pages 32-35

Mama was making her way toward the buggy now and calling us. “We must be going.” she said. The sun as yet had not climbed very high as my mother and two sisters got into the buggy and I in the saddle. Looking back we left the old home for good and left behind the things that had meant so much. My father had already purchased the eighty acres upon which he would build our new home. He had rented the Baptist parsonage for us to live in as the minister was a young single fellow who had not as yet finished his theological course and was just boarding.
My father had warned the navy yard we were moving and they would have to get someone else, as he did not wish to board away from home. They gave him up with reluctance. Father told them how to find us if they just had to have him.
As we drove away, I looked back once more. Everything was so plain to me now. There was the old mill well that I rescued the pet rabbit from. How he had gotten in there nobody knew, but had I fallen in neither of us would have been found for awhile.
As we drove through the shady forest lane that led to the new shelled road, we drove past the clay pit which was my favorite place to play on hot summer days. Mama thought we could make better time. ( In those days they used oyster and clam shells in fixing roads.) Under my breath I whispered good-bye to the forest , the birds, buttercups and clover with lush grass that grew by the wayside and all the things that had meant so much to me in my childhood.
One day without telling mama. I took the cow and calf to pasture by the wayside which happened to be next to old Billy’ cornfield. Where he came from I could never tell you, but all of a sudden there he stood, shaking his finger at me and saying, “if one or both of them gets one foot on my place I am going to take them and tie them up and your folks will have to pay three dollars each to get them back. Three dollars was a lot of money in those days. I think I must have turned white as a sheet for I was so scared I felt lifeless in the saddle, but hung on to the cow and calf I knew I had to. I started wrapping their ropes shorter around the saddle horn. I thought in spite of me the calf would get a foot on his land. That thing seemed to pull like a two ton horse. The cow was more gentle. I could talk to her. In the first place they were not hungry, I just thought the grass looked so nice. I finally got my pony, which was as large as a medium size horse, to move down the lane toward home. I was almost dragging the calf for he had his front feet set right in the dirt and his back feet almost on old Billy’s land. I think I was as light as a feather in that saddle trying to help the pony for fear old Billy would grab the calf and say “now you’ll pay because you are on my land” and I knew what I would get.
We looked one more time back at the neighbors we had left behind that had come to wish us well and say goodbye. The people who had bought the place were giving us a last wave, as we passed the old colored mammy’s cabin, she was standing in the door, filling most of it with her big broad self. Her teeth and her kinkie wool tied up in a red bandana handkerchief as she waved with her big black hand that was white on the inside for that was a characteristic of the colored people. She was bowing up and down as we passed.
I couldn’t help but think of the winter we had the big snow, the biggest I have ever seen before or since. After the snow the wind came up piling the snow into big drifts. I bundled to my neck and warm enough I thought, started from the house up the barn lane. I wasn’t very old then. I thought it fun to climb through the big drifts. Finally I became tired, so tired I was stuck in one of the drifts. My sisters and brother had gone to the house. I cried and called but to no avail. They were just starting to look for me when the old colored mammy knocked at the door. “I heard a child crying and calling and calling, Miz Borchardt “Yours all home?” Mama looked around and said, “Where’s Annie?” “We are going to look for her.” My two sister and brother said as they went toward the barn lot lane. There I was, my feet and fingers about frozen. I said, with tears running down my cheeks, “Where were you? Why did you go to the house and leave me?” They helped me out of the snow drift and my oldest sister and brother made a hand chair and I sat on their hands between them with one arm around each neck. I was carried to the house in the fashion they had carried me so many times. Some times they would let their hands come loose and let me fall.
To make this hand chair you take your right hand and take a hold of your left wrist. The other fellow does the same. Then you grab a hold of his right wrist and he grabs a hold of your left wrist, thus you have a seat.
I was on the gallop now and in the lead. They had freshly shelled the road and these were not too good for the horses feet. Here was the road where I rode out and made an “L” shape turn too fast. Having no saddle on to hag on to and being only about six or seven years old. I rolled off at the turn dislocating my right elbow. Papa told me to look at the humming bird in the honey suckle vine. I did. He pulled on my arm and said, “Mama, we’ll have to take her to doctor Field at Gilmerton.” He was the doctor for the lumber mill As well as people of the country. I was put on a table. My father held me while the doctor pulled. I kicked and cried until finally it popped into place. I went home with it in a sling which I wore for some little time. The doctor said, “don’t ride any more horses for awhile.”
The new shell road bridge was in view now. We drove a little faster and paused for awhile on the bridge. There was the little quiet nook where my brother spent so many happy hours fishing in the river with his reed pole and bent pin for a hood and his can of worms. (Reeds grew in low damp places in that country, sometimes 8 and 10 feet long or high. They made excellent fishing poles.) I could see my brother then with his large brim, torn straw hat, knee pants, freckly face and bare footed coming home, whistling, with his catch of fish over one shoulder and his reed pole over the other. His beagle hound dog was at his heels. How often I wished I could paint so I could have captured it and today that picture is just as vivid to me as the day I captured it.
My brother always loved to hunt and fish a s a pastime like my father when he would go with his friends to the old dismal swamp where there was a big lake. There they would hunt and fish. Later the swamp was cleared and made into a very large corn field.
The Old Tempty hole was just down the river to the left of us now. There was also the old persimmon tree where m mouth felt like alum from eating the partly ripe ones until I knew better. There close by were the walnut and hickory trees that we gathered nuts from in the fall for our winter’s supply of goodies. Mother graciously made them into candy and cakes for us after we would get the goodies picked out for her. There was the shaded quiet deep water at the edge and out a ways the swift running water in which I used to like to watch my sticks and leaves float away to foreign land, I would say.
There to the right of us, just across the bridge, was the scene of what once was an old colonel’s home, now burned to ashes. Only part of the brick wall was left standing, and the rotting away dock at the water’s edge was here his goat, another way of transportation for the plantation owner, could be tied up. And a row boat with just its bow sticking out of the water added to the grim reminder of what had been. Yet, one could visualize scenes and activities of a place like this. The colored slaves keeping the home immaculate, the old four poster bed with its canopy, the marble top dresser with huge mirror that my lady could see herself at any angle were all part of the scene. There were the slave quarters with the colored children playing around and mammy at twilight crooning a lullaby to her little colored babe, more precious to her than gold itself. There were the foxhound pens and the stables with their fine riding horses so the master and my lady could ride to the hounds and perhaps scare up a fox. Plantations on rivers were much more valuable in those days. Flowers still grew around the edge of the house despite its ruins. Out back a ways was the family burial plot or cemetery, long since forgotten, graves sunk in and tomb stones toppled into the gaping graves. One time my brother, two sisters and I visited this cemetery, just curious wanting to look like we always did. We read the tombstones with their epitaph and gathered flowers. We sometimes took a few home to mama for her garden. There was the old orchard still trying to bear though most of the trees were half dead. One was a fig bush that had figs each year and a peach that was yellow in color when ripe. It grew right by the corner of the old brick house. It evidently had come up there from a seed after all had been forgotten. Thus my mind rambled as we drove along into the scenes of the past.
Now we had come to a lane where one night my brother was coming home a little late with groceries for the store in town. It was winter and days were short. This lane was in some timber making this a wooded stretch of road. As my brother approached the lane two men appeared, tossed a tree across the road in front of his horses. My brother said he hollered and laid on the whip. The horses reared, jumped over the tree and the wagon went over with two awful jolts. Out of the corner of his eye, as he continued to lay on the whip, he could see the two men just about to catch a hold of the back of the wagon. Groceries were bounding everywhere. He said he knew his hair was standing on end. As he neared the bridge, one of the men tripped and fell and the other gave up the chase at the same time. When he got home he could hardly tell what happened because he was shaking so. At the time he was twelve or thirteen.
At the other end of that same lane was another old colonial mansion that knew great activity during slavery days. Friends of ours lived there now. We had often been there to visit. He was a great man for white mules and had sic of them. I used to admire them because they were so pretty. He always kept them trimmed up nice. He said to me, “you know when these mules die they’ll come back to this earth in the form of a human.” Of course, being a child, things like that always stuck in my mind and I pondered over it for some days. Finally I had to tell my mother about it. She said, “just forget the whole thing. That couldn’t possibly happen>“
Then again we were all there visiting. We were sitting in the large manor house hallway. Someone was speaking of winds causing doors to open sometimes. He said, “we’ll just be sitting here of evenings with no wind and the doors will open and windows rattle. I was always curious so said, “How come?”
“well he said, “there was a slave woman killed in the attic of this house one time. The blood stain is there yet as no one has ever been able to completely wash it off the floor.” “How come?” he said, “the master of the house came home for his dinner and the slave woman was a little late getting it ready and he stood over her and said ”put your hands in that boiling liquid and remove that meat” trying to punish her. She said, ‘master, I’d ruin my hands and couldn’t cook for you’ and thus refusing he drug her up the stairs to the attic and snuffed out her life!”
Then there was the old Howard home about a century old. Emmett told me his great, great, great grandfather had died there and was buried close by. He said they could hear chains rattling up and down the steps at night. Of course, we were both small children and he’d heard slave stories the same as I. Emmett was a very large boy, red hair, freckles and always went bare foot in the summer time. When he became a man he became quite wealthy by inventing some kind of paper that could be used in various ways.