Chapter 7

I made a visit to hers a few days after our separation, and came away with my heart in my mouth at the sight of some of the familiar objects of Mammy's room, and such of our own as she had fallen heir to, in strange places and appositions. I also felt that Mammy's room had a more homelike aspect than my own.

There was no doubt that Mammy enjoyed her new conditions and surroundings. She had been provided with a paper signed by some of us, stating that it was with our permission that she lived to herself. This secured her free movement at all times--the privilege of very few of her race not legally manumitted.

Her visits to me were quite frequent, and she never failed to find something that needed putting to rights, and putting it so immediately, with fierce comments on the worthlessness of all “high-lands,” which was _negroce_ for hirelings--a class held in contempt by the servants owned in families.

I think that Mammy must have discovered the fact that my estate was somewhat deteriorated.

I was painfully conscious of this myself, and saw no prospect of its amelioration. The little cash that had come to me was quite dissipated, and my meagre salary was insufficient to satisfy my artificial wants--the only ones that a young man cannot dispense with and be happy.

In spite of the opinion prevailing in those days, that when a young man embraced the career of an artist it was a farewell to all hope of a sober and prosperous career, my father had been willing for me to follow my manifest bent, and I was to sacrifice a university career as the alternative. But the last enemy stepped between me and my hopes, and there was nothing for it but to go to work.

I had an ardent admirer in Mammy, who, in her innocence of a proper standard, frequently compared my productions to a “music back” or a tobacco label. That was before the days of chromos.

Mammy turned up Sunday mornings to look after my buttons. Those were days of fond reminiscence and poignant regret on my part.

“Seems to me hit's time for you to be getting some new shirts, Mahs William,” she said, one Sunday morning. Mammy touched me sorely there. A crisis was certainly impending in my lingerie.

“Oh, I reckon not. You must have got hold of a bad one, Mammy.”

“I got hole uv all uv um what is out uv wash; and them gwine. The buttons is shackledy on all uv um, too. I wish I wuz a washer; then you wouldn't have to give yo' clothes out to these triflin' huzzies whar rams a iron over yo' things like they wuz made uv iron too.”

“I suppose that you are getting along pretty well, Mammy,” I remarked, irrelevantly.

“Oh, I kain' complain. I made two dollars an' five an' threppence out'n the Scott party last week; an' I hear tell uv some new folks on Franklin Street gwine give a big party, an' I'm spectin' somethin' out uv dat. Lawdy, Lawdy, Mahs William,” she added, after a pause given to reflection, “hit certainly does 'muse me to see how some 'r dese people done come up. But they kain' fool me. I knows what's quality in town an' what ain't. I can reckermember perfick when some uv these vay folks, when dey come to your pa's front do', never expected to be asked in, but jess wait thar 'bout their business ontwell yo' pa got ready to talk to um at the do'. Yes, sah. I bin see some uv dese vay people's daddies”--Mammy used this word advisedly--“kayin' their vittles in a tin bucket to their work; that what I bin see.”

I was shaving during this monologue of Mammy's, with my back to her. A sudden exclamation of the name of the Lord made me start around and endanger my nose. I was not startled at the irreverence of the expression, however, as sacred names were familiar interjections of Mammy's, as of all her race.

“Ev'y button off'n these draw's,” Mammy answered to my alarmed question--alarmed because I anticipated some disaster to my wardrobe. “Hit's a mortal shame. I'll take 'em home, an' Monday I'll get some buttons on Broad Street an' sew um on.”

This was embarrassing. I had twelve and a half cents in Spanish silver coin which I had reserved for the plate at church that day. I was going under circumstances that rendered a contribution unavoidable. I hated to expose my narrow means to Mammy, and said, carelessly, as I returned to my lather: “Oh, never mind. Another time will do, Mammy.”

“Another time! You reckermember my old sayin', don't you, 'a stitch in time saves nine'? An' mo'n dat, bein' as this is the only clean pah you got, you 'bleest to have um next week fer de others to go to wash.”

Confession was inevitable. “The fact is, Mammy, I don't happen to have any change to-day that I can hand you for the buttons.” I was thankful that my occupation permitted me to keep my face from Mammy.

“Oh, ez fer that, Mahs William, yo' needn't bother. I got 'nough change 'round 'most all de time.”

Mammy's tone was patronizing, and brought home to me such a realization of my changed and waning fortunes as no other circumstance could have done. Possibly I may have imagined it in my hypersensitiveness, but Mammy's voice in that sentence seemed transformed, and it was another mammy who spoke.

I apparently reserved my protest until some intricate passage in my shaving was passed. At least I thought that Mammy would think so. I was really trying to put my reply in shape.

I was anticipated.

“You know you is really 'titled to yo' fif's by law, Mahs William,” resumed Mammy, in her natural manner, “because still bein' bond, you could call on me, an' I don't begrudge you; in fact, Ise beholden to you.”

“Not at all, Mammy. Don't talk any more about my fifth. You are as good as free, you know.”

“I knows that, Mahs William; but right is right, and I gwine to pay for them buttons.”

“Well, you may do that this time, Mammy, but I shall certainly return you the money.”

“Jess as you choose, Mahs William, but you's 'titled to yo' fif' all the same.”

I must note here a characteristic of Mammy's which had strengthened as her powers failed, namely, “nearness.” The euphemism applied at first, though Mammy yielded to temptations in the way of outfit as long as she deemed herself “likely.” After that period a stronger expression was required. She was always in possession of money, and was frequently our banker for a day, when, in emergencies, our parents were not on hand.

Monday I found my garment with its full complement of buttons, but of such diversity of pattern that I planned a protest for Mammy's next visit.

But when she explained that the bill was only fo'pence--six and a quarter cents, Spanish--and that it was the fashion now, so she was told, “to have they buttons diffunt, so they could dentrify they clothes,” I settled without remark. Mammy's financial skill and resource in imagination condoned everything.

It is painful to record that Mammy, encouraged by immunity from inquiry and investigation, no doubt, was tempted, as thousands of her betters have been and will be, and yielded under subsequent and similar circumstances.

My affairs took an unexpected turn now, and circumstances which have no place here made it possible for me to go to New York, with the intention of studying for my long-cherished purpose of making art my calling.

I heard from Mammy from time to time--occasionally got a letter dictated by her. They opened with the same formula, beginning with the fiction that she “took her pen in her hand,” and continuing, “these few lines leaves me tollerbul, and hoping to find you the same.” My friend, the amanuensis, took great pleasure in reporting Mammy verbatim and phonetically. The times were always hard for Mammy in these letters, but she “was scufflin' 'long, thank Gawd, an' ain't don' forgot my duty to the 'state 'bout them fif's.”

On my periodical visits home I always called upon her, and had a royal reception. I had casually said in a message to her in one of my letters that I never would forget her black tea and brown sugar. The old dame remembered this, and on my first visit home and to her, and on all succeeding visits, treated me to a brew of my favorite.

“Jess the same, Mahs William. Come from Mr. Blar's jess the same.”

But we become sophisticated in time. I found that Mammy's tea lingered in my memory, it is true; and the prospect of a recurrence very nearly operated against future visits. But virtue asserted herself, and I always went.

War now supervened. To it the brushes and the palette yielded. I returned home, and to arms. While all this made a complete revolution in my affairs, those of Mammy seemed to hold the even tenor of their way.

I saw Mammy every time I had a furlough, and she repaired for me damages of long standing. In sentiment she was immovably on my side. She objected decidedly to any more of “them no-'count men bein' sot free,” and was very doubtful whether any more of her own sex should be so favored, except “settled women.”

I do not know whether Mammy had a lurking suspicion that general manumission meant competition or not. So far as I could make out, she fared as she had long elected to do. Bacon and greens and her perennial tea were good enough for her. And here may be noted the average negro's indifference to cates. In my experience I never knew them to give up “strong food” for delicate fare except on prescription.

The next phase of my intercourse with Mammy was after the evacuation of the city and the event of Appomattox. The first incident was, with the negroes' usual talent that way, so transmogrified in pronunciation that it could mean nothing to them. It stood to them for a tremendous change, one which could not be condensed into a word, even though it exceeded their powers to pronounce it.

I had come back, as had thousands of others, with nothing in my hands, and only a few days' rations accorded by the enemy in my haversack; had come back to a mass of smoking débris and a wide area of ruin which opened unrecognized vistas that puzzled, dazed, and pained the home-seeker.

By instinct, I suppose, I drifted towards my _ante bellum_ quarters. My former landlord gave me a speechless welcome. To my inquiry as to the possibility of my reinhabiting my old quarters, he simply nodded and handed me the key. The tears that I had seen standing on his lids rolled down as he did so.

The room was cumbered with the chattels of the last tenant. There was no bed amongst them, but a roll of tattered carpet served me perfectly. I fell asleep over a slab of hardtack. That evening, on waking, I bethought me of Mammy.

My kind host allowed me to make a toilet in his back room behind the store. It consisted of a superficial ablution and the loan of a handkerchief. Mammy was not in. A neighbor of her sex and color offered me a chair in her house, but I sat in Mammy's tiny porch.

This part of the city was unchanged, but I missed a familiar steeple which had always been visible from Mammy's door.

It was late afternoon when Mammy came. She did not recognize me, but paused at the gate.

“Ef you's a sick soldier you must go to the hospital; you kain' stay here,” I heard her say before I roused myself sufficiently to speak.

“Mammy.”

An ejaculation of the name of the Lord that brought the neighbor to her door went up, and Mammy caught my hands and wept.

“Come in, my Gawd! Mahs William! you ain' hurted, is you?”

She pushed a chair to me and took one herself. For a few moments she confined herself to ejaculations of “Well! well! well!” and the name of the Deity. Then, “The town is bu'nt up; the army done 'rendered, an' Mahs William come back ragged ez a buzzard!”

I did not interrupt her. I could think of nothing to say, and began to be afraid that something was the matter with my brains. Meanwhile Mammy was bustling about, and before I knew it she had started the little fire into a blaze and the tea was boiling.

The flickering light glinted over the walls. At first I did not heed what it revealed; then I saw it glow and fade over some early efforts of my own, frame-less crudities, to which Mammy had fallen heir. They had become old masters! What centuries ranged themselves between the birth of those pictures and now!

This time tea was nectar, and after I had eaten a little cold middling bacon and hoe-cake, that she had put before me on a fractured member of our old Canton set, I took a more cheerful view of life. I believe that I would have shed tears over these poor relics from happier days, except that I was not quite conscious that anything was real that day. I told Mammy where I was. She seemed to think it perfectly in the nature of things that I should be there. Indeed, she appeared singularly calm in this cataclysm.

I encountered friends on my return to my quarters, and had invitations innumerable to meals and shelter. My costume was no drawback. Nobody knew how anybody was dressed.

The city was in a fever of excitement over the probable fate of those who had not yet returned, and in making provision for the homeless. Mammy turned up next morning with some of my civilian clothes that had been confided to her.

Mammy's simple “What you gwine do now, Mabs William?” thrown in whilst she assisted by her presence at my complete change of toilet--lapse of time was nothing to her--woke me to the momentous problem. There was no commissary sergeant to distribute even the meagre rations that so long left us ravenous after every meal. I could not camp in the Capitol Square, even if I had wished so to do.

Mammy left me with the injunction to call on her “ef I didn't have nowhar else to go.”

I went with unbroken fast to see what was left of the city. I met many acquaintances on the same errand. None of us seemed to realize that day what was to be done. For four years our campaigns had been planned for us.

I learned from one acquaintance, however, that I could have rations for the asking, and not long after found myself in line at the United States Commissary Department, along with hundreds of others, and departed thence bearing a goodly portion of hardtack and codfish. These I took to Mammy, who cooked the fish for me under loud protests against the smell.

Not long thereafter a number of us paroled soldiers made a mess, and cooked for ourselves at the room of one of them.

On one of these indeterminate days--dates had become nothing to me--I saw a dapper young man sketching about the ruins. I spoke to him, and mentioned that his had been my profession. This acquaintance was the beginning of hope.

I showed the young man places of interest, gave him points about a good many things, and at last fell to making sketches to help him out. They were perfectly satisfactory and liberally paid for. With this capital I set myself up in another place, which had a north light--by-the-way, I had been dispossessed of the asylum where I first found shelter, as the previous tenant returned. I was able to purchase material and apparel. But what was I to paint, and where to sell the product? My hand was out, I discovered, so I set to studying still life, and painting those of my friends who had the patience to sit.

I would have gone back to my old haunts in New York but for the material reason that my funds were too low, and the sentimental one that I not only was not in the humor for appealing to citizens of that section for patronage, but was not sure that it would not be withheld, from an analogous state of mind towards me.

Summer ran into fall. Mammy's visits increased in frequency, and her conversation drifted towards the difficulties of living.

I had long ago discharged all of her claims for material and repairs, but I noticed a tendency on her part to prepare my mind for a regular subsidy. I ignored these hints because it was impossible for me to carry out Mammy's plan, and painful for me to say so.

She approached the matter in a different way finally, and said, one day:

“Mahs William, you been cayin' on yo' fif' for some time now. Doan you think it's time for some of the yothers to look after them?”

I suggested that the whole family was about on a parity financially; that one brother was drifting in the trans-Mississippi, another living more precariously than I was. Suddenly a thought struck me, and I proposed that Mammy should apply to my married sister in the country, who could at least give her a home.

Mammy was very nearly indignant in her rejection of the proposition.

“Me live in de country! Why, Mahs William, I'm town-bred to de backbone. What I gwine do thar? Whar's anybody whar'll want my sponge-cake, jelly, and blue-monge, whar I can git ez much ez I wants to do in town? Who gwine want my clar-starchin' an' pickle-makin' an' ketchups? Dem tacky people doan want none of my makin's.”

I ventured to remind Mammy that all dwellers in the country were not tackies.

“I know dat, sah; but whole parcel of um is. Besides, heap uv de quality folks is poor an' in trouble sence the revackeration. I'd rather give up my other fif's fust.”

Of course Mammy's propositions were contradictory, but I had long known that she was not gifted with a logical mind, so I made no attempt to convict her of inconsistency.

From time to time I got small jobs of drawings for architects, as people had begun to bestir themselves and rebuild. I had been assured that I would find no prejudice against me in New York, but would stand on my own merits. I was not profoundly convinced that this was a safe risk for me to take. But living here was becoming impossible. Our own people were out of the question as purchasers of pictures. My still-lifes, from long exposure in the window of a friendly merchant in Broad Street, were becoming the camping-ground of the flies, and deteriorating rapidly. I was not strong in landscape, and the only subjects which suggested themselves were military, taken from my point of view politically, and not likely to be convertible into cash by persons of other convictions.

I was leaning against my ceiling one gray afternoon--at least I suppose it should be called ceiling, for it ran from the highest part of the chamber on an angle to the floor, and was pierced by a dormer--and contemplating a bunch of withered flowers which I had studied almost into dissolution, when Mammy knocked.

I had laid my palette on the floor, and was standing with my hands in my pockets. They fumbled, on one side with my bunch of keys, on the other with a small roll of small bills, the dreadful fractional currency of that era, whilst, in imagination, I projected my motive on the bare canvas, a twenty by twenty-four. I was sorry that Mammy had come, because a subject was beginning to take form in my mind. It was suggested by the withered flowers.

I thought that it would be a good idea to group them with a bundle of letters, some showing age, the top one with a recent postmark, and call the composition “Dead Hopes.” My thoughts were divided between the selection of a postmark for the top letter and the possibility of getting a frame, whilst Mammy was going through the process of finding a chair and seating herself. The invitation to come in implied the other courtesies.

The old lady was marvellously attired, and I wondered what could be the occasion of it. She had on a plaid shawl of purple, green, and red checkers, crossed on her bosom. Around her throat there was a lace collar of some common sort, held by a breastpin of enormous value if calculated by the square inch. She wore her usual turban of red and white, but on the top of it to-day was a straw bonnet of about the fashion of 1835, with flowers inside, and from it depended a green veil. Her frock was silk of an indescribable tint, the result of years of fading, and was flounced. The old lady had freed herself of her black cotton gloves, and was rolling them into a ball. I sighed inwardly, for this was the outward sign of undeterminable sitting.

Suddenly the self-arranged color scheme struck me as the cool light fell over Mammy. I seated myself and seized my palette.

“Sit still, Mammy, right where you are. I'm going to paint you.”

“Namer Gawd! paint me, Mahs William? After all dem pretty things whar you kin paint, paint yo' old Mammy?” She slapped herself on the knees, called the name of the Lord several times, and burst into the heartiest laugh that I had heard from her for some time.

“Yes, Mammy, just sit right still, and don't talk much, and I won't make you tired.”

I worked frantically, getting in the drawing as surely as I could, then attacked the face in color. The result was a success that astonished me. Mammy's evident fatigue stopped me. It was fortunate. I might have painted more and spoiled my study. I thought that she would go now, but her mission was not fulfilled. She had come to consult me on an important matter.

“You know this Freedman's Bureau, Mahs William? Well, they tells me--Lawd knows what they calls it bureau for!--they tells me that of a colored pusson goes down thar and gives in what he wuz worth--women either, mind you--that the guv'mint would pay um.”

Mammy paused for corroboration, but I determined to hear what she might add to this remarkable statement. “Well?”

“Well, sah, I didn't want to go down thar without no price, so I called in to arst you what you might consider yo' fif' worth, an' five times ovah.”

I did not laugh at Mammy. The emancipated negroes had such utterly wild notions of what was going to be done for them that Mammy's statement did not surprise me very much. I let her go with the assurance that I would inquire into the matter. She left enjoining me not to put that “fif' too cheap,” and I insisting that she should not go to the Bureau, in deference to whose officials her astonishing toilet had evidently been made.

I was so much pleased with my own work that it was nearly twilight before the knock of a familiar friend roused me. He was a clever amateur, and took the greatest interest in my work. His enthusiasm over Mammy's effigy made me glow. He agreed to pose for me in Mammy's costume.

Next day I borrowed the outfit without intimating that it was to be worn by anybody. Mammy was over-nervous about its being properly cared for. I think that she still contemplated appearing in it at the Bureau.

In a week the picture was complete. My model and I went out and celebrated appropriately but frugally.

A small label in the corner gave the title to the picture--“My old Mammy.”

My friend gave my work a place in his window, and my acquaintances generally accorded unqualified praise. The older ones recognized Mammy at once.

Pending a purchaser for this, I started my deferred subject, and changed it into a figure piece. A lovely friend was my model. She contemplated the flowers and letters. Above the old piece of furniture on which she leaned there hung a photograph, a sword, and a sash--a more striking suggestion of my first title, “Dead Hopes.” How little I dreamed, as I worked, that there was such happy irony in the name, and that Mammy could ever, in the remotest way, conduce to such a result!

Nearly every morning I hovered about my friend's establishment at a sufficient distance to elude suspicion of my anxiety, but easily in visual range of my exhibit.

One morning it was not visible. I rushed to the store with a throbbing breast. Alas! the picture had only been shifted to another light. Before the revulsion of feeling had time to overpower me I was seized by my friend the merchant.

“It's a regular play,” he exclaimed.

He forced me to a seat on a pile of cheese-boxes, and facing me, began: