Put her down, said the overseer. She promptly was seized by the men, and, in a moment, was lying flat on the ground with her petticoats up to her shoulders.
Her bottom was small, with pear-shaped cheeks. At the upper part of her thighs was a small space through which peeped the crisp black hair shading the spot. She received her dozen strokes, and, though the overseer did not whip her as hard as he had whipped the black woman, the girl twisted her loins and squealed loudly from the first stroke to the last.
When all was over, her olive-skinned little bottom had become a dusky-red color. She rose to her feet, dancing about for a moment in pain. Then she walked stiffly away, wailing loudly, with both hands pressed to her bottom.
The third culprit was a sturdy mulatto woman, thirty-five years of age. She submissively lay down when ordered, and the overseer soon stripped her. She had a big, round, plump bottom.
The skin was smooth and of a yellowish tint, not at all pretty. The strap cracked, striping her bottom with twelve red bands and making her wince, wriggle and cry aloud. But she never once screamed.
The other delinquents-two black women aged respectively twenty-seven and thirty years and a mulatto girl aged twenty years-were then disposed of by the overseer in the same way. The black women bore their punishment with a certain amount of fortitude, but the mulatto girl writhed and squealed, making almost as much outcry as the quadroon.
I will here state that, from what I saw of whipping during my residence in the South, I came to the conclusion that the light-colored slave-women had finer skins than the darker-colored women. Consequently the former felt more pain while being whipped than the latter.
Moreover, the whipping of such females by men, besides being cruel and most indecent, was also, in my opinion, extremely unfair as a punishment. For instance, if an octoroon woman and a full-blooded black woman, both of the same age and physique, were to undergo exactly the same punishment, the octoroon would suffer far more than the black.
When the overseer had finished whipping the last culprit and she had gone whimpering away, he told his assistants to go to their quarters. Then, rolling up the strap, he put it in his pocket and strolled leisurely away in the direction of the overseers’ house. (The four men lived together, and I have no doubt they had carnal intercourse with all the best looking field-girls.) The man had been perfectly unmoved throughout the whole affair, not appearing to be the least excited at seeing the naked bottoms of the women writhing and twisting with seemingly lascivious movements under his strokes, and he had whipped the poor creatures with as little compunction as if they had been dogs. However, as it was his almost daily work, he was quite accustomed to it, and I don’t suppose that the cruelty of the enterprise ever struck him.
Slavery had a demoralizing effect upon most of the white people in the South; they hardly looked upon slaves as human beings. I often heard white men use the expression a nigger is no better than a hog. But again I am digressing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By this time everyone had disappeared, and I was alone in the fast-gathering dusk. My ears still seemed to be ringing with the sharp cracking sound of the strap striking the flesh of the women, and I still seemed to hear their cries of pain.
I felt pity, but my feelings were not so keen as they might have been a few months previously. I had grown accustomed to seeing women whipped, though I had never before seen six turned up one after the other. Moreover, since my own shameful whipping and the events which had followed, my nature had become hardened. I walked back to the house without meeting anyone, and went up to my room, where I found Rosa waiting for me. I changed my dress and bathed my face, then after having my hair brushed, I went down to dinner, which I ate with my usual good appetite, though now and then I could not help thinking of the scene I had witnessed.
After dinner I amused myself with a book until bedtime. Next morning I received a letter from Randolph, telling me that business matters would oblige him to go on to New Orleans and that he did not know exactly how long he might be detained. The news did not trouble me; I did not care for him, so I did not miss him, and I liked the thought of having so many days to myself without being poked. A nice quiet embrace in bed at night was all very well, but I disliked being poked by day with all my clothes on, and that was what Randolph often did to me. He was a man of strong sensual passions, and the least thing inflamed them: a paragraph in a paper, a picture or passage in a book, an unexpected glimpse of my ankles, or some other trifle would set him off, and then, in a twinkling I would find myself being turned up in some ridiculous position. Now all that was done — for awhile.
After breakfast, I went to the library to answer his letter, and, just as I had finished writing, Dinah, looking annoyed, came into the room with a long story of how Emma, one of the mulatto kitchen-girls, had lately been neglecting her work.
Said Dinah: I scold her an’ I scold her, but she don’t mind me one little bit, an’ dis very mawnin’ de ornery nigger wench was sassy to me, who am de housekeeper of Woodlands.
(Quadroons always call anyone darker than themselves niggers.) She continued: Now Missis, you jus’ send for her, I’ll take de gal ’up,’ and den you give her a good whippin’ with de switch.
No, Dinah, I cannot do that, said I.
Well den, Missis, send her to de overseer.
No, I won’t do that either.
Dinah looked very much surprised. She could not understand why I would neither whip the girl nor send her to the overseer.
Oh, but, Missis, she said, if dis yer gal isn’t whipped for her sassiness to me, all de other nigger wenches will get sassy to me, an’ I shan’t be able to keep dem in order.
I could hardly keep my countenance on hearing the contemptuous way Dinah spoke about nigger wenches. Although she was a slave herself, and liable at any moment to be whipped if she committed an offense, she had a great idea of her own importance as housekeeper of Woodlands. I said: Wait till Mr. Randolph comes home, then report Emma to him and he will very likely punish her.
Dinah was not satisfied with my suggestion, so she remarked that if I did not like to whip the girl with the switch or to send her to the overseer, I might at least give her a spanking with a slipper.
But I would not consent to do even that, and finally she went away fuming and muttering something about my being too easy with sassy nigger wenches.
A week passed uneventfully. Then a little incident took place which annoyed me very much and caused me to do a thing which I never had done before in my Me.
I was fond of reading out of doors in fine weather, and, one bright afternoon, taking a book, I set off to a secluded part of the grounds where there was a little pond full of beautiful water-lilies and surrounded by flowering shrubs of various sorts. On the bank of the pond was a creeper-covered summer house, furnished with a couple of long, softly-cushioned chairs and a small, round table. The floor was covered with Chinese matting. It was a comfortable little place and a favorite resort of mine.
On approaching the pond, I saw two children busily engaged in throwing stones at something struggling in the water. I knew the children; they lived in the house; they were brother and sister, their mother being a fine mulatto woman named Margaret, who was one of the kitchen maids, and, since both the boy and the girl were quadroons, their father, whoever he was, must have been a white man.