When Grandmamma Was New: The Story of a Virginia Childhood

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oking backward, I seem to have gone to sleep one night, an ignoramus

he puzzle submitted to her by my m

you have been pumping into the poor child for two years has thawed out. I

o me. By the middle of February I had gone three times through the inimitable classic, Cobwebs-to-catch-Flies, and read at least six other books through twice, besides being up to my eyes and over the head of my understanding in Sandford and Merton, that most fascinating of prosy impossibilities. Beside the classic I have named, and Rosamond, Harry and Lucy

or one-third of what

ciously inclined plane of learning. Our manner of receiving and digesting mind-food was very much like Bud's

lling and writing, and sums. After these, my mother read aloud from Grimshaw's History of England, simplifying the language when she considered it necessary, which was not often, while Mary 'Liza made up the first set of chemises (in the vernacular "shimmys,") she had undertaken for herself, and I knit twenty rounds on a stocking. My mother put in a "mark" of black silk every morning from which I could count the rounds upward. Mary 'Liza had knit a dozen pairs in all. In the tops of six, sh

were mine to use, or abuse, as I liked. We applied "evening" to the hours between the three o'clock dinner

she was glad to provide a decent "den" for me nearer home than the Old Orchard and the more distant woods, and she was losing hold of her hope of making me into a pattern daughter. It gives me a twinge to recollect how thanklessly I accepted what must have been an act of self-denial on her part, perhaps even a compromise with conscience. Mam' Chloe-by my mother's orders, as I know now-hunted up some breadth

aomi, and Ophelia. Once, I "did" Job by wrapping a meal-sack-for sackcloth-about me, and, sitting upon the ground, throwing ashes over my head and into the air, the while four colored boys, previously instructed, burst in one by one, with n

chen fire, and showed us how to wrap them in rags to keep in the warmth. Clad in my red cloak, a wadded ho

oor one raw day when she was walking for exerci

headache, and the cold would give me

en with her when she drove over to "spend the day" with my mother, I had no white playfellow near my own age. Mary 'Liza "was not fond of playing," although she would do it when we had

a hymn to memory, and five verses of a psalm. Beyond this, no religious exercise was binding upon us, and there was a great deal of the day to be got rid of. Mary 'Liza read the memoirs of Mary Lothrop and Nathan W. Dickerman, seated upright on her cricket at one corner of the chamber fireplace, and in the evening, if the

ollow suit. We read none but good books on Sunday. Little Henry and His Bearer, Anna Ross, and Helen Maurice were allowed; the memoirs I have named were advised. The Fairchild Family "partook too much of the nature of fiction to be qui

end of the room; upon this was my chair. I sat in it during the singing, and mounted upon it while reading and exhorting. Subtle reverence, which I could not analyze, held me back from "offering prayer." What we were doing was only "making believe" after all, and belief in the All-seeing Eye, the A

would preac

in March, I arose discreetly upon my ticklish pulpit to announce through my nose, "We will commence

reach of chapel etiquette. I raised the tune, and every other pair of lungs there joined in without fear of criticism or favor of his neighbors' ears. Some of

ay, away

written on

n yonder wo

edeemer re

Rev. Wesley Greene, a circuit-rider who had conducted an "arbor-meeting" at Fine Creek meeting-house last summer. Our negroes were all Baptists, and considered themselves remiss, as devout hearers of aught that part

. She received the fanciful title from a young visitor to the plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted

ened by the aforementioned antenn?, albeit lessened by the baby she always carried on some portion of her wiry frame. She was the toughest, most supple, and most versatile creature I ever saw, of any color or clime. The baby was disposed decorously a

Greene's sermons, "I tell you, Miss Ma'y, the S

of the Apocalypse and their awesome riders, and the others following her lead, my voice was drowne

the preacher," I had to admonish them in my natural voice an

-that squeaked dismally-was so wrought upon by the ring of unknown and high-sounding syllables as to set up a dreary drone like the hum of an e

r island, or town-I fastened, in fancy, upon her words, and constructed a hypothesis relative to the mysterious locality. Why I should have strung it upon the same strand of condemn

e "Death and Hell," and the prophecy of killing with sword and with famine and the wild beasts of the field. I was

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note, modulated to the standard of civility I had indicated. I had made a hortatory hit, and it was encored. I spr

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a rocket, clear over Mariposa's head, breaking my fall somewhat upon another girl and baby, a

de no noise when his head was shot off. But I screamed lustily now in the belief that my nos

did not comprehend. I could not doubt that he pitied me, when he carried me, bloody and dirty as I was, into the chamber, and stood by while my mother and Mam' Chloe set me to rights. The shock of t

on Sunday," said my mother,

e forth, earnestly, my swollen nose making the pious tw

replace to hide the laugh

ht his remark as she followed him. "I heard th

recitation, and I lost the rest

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