My Brother, Theodore RooseveltRobinson, Corinne Roosevelt
History
My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
There was also a certain “little black Sarah,” who was the
foster-sister of my uncle, Irvine Bulloch, my mother’s younger brother.
In the old Southern days on such plantations there was almost always
a colored “pickaninny” to match each white child, and they were
actually considered as foster brother or sister. Little Irvine was
afraid of the darkness _inside_ the house, and little Sarah was afraid
of the darkness _outside_ the house, and so the little white boy and
the little black girl were inseparable companions, each guarding
the other from the imaginary dangers of house or grounds, and each
sympathetically rounding out the care-free life of the other.
My mother’s brilliant half-brother, Stewart Elliott, whose love of art
and literature and music took him far afield, spent much of his time
abroad, and when he came back to Roswell (the name of the plantation)
he was always much amused at the quaint slave customs. One perfect
moonlight night he took his guitar into the grove near the house to
sing to the group of girls on the porch, but shortly afterward returned
much disgusted and described the conversation which he had overheard
between little white Irvine and little black Sarah on the back porch.
It ran as follows, both children gazing up into the sky: _Sarah_:
“Sonny, do you see de Moon?” “Yes, S_a_rah, it do crawl like a worrum.”
The moon at the moment was performing the feat which Shelley poetically
described as gliding, “glimmering o’er its fleecelike floor.” The young
musician could not stand the proximity of such masters of simile as
were Irvine and Sarah, and demanded that they should be forbidden the
back porch on moonlight nights from that time forth!
There was also another young slave who went by the name of “Black
Bess,” and was the devoted companion of her two young mistresses,
Martha, my mother, and her sister, Anna Bulloch. She slept on a mat at
the foot of their beds and rendered the devoted services that only the
slave of the old plantation days ever gave to his or her mistress. My
mother used to accompany her mother on her visits to all the outlying
little huts in which the various negroes lived, and she often told us
the story of a visit one day to “Mom Lucy’s” little home, where a baby
had just been born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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