Kitabı oku: «Dixie After the War», sayfa 9

A man who belonged to the “Crippled Squad,” not one of whom had a full complement of arms and legs, told this story: As four of them were limping along near Lexington, they noticed a gray-headed white man in rough, mud-stained clothes turning furrows with a plow, and behind him a white girl dropping corn. Taking him for a hired man, they hallooed: “Hello, there!” The man raised his head. “Say,” they called, “can you tell us where we can get something to eat?” He waved them towards a house, where a lady who was on the porch, asked them to have a seat and wait while she had food cooked.

They had an idea that she prepared with her own hands the dinner to which they presently sat down, of hot hoe-cakes, buttermilk, and a little meat so smothered in lettuce leaves that it looked a great deal. When they had cleared up the table, she said: “I am having more bread cooked if you can wait a few minutes. I am sorry we have not more meat and milk. I know this has been a very light repast for hungry men, but we have entertained others this morning, and we have not much left. We hate to send our soldiers hungry from the door; they ought to have the best of everything when they have fought so long and bravely and suffered so much.” The way she spoke made them proud of the arms and legs they didn’t have.

Now that hunger was somewhat appeased, they began to note surroundings. The dwelling was that of a military man and a man of piety and culture. A lad running in addressed the lady as “Mrs. Pendleton,” and said something about “where General Pendleton is plowing.”

They stumbled to their crutches! and in blushing confusion, made humble apologies, all the instincts of the soldier shocked at the liberties they had taken with an officer of such high grade, and at the ease of manner with which they had sat at his table to be served by his wife. They knew their host for William Nelson Pendleton, late Brigadier-General, C. S. A., Chief of Artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia, a fighting preacher. She smiled when they blundered out the excuse that they had mistaken him for a day-labourer.

“The mistake has been made before,” she said. “Indeed, the General is a day-labourer in his own field, and it does not mortify him in the least now that all our people have to work. He is thankful his strength is sufficient, and for the help that the schoolboys and his daughters give him.” She put bread into their haversacks and sent them on their way rejoicing. The day-labourer and his plow were close to the roadside, and as they passed, they drew themselves up in line and brought all the hands they had to their ragged caps in salute.

Dr. Robert G. Stephens, of Atlanta, tells me of a Confederate soldier who, returning armless to his Georgia home, made his wife hitch him to a plow which she drove; and they made a crop. A Northern missionary said in 1867, to a Philadelphia audience, that he had seen in North Carolina, a white mother hitch herself to a plow which her eleven-year-old son drove, while another child dropped into the furrows seeds Northern charity had given. I saw in Virginia’s Black Belt a white woman driving a plow to which her young daughters, one a nursing mother, were hitched; and near the same time and place an old negro driving a milch-cow to his cart. “Uncle Eph, aren’t you ashamed,” I asked, “to work your milch-cow?” “Law, Miss, milch-white-’oman wuk. Huccom cow can’t wuk?”

TOURNAMENTS AND PARTIES

CHAPTER XV
Tournaments and Starvation Parties

It would seem that times were too hard and life too bitter for merry-making. Not so. With less than half a chance to be glad, the Southerner will laugh and dance and sing – and make love. At least, he used to. The Southerner is no longer minstrel, lover, and cavalier. He is becoming a money-maker. With cannons at our gates and shells driving us into cellars, guitars were tinkling, pianos were not dumb, tripping feet were not stayed by fear and sorrow. When boys in gray came from camp, women felt it the part of love and patriotism to give them good cheer, wearing smiles while they were by, keeping tears for them when absent.

With the war over and our boys coming home for good, ah, it was not hard to laugh, sing and dance, poor as we were! “Soldiers coming up the road,” “Some soldiers here for tonight,” the master of the house would say, and doors would fling wide. “Nice fellows, I know,” or “I knew this one’s father, and that one’s uncle is Governor – and this one went to school with our Frank; and these fought side by side with friends of ours,” or “Their names are so-and-so,” or just, “They are gentlemen.” Maidens would make themselves fair; wardrobes held few or no changes, but one could dress one’s hair another way, put a rose in one’s tresses, draw forth the many-times-washed-over or thrice-dyed ribbon for adornment. After supper, there would be music in the parlor, and perhaps dancing. But not always! too often, the guest’s feet were not shod for dancing. It might be that he was clothed from shirt to shoe in garments from the host’s own store. Many a soldier would decline entering the great house and beg off from presentations, feeling the barn a more fitting shelter for his rags, and the company of ladies a gift the gods must withhold.

Joy reigned in every household when its owner came home from the war, joy that defeat at arms could not kill. The war was over! it had not ended as we had prayed, but there was to be no crying over spilt milk if young people had their way.

Departure of old servants and installation of new and untried ones was attended with untold vexation, but none of this was allowed to interfere with the pleasure and happiness of young people when it was possible to prevent it. Southern mistresses kept domestic difficulties in the background or made merry over them. On the surface, domestic machinery might seem to move without a hitch, when in reality it was in so severe a state of dislocation that the semblance of smooth operation was little short of a miracle.

Reserves of cotton and tobacco that had escaped the attention of the Yankee Army sold high. Fortunate possessors were soon flush with greenbacks which were put in quick circulation. It was a case of a little new bonnet and an alpaca skirt with girls everywhere; women had done without clothes so long, they felt they just must have some now; our boys had gone in rags so long, they must have new clothes, too; everybody had lived so hard and been so sad, there must be joy now, love-making and dancing. The “Starvation Party” did not go out of fashion with war. Festal boards were often thinly spread, but one danced not the less lightly for that. Enough it was to wing the feet to know that the bronzed young soldier with his arm about your waist must leave you no more for the battle.

To show how little one could be festive on, we will take a peep at a starvation party given on a plantation near Lexington, North Carolina, by Mrs. Page, soon after General Kilpatrick’s troops vacated the mansion. “We had all been so miserable,” Mrs. Page tells, “that I was just bound to have some fun. So I gave a dining.”

She invited ten ladies, who all came wondering what on earth she could set before them. They walked; there was not a carriage in the neighbourhood. They were all cultured, refined women, wives and daughters of men of prominence, and accustomed to elegant entertainment. A few days before, one of them had sent to Mrs. Page for something to eat, saying she had not a mouthful in the house, and Mrs. Page had shared with her a small supply of Western pork and hardtack which her faithful coloured man, Frank, had gotten from the Yankees. Mrs. Page had now no pork left. Her garden had been destroyed. She had not a chair in the house, and but one cooking utensil, a large iron pot. And not a fork, spoon, cup, plate or other table appointment.

With pomp and merriment, Mrs. Drane, a clergyman’s widow, the company’s dean and a great favourite with everybody, was installed at the head of the bare, mutilated table, where rude benches served as seats. Mrs. Marmaduke Johnston, of Petersburg, was accorded second place of honour. The menu consisted of a pudding of corn-meal and dried whortle-berries sweetened with sorghum; and beer made of persimmons and honeyshucks, also sweetened with sorghum. The many-sided Frank was butler. The pudding, filling the half of a large gourd, was placed in front of Mrs. Drane, and she, using hardtack as spoon, dipped it up, depositing it daintily on other hardtack which answered for plates and saucers.

The beer was served from another gourd into cups made of newspapers folded into shape; the ladies drank quickly that the liquid might not soak through and be lost. They enjoyed the beverage and the pudding greatly and assured their hostess that they had rarely attended a more delightful feast. The pudding had been boiled in the large iron pot, and Frank had transferred it to the gourd. In his kitchen and pantry, gourds of various sorts and sizes seemed to ask: “Why were vessels of iron, pewter, and copper ever invented, and what need has the world of china-ware so long as we grow on the backyard fence?”

How Frank’s mistress, a frail-looking, hospitable, resourceful little woman, provided for herself and family and helped her friends out of next to nothing; how her cheerfulness, industry, and enterprise never failed her or others; and how Frank aided her, would in itself fill a book.

But then it is a story of Southern verve and inventiveness that could be duplicated over and over again.

Did not Sir George Campbell write in an English magazine of how much he enjoyed a dinner in a Southern mansion, when all the feast was a dish of roasted apples and a plate of corn-bread? Not a word of apology was uttered by his host or hostess; converse was so cultured and pleasing, welcome so sincere, that the poverty of the board was not to be weighed in the balance. This host who had so much and so little to give his guest was Colonel Washington Ball, nearest living kinsman to General George Washington.

The fall of 1865 was, in Virginia at least, a bountiful one. Planters’ sons had come home, gone into the fields, worked till the crop was all laid by; and then, there was no lack of gaiety. A favourite form of diversion was the tournament, which furnished fine sport for cavalry riders trained under Stuart and Fitz Lee.

One of the most brilliant took place in 1866, at a famous plantation on the North Anna River. The race-track had been beaten down smooth and hard beforehand by the daily training of knights. It was in a fair stretch of meadow-land beyond the lawns and orchards. The time was October, the weather ideal, the golden haze of Indian Summer mellowing every line of landscape. On the day appointed the grounds were crowded with carriages, wagonettes, buggies and vehicles of every sort, some very shabby, but borrowing brightness from the fair young faces within.

The knights were about twenty-five. Their steeds were not so richly caparisoned as Scott’s in “Ivanhoe,” but the riders bestrode them with perhaps greater ease and grace than heavy armor permitted mediæval predecessors. Some wore plumed hats that had covered their heads in real cavalry charges, and more than one warrior’s waist was girt with the red silk sash that had belted him when he rode at the head of his men as Fitz Lee’s captain. A number were in full Confederate uniform, carrying their gray jackets as jauntily as if no battle had ever been lost to them. One of these attracted peculiar attention. He was of very distinguished appearance; and from his arm floated a long streamer of crape. Every one was guessing his name till the herald cried: “Knight of Liberty Lost!” The mourning knight swept before the crowd, bearing off on the point of his spear the three rings which marked his victory for at least that run.

For this sport, three gibbet-like structures stand equal distances apart on a straight race-track. From the arm of each, a hook depends and on each hook a ring is hung. Each knight, with lance poised and aimed, rides full tilt down this track and takes off all the rings he can in a given number of rides. He who captures most rings is victor. It is his right to choose the Queen of Love and Beauty, riding up to her on the field and offering a ring upon his spear. The knight winning the second highest number chooses the First Maid of Honour; and so on, until there is a royal quartette of queen and maids.

The tournament was to the South what baseball is to the nation; it was intensely exciting and picturesque, and, by reason of the guerdon won, poetic, investing an ordinary mortal with such power as Paris exercised when he gave the golden apple to Venus. It had spice of peril to make it attractive, if “danger’s self is lure alone.” Fine horsemanship, a steady hand, and sure eye were essentials.

“Liberty Lost” won, and the mourning knight laid his laurels at the feet of a beautiful girl who has since reigned as a social queen in a Northern home. The coronation took place in the mansion that evening. After a flowery address, each knight knelt and offered a crown to his fair one. The symbols of royalty were wreaths of artificial flowers, the queen’s shaped like a coronet, with sprays forming points. Her majesty wore a gown that had belonged to her great-grandmother; very rich silk in a bayadere pattern, that served as becoming sheath for her slim blonde loveliness. After the coronation, the knights led their fair ones out in the “Royal Set” which opened the ball.

Perhaps it is better to say that George Walker, the negro fiddler, opened the ball. He was the most famous man of his craft in the Piedmont region. There he was that night in all his glory at the head of his band of banjoists, violinists and violincellist; he was grandeur and gloss personified when he made preliminary bow and flourish, held his bow aloft, and set the ball in motion!

“Honour yo’ pardners!”

“And didn’t we do as George told us to do!” Matoaca says. “Such dance-provoking melodies followed as almost bewitched one’s feet. ‘Life on the Ocean Wave,’ ‘Down-town Girls Won’t You Come Out Tonight and Dance by the Light of the Moon!’ ‘Fisher’s Horn-Pipe’ and ‘Ole Zip Coon’ were some of them. Not high-sounding to folks of today, but didn’t they make feet twinkle! People did what was called ‘taking steps’ in those days. I can almost hear George’s fiddle now, and hear him calling: ‘Ladies to the right! Gents to the right! Ladies to the center! Gents to the center! Hands all ’roun’ an’ promenade all!’ Who could yell ‘Do se do!’ and ‘Sashay all!’ with such a swing?”

About one o’clock all marched in to supper, the queen and her knights and maidens leading. It was hard times in Virginia, but the table groaned under such things as folks then thought ought to adorn a festal board. There was not lacking the mighty saddle-o’-mutton, roast pig with apple in his mouth, Smithfield ham, roast turkey, and due accompaniments. The company marched back to the ball-room, and presently marched again to a second supper embracing sweets of all descriptions.

Commencements at schools and colleges, which the South began to restore and refill as quickly as she was able, brought the young people together and were strong features in our social life. So were Sunday schools; and, in the country, protracted meetings or religious revivals. And barbecues. Who that has gone out to a frolic in the Southern woods and feasted on shote or mutton roasted over a pit and basted with vinegar and red pepper gravy, can forget what a barbecue is!

Summer resorts became again meeting-grounds for old friends, and new. Social gatherings at the Greenbrier White Sulphur were notable. General Lee was there with his daughter, and the first to lead in extending courtesies to Northern guests attracted to the White by the reputation of that famous watering-place. Again, our women were at their ancient haunts, wearing silks and laces as they were prospering under the new order or as their great-grandmothers’ trunks, like that of Love and Beauty’s Queen, held reserves not yet exhausted. And under the silks and laces, hearts cried out for loved ones who would gather on the green lawns and dance in the great halls no more. But heroism presented a smiling face and took up life’s measure again.

In cities changes were not so acute as in the country, where people, without horses and vehicles, were unable to visit each other. The larger the planter, the more extreme his family’s isolation was like to be, his land and his neighbours’ lands stretching for miles between houses. I heard a planter’s wife say, “Yours is the first white woman’s face I have seen for six months.” Her little daughter murmured mournfully: “And I haven’t seen a little white girl to play with for longer than that.” Multitudes who had kept open house could no longer. To a people in whom the social instinct was so strong and hospitality second nature, abrupt ending of neighbourly intercourse was a hard blow.

Stay and bankrupt laws for the benefit of the debtor class and bearing much hardship on creditors, often orphan minors, were passed, and under these planters were sold out and moved to new places, their overseers often succeeding them and reigning in their stead. It was not an unknown thing for men to manage to get themselves sold out under these laws, thus evading payment of obligations and at the same time securing a certain quota for themselves, which the law allowed. It seemed to me that many who took it were better off than before. There were unfortunates who had to pay security debts for bankrupts. Much hard feeling was engendered.

Some measure for relief of the debtor class was necessary. A man who had contracted debts on the basis of thousands of acres at fifteen to fifty dollars an acre, and owning a hundred or more negroes, worth a thousand dollars each, could not meet in full such engagements when his land would not bring two dollars an acre, when his negroes were set free, and hired labour, if he had wherewithal to hire, could not be relied on. Some men took the Bankrupt Law for protection, then set themselves to work and paid obligations which could not be exacted by law.

THE BONDAGE OF THE FREE

CHAPTER XVI
The Bondage of the Free

“Had slavery lasted a few years longer,” I have heard my mother say, “it would have killed Julia, my head-woman, and me. Our burden of work and responsibility was simply staggering.”

In the ante-bellum life of the mistress of a Southern plantation there was no menial occupation, but administrative work was large and exacting. The giving out of rations, clothes, medicines, nursing of the sick, cutting out of garments, sewing, spinning, knitting, had to be directed. The everlasting teaching and training, the watch-care of sometimes several hundred semi-civilized, semi-savage people of all ages, dispositions and tempers, were on the white woman’s hands.

The kitchen was but one department of that big school of domestic science, the home on a Southern plantation, where cooks, nurses, maids, butlers, seamstresses and laundresses had understudies or pupils; and the white mistress, to whom every student’s progress was a matter of keen personal interest and usually of affectionate concern, was principal and director. The typical Southern plantation was, in effect, a great social settlement for the uplift of Africans.

For a complete picture of plantation life, I beg my readers to turn to that chapter in the “Life of Leonidas Polk” written by his son, Dr. W. M. Polk, which describes “Leighton” in the sugar-lands on Bayou La Fourche. Read of the industrial work and then of the Sabbath, when the negroes assembled in the bishop’s house where the chaplain conducted the service while the bishop sat at the head of his servants. Worship over, women withdrew into another room, where Mrs. Polk or the family governess gave them instruction; the children into still another, where Bishop Polk’s daughter taught them; the men remained with the chaplain for examination and admonition. The bishop made great efforts to preserve the sanctity of family life among his servants. He christened their babies; their weddings were celebrated in his own home, decorated and illuminated for them. The honour coveted by his children was to hold aloft the silver candlesticks while their father read the marriage service. If a couple misbehaved, they were compelled to marry, but without a wedding-feast.

Andrew P. Calhoun, eldest son of John C. Calhoun, was President of the South Carolina Agricultural College and owner of large lands in Alabama and South Carolina. He took pride in raising everything consumed on his plantations. In the New York home of his son, Mr. Patrick Calhoun, three of his old servants live; his wife’s maid says proudly: “I have counted thirty things on my Miss’ dinner-table that were grown on the place.” Cotton and wool were grown on the place and carded, spun, dyed, woven into cloth by negro women; in great rooms, well lighted, well aired, well equipped, negro cutters, fitters and seamstresses fashioned neat and comfortable garments for a contented, well-cared-for laboring force. Mrs. Calhoun devoted as much time to this department of plantation work, which included the industrial and moral education of negro women, as Mr. Calhoun devoted to the general management of his lands and the industrial and moral uplift of negro men. The Polk and Calhoun plantations were types of thousands; and their owners types of thousands of planters who applied the same principles, if sometimes on lesser scale, to farming operations. No institutional work can take the place of work of this kind. It is like play to the real thing. Without decrying Hampton, Petersburg and Tuskegee, it can be said with truth that these institutions and many more in combination would be unable to do for a savage race what the old planters and the old plantation system of the South did for Africa’s barbarians. Employers of white labor might sit at the feet of those old planters and learn wisdom. Professor Morrison, of the Chair of History and Sociology at Clemson College, tells me that the instruction of students in their duty to their servants constituted a recognised department in some Southern colleges.

Mammy Julia was my mother’s assistant superintendent, so to speak. “I could trust almost anything to her,” her mistress bore testimony, “for she appreciated responsibility and was faithfulness itself. I don’t know a negro of the new order who can hold a candle to her.” Mammy Julia and my mother had no rest night or day. Black folks were coming with troubles, wants, quarrels, ailments, births, marriages and deaths, from morning till night and night till morning again. “I was glad and thankful – on my own account – when slavery ended and I ceased to belong, body and soul, to my negroes.” As my mother, so said other Southern mistresses.

Perhaps the Southern matron’s point of view may be somewhat surprising to those who have thought that under ante-bellum conditions, slavery was all on the negro’s side and that all Southern people were fiercely bent on keeping him in bonds. Many did not believe in slavery and were trying to end it.

Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s father and uncle freed some five hundred slaves, with General Lee’s approval, thus alienating from her over $500,000 worth of property. The Hampton family, of South Carolina, sent to Liberia a great colony of freed slaves, who presently plead to be brought home. General Preston, Confederate, of Kentucky, freed his negroes; he would not sell, and could not afford to keep, them; they were “over-running and ruining his plantation, and clearing up forests for firewood; slavery is the curse of the South.”

Many families had arranged for a gradual emancipation, a fixed percentage of slaves being freed by each generation. By will and otherwise, they provided against division of families, an evil not peculiar to slavery, as immigrant ships of today, big foundling asylums, and train-loads of home-seeking children bear evidence.

But freedom as it came, was inversion, revolution. Whenever I pass “The House Upside Down” at a World’s Fair, I am reminded of the South after freedom. In “South Carolina Women in the Confederacy,”¹² Mrs. Harby tells how Mrs. Postell Geddings was in the kitchen getting Dr. Geddings’ supper, while her maid, in her best silk gown, sat in the parlour and entertained Yankee officers. Charleston ladies cooked, swept, scrubbed, split wood, fed horses, milked and watered the cattle; while filling their own places as feminine heads of the house, they were servants-of-all-work and man of the house. Mrs. Crittendon gives an anecdote matching Mrs. Geddings’. A Columbia lady saw in Sherman’s motley train an old negress arrayed in her mistress’ antiquated, ante-bellum finery, lolling on the cushions of her mistress’ carriage, and fanning (in winter) with a huge ostrich-feather fan. “Why, Aunt Sallie, where are you going?” she called out impulsively. “Law, honey! I’se gwine right back intuh de Union!” and on rode Aunt Sallie, feathers and flowers on her enormous poke-bonnet all a-flutter.

Mrs. Jewett, of Stony Creek, saw her negro man walking behind the Yankee Army with her husband’s suit of clothes done up in a red silk handkerchief and slung on a stick over his shoulder. Her two mulatto nurse-girls laid down their charges, attired themselves in her best apparel and went; her seamstress stopped sewing, jumped on a horse behind a soldier who invited her, and away she rode.

As victorious armies went through the country, they told the negroes, “You are free!” Negroes accepted the tidings in different ways. Old Aunt Hannah was not sure but that the assurance was an insult. “Law, marster!” she said, “I ain’ no free nigger! I is got a marster an’ mistiss! Dee right dar in de great house. Ef you don’ b’lieve me, you go dar an’ see.” “You’re a d – d fool!” he cried and rode on. “Sambo, you’re free!” Some negroes picked up the master’s saddle, flung it on the master’s horse, jumped on his back and rode away with the Yankees. After every Yankee army swarmed a great black crowd on foot, men, women, and children. They had to be fed and cared for; they wearied their deliverers.

Yankees told my father’s negroes they were free, but they did not accept the statement until “Ole Marster” made it. I remember the night. They were called together in the back yard – a great green space with blossomy altheas and fruit-trees and tall oaks around, and the scent of honeysuckles and Sweet Betseys making the air fragrant. He stood on the porch beside a table with a candle on it. I, at his knee, looked up at him and out on the sea of uplifted black faces. Some carried pine torches. He read from a paper, I do not know what, perhaps the emancipation proclamation. They listened silently. Then he spoke, his voice trembling:

“You do not belong to me any more. You are free. You have been like my own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account to Him of how I raised you, how I treated you. I want you all to do well. You will have to work, if not for me, for somebody else. Heretofore, you have worked for me and I have supported you, fed you, clothed you, given you comfortable homes, paid your doctors’ bills, bought your medicines, taken care of your babies before they could take care of themselves; when you were sick, your mistress and I have nursed you; we have laid your dead away. I don’t think anybody else can have the same feeling for you that she and I have. I have been trying to think out a plan for paying wages or a part of the crop that would suit us all; but I haven’t finished thinking it out. I want to know what you think. Now, you can stay just as you have been staying and work just as you have been working, and we will plan together what is best. Or, you can go. My crops must be worked, and I want to know what arrangements to make. Ben! Dick! Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell me if you mean to stay; you needn’t promise for longer than this year, you know. If you want to go somewhere else, say so – and no hard thoughts!”

The long line passed. One and all they said: “I gwi stay wid you, Marster.” A few put it in different words. Uncle Andrew, the dean of the body, with wool as white as snow, a widower who went sparking every Sunday in my grandfather’s coat and my grandfather’s silk hat, said: “Law, Marster! I ain’ got nowhar tuh go ef I was gwine!” Some wiped their eyes, and my father had tears in his.

Next morning, old Uncle Eph, Andrew’s mate, was missing; his aged wife was in great distress. She came to my father reproachfully: “Marster,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’ put all dat foolishness ’bout freedom in Eph’s hade. He so ole I dunno what gwi become uh him ’long de road. When I wake up dis mo’nin’, he done tied all his close up in his hankercher and done lit out.” In a few days he returned, the butt of the quarters for many a day. “I jes wanter see whut it feel lak tuh be free,” he said, “an’ I wanter to go back to Ole Marster’s plantation whar I was born. It don’ look de same dar, an’ I done see nuff uh freedom.”

Presently my father was making out contracts and explaining them over and over; he would sign his name, the negro would make his mark, the witnesses sign; and the bond for a year’s work and wages or part of the crop, was complete. At first, contracts had to be ratified by a Freedmen’s Bureau agent, who charged master and servant each fifty cents or more. After one of our neighbours told his negroes they were free, they all promised to stay, as had ours. Next morning all but two were gone. In a few days all returned. The Bureau Agent had made them come back.

Many negroes leaving home fared worse than Uncle Eph. After the fall of Richmond, Mr. Hill, who had been a high official of the Confederacy, went back to his plantation, where he found but three negroes remaining, the rest having departed for Washington, the negro heaven. One of these, a man of seventy, said he must go, too. His ex-master could not dissuade him. He was comfortably quartered and Mr. Hill told him he would be cared for the rest of his life. Nothing would do but he must sell his chickens and his little crop of tobacco to one of the other negroes and go. Mr. Hill gave him provisions for ten days, had the wagon hitched up and sent him to Culpeper, where he was to take the train. On Culpeper’s outskirts was the usual collection of negroes, snack-house, bad whiskey, gambling, and kindred evils. Here Uncle John stopped. He had started with $15 cash. In less than a week his money was gone and he was thrown out on the common.