Pierre held Solange’s arm as if his bride were life itself, and the couple led the procession into a fine morning and wedded bliss.
When the party appeared, coachmen quit gossiping and hurried to their Masters’ conveyances.
Arms crossed beneath her breasts, a modestly dressed black woman waited at the foot of the stairs.
“Why . . .” Solange gasped.
“Good morning, Missus,” Mammy said. “I wishin’ you every happiness.”
“But, Ruth . . .” Pierre began.
Pauline burst past the couple, crying, “Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!”
At which Eulalie—who had never met this woman—burst into tears. Father John asked, “Is there something you want, dear woman?”
“I wants come back,” Mammy said. “Master Pierre and Missus Solange needin’ they Mammy now.”
Jammed behind them in the aisle, important necks craned and impatient questions were asked.
Hugging the sobbing Pauline and speaking past her, Mammy said, “I wants come home.”
The Gift of Prophecy
“POOR CHILD GOT no teat to suck and no Momma love her. Just look at you, Miss Ellen Robillard. All scrunched up and you head squoshed where Doctor clamp it. Your Papa wouldn’t have no midwife, wouldn’t tolerate none. For rich folks it’s modern times. Master Pierre hire himself a prime ‘fizz-i-shun.’ That man studied doctorin’, can’t say how many years he studyin’. Enough so man what never had no baby he ownself nor never catch one knows better’n any nigger midwife who done had babies and catchin’ ’em for years. Doctor man studied ’bout babies—why he even been to Philadelphia!
“Miss Ellen, you was still considerin’ should you come to the light or should you not, just takin’ your sweet baby time. But Doctor Man impatient. Might be other babies needin’ him or might be he had somewheres important go. Well, he fetched you with he shiny clamps and your Momma bleed like a butchered hog. Honey, I seed enough of blood, I don’t want see no more.”
The Pink House shivered to an old man’s tremulous shriek.
Mammy rocked little Ellen, shushing, shushing. “Nehemiah, he findin’ you a wet nurse, and soon you be suckin’ and warm. Miss Solange hold you onct ’fore she go to them spirits. You Momma smile at you, Baby Ellen. I seed it!
“Your Papa, he don’t know what. He find love when he don’t hardly think he love no more, and now love took away. Master Pierre he whipped and wonderin’. Master Pierre already lost one wife and child afore Miss Solange. Now she gone too and Master Pierre thinkin’ there ain’t much reason for livin’ on when livin’ hurt so. Sometimes, Little Miss, sorrowin’ am the onliest thing what am.”
The doctor bustled past the woman and baby. He paused, maybe to say something, or examine the infant one last time, but with an oath he clattered down Jehu’s beautiful stairs.
Although Mammy was expected to use the back stairs with the other servants, some mornings before the white folks were up and about, she visited those stairs to touch a mahogany stair rail she’d seen Jehu fashion. That wood was slippery as water and turned like an invitation.
Baby Ellen lay in her lap, light and heavy. Her breathing was soft and strong.
“Baby, I reckon Miss Solange my Momma too. I knowed her all my life, and I reckon, weren’t for Miss Solange, I wouldn’t be holdin’ you today. I don’t recall hardly nothin’ ’bout my born Momma. Sometimes, so faint it like she in a faraway room, I hears her sayin’ ‘Ki kote pitit-la?’ which was a game we play. ‘Ki kote pitit-la? . . . Oh, where is that child?’ Where is that child?” Momma ain’t never come to me like Martine or Gullah Jack or Miss Penny or them other spirits, but she speak sometimes. I ’spect my born Momma love me, but she don’t come. My Jehu, he . . . he don’t come neither. Spirits busy doin’ spirit things. They’s different rooms where them spirits be and they comes and goes. Might be one day Missus Solange come too. But might not. Might be she busy tendin’ Martine.”
She adjusted the infant in her lap. “Your Momma kind when she remember to be kind and she wouldn’t never have sold me ’cept I wanted sold. Reckon she loved me after her fashion. Miss Ellen, listen to Mammy talkin’ foolishness . . .”
Mammy kept an ear cocked for Nehemiah and the wet nurse. The infant had only one suck before her Momma’s teats went cold.
Mammy was tired past tired. “All them you loves gonna die, child. Every one of ’em. If Le Bon Dieu smile on you particular, you die afore they do. That the truth, child. Everybody know it but nobody wants hear it ’count hearin’ don’t make nothin’ no better. Some things hearin’ ’bout make things worse. Ain’t like dyin’ is some newfanglement nobody ever heard nothin’ ’bout afore.
“Sometimes I can see things. Didn’t want to, didn’t ask to, and wish I didn’t. Seein’ never did me a lick of good. Before you born I seed Mistress Solange like she got a mist round her; she blurred, not sharp like rest of us. Should I told her, ‘Mistress Solange, you ain’t long for this world’? How that help arything? How that make Miss Solange’s last days better? Might be she knows anyway but not sayin’ herself. Sometimes folks do. Might be she ready to go.”
The sobbing Pierre efmerged from his wife’s chamber. He stared at Ruth’s lap as if his infant were an unwelcome stranger.
“Mammy . . .”
“Master Pierre.”
“I . . .”
“We gonna miss her terrible. Miss Solange in the Kingdom this day.”
“Oh, God!” A sob racked the man, and he stumbled off.
Mammy touched the soft blue-veined hollow throbbing atop the baby’s head. “How can it help us knowin’ when our lovelies gonna die? We knows they is, and we knows grievin’s worse than dyin’. Don’t need know when. After you gone, you with the spirits and spirits ain’t grievin’. Martine ain’t grievin’. Martine ain’t . . .”
Mammy bent to kiss Baby Ellen. “We got to act like what ain’t true is, that we gonna live long and be happy, that tomorrow be sunny, never no hurricano no more. Them hurricanos, they thing of the past! You be happy, Miss Ellen, you gets ’vited to balls and picnics, all the fetes. People see you bein’ happy and figure, ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Miss Ellen knows somethin’ I don’t. Maybe my lovelies ain’t gonna be laid under the cold ground. Maybe my lovelies be the first since Jesus live long as they wants to.’ Little Missus, you got to pretend. Pretenders welcome everywheres. Got to pretend get from one day to the next.” Mammy dabbed her eyes. “We dependin’ on pretendin’.”
The babe’s life pulsed under her hand. “Reckon, after today I be pretendin’ again, but not today. Can’t rightly bear no pretendin’ this day.”
Mammy’s tears fell onto the baby’s blanket. “Little Missus, world didn’t start when you did. It been here awhile. Bein’ Miss Ellen Robillard gonna be troublesome. You got two sisters what’s older, and they gonna boss you like you was one of they doll children. They gonna do that, sure as you’re lyin’ here. Master Pierre—you see how he look at you? Ary time he look at you, he don’t see the woman he loved. He learn to love you, sure he will, but in the very back of he mind be dark corner where you Momma’s gone and you ain’t.
“Savannah folks: they gonna remember you killed your Momma. Likely they never say nothin’ to your face, but they looks at you and remember your Momma, always so sharp and so gay, and they thinkin’ five-pound baby Ellen ain’t no fair swap for Mistress Solange. No, they ain’t gonna say it outright, but they thinkin’ it. Until those who knowed you Momma is gone theyselves, they thinkin’ you killed her. No, ’tain’t fair. ’Tain’t fair! Fairness what preachers bother about.
“’Tain’t fair they thinkin’ little child killed her Momma, but they thinkin’ it—can’t help theyselves—and directly you see in their eyes, they blamin’ you for somethin’ and you ask, ‘What was it I done?’ and directly you hits on the answer. Might be you thinkin�
�: why, that ain’t so. I never done no such a thing. Prolly you buck and jibe. Might be you fight back, but their eyes don’t change and after time you start thinkin’, maybe I din’t mean kill her, but ’twas me done it, and you take that lie on yourself. Can’t help youownself. Might be none of us can. We comes into the world the way it am, and we gots make the best of it.”
The child fussed and burped but didn’t wake. The front door opened quietly, and Nehemiah and a young woman mounted Jehu’s stairs.
Mammy said, “If Le Bon Dieu and the spirits will it, we find some happiness on this earth. You ain’t got no Momma, but you got you a Mammy. And, honey, I reckon I gots me a child.”
Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints
The passions are not to be stilled by being soothed: whatever is allowed them is but an allurement to go further and soon makes their tyranny uncontrollable.
THE REVEREND ALBAN BUTLER
ELLEN ROBILLARD WAS a quiet child in a quiet household. Her first word was Mam, which Mammy told everybody was Ellen’s attempt at Mom-ma because the child missed her Momma so much. Others failed to spot any special affection for a dead mother whose place had been usurped by her Negro servant.
Ellen’s oldest sister, Pauline, was fixed on marriage and saw the child, when she saw her at all, as a distraction. Mammy blamed Pauline’s imperfect deportment for the caliber of her suitors: the second sons of rich planters or first sons of unsuccessful ones. Absent Carey Benchley’s greening stovepipe, fusty frock coat, and short boots, one could be forgiven for mistaking the man’s shrillness for a nervous woman’s. Having been “saved” at a camp meeting, Carey expressed conventional moralisms as if he’d invented them.
Pauline was engaged to become Mrs. Carey Benchley.
Her younger sister, Eulalie, had deportment but was dreamy. When Mammy caught Eulalie reading a novel—Mr. Dickens’s Oliver Twist—she warned the child that no Georgia gentleman would marry a girl who was smarter than himself.
Pauline couldn’t marry Carey until her father emerged from deep mourning, but Ellen was walking and talking when Pierre’s tailor delivered his third successive black suit. A year later, when Ellen began to read, Nehemiah quietly exchanged his Master’s black mourning garb for slightly cheerier purple. Pierre made no objection. Indeed, he may not have noticed. Soon afterward Mr. Carey Benchley and Miss Pauline Robillard were married in the Baptists’ new church on Chippewa Square. While the family pew was nearly empty, the rest of the church was packed with Pierre’s friends, grateful he was out and about. Antonia Sevier, in purple for her husband, who’d passed eighteen months before, was particularly amiable. At the City Hotel reception, Pierre was disappointed by the teetotal punch and didn’t stay as long as Mrs. Sevier had hoped.
That next Saturday, although Mrs. Sevier arrived at Pink House without invitation, she and her daughter, Antoinette, were admitted. Mrs. Sevier told Pierre that children of similar rank and heritage must naturally become friends. Despite this indelicate push, the girls did become fond of one another, although Antoinette was as quick and disrespectful as Ellen was quiet and obedient. On the Seviers’ third visit, while the girls were admiring Ellen’s French porcelain dolls, Antoinette announced that she was thirsty and commanded Mammy to fetch water. Mammy replied that any healthy child could walk downstairs, go to the well, and wind the windlass. That evening Antoinette informed her mother that Pierre Robillard owned an impudent Negro. Determined that Dear Pierre should enjoy the best service, Mrs. Sevier informed Pierre that absent a Mistress to discipline them, his servants were assuming more than servants’ due.
While Pierre let this pass, Nehemiah and Mammy didn’t, and though Mrs. Sevier did her best, the blossom she hoped might set delicious fruit withered. Pierre was often out when Mrs. Sevier called, and her visiting card (corner turned up to indicate delivery by her own hand) vanished between the card tray and Pierre. Her sincere, much-labored-over letter—Had she committed some offense?—elicited no reply.
Weekday mornings, Ellen’s Mammy and Antoinette’s Mammy brought the girls to Reynolds Square. One morning, Mrs. Sevier rose earlier than her custom to come to the square and demand of Mammy what, exactly, was going on.
Alas, Mammy was so stupid, so completely oblivious of her Master’s intentions and affections. The following Sunday, the resourceful Mrs. Sevier attended services at the South Broad Street Presbyterian Church, and, after its painfully Protestant service ended, she waylaid Pierre, and that amiable, slightly befuddled widower discovered a previously unknown intention to escort the charming widow to the mayor’s reception for Governor Lumpkin Saturday next. In the intervening week, despite unpleasantness about certain overdue bills, Antonia’s seamstress delivered a new gown with gigot sleeves. To set it off, Antonia purchased a hat with egret plumes.
When Robillard’s carriage didn’t appear at the appointed time, Antonia presumed a harmless misunderstanding and proceeded to the reception, where she told Mayor Gordon her escort had been delayed on business, only to sit through the three-hour affair without him.
Thenceforth, she snubbed the baffled Pierre, who believed Antonia had canceled their engagement. Hadn’t he heard so from Nehemiah’s own lips? Pierre never deciphered the angry glares and pregnant silences Antonia Sevier directed at him.
Six months later, Antonia Sevier married Mr. Angus Wilson, and Pierre sent them a rather nice silver cream pitcher, which gift was never acknowledged.
January 30, 1835, was consequential nationally and for different reasons in the Pink House as well. On that date in Washington, D.C., an unemployed housepainter, one Richard Lawrence, failed to assassinate President Jackson, and in Savannah, Georgia, little Ellen Robillard tugged the Reverend Butler’s Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints off the shelf. That book would have greater influence on the child than the assassin’s misfiring pistols had on Jackson. Lives of the Saints became “Miss Ellen’s Book.” She toted it around like a favorite doll, poring over stories and lurid pictures. Young Mistress Ellen spoke about St. Teresa, St. Agatha, and St. Margaret as if they were real folks on the other side of town.
When Ellen asked whether her mother, Solange, might be recognized as a saint one day, Mammy said, “Sure she will, honey. You Momma was the bestest saint ever been.”
Although she never spoke against Miss Ellen’s book, Mammy didn’t favor it. All those pictures of saints stuck full of arrows or ’bout to be cut to pieces or set upon by wolves—anyone who knew just how much blood could pour out of one poor human body couldn’t have made those pictures, that’s what Mammy thought. Anyway, those saints didn’t look like people stabbed with arrows or ’bout to have their heads chopped off; they looked like they were whiskey drunk or maybe they was halfway to Paradise already. In her whole life, onliest man Mammy ever saw lookin’ like Miss Ellen’s saints had been Denmark Vesey.
Desiring to Die for Faith was foolishness, but not Everyday Foolishness. It was one of those Honorable Foolishnesses Mommas praised to their children all the while praying their babies wouldn’t try it out for themselves.
Mammy warned Ellen, “Ain’t no use bein’ poor and good. Cheerful face get you arything you gots to get.”
* * *
Ellen Robillard became a Saint-in-Waiting. On her own, without consulting her father, she approached Father Michael for confirmation instruction. Though the good father was busy with a flood of Irish immigrants and a handsome new church a-building, Ellen’s childlike eagerness to explore her faith invigorated his own, and unless he was called away to a sickbed or deathbed, Father Michael was available to the sincere little girl Mondays and Thursdays after dinner. Pierre set a good table, and two nights a week, the Father dined at the Pink House.
If Pierre ever regretted the promise to Solange to rear their child in the Catholic faith, he never said so, and Father Michael was so learned and kind, Pierre looked forward to t
he priest’s regular appearances.
* * *
Savannah’s French community was smaller than it had been, Frère Jacques was once again Gunn’s Tavern with an Irish clientele. Pierre’s compatriots spoke with the Low Country’s languid soft r’s. As French influence diminished and cotton wealth grew, Savannah’s appetite for French silks and wines and fashions grew too, and under Nehemiah, L’Ancien Régime’s able manager, Pierre’s business flourished.
When Father Michael told Pierre his daughter might have a vocation, her father chuckled. “Oh, Mammy won’t like that. She believes all young ladies are incomplete until they wed young gentlemen.”
“Mammy . . . ?”
“Runs our household, don’t you know. Orders me about like I was her slave. When I balk, Nehemiah has ‘a little talk’ and I’m soon toeing the line again.”
“But you . . . you’re Master here.”
“So I am,” Pierre said complacently.
* * *
When Antoinette snickered at Ellen’s invitation to join confirmation class, their friendship ended.
Antoinette befriended Philippe Robillard, whose mother had reared the boy, it was said, “like a wild Indian.” (When Pierre offered advice and help, his cousin’s widow slammed the door in his face.) Young Philippe didn’t attend church. “Apparently,” one grande dame sniffed, “the Sabbath is just another day to that boy.”
The unexceptionable Franklin Ward began calling on Eulalie.
Because Mr. and Mrs. Carey Benchley came to town for Saturday market and stayed over at the Pink House, the couple were present when Franklin called. Since Mr. Ward was a Millerite, the Baptist Benchleys subjected the earnest young man to amusing gibes. Franklin Ward’s father and uncle had been Yankee physicians, and Franklin had been fixed on that vocation until he was influenced by Reverend William Miller’s prediction that Christ would return in the flesh between March 1843 and October 1844—dates devised by scrupulous calculations from certain prophecies in the Book of Daniel. Carey Benchley had never heard anything so risible, and if, during the week, he thought of an amusing question, he was bound to pop it Sunday. “When Jesus comes again,” Pauline’s husband asked, “who’s gonna drive him around? Who’s gonna cook for him?”
Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy From Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind Page 22