The Wit and Humor of America Volume I Part 12

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when I thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of question. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family--have as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy painted for them in our world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be taken in proof of the one a.s.sertion than of the other. When she came to us, it was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her mother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural influences of the hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words of one syllable.

The first week of her services she was obedient and faithful to her duties; but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up the front steps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she modified even this form of service, and spent her time in the fields, appearing at the house only when nature importunately craved mola.s.ses....

In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone betrayed her sylvan blood, for she was in all other respects negro and not Indian. But it was of her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted,--when not engaged in argument to maintain the superiority of the African race. She loved to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own arrogant habit of feeling; and she seemed indeed to have inherited something of the Indian's hauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning and abundant amiability. She gave many instances in which her pride had met and overcome the insolence of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no means singular in her pride of being reputed proud.

She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it, and then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred; as when she warded off reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that she had lived with ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen after they had taken their bitters. "Quality ladies took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which was still in ma.n.u.script, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes.

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so original and suggestive as Mrs. Johnson's. We loved to trace its intricate yet often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry,--of finding hints of the Pow-wow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest.

She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily than far more civilized people.

There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folks in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fear between master and servant, without disturbing the familiarity of their relation. She advised freely with us upon all household matters, and took a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be flattered or caressed into almost any service, but no threat or command could move her. When she erred she never acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomely expressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us, that she never had done half so much for people before, and that she never had been nearly so well suited in any other place; and for a brief and happy time we thought that we never should part.

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and was presented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean this was his figurative att.i.tude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric that we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheep lately under his charge, that he could not be cla.s.sed by any stretch of comparison with the blonde and straight-haired members of Mrs. Johnson's family.

He remained with us all the first day until late in the afternoon, when his mother took him out to get him a boarding-house. Then he departed in the van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect his spirits, and, after he had sufficiently animated himself by clapping his palms together, starting off down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest terror of the cows in the pasture, and the confusion of the less demonstrative people of our household. Other characteristic traits appeared in Hippolyto Thucydides within no very long period of time, and he ran away from his lodgings so often during the summer that he might be said to board round among the outlying cornfields and turnip-patches of Charlesbridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time in our bas.e.m.e.nt; for whenever we went below we found him there, balanced--perhaps in homage to us, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in himself--upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of his boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried in the gra.s.s without.

We could formulate no very tenable objection to all this, and yet the presence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed our imaginations. We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous eidolon, balanced upon every window-sill; and he certainly attracted unpleasant notice to our place, no less by his furtive and hangdog manner of arrival than by the bold displays with which he celebrated his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy; and if we had listened to her we should have believed there was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose....

At last, when we said positively that Thucydides should come to us no more, and then qualified the prohibition by allowing him to come every Sunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child's feelings by telling him not to come where his mother was; that people who did not love her children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went.

We thought it a masterstroke of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must go in any event; but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his mother stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go into the country with us, and she, after long reluctation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to send him away to friends during her absence.

We made every preparation, and on the eve of our departure Mrs. Johnson went into the city to engage her son's pa.s.sage to Bangor, while we awaited her return in untroubled security.

But she did not appear till midnight, and then responded with but a sad "Well, sah!" to the cheerful "Well, Mrs. Johnson!" that greeted her.

"All right, Mrs. Johnson?"

Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle and half death-rattle, in her throat. "All wrong, sah. Hippy's off again; and I've been all over the city after him."

"Then you can't go with us in the morning?"

"How _can_ I, sah?"

Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then she came back to the door again, and opening it, uttered, for the first time in our service, words of apology and regret: "I hope I ha'n't put you out any. I _wanted_ to go with you, but I ought to _knowed_ I couldn't. All is, I loved you too much."

Pa.s.s

BY IRONQUILL

A father said unto his hopeful son, "Who was Leonidas, my cherished one?"

The boy replied, with words of ardent nature, "He was a member of the legislature."

"How?" asked the parent; then the youngster saith: "He got a pa.s.s, and held her like grim death."

"Whose pa.s.s? what pa.s.s?" the anxious father cried; "'Twas the'r monopoly," the boy replied.

In deference to the public, we must state, That boy has been an orphan since that date.

TEACHING BY EXAMPLE

BY JOHN G. SAXE

"What is the 'Poet's License,' say?"

Asked rose-lipped Anna of a poet.

"Now give me an example, pray, That when I see one I may know it."

Quick as a flash he plants a kiss Where perfect kisses always fall.

"Nay, sir! what liberty is this?"

"The _Poet's License_,--that is all!"

WHEN ALBANI SANG[1]

BY WILLIAM HENRY DRUMMOND

Was workin' away on de farm dere, wan morning not long ago, Feexin' de fence for winter--'cos dat's w'ere we got de snow!

W'en Jeremie Plouffe, ma neighbor, come over an' spik wit' me, "Antoine, you will come on de city, for hear Ma-dam All-ba-nee?"

"W'at you mean?" I was sayin' right off, me, "Some woman was mak'

de speech, Or girl on de Hooraw Circus, doin' high kick an' screech?"

"Non--non," he is spikin'--"Excuse me, dat's be Madam All-ba-nee Was leevin' down here on de contree, two mile 'noder side Chambly.

"She's jus' comin' over from Englan', on steamboat arrive Kebeck, Singin' on Lunnon an' Paree, an' havin' beeg tam, I ex-pec', But no matter de moche she enjoy it, for travel all roun' de worl', Somet'ing on de heart bring her back here, for she was de Chambly girl.

"She never do not'ing but singin' an' makin' de beeg grande tour An' travel on summer an' winter, so mus' be de firs' cla.s.s for sure!

Ev'ryboddy I'm t'inkin' was know her, an' I also hear 'noder t'ing, She's frien' on La Reine Victoria an' show her de way to sing!"

"Wall," I say, "you're sure she is Chambly, w'at you call Ma-dam All-ba-nee?

Don't know me dat nam' on de Canton--I hope you're not fool wit' me?"

An he say, "Lajeunesse, dey was call her, before she is come mariee, But she's takin' de nam' of her husban'--I s'pose dat's de only way."

"C'est bon, mon ami," I was say me, "If I get t'roo de fence nex' day An' she don't want too moche on de monee, den mebbe I see her play."

So I finish dat job on to-morrow, Jeremie he was helpin' me too, An' I say, "Len' me t'ree dollar quickly for mak' de voyage wit' you."

Correc'--so we're startin' nex' morning, an' arrive Montreal all right, Buy dollar tiquette on de bureau, an' pa.s.s on de hall dat night.

Beeg crowd, wall! I bet you was dere too, all dress on some fancy dress, De lady, I don't say not'ing, but man's all w'ite shirt an' no ves'.

Don't matter, w'en ban' dey be ready, de foreman strek out wit' hees steek, An' fiddle an' ev'ryt'ing else too, begin for play up de musique.

It's fonny t'ing too dey was playin' don't lak it mese'f at all, I rader be lissen some jeeg, me, or w'at you call "Affer de ball."