, earaches, toothaches and backaches, all these minor ills came under the care of the overseer and “Gunn’s Domestic Medicine,” a formidable volume of instruction. The lady, the “mistis” of the big house, made frequent visits to the quarter lot, saw that things were kept tidy and ministered to the sick.

We did not have “made-over” dishes, cold meats nor stale bread on our tables; little darkies were sent by the half sick and aged for “left overs.” Children were not bottlefed or spoonfed; they consumed pot liquor and mush and molasses as soon as they were weaned. Corn, cowpeas and turnips were cultivated for the slaves, and when there was an overplus of garden vegetables it was sent to the quarter kitchen. Their meat was pickled pork—it was called “clear sides”—shipped from Kentucky or Missouri. All their cooking was done by two cooks in a big kitchen, but every cabin had a fireplace, with a pot or skillet, of course, for we all know how the darky dotes on little messes of her own doing. All the doors had locks, and the women went to the field with the key hung around their necks.

Each spring at house-cleaning, cabins were whitewashed inside and out; also the stables and other plantation buildings, the fences and trees as high up as a long pole or brush could reach. From Saturday noon till Monday was holiday, when the enterprising men chopped wood, for which they were paid, and the drones sunned themselves on the porch steps, and the women washed their clothes. I knew of only one planter who made his negroes work on Sundays. He was an Englishman who married into a plantation. The indignant neighbors called the attention of the grand jury in that case, with success, too. During sugar-making everybody worked day and night, but the season was short, terminating in December.

I cannot recall more than three deaths in ten years. I have no record to refer to (I guess that plantation folio afforded some information to the Union army). There was a burial ground for the slaves. One of them, the engineer, by the way, and a mighty good negro, too, acted as preacher. He married and buried and in all ways ministered to the spiritual needs of his flock. I recall teaching Lewis to sing “Canaan.” He wanted to learn a hymn, and had a lusty bass voice, while I did not have any at all. Lewis was not the only accomplished negro. We did not have white labor. There were slave carpenters, coopers, masons and sugar makers; women who cut and made all clothing, shirts, coats, pantaloons, dresses.

By law no child under ten years of age could be sold from its mother. I suppose that law is obsolete now! It happened a negro child born in the penitentiary of a convict mother, named Alroy, had to remain ten years in confinement; he was taught reading and writing, probably all the Rs, by the convicts, while he imbibed in such surroundings a good many less desirable accomplishments. Hon. Mr. Alroy represented his native parish in the Louisiana Legislature of reconstruction times. He was better fitted probably than some of his dusky colleagues, for he could read the laws; some of them could not. That is also of the dead past, thank God, and has no bearing on the old plantation life, except as an illustration of the law regarding slaves.

The “big house” had no fastenings on the front and back doors. In the absence of my husband one time I was awakened, in the dead hour of night, by a touch on my shoulder. “It’s me, mistis; de levee’s broke.” A crevasse! Without taking time to put on an extra gown, I was an hour giving orders and dispatching men to the planters, even twenty miles off, for assistance.

For a week thereafter, day and night, I fairly lived on horseback at the levee, superintending the repair work in place of my absent husband and our inefficient overseer. Each planter affected by the crevasse came, or sent an overseer with a force of slaves, who worked in hour shifts, to their waists in the water, driving piles and heaping sand bags. As the shifts changed the men were given a dram and hot soup or coffee, and sent to a huge bonfire nearby to dry themselves.

Another time I landed from a boat at the witching hour between midnight and dawn. The boat’s bell and whistle sounded to attract some light sleeper. By the time I was fairly ashore a glimmering light of a lantern was seen. I was escorted to the house by the coachman, but if any other negro had responded I should have felt quite as safe.

Mammy Charlotte was supreme in the domestic department. The little cupbearers from the quarters reported to her for the “dreenings” of the coffee pot or the left-over soup. The visitor by the library fire called to her for a glass of wine or a “finger” of whisky. I called Charlotte to ask what we were going to have for dinner. She was the busy one, and every plantation had just such a mammy. Charlotte and I belonged to the same church. When there was a vacant seat in the carriage Sunday morning she was called to occupy it.

One of our neighbors, that a New Englander would call a “near” man, owned a few acres adjoining ours, but too remote from his plantation to be advantageously cultivated. He would not fence his property nor work his road, nor keep his levee in repair (it was just there we had the crevasse); however, it afforded good pasturage for Uncle Billy’s cow, and for us, a supply of mushrooms. Billy’s nets and lines supplied us with shrimp and fish, small catfish that William cooked _à la pompano_, not a poor imitation of that delectable Gulf dainty. I heard Charlotte berating Billy for not bringing in some more of those fine shrimp, when he knew, too, there was company in the house. Imagine my consternation at Billy’s reply, “Dey done gorn; dat ole drowned mule is floated away.”

Col. Hicky was our nearest neighbor, on Hope estate. When the dear old man was eighty and I was twenty-five we were great chums. He never passed in his buggy if I was visible on the lawn or porch without stopping for a chat. There was frequent interchange of neighborly courtesies. He had fine large pecans, and we didn’t; we had celery and he didn’t, so there was much flitting back and forth of baskets. If we were having an unusual occasion, like the dinner my husband gave in honor of Messrs. Slidell and Benjamin, when they were elected to the United States Senate, a big basket came from Hope estate. Didn’t the dear old gentleman send a capon turkey which was too big for any dish we had, and didn’t we have to borrow the Hicky dish?

Col. Hicky had a birthday dinner, when he was eighty-two, and a grand dinner it was, to be sure. Sam Moore—I never knew just who he was, or why he was so essential at every function—sat at the host’s right. The Colonel was too deaf to hear all the _bon mots_, and Sam interpreted for him, and read in a loud voice all the toasts, some of which were very original and bright. Anyone remembering Col. Winthrop, or better still, Judge Avery, can understand there was no lack of wit and sparkle in any toast they might make.

XXVII

PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED

I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or, “People I Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I Have Entertained.” Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied life, I find myself dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since departed to the “House of Many Mansions,” guests who came and stayed, and went, some of whom I had never seen before, and some I never heard from after, but there are guests and guests, as every housewife knows. Particularly country house guests come, whose city houses are not open to what a neighbor of mine calls “trunk visitors.” In the days of which I write, every house, especially every plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string outside the door. I amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied assortment of visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to rest their mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about the gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffee pot, or the lady who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the innocence of their hearts.

The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal. Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent parish where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a young girl. With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the citadel, and to continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was put to flight. Now he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest, and salve his wounds at our home. I was amazed when my housemaid told me he had not only brought his valet, but his own linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood then why he was not an acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee pot would scare any prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he had committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans, a few years ago.

Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-president. The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were Buchanan and Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her husband mount to the top of the ladder of preferment, and did no little engineering in his behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was charming, a delightful visitor, a relative by marriage to us, but so remote, that if she had not been so lovely and the vice-president so distinguished, the dim connection would never have been thought of. Her aspirations were not realized, and he was tail to another presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did not meet Mrs. Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I saw her husband he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”

During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on the opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his grandiloquent flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to our house to stay till their _lares et penates_ were settled in their new home. The man, in the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style, accepted. When I asked how many there were in the family, my hospitable husband replied that he only heard mention of a wife. In due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever so much turning and backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as if to announce a surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at our levee, and a whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path to the house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged mother and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a darky with the baby in arms!

One guest room had been made ready, but three additional chambers were at once put in commission. By the time wraps had been removed and fresh fires made all over the house—it was mid-winter—I was ten times more breathless than my unexpected crowd. Every day for over a week the man and his wife were conveyed to their new home in our carriage, and there they stayed from morn to dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my special care. She was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed, all of us were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him to his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices, to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels carpets, all hours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse spanked it, and I didn’t care.

One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very diverting. They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered chair in the library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with hairpin and nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted mantel, till it looked like it had been taken from some buried city of Egypt. Thank goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of time the family moved into the new home, and gave a house-warming ball within the next week—_vive la bagatelle_!

Reading with great interest a newly published book, “The Circuit Rider’s Wife,” brings vividly to mind a visitor we once had. She was one of the sweetest and loveliest of women. She was a Methodist, the only one in a wide acquaintance I ever met, who claimed to have “the gift of sanctification.” I do not believe one possesses the power within oneself to resist sin, nor do I mean to inject religious views and doctrines in these remarks about “People I Have Entertained,” but I do say, if there ever was a really sanctified woman it was this Mrs. Abe Smith of Mississippi. She was our guest one short, happy, glorified week. She read her Bible chapter to us every morning, and prayed with and for us all day long, if we wanted, and we generally did, for surely she had the gift of prayer. I never listened to such uplifting prayers as dear Mrs. Smith could utter; her very voice was an inspiration. She was highly connected and highly cultivated and had a vocal training that comprised very intricate music, but with “The Coming of the Lord” she confined her voice entirely to psalms and hymns. Her mission was to pray and sing, but no doubt when the harvest was waiting, in some meeting house, she could exhort with an eloquence equal to the most earnest itinerant in the pulpit. We had one strange glorification and sanctification, but it was interrupted by the coming of a Methodist preacher, who claimed to having sought, in vain, the gift of sanctification. The last few days of lovely Sister Smith’s visit were spent in the library with closed doors, wrestling with the halting soul of Brother Camp.

These were the expiring days of the old “Peace which passeth understanding.” After that came the war, which sorely tried the heart of the glorified woman, and she proved faithful to her gift of sanctification even unto the bitter end....

One November day I entered my library with an open letter of introduction in my hand, to say to the young man, placidly warming himself at the fire, that the letter was not meant for my husband, who was not at home, but for his brother. He replied he understood the brother was not in Louisiana, and he took the liberty of transferring the introductory epistle to the next of kin. He was a young doctor, threatened with lung trouble, who had come South to spend some time in somebody’s sugar house. I frankly told him that our sugar house was not by any means a suitable place for an invalid, but (I glanced out of the door and saw his vehicle had departed and his trunk was on the porch) I would be pleased to have him remain my guest until my husband returned to see what could be devised to further the invalid’s plan. Northern and Western people, who never had been in a sugar house and inhaled the warm fumes of boiling cane juice, night and day, and incidentally submitted to the discomforts of an open building, not intended for sleeping quarters, thought that the treatment, as they chose to call it, was a cure for tuberculosis. My guest found himself quite comfortable, and remained in our home five months. Nothing more was said about sugar house treatment. By spring, like a butterfly, he emerged into the sunlight, strong and well and ready to fly to pastures new, which he did. We did not even hear from that doctor again. He was a physician in good practice in Galveston during the war, and told Gen. Magruder he thought he had met us years before!

Every planter in my day entertained strangers who came and went, like a dream. Some were grateful for their entertainment, some did not so much as write “bread and butter” notes, after their departure.