CHAPTER 6

OUR COLORED FRIENDS

When my father and Uncle Scott moved to Osceola for the first time we came in contact with the Negro.

Our family were Democrats in Pennsylvania, and had been for the Union, but were not Abolitionists like the Wrights. They thought the Civil War unnecessary.

The most penetrating observation as to the Negro question I know was made by a Southerner, President of a college, who said: "The Northern people love the Negro as a race and despise them as individuals; the Southern people despise them as a race but love them as individuals."

In the days of my youth at least this was a true statement. The colored folk we knew added a large element of comfort and good cheer to life. Our grandparents knew nothing of them. To our parents they were, save to Uncle Scott and Aunt Nettie, quite unsolved mysteries. My mother and Aunt Lizzie never could get the knack of handling them, and Clark, Dwight and Newell were always away from them. But the rest of my generation, Harrison, Don, Grace, Edith, Tressie and myself have been "Our White Folks" to a series of honest, faithful, cheerful Negroes, of the old type.

The fine old-time Negroes themselves taught us the proper attitude and the right things to do. "Aunt Mary Fuel" began the procession in Osceola. She was the Negro Mammy of all Uncle Scott’s children. Born a slave she was a house servant to "Quality white folks", and had been brought to St. Clair County from Virginia when a young woman by the Fuels. Bright as she could be, black as coal, with bright, beady eyes and a very expressive countenance—a good woman, a good

cook, and a splendid nurse—she had very definite ideas on how young gentlemen and young ladies should behave. She was always a part of Uncle Scott’s family, as essential almost as the kitchen stove. No record of the Nesbit family would be complete which left out our colored friends.

Once after I had been in Washington and before Uncle Scott came, I visited Osceola,—visiting back and forth was not expensive when railroad passes were plentiful. As Aunt Mary Fuel was replenishing the griddle cakes we were discussing Virginia, and I proceeded to say some rather uncomplimentary things about the state. She grew indignant. At last I said:

"Why, the land is miserably poor. I’ll bet we can raise more corn on a hundred acres of Missouri land than they can raise on all the farms between Richmond and Charlottesville."

Aunt Mary could hear no more. As she started for the kitchen she said, her eyes blazing:

"Raise co’n, raise co’n? Dey ain’t got time to raise co’n in Virginia—dey raise men dar!"

One morning, after I started writing this book, I went out to breakfast ahead of my wife. Old Martha Mason, the best cook we ever had, and the finest type of old-time Negro, laid a slip beside my plate and said:

"Mr. Charlie, please take care of that for me, if you please, sir." She vanished into the pantry, and I examined the paper and found it was a notice from a bank of a $350 note due in a couple of days.

My wife had remarked a few days before that Martha seemed worried of late, so here was the cause. "Big Trouble" had come, and she turned to "her white folks."

On questioning her later I found that she had bought a~ brick house, giving a first mortgage for $3,000, and a second mortgage of $1,500. It had been sold to her on the installment plan, and she had paid the second mortgage down to $350. It was due and the first also, and she had no money beyond enough for the $35.00 monthly installment and the man who sold it demanded his money.

Well, it was far from convenient for me to take time then or to put up money, but if it had been three times as inconvenient I would have fixed it for old Martha who had been faithfulness itself. I paid the note, took up the first mortgage, put a new trust for $3,400 and arranged her payments at $35.00 per month.

Her spirits revived like a drought wilted plant after a good rain. She rents rooms and makes a good margin of profit on her house. She had old Aunt Mary Fuel to thank in part. She taught us children in her shrewd way, the duties of "Quality white folks."

There was in Osceola proportionately a large colored population. There was The Kingdom across the river, where the better class of Negroes lived, each owning a small farm. And there was "Happy Hollow" down behind the town where the ordinary Negroes lived, in a series of little cabins. It was a place to see, swarming with pickaninnies and dogs. No stray mongrel so poor and wretched but he found a home in Happy Hollow.

The Southerners who came from Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee to St. Clair between 1830 and 1855, brought many house servants and mechanics and carpenters to build their houses for them. They brought blacksmiths, gardeners and stone masons, all well-trained slaves. When the war was over these old masters were still "quality". They helped their old slaves to own homes in "The Kingdom."

Aunt Mary Fuel soon attached herself to Uncle Scott. She was something new and strange and vastly entertaining to us children. Then there was Uncle Peter Waldo from The Kingdom. He had a large round head, was strong and erect despite his 70 years and he lived to be nearly a hundred. He had a fine team of horses and a good wagon, and used to bring garden truck to town, and chickens and eggs and turkeys. He chose his customers and lived well. He took his customers’ boys on two big picnics every fall and he would talk about them to us all the rest of the year. He took us way up the Osage River to a big pecan grove early in the autumn, and a couple of weeks later he would take us to gather black walnuts. We would take our luncheons and be gone all day and come home with a wagonload of nuts. When talking to our mothers about the luncheons which he would begin doing some weeks ahead, he would say:

"Well, Missus, don’t make no difference what you put up so there is plenty of pound cake; dese boys shore do love pound cake."

He had a short curly beard, white as snow, and his head was covered with white wool also. His eyes bright, his teeth white and sound, his skin jet black and clean looking—we thought him a wonderfully fine looking man.

The parents trusted him fully and he always made a good day’s pay when he took us up the river for "those sweet nuts you all will want to crack in front of the fire when it’s cold next winter."

When my father moved back from Osceola to the farm, he took Sam Harris, his wife Tillie, their daughter Sue, and a sister’s son, Wyatt Tolson. Sam and Tillie were always entertaining. When he was a boy and they both were slaves, one of his stunts was to help train the young blood hounds. When mere pups, he would be made to come to them, and then run down the road to try to hide from them. It was fun for him while they were small pups, but later when larger he had to climb trees and yell for help and he said he didn’t like that so well.

Tillie’s sister had worked at the Younger boys' home, and she had always some thrilling stories.

‘Whether it was from Uncle Peter Waldo or from Aunt Mary Fuel we first heard the wonders of the hoop snake and the whip snake is hazy. These wise old heads knew not to tell stories to their white children which would terrify them, so we learned of these marvels of animate creation bit by bit. But Tillie Harris could make our flesh creep as she told us of the hoop snake in later years. This snake could take its horny tail firmly in its own mouth, convert itself thus into a hoop and roll at a furious rate over the ground. The ordinary snake could be outrun by any scared youngster, but the hoop snake went as fast as a bird could fly.

When the hoop snake had overtaken its victim, it simply let go its own tail and Zip—Bang! the sharp, horny tail struck right into you, and this horn or stinger on the end of its tail was deadly poison.

The only thing that saved lots of people from being killed by the hoop snake was that they could not see so very well rolling along this way, and often they stuck their stinger tail into a tree, and when they did it killed the snake, and in a few days the tree, too, would die.

Tillie said if one ever got after us to run till it got close to us and then dodge behind a tree. As there were no trees on the prairie, we asked her how to save ourselves if one got after us when we were going to school. Well, she said, she thought hoop snakes only lived in the woods, but that in the big woods you always saw trees dead, killed by hoop snakes, and that she had often dug about the roots of these dead trees and found the snake bones showing the snake had died when he hit the tree.

We had seen the rattles on rattlesnakes’ tails, and his sharp, horny "stinger" on the hoop snake’s tail didn’t seem any more wonderful than the rattles.

She also told us of the whip snake which would wrap itself about a boy’s waist and whip his legs with its tail, till he hollered "bloody murder." But neither of these terrible snakes did we ever see, though in greater dread of them as children than of the deadly rattlers which were all about us.

Grandfather Nesbit once, when he had taken us all in a big wagon blackberrying, had killed a small joint snake, and he showed us its several joints broken cleanly apart and lying about. Tillie explained to us, when we got home and told her of it, that after sundown all those joints would come together again and the snake would crawl off "good as new."

J. L. McNeill, in North Carolina, evidently heard these same bits of folk lore from the Negroes a thousand miles away, and left them in verse:

Till de tree en him bofe dies.

En he busties up jis same as glass,

En den you thinks he’s dead.

Tressie went away to school, first to an academy at Butler, Missouri, and then to the Synodical Seminary at Fulton, Missouri. To Fulton Sade and my brother and myself all went later. Fulton was the county seat of Calloway County, but in reality it was the Capital of the "Kingdom of Calloway" as it was called. Both the young ladies seminary and Westminster College were Southern Presbyterian schools, and Calloway was as "south" as Georgia or Virginia, for contrary to its appearance on the map, Virginia is the "mostest south of any state there is."

Thus it can be easily seen how our generation grew up with an entirely different attitude toward the colored people than our grandparents or parents ever knew. They have served us well for 60 years; have added much to our comfort and pleasure, and I am of the opinion that their perennial good humor, their sympathy, their kindness to all hurt or in distress, or sick, their art in music and grace in movement, their courtesy and tact have been a very great asset to our nation.

But we knew and liked the "old-time" Negro. The new independent free Negro, "who is as good or better" than’ the white, I am not keen for. For forty years I have known and employed the old kind, and for 60 years our family have employed them and neither of us have had any regrets. They have always been interesting and entertaining to me. Their shrewdness, especially in reading the character of the whites, is as great as their wit and humor.

These studies led me to tell stories about the Negro and to quote their sayings and some way I attained quite a reputation as a Negro story teller. On one occasion at a banquet in Washington I was down to tell something. The toastmaster intending to be complimentary said:

"I will now introduce one of the best Negro orators in the country, Mr. Charles F. Nesbit."

It started that item on the program off with a laugh anyway, if the joke was on me.

One of the stories Booker Washington used to like to tell was of a meeting in South Carolina called by the leading citizens of the county, who were mostly large land owners. Their plan was to raise some money to induce a lot of European emigrants to come and settle in that section. The chairman said, after several of the speakers had set out their ideas of the advantages to accrue:

"We are glad to see Uncle Moses Green, the leader of the colored people, and would like to hear from him. We hope the colored people favor this plan."

Moses, who was a Baptist preacher, arose.

"I thank you, gentlemens, for askin’ me to speak at this meetin’, but not to waste time and come to the p’int, we colored people think there is about as many white folks here now as us colored people can support."

When Uncle Scott left Osceola for Washington he saw that Aunt Mary Fuel was owning her little log cabin home and with something to keep the wolf always away from her door.

Once, some years after we had moved to Washington, I visited St. Clair and when in Osceola at once asked for her. Yes, she was alive and well, and her daughter Patsey lived with her. She was over 80 years old and quite blind. I went out to her cabin about 5 P. M. and knocked on the door. Patsey came to open it. She did not know me for when we lived in Osceola she was working as a house maid in St. Louis. I asked if Aunt Mary Fuel was home and she said "Yes," and called out:

"Mammy, a gentleman want to see you 1"

The old woman came slowly, feeling her way to the door; putting on a deep voice I said:

"Aunt Mary, a gentleman up-town told me you could tell fortunes, and I want you to tell mine," and I slipped a silver dollar into her hand.

"I can tell you is one of the Nesbits—that I can. But, ‘deed I can’t tell which one!"

So we had a good visit and many a laugh over the old times, and I had to tell of Mr. Scott and Mrs. Nesbit, and "Miss Grace," and "Mr. Harry," and "Mr. Don," and "Miss Edith."

Then when I left, after giving each one of them, including the grandchildren, a dollar, I had to promise to say "Howdy" and "God Bless You" to every single one of them.

When both our families went to live in Belmont, Virginia, we took over the place and all the old servants. The bright star in the cloud, big and little, was Uncle "Lias." He was the man of all work. He made a good garden, tended the big lawn and grounds, milked the cow, looked after the furnace, and kept wood for the open fires. He was a local preacher of considerable note. He used to get me to help him with his sermons.

I noticed that his sermons were very fanciful and imaginative. He always took the text from Revelations, generally about the seven beasts with the seven horns, or the seven seals which no man could break, etc. I said to him one day:

"Lias, this kind of preaching doesn’t really help your people. They are hard working people, and they have lots of problems to meet in life, and you should preach plain, simple, helpful sermons to them."

He studied a while, and said he thought I was right.

"Now," I said, "nobody knows the answer to these texts you are selecting from Revelations. You don’t know what they mean, and nobody else knows what they mean. You pick out some plain, simple text, and preach some plain, honest doctrine to your people which will help them to live better and make life easier for them."

He said he thought I was entirely right, and he came to me with a broad smile on his face a few days later, and said:

"Mr. Chancy, I’se got a text now that will please you. It’s a simple text."

"It’s from the verse 9, of 108th Psalm, ‘Moab is my washpot; upon Edom will I cast my shoe.’"

Then I learned that the colored people do not enjoy anything in the way of a sermon that is not mysterious and full of imaginative flights.

One day, when hoeing in the garden with Lias, I said to him:

"Lias, you must have had a lot of experience with women in your time."

"‘Deed I has, Mr. Chancy. And to tell you the truth, I cuts a pretty wide swathe with ‘em yet."

"Well," said I, "that is just what I wanted to talk to you about. Now my best girl has gotten very offish, and I want you to tell me how a man could go about it to get his girl in a good humor again when she seems to be put out with him."

The old man straightened himself up and a smile of pride spread over his wrinkled features, and he said:

"Mr. Chancy, you’ve got to be audacious with a woman. They doesn’t like a man unless he is audacious."

"Well," I said, "Lias, illustrate this to me."

"Well, Mr. Charley, s’pose I meets a young lady named Miss Johnson at church or somewhere else, and I takes a fancy to her. I goes up to her house to call and when she comes to the door I says: ‘Good evening, Miss Johnson, I hope you are well.’ She says, ‘Good evening, Mr. Jackson, I am well and I hopes you is well.’ Then I says: ‘Physically I am well, Miss Johnson, but mentally I am disturbed and troubled.’ She then will say, ‘What disturbs you mentally?’ and I will say, ‘Thoughts of thee my fair one keep me from my slumber.’—Now, that is what I calls being audacious, and that’s what women like."

Upon inquiry I found that he felt that that should be at the first call upon a young woman he had just met, and so I told him it didn’t apply in my case, because my best girl and I had been good friends for a considerable number of years. But he insisted that probably the trouble was that I was entirely too lacking in audacity. Whether or not his advice helped me the girl became my wife in a very few years later.

When Uncle Scott bought "Alwington" at ‘Warrenton, Virginia, he and Grace, who lived some four miles out, had some very fine Negro help.

Uncle Scott greatly enjoyed talking with the characters about "Alwington". He recorded some of their amusing use or misuse of words.

Harrison has at "Alwington" still Lally, who has been the nurse for Edith and Betty and has been with them since Edith was born, and a cook, whose weight I would not dare estimate, but she is a good cook, and has only two demands which, if met, make her happiness complete—plenty of food to cook and plenty of company to eat it—and she is happy most of the time.

When I was in business in Washington, we had a little bowlegged crooked-faced Negro named "Minor", who hauled ashes and trash. One Saturday he had his bill for the week, and one item was 75 cents for hauling a load and a half of ashes.

"But Minor," I said, "you must not haul half-loads. Let the ashes go till you have a whole load."

"But I wet it down and hauled a load and a half at one time."

This interested me. "Now, how could you haul a load and a half at once? We pay you to haul all you can each time."

"Well, sir, I puts water on it and that shrinks the ashes up so you can haul a load and a half. You take a barrel of ashes and put water on it, and it will be a half a barrel."

"Well, now, Minor, you have studied all about ashes for years, explain this to me" so we argued a while. "Now, Minor, do you mean to tell me that if you take a perfectly tight barrel, fill it with ashes and then pour a barrel of water on it there will not be a barrel full?"

"Yes, sir. Dat’s what I says."

"Well, how do you explain it? A barrel full of water is a barrel full; a barrel full of ashes is a barrel full—yet you say if you pour the water on the ashes there will not be more than half a barrel full. Now explain it."

Scratching his head and standing first on one foot and then on another, he said: "Well, de way I ‘splain it is that passing through the fire—all that fire in the furnace—the ashes gets so hot and so dry dat dey jes sucks de water up."

I thought this explanation was worth the extra quarter Minor evidently needed.

The new high schools and universities for the colored may "elevate" the race, but will they ever produce as reliable, as honest and as shrewdly practical a race as the "old-time Negroes" were? In 60 years our family has never suffered a theft or a betrayal of trust from one of them. They have been reliable and happy.

One day at "Alwington" Joe Brent and John Thomas and Wallace Lacy were picking stones off the garden field. Joe was a pillar of the Baptist Church, and almost 65; John 45; and not very bright, nor very white. Wallace had been to school and was very bright and about 25 years old.

Wallace: "What make you think dey do?"

John: "Well, long as I know’d dis place, an’ dat’s a heap of years, we been pickin’ up stones and haulin’ dem off. And if dey don’t grow what dey come furn? They must grow."

Then Wallace said to me: "Mr. Charles, do stones grow in the ground?"

Well, I saw old Joe was listening to the argument, so instead of answering directly I asked him, and straightening up he said:

"Not nowadays. Not in this day and age. Stones don’t grow. They used to grow, but no stones had grow’d since they laid Christ in the Rock Tomb."

The younger men pursued the matter, though as to how dirt changed into stones, or how stones came to be. I was finally appealed to and said dirt came after stones, that rocks and stones broke up or wore down and made dirt, and then I explained how the world was first a red hot ball of fire and cooled and the crust was all stone.

The old man listened with his eyes on me. He said:

"Then, Mr. Charlie, you is one of them people don’t believe the Bible? You believes the world round?"

"Yes," I told him, I did.

"Well," he said, "it ain’t round. It’s flat—the Bible said so, and the Bible is God’s Word, and God made the world and He knows more about it than a lot of fool men who is trying to destroy folks’ souls."

"But," said I, "Mr. Don Nesbit has been clear around the world. He went to New York, got on a battleship, sailed to Europe, through the Mediterranean Sea, and the Suez Canal, and Indian Ocean to China, then across the Pacific Ocean and came in to San Francisco and across the country home."

"Yes, I heard all dat," said he, "but it don’t prove the world is round. I go over to town, den I go to Major Renfrees’ farm, there I go to Culpeper and clar’ down to Richmond, then I go to Norfolk, den I gets on a boat and goes to Baltimore, den I take the train and comes to Washington, and then home here to Warrenton—well, has I been around anything?

"It’s all right, Mr. Charlie, folks like you what is church members sayin’ the world is round. Can’t you see it’s flat? Can’t you see the sun rise and pass across the world, and see it set in the sky? I ain’t seen nobody what been to any part of the world wasn’t flat. Mr. Don tells me in France and China the world flat just same as here.

"I declare I gets outdone wid all you white folks letten men what write books make plum fools out of you. Why you all say the world turns over once every day. Well, two nights I puts a rake out with the teeth to the west, and de handle pint east, now if it turn over next morning the teeth would be pointin’ east, but dey wasn’t, dey was pointin’ west.

He labored with me for some days. He had heard "Sundo-move" Jasper, a Negro preacher of Richmond, Virginia, whose sermon on "Sun do Move," was a remarkable one, and his faith was firm in the arguments Jasper used.

Aune Jennie was an ample, wholesome person, always laughing, always busy. She, as a girl, had joined the migration to Washington at the close of the Civil War. She moved along on foot from the far South out of the cotton fields from camp to camp, receiving such kindness and attention from some of the Yankee soldiers that before she reached Washington she was great with child. Jim took her into his home. His wife had taken up with a white soldier a short time before, only a few months after her marriage, and left Jim. Jenny, her child, was a fairly light mulatto and she stayed on living with Jim. She had 15 children after the first "daughter of the regiment," —all his. They were all well raised and prosperous; one a plasterer; one a fireman on the Southern Railway; one a blacksmith, etc. He had a few acres and a little log cabin near Grace’s home. She had hens and a flock of turkeys and a shoat or two always fattening in the pen.

Grace said to her once: "Jennie, you and Jim ought to really get married. You know you never have been married, and his wife might come back, or some woman get around Jim and get married to him and get his property. You ought to have his property if he should die—but you ought to get married."

She rested her arms on her hips, and her eyes b1azing~—Grace said, one of the few times she ever saw Aunt Jennie angry:

Grace said she pitied the woman who tried it.

One day at Grace’s—the year I stayed there and got back my health—John came in and said:

"Well, Miss Grace, I got the varmint what’s been getting the aigs."

"The biggest black snake I ever see."

We all went out in the yard where the snake was still writhing, and soon all the children, white and black, were in a circle about the snake.

"Dar ‘s a aig in him now," declared Aunt Betty.

Sure enough, there was a bump half way down the writhing black body. John put his foot on the snake and cut open the reptile, and lo, and behold! a china nest-egg was laid bare.

"I’ll swear if I’d a knew’d dat was in him, I’d a let him die in torment, and not killed him," said John.

Uncle Scott sent Joe Brent up to Freedman’s Hospital in Washington to have some minor operation. When he got out, Uncle Scott said to him one day:

"Don’t a good many Negroes in cold weather pretend to be sick so as to get in the Hospital as charity patients?"

"Well, dey may try but it don’t get ‘em nowhere. When dat Doctor come in and puts his rasticus on em, he know whether they sick."

Uncle Scott gathered that the "rasticus" was as near as Joe came to getting stethoscope. When an elder at Osceola, Uncle Scott said to the janitor about a newly arrived clergyman:

"Sam, wasn’t that a powerful sermon?"

"Yes, sah—an’ dat prayer—"

"Yes, it was a wonderful prayer."

"It wuz so. Why he axed God for things our other preacher didn’t even know he had."

Joe Brent said: "Jim’s wife is a Catholic they say but dey was married by a Prodigal preacher."

Wallace Lacy said: "Does you want me to trim them big Columbardy popular trees? No, I believes dey is Balm of Gillion trees."

He said on a trip he didn’t carry a trunk, "only a police." And he used to talk of an autocratic pistol", he meant an automatic.