From H. W.
Pine Grove, April 29. Our days pass pretty much after this fashion. Mr. Philbrick gets up about six, calls me, and I obey, having stipulated for a full hour in which to dress. After we get downstairs it takes the united efforts of most of the family to get the breakfast on the table, and we are fortunate if we get up from that meal by half-past eight. It generally consists of hominy, very delicious eaten with either milk, butter, or molasses, corn-cake, or waffles of corn-flour—the best of their kind—concentrated coffee, chocolate, or tea, army bread—when we can get it—crackers, when we can’t, and boiled eggs or fried fish, as the case may be. The important operations of dish-washing and arranging the rooms upstairs take longer than you can imagine, and things are not always done when I go to school at ten, which with our simple style of living is rather a nuisance. H. begins to pity the Southern housekeepers. This morning, after making the starch in our little kitchen in the house, she waited about for two hours, before she could get hold of one of the three servants. They were all off at the kitchen, smoking and talking and taking things easy. Joe was nominally cleaning knives, Flora had gone to empty a pail of water, and Sukey had no thought about her starched clothes!
Well, I walk off to school, under the white umbrella if the sun shines, dressed as warmly as I can if it does not. My way lies between a row of large “Heshaberry” trees, as the negroes call them; a corruption, I suppose, of Asia Berry, as it is the “Pride of Asia,” in full blossom now, with scent something like our lilac, but more delicate. On each side of these trees are the corn-houses, stables, cotton-houses, and near the house a few cabins for house-servants, and the well. They stretch an eighth of a mile, when a gate (left open) shuts off the nigger-house and field. Another eighth brings me to the cabins, which have trees scattered among them, figs and others. The children begin to gather round me before I get there, with their bow and curtsey and “goo’ mornin, Marm,” and as I go through the quarters I send them in to wash their hands and faces. The praise-house reached, one of the children rings the bell out of the door to summon all, and they gather quickly, some to be sent off to wash their faces—alas, they cannot change their clothes, which are of the raggedest. But now enough clothes have come to begin to sell, I hope to have a better dressed set before long. I keep them in for about two hours—there are about thirty of the little ones who come in the morning, ten and under; all older are in the field, and come in the afternoon, as they finish work by noon always.
I go back to lunch at half-past twelve, a cold one generally, sometimes a few waffles or some hominy for variety, but crackers, sardines, and blackberries which we have in abundance now, make a refreshing meal, with tea or coffee when we please. Shop24 has to be tended in the afternoon principally, and I sometimes take a turn at it till I go off at half-past three to school again. We use for shop the little room between Mr. G.’s and the entry, selling out of the window over a box for a counter, to the groups on the porch. It is a funny sight and funny work for us, albeit interesting, for they have had no clothes for a year, and buy eagerly. Mr. Philbrick has not been able to let them have any clothing before, as there has only been enough to give a garment to one in ten, and they have been so used to being treated alike that their jealousy is very easily roused, and it is a difficult matter to deal with them. For the same reason the clothes have to be sold, the money going back to the Commission, to be used again for their benefit. It would be very much better if only the goods were sent, for they prefer to make their own clothes and all know how to sew.
These people show their subserviency in the way they put Marm or Sir into their sentences every other word and emphasize it as the one important word, and in always agreeing to everything you say. In school it is rather annoying to have them say, “Yes Marm, ’zackly Marm,” before it is possible for an idea to have reached their brains.
Flora, our housemaid, who is a character, has a great deal of dignity and influence among the other negroes, and takes the greatest care of us. She is most jealous for what she considers our interests, and moreover is quite an interpreter, though it is hard enough to understand her sometimes. “Learning” with these people I find means a knowledge of medicine, and a person is valued accordingly. Flora wanted to know how much “learning” Miss Helen25 had had, and it was a long time before I could make out what she meant.
H. says she never saw me look so well, so you see I thrive in spite of fleas, which have almost flayed me alive. I understand what it means by eels getting used to being skinned.
May 1. Took a ride through the quarters. We stopped to see Doll and her week-old baby. H. had quite a talk with Mily, the nurse, who told her it did them good to see white ladies about, and hoped we were going to stay. She seemed very much disappointed when H. told her we should be here [at Pine Grove] only a short time longer. I think it does them good just to have me walk through the quarters four times a day—they always curtsey and say a word.
In the afternoon, as I came out of school, Cuffy said, “You promise to jine praise with we some night dis week, Missus,” so I told him I would go up in the evening if Mr. G. would go with me. When we went up after eight they were just lighting the two candles. I sat down on the women’s side next a window, and one of the men soon struck up a hymn in which the others joined and which seemed to answer the purpose of a bell, for the congregation immediately began to assemble, and after one or two hymns, Old Peter offered a prayer, using very good language, ending every sentence with “For Jesus’ sake.” He prayed for us, Massa and Missus, that we might be “boun’ up in de belly-band of faith.” Then Mr. G. read to them and made a few remarks to which they listened very attentively; then some hymn-singing, Cuffy deaconing out the lines two at a time. Then some one suddenly started up and pronounced a sort of benediction, in which he used the expression “when we done chawing all de hard bones and swallow all de bitter pills.” They then shook hands all round, when one of the young girls struck up one of their wild songs, and we waited listening to them for twenty minutes more. It was not a regular “shout,”26 but some of them clapped their hands, and they stamped in time. It was very difficult to understand the words, though there was so much repetition that I generally managed to make out a good deal, but could not remember it much, still less the music, which is indescribable, and no one person could imitate it at all. As we walked home we asked Cuffy if they considered the “shout” as part of their religious worship; he said yes, that “it exercise the frame.” Mr. G. told him that some of the old people had told him they did not like the shouts, or think them religious, but he said old Binah did not object to them in the praise-house, but she did not like the shout “out in de world,” i. e. before they joined the Church or came to “strive behind the Elders.” He makes his own hymns, “praying to de Lord Jesus to teach him as he in de woods—jine one word ’ginst toder.” They were almost unintelligible as he deaconed them out, but I daresay they were his own, unconsciously caught, perhaps, in part from what he had heard in the white people’s church. The only song I could remember ran somewhat after this fashion:
Oh, Jacob’s ladder.
Climb high, climb higher!
Oh sodier of de jubilee,
When you git dere ’member me,
Oh! sodier of de cross!
In the introduction to “Slave Songs of the United States,” a collection made chiefly at Port Royal and published in 1867, this particular song is set down as spurious, that is, as being sung to a well-known “white folks’” tune. But most of the negro music is described as “civilized in its character, partly composed under the influence of association with the whites, partly actually imitated from their music. In the main it appears to be original in the best sense of the word.”
The same writer goes on:
“On the other hand there are very few which are of an intrinsically barbaric character, and where this character does appear, it is chiefly in short passages, intermingled with others of a different character.... It is very likely that if we had found it possible to get at more of their secular music, we should have come to another conclusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element.... Mr. E. S. Philbrick was struck with the resemblance of some of the rowing tunes at Port Royal to the boatmen’s songs he had heard upon the Nile....
“The words are, of course, in a large measure taken from Scripture, and from the hymns heard at church; and for this reason these religious songs do not by any means illustrate the full extent of the debasement of the dialect.” Of words funnily distorted through failure to understand their meaning there are, however, many examples. “Paul and Silas, bound in jail,” was often sung “Bounden Cyrus born in jail;” “Ring Jerusalem” appeared as “Ring Rosy Land,” etc., etc. “I never fairly heard a secular song among the Port Royal freedmen, and never saw a musical instrument among them. The last violin, owned by a ‘worldly man,’ disappeared from Coffin’s Point ‘de year gun shoot at Bay Pint.’”
The negroes’ manner of singing is pretty well suggested by the following:
“The voices of the colored people have a peculiar quality that nothing can imitate; and the intonations and delicate variations of even one singer cannot be reproduced on paper. And I despair of conveying any notion of the effect of a number singing together, especially in a complicated shout.... There is no singing in parts, as we understand it, and yet no two appear to be singing the same thing—the leading singer starts the words of each verse, often improvising, and the others, who ‘base’ him, as it is called, strike in with the refrain, or even join in the solo, when the words are familiar. When the ‘base’ begins, the leader often stops, leaving the rest of his words to be guessed at, or it may be they are taken up by one of the other singers. And the ‘basers’ themselves seem to follow their own whims, beginning when they please and leaving off when they please, striking an octave above or below (in case they have pitched the tune too low or too high), or hitting some other note that chords, so as to produce the effect of a marvellous complication and variety, and yet with the most perfect time, and rarely with any discord. And what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently to strike sounds that cannot be precisely represented by the gamut, and abound in ‘slides from one note to another, and turns and cadences not in articulated notes.’”
How the same songs could be sung equally well at all sorts of work is explained by another writer,27 as follows: “Of course the tempo is not always alike. On the water, the oars dip ‘Poor Rosy’ to an even andante, a stout boy and girl at the hominy-mill will make the same ‘Poor Rosy’ fly, to keep up with the whirling stone; and in the evening, after the day’s work is done, ‘Heab’n shall-a be my home’ [a line from ‘Poor Rosy’] peals up slowly and mournfully from the distant quarters. One woman—a respectable house-servant, who had lost all but one of her twenty-two children—said to me: ‘Pshaw! don’t har to dese yer chil’en, misse. Dey just rattles it off,—dey don’t know how for sing it. I likes “Poor Rosy” better dan all de songs, but it can’t be sung widout a full heart and a troubled sperrit!’”