Ole Mammy's Torment

Chapter 2

It was a warm night in May. The bright moonlight shone in through the c****s of the little cabin, and streamed across Ivy's face, where she lay asleep on Mammy's big feather bed. Bud was gently snoring in his corner of the trundle-bed below, but John Jay kicked restlessly beside him. He could not sleep with the moonlight in his eyes and the frogs croaking so mournfully in the pond back of the house. To begin with, it was too early to go to bed, and in the second place he wasn't a bit sleepy.

Mammy sat on a bench just outside of the door, with her elbows on her knees. She was crooning a dismal song softly to herself,--something about

It gave him such a creepy sort of feeling that he stuck his fingers in his ears to shut out the sound. Thus barricaded, he did not hear slow footsteps shuffling up the path; but presently the powerful fumes of a rank pipe told of an approaching visitor. He took his fingers from his ears and sat up.

Uncle Billy and Aunt Susan had come over to gossip a while. Mammy groped her way into the house to drag out the wooden rocker for her sister-in-law, while Uncle Billy tilted himself back against the cabin in a straight splint-bottomed chair. The usual opening remarks about the state of the family health, the weather, and the crops were of very little interest to John Jay; indeed he nearly fell asleep while Aunt Susan was giving a detailed account of the way she cured the misery in her side. However, as soon as they began to discuss neighborhood happenings, he was all attention.

The more interested he grew, it seemed to him, the lower they pitched their voices. Creeping carefully across the floor, he curled up on his pillow just inside the doorway, where the shadows fell heaviest, and where he could enjoy every word of the conversation, without straining his ears to listen.

"Gawge Chadwick came home yestiddy," announced Uncle Billy.

"Sho now!" exclaimed Mammy. "Not lame Jintsey's boy! You don't mean it!"

"That's the ve'y one," persisted Uncle Billy. "Gawge Washington Chadwick. He's a ministah of the gospel now, home from college with a Rev'und befo' his name, an' a long-tailed black coat on. He doesn't look much like the little pickaninny that b'long to Mars' Nat back in wah times."

"And Jintsey's dead, poah thing!" exclaimed Aunt Susan. "What a day it would have been for her, if she could have lived to see her boy in the pulpit!"

Conversation never kept on a straight road when these three were together. It was continually turning back by countless by-paths to the old slavery days. The rule of their master, Nat Chadwick, had been an easy one. There had always been plenty in the smoke-house and contentment in the quarters. These simple old souls, while rejoicing in their freedom, often looked tenderly back to the flesh-pots of their early Egypt.

John Jay had heard these reminiscences dozens of times. He knew just what was coming next, when Uncle Billy began telling about the day that young Mars' Nat was christened. Mis' Alice gave a silver cup to Jintsey's baby, George Washington, because he was born on the same day as his little Mars' Nat. John Jay knew the whole family history. He was very proud of these people of gentle birth and breeding, whom Sheba spoke of as "ou' family." One by one they had been carried to the little Episcopal churchyard on the hill, until only one remained. The great estate had passed into the hands of strangers. Only to Billy and Susan and Sheba, faithful even unto death, was it still surrounded by the halo of its old-time grandeur.

Naturally, young Nat Chadwick, the last of the line, had fallen heir to all the love and respect with which they cherished any who bore the family name. To other people he was a luckless sort of fellow, who had sown his wild oats early, and met disappointment at every turn. It was passed about, too, that there was a romance in his life which had changed and embittered it. Certain it is, he suddenly seemed to lose all ambition and energy. Instead of making the brilliant lawyer his friends expected, he had come down at last to be the keeper of the toll-gate on a country turnpike.

Lying on his pillow in the dense shadow, John Jay looked out into the white moonlight, and listened to the old story told all over again. But this time there was added the history of Jintsey's boy, who seemed to have been born with the ambition hot in his heart to win an education. He had done it. There was a quiver of pride in Uncle Billy's voice as he told how the boy had outstripped his young master in the long race; but there was a loyal and tender undercurrent of excuse for the unfortunate heir running through all his talk.

It had taken twenty years of struggle and work for the little black boy to realize his hopes. He had grown to be a grave man of thirty-three before it was accomplished. Now he had come home from a Northern college with his diploma and his degree.

"He have fought a good fight," said Uncle Billy in conclusion, finishing as usual with a scriptural quotation. "He have fought a good fight, and he have finished his co'se, but"--here his voice sank almost to a whisper--"he have come home to die."

A chill seemed to creep all over John Jay's warm little body. He raised his head from the pillow to listen still more carefully.

"Yes, they say he got the gallopin' consumption while he was up Nawth, shovellin' snow an' such work, an' studyin' nights in a room 'thout no fiah. He took ole Mars's name an' he have brought honah upon it, but what good is it goin' to do him? Tell me that. For when the leaves go in the autumn time, then Jintsey's boy must go too."

"Where's he stayin' at now?" demanded Mammy sharply, although she drew the corner of her apron across her eyes.

"He's down to Mars' Nat's at the toll-gate cottage. 'Peahs like it's the natch'el place for him to be. Neithah of 'em's got anybody else, and it's kind a like old times when they was chillun, play in' round the big house togethah. I stopped in to see him yestiddy. The cup Mis' Alice gave him was a-settin' on the mantel, an' Mars' Nat was stewin' up some sawt of cough tonic for him. The white folks up Nawth must a thought a heap of him. He'd just got a lettah from one of the college professahs 'quirin' bout his health. Mars' Nat read out what was on the back of it: 'Rev'und Gawge W. Chadwick, an' some lettahs on the end that I kain't remembah. An' he said, laughin'-like, sezee, 'well, Uncle Billy, you'd nevah take that as meanin' Jintsey's boy, would you now? It's a mighty fine soundin' title,' sezee. Gawge gave a little moanful sawt of smile, same as to say, well, aftah all, it wasn't wuth what it cost him. An' it wasn't! No, it wasn't," repeated Uncle Billy, solemnly shaking the ashes from his pipe. "What's the good of a head full of book learnin' with a poah puny body that kaint tote it around?"

Somehow, Uncle Billy's solemn declaration, "he have fought a good fight," associated this colored preacher, in John Jay's simple little mind, with soldiers and fierce battles and a great victory. He lay back on his pillow, wishing they would go on talking about this man who had suddenly become such a hero in his boyish eyes. But their talk gradually drifted to the details of Mrs. Watson's last illness. He had heard them so many times that he soon felt his eyelids slowly closing. Then he dozed for a few minutes, awakening with a start. They had gotten as far as the funeral now, and were discussing the sermon. They would soon be commenting on the way that each member of the family "took her death." That was so much more interesting, he thought he would just close his eyes again for a moment, until they came to that.

Their voices murmured on in a pleasing flow; his head sunk lower on the pillow, and his breathing was a little louder. Then his hand dropped down at his side. He was sound asleep just when Aunt Susan was about to begin one of her most thrilling ghost stories.

In the midst of an account of "a ha'nt that walked the graveyard every thirteenth Friday in the year," John Jay turned over in his sleep with a little snort. Aunt Susan nearly jumped out of her chair, and Uncle Billy dropped his pipe. There was a moment of frightened silence till Mammy said, "It must have been Bud, I reckon. John Jay is allus a-knockin' him in his sleep an' makin' him holler out. Go on, sis' Susan."

The moon had travelled well across the sky when Mammy's guests said good night. She lingered outside after they had gone, to look far down the road, where a single point of light, shining through the trees, marked the toll-gate. It would not be so lonely for Mars' Nat, now that George had come home. She recalled the laughing face of the little black boy as she had known it long ago, and tried to call up in her imagination a picture of the man that Uncle Billy had described. Visions of the old days rose before her. As she stood there with her hands wrapped in her apron, it was not the moon-flooded night she looked into, but the warm, living daylight of a golden past.

At last, with a sigh, she turned to take the chairs into the house. Lifting the big rocker high in front of her, she stepped over the threshold and started to shuffle her way along to the candle shelf. The chair came down in the middle of the floor with a sudden bang, as she caught her foot in John Jay's pillow and sprawled across him.

The boy's first waking thought was that there had been an earthquake and that the cabin had caved in. He never could rightly remember the order of events that followed, but he had a confused memory of a shriek, a scratching of matches, and the glimmer of a candle that made him sit up and blink his eyes. Then something struck him, first on one ear, then the other, cuffing him soundly. He was too dazed to know why. Some blind instinct helped him to find the bed and burrow down under the clothes, where he lay trying to think what possible fault of his could have raised such a cyclone about his ears. He was too deep under the bedclothes to hear Mammy's grumbling remarks about his "tawmentin' ways" as she rubbed her skinned elbow with tallow from the candle.