Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while laboring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she spoke to me.

She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation under Mr. K's overseership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valor is sufficiently accounted for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her first-born, the son of Mr. K-, who forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a farther punishment, to Five Pound-a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished for such offenses as are not sufficiently atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy, makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor creature said that, bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain, unvarnished manner in which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple horror and misery of their bare details.

MY DEAREST E- —‚—I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children flowing in the whole morning to say "Ha de, missis ?" Among others, a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages; nine of her children had died; for the last

three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in the field. She held my hands, and stroked them in the most appealing way while she exclaimed, "Oh my missis! my missis! me neber sleep till day for de pain," and with the day her labor must again be resumed. I gave her flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with; rest I could not give her-rest from her labor and her painthis mother of fifteen children.

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages: one had been caused with falling down with a very heavy burden on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up. She said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cowhide stands and stripes them. I give you the woman's words. She did not speak of this as of any thing strange, unusual, or especially horrid and abominable; and when I said, “Did they do that to you when you were with child?" she simply replied, "Yes, missis." And to all this I listen-I, an English woman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I can not say, "That thing shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villainy shall never be known here again." I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression which I am beginning to feel daily

more and more, surrounded by all this misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. The blessed spring is coming very fast, the air is full of delicious wildwood fragrances, and the wonderful songs of Southern birds; the wood paths are as tempting as paths into Paradise, but Jack is in such deadly terror about the snakes, which are now beginning to glide about with a freedom and frequency certainly not pleasing, that he will not follow me off the open road, and twice to-day scared me back from charming wood paths I ventured to explore with his exclamations of terrified warning.

I gathered some exquisite pink blossoms, of a sort of waxen texture, off a small shrub which was strange to me, and for which Jack's only name was dye-bush; but I could not ascertain from him whether any dyeing substance was found in its leaves, bark, or blossoms.

I returned home along the river side, stopping to admire a line of noble live oaks beginning, alas! to be smothered with the treacherous white moss under whose pale trailing masses their verdure gradually succumbs, leaving them, like huge hoary ghosts, perfect mountains of parasitical vegetation, which, strangely enough, appears only to hang upon and swing from their boughs without adhering to them. The mixture of these streams of graywhite filaments with the dark foliage is extremely beautiful as long as the leaves of the tree survive in sufficient masses to produce the rich contrast of color; but when the moss has literally conquered the whole tree, and, after stripping its huge limbs bare, clothed them with its own wan masses, they always looked to me like so many gigantic Druid ghosts, with flowing robes and beards, and locks all of one ghastly gray, and I would not have broken a twig off them for the world, lest a sad voice, like that which reproached Dante, should have moaned out of it to me,

"Non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?"

A beautiful mass of various woodland skirted the edge of the stream, and mingled in its foliage every shade of green, from the pale, stiff spikes and fans of the dwarf palmetto to the dark canopy of the magnificent ilex-bowers and brakes of the loveliest wildness, where one dare not tread three steps for fear. What a tantalization! it is like some wicked enchantment.

Dearest E———,—I have found growing along the edge of the dreary inclosure where the slaves are buried such a lovely wild flower; it is a little like the euphrasia or eyebright of the English meadows, but grows quite close to the turf, almost into it, and consists of clusters of tiny white flowers that look as if they were made of the finest porcelain. I took up a root of it yesterday, with a sort of vague idea that I could transplant it to the North; though I can not say that I should care to transplant any thing thither that could renew to me the associations of this place-not even the delicious wild flowers, if I could.

The woods here are full of wild plum-trees, the delicate white blossoms of which twinkle among the evergreen copses, and, besides illuminating them with a faint starlight, suggest to my mind a possible liqueur like kirsch, which I should think could quite as well be extracted from wild plums as wild cherries, and the trees are so numerous that there ought to be quite a harvest from them. You may, and, doubtless, have seen palmetto plants in Northern green and hot houses, but you never saw palmetto roots; and what curious things they are! huge, hard, yellowish-brown stems, as thick as my arm, or thicker, extending and ramifying under the ground in masses that seem hardly justified or accounted for by the elegant, light, spiky fans of dusky green foliage with which they

fill the under part of the woods here. They look very tropical and picturesque, but both in shape and color suggest something metallic rather than vegetable; the bronzegreen hue and lance-like form of their foliage has an arid, hard character, that makes one think they could be manufactured quite as well as cultivated. At first I was extremely delighted with the novelty of their appearance; but now I feel thirsty when I look at them, and the same with their kinsfolk, the yuccas and their intimate friends, if not relations, the prickly pears, with all of which once strange growth I have grown contemptuously familiar

now.

Did it ever occur to you what a strange affinity there is between the texture and color of the wild vegetables of these sandy Southern soils, and the texture and color of shells? The prickly pear, and especially the round little cactus plants all covered with hairy spikes, are curiously suggestive of a family of round spiked shells, with which you, as well as myself, are doubtless familiar; and though the splendid flame-color of some cactus blossoms never suggests any nature but that of flowers, I have seen some of a peculiar shade of yellow-pink, that resembles the mingled tint on the inside of some elaborately colored shell, and the pale white and rose flowers of another kind have the coloring and almost texture of shell, much rather than of any vegetable substance.

To-day I walked out without Jack, and, in spite of the terror of snakes with which he has contrived slightly to inoculate me, I did make a short exploring journey into the woods. I wished to avoid a plowed field, to the edge of which my wanderings had brought me; but my dash into the woodland, though unpunished by an encounter with snakes, brought me only into a marsh as full of landcrabs as an ant-hill is of ants, and from which I had to retreat ingloriously, finding my way home at last by the beach.

« AnteriorContinuar »