第3章 CHAPTER I.(2)

Aunt Judy got well, but had one eye out; we could always feel the shot in her forehead. She was one of the best servants, and a dear good friend to me. She used to bring two of her children and come up to my room on Sundays and sit with me, saying, she did not want to be in the cabin when "strange niggers were there." This misfortune had disfigured her face and she always avoided meeting people. I can see her now, with one child at the breast, and another at her knee, with her hand on its head, feeling for "buggars." I was very much attached to this woman and wanted to take care of her in her old age. I went to Southern Texas to get her in 1873. I found some of her children in Sherman, Texas, but aunt Judy had been dead six months. She always said she wanted to live with me.

My mother always left her small children in the care of the servants.

I was quite a little girl before I was allowed to eat at "white folk's table." Once my mother had been away several days and came home bringing a lot of company with her. I ran out when I saw the carriages driving up, and cried: "Oh, ma, I am so glad to see you.

I don't mind sleeping with aunt Eliza, but I do hate to sleep with uncle Josh," think I was quite dirty, and some of the colored servants snatched me out of sight. Aunt Eliza was aunt Judy's half-sister, her father was a white man. She was given to my father by my grandmother, was very bright and handsome, and the mother of seventeen children.

My grandmother remembered aunt Eliza in her will, giving her some linen sheets, furniture, and other things.

One of aunt Eliza's sons was named Newton. My father had a mill and store up in Lincoln County, near Hustonville. Newton used to do the hauling for my father with a large wagon and six-mule team. He would often do the buying for the store and take measurements of grain, and my father trusted him implicitly. Once a friend of my father said to him, as Newton was passing along the street with his team:

"George, I'll give you seventeen hundred dollars for that negro." My father said: "If you would fill that wagon-bed full of gold, you could not get him." A few weeks after that Newton died. I remember seeing my father in the room weeping, and remember the chorus of the song the negroes sang on that occasion: "Let us sit down and chat with the angels."

The husband of aunt Eliza was "uncle Josh," a small Guinea negro, as black as coal and very peculiar. I always stood in awe of him, as all the children did. I remember one expression of his was: "Get out of the way, or I'll knock you into a cocked hat." The reason I had to sleep with aunt Eliza, Betsy, my nurse, was only ten years older than I was. Betsy was a girl given by my grandfather Campbell to my mother when my father and mother were married. My mother was a widow when she married my father. She had married Will Caldwell, a son of Capt. Caldwell, who died in Sangamon County, Ill., he had freed his negroes and moved there from Kentucky. Will Caldwell died after three years, leaving my mother with two children. Both of them died at my grandfather Campbell's in Mercer county, Kentucky, before she married my father.

I was about four years old when my grandmother Moore died. She lived on a farm in Garrard County, about two miles from my father. She used to ride a mare called "Kit." Whenever we would see grandma coming up the avenue, the whole lot of children, white and black, ran to meet her. She always carried on the horn of her saddle a handbag, then called a "reticule," and in that she always brought us some little treat, most generally a cut off of a loaf of sugar, that used to be sold in the shape of a long loaf of bread. We would follow her down to the stile, where she would get off, and delight us all by taking something good to eat out of the "reticule." We would tie old Kit, and then take our turn in petting the colt. The first grief I remember to have had was when I heard of the death of my grandmother. I wanted to see her so badly and go to the funeral, and for weeks I would go off by myself and cry about her death. I used to love to lie and sit on her grave at the back of the garden. Older people often forget the sorrows of childhood, but I felt keenly the injustice of not being allowed to see her dead face and do to this day.

We left that home, when I was about five years old, for a place about two miles from Danville, Kentucky. The house had a flat roof, the first one built in that county; it had an observatory on top. Our nearest neighbors were Mr. Banford's family, Mr. Caldwell, and Mr. Spears.

Dr. Jackson and Dr. Smith were both our physicians, and my father used to hire his physicians by the year. Dr. Jackson was a bachelor and said he was going to wait for me, and I believed him. I remember visiting Dr. Smith in Danville and seeing a human skeleton for the first time. I also saw leeches he used in bleeding. I remember when one of my little brothers was born, they told me Dr. Smith found him in a hollow stump. After that I spent hours out in the woods looking in hollow stumps for babies.

My mother's father was James Campbell, born in King and Queens County, Virginia. His parents were from Scotland. He was married twice. By his first wife he had two sons, William and Whitaker. William married and died young, and I heard, left one child, a daughter.

Uncle "Whitt" lived to be an old man. The second time my grandfather married a Miss Bradshaw. He had four sons and six daughters. I used to stay at grandma's with my aunt Sue. When my mother would take long trips or visits, she would send the younger children, with my nurse Betsy, over there to stay until she returned. The only thing I construe into a cross word, that my grandfather ever spoke to me, was when I was running upstairs and stumbled and he said: "Jump up, and try it again, my daughter." I was so humiliated by the rebuke that I hid from him for several days. He was a Baptist deacon for years.