Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839. Fanny Kemble
its vicinity. The number of hands employed in this threshing-mill is very considerable, and the whole establishment, comprising the fires and boilers and machinery of a powerful steam engine, are all under negro superintendence and direction. After this survey, I occupied myself with my infant plantation of evergreens round the dyke, in the midst of which interesting pursuit I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. B–, a neighbouring planter, who came to transact some business with Mr. – about rice which he had sent to our mill to have threshed, and the price to be paid for such threshing. The negroes have presented a petition to-day that they may be allowed to have a ball in honour of our arrival, which demand has been acceded to, and furious preparations are being set on foot.
On visiting the Infirmary to-day, I was extremely pleased with the increased cleanliness and order observable in all the rooms. Two little filthy children, however, seemed to be still under the ancien régime of non-ablution; but upon my saying to the old nurse Molly, in whose ward they were, 'Why, Molly, I don't believe you have bathed those children to-day,' she answered, with infinite dignity, 'Missis no b'lieve me wash um piccaninny! and yet she tress me wid all um niggar when 'em sick.' The injured innocence and lofty conscious integrity of this speech silenced and abashed me; and yet I can't help it, but I don't believe to this present hour that those children had had any experience of water, at least not washing water, since they first came into the world.
I rowed over to Darien again, to make some purchases, yesterday; and enquiring the price of various articles, could not but wonder to find them at least three times as dear as in your northern villages. The profits of these southern shopkeepers (who, for the most part, are thoroughbred Yankees, with the true Yankee propensity to trade, no matter on how dirty a counter, or in what manner of wares) are enormous. The prices they ask for everything, from coloured calicoes for negro dresses to pianofortes (one of which, for curiosity sake, I enquired the value of), are fabulous, and such as none but the laziest and most reckless people in the world would consent to afford. On our return we found the water in the cut so extremely low that we were obliged to push the boat through it, and did not accomplish it without difficulty. The banks of this canal, when they are thus laid bare, present a singular appearance enough,—two walls of solid mud, through which matted, twisted, twined, and tangled, like the natural veins of wood, runs an everlasting net of indestructible roots, the thousand toes of huge cypress feet. The trees have been cut down long ago from the soil, but these fangs remain in the earth without decaying for an incredible space of time. This long endurance of immersion is one of the valuable properties of these cypress roots; but though excellent binding stuff for the sides of a canal, they must be pernicious growth in any land used for cultivation that requires deep tillage. On entering the Altamaha, we found the tide so low that we were much obstructed by the sand banks, which, but for their constant shifting, would presently take entire possession of this noble stream, and render it utterly impassable from shore to shore, as it already is in several parts of the channel at certain seasons of the tide. On landing, I was seized hold of by a hideous old negress, named Sinda, who had come to pay me a visit, and of whom Mr. – told me a strange anecdote. She passed at one time for a prophetess among her fellow slaves on the plantation, and had acquired such an ascendancy over them that, having given out, after the fashion of Mr. Miller, that the world was to come to an end at a certain time, and that not a very remote one, the belief in her assertion took such possession of the people on the estate, that they refused to work; and the rice and cotton fields were threatened with an indefinite fallow, in consequence of this strike on the part of the cultivators. Mr. K–, who was then overseer of the property, perceived the impossibility of arguing, remonstrating, or even flogging this solemn panic out of the minds of the slaves. The great final emancipation which they believed at hand had stripped even the lash of its prevailing authority, and the terrors of an overseer for once were as nothing, in the terrible expectation of the advent of the universal Judge of men. They were utterly impracticable—so, like a very shrewd man as he was, he acquiesced in their determination not to work; but he expressed to them his belief that Sinda was mistaken, and he warned her that if, at the appointed time, it proved so, she would be severely punished. I do not know whether he confided to the slaves what he thought likely to be the result if she was in the right; but poor Sinda was in the wrong. Her day of judgement came indeed, and a severe one it proved, for Mr. K– had her tremendously flogged, and her end of things ended much like Mr. Miller's; but whereas he escaped unhanged, in spite of his atrocious practices upon the fanaticism and credulity of his country people, the spirit of false prophecy was mercilessly scourged out of her, and the faith of her people of course reverted from her to the omnipotent lash again. Think what a dream that must have been while it lasted, for those infinitely oppressed people,—freedom without entering it by the grim gate of death, brought down to them at once by the second coming of Christ, whose first advent has left them yet so far from it! Farewell; it makes me giddy to think of having been a slave while that delusion lasted, and after it vanished.
Dearest E–. I received early this morning a visit from a young negro, called Morris, who came to request permission to be baptised. The master's leave is necessary for this ceremony of acceptance into the bosom of the Christian Church; so all that can be said is, that it is to be hoped the rite itself may not
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