Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  The fact was, that responsibility, aggravated by her husband’s negligence, had transformed the worthy woman into a sort of domestic dragon of the Hesperides; and her good helpmeet declared that he believed she never slept, nor meant anybody else should. It was all very well, he would observe. He wouldn’t quarrel with her for walking the whole night long, or sleeping with her head out of the window, watching the smoke-house; for stealing out after one o’clock to convict Pompey, or circumvent Cuff, if she only wouldn’t bother him with it. Suppose the half of the hams were carried off, between two and three, and sold to Abijah Skinflint for rum? — He must have his sleep; and if he had to pay for it in ham, why, he’d pay for it in ham; but sleep he must, and would. And supposing he really believed, in his own soul, that Cuffy, who came in the morning, with a long face, to announce the theft, and to propose measures of discovery, was in fact the main conspirator — what then? He couldn’t prove it on him. Cuff had gone astray from the womb, speaking lies ever since he was born; and what would be the use of his fretting and sweating himself to death to get truth out of Cuff? No, no! Mrs. G., as he commonly called his helpmeet, might do that sort of thing, but she mustn’t bother him about it. Not that Uncle Jack was invariable in his temper; human nature has its limits, and a personage who finds “mischief still for idle hands to do” often seems to take a malicious pleasure in upsetting the temper of idle gentlemen. So Uncle Jack, though confessedly the best fellow in the world, was occasionally subject to a tropical whirlwind of passion, in which he would stamp, tear, and swear, with most astounding energy; and in those ignited moments all the pent-up sorrows of his soul would fly about him, like red-hot shot, in every direction. And then he would curse the negroes, curse the overseers, curse the plantation, curse Cuff and Pomp and Dinah, curse the poor white folks round, curse Mr. Abijah Skinflint, and declare that he would send them and the niggers all severally to a department which politeness forbids us to mention. He would pour out awful threats of cutting up, skinning alive, and selling to Georgia. To all which commotion and bluster the negroes would listen, rolling the whites of their eyes, and sticking their tongues in their cheeks, with an air of great satisfaction and amusement; because experience had sufficiently proved to them that nobody had ever been cut up, skinned alive, or sent to Georgia, as the result of any of these outpourings. So when Uncle Jack had one of these fits, they treated it as hens do an approaching thunderstorm, — ran under cover, and waited for it to blow over.

  As to Madam Gordon, her wrath was another affair. And her threats they had learned to know generally meant something; though it very often happened that, in the dispensation of most needed justice, Uncle Jack, if in an extra good humor, would rush between the culprit and his mistress, and bear him off in triumph, at the risk of most serious consequences to himself afterwards. Our readers are not to infer from this that Madam Gordon was really and naturally an ill-natured woman. She was only one of that denomination of vehement housekeepers who are to be found the world over — women to whom is appointed the hard mission of combating, single handed, for the principles of order and exactness, against a whole world in arms. Had she had the good fortune to have been born in Vermont or Massachusetts, she would have been known through the whole village as a woman who couldn’t be cheated half a cent on a pound in meat, and had an instinctive knowledge whether a cord of wood was too short, or a pound of butter too light. Put such a woman at the head of the disorderly rabble of a plantation, with a cheating overseer, surrounded by thieving poor whites, to whom the very organization of society leaves no resource but thieving, with a never-mind husband, with land that has seen its best days, and is fast running to barrenness, and you must not too severely question her temper, if it should not be at all times in perfect subjection. In fact, Madam Gordon’s cap habitually bristled with horror, and she was rarely known to sit down. Occasionally, it is true, she alighted upon a chair, but was in a moment up again, to pursue some of her household train, or shout, at the top of her lungs, some caution toward the kitchen.

  When Harry reined up his horse before the plantation, the gate was thrown open for him by old Pomp, a superannuated negro, who reserved this function as his peculiar sinecure.

  “Lord bress you, Harry, dat you? Bress you, you ought fur to see mas’r! Such a gale up to de house!”

  “What’s the matter, Pomp?”

  “Why, mas’r, he done got one of he fits! Tarin’ round dar, fit to split! — stompin’ up and down de ‘randy, swarin’ like mad! Lord, if he ain’t! He done got Jake tied up, dar! — swars he’s goin’ to cut him to pieces! He! he! he! Has so! Got Jake tied up dar! Ho! ho! ho! Real curus! And he’s blowin’ hisself out dere mighty hard, I tell you! So, if you want to get word wid him, you can’t do it till he done got through wid dis yer!” And the old man ducked his pepper-and-salt-colored head, and chuckled with a lively satisfaction.

  As Harry rode slowly up the avenue to the house, he caught sight of the portly figure of its master, stamping up and down the veranda, vociferating and gesticulating in the most violent manner. He was a corpulent man, of middle age, with a round, high forehead, set off with grizzled hair. His blue eyes, fair, rosy, fat face, his mouth adorned with brilliant teeth, gave him, when in good humor, the air of a handsome and agreeable man. At present his countenance was flushed almost to purple, as he stood storming, from his rostrum, at a saucy, ragged negro, who, tied to the horse-post, stood the picture of unconcern; while a crowd of negro men, women, and children were looking on.

  “I’ll teach you!” he vociferated, shaking his fist. “I won’t — won’t bear it of you, you dog, you! You won’t take my orders, won’t you? I’ll kill you — that I will! I’ll cut you up into inch pieces!”

  “No, you won’t, and you know you won’t!” interposed Mrs. Gordon, who sat at the window behind him. “You won’t, and you know you won’t! and they know you won’t, too! It will all end in smoke, as it always does. I only wish you wouldn’t talk and threaten, because it makes you ridiculous!”

  “Hold your tongue, too! I’ll be master in my own house, I say! Infernal dog! — I say, Cuff, cut him up!

  —— Why don’t you go at him? — Give it to him! — What you waiting for?”

  “If mas’r pleases!” said Cuff, rolling up his eyes, and making a deprecating gesture.

  “If I please! Well, blast you, I do please! Go at him! — thrash away! Stay, I’ll come myself.” And seizing a cowhide, which lay near him, he turned up his cuffs, and ran down the steps, but missing his footing in his zeal, came head-first against the very post where the criminal was tied.

  “There! I hope, now, you are satisfied! You have killed me! — you have broke my head, you have! I shall be laid up a month, all for you, you ungrateful dog!”

  Cuffy and Sambo came to the rescue, raised him up carefully, and began brushing the dust off his clothes, smothering the laughter with which they seemed ready to explode, while the culprit at the post seemed to consider this an excellent opportunity to put in his submission.

  “Please, mas’r, do forgive me! I tole ’em to go out, and dey said dey wouldn’t. I didn’t mean no harm when I said ‘Mas’r had better go hisself;”cause I thinks so now. Mas’r had better go! Dem folks is curus, and dey won’t go for none of us. Dey just acts ridiculous, dey does! And I didn’t mean fur to be sarcy, nor nothin’. I say ‘gin, if mas’r’ll take his horse and go over dar, mas’r drive dose folks out; and nobody else can’t do it! We done can’t doit — dey jest sarce us. Now, ‘fore my Heavenly Master, all dis yere is de truth I’ve been telling. De Lord, de Master, knows it is; and if mas’r’ll take his horse, and ride down dere, he’d see so; so dere, jest as I’ve been telling mas’r. I didn’t mean no harm at all, I didn’t!”

  The quarrel, it must be told, related to the ejecting of a poor white family which had squatted, as the phrase is, in a deserted cabin, on a distant part of the Gordon plantation. Mrs. Gordon’s untiring assiduity having discovered this fact, she had left her husba
nd no peace till something was undertaken in the way of ejectment. He accordingly commissioned Jake, a stout negro, on the morning of the present day, to go over and turn them off. Now, Jake, who inherited to the full the lofty contempt with which the plantation negro regards the poor white folks, started upon his errand, nothing loath, and whistled his way in high feather, with two large dogs at his heels. But when he found a miserable, poor, sick woman, surrounded by four starving children, Jake’s mother’s milk came back to him, and instead of turning them out, he actually pitched a dish of cold potatoes in among them, which he picked up in a neighboring cabin, with about the same air of contemptuous pity with which one throws scraps to a dog. And then, meandering his way back to the house, informed his master that “he couldn’t turn de white trash out, and if he wanted them turned out, he would have to go hisself.”

  Now, we all know that a fit of temper has very often nothing to do with the thing which appears to give rise to it. When a cloud is full charged with electricity, it makes no difference which bit of wire is put in. The flash and the thunder come one way as well as another. Mr. Gordon had received troublesome letters on business, a troublesome lecture from his wife, his corn-cake had been overdone at breakfast, and his coffee burned bitter; besides which, he had a cold in his head coming on, and there was a settlement brewing with the overseer. In consequence of all which things, though Jake’s mode of delivering himself wasn’t a whit more saucy than ordinary, the storm broke upon him then and there, and raged as we have described. The heaviest part of it, however, being now spent, Mr. Gordon consented to pardon the culprit on condition that he would bring him up his horse immediately, when he would ride over and see if he couldn’t turn out the offending party. He pressed Harry, who was rather a favorite of his, into the service; and in the course of a quarter of an hour they were riding off in the direction of the squatter’s cabin.

  “It’s perfectly insufferable, what we proprietors have to bear from this tribe of creatures!” he said. “There ought to be hunting-parties got up to chase them down, and exterminate ‘em, just as we do rats. It would be a kindness to them; the only thing you can do for them is to kill them. As for charity, or that kind of thing, you might as well throw victuals into the hollow logs as to try to feed ‘em. The government ought to pass laws, — we will have laws, somehow or other, — and get them out of the state.”

  And so discoursing, the good man at length arrived before the door of a miserable, decaying log cabin, out of whose glassless windows dark emptiness looked, as out of the eyeholes of a skull. Two scared, cowering children disappeared round the corner as he approached. He kicked open the door, and entered. Crouched on a pile of dirty straw sat a miserable, haggard woman, with large, wild eyes, sunken cheeks, disheveled, matted hair, and long, lean hands, like bird’s claws. At her skinny breast an emaciated infant was hanging, pushing, with its little skeleton hands, as if to force the nourishment which nature no longer gave; and two scared-looking children, with features wasted and pinched blue with famine, were clinging to her gown. The whole group huddled together, drawing as far as possible away from the newcomer, looked up with large, frightened eyes, like hunted wild animals.

  “What you here for?” was the first question of Mr. Gordon, put in no very decided tone; for if the truth must be told, his combativeness was oozing out.

  The woman did not answer, and after a pause, the youngest child piped up in a shrill voice, —

  “Ain’t got nowhere else to be!”

  “Yes,” said the woman, “we camped on Mr. Durant’s place, and Bobfield — him is the overseer — pulled down the cabin right over our head.’Pears like we couldn’t get nowhere.”

  “Where is your husband?”

  “Gone looking for work.’Pears like he couldn’t get none nowhere.’Pears like nobody wants us. But we have got to be somewhere, though!” said the woman in a melancholy, apologetic tone. “We can’t die, as I see!

  —— wish we could!”

  Mr. Gordon’s eye fell upon two or three cold potatoes in a piece of broken crock, over which the woman appeared keeping jealous guard.

  “What you doing with those potatoes?”

  “Saving them for the children’s dinner.”

  “And is that all you’ve got to eat, I want to know?” said Mr. Gordon in a high, sharp tone, as if he were getting angry very fast.

  “Yes,” said the woman.

  “What did you have to eat yesterday?”

  “Nothing!” said the woman.

  “And what did you eat the day before?”

  “Found some old bones round the nigger houses; and some on ’em give us some corn-cake.”

  “Why the devil didn’t you send up to my house, and get some bacon? Picking up bones, slop, and swill, round the nigger huts? Why didn’t you send up for some ham, and some meal? Lord bless you, you don’t think Madam Gordon is a dog to bite you, do you? Wait here till I send you down something fit to eat. Just end in my having to take care of you, I see! And if you are going to stay here, there will be something to be done to keep the rain out!”

  “There, now,” he said to Harry, as he was mounting his horse, “just see what ’tis to be made with hooks in one’s back, like me! Everybody hangs on to me, of course! Now, there’s Durant turns off these folks; there’s Peters turns them off! Well, what’s the consequence? They come and litter down on me, just because I am an easy, soft-hearted old fool! It’s too devilish bad! They breed like rabbits! What God Almighty makes such people for, I don’t know! I suppose He does. But there’s these poor, miserable trash have children like sixty; and there’s folks living in splendid houses, dying for children, and can’t have any. If they manage one or two, the scarlet fever or whooping-cough makes off with ‘em. Lord bless me, things go on in a terrible mixed-up way in this world! And then, what upon earth I’m to say to Mrs. G.! I know what she’ll say to me. She’ll tell me she told me so — that’s what she always says. I wish she’d go and see them herself — I do so! Mrs. G. is the nicest kind of a woman — no mistake about that; but she has an awful deal of energy, that woman! It’s dreadful fatiguing to a quiet man, like me — dreadful! But I’m sure I don’t know what I should do without her. She’ll be down upon me about this woman; but the woman must have some ham, that’s flat! Cold potatoes and old bones! Pretty story! Such people have no business to live at all; but if they will live, they ought to eat Christian things! There goes Jake. Why couldn’t he turn ’em off before I saw ‘em? It would have saved me all this plague! Dog knew what he was about when he got me down here! Jake! Oh, Jake, Jake! come here!”

  Jake came shambling along up to his master, with an external appearance of the deepest humility, under which was too plainly seen to lurk a facetious air of waggish satisfaction.

  “Here, you, Jake; you get a basket” —

  “Yes, mas’r!” said Jake, with an air of provoking intelligence.

  “Be still saying ‘Yes, mas’r,’ and hear what I’ve got to say! Mind yourself!”

  Jake gave a side glance of inexpressible drollery at Harry, and then stood like an ebony statue of submission.

  “You go to your missis, and ask her for the key of the smoke-house, and bring it to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you tell your missis to send me a peck of meal. Stay — a loaf of bread, or some biscuit, or corn-cake, or anything else which may happen to be baked up. Tell her I want them sent out right away.”

  Jake bowed and disappeared.

  “Now we may as well ride down this path, while he is gone for the things. Mrs. G. will blow off on him first, so that rather less of it will come upon me. I wish I could get her to see them herself. Lord bless her, she is a kind-hearted woman enough! but she thinks there’s no use doing, — and there ain’t. She is right enough about it. But then, as the woman says, there must be some place for them to be in the world. The world is wide enough, I’m sure! Plague take it! why can’t we pass a law to take them all in with our niggers,
and then they’d have some one to take care of them! Then we’d do something for them, and there’d be some hope of keeping ’em comfortable.”

  Harry felt in nowise inclined to reply to any of this conversation, because he knew that, though nominally addressed to him, the good gentleman was talking merely for the sake of easing his mind, and that he would have opened his heart just as freely to the next hickory bush, if he had not happened to be present. So he let him expend himself, waiting for an opportunity to introduce subjects which lay nearer his heart.

  In a convenient pause he found opportunity to say,—”Miss Nina sent me over here, this morning.”