Tenting on the Plains (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Bacon Custer

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СКАЧАТЬ delays and irregularities in traveling, on account of the home-coming of the troops, we never knew how long it might be before the next eating-house was reached. The General insisted upon Eliza's going right with us, as no other table was provided. The proprietor, already rendered indifferent to people's comfort by his extraordinary gains, said there was no table for servants. Eliza, the best-bred of maids, begged to go back dinnerless into the car, but the General insisted on her sitting down between us at the crowded table. A position so unusual, and to her so totally out of place, made her appetite waver, and it vanished entirely when the proprietor came, and told the General that no colored folks could be allowed at his table. My husband quietly replied that he had been obliged to give the woman that place, as the house had provided no other. The determined man still stood threateningly over us, demanding her removal, and Eliza uneasily and nervously tried to go. I trembled, and the fork failed to carry the food, owing to a very wobbly arm. The General firmly refused, the staff rose about us, and all along the table up sprang men we had supposed to be citizens, as they were in the dress of civilians. "General, stand your ground; we'll back you; the woman shall have food." How little we realize in these piping times of peace, how great a flame a little fire kindled in those agitating days. The proprietor slunk back to his desk; the General and his hungry staff went on eating as calmly as ever; Eliza hung her embarrassed head, and her mistress idly twirled her useless fork—while the proprietor made $1.50 clear gain on two women that were too frightened to swallow a mouthful. I spread a sandwich for Eliza, while the General, mindful of the returning hunger of the terrified woman, and perfectly indifferent as to making himself ridiculous with parcels, marched by the infuriated but subdued bully, with either a whole pie or some such modest capture in his hand. We had put some hours of travel between ourselves and the "twenty-minutes-for-dinner" place which came so near being a battle-ground, before Eliza could eat what we had brought for her.

      I wonder if any one is waiting for me to say that this incident happened south of the Mason and Dixon line. It did not. It was in Ohio—I don't remember the place. After all, the memory over which one complains, when he finds how little he can recall, has its advantages. It hopelessly buries the names of persons and places, when one starts to tell tales out of school. It is like extracting the fangs from a rattlesnake; the reptile, like the story, may be very disagreeable, but I can only hope that a tale unadorned with names or places is as harmless as a snake with its poison withdrawn.

      I must stop a moment and give our Eliza, on whom this battle was waged, a little space in this story, for she occupied no small part in the events of the six years after; and when she left us and took an upward step in life by marrying a colored lawyer, I could not reconcile myself to the loss; and though she has lived through all the grandeur of a union with a man "who gets a heap of money for his speeches in politics, and brass bands to meet him at the stations, Miss Libbie," she came to my little home not long since with tears of joy illuminating the bright bronze of her expressive face. It reminded me so of the first time I knew that the negro race regarded shades of color as a distinctive feature, a beauty or a blemish, as it might be. Eliza stood in front of a bronze medallion of my husband when it was first sent from the artist's in 1865, and amused him hugely, by saying, in that partnership manner she had in our affairs, "Why, Ginnel, it's jest my color." After that, I noticed that she referred to her race according to the deepness of tint, telling me, with scorn, of one of her numerous suitors: "Why, Miss Libbie, he needent think to shine up to me; he's nothing but a black African." I am thus introducing Eliza, color and all, that she may not seem the vague character of other days; and whoever chances to meet her will find in her a good war historian, a modest chronicler of a really self-dying and courageous life. It was rather a surprise to me that she was not an old woman when I saw her again this autumn, after so many years, but she is not yet fifty. I imagine she did so much mothering in those days when she comforted me in my loneliness, and quieted me in my frights, that I counted her old even then.

      Eliza requests that she be permitted to make her little bow to the reader, and repeat a wish of hers that I take great pains in quoting her, and not represent her as saying, "like field-hands, whar and thar." She says her people in Virginia, whom she reverences and loves, always taught her not to say "them words; and if they should see what I have told you they'd feel bad to think I forgot." If whar and thar appear occasionally in my efforts to transfer her literally to these pages, it is only a lapsus linguæ on her part. Besides, she has lived North so long now, there is not that distinctive dialect peculiar to the Southern servant. In her excitement, narrating our scenes of danger or pleasure or merriment, she occasionally drops into expressions that belonged to her early life. It is the fault of her historian if these phrases get into print. To me they are charming, for they are Eliza in undress uniform—Eliza without her company manners.

      She describes her leaving the old plantation during war times: "I jined the Ginnel at Amosville, Rappahannock County, in August, 1863. Everybody was excited over freedom, and I wanted to see how it was. Everybody keeps asking me why I left. I can't see why they can't recollect what war was for, and that we was all bound to try and see for ourselves how it was. After the 'Mancipation, everybody was a-standin' up for liberty, and I wasent goin' to stay home when everybody else was a-goin'. The day I came into camp, there was a good many other darkeys from all about our place. We was a-standin' round waitin' when I first seed the Ginnel.

      "He and Captain Lyon cum up to me, and the Ginnel says, 'Well, what's your name!' I told him Eliza; and he says, looking me all over fust, 'Well, Eliza, would you like to cum and live with me?' I waited a minute, Miss Libbie. I looked him all over, too, and finally I sez, 'I reckon I would.' So the bargain was fixed up. But, oh, how awful lonesome I was at fust, and I was afraid of everything in the shape of war. I used to wish myself back on the old plantation with my mother. I was mighty glad when you cum, Miss Libbie. Why, sometimes I never sot eyes on a woman for weeks at a time."

      Eliza's story of her war life is too long for these pages; but in spite of her confession of being so "'fraid," she was a marvel of courage. She was captured by the enemy, escaped, and found her way back after sunset to the General's camp. She had strange and narrow escapes. She says, quaintly: "Well, Miss Libbie, I set in to see the war, beginning and end. There was many niggers that cut into cities and huddled up thar, and laid around and saw hard times; but I went to see the end, and I stuck it out. I allus thought this, that I didn't set down to wait to have 'em all free me. I helped to free myself. I was all ready to step to the front whenever I was called upon, even if I didn't shoulder the musket. Well, I went to the end, and there's many folks says that a woman can't follow the army without throwing themselves away, but I know better. I went in, and I cum out with the respect of the men and the officers."

      ELIZA COOKING UNDER FIRE.

      Eliza often cooked under fire, and only lately one of the General's staff, recounting war days, described her as she was preparing the General's dinner in the field. A shell would burst near her; she would turn her head in anger at being disturbed, unconscious that she was observed, begin to growl to herself about being obliged to move, but take up her kettle and frying-pan, march farther away, make a new fire, and begin cooking as unperturbed as if it were an ordinary disturbance instead of a sky filled with bits of falling shell. I do not repeat that polite fiction of having been on the spot, as neither the artist nor I had Eliza's grit or pluck; but we arranged the camp-kettle, and Eliza fell into the exact expression, as she volubly began telling the tale of "how mad those busting shells used to make her." It is an excellent likeness, even though Eliza objects to the bandana, which she has abandoned in her new position; and I must not forget that I found her one day turning her head critically from side to side looking at her picture; and, out of regard to her, will mention that her nose, of which she is very proud, is, she fears, a touch too flat in the sketch. She speaks of her dress as "completely whittled out with bullets," but she would like me to mention that "she don't wear them rags now."

      When Eliza reached New York this past autumn, she told me, when I asked her to choose where she would go, as my time was to be entirely given to her, that she wanted first СКАЧАТЬ