the week
before Christmas. I doubt if they would have been put back even then,
but that Mammy dreaded criticism, from maids and carriage drivers
visiting kinfolk brought with them. Big yawning cracks in cold weather
were in a way the hall-mark of poor-white cabins. It would have half
broken Mammy's heart to give anybody room to say she belonged to less
than real quality.

She was autocratic; a benevolent despot; withal severe. If I displeased
her by meddling, putting small grimy fingers into pies they should not
touch, she set me to shelling black-eyed peas--a task my soul loathed,
likewise the meddlesome fingers--still I knew better than to sulk or
whine over it. For that I would have been sent back into the house. The
kitchen stood thirty yards away from the back door, with a branchy oak
in front of it, and another, even branchier, shading the log foot-way
between. The house offered only grown-up talk, which rarely interested
me. In the kitchen I caught scraps of Brer Rabbit's history, pithily
applied, other scraps of song--Mammy always "gave out" the words to
herself before singing them--proverbs and sayings such as "Cow want her
tail agin in fly-time" applied to an ingrate, or: "Dat's er high kick
fer er low horse," by way of setting properly in place a pretender.

Best of all, I got the latest news of the countryside for ten miles
around. Wireless has little on the way things ran about among the
plantations. It was a point of honor among the black men to have wives
or sweethearts away from home. This meant running about
nightly--consequently cross-currents of gossip lively enough to make the
yellowest journal turn green with envy. Mammy was a trifle apologetic
over having a husband no further off than the next neighbor's. To make
up for it, however, the husbands who came to his house lived from three
to five miles away--and one of them worked at the mill, hence was a
veritable human chronicle. Thus Mammy was able to hold her head up with
Susan, her sister, who milked and washed.

Susan might have been called a widow of degrees--she had had three
husbands, but only two were living. The last parting was always
threatening to end in meeting over again--still that did not hinder her
cabin from being the rendezvous of all the likeliest fellows within easy
walking range. Naturally she had things to tell--worth hearing whether
or no they were true. So also had Phoebe, who was a sort of scullion,
fetching in wood and wa