room they were in was so vast, and sometimes the negroes lay so thick on the floor, rolled in their blankets (you know, even in the summer they sleep under blankets), all snoring so loudly, she would never have heard a groan or a whimper any more than they did, if she had slept, too.  And negro mothers are so careless and such heavy sleepers.  All night she would creep at regular intervals to the different pallets, and draw the little babies from under, or away from, the heavy, inert impending mother forms.  There is no telling how many she thus saved from being overlaid and smothered, or, what was worse, maimed and crippled.

Whenever a physician came in, as he was sometimes called, to look at a valuable investment or to furbish up some piece of damaged goods, she always managed to get near to hear the directions; and she generally was the one to apply them also, for negroes always would steal medicines most scurvily one from the other.  And when death at times would slip into the pen, despite the trader’s utmost alertness and precautions,—­as death often “had to do,” little Mammy said,—­when the time of some of them came to die, and when the rest of the negroes, with African greed of eye for the horrible, would press around the lowly couch where the agonizing form of a slave lay writhing out of life, she would always to the last give medicines, and wipe the cold forehead, and soothe the clutching, fearsome hands, hoping to the end, and trying to inspire the hope that his or her “time” had not come yet; for, as she said, “Our time doesn’t come just as often as it does come.”

And in those sad last offices, which somehow have always been under reproach as a kind of shame, no matter how young she was, she was always too old to have the childish avoidance of them.  On the contrary, to her a corpse was only a kind of baby, and she always strove, she said, to make one, like the other, easy and comfortable.

And in other emergencies she divined the mysteries of the flesh, as other precocities divine the mysteries of painting and music, and so become child wonders.

Others came and went.  She alone remained there.  Babies of her babyhood—­the toddlers she, a toddler, had nursed—­were having babies themselves now; the middle-aged had had time to grow old and die.  Every week new families were coming into the great back chamber; every week they passed out:  babies, boys, girls, buxom wenches, stalwart youths, and the middle-aged—­the grave, serious ones whom misfortune had driven from their old masters, and the ill-reputed ones, the trickish, thievish, lazy, whom the cunning of the negro-trader alone could keep in circulation.  All were marketable, all were bought and sold, all passed in one door and out the other—­all except her, little Mammy.  As with her lameness, it took time for her to recognize, to understand, the fact.  She could study over her lameness, she could in the dull course of time think out the broomstick way of palliation.  It would have been almost better, under the circumstances, for God to have kept the truth from her; only—­God keeps so little of the truth from us women.  It is his system.