CHAPTER I
As the usages of society generally require an introduction between strangers before communications of any moment can transpire, I hasten now to introduce myself, that the readers hereof, as yet strangers, but whom I hope before long familiarly to call “gentle” and “dear,” may acquire at least one element of interest in the narrative I propose to offer, namely, acquaintance with its subject – modesty forbids me to say hero.
I am, then, at your service, John – ; no, I cannot call my own name, it always sounds strange in my own mouth. I’ll hand you my card in a moment; and while I am fingering nervously in my case for the best engraved one I reflect:
Why should you listen with the slightest attention to my history? How can I expect you to care any more for me and my affairs, than for anybody else and anybody else’s affairs? What right have I to inflict upon you a recital of events, in no way connected with yourself, that three-fourths of you believe untrue, and that concerns parties you never saw and perhaps never will see? None, reader, none!
All the attention you give must be entirely gratuitous, except what I shall gain by tickling the selfish side of your nature; for I well know that you like or dislike a book in proportion as yourselves are flattered. This flattery, however, must not be the result of the author’s effort, but your own. If the persons told of are beneath you in morals or intellect, then it is pleasant to reflect on your own superiority. Are they above you in these particulars? then you are pleased to associate with them, so to speak, and to assign to yourselves, in imagination, a similarity of conduct, under similar circumstances. The book must also possess an ingenuity of thought and expression that will make you conscious, to a flattering extent, of your own ingenuity in detecting it. Hence, often the most pleasant books to read are those that tell of simple things in such a way that you exclaim:
“I could have written that myself, if I had only thought of it.”
To afford self-complacent comparisons to the conceited, to furnish evidences of their own ingenuity to the soi-disant original, and to give conscious improvement to the soberly studious, is a more difficult task than I can undertake. I will simply tell my story, and leave the self-bees to suck what honey they please out of it.
Ah! I have at last found it. Here is my card:
You smile; you know me? No, I beg pardon, I have never had the honor of your acquaintance. You may have known some of the Smiths, but not the members of our immediate family. John is an old family name with us. My father, grand and great grandfather, were all named John; in fact we could ascend the family tree six squares, without getting out of the Johns; and even the seventh, who was an H (H. T. Smith), was preceded by numerous Johns, only to be distinguished from each other by the middle initials. There was a John A. Smith, and a John B. Smith, and a John C. Smith; coming down so alphabetically that I used to think, when a child, that, as father and myself only had John for our names, a great many Smiths, whose names were lost, had already lived, and used up the balance of the alphabet for their middle initials.
Our family is a very large one, being represented in almost every nation on the globe; but its vast extent is a matter of pride, not reproach, with me. When I remember the long list of Warriors, Statesmen, Scholars, and the immense army of Usemen it has given to the world, I conceive that the world owes the name a debt of gratitude, and, being one of the creditors, I expect partial payment at least.
The name itself points to an artizan origin, but the sieve of centuries has filtered our blood clear of the last dust of the anvil, and it throbs in our veins with Heraclidean purity. Perhaps the majority of my connections were men of humble birth, but where the number is so immense, we can claim only those that are creditable. Consequently, the aforesaid tree, hanging up in our library, with dusty, tarnished frame, and an age-yellowed parchment, presented a very mottled appearance of groups of very little blocks, with very little “Smiths” written on them, and very large blocks, their names spelt in capitals, and with broad red lines connecting them to us. These last were Smiths who attained to something and were worth claiming. Away off in one corner, with a great quantity of zigzag lines to make it even connect at all, was the name of John Smith, with “Capt.” prefixed, and the date 1609. Father used to take me on his knee, when I grew old enough to listen, and tell me long stories about my brave relative, who had fought with the Turks, slept on straw, (a fact which led me to believe that he was also a kinsman of Margaret Daw), dared the Indians, looked calmly at Powhatan’s lifted club, and then flirted with his gentle protectress, Pocahontas. Her descendants, in Virginia, father told me, always claimed kin with our family, though the relationship was based entirely on this approximation to matrimony between our ancestors. I remember well that I did not wish to recognise, as relatives, the children of the mulatto her picture represented her to be; and I insisted that they be put down with the little blocks and little Smiths, until he informed me that many of them had become distinguished; and while it was quite a disgrace in society to have had a dark ancestor with kinky hair, it was quite an honor to have had a dark ancestor with straight hair. I have seen, in life, since then, that social distinction often turns upon less than the crook of a hair.
For our immediate family there were father and mother and I, after I came.
My father was wealthy, owning a very large plantation near Goldsboro, a fine residence in Wilmington, N. C., and some heavy renting real estate in New York.
Possessing the means for it, he was fond of display, and stood among the neighbors, in the country, as a proud, though popular man. They admired his pride because it was above their envy, while his uniform courtesy and kindness flattered all with whom he had intercourse. His carriage at elections was sure to be welcomed with cheers, as it drove on the grounds, though he could never be persuaded to dabble in the turbulent waters of politics. In town, some loved, some envied, but all respected him. His perfect integrity, his generosity, and his social qualities, secured for him, at all times, a large circle of friends, while there were some who, feeling socially equal, were surpassed by him in character, both in their own eyes and in public opinion; these, of course, regarded him with some disfavor.
But of mother no tongue spoke evil. Every one possesses a distinguishing idiosyncrasy; hers was goodness – all that was comprehended under St. Paul’s “charity.” There was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal about her life; it was one of unselfish love, active benevolence, holy influence, and unassuming piety. I believe that the only command in the Bible she could not obey was, “Take up thy cross,” for her angelic temperament made every duty a pleasure, and every sacrifice a source of happiness. Nor was she only theoretically good. She put her faith into constant practice. When her pew was vacant at church, the doctor was sure to be our visitor; the pupils in her Sabbath school class made an entire transfer of the affections they should have reserved for their own mothers to her; and our servants refrained from any insolence and disobedience out of the purest respect for her – a perfect anomaly in slavery. The meanest hut in town could boast her presence if there was sickness within its walls; and our dining-room servants brought a salver and napkin for charity delicacies as regularly as they laid the cloth. Yet her charity was not of that order which begins anywhere else but at home; everyone in our house felt that she had a deep interest in them. Her smile was almost constant, and when she did reprove there was a tone of regret about her words, as if they pained her more than they did the recipient.
She and father were very happy together, though they lacked congeniality. He was fond of display and gaiety, she fond of retirement and quiet; his heart chiefly on the world, her’s all on heaven; he haughty though courteous, she gentle and kind; he formal, she good natured and easy in her every manner.
Father was a Polonius about dress, believing it should be “costly as thy purse can buy;” and he inundated mother’s wardrobe with silks, brocade and velvets, and constantly replenished her bijouterie with jewels of rare value, till she was as much bewildered as Miss McFlimsey, from a cause just the reverse. I have often smiled to see her, just to please father, start to church in a magnificent train and exquisite bonnet, looking for all the world like a poor dove, dressed in peacock’s plumage.
But I must not plunge into affairs too rapidly. Having given this short prologue before the curtain, I will now let it rise upon the first scene.
Ring the bell!
CHAPTER II
I was apparently expected, for, as I have been credibly informed, an extensive wardrobe had been prepared for me, and a whole drawer in the bureau appropriated for its storage. The said wardrobe consisted of several long sacerdotal robes, of the finest cambric; a dozen or more very unsacerdotal looking nether garments of linen and cambric, ruffled and trimmed with thread lace; a number of gowns of rich material; also a couple of flannel skirts, heavily embroidered, and seemingly intended only to tangle the feet; and quite a pile of unmentionables, with necessary fastenings.
There was also an elegant India muslin robe, trimmed with embroidery and fretted with lace, and a handsome lace cap, laid apart to themselves. These, as I afterwards learned, were intended for my baptismal suit.
I have thus particularized, because I am rather proud of having come into property so early.
One blustering night in the latter part of March I arrived, invaded the wardrobe, and appeared next morning on a pillow of state, ready to receive company. My appearance could not have been excessively prepossessing, as I formed no exception to the usual standard of æsthetic attainment exhibited by the little red monsters of my age. My hair was very thin and peach-fuzzy; eyes of uncertain hue, and apparently disgusted with the world and its sights, if we may judge from the persistency with which they kept the puffy, lashless lids closed; a dusty little forehead, that wrinkled so much when the eyes did open that one would suppose I had seen trouble, and “had losses” in the world from which I had so recently come; my mouth, purple and projecting with the upper lip, while the under lip was sucked in, after the most approved directions for pronouncing the Greek phi. The sleeves of my wrapper were rather too long (the usual fault in our first clothes, arising, perhaps, from the fact that while they are in process of construction there is no opportunity of trying them on us), and were rolled up around my tight-closed fists, which kept digging into my eyes with prize-fighting pertinacity.
The day following my advent being Sunday, and the place of my birth being in the country, many of the neighbors dropped in to see Mrs. Smith and the baby. All went through the same programme.
“How d’ye do, Mrs. Smith; I hope you came through well; but then this is your first. There’s nothing like getting used to it. And where’s the little dear?”
And without waiting for my mother’s replies and thanks, they would turn to the nurse holding me in her lap on the pillow, and removing the wrapping from my face as carefully as if it were a bird, and would fly out, they would gaze at me mesmerically, cluck to me with a perseverance undamped by the want of effect, and finally turn away with the defiant assertion that I was the perfect image of both my parents; an assertion which would have been at least debatable, from the fact that my father was very dark in complexion and feature, and my mother very fair. Some even insisted on holding me, the spinster visitors being particularly desirous of this privilege; and getting me in their laps, they would examine the tightness of my clothing, and the temperature of my skin, with the well assumed criticism of experience. And if one found, on thrusting her hands beneath my clothes, that my feet were cold, most proudly and complacently she would unfold my garments, and expose my little splotched limbs to the fire. My feet and legs must have looked very pitiful indeed, sticking out of a wilderness of flannel like two slim beets, crossing each other with their little flat soles, as if I was born to be a tailor!
When the visitors were gone my father would come and gaze long and steadily into my face, then anxiously suggest that something must be the matter with me, because I was lying so still; and my mother would call for me to be brought to her, and after innumerable fixings, adjusting the cloth over my face this way, turning my head that way, hiding the point of one pin, pulling out another, straightening this and that fold of a garment – after all these nervousnesses, peculiar to young mothers, I would be found to be sleeping soundly; and then mother would regale herself with a long conversation between us, though it is more than probable she monopolized the talking.
But as my presence, so important to one household, had no effect whatever upon the old monarch of the glass and scythe, the days still managed to glide by, and with the crying spell at the morning bath, the troublesome feeding, father’s fidgets and mother’s anxiety, I arrived at the first era in baby life —noticing. What an important period! How many things were tried to attract my attention! Father whistled and clucked his mouth almost away; Aunt Hannah, my nurse, coming with my bottle, would tinkle on it with her thimble and sputter her lips to draw my blinking eyes towards her, and mother shook, successively and constantly, all her different bunches of keys over my face, in the vain endeavor to discover my favorite. Unconscious I, all the while lying on my back, vacantly staring to see the sounds. Mother now being able to sit up, it was her constant delight to have me in her lap, treating me as if I were a doll, and she a girl of ten; trying vainly to part and brush my scanty hair, making me sit up, while she kept my limber neck steady with one careful hand; and wearing my palms out teaching me to “patty cake.” And such air castles as she would build for me! Telling me with as much emphasis as if I understood it all, and with each word, giving me a soft peck on the cheek with her forefinger.
“Never mind, tweetness! we’ll do ‘way from this old country house soon, and live in the town, and then, oh! the putty things Johnnie will have! A putty ‘ittle tarriage and a g’eat big yocking horse, with a long mane and tail, and a ‘ittle g’een wagon, and a ‘ittle black dog, and ah! so many, many putties for a tweet ‘ittle boy.” Then chattering my chin in her ecstasy of love, till the titillation made me draw my face into a shape that might, by a very wide stretch of the imagination, be called a smile, she would scream for father to witness my display of intelligence. He, of course, would not believe it till I was chattered again; but instead of the laugh, the concussion of my gums would produce such plaintive wails that mother would apologise, with all the pleonasm of baby talk, and soothingly request me to “there, then, darling!”
My extreme youth prevented me from seeing the exact philosophy of “there then-ing” under pain, and I would continue my vocale till something more palatable to baby taste than baby talk would stop my mouth, and sleep’s gentle wing would fan away my tears.
How long would a mother’s patience watch my slumbers while she mused on the strange responsibility of her position! A soul given to her to form for good or evil; the potter’s clay placed in her hands to make a vessel unto honor or dishonor! How fervent her prayer: “O, Father, guide me to guide him!”
What an impostor is the slumbering babe! His tiny hand, resting in dimpled fairness on your breast, seems to lift the veil of Futurity, and open to your view the brightest paths of flowery beauty, down which his feet shall patter with the innocence of childhood, run with the eager ambition of youth, stride with the honors of manhood, and totter with the feebleness of old age into the grave o’er which towers the marble tribute of a nation’s love. Were the real curtain lifted, and Life’s true pathway shown, how Earth’s timid ones would shrink from its thorns and poisons, its bubble hopes and bitter cups. Thank God the Future is hidden, but the promise stands: “As thy days are, so shall thy strength be.”
CHAPTER III
The year, growing old, began to feel ashamed of the jaunty green in which the spring and summer had decked him, and was laying aside his verdant garments, leaf by leaf, for the more dignified russet of autumn, when we – that is to say, father, mother and myself – prepared to return to our winter residence in Wilmington. I, of course, have no recollection of the journey, but have since been told that I stood it like a little soldier, though whether diminutive stature has anything to do with military fortitude I leave to nursery disputants to settle; as I believe their invariable encouragement to patience and endurance is the example of a fictitious officer of small size. The man has never been a child who has not been requested to take a dose of physic or bear a mustard plaster like a little captain, thereby inspiring himself with the greatest respect and admiration for the immense deglutitory capacity of that functionary, and the callosity of his epidermis.
The winter in turn passed away, and another spring and summer in the country, and we were returning again to town in the Fall, before I can begin to recollect things on my own account. What vague, undefined and grotesque memories they are! The carriage in which we travelled seems now to have been a chaos of shawls and baskets, from which father, mother and Aunt Hannah protruded helplessly, like pictures of fairies coming out of flowers. It was very cloudy, or at least everything now seems to have been gray when we started. The wheels commenced humming a drowsy tune, as they rolled through the sand, and soon hummed me to sleep; and when I awoke the carriage was going backward, and the sun had come out in the wrong place. Then we stopped at a well, near a house with a fat, wooden chimney, and an aspen tree in front, whose leaves seemed to be blinking all their eyes at me. A man in a broad-flapped hat came out with a gourd in his hand, and behind him a large yellow dog, that was tied to a piece of wood, and barked and jumped on each side of the string as if he wanted to shake it off. The well had a long pole, with a bucket at one end and a large stone at the other; and when Horace, our driver, went to it to draw some water for the horses, the stone seemed to fly up to the clouds. Then Horace filled the bucket and carried it to the horses, and I could hear them kissing it, as if they were so glad to see it; and, while I was listening at that, the man with the hat and dog handed in, at the carriage window, the great cool-looking gourd, with a long, crooked handle, down into which the water clicked, as if laughing, when father held it to me to drink.
After I had been bidden to “thank the kind gentleman, Johnnie,” and done so, Horace strapped the bucket again under the carriage, got up to his seat, and the house and well moved back out of sight, just as the man sent the stone flying up again to the sky. All is a blank for a long time – till Horace drives over a snake, and they hold me up to the window to see it. My eyes can discover nothing but the shadow of the bucket swinging between the wheels; and ever afterwards a bucket, under one of the old fashioned carriages, is associated with a dead snake and a hot, sandy road. There is another sleepy blank, and I drowsily rouse up, as we drive into town, to find it dark, and the lights all in a hurry to go somewhere, chasing each other by the carriage window, till one bold blaze stops right in front of it, and father exclaims, “Here we are!”
We get out, shawls, chaos and all, and I am carried up some broad stone steps, into a large hall with bright lights, and on through to a strange room, where there are new faces among the servants, a little excrescence of a fireplace, filled with red coals, and a large table steaming with good smelling dishes. Everything, for an indefinite period after this, is confused and unsatisfactory, and I can eliminate nothing into distinct recollection but two series of events, which, from their frequent repetition, have become facts of memory, viz., rides in my little carriage, and, in educational phrase, corrections; more plainly, whippings.
What tortures I suffered in my carriage, children alone know. Enclosed on three sides by the leather curtains, I was confined in front by a strap, which was buckled across my breast, to keep me from falling out, and, thus cooped up like a criminal, I would sit, listening to the grinding, gritty sound of the wheels as they rolled over the flag stones, bumping my head against the framework, knocking my cap awry, and not knowing how to put it straight again, and suffering the misery of whining without being noticed – a source of much affliction, by the way, to many grown-up children – my nurse all the while walking behind, and pushing me along, engaged in too deep a conversation with other nurses to heed my murmuring!
One of my sorest trials was to pass the stores, and have some pert clerk stop my carriage and say:
“Hello! Auntie, whose child is that?”
“Col. Smith’s, sir.”
“Why,” coming to me, and squatting down by the carriage, “I’ll declare, he’s a fine little fellow. How d’ye do, sir.”
“Tell the gentleman how d’ye,” persuades Aunt Hannah, who, like all nurses, is flattered by compliments to her protégé; but, before I can turn away in disgust, his tobacco-smelling moustache scratches my face. My greatest consolation, in all this persecution, was to meet little Lulie Mayland, my assigned sweetheart, though I was rather young for the blind god’s arrow. Our nurses would lift us from our carriages and hold us up to kiss each other; and I would be in a perfect glee as she tried to put her little plump fingers into my eyes, and I felt her moist little mouth on my cheek. Putting me down in the foot of her carriage, we would be rolled home together, as happy and joyous as children only can be.
The other series of events to which I have alluded were, from their very frequency, fixed still more indelibly upon my mind; though the intense activity of certain cognitive faculties, during their occurrence, may have contributed somewhat to their retention. They were the immediate and inevitable consequence of any recusancy, on my part, in regard to the rules of the bath. I possessed the usual hydrophobic prejudice of extreme youth, and dreaded morning ablutions as Rome did the Gauls. Had I been old enough to have managed the bath myself I should not have cared, but to be washed like a dish, put into the tub, and spongeful after spongeful squeezed over me, was more than my good nature could submit to. Mother, finding her reasoning wasted, and her commands disregarded, would send for switches, and laying me across her lap, pour hot embers, as it seemed to me, on my naked legs. I did not stop to debate, which I might have done with propriety, whether the friction developed the latent heat of the rods, or whether they were actually set on fire and then applied; I simply recognized the fact, that unless the bath came the fire did, and I wisely chose the former. The embers’ influence would last, on an average, about two days, when they would have to be again applied.