XXXIXA VISIT OF TENDER MEMORIES
It was the year of the Exposition in New Orleans that I arrived with my little daughter on a visit to a Creole friend. We left the train at the foot of Canal Street, and boarded one of those old-timey mule cars, in which the passenger drops his fare in a box and the driver sits on a stool behind a dashboard, reinforced with a stout facing of sheet iron, and manages his mule, if he can. In our case he couldn’t. A lot of excursionists, with gripsacks and useless overcoats, filled the little car. When they had deposited their coins, and the driver had counted them, and we were ready to start, Mr. Mule took “de studs” and refused to proceed. When, urged by calls and whip, he let those husky feet fly against the dashboard, with deafening and startling results, the wherefore of the iron protector was made manifest to us. Suddenly, as if electrified, the mule bounded forth, up crowded Canal Street, with race-horse speed. Our fellow passengers, Eastern men, probably, and ignorant ofmule nature, jumped from the rear of that racing car, as fast as they dared. I held on to the scared little girl, for I had not lived on a plantation without having become acquainted with mule tactics. When our steed reached his destination, at the foot of Camp Street, there were no passengers in that car but ourselves.
That was our first acquaintance with the queer transportation facilities of that date, but it was enriched by others before our visit to the Crescent City terminated.
We found our friend, dear Phine, in considerable excitement about a trunk filled with silver, that had been in her keeping awaiting a claimant. The Louisiana State Bank had, until the war, a branch in Baton Rouge, of which William S. Pike was president or manager, and his family, as was the custom, lived “over the bank.” At the break up and disorganization of all business, this especial Louisiana State Bank removed its assets (if there were any; assets were an uncertain quantity in those days) to the New Orleans headquarters. All the household effects of the manager’s family—the accumulation of years, in garret and closets—were sent to New Orleans, and the Pikes moved there too. After the death of Mr. Pike, the family closed their Camp Street house and went to Canada. Thence a requestcame to my friend, Phine, whose whole unselfish existence had been spent for the help of others, to pack away personal effects, have the furniture sold, and the house put also on the market.
Looking through boxes and trunks and bundles and barrels, she stumbled upon an old, weather-worn, almost dilapidated trunk, without hasp or lock, but securely tied with bits of strong rope. It was found to be filled with silver, bowls, a tea set and various odd pieces. Not one article bore a mark by which it could be identified, not a scrap of paper—all the pieces were wrapped in rags and securely packed into this apparently unsafe receptacle. Phine knew that this silver did not belong to the family, nor to any friend of the family. The trunk was conveyed to Phine’s garret, and she sat down to rack her brain about it. At last it was decided that in the uncertainty and alarm of the early war days, some planter brought that trunk to the bank at Baton Rouge, for safe keeping, using every precaution to avoid suspicion of its valuable contents. Probably it came, tied behind his own buggy. There it had lain for years, nobody now left to give any information regarding it. Phine wrote to Mr. Pike’s brother at Shreveport, and he knew naught of it, but he advertised it, with the usual “prove property” clause.
In time, a man answered, stating his wife was a very small child during the war, but she remembered a quantity of family silver had been removed from her father’s house. She was now the last remaining one of her family, but she could identify one article in the lot, a unique urn-shaped pitcher, of which she submitted a drawing, from memory. The trunk with its valuable contents had just been dispatched to the woman....
My little daughter and I took many rambles down into the picturesque parts of the old city. I presume in New York it might be called slumming, but every old crawfish ditch and dirty alley was dear to me. Even the old French cemeteries down Basin Street were full of tender memories. When we went home from such tramps, and Elise told, in her graphic way, of the tumbledown appearance of whole streets that mother was so enthusiastic over, our genial host, Phine’s husband, would say, “Why don’t you go up St. Charles Avenue? We fixed that up fine to show to visitors.” But St. Charles Avenue had no sweet memories for me, it had not existed in my day. We saw St. Charles Avenues every day, at home. We had no old French cemeteries, the inscription on almost every tomb calling forth memories of dear, departed Creole friends.
The old cathedral and its environs had tohave several visits. I had to show my little girl (oh, how reminiscent I was, to be sure!) the very shop whose windows I used to look into, at the beads, corals, shells, etc., from Southern seas. And, my dear, the very man with gold earrings was there, shuffling around with strings of rough coral beads, and conch shells, that very man (so it seemed)—and he was not a day older—that was doing that very thing seventy years ago, when I had to tip-toe to get a good view of that entrancing interior.
In the narrow street by the cathedral we purchased rosaries for our Catholic maids at home. We walked up and down the narrow way, looking for a tiny shop where I had bought, years and years ago, materials and a book of instruction for the making of paper flowers. Roses and jasmines and pinks and honeysuckles were hung in lavish profusion all about my plantation home, and they lent quite a festive charm on wintry, rainy days, when there was not a blooming plant to be had. I was reveling so far into the sweet past that I was almost surprised that the hustling little French woman (of sixty years ago) was not there, behind her stack of paper goods, like the man with the gold earrings, but she wasn’t, and the very shop was gone, too.
Eliza Ripley
Eliza Ripley
Eliza Ripley
We sat, to rest, on benches in the old Placed’Armes. I looked at those Pontalba buildings, that faded, dilapidated, ramshackle row, and remembered how fine and imposing it was, in my day, and how I had wished that father would take one of those elegant houses, where we would be so near the French market, and the shop of beads and shells, and monkeys and parrots.
We strolled up Royal Street, and the little girl saw the house in which the Boufords lived, sixty years ago. The saucy child ventured to remark she always had thought I visited nice people, but they must have lived in shabby houses. I did not notice her comment, but proceeded to point to the balcony where I stood to see a Mardi Gras procession, a frolicsome lot of the festive beaux of the period, and to catch the bonbons and confetti they threw at us from the landeaus and gaily decked wagons. It was long after the Mardi Gras of the thirties, and long, long before the Mardi Gras of to-day, a kind of interregnum, that the young fashionable men were turning into a festival. I recall Mrs. Slocomb’s disgust when Cuthbert fell ill of pneumonia, after his exposure that day. Cuthbert Slocomb was chubby and blond, and with bare neck and short sleeves, tied up with baby blue ribbon, a baby cap similarly decorated, he made a very good counterfeit baby, seated, too, in a high chair, with a rattle to playwith. The “mamma” had long black ringlets and wore a fashionable bonnet. I have forgotten, if in fact I ever knew, what youth represented the mamma. There were no masks, but the disguises with paint, powder and wigs were sufficient to make them unrecognizable. If Cuthbert Slocomb had not been ill, I probably would not have known the “baby.”
A New Orleans Cemetery.
A New Orleans Cemetery.
A New Orleans Cemetery.
During that visit I went to the cemetery Decoration Day. Mind you, I have seen about forty Decoration days, North—but this one in my own Southland, among my own beloved dead, has been the only Decoration Day I have ever seen in a cemetery.(I wish my feelings were not quite so strong.) Phine and I stood beside the tomb that contains the dust of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, a man I had known well, a contemporary and valued friend of my father’s, a man whose children and grandchildren were dear to me. We saw the solemn procession file in, and halt a little beyond us. The band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and hundreds of voices joined in the musical prayer. I could not sing, I never could, but I could weep, and my eyes were not the only moist ones in the assembly. Such a throng of sober, sad people there was, such a lot of veterans, many in shabby, weather-stained gray, that bore evidence of hard service....
Phine had kept track of the people from whom I had been so long separated that age had obliterated means by which I could recognize them. As a veteran, in the shabby old gray (I felt like taking everyone such by the hand), approached, Phine caught my arm and whispered “Douglas West,” and at the same moment his eye met mine with a flash of recognition. I had not seen Douglas for over thirty years. And weren’t we glad to meet? on that ground, too, so sacred to both of us. And didn’t we meet and meet and talk and talk, many times thereafter, in Phine’s dear little parlor on Carondelet Street? Indeed, we did.
Later on, Phine whispered, “You knew that man, I’ll tell you who he is after he passes us.” A quite tottering, wrinkled, old man passed. I gave him a good stare, shook my head. I did not know, nor think I ever had known him. It was A. B. Cammack—who would have believed it? He was a bachelor in 1850, the time when I thought a man of thirty was an old man. We happened to be fellow passengers on that fashionable A No. 1 steamboat,Belle Key. I was a frisky young miss, and Mr. Cammack was, as I say, an old bachelor. He did not know, nor want to know anybody on the boat, but it happened he was introduced to our small party, at the moment of sailing, so we had a reluctant sort of bowing acquaintance for the first day or so.Broderie Anglaisewas all the rage. Any woman who had time forfrivolité, as the Creoles called tatting, was busy working eyelets on linen. Of course I hadBroderie, too. Mr. Cammack gradually thawed, and brought a book to read to me while my fingers flew over the fascinating eyelets. The book, I distinctly remember, was “Aunt Patsy’s Scrap Bag,” a medley of silly nonsensical stuff, written by a woman so long dead and so stupid while she lived that nobody even hears of her now, but Mr. Cammack was immensely entertaining and witty, and we roared over that volume, and his comments thereon.I have often dwelt on that steamboat episode, but I doubt if it ever gave him a moment’s thought. I really think if it had been like my meeting with Douglas West we might have had quite a bit of fun, living again that week on theBelle Key. A hearty laugh, such as we had together, so many years before, might have smoothed some of the wrinkles from his careworn face, and a few crow’s feet out of mine. But he never knew, possibly would not have cared if he had known, that we almost touched hands in the crowd on that Decoration Day.
On and on we strolled, past a grand monument to the memory of Dr. Choppin, whom I knew so well, and loved too, girl fashion, when he was twenty, and who sailed away, boy fashion, to complete his medical education in Paris. Maybe if we had met, in the flesh, on that Decoration Day, it might have beena la Cammack. We never did meet, after that memorable sailing away, but he has a tender niche in my heart even yet, and I was pleased to see some loving hand had decorated that sacred spot....
Phine and I strolled about after the ceremonies were completed. She had a toy broom and a toy watering pot in the keeper’s cottage, and was reluctant to leave before she had straightened and freshened the bouquets we had placed on the tombs ofthe dead she loved, and swept away the dust, and watered the little grass border again.
A year ago she herself fell asleep and was laid to rest in the lovely cemetery, and with her death the last close tie was broken that bound me to New Orleans.