The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one would infer) took place in—­it sounds like the “Arabian Nights” now!—­took place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader’s auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech—­a great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation into the profits of the morrow.

The place can be pointed out now, is often pointed out; but no emotion arises at sight of it.  It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edifice that emotion only comes afterward in thinking about it, and then in the reflection that such an edifice could be, then as now, plain and matter-of-fact.

For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physical soundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged or counterfeited.  Little Mammy’s good-for-nothing mother was sold as readily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would pay for a crippled baby.  The mother herself would not have taken her as a gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to give away anything.  Some doctoring was done,—­so little Mammy heard traditionally,—­some effort made to get her marketable.  There were attempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondencies in age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute, at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts.  Nothing equaled a negro-trader’s will and power for fraud, except the hereditary distrust and watchfulness which it bred and maintained.  And so, in the even balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained a fixture in the stream of life that passed through that back room, in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless, however—­rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values as substitutes, as panaceas.  She earned her nourishment, and Providence did not let it kill the little animal before the emancipation of weaning arrived.

[Illustration:  “LITTLE MAMMY.”]

How much circumstances evoked, how much instinct responded, belongs to the secrets which nature seems to intend keeping.  As a baby she had eyes, attention, solely for other babies.  One cannot say while she was still crawling, for she could only crawl years after she should have been walking, but, before even precocious walking-time, tradition or the old gray-haired negro janitor relates, she would creep from baby to baby to play with it, put it to sleep, pat it, rub its stomach (a negro baby, you know, is all stomach, and generally aching stomach at that).  And before she had a lap, she managed to force one for some ailing nursling.  It was then that they began to call her “little Mammy.”  In the transitory population of the “pen” no one stayed long enough to give her another name; and no one ever stayed short enough to give her another one.