The family with whom I now found a home consisted of Heinrich Nest (“The Master”) and his three daughters – Darla, Harmony and Dawn. The family lived in something like “style”. They were famed for their wealth and social position throughout the neighbourhood. Their home was the paradise of homes in Stringtown, Kentucky. Travellers often paused to admire the tasteful arrangement of the grounds and the neat, artistic plan of the house.
The property was named Mercy Hall for its previous owners – the prominent Mercy Family of Virginia. Elm trees lined the drive like the Royal Guard. To the left of the drive was an enclosed pasture, and to the right was an orchard. The drive forked in three directions – to the western end of the property, to the “big house”, and to the eastern end of the property. The roads were all connected in a circle.
The western end of the property contained the majority of the outbuildings. There was a barn; a stable for The Master’s prized thoroughbred horses, a sty for the pigs, a chicken coop, the smokehouse for curing meat, the slaughterhouse, the granary, the dairy, and the icehouse. These were all connected to the western road which met the eastern road at the rear of the property.
At the rear of the property was a pond where ice would be collected during winter and stored in the icehouse. There was also a burial ground, a vegetable garden, a cabin for the blacksmith and carpenter, and a mule barn. The road separated them from the well, the wash house, the loom house, the privy, the woodshed, and the kitchen with the slave hall attached to it. These were situated immediately behind the “big house”.
The eastern end of the property contained the family’s main source of income. Here lay the tobacco and hemp barns; and the slave quarters which stood a ways off from the “big house”, close to the woods. The slave quarters were wretched hovels housing five slaves on average.
They were old, small, whitewashed, log cabins that had seen better days with no windows, no openings except for the doorway. There was a ‘chimney’ to one end of the house. The ‘chimney’ was a pile of sticks (which often caught on fire) held together by mud. The fire-place was made of clay. Any chinks in the walls or roof were stopped with wads of cotton, corn shucks* or whatever was at hand. Our ‘beds ‘were old cots or straw pallets. We sat on broken stools or old pine boxes. The houses stood in two rows with a wide street between them. The overseer’s quarters were nearby, closer to the road.
The overseer’s house was a brick cabin. It had three rooms – his bedroom, his office and his kitchen. It had numerous glass windows and a true fireplace and chimney of brick. There was a porch at the rear of the house, where the overseer, Mr. Walsh, could sit and survey the nearby slave quarters and the fields of tobacco and hemp. A thicket hid all this from the view of the traveller and drew attention to the big house.
The middle road of the drive was flanked by a primrose-lined sunken garden on both sides. It led to the “big house”- the residence of The Master. It was a large, two-story brick house with white, shuttered glass windows and a veranda at the front. The coach house was attached to the left side of the house and a long, narrow, covered walkway connected the kitchen to the “big house”. The main door was made of oak and had a beautiful gilded, scrolled knocker and led to the ground floor. The ground floor had the entrance hall, a solarium, The Master’s study, a library, a dining room, a living room and the stairs that led to the upper floor.
The upper floor contained the bedrooms of the occupants, bathrooms, a nursery and an attic. The largest bedroom belonged to The Master and had a bathroom. Miss Darla’s room had a boudoir in addition to the adjoining bathroom as did the bedrooms of Misses Harmony and Dawn. The two guest rooms shared a bathroom. The nursery was kept locked and the attic contained trunks of linens and the personal effects of the family.
The house seemed to bespeak refined minds and delicate, noble natures but the occupants were people of coarse, barbaric natures. They perpetrated acts of wickedness and diabolical cruelty without the least pang of remorse or regret. Whilst the family revelled in luxury, the slaves were denied the most ordinary necessities. The cook, who prepared the nicest dainties, the most tempting, sumptuous dishes, had to console herself with a coarse, scanty diet that would shock even a beggar.
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I shared a cabin with Aunt Grace, the cook; a girl of about twelve named Celia (“CeeCee”), and her three siblings. Aunt Grace slept on a rickety cot and the rest of us on pallets of straw. Grace was a slender old woman whose dark, scowling countenance looked out from under a small cap of faded muslin that was perched atop her plaited, greying hair.
The night that I arrived at Mercy Hall, I slept fitfully. My mind was swarmed with thoughts of my family and friends. “Sold,” I murmured. What was it to be sold? Why was I sold? Why was I separated form my mother and friends? Who gave The Master the right to force me from my good home? Alas, I had no answers for these questions.
The next morning I was awoken by the shrill sound of a hunting horn. This was the signal for all the slaves to rise and woe unto him or her that was found missing or tardy when the roll was called! I and my fellow cabin dwellers quickly sprang up and dressed ourselves and went out into the yard.
In the yard was the overseer – Adam Walsh. He was tall, heavyset, athletic man with a piercing, chilling gaze. He stood with his whip in hand as he called out the names of all the slaves and assigned their daily tasks to them. The slaves received their orders with smiles of terror more than pleasure. He then dismissed them and looked at me fiercely.
“Come here, gal,” he commanded.
With a timid step, I obeyed.
“What are you fit for? Not much of anything, ha?” he demanded, pulling me by the ear to stand in front of him.
“Well, you are likely looking. How much work can you do?”
I stammered out something as to my willingness to do anything that was required of me. He examined my hands, and concluding from their size and quality, that I was best suited for house work. He made remain in the kitchen until after breakfast.
The kitchen was a two-room brick structure with a wide passage between both rooms and windows to draw cooling breezes. One room was used for the storage of cooking and other utensils, and the food. The other room was for food preparation. The main room had a large fireplace at one end with a long iron bar extending across it. The large pots were suspended over lit coals from this bar by means of hooks. There was also a big oven for baking as well as a long table in the middle of the room. In addition, there were a few stools and chairs strewn around the room. The slave dining hall was attached to the rear of the kitchen.
I entered the room and found two of CeeCee’s siblings begging Aunt Grace to give them a piece of hoe cake* while CeeCee at in a corner hushing her youngest sibling.
“Be off wid you, or I’ll tell Mass or de overseer,” she threatened as their solicitations became more clamorous.
This threat had power to silence the most earnest demands of the stomach. Aching hunger was far less dreaded than the lash of the overseer, Mr. Walsh. My entrance was a diversion for the children. They crowded closer to CeeCee and eyed me doubtfully.
“Who’s her?”, “Whar she come from?”, “When she gwyn away?” and such expressions escaped them in stifled tones.
“Come in, set down,” said Aunt Grace to me.
With a very uneasy feeling, I seated myself upon a broken stool to which Aunt Grace pointed. The loud blast of the horn was the signal for the slaves to suspend their labour and come to breakfast. A negro man and three negro women rushed in at the door, ravenous for their rations. I expected them to retire to the slave dining hall and eat their meal at a table there. I was surprised to learn that the dining hall had no table and was used mainly during the winter and watched as the slaves took a slice of bacon and a pone* of bread in hand and ate it standing.
At home we always took our meal at a table, our manners trained into something like the softness of humanity. There, as regularly as the Sunday dawned, were we summoned to the house to hear the Bible read, and join (though at a respectful distance) with the family in prayer. But this I subsequently learned was an unusual practice in Stringtown, and was attributed to the fact that Mr. Nielsen’s wife had been born in the State of Massachusetts. There the people were crazy and fanatical enough to believe that “niggers” were human beings with souls, who were to be treated kindly. How I longed for home!
“Well,” said the man, “I’d like to git a bit more bread.”
“You’s had yer sher,” replied Aunt Grace. “Mister Walsh ses one slice o’ meat and a pone o’ bread is to be the ‘lowance.”
“I knows it, but if thar’s any scraps left from the house table, you wimmin folks always gits it.”
“Who’s got de bes’ right? Sure, and aren’t de one who cooks it got de bes’ right to it?” asked Aunt Grace with a triumphant voice.
“Ha ha!” cried Zeke upon entering, “Here comes de brekfust leavin’s. Now who’s smartes’ shall have ‘em.”
Immediately Zeke, his comrade and the three women seized a waiter of fragments of biscuit, ham, eggs and coffee –the remains of the breakfast prepared for The Master and family.
“By gar,” cried Zeke, “I’ve got de coffee pot, and I’ll drink dis!”
Without further ceremony, he applied the spout of the coffee pot to his mouth, and, sans cream or sugar, gulped the coffee grounds. His comrade claimed the ham while two of the women held a considerable contest over a biscuit. Blows and lies passed frequently between them. Aunt Grace tried to stop them but failed.
The women stood with eyes blazing like comets, their arms twisted around each other in a very furious struggle. One of them, losing her balance, fell upon the floor and dragged the other women after her. While they rolled and wallowed in a cloud of dust, the disputed biscuit dropped and rolled away to be snatched up by Zeke, who happily devoured it. I stood all agape, looking on with amazement.
Amanda, the girl form whom the waiter had been snatched, returned to the house and made a report of the fracas. Instantly and unexpectedly, Walsh, flaming with rage, stood in the midst of the riotous group. Seizing hold of the women, he knocked them on their heads with clenched fists.
“Hold, black wretches! Come, I will give you a leetle fun. Off now to the post!”
The appeals for mercy, promises of mended ways and excuses would have touched a heart of stone, but not Walsh. He had the power to resist even the prayer of an angel. To him, the cries of human suffering and the agony of distress were the sweetest music. My heart bled when I saw the two women being led away, and I put my hands in my ears to shut out their screams that rang with a strange terror in the morning air. A look of fright was on the face of all.
“They be getting’ awful beatin’ at the post, “muttered Zeke, a sardonic smile flitted over his hard features.
It was sad to behold the depths of degradation into which this man had fallen. He could smile at the anguish of a fellow slave. Originally, his nature may have been kind and gentle, but a continuous system of brutality had so deadened his sensibilities, that he had no humanity left. For this the white man is accountable.
Poor oppressed African! Thorny and rugged is our path of life! Many a secret sigh and bleeding tear attest our cruel martyrdom. Holy men stand in splendid churches, delivering elaborate harangues mistaking the definition of servitude and impressing upon the negro to accept slavery as morally right. Serving and being a slave are very different. There is no argument to justify slavery as some moral right.
As may be supposed, I had little appetite for my breakfast, but I managed to deceive others into the belief that I had made a hearty meal. But those screams from half-starved wretches had a fatal and terrifying fascination that chased away my hunger and burned into my mind…