Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “I have been through all this, Nina,” said the latter, with a melancholy shake of her head, “and I know the vanity of it.”

  “Well, aunty, I haven’t been through it, so I don’t know.”

  “Yes, my dear, when I was of your age, I used to go to balls and parties, and could think of nothing but of dress and admiration. I have been through it all, and seen the vanity of it.”

  “Well, aunt, I want to go through it, and see the vanity of it, too. That’s just what I’m after. I’m on the way to be as sombre and solemn as you are, but I’m bound to have a good time first. Now, look at this pink brocade!”

  Had the brocade been a pall, it could scarcely have been regarded with a more lugubrious aspect.

  “Ah, child! such a dying world as this! To spend so much time and thought on dress!”

  “Why, Aunt Nesbit, yesterday you spent just two whole hours in thinking whether you should turn the breadths of your black silk dress upside down, or down side up; and this was a dying world all the time. Now, I don’t see that it is any better to think of black silk than it is of pink.”

  This was a view of the subject which seemed never to have occurred to the good lady.

  “But now, aunt, do cheer up, and look at this box of artificial flowers. You know I thought I’d bring a stock on from New York. Now, aren’t these perfectly lovely? I like flowers that mean something. Now, these are all imitations of natural flowers, so perfect that you’d scarcely know them from the real. See — there, that’s a moss-rose; and now look at these sweet peas, you’d think they had just been picked; and there — that heliotrope, and these jessamines, and those orange-blossoms, and that wax camellia” —

  “Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity!” said Mrs. Nesbit, shutting her eyes, and shaking her head: —

  “‘What if we wear the richest vest, —

  Peacocks and flies are better drest; This flesh, with all its glorious forms, Must drop to earth, and feed the worms.’”

  “Aunt, I do think you have the most horrid, disgusting set of hymns, all about worms, and dust, and such things!”

  “It’s my duty, child, when I see you so much taken up with such sinful finery.”

  “Why, aunt, do you think artificial flowers are sinful?”

  “Yes, dear; they are a sinful waste of time and money, and take off our mind from more important things.”

  “Well, aunt, then what did the Lord make sweet peas and roses and orange-blossoms for? I’m sure it’s only doing as he does, to make flowers. He don’t make everything gray, or stone-color. Now, if you only would come out in the garden, this morning, and see the oleanders, and the crape myrtle, and the pinks, the roses, and the tulips, and the hyacinths, I’m sure it would do you good.”

  “Oh, I should certainly catch cold, child, if I went out doors. Milly left a crack opened in the window, last night, and I’ve sneezed three or four times since. It will never do for me to go out in the garden; the feeling of the ground striking up through my shoes is very unhealthy.”

  “Well, at any rate, aunt, I should think if the Lord didn’t wish us to wear roses and jessamines, he would not have made them. And it is the most natural thing in the world to want to wear flowers.”

  “It only feeds vanity and a love of display, my dear.”

  “I don’t think it’s vanity or a love of display. I should want to dress prettily if I were the only person in the world. I love pretty things because they are pretty. I like to wear them because they make me look pretty.”

  “There it is, child; you want to dress up your poor perishing body to look pretty — that’s the thing!”

  “To be sure I do. Why shouldn’t I? I mean to look as pretty as I can, as long as I live.”

  “You seem to have quite a conceit of your beauty!” said Aunt Nesbit.

  “Well, I know I am pretty. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. I like my own looks, now, that’s a fact. I’m not like one of your Greek statues, I know. I’m not wonderfully handsome, nor likely to set the world on fire with my beauty. I’m just a pretty little thing; and I like flowers and laces, and all of those things; and I mean to like them, and I don’t think there’ll be a bit of religion in my not liking them; and as for all that disagreeable stuff about the worms, that you are always telling me, I don’t think it does me a particle of good. And if religion is going to make me so poky, I shall put it off as long as I can.”

  “I used to feel just as you do, dear, but I’ve seen the folly of it!”

  “If I’ve got to lose my love for everything that is bright, everything that is lively, and everything that is pretty, and like to read such horrid stupid books, why, I’d rather be buried, and done with it!”

  “That’s the opposition of the natural heart, my dear.” The conversation was here interrupted by the entrance of a bright, curly-headed mulatto boy, bearing Mrs. Nesbit’s daily luncheon.

  “Oh, here comes Tomtit,” said Nina; “now for a scene. Let’s see what he has forgotten, now.”

  Tomtit was, in his way, a great character in the mansion. He and his grandmother were the property of Mrs. Nesbit. His true name was no less respectable and methodical than that of Thomas; but as he was one of those restless and effervescent sprites who seem to be born for the confusion of quiet people, Nina had rechristened him Tomtit, which sobriquet was immediately recognized by the whole household as being eminently descriptive and appropriate. A constant ripple and eddy of drollery seemed to pervade his whole being; his large, saucy black eyes had always a laughing fire in them, that it was impossible to meet without a smile in return. Slave and property though he was, yet the first sentiment of reverence for any created thing seemed yet wholly unawakened in his curly pate. Breezy, idle, careless, flighty, as his woodland namesake, life to him seemed only a repressed and pent-up ebullition of animal enjoyment; and almost the only excitement of Mrs. Nesbit’s quiet life was her chronic controversy with Tomtit. Forty or fifty times a day did the old body assure him “that she was astonished at his conduct;” and as many times would he reply by showing the whole set of his handsome teeth, on the broad grin, wholly inconsiderate of the state of despair into which he thus reduced her.

  On the present occasion, as he entered the room, his eye was caught by the great display of finery on the bed; and hastily dumping the waiter on the first chair that occurred, with a flirt and a spring as lithe as that of a squirrel, he was seated in a moment astride the foot-board, indulging in a burst of merriment.

  “Good law, Miss Nina, whar on earth dese yer come from? Good law, some on ’em for me, isn’t ‘er?”

  “You see that child!” now said Mrs. Nesbit, rocking back in her chair with the air of a martyr. “After all my talkings to him! Nina, you ought not to allow that; it just encourages him!”

  “Tom, get down, you naughty creature, you, and get the stand and put the waiter on it. Mind yourself, now!” said Nina, laughing.

  Tomtit cut a somerset from the foot-board to the floor, and striking up, on a very high key, “I’ll bet my money on a bobtail nag,” he danced out a small table, as if it had been a partner, and deposited it, with a jerk, at the side of Mrs. Nesbit, who aimed a cuff at his ears; but as he adroitly ducked his head, the intended blow came down upon the table with more force than was comfortable to the inflictor.

  “I believe that child is made of air! — I never can hit him!” said the good lady, waxing red in the face. “He is enough to provoke a saint!”

  “So he is, aunt; enough to provoke two saints like you and me. Tomtit, you rogue,” said she, giving a gentle pull to a handful of his curly hair, “be good, now, and I’ll show you the pretty things by and by. Come, put the waiter on the table, now; see if you can’t walk, for once!”

  Casting down his eyes with an irresistible look of mock solemnity, Tomtit marched with the waiter, and placed it by his mistress.

  The good lady, after drawing off her gloves and making sundry little decorous preparations, said a short grace over her
meal, during which time Tomtit seemed to be holding his sides with repressed merriment; then gravely laying hold of the handle of the teapot, she stopped short, gave an exclamation, and flirted her fingers, as she felt it almost scalding hot.

  “Tomtit, I do believe you intend to burn me to death, some day!”

  “Laws, missus, dat are hot? Oh, sure I was ‘tickler to set the nose round to the fire.”

  “No, you didn’t! You stuck the handle right into the fire, as you ‘re always doing!”

  “Laws, now, wonder if I did,” said Tomtit, assuming an abstracted appearance. “‘Pears as if never can ‘member which dem dare is nose, and which handle. Now, I’s a-studdin’ on dat dare most all de morning — was so,” said he, gathering confidence, as he saw, by Nina’s dancing eyes, how greatly she was amused.

  “You need a sound whipping, sir — that’s what you need!” said Mrs. Nesbit, kindling up in sudden wrath.

  “Oh, I knows it,” said Tomtit. “We’s unprofitable servants, all on us. Lord’s marcy that we ain’t ‘sumed, all on us!”

  Nina was so completely overcome by this novel application of the text which she had heard her aunt laboriously drumming into Tomtit, the Sabbath before, that she laughed aloud, with rather uproarious merriment.

  “Oh, aunt, there’s no use! He don’t know anything! He’s nothing but an incarnate joke, a walking hoax!”

  “No, I doesn’t know nothing, Miss Nina,” said Tomtit, at the same time looking out from under his long eyelashes. “Don’t know nothing at all — never can.”

  “Well, now, Tomtit,” said Mrs. Nesbit, drawing out a little blue cowhide from under her chair, and looking at him resolutely, “you see, if this teapot handle is hot again, I’ll give it to you! Do you hear?”

  “Yes, missis,” said Tomtit, with that indescribable singsong of indifference which is so common and so provoking in his class.

  “And now, Tomtit, you go downstairs and clean the knives for dinner.”

  “Yes, missis,” said he, pirouetting towards the door. And once in the passage, he struck up a vigorous “Oh, I’m going to glory, won’t you go along with me;” accompanying himself, by slapping his own sides, as he went down two stairs at a time.

  “Going to glory!” said Mrs. Nesbit, rather shortly; “he looks like it, I think! It’s the third or fourth time that that child has blistered my fingers with this teapot, and I know he does it on purpose! So ungrateful, when I spend my time, teaching him, hour after hour, laboring with him so! I declare, I don’t believe these children have got any souls!”

  “Well, aunt, I declare, I should think you’d get out of all patience with him; yet he’s so funny, I cannot, for the life of me, help laughing.”

  Here a distant whoop on the staircase, and a tempestuous chorus to a Methodist hymn, with the words, “Oh come, my loving brethren,” announced that Tomtit was on the return; and very soon, throwing open the door, he marched in, with an air of the greatest importance.

  “Tomtit, didn’t I tell you to go and clean the knives?”

  “Law, missis, come up here to bring Miss Nina’s love-letters,” said he, producing two or three letters. “Good law, though,” said he, checking himself, “forgot to put them on a waity!” and before a word could be said, he was out of the room and downstairs, and at the height of furious contest with the girl who was cleaning the silver, for a waiter to put Miss Nina’s letters on.

  “Dar, Miss Nina,” appealing to her when she appeared, “Rosa won’t let me have no waity!”

  “I could pull your hair for you, you little image!” said Nina, seizing the letters from his hands, and laughing while she cuffed his ears.

  “Well,” said Tomtit, looking after her with great solemnity, “missis in de right on’t. Ain’t no kind of order in this here house, ‘pite of all I can do. One says put letters on waity. Another one won’t let you have waity to put letters on. And, finally, Miss Nina, she pull them all away. Just the way things going on in dis yer house, all the time! I can’t help it; done all I can. Just the way missus says!” There was one member of Nina’s establishment of a character so marked that we cannot refrain from giving her a separate place in our picture of her surroundings, — and this was Milly, the waiting-woman of Aunt Nesbit.

  Aunt Milly, as she was commonly called, was a tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested African woman, with a fullness of figure approaching to corpulence. Her habit of standing and of motion was peculiar and majestic, reminding one of the Scripture expression “upright as the palm-tree.” Her skin was of a peculiar blackness and softness, not unlike black velvet. Her eyes were large, full, and dark, and had about them that expression of wishfulness and longing which one may sometimes have remarked in dark eyes. Her mouth was large, and the lips, though partaking of the African fullness, had, nevertheless, something decided and energetic in their outline, which was still further seconded by the heavy moulding of the chin. A frank smile, which was common with her, disclosed a row of most splendid and perfect teeth. Her hair, without approaching to the character of the Anglo-Saxon, was still different from the ordinary woolly coat of the negro, and seemed more like an infinite number of close-knotted curls, of brilliant, glossy blackness.

  The parents of Milly were prisoners taken in African wars; and she was a fine specimen of one of those warlike and splendid races, of whom, as they have seldom been reduced to slavery, there are but few and rare specimens among the slaves of the South. Her usual head-dress was a high turban, of those brilliant colored Madras handkerchiefs in which the instinctive taste of the dark races leads them to delight. Milly’s was always put on and worn with a regal air, as if it were the coronet of the queen. For the rest, her dress consisted of a well-fitted gown of dark stuff, of a quality somewhat finer than the usual household apparel. A neatly starched white muslin handkerchief folded across her bosom, and a clean white apron, completed her usual costume. No one could regard her, as a whole, and not feel their prejudice in favor of the exclusive comeliness of white races somewhat shaken. Placed among the gorgeous surroundings of African landscape and scenery, it might be doubted whether any one’s taste could have desired, as a completion to her appearance, to have blanched the glossy skin whose depth of coloring harmonizes so well with the intense and fiery glories of a tropical landscape.

  In character Milly was worthy of her remarkable external appearance. Heaven had endowed her with a soul as broad and generous as her ample frame. Her passions rolled and burned in her bosom with a tropical fervor; a shrewd and abundant mother wit, united with a vein of occasional drollery, gave to her habits of speech a quaint vivacity.

  A native adroitness gave an unwonted command over all the functions of her fine body, so that she was endowed with that much-coveted property which the New Englander denominates “faculty,” which means the intuitive ability to seize at once on the right and best way of doing everything which is to be done. At the same time, she was possessed of that high degree of self-respect which led her to be incorruptibly faithful and thorough in all she undertook; less, as it often seemed, from any fealty or deference to those whom she served, than from a kind of native pride in well-doing, which led her to deem it beneath herself to slight or pass over the least thing which she had undertaken. Her promises were inviolable. Her owners always knew that what she once said would be done, if it were within the bounds of possibility.

  The value of an individual thus endowed in person and character may be easily conceived by those who understand how rare, either among slaves or freemen, is such a combination. Milly was, therefore, always considered in the family as a most valuable piece of property, and treated with more than common consideration.

  As a mind, even when uncultivated, will ever find its level, it often happened that Milly’s amount of being and force of character gave her ascendency even over those who were nominally her superiors. As her ways were commonly found to be the best ways, she was left, in most cases, to pursue them without opposition or control. But favorite as she
was, her life had been one of deep sorrows.

  She had been suffered, it is true, to contract a marriage with a very finely endowed mulatto man, on a plantation adjoining her owner’s, by whom she had a numerous family of children, who inherited all her fine physical and mental endowments. With more than usual sensibility and power of reflection, the idea that the children so dear to her were from their birth not her own — that they were, from the first hour of their existence, merchantable articles, having a fixed market value in proportion to every excellence, and liable to all the reverses of merchantable goods — sank with deep weight into her mind. Unfortunately, the family to which she belonged being reduced to poverty, there remained, often, no other means of making up the deficiency of income than the annual sale of one or two negroes. Milly’s children, from their fine developments, were much-coveted articles. Their owner was often tempted by extravagant offers for them; and therefore, to meet one crisis or another of family difficulties, they had been successively sold from her. At first, she had met this doom with almost the ferocity of a lioness; but the blow, oftentimes repeated, had brought with it a dull endurance, and Christianity had entered, as it often does with the slave, through the rents and fissures of a broken heart. Those instances of piety which are sometimes, though rarely, found among slaves, and which transcend the ordinary development of the best instructed, are generally the results of calamities and afflictions so utterly desolating as to force the soul to depend on God alone. But where one soul is thus raised to higher piety, thousands are crushed in hopeless imbecility.