My Brother, Theodore RooseveltRobinson, Corinne Roosevelt
History
My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
Mom Lucy had had several children, none of whom had lived but a few
hours, and when my grandmother and her little daughter visited the
new baby, now about a week old, the mother, still lying on her couch,
looked up at my grandmother and said: “Ole Miss, I jus’ done name her.”
“And what have you named her, Lucy?” asked my grandmother; “she is a
fine baby and I am so glad you are going to have the comfort of her all
your life.” “Oh!” said the colored woman sadly, “I don’t ’spec’ her to
live, dey ain’t none of ’em done live, and so I jus’ call her Cumsy.”
“Cumsy?” said my grandmother, “and what may that mean, Lucy?” “Why, ole
Miss, don’t you understan’? Dey all done go to deir heavenly home, and
so I jus’ call dis one ‘Come-see-de-world-and-go,’ and my ole man and
me we is goin’ to call her ‘Cumsy’ for short.”
My grandmother tried to argue Lucy out of this mortuary cognomen, but
with no effect, and years afterward when my mother revisited Roswell
as Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the first negroes to greet her was
“Come-see-the-world-and-go!”
All these stories of the old plantation were fascinating to the
children of the nursery in 20th Street, and we loved to hear how the
brothers and sisters in that old house played and worked, for they
all did their share in the work of the household. There the beautiful
half-sister of my mother, Susan Elliott, brought her Northern lover,
Hilborne West, of Philadelphia, whose sister, Mary West, had shortly
before married Weir Roosevelt, of New York, the older brother of my
father, Theodore Roosevelt. This same Hilborne West, a young physician
of brilliant promise, adored the informal, fascinating plantation life,
and loved the companionship of the two dainty, pretty girls of fourteen
and sixteen, Martha and Anna Bulloch, his fiancée’s young half-sisters.
Many were the private theatricals and riding-parties, and during that
first gay visit Doctor West constantly spoke of his young connection by
marriage, Theodore Roosevelt, who he felt would love Roswell as he did.
A year afterward, inspired by the stories of Doctor West, my father,
a young man of nineteen, asked if he might pay a visit at the old
plantation, and there began the love-affair with a black-haired girl
of fifteen which later was to develop into so deep a devotion that
when the young Roosevelt, two years later, returned from a trip abroad
and found this same young girl visiting her sister in Philadelphia,
he succumbed at once to the fascination from which he had never fully
recovered, and later travelled once more to the old pillared house
on the sand-hills of Georgia, to carry Martha Bulloch away from her
Southern home forever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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