Free, she was free!  But she had not hoped for freedom.  The plantation, the household, the delicate ladies, the teeming children,—­broomsticks they were in comparison to freedom, but,—­that was what she had asked, what she had prayed for.  God, she said, had let her drop, just as her mother had done.  More than ever she grieved, as she crept down the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer’s block.  An ownerless free negro!  She knew no one whose duty it was to help her; no one knew her to help her.  In the whole world (it was all she had asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or gentleman (it was the extent of her dreams) beholden to her as to a nurse.  And all her innumerable black beneficiaries!  Even the janitor, whom she had tended as the others, had deserted her like his white prototype.

She tried to find a place for herself, but she had no indorsers, no recommenders.  She dared not mention the name of the negro-trader; it banished her not only from the households of the whites, but from those of the genteel of her own color.  And everywhere soldiers sentineled the streets—­soldiers whose tone and accent reminded her of the negro-trader.

Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to friendless negroes.  She became a runaway.  With a bundle tied to the end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it, she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ignoble past, and the heart-disappointing termination of it.  Following a railroad track, journeying afoot, sleeping by the roadside, she lived on until she came to the one familiar landmark in life to her—­a sick woman, but a white one.  And so, progressing from patient to patient (it was a time when sick white women studded the country like mile-posts), she arrived at a little town, a kind of a refuge for soldiers’ wives and widows.  She never traveled further.  She could not.  Always, as in the pen, some emergency of pain and illness held her.

That is all.  She is still there.  The poor, poor women of that stricken region say that little Mammy was the only alleviation God left them after Sheridan passed through; and the richer ones say very much the same thing—­

But one should hear her tell it herself, as has been said, on a cold, gloomy winter day in the country, the fire glimmering on the hearth; the overworked husband in the fields; the baby quiet at last; the mother uneasy, restless, thought-driven; the soft black hand rubbing backward and forward, rubbing out aches and frets and nervousness.

The eyelids droop; the firelight plays fantasies on the bed-curtains; the ear drops words, sentences; one gets confused—­one sleeps—­one dreams.

“ONE OF US”