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Updated: June 21, 2025
This out-building had once served as servants' quarters, and it still had the open fireplace and broad hearth before which many a black mammy had toasted the toes of her pickaninnies, as well as the trap-door in the ceiling leading to the loft where they had slept.
They were quartered opposite our house in Charleston, and the pickaninnies were objects of profound interest to the children of the neighborhood. One or two letters came from the emigrants after they reached Liberia. Then silence fell on the African farm. Some of the most effective anti-slavery reformers were Charlestonians by birth and breeding.
A Jamaican author wrote, for example, that in five or six months on one plantation "not less than nine and thirty thousand were caught." In the "weeding gang," in which most of the children from five to eight years old were kept as much for control as for achievement, there were twenty pickaninnies, all black, under Mirtilla as "driveress," who had borne and lost seven children of her own.
Humanity about was joyous, however. Laughter and banter and song came from the cabins that lined the big ravine and the little ravines opening into it. A banjo tinkled at the entrance of "Possum Trot," sacred to the darkies. We moved toward it. On the stoop sat an ecstatic picker and in the dust shuffled three pickaninnies one boy and two girls the youngest not five years old.
He also formed a military company of the little negroes on the family estate, and drilled them keenly, actually making something like a military show with the barefooted, ragged pickaninnies, with their rolling eyes and woolly heads.
An aged darkey was swinging an axe at the woodpile and two little pickaninnies were gathering a basket of chips. Already the air was filled with the twilight sounds of the farm the lowing of cattle, the bleating of calves at the cowpens, the bleat of sheep from the woods, and the nicker of horses in the barn.
He had come back some other way known to Pickaninnies and had in his arms a pot just like the one we had seen. But this one was full, and he set it down for us to look at. There were doubloons of Spain, there were pistoles, guineas, Arabian pieces, Jewish money, coins of Alexander the Great, and I know not what besides.
Seated in a half circle on the grass were clustered the pickaninnies and their grinning forebears. All was ready, and over the scene Miss Liz smiled with placid contentment. It was fitting, she had more than once this day averred, for them to turn their minds patriotward.
And there was another reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen pickaninnies. In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the little chorus had made good. Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet coats and caps, grinning sociably.
Beside that, had not Flora taken off the blue cockade so that Sylvia would not be reminded of the trouble at school? But Grace felt no such restraints. She was a southern girl as well as Flora, but she was sorry for the old colored woman. "Well, I do wish we could keep the pickaninnies until they grow up. It seems a shame when they feel so bad to be sold off to strangers.
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