beyond. Here he found the new-made grave, and laid the
flowers upon it.
" He will like them because they come from there" was
his thought.
Then, with a buoyant step, he started up the long, low,
white peninsula, set with its olive-woods in a sapphire sea ;
and his face was turned northward.
12
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky,
The coast-land of our western Italy.
I view the waters quivering ; quaff the breeie.
Whose briny radness keeps an under taste
Of flavorous tropic sweets, perchance swept home
From Cuba's perfumed groves and garden spiceries.
Paul Hamilton Haynb.
Call on thy children of the hill,
Wake swamp and river, coast and rill,
Rouse all thy strength, and all thy skill,
Carolina!
Tell how the patriot^s soul was tried.
And what his dauntless breast defied ;
How Rutledge ruled and Laurens died,
Carolina!
Hbnry Tuibod.
Do you know the cotton country — ^the country of broad
levels open to the sun, where the ungainly, ragged bushes
stand in long rows, bearing the clothing of a nation on their
backs ? Not on their backs either, for the white wool is scat-
tered over the branches and twigs, looking, not as if it grew
there, but as if it had been blown that way, and had caught
and clung at random. When I first came to the cotton coun-
try, I used to stand with my chin on the top-rail of the fences,
trying to rid my eyes of that first impression. I saw the fields
only when the cotton was white, when there were no green
leaves left, and the fleecy down did not seem to me a vege-
table at alL Starved cows passed through the half-plucked
rows untempted, and I said to mysdf : " Of course. Cows
do not eat cotton any more than they eat wool ; but what
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY: 179
bush is there at the North that they would not nibble if starv-
ing ? " Accustomed to the trim, soldierly ranks of the West-
em corn-fields, or the billowy grace of the wheat, I could
think of nothing save a parade of sturdy beggannen unwill-
ingly drawn up in line, when I gazed upon the stubborn, un-
even branches, and generally lop-sided appearance of these
plants — plants, nevertheless, of wealth, usefulness, and his-
toric importance in the annals of our land. But after a while
I grew accustomed to their contrary ways, and I even began
to like their defiant wildness, as a contrast, perhaps, to the
languorous sky above, the true sky of the cotton country, with
its soft heat, its hazy air, and its divine twilight that lingers so
long. I always walked abroad at sunset, and it is in the sun-
set-light that I always see the fields now when far away. No
doubt there was plenty of busy, prosaic reality down there in
the mornings, but I never saw it ; I only saw the beauty and
the fancies that come with the soft after-glow and the shadows
of the night
Down in the cotton country the sun shines steadily all day
long, and the earth is hot under your feet There are few
birds, but at nightfall the crows begin to fly home in a long
line, going down into the red west as though they had im-
portant mess^es to deliver to some imprisoned princess on
the edge of the horizon. One day I followed the crows, I
said to myself: "The princess is a ruse; they probably light
not far from here, and I am going to find their place. The
crows at home — that would be something worth seeing."
Turning from the path, I went westward. " What ! '* said a
country-woman, meeting Wordsworth on the road, " are ye
stepping westward, sir ? " I, too, stepped westward.
Field after field I crossed ; at last the fences ceased, and
only old half-filled ditches marked the boundary-lines. The
land sloped downward slightly, and after a while the ridge
behind me seemed like a line of heights, the old cotton-plants
on its top standing out as distinctly as single pine-trees on a
mountain-summit outlined against the sky ; so comparative is
Digitized
by Google
i8o IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
height. The crows still flew westward as I came out upon a
second level lower down than the first, and caught a golden
gleam through the fringe of bushes in the middle of the plain.
I had unwittingly found the river at last, that broad, brown
river that I knew was down there somewhere, although I had
not seen it with my bodily eyes. I had full knowledge of
what it was, though, farther south toward the ocean ; I knew
the long trestles over the swamps and dark canebrakes that
stretched out for miles on each side of the actual stream —
trestles over which the trains passed cautiously every day, the
Northern passengers looking nervously down at the quaking,
spongy surface below, and prophesying accidents as certain
some time — ^when they were not on board. Up here in the
cotton country, however, the river was more docile; there
were no tides to come up and destroy the banks, and with the
exception of freshets the habits of the stream were orderly.
The levels on each side might have been, should have been,
rich with plenty. Instead, they were uncultivated and deso-
late. Here and there a wild, outlawed cotton-bush reared its
head, and I could trace the old line of the cart-road and cross-
tracks ; but the soil was spongy and disintegrated, and for a
long time evidently no care had been bestowed upon it. I
crossed over to the river, and found that the earth-bank which
had protected the field was broken down and washed away in
many places ; the low trees and bushes on shore still held the
straws and driftwood that showed the last freshet's high-
water mark.
The river made an irregular bend a short distance below,
and I strolled that way, walking now on the thick masses of
lespedeza that carpeted the old road-track, and now on the
singularly porous soil of the level, a soil which even my inex-
perienced eyes recognized as worthless, all its good particles
having been drained out of it and borne away on the trium-
phant tide of the freshets. The crows still evaded me, cross-
ing the river in a straight line and flying on toward the west,
and, in that arbitrary way in' which solitary pedestrians make
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY. 181
compacts with themselves, I said, " I will go to that tree at
the exact turn of the bend, and not one step farther." I
went to that tree at the exact turn of the bend, and then I
went — ^farther ; for I found there one solemn, lonely old house.
Now, if there had been two, I should not have gone on ; I
should not have broken my compact. Two houses are so-
ciable and commonplace ; but one all alone on a desolate
waste like that inspired me with — ^let us call it interest, and I
went forward.
It was a lodge rather than a house ; in its best day it coula
never have been more than a very plain abode, and now, in its
worst, it seemed to have fallen into the hands of Giant De-
spair. " Forlorn " was written over its lintels, and " without
hope " along its low roof-edge. Raised high above the
ground, in the Southern fashion, on wooden supports, it
seemed even more unstable than usual to Northern eyes, be-
cause the lattice-work, the valance, as it were, which generally
conceals the bare, stilt-like underpinning, was gone, and a
thin calf and some melancholy chickens were walking about
underneath, as though the place was an arbor. There was a
little patch of garden, but no grass, no flowers ; everything
was gray, the unpainted house, the sand of the garden-beds,
and the barren waste stretching away on all sides. At first I
thought the place was uninhabited, but as I drew nearer a
thin smoke from one of the chimneys told of life within, and
I said to myself that the life would be black-skinned life, of
course. For I was quite accustomed now to finding the fami-
lies of the freedmen crowded into just such old houses as
this, hidden away in unexpected places ; for the freedmen
hardly ever live up on the even ground in the broad sunshine
as though they had a right there, but down in the hollows or
out into the fringes of wood, where their low-roofed cabins,
numerous though they may be, are scarcely visible to the
passer-by. There was no fence around this house ; it stood
at large on the waste as though it belonged there. Take
away the fence from a house, and you take away its respecta-
Digitized
by Google
i82 IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
bility ; it becomes at once an outlaw. I ascended the crazy,
sunken steps that led to the front door, and lifted the knocker
that hung there as if in mockery; who ever knocked there
now save perhaps a river-god with his wet fingers as he hur-
ried by, mounted on the foaming freshet, to ravage and lay
waste again the poor, desolate fields ? But no spirit came to
the door, neither came the swarm of funny little black faces I
had expected ; instead, I s?.w before me a white woman, tall,
thin, and gray-haired. Silently she stood there, her great,
dark eyes, still and sad, looking at me as much as to say,
•* By what right are you here ? "
"Excuse me, madam," was my involuntary beginning;
then I somewhat stupidly asked for a glass of water.
" I would not advise you to drink the water we have here ;
it is not good," replied the woman. I knew it was not ; the
water is never good down on the levels. But I was very stu-
pid that day.
" I should like to rest a while," was my next attempt. It
brought out a wooden chair, but no cordiality. I tried every-
thing I could think of in the way of subjects for conversation,
but elicited no replies beyond monosyllables. I could not
very well say, ** Who are you, and how came you here ? " and
yet that was exactly what I wanted to know. The woman's
face baffled me, and I do not like to be baffled. It was a face
that was old and at the same time young ; it had deep lines,
it was colorless, and the heavy hair was gray ; and still I felt
that it was not old in years, but that it was like the peaches
we find sometimes on the ground, old, wrinkled, and withered,
yet showing here and there traces of that evanescent bloom
which comes before the ripeness. The eyes haunted me;
they haunt me now, the dry, still eyes of immovable, hopeless
grief. I thought, " Oh, if I could only help her ! " but all I
said was, " I fear I am keeping you standing " ; for that is the
senseless way we human creatures talk to each other.
Her answer was not encouraging.
" Yes," she replied, in her brief way, and said no more.
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY. 183
I felt myself obliged to go.
But the next afternoon I wandered that way again, and
the next, and the next. I used to wait impatiently for the
hour when I could enter into the presenc'e of her great silence.
How still she was ! If she had wept, if she had raved, if she
had woriced with nervous enei^, or been resolutely, doggedly
idle, if she had seemed reckless, or callous, or even pious ;
but no, she was none of these. Her old-young face was ever
the same, and she went about her few household tasks in a
steady, nerveless manner, as though she could go on doing
them for countless ages, and yet never with the least increase
of energy. She swept the room, for instance, every day, never
thoroughly, but in a gentle, incompetent sort of way peculiarly
her own ; yet she always swept it and never neglected it, and
she took as much time to do it as though the task was to be
performed with microscopic exactness.
She lived in her old house alone save for the presence of
one child, a boy of she or seven years—a quiet, grave-eyed
little fellow, who played all by himself hour after hour with
two little wooden soldiers and an empty spool. He seldom
went out of the house ; he did not seem to care for the sun-
shine or the open air as other children care, but gravely
amused himself in-doors in his own quiet way. He did not
make his wooden soldiers talk or demolish each other trium-
phantly, according to the manner of boys ; but he marshaled
them to and fro with slow consideration, and the only sound
was the click of their little muskets as he moved them about.
He seemed never to speak of his own accord ; he was strange-
ly silent always. I used to wonder if the two ever talked to-
gether playfully as mother and child should talk; and one
day, emboldened by a welcome, not warmer, for it was never
warm, but not quite so cold perhaps, I said :
" Your little son is very quiet, madam."
" He is not my son."
" Ah ! " I replied, somewhat disconcerted. " He is a pretty
child ; what is his name ? "
Digitized
by Google
J 84 ^^ THE COTTON COUNTRY.
** His name is John."
The child heard us in his barren comer, but did not look
up or speak ; he made his two soldiers advance solemnly upon
the spool in silence/ with a flank movement. I have called
the comer barren, because it seemed doubly so when the boy
sat there. The poorest place generally puts on something of
a homelike air when a little child is in it ; but the two bare
walls and angle of bare floor remained hopelessly empty and
desolate. The room was large, but there was nothing in it
save the two wooden chairs and a table ; there was no wo-
manly attempt at a rag-carpet, curtains for the vsrindows, or
newspaper pictures for the walls — none of those little con-
trivances for comfort with which women generally adom even
the most miserable abiding-places, showing a kind of courage
which is often pathetic in its hopefulness. Here, however,
there was nothing. A back-room held a few dishes, some
boxes and barrels, and showed on its cavernous hearth the
ashes of a recent fire. " I suppose they sleep in a third bare
room somewhere, with their two beds, no doubt, standing all
alone in the center of the chamber ; for it would be too hu-
man, of course, to put them up snugly against the wall, as
anybody else would do," I said to myself.
In time I succeeded in building up a sort of friendship
with this solitary woman of the waste, and in time she told
me her story. Let me tell it to you. I have written jstories
of imagination, but this is a story of fact, and I want you to
believe it. It is tme, every word of it, save the names given,
and, when you read it, you whose eyes are now upon these
lines, stop and reflect that it is only one of many life-sto-
ries like unto it. " War is cmelty," said our great general.
It is. It must be so. But shall we not, we women, like Sis-
ters of Charity, go over the field when the battle is done,
bearing balm and wine and oil for those who suffer?
" Down here in the cotton country we were rich once,
madam ; we were richer than Northemers ever are, for we
toiled not for our money, neither took thought for it ; it came
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY, 185*
and we spent it ; that, was all. My father was Clayton Cotes-
worth, and our home was twenty miles from here, at the
Sand Hills. Our cotton-lands were down on these river-
levels ; this was one of our fields, and this house was built
for the overseer ; the negro-quarters that stood around it have
been carried off i»ecemeal by the freedmen." (Impossible to
put on paper her accentuation of this title.) " My father was
an old man ; he could not go to battle himself, but he gave
first his eldest son, my brother James. James went away
from earth at Fredericksburg. It was in the winter, and very
cold. How often have I thought of that passage, * And pray
ye that your flight be not in the winter,' when picturing his
sufferings before his spirit took flight ! Yes, it was very cold
for our Southern boys ; the river was full o£ floating ice, and
the raw wind swept over them as they tried to throw up in-
trenchments on the heights. They had no spades, only pointed
sticks, and the ground was frozen hard. Their old uniforms,
worn thin by hard usage, hung in tatters, and many of them
had no shoes ; the skin of their poor feet shone blue, or glis-
tening white, like a dead man's skin, through the coverings of
rags they made for themselves as best they could. They say
it was a. pitiful sight to see the poor fellows sitting down in
the mornings, trying to adjust these rag-wrappings so that
they would stay in place, and fastening them elaborately with
their carefully saved bits of string. He was an honored man
who invented a new way. My brother was one of the shoe-
less ; at the last, too, it seems that he had no blanket, only a
thin counterpane. When night came, hung^ and tired as he
was, he could only wrap himself in that and lie down on the
cold ground to wait for morning. When we heard all this
afterward, we said, ' Blessed be the bullet that put him out of
his misery ! ' for poor James was a delicate boy, and had been
accustomed to loving, watchful care all his life. Yet, oh, if I
could only know that he was warm once, just once, before he
died ! They told us he said nothing after he was shot save
* How cold ! How cold ! ' They put his poor, stiff body has-
Digitized
by Google
•i86 IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
tily down under the sod, and then the brigade moved on ; 'no
man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day/
" Next John went, my second brother. He said good-by,
and marched away northward — northward, northward, alws^s
northward — to cold, corpse-strewed Virginia, who cried aloud
to us continually, • More ! more ! ' Her roads are marked
with death from her Peaks of Otter to the sea, and her great
valley ran red. We went to her from all over the South, from
Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and from our own Carolina.
We died there by thousands, and by tens of thousands. O
Virginia, our dead lie thick in thy tidewater plains, in thy
tangled Wilderness, and along thy river-shores, with faces up-
turned, and hearts still for ever.
" John came back to us once, and wedded the fair girl to
whom he was betrothed. It was a sad bridal, although we
made it as gay as we could ; for we had come to the times of
determined gayety then. The tone of society was like the
determinedly gay quicksteps which the regimental bands play
when returning from a funeral, as much as to say, * Le roi est
mort, vive le roi ! * So we turned our old silk dresses, and made
a brave appearance ; if our shoes were shabby, we hid them
under our skirts as well as we could, and held our heads the
higher. Maum Sally made a big wedding-cake, as of old,
and we went without meat to pay for the spices in it ; such
luxuries we obtained from the blockade-runners now and then,
but they were worth almost their weight in gold. Then John,
too, left us. In four months he also was taken — killed by
guerrillas, it is supposed, as he rode through a lonely moun-
tain-defile.- He was not found for weeks; the snow fell and
covered him, mercifully giving the burial the frozen earth de-
nied. After a while the tidings came to us, and poor Mabel
slowly wept herself into the grave. She was a loving-hearted
little creature, and her life was crushed. She looked at her
baby once, called his name John, and then died. The child,
that boy yonder, seems to have inherited her g^ef. He sheds
no tears, however ; his g^rl-mother shed them all, both for
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY. 187
him and for herself, before ever he saw the light. My turn
came next.
" You have been married, madam ? Did you love, too ? I
do not mean regard, or even calm affection ; I do not mean
sense of duty, self-sacrifice, or religious goodness. I mean
love — ^love that absorbs the enthre beii^. Some women love
so ; I do not say they are the happiest women. I do not say
they are the best. I am one of them. But God made us all ;
he gave us our hearts — ^we did not choose them. Let no wo-
man take credit to herself for her even life, simply because it
has been even. Doubtless, if he had put her out in the
breakers, she would have swayed too. Perhaps she would
have drifted from her moorings also, as I have drifted. I go
to no church ; I can not pray. But do not think I am defiant ;
no, I am only dead. I seek not the old friends, few and ruined,
who remain still above-ground ; I have no hope, I might al-
most say no wish. Torpidly I draw my breath through day
and night, nor care if the rain falls or the sun shines. You
Northern women would work; I can not. Neither have I
the courage to take the child and die. I live on as the palsied
animal lives, and if some day the spring fails, and the few
herbs within his reach, he dies. Nor do I think he grieves
much about it ; he only eats from habit. So I.
" It was in the third year of the war that I met Ralph
Kinsolving. I was just e^hteen. Our courtship was short ;
indeed, I hardly knew that I loved him until he spoke and
asked me to give him myself. * Marry me, Judith,* he pleaded
ardently ; * marry me before I go ; let it be my wife I leave
behind me, and not my sweetheart. For sweethearts, dear,
can not come to us in camp when we send, as we shall surely
send soon, that you may all see our last grand review.' So
spoke Rafe, and with all his heart he believed it. We all be-
lieved it. Never for a moment did we doubt the final triumph
of our arms. We were so sure we were right !
" * Our last grand review,* said Rafe ; but he did not dream
of that last review at Appomattox, when eight thousand hun-
Digitized
by Google
i88 IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
gry, exhausted men stacked their muskets in the presence of
the enemy, whose glittering ranks, eighty thousand strong,
were drawn up in line before them, while in the rear their
well-filled wagons stood — wagons whose generous plenty
brought tears to the eyes of many a poor fellow that day,
thinking, even while he eagerly ate, of his desolated land, and
his own empty fields at home.
" I did marry my soldier, and, although it was in haste, I
had my wedding-dress, my snowy veil ; lace and gauze were
not needed at the hospitals! But we went without the
wedding-cake this time, and my satin slippers were made at
home, looking very like a pair of white moccasins when fin-
ished.
" In the middle of the ceremony there was an alarm ; the
slaves had risen at Latto's down the river, and were coming
to the village armed with clubs, and, worse still, infuriated
with liquor they had found. Even our good old rector paused.
There were but few white men at home. It seemed indeed a
tune for pausing. But Rafe said, quietly, * Go on ! ' and, un-
sheathing his sword, he laid it ready on the chancel-rail. ' To
have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse,
for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to
cherish, till death us do part,' repeated Rafe, holding my hand
in his firm clasp, and looking down into my frightened face so
tenderly that I forgot my alarm — everything, indeed, save his
love. But when the last word was spoken, and the blessing
pronounced over our bowed heads, the shining sword seeming
a silent witness, Rafe left me like a flash. The little church
was empty when I rose from my knees ; the women had hur-
ried home with blanched faces to bar their doors and barri-
cade their windows, and the men had gone for their horses
and g^ns ; only my old father waited to gfive me his blessing,
and then we, too, hastened homeward. Our little band of
defenders assembled in the main street, and rode gallantly
out to meet the negroes, who were as fifty to their one. Rafe
was the leader, by virtue of his uniform, and he waved his
Digitized
by Google
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY. 189
hand to me as he rode by. * Cheer up, Judith/ he cried ; ' I
will soon return/
" I never saw him again.
"They dispersed the negroes without much difficulty;
Latto's slaves had been badly treated for months, they had
not the strength to fight long. But Rafe rode to the next
town with the prisoners under his charge, and there he met
an imploring summons to the coast ; the Federal ships had
appeared unexpectedly off the harbor, and the little coast-city
lay exposed and helpless at the mouth of the river. All good
men and true within reach were summoned to the defense.
So my soldier went, sending back word to me a second time,
' I will soon return.* But the siege was long, long — one of
those bitterly contested little sieges of minor importance, with
but small forces engaged on each side, which were so numer-
ous during the middle times of the war — ^those middle times
after the first high hopes had been disappointed, and before
the policy of concentration had been adopted by the North —
that slow, dogged North of yours that kept going back and
beginning over again, until at last it found out how to do it.
This little siege was long and weary, and when at last the