A Woman Rice Planter
9781465634771
108 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
While the influences and mechanisms of the present world tend to make all parts of it alike in thought and in costume, the various nooks and corners of our own country are gradually losing their original highly accentuated characteristics, and are merging into a general similarity. Most of what you hear and see any morning in the towns of Massachusetts you will hear and see in Omaha, Denver, Seattle, or anywhere else, because the department stores advertise and sell the same kind of clothes everywhere at the same time, and the same news is everywhere published in the daily papers. Our American literature is therefore very lucky to have produced its Jewetts, Wilkinses, Cables, Craddocks, Pages, and Harrises, who have well set down for our perpetual interest and instruction the evaporating charm of their chosen fields. Here is another book belonging to this valuable indigenous shelf of ours, a shelf where stand the volumes that tell of people and events that could have been met with nowhere in the world save upon our own native soil. Although it is not fiction, but a record of personal experience, it should prove to many readers as entertaining as our best fiction. It is about the South, a particular part of the South, the rice-plantation coast of South Carolina. In this region, field and water and forest intermingle to form a strange, haunting scene, full of character and mystery. To dine with a neighbor here, one needs both the horse and the boat; travel has to be amphibious. And in this region, too, the marks that were made by the old days have been by the new days obliterated less than in most parts of our country. The Massachusetts, the New York, the Pennsylvania of fifty years ago, have been swept into albums and libraries; shelves and cabinets are their resting-place. Would you know how yonder large mills looked in 1860? No mills were there then, the spot was a pond, with a country road and a farm-house about half a mile down the road; perhaps somebody has a photograph or a wood-cut showing it as it used to be. That is what most of us in the North and East have to do—pull down old books, pull open old drawers—if we would see the former aspect of our neighborhood. Not so is it in the country of the rice. The Southerner of to-day can still trace the fields and woods of old. His house may be roofless, his garden walks a tangle, but the avenue of live oaks still stands, the chimney of his mill still rises above a pile of crumbled bricks, at the doors of the cabins the negroes still sit, clad in a fashion not yet changed beyond recognition. The fields themselves may have had their banks cut and dissolved away by unresisted freshets, but still they are visible, still the unchanged river pours between and around them, and still the boat loads of people creep and prowl through the cuts. True it is that no longer are these people well-to-do neighbors going to visit each other, rowed by an ebony crew in uniform that chants plantation songs in rhythm to the strokes of its oars—those neighbors are most of them lying in the graveyard of St. Michael's, Charleston, or in the lovely enclosures surrounding the little silent country churches upon which one sometimes emerges during a long ride through the woods. They who go in the boats to-day are apt to be less prosperous, whatever their color, and when they are black they may very likely be poachers who do not sing. But in spite of these differences, the general scene is the same. Thus the mark of the old days remains visible; emancipation has by no means obliterated it; emancipation has merely brought to a close the old days themselves, without building on top of them anything new; it is Time that gently and silently and slowly is strewing its leaves upon that ended era.
