Her walk--I am afraid
I must admit, as all biographers seem privileged to deal with the frailties
of their victims as freely as with their virtues--her walk, viewed through
the medium already alluded to, did not owe its occasional uncertainty to
"very coarse veins," though that malady, with a slight phonetic difference,
Mammy undoubtedly suffered from, in common with the facts. She was a great
believer in "dram" as a remedial agent, and homoeopathic practice was
unknown with us at that period.
Mammy's code of laws for our moral government was one of threats of being
"repoated to ole mahster," tempered by tea of her own making dulcified by
brown sugar of fascinating sweetness, anecdote, and autobiography.
The anecdotal part consisted almost exclusively of the fascinating
repertoire of Uncle Remus. Indeed, to know the charm of that chronicle is
reserved to the man or woman whose childhood dates from the _ante bellum_
period, and who had a Mammy.
In the autobiographical part Mammy spread us a chilling feast of horrors,
varied by the supernatural. Long years after this period I read a protest
in some Southern paper against this practice in the nursery, with its
manifest consequences on the minds of children.
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