Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Read online

  The arrival of company at the house, the arranging of dinners and suppers “in style,” awoke all the energies of her soul; and no sight was more welcome to her than a pile of travelling trunks launched on the verandah, for then she foresaw fresh efforts and fresh triumphs.

  Just at present, however, Aunt Chloe is looking into the bake-pan; in which congenial operation we shall leave her till we finish our picture of the cottage.

  In one corner of it stood a bed, covered neatly with a snowy spread; and by the side of it was a piece of carpeting, of some considerable size. On this piece of carpeting Aunt Chloe took her stand, as being decidedly in the upper walks of life; and it and the bed by which it lay, and the whole corner, in fact, were treated with distinguished consideration, and made, so far as possible, sacred from the marauding inroads and desecrations of little folks. In fact, that corner was the drawing-room of the establishment. In the other corner was a bed of much humbler pretensions, and evidently designed for use. The wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he happened to meet with its like.

  On a rough bench in the corner, a couple of woolly-headed boys, with glistening black eyes and fat shining cheeks, were busy in superintending the first walking operations of the baby, which, as is usually the case, consisted in getting up on its feet, balancing a moment, and then tumbling down, — each successive failure being violently cheered, as something decidedly clever.

  A table, somewhat rheumatic in its limbs, was drawn out in front of the fire, and covered with a cloth, displaying cups and saucers of a decidedly brilliant pattern, with other symptoms of an approaching meal. At this table was seated Uncle Tom, Mr. Shelby’s best hand, who, as he is to be the hero of our story, we must daguerreotype for our readers. He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity.

  He was very busily intent at this moment on a slate lying before him, on which he was carefully and slowly endeavoring to accomplish a copy of some letters, in which operation he was overlooked by young Mas’r George, a smart, bright boy of thirteen, who appeared fully to realize the dignity of his position as instructor.

  “Not that way, Uncle Tom, — not that way,” said he, briskly, as Uncle Tom laboriously brought up the tail of his g the wrong side out; “that makes a q, you see.”

  “La sakes, now, does it?” said Uncle Tom, looking with a respectful, admiring air, as his young teacher flourishingly scrawled q’s and g’s innumerable for his edification; and then, taking the pencil in his big, heavy fingers, he patiently recommenced.

  “How easy white folks al’us does things!” said Aunt Chloe, pausing while she was greasing a griddle with a scrap of bacon on her fork, and regarding young Master George with pride. “The way he can write, now! and read, too! and then to come out here evenings and read his lessons to us, — it’s mighty interestin’!”

  “But, Aunt Chloe, I’m getting mighty hungry,” said George. “Isn’t that cake in the skillet almost done?”

  “Mose done, Mas’r George,” said Aunt Chloe, lifting the lid and peeping in,—”browning beautiful — a real lovely brown. Ah! let me alone for dat. Missis let Sally try to make some cake, t’ other day, jes to larn her, she said. ‘O, go way, Missis,’ said I; ‘it really hurts my feelin’s, now, to see good vittles spilt dat ar way! Cake ris all to one side — no shape at all; no more than my shoe; go way!”

  And with this final expression of contempt for Sally’s greenness, Aunt Chloe whipped the cover off the bake-kettle, and disclosed to view a neatly-baked pound-cake, of which no city confectioner need to have been ashamed. This being evidently the central point of the entertainment, Aunt Chloe began now to bustle about earnestly in the supper department.

  “Here you, Mose and Pete! get out de way, you niggers! Get away, Polly, honey, — mammy’ll give her baby some fin, by and by. Now, Mas’r George, you jest take off dem books, and set down now with my old man, and I’ll take up de sausages, and have de first griddle full of cakes on your plates in less dan no time.”

  “They wanted me to come to supper in the house,” said George; “but I knew what was what too well for that, Aunt Chloe.”

  “So you did — so you did, honey,” said Aunt Chloe, heaping the smoking batter-cakes on his plate; “you know’d your old aunty’d keep the best for you. O, let you alone for dat! Go way!” And, with that, aunty gave George a nudge with her finger, designed to be immensely facetious, and turned again to her griddle with great briskness.

  “Now for the cake,” said Mas’r George, when the activity of the griddle department had somewhat subsided; and, with that, the youngster flourished a large knife over the article in question.

  “La bless you, Mas’r George!” said Aunt Chloe, with earnestness, catching his arm, “you wouldn’t be for cuttin’ it wid dat ar great heavy knife! Smash all down — spile all de pretty rise of it. Here, I’ve got a thin old knife, I keeps sharp a purpose. Dar now, see! comes apart light as a feather! Now eat away — you won’t get anything to beat dat ar.”

  “Tom Lincon says,” said George, speaking with his mouth full, “that their Jinny is a better cook than you.”

  “Dem Lincons an’t much count, no way!” said Aunt Chloe, contemptuously; “I mean, set along side our folks. They ‘s ‘spectable folks enough in a kinder plain way; but, as to gettin’ up anything in style, they don’t begin to have a notion on ‘t. Set Mas’r Lincon, now, alongside Mas’r Shelby! Good Lor! and Missis Lincon, — can she kinder sweep it into a room like my missis, — so kinder splendid, yer know! O, go way! don’t tell me nothin’ of dem Lincons!” — and Aunt Chloe tossed her head as one who hoped she did know something of the world.

  “Well, though, I’ve heard you say,” said George, “that Jinny was a pretty fair cook.”

  “So I did,” said Aunt Chloe,—”I may say dat. Good, plain, common cookin’, Jinny’ll do; — make a good pone o’ bread, — bile her taters far, — her corn cakes isn’t extra, not extra now, Jinny’s corn cakes isn’t, but then they’s far, — but, Lor, come to de higher branches, and what can she do? Why, she makes pies — sartin she does; but what kinder crust? Can she make your real flecky paste, as melts in your mouth, and lies all up like a puff? Now, I went over thar when Miss Mary was gwine to be married, and Jinny she jest showed me de weddin’ pies. Jinny and I is good friends, ye know. I never said nothin’; but go ‘long, Mas’r George! Why, I shouldn’t sleep a wink for a week, if I had a batch of pies like dem ar. Why, dey wan’t no ‘count ‘t all.”

  “I suppose Jinny thought they were ever so nice,” said George.

  “Thought so! — didn’t she? Thar she was, showing em, as innocent — ye see, it’s jest here, Jinny don’t know. Lor, the family an’t nothing! She can’t be spected to know! ‘Ta’nt no fault o’ hem. Ah, Mas’r George, you doesn’t know half ‘your privileges in yer family and bringin’ up!” Here Aunt Chloe sighed, and rolled up her eyes with emotion.

  “I’m sure, Aunt Chloe, I understand my pie and pudding privileges,” said George. “Ask Tom Lincon if I don’t crow over him, every time I meet him.”

  Aunt Chloe sat back in her chair, and indulged in a hearty guffaw of laughter, at this witticism of young Mas’r’s, laughing till the tears rolled down her black, shining cheeks, and varying the exercise with playfully slapping and poking Mas’r Georgey, and telling him to go way, and that he was a case — that he was fit to kill her, and that he sartin would kill her, one of these days; and, between each of these sanguinary predictions, going off into a laugh, each longer and stronger than the other, till George really began to think that he was a very dangerously witty fel
low, and that it became him to be careful how he talked “as funny as he could.”

  “And so ye telled Tom, did ye? O, Lor! what young uns will be up ter! Ye crowed over Tom? O, Lor! Mas’r George, if ye wouldn’t make a hornbug laugh!”

  “Yes,” said George, “I says to him, ‘Tom, you ought to see some of Aunt Chloe’s pies; they’re the right sort,’ says I.”

  “Pity, now, Tom couldn’t,” said Aunt Chloe, on whose benevolent heart the idea of Tom’s benighted condition seemed to make a strong impression. “Ye oughter just ask him here to dinner, some o’ these times, Mas’r George,” she added; “it would look quite pretty of ye. Ye know, Mas’r George, ye oughtenter feel ‘bove nobody, on ‘count yer privileges, ‘cause all our privileges is gi’n to us; we ought al’ays to ‘member that,” said Aunt Chloe, looking quite serious.

  “Well, I mean to ask Tom here, some day next week,” said George; “and you do your prettiest, Aunt Chloe, and we’ll make him stare. Won’t we make him eat so he won’t get over it for a fortnight?”

  “Yes, yes — sartin,” said Aunt Chloe, delighted; “you’ll see. Lor! to think of some of our dinners! Yer mind dat ar great chicken pie I made when we guv de dinner to General Knox? I and Missis, we come pretty near quarrelling about dat ar crust. What does get into ladies sometimes, I don’t know; but, sometimes, when a body has de heaviest kind o’ ‘sponsibility on ‘em, as ye may say, and is all kinder ‘seris’ and taken up, dey takes dat ar time to be hangin’ round and kinder interferin’! Now, Missis, she wanted me to do dis way, and she wanted me to do dat way; and, finally, I got kinder sarcy, and, says I, ‘Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew ‘s on ‘em; and look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor? Dar! I was jist so sarcy, Mas’r George.”

  “And what did mother say?” said George.

  “Say? — why, she kinder larfed in her eyes — dem great handsome eyes o’ hern; and, says she, ‘Well, Aunt Chloe, I think you are about in the right on ‘t,’ says she; and she went off in de parlor. She oughter cracked me over de head for bein’ so sarcy; but dar’s whar ‘t is — I can’t do nothin’ with ladies in de kitchen!”

  “Well, you made out well with that dinner, — I remember everybody said so,” said George.

  “Didn’t I? And wan’t I behind de dinin’-room door dat bery day? and didn’t I see de General pass his plate three times for some more dat bery pie? — and, says he, ‘You must have an uncommon cook, Mrs. Shelby.’ Lor! I was fit to split myself.

  “And de Gineral, he knows what cookin’ is,” said Aunt Chloe, drawing herself up with an air. “Bery nice man, de Gineral! He comes of one of de bery fustest families in Old Virginny! He knows what’s what, now, as well as I do — de Gineral. Ye see, there’s pints in all pies, Mas’r George; but tan’t everybody knows what they is, or as orter be. But the Gineral, he knows; I knew by his ‘marks he made. Yes, he knows what de pints is!”

  By this time, Master George had arrived at that pass to which even a boy can come (under uncommon circumstances, when he really could not eat another morsel), and, therefore, he was at leisure to notice the pile of woolly heads and glistening eyes which were regarding their operations hungrily from the opposite corner.

  “Here, you Mose, Pete,” he said, breaking off liberal bits, and throwing it at them; “you want some, don’t you? Come, Aunt Chloe, bake them some cakes.”

  And George and Tom moved to a comfortable seat in the chimney-corner, while Aunte Chloe, after baking a goodly pile of cakes, took her baby on her lap, and began alternately filling its mouth and her own, and distributing to Mose and Pete, who seemed rather to prefer eating theirs as they rolled about on the floor under the table, tickling each other, and occasionally pulling the baby’s toes.

  “O! go long, will ye?” said the mother, giving now and then a kick, in a kind of general way, under the table, when the movement became too obstreperous. “Can’t ye be decent when white folks comes to see ye? Stop dat ar, now, will ye? Better mind yerselves, or I’ll take ye down a button-hole lower, when Mas’r George is gone!”

  What meaning was couched under this terrible threat, it is difficult to say; but certain it is that its awful indistinctness seemed to produce very little impression on the young sinners addressed.

  “La, now!” said Uncle Tom, “they are so full of tickle all the while, they can’t behave theirselves.”

  Here the boys emerged from under the table, and, with hands and faces well plastered with molasses, began a vigorous kissing of the baby.

  “Get along wid ye!” said the mother, pushing away their woolly heads. “Ye’ll all stick together, and never get clar, if ye do dat fashion. Go long to de spring and wash yerselves!” she said, seconding her exhortations by a slap, which resounded very formidably, but which seemed only to knock out so much more laugh from the young ones, as they tumbled precipitately over each other out of doors, where they fairly screamed with merriment.

  “Did ye ever see such aggravating young uns?” said Aunt Chloe, rather complacently, as, producing an old towel, kept for such emergencies, she poured a little water out of the cracked tea-pot on it, and began rubbing off the molasses from the baby’s face and hands; and, having polished her till she shone, she set her down in Tom’s lap, while she busied herself in clearing away supper. The baby employed the intervals in pulling Tom’s nose, scratching his face, and burying her fat hands in his woolly hair, which last operation seemed to afford her special content.

  “Aint she a peart young un?” said Tom, holding her from him to take a full-length view; then, getting up, he set her on his broad shoulder, and began capering and dancing with her, while Mas’r George snapped at her with his pocket-handkerchief, and Mose and Pete, now returned again, roared after her like bears, till Aunt Chloe declared that they “fairly took her head off” with their noise. As, according to her own statement, this surgical operation was a matter of daily occurrence in the cabin, the declaration no whit abated the merriment, till every one had roared and tumbled and danced themselves down to a state of composure.

  “Well, now, I hopes you’re done,” said Aunt Chloe, who had been busy in pulling out a rude box of a trundle-bed; “and now, you Mose and you Pete, get into thar; for we’s goin’ to have the meetin’.”

  “O mother, we don’t wanter. We wants to sit up to meetin’, — meetin’s is so curis. We likes ‘em.”

  “La, Aunt Chloe, shove it under, and let ’em sit up,” said Mas’r George, decisively, giving a push to the rude machine.

  Aunt Chloe, having thus saved appearances, seemed highly delighted to push the thing under, saying, as she did so, “Well, mebbe ‘t will do ’em some good.”

  The house now resolved itself into a committee of the whole, to consider the accommodations and arrangements for the meeting.

  “What we’s to do for cheers, now, I declar I don’t know,” said Aunt Chloe. As the meeting had been held at Uncle Tom’s weekly, for an indefinite length of time, without any more “cheers,” there seemed some encouragement to hope that a way would be discovered at present.

  “Old Uncle Peter sung both de legs out of dat oldest cheer, last week,” suggested Mose.

  “You go long! I’ll boun’ you pulled ’em out; some o’ your shines,” said Aunt Chloe.

  “Well, it’ll stand, if it only keeps jam up agin de wall!” said Mose.

  “Den Uncle Peter mus’n’t sit in it, cause he al’ays hitches when he gets a singing. He hitched pretty nigh across de room, t’ other night,” said Pete.

  “Good Lor! get him in it, then,” said Mose, “and den he’d begin, ‘Come saints — and sinners, hear me tell,’ and den down he’d go,” — and Mose imitated precisely the nasal tones of the old man, tumbling on the floor, to illustrate the supposed catastrophe.

  “Come now, be decent, ca
n’t ye?” said Aunt Chloe; “an’t yer shamed?”

  Mas’r George, however, joined the offender in the laugh, and declared decidedly that Mose was a “buster.” So the maternal admonition seemed rather to fail of effect.

  “Well, ole man,” said Aunt Chloe, “you’ll have to tote in them ar bar’ls.”

  “Mother’s bar’ls is like dat ar widder’s, Mas’r George was reading ‘bout, in de good book, — dey never fails,” said Mose, aside to Peter.

  “I’m sure one on ’em caved in last week,” said Pete, “and let ’em all down in de middle of de singin’; dat ar was failin’, warnt it?”

  During this aside between Mose and Pete, two empty casks had been rolled into the cabin, and being secured from rolling, by stones on each side, boards were laid across them, which arrangement, together with the turning down of certain tubs and pails, and the disposing of the rickety chairs, at last completed the preparation.

  “Mas’r George is such a beautiful reader, now, I know he’ll stay to read for us,” said Aunt Chloe; “‘pears like ‘t will be so much more interestin’.”

  George very readily consented, for your boy is always ready for anything that makes him of importance.

  The room was soon filled with a motley assemblage, from the old gray-headed patriarch of eighty, to the young girl and lad of fifteen. A little harmless gossip ensued on various themes, such as where old Aunt Sally got her new red headkerchief, and how “Missis was a going to give Lizzy that spotted muslin gown, when she’d got her new berage made up;” and how Mas’r Shelby was thinking of buying a new sorrel colt, that was going to prove an addition to the glories of the place. A few of the worshippers belonged to families hard by, who had got permission to attend, and who brought in various choice scraps of information, about the sayings and doings at the house and on the place, which circulated as freely as the same sort of small change does in higher circles.