Excerpts from The Making of a Minister's Wife by Anna Mary French Johnson
The author was the daughter of John Noah French and Sarah Seely Jessup, both born in Orange County, NY. Each came from long lines of pioneer New England ancestry. Anna's life story is fascinating, with its details about the everyday life of a woman born just after the Civil War who went on to raise her family as the wife of a farmer/minister with posts at churches in Illinois, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. Anna grew up in Knoxville, TN, and always considered it "home." Some information not related to Knoxville has been included here because of the social and cultural detail it provides.	Anna Mary French, circa 1878

The Illinois climate eventually proved to be as bad for my father's delicate lungs as that of New York had been. So, when I was six-months-old [1869-1870], the farm was sold and the family migrated to Knoxville, Tennessee. Upon our arrival we moved into the second of the thirty houses in which I was to live.

The house had just been vacated by an English family named Hodgson. It was here that the young daughter, later known as Frances Hodgson Burnett, wrote the first of her stories, of which Little Lord Fauntleroy became the best known.

Father bought a narrow, ten-acre strip of land skirted by timber at the back, upon which to start a nursery. He built a small house that spring when I was a year old and we moved into what was home number three for me. It was here that my first personal recollections began -- of my father lifting me up from the floor to his knee. Of nineteen-year-old George and seventeen-year-old Dannie, resplendent in their cadet-blue, brass-buttoned uniforms which they wore as students at the state university; of the honeysuckle-covered porch where Mother rocked me on moon-lit nights.

In a letter which I have to-day, written by Dannie to Cousin John in the North when I was three, he announced, "Little Sis can sing -- she sings 'Way down Souf in Dickens'!"

The first four years were busy and interesting ones for the family. Dannie's letters tell about their combined incredible industry which turned the nursery plot into a blooming garden, from the rose borders about the house to the berry bushes at the far end. The two older boys reveled in college and social life.

Jokes were much the same in the seventies as they are to-day. Wise-cracking Dannie, when he answered Cousin John's question about why they drilled so much at the university, writes that he hears there is to be a war in China and they are drilling down through so they can help them! Mother adjusted herself to the easy-going ways of the South. The family were welcomed into the northern Second Presbyterian Church downtown, where Father was soon singing in the choir. I hope those were happy days for Mother, for tragedy was near.

In the fall after I was four-years-old, Father's losing battle for health culminated in a severe cold that sent him to bed. One night the two older boys had walked downtown to the mid-week meeting at the church while Mother sat watching beside the sick-bed. We two younger ones were sound asleep in the dreamlessness of childhood in another upstairs bedroom.

Suddenly the crunch of carriage wheels in the short lane up from the roadway brought Mother to her feet in surprise. She hurried down the stairs to throw open the side door. The light of the lamp in her hand revealed George helping Dannie out of the vehicle and into the house, aided by the coachman of one of the downtown members of the church. The seventeen-year-old boy had been suddenly stricken by a hemorrhage while sitting in the meeting.

The small parlor was turned into a second sickroom. Father, who was only forty-nine years old, never knew what had happened for on the last day of November he was laid to rest in Grey's [now Old Gray] Cemetery. In two short weeks the gay, apparently husky Dannie followed him. His last letter was written but a few days before he was taken ill to the favorite Cousin John in Illinois, in which there is no mention of any ailment. The last entry in his boyish diary was made the day before his fatal illness. What surprises Heaven held in store for those two!

Mother could scarcely have gotten through those last days of Dannie's and Father's illness, with no nurses or hospitals available, had it not been for the new southern friends who came to her assistance. I remember the luxurious homes where Johnnie and I were cared for. Private carriages were provided for the two funerals. Masses of flowers were sent from Perez Dickenson's Island Home Gardens. All the appointments of mourning were generously given to Mother.

Mourning then consisted of black wool dresses heavily weighted with wide bands of crepe; tiny black bonnets to which were attached dense crepe veils which shrouded the wearer to the feet; blackbordered handkerchiefs, stationery, and calling-cards.

To this day, when I smell tuberoses, black crepe, or geraniums, I see again that little parlor crowded with grave-faced friends; a flower-banked coffin at one end, and every doorway filled with Negro faces that crinkled into tears at the strains of "Shall We Gather at the River?"

For nearly a year, the oval-framed portraits of Father and Dannie, which hung above the small Peloubet and Pelton rosewood organ, filled me with terror if I found myself alone in the room. Two funerals in two weeks were a good deal for a four-year-old.

Distances seemed so great, and the emergency so shockingly sudden, that no relatives arrived for the funerals. Within a few weeks, however, my pretty cousin, Fannie Howell, came down to us from New York State on a mission of consolation, bringing youth and laughter into our saddened home. The grassy, shaded croquet-ground became the gathering-place for the eligible young men of the town. The rose arbors sheltered romantic couples between moonlight games. George -- whose university days were now ended -- though burdened with new responsibilities, entered into the gaiety about him.

The following summer when I was five, Mother was persuaded to make a trip to Florida, New York, to visit her father and to take me with her, while Fannie kept house for George and seven-year-old Johnnie.

By the time we returned home, Cousin Fannie had secured a small ward school to teach. So that fall, Johnnie and I started to school to her and learned our a-b-c's. Life must have seemed almost tranquil again to Mother, with the business prospering under George's youthful energy, with Aunt Em'line in charge of the hot kitchens -- southern houses had an indoor and an outdoor kitchen -- and with us happy in the new adventure of school.

Then, without warning, tragedy struck again. In October, seven-year-old Johnnie, who had seemed as sturdy as I, was stricken with the dread disease, membranous croup. The struggle was soon over. It was the third death in less than a year. Out of the family of six who had come to this alien land five years before, only Mother, George, and I were left. Cousin Fannie stayed with us through the second winter of mourning and then returned to her home in the North.

In my loneliness, I began to play with Aunt Em'line's small, coal-black 'Liza. Oblivious to race problems, we kept house together in harmony, just as our mothers did. Each morning, I used to peer down the road to see Aunt Em'line waddling up from the tiny cabin beneath the clay-bank hill, with 'Liza darting back and forth like a wiry little pig-tailed blackbird at her side.

The incongruity of their family complexions meant nothing to me. I was too young to sense the drama back of the difference in color between Aunt Em'line's pre-war and post-war children. The two older ones, who were born while Em'line was a slave, were light and handsome; little Ike and 'Liza, born in the cabin below the hill, were ebony replicas of her lawful husband, Uncle Ike.

Uncle Ike was busy around town all day with his rickety little wagon and his old mule, "a-haulin' and atotin'." One of my vivid Tennessee memories is of Aunt Em'line on our back porch, polishing her hot flatiron back and forth on a scorching fragrant cedar branch to the rhythmic complaint that "Jurden am a ha'ad road to trabbel." And presently the clothes-rack and all the chairs on the wide back porch would be covered with starchy dresses, petticoats, and sunbonnets.

There came a memorable morning when she failed to appear. A frightened messenger brought the news that Aunt Em'line had died suddenly in the night. Shocked, Mother and I hurried down to the two-roomed cabin. Past the mournful row squatted along the outer wall in the blazing sun we hurried, and into the darkened room where Aunt Em'line was "laid out" in state. Holding tightly to Mother's hand, I gazed with awe at the quiet bronze face. As we turned away, my fears were soothed as Mother said softly, "Aunt Em'line was a lady and a Christian."

Daily a group of little dark playmates came up from the Commons, a strip of land lying between the curve of the Turnpike and the old Clinton dirt road on which we lived. We particularly loved to play cemetery under the piles of leaves on the hillside. Or again, we would rush down to the middle of the dusty road and prance in a circle around a little whirling figure, clapping time as we droned:

"Oh l-o-n-g summa' day, Patta Juba dis way, Patta Juba dat; Oh l-o-n-g summa' day!"

The little nursery farm began to bear fruit in riotous fashion. Goobers, known to Northerners as peanuts, were perhaps the most popular crop. Crews of colored folk were constantly employed.

When peaches and tomatoes were ripe, the shady backyard was filled with laughing, singing colored women, sitting around steaming tubs, scalding, peeling, and pitting for the canning kettles and drying trays. The canning was done in long tin cans, which were sealed with resin on the end.

My first earnings were for picking strawberries. It was fun to hunch along on my knees in the blazing sun, racing with a dozen or so little colored folks to see who could fill the most boxes. One of my unfulfilled ambitions was to pick as fast as little black John Brown, who had been most unfairly endowed with six fingers on each hand.

The profound inertia of the majority of southern Negroes -- the ability to loll for hours in the sun, legs outstretched, with hands and brains completely idle -- we attributed to inborn laziness. Seldom did any one pause to recall that an unvarying diet of "co'n pone an' bacon," and too-hard work in the years when they were getting their growth, may have had something to do with the Negro disinclination to exertion.

My so-called education was further continued in a rapidly shifting series of small, individually supported schools, whose terms were so short that I attended several in the course of a year. They were held in tiny school-houses, church basements, converted parlors, and log cabins in the woods. The teachers were usually health-seekers from the North, or ambitious, poor young men getting started in the world. To me, this hop-skip-and-jump way of acquiring the three R's seemed perfectly natural. I was certainly not conscious at the time that I was learning anything that would fit me for the profession of a minister's wife.

In those iceless days down South, I remember that food was kept in cold, dirt-bottomed cellars, or suspended in pails down the wells. Country folks had advantages over city folks if they possessed a "crick" with a spring-house over it, reached by broad stepping-stones and furnished with low shelves inside.

In those screenless days, mosquito-bar canopies shrouded the beds. Green branches were kept in motion over the tables. Rooms were adroitly darkened. Pennyroyal was rubbed on hands and faces. The greatest triumph of art over utility was a creation called an air-castle. Perforated cardboard was made into cubes stitched with bright zephyrs and hung from the ceiling to sway in the breeze. It was supposed to be a decoy for flies.

In the seventies, the hub of every southern front parlor was the marble-topped center table, sacred to four articles: the immense leather family Bible containing the family records, the equally large red-plush family album, a spray of hair or wax flowers under a glass dome, and a stereoscope flanked by a pile of fascinating views of Niagara Falls and the Philadelphia Centennial. In one corner of the parlor usually stood a what-not loaded with trinkets. In another corner leaned a gay, peacock-feather fly-chaser, for company use. Against one wall was a reading table with the shaded coal-oil lamp enthroned on a large mat of red and green zephyr which fluffed around the standard in a cascade of clipped border. Fascinating, murmuring conch shells were used as doorstops.

In those days there was no "Sunday Problem." I never dreamed of asking, "Oh, what are we going to do today?" The Sundays of my life then were cut from the same pattern that they are today -- a pattern seemingly lost, or never known at all by many.

A lovely part of those childhood Sundays was my long walk alone downtown to Sunday-school. As I passed the little cabins on the Commons, one and another mellow voice would greet me from the open doorways, "Howdy, Miss Annie! Um'mh! Yo' sho' does look mighty sweet dis mo'nin', honey!" Which tributes were accepted by me with entire complacence. Every starched, fluted, white ruffle swished around me elegantly -- no common, flat-iron ruffles for me! A fan dangled at my wrist; the long streamers of my leghorn hat and my wide sash floated in the breeze; a tiny pancake parasol tilted archly over my shoulder.

The equipment of the primary room of the Sunday-school of that far-off day was not unsuitable to our physical needs. We sat on little graduated circular pews, so that my feet never dangled in the air and went to sleep, as they did on the big pews upstairs. But the lessons were less adapted to our needs; they were usually awe-inspiring sessions with the major and minor prophets. Yet I loved to be there to sing and to march to the sound of dropping pennies.

At the close of the hour, I would hurry up to the vestibule of the church to wait for Mother and George. They always drove down in the light buggy behind our bay horse King, who doubtless looked forward to this weekly sojourn in the city livery-stable across the street. George then left us to climb the winding stairs to the choir-loft. Mother and I would slip into our seat in the back of the church under the gallery. Of course a widow could not afford to rent a pew in the expensive middle section. Thrilling deliciously to the vibrations of the pipe-organ, I would settle back to watch the light from the stained-glass windows slant across the audience in a mosaic of rose and purple and jade.

I think there is no modern sound comparable to that rustle of bending worshipers which once followed the minister's injunction, "Let us pray," as every forehead touched the rim of the pew in front. The rustle may have been compounded of the crackle of silk skirts and the creak of stays, but to me it was the very essence of reverence.

Presently the soothing sermonizing of dear old Doctor Nathan Bachman would complete my sense of worship. I did not comprehend much that he said. It was not necessary that I should. Neither he nor I knew then that he was preparing me for my life-work.

If Sunday-school and church services together were "entirely too much for a small child to sit through," I never knew it. My mother was equally ignorant.

I was about eight-years-old when the most important single influence of my life began. As I was returning from one of my neighboring, daily "come-back-in-just-one-hour" play excursions, I saw a livery rig tied to the fence of the vacant lot adjacent to us. Three strange men were pacing across my favorite, tree-shaded playground.

When I burst into the house, full of questions, Mother calmly informed me that a church mission board in the North had purchased the land upon which to erect a school building for Freedmen. "What are Freedmen?" I asked wonderingly.

"Why, they're just Dilcy Griffits, Uncle Ike, and the folks down on the Commons who used to belong to the white people, but who are now free," she explained simply.

Perhaps it was then that I first noticed that there were no schools for colored children. There were small churches -- we could hear their preaching and shouting down on the Commons from our front porch in the evenings. But I suppose that not one of my little colored playmates could read or write.

The next few months were exciting ones as we youngsters played hide-and-go-seek in the excavations and among the piles of sand, lumber, and brick, and decorated ourselves with pine-shaving curls.

At last the big red-brick building was finished which was to house both faculty and class-rooms under one roof. Later many more buildings were added.

Upon the arrival of the first teachers, my usually calm mother was all shining excitement as she exclaimed to George at the dinner table, "They will seem to me just like home-folks! They are all graduates of the United Presbyterian colleges at Pittsburgh or Wooster or Monmouth -- and every one of them is an appointed missionary!" This last to her was their highest recommendation, reared as she had been upon missionary traditions; for the name of Jessup has been potent in the Syrian and Persian mission fields for many decades.

What a momentous day it was for me when the new president arrived from New York City. Peering from a side window, I saw the shabby station hack, drawn by two weary mules, stop at the fence. There was no driveway as yet into the grounds. Seven persons emerged, loaded down with hand luggage, and straggled single-file up the tan-bark walk to their new home. Doctor John S. McCulloch, tall and bearded, came first. Then Mrs. McCulloch, matriarchal and handsome. After them followed the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter, Ida, with Bruce, Craig, Paul, and Ralph, like steps, trailing after. I was entranced!

What a wilderness it must have seemed to them. Doctor McCulloch had been called from a city pastorate to what he thought was a college presidency, only to find when he arrived that it was a primary day-school. The board had incorporated that name in its charter and the colored folks were so inordinately proud of the magic word "College" that it was allowed to stand until the institution had earned the title.

Ida, who had just graduated from the College of the City of New York, confessed in after years that she cried herself to sleep at night for many months that first year.

In the fall, I attended the big public school downtown for the first time, where many of my playmates were Sunday-school acquaintances. It was a long distance to walk daily. I stuck to it until the winter rains set in and brought on my annual attack of sore throat. By the time I had recovered, I was panic-stricken at the thought of trying to catch up with my classes.

Once more Mother faced the problem of where to have Anna Mary continue her patchwork education. Her conclusion doubtless seemed simple and natural to her. It came about through her growing friendship with the isolated little group of teachers next door, who were a body of highly trained, cultivated, selfless mission workers. She had kept in touch with the broadening missionary activities of the Church and of women, and subscribed annually for Women's Work for Women for herself, and Children's Work for Children for me. She firmly believed that all of God's children should have an equal chance in this world.

So she saw nothing amiss in her decision to send me to the colored school where I would be under the tutelage of the excellent white teachers there. Three members of the Monmouth College Wallace family, a sister and two sons of President David Wallace, were among the number. Besides the four McCulloch boys, there were a half-dozen northern and English children who had already set the precedent by attending the Colored College. I was very happy at being allowed to join them.

The new school for Freedmen flourished. Pupils began to arrive from elementary schools at a distance, so that it was not long before college subjects were being taught on the upper floors, while ex-slaves on the first floor were learning to read the Bible and to write their own names. I can still see old Uncle Billy Broadnax using his meatskewer alternately as a toothpick and a pointer for his letters.

There was a touching pride in the young people over their first forays into higher learning -- history, trigonometry, Latin, Greek, and mythology. I well recall how the bigger boys grandiloquently rolled the syllables, "De Senectute," under their tongues. The weekly Friday Exercises also gave an outlet for all the bon or'tors in the student body.

It was on that old chapel platform that I made my first stage appearances. We were required to take turns in reading pieces from a book, giving recitations learned "by heart," and delivering original essays.

And how these colored young folks reveled in their choral work. No white throats can ever duplicate for me their organ-like tones as they sang "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep."

The Annual Exhibitions in the month of May were their supreme delight. Bushels of red and pink roses from our gardens were always donated for bouquets to be presented impartially to all performers. Their first taste of self-expression was furnished by this simple mission school. So I started into the enthusiastic atmosphere of the school next door with no slightest premonition of disaster.

While the Negroes were absorbing the school advantages so newly available to them, I was unconsciously learning from them valuable lessons for my future unguessed profession. They taught me to laugh -- to laugh when I wanted to cry; and no trait is more necessary to a minister's wife. They made a joke even of the color of their skins, which they called the trick the Lord had played on them.

Apparently, no amount of schooling ever dulls their sense of caricature. Years afterward, I was watching a group of college jubilee singers in the North, as they listened to the instructions of their popular white director. Their attitude was one of docile gravity. The moment, however, after he had turned to leave, as though by a pre-arranged signal, the entire company wrinkled their noses and gleefully stuck out their tongues at his retreating form.

From these people who for two hundred years had never owned anything, not even their own bodies, I learned what little I know of generosity. They were prodigal with their meager possessions. The minister's wife ought to be weak in arithmetic when it comes to counting up what she dispenses.

From them also, I experienced the first warm-hearted affection outside my own family. No people have ever suffered more at the hands of a dominant race than the Negro. Yet no people have ever lavished more care or love upon their oppressors than have they. Their unstinted flattery doubtless had an ulterior motive in the days of their dependency. Nevertheless, for me, it helped to heal the wounds inflicted by my white companions because of my association with colored folk. They taught me that the unselfish are always interested in the welfare of others. When my supply of interestedness runs low, I try to conjure up that old-time atmosphere of adulation to throw around people.

My early contacts with the mysticism of the Negro made faith a reality to me. A people closer to the primitive seem to have a more authentic spiritual experience than is vouchsafed to sophisticates. With the insatiable eagerness of youth, I never failed to attend the midweek prayer-meetings at the school. Besides the students, the older Negroes from the Commons loved to flock up the hill and squeeze themselves into the primary desks of their beloved "College."

The simple lessons in living, drawn from the Scriptures by Doctor McCulloch for those childlike minds, affected me deeply. The sincerity of the prayers of those ex-slaves has long outlived in my memory their ludicrous phraseology.

Yet by some strange mischance, I did not make any formal profession of faith while I was in this deeply spiritual atmosphere. The teachers, who tried to deal with me according to formula, fervently urged me to "Believe!" Each time my puzzled mind would ask, "Believe what?" But none of them seemed able to explain the simple plan of salvation to me. Had they done so, I should have capitulated at once; for I had a deep-rooted faith that has not been improved upon in the long years since. As it was, I went my way enigmatically, to the bewilderment of those earnest, nonunderstanding grown-ups.

Soon a second red-brick building, a girls' dormitory, was erected. Another white girl, the daughter of furloughed foreign missionaries of the United Presbyterian Church, arrived from middle Tennessee to live in the colored girls' dormitory. So, in addition to the McCulloch boys, I now had Matilda Strang for a playmate. Tillie felt thoroughly at home here, for she had been born and brought up among brown faces in Egypt. She was too wise to expect to make acquaintances off the campus. Later, her self-sufficiency and cosmopolitanism were to prove a bulwark to me.

I, too, felt at home among the two hundred dark-skinned companions, some of whom I had played with since babyhood. But I now began to feel a difference among my white companions downtown -- a gradual drawing away from me, a queer letting-alone. Something must be terribly wrong with me. But with the fierce sensitiveness of childhood, I dared not ask what.

I noticed that the letting-alone extended to Mother, too. Even George seemed to be under a ban. At last I began to realize that the change was traceable to my attendance at the colored school. As long as I merely played with colored children, as had been the custom of white children on slave plantations for generations, all was well. But to go to their school -- that was the hideous mistake. It was an admission of their equality.

It was then too soon after the war for many evidences of the Negroes' capabilities to be apparent. Southerners, many of whom had been watchful and responsible caretakers of their black chattels, felt the terrible unwisdom of granting the franchise to these grown-up children. They were apprehensive of uprisings, should the colored people -- who far outnumbered the white Southerners -- be given unrestricted advantages. The invasion of northern teachers was an implied and stinging rebuke to the entire South. It was years before I understood the southern side of the question.

As though to compensate for my ostracism down in the city, life on the other side of the fence became so enchanting that my mother found it quite impossible to keep me at home. What a torment I must have been to Ida McCulloch! She was my ideal -- with her wavy brown hair, arranged in styles which the colored girls vainly tried to imitate -- and her New York City frocks, which they could more nearly approach with their skilled fingers. My cup of bliss overflowed whenever "Miss Ida" allowed me to dress up in her long skirts. With no hesitation, I would put on her unused best white dotted swiss, festooned with yards of black velvet ribbon, and parade up and down the hall before an envious audience of little black girls. There was no place for this pretty northern girl to wear her finery.

My introduction to literature occurred in the McCulloch sitting-room where the boys and I contentedly sewed interminable carpet-rags, while their mother read to us from Hiawatha, David Copperfield, and Leatherstocking Tales. After our stint, we would play exciting games of Authors, and cat apples, fried cakes, and cookies.

It is not surprising that George and Ida soon became a solace to each other. With their engagement, the bonds of our small family were knit even more closely with the world next door. In a desperate effort to solve the problem and right the social blunder she had made, Mother did the worst possible thing she could have done by taking me out of the despised Colored College and sending me down to an exclusive private school for girls.

If I had felt myself scorned before, here I was a veritable outcast. They tittered when I recited. They hazed me on the playground. A favorite method was to make me the end victim in Crack-the-Whip and send me rolling in the dust to the ruination of my fresh gingham dresses and my feelings. All the cruelties of which genteel little girls were capable were heaped upon me. I did not stay through the second term but shifted to a small country school where I had my own brother for teacher. George had decided to supplement the returns from the nursery by teaching school at Middlebrook. As this was but a few miles down Kingston Pike past the state university and the city limits, he drove King, our glistening old bay war-horse, back and forth daily.

The Middlebrook children neither knew nor cared where I had attended school before. My first affairs of the heart began here, carried on through the exchange of shy glances, polished red apples, and valentines.

Toward the end of a happy term, I began to be burdened by a deep secret which I wasn't quite sure called for tears or rejoicing. Mother was to be married again. After seven years of widowhood, an old-time friend in the Second Presbyterian Church, whose wife had long been dead, had persuaded her to take this step, which seemed to her to solve many problems. Chiefly, it would release George to strike out for himself so that he might marry Ida and establish a home of his own.

I was given a small shining gold ring by my prospective stepfather [T. D. Davis] when Mother received her ring. It kept me from minding being sent to bed alone for the first time in my life and so early!

The wedding plans were my secret. The horde of colored helpers about the place were avid gossips. Mother did not want them "talking." So George pointed out to Mother that, as he had a convenient birthday in November, she might pretend to give him a birthday party. Car'line, 'Liza, Henrietta, and the others enthusiastically helped Mis' French get up a party for the handsome Mister George.

It was more difficult to account to them for the prolonged stay of a little English seamstress who made up a marvelous array of new and remade garments for Mother and me. I think Mother dropped some casual remark about a trip to the North.

My especial delight was my first silk dress, an old one of Ida's dyed a brilliant blue and made with fluffy panniers draped over the short skirt. This was of far more importance to me than the soft brown cashmere which the bride was to wear. I nearly expired under the strain on the final day.

As soon as school was out, George hustled old King over the road toward home faster than that horse had traveled since enemy gunfire pursued him.

Welsh relatives of the groom arrived. The college folks drifted over from next door. Our two kitchens -- outdoor and indoor -- were filled with excited colored helpers, putting the last touches on the birthday feast.

It was my thrilling duty to stick my head through the doorway into the kitchen and announce in a stage-whisper, "Mother says for you all to come right in here quick!"

In bewilderment they crowded the space which faced the stairway just as Mis' French came down on the arm of the gentleman who had been calling at the house so frequently on Sundays of late. Before they sensed what was happening, the couple had turned toward the parlor and faced the minister, who began the brief marriage service. The astonished colored help could scarcely recover their wits sufficiently to serve the feast they had prepared.

When my stepfather came to make his home with us, George, true to the urge of his ancestors, immediately turned his face toward the West. Pioneer Nebraska was the region he chose for his new home. Again I returned to the Colored College.

Suddenly I began to grow up. At thirteen, I looked eighteen. Mother could not let down my ruffled dresses fast enough. Each night, before my mirror, I glued my long bangs in curlicues to my forehead with quince juice. The next day I appeared with a fluffy fringe and the rest of my hair, in a braid "long enough to sit on." I pinched in my waist and my feet, as was the custom. My too-red cheeks were surreptitiously toned down with corn-starch. By some means, I secured a small set of hoops and a bustle. I was a young lady!

All that I lacked now were invitations to go out with young men. And then they began to come, too. My first social engagement was with a forlorn young northern teacher from the school next door. He was still a little dazed by the unexpected isolation into which he had been dropped. How flutteringly I minced along beside him as we set off for town down the tan-bark path, followed by delighted Negro giggles as we traversed the Commons.

We heard a speech by that famous mulatto, Frederick Douglass. Born in Maryland, he educated himself, renamed himself, and became a world-famous orator. Afterwards, he was Minister to Haiti.

Another time, we went to hear Blind Tom play the piano. This illiterate slave, born blind, had a phenomenal natural gift of music and a childlike habit of vigorously applauding himself after each number. He later made many successful European tours.

I went -- also romantically escorted -- to hear Ira D. Sankey sing the new-fashioned religious hymns which caught the public fancy much as radio ballads do today.

One diversion in which I longed to indulge was roller-skating. Indoor rinks were having a great popularity. But they were called by decorous elders, "the Devil's Toboggan Slide." My decorous mother said no. So I never owned the longed-for skates nor saw the inside of a rink.

Another unsatisfied longing was to attend one of the Turnverein Balls with my new stepbrother and his wife. But they always firmly refused to take me with them, to my surprise and disappointment.

There was one gruesome community affair, however, which was even more popular and about which I was even more curious. That was the occasional hanging that took place in the yard of the county jail. As the widely discussed time drew near, a steady procession of wagons, creaking carts, and horseback riders began to stream past our house. The Tennessee mountaineer always brought his entire family and several dogs when he came to witness a hanging. They would camp among the pines on the Commons, and on the hillside across the road. This would continue for several days. The central figure in such tragic spectacles was usually a mountain white of whom they knew, or a Negro whom they hated. For days I would hang over our white gate, peering at each passing face in shocked wonder.

My happiest pastime was horseback riding. My mount was mahogany-colored old King. I would use George's saddle with one stirrup thrown over the pommel to simulate a side-saddle. My dream for years was to own a sweeping navy-blue flannel habit with brass buttons on the tight little basque, topped by a soft fedora hat with a quill stuck in the side. The nearest I ever came to a realization of this longing was a long, mud-spattered black calico skirt pinned around my waist over my gingham dress and whatever hat I happened to have, pinned up on the side. With the fun-loving teachers from next door riding a motley collection of nags, we had hilarious times; even though it was a struggle to stick on King in such a makeshift saddle. Some of the others had the same sort of equipment. But of course, "sideways" was the only permissible way for a lady to ride.

My poor mother realized, however, that I had social needs which could not be supplied by the teachers next door; yet because of my attendance at that colored school, I was debarred from a normal social life in the town. The ostracism I suffered bred within me a deep-seated timidity -- I suppose today you would call it an inferiority complex.

Now, whenever I am overcome by a secret conviction that nobody loves me and, as a result, make some swashbuckling gesture, others do not know that it is only an attempt to down that old shadow of defeat. How sympathetic I am toward other folks who sometimes wear an air of bravado, for almost invariably it covers up old fears and old wounds.

Mother saw, too late, that it was impossible to rehabilitate me socially in the eyes of my former white playmates. I was branded by my colored associations although in those years of daily contact I met nothing but decency. None of the black ever came off!

Today, I bear no ill-will toward those southern people, for out of my experiences came some of my most valuable lessons in learning to be a minister's wife. My youthful tragedies taught me to sympathize with the underprivileged of the world, the lonely, the friendless; to champion those whose skins seem to be the wrong color, or who live on the wrong side of the tracks, or whose schooling ended too soon.

I have great respect for the strides toward Christian justice which have been made in the South by the Inter-racial Cooperation Commission, composed of southern leaders, both white and colored. It seems like a miracle that joint councils for their mutual welfare are held today by colored women who are only three generations away from slavery, and southern white women who are only three generations away from slave-owning.

A successful solution of my social problem was not reached in a single bound. It took many conferences with the faculty friends next door before a temporary expedient was decided upon. I was to go on the train alone to visit Matilda Strang who was spending that year at home in middle Tennessee.

What high adventure! I still see the pink mist of peach blossoms through which the little train leisurely journeyed; the glimpses of four state boundaries from the top of Lookout Mountain, with Moccasin Bend gleaming to the west. I can remember my consuming curiosity about my fellow-passengers, where they were going and why; and my scared night in the flimsy little junction hotel at Decherd.

Mrs. Strang was the earliest minister's wife I can recall. I do not remember one at the Second Church at Knoxville. Perhaps it was too large a group. Mrs. McCulloch was to me a school-master's wife.

My visit to the Strang home was unclouded by anxiety. There were always gay young people about the house during the day and ranged on the long porch during the bright, moon-lit evenings. Banjos, guitars, high sweet and low mellow voices provided perfect entertainment far into the night. I would have been content to stay on indefinitely. A vast deal of sentiment filled the air. I was the visitor and had enough adulation offered me to have completely turned my shallow young head had I been steeped in it much longer.

But after some weeks, a summons came from Mother to come home immediately, hinting at another and a longer journey for me. After regretful leave-takings with the family who had become so dear to me -- there were Ambrose and Herman,besides Tillie -- I left for Knoxville, my curiosity mounting with every mile.

Mother's plan was that I should go for a visit to Nebraska where George and his bride had settled the year before at the little town of York. I was to accompany one of the teachers from the college, Mrs. Waite, and her two children as far as Kansas City and travel the rest of the way alone. It was all very exciting.

The time was short. Three dresses had to be made simultaneously by three dressmakers. What luxury! My loyal English friend Adah Stephenson devoted herself to helping Mother get me ready as she drove me about on a dizzy round of fittings. My favorite of the dresses was a gray, rose-sprigged muslin with graduated ruffles from waist-line to hem.

Saying good-by to Mother was a tearful performance for us both. But I turned toward the new life with fastbeating heart and eager feet.

Probably Mrs. Waite never forgot my first public meal which was in the Cincinnati railroad station. She and the children ate at the lunch-counter while I guarded our cumbersome luggage. Afterwards she kindly sent me in to order my own supper, at her expense. Little did she reck the depths of my ignorance! I must have asked for some of everything in sight, especially fried chicken from under a glass dome. It was years before I even knew enough to worry about the size of that bill.

At Kansas City, I was left alone to wait from seven in the morning until after midnight for a northbound train. I made a few acquaintances, but was terribly afraid of any one who eyed me at all intently. It was wearisome, sitting in narrow seats flanked by hard iron arms. Ladies' rooms with rockers and couches did not exist then. How relieved I was at last to tug my heavy telescope bag onto the train, and curl up on a seat to sleep. But, by the next day, my curiosity concerning my fellow-passengers was as avid as ever. That interest in humanity has served me well since.

It was wonderful to see Brother George waiting on the station platform of York, Nebraska, at the end of my lonely journey.

I tutored out of school hours with the teacher of the school up at the corner, trying to patch up the gaps in my ragged schooling.

I made my plans to attend the small Presbyterian college at Hastings, Nebraska. Mother gave her consent, though she had hoped for years that I might go to Maryville College near Knoxville, in Tennessee, or to Ferry Hall at Lake Forest near Chicago, where several of my girl cousins had gone. Her chief anxiety, however, was over the matter of funds. That was of small concern to my blithe heart.

For we were dreadfully modern, by all the standards of our parents. I am always irritated today by writers who picture a past period as "quaint." No period is quaint to the ones who are living in it; it is always new and fast-rushing and very modern.

Archly I still made the assertion about the two sorts of men whom I would never marry -- a farmer or a minister. I consoled myself with the thought that perhaps it was just as well, for I was totally untrained to be a minister's wife. But I was mistaken. Every one of the ups and downs of my variegated eighteen years had been an intensive preparation for the job of being a minister's wife; whereas almost none of these ups and downs had given me an inkling of my job as a farmer's wife.

Farming in East Tennessee had seemed to me only an unequal struggle with stony nature. There were no opulent plantation-owners there, only mountaineer farmers who worked their uptilted patches of ground with a wooden hand-plow, pulled by a narrow-minded mule and a spavined horse. The houses were dark, ugly cabins, scantily furnished. No wonder I had vowed in those early days never to marry a farmer.

In Nebraska the vast, treeless fields, with ruddy young Vikings guiding newly invented machinery across them, thrilled me with a sense of space and freedom. Farmers were the important citizens there. The houses were still new and unadorned, but everything was in the making. Here, unconsciously, my ideas had begun to change.

In Illinois, the older, larger houses, well-shaded, surrounded with shrubbery and flowers, and flanked by orchards and gardens, made country life seem to my youthful eyes an easy, placid existence. Young eyes wear rose-tinted glasses -- luckily, I suppose.

There was no plan for an immediate marriage. Engagements were expected to be long. Romantic girls looked with awe upon couples who had been promised to each other for ten years. It was supposed to insure the thorough acquaintance necessary to live happily ever after. And whether or not it was "happy," it was certainly for "ever," for at that time, I had never knowingly laid eyes upon a divorced person.

So after an acquaintance of four months with the man I had promised to marry, I followed Mother back to the South to settle down as an Engaged Girl for an indefinite length of time.

As the southbound train carried me into Knoxville after my absence of three years, I peered out eagerly for some familiar sight.

At the street crossing which we were passing at the moment stood a rickety, unpainted little wagon and an old mule-wheels and legs aslant in a familiar pose. Startled, I gazed at the serene, black-skinned driver holding the frayed rope reins; it was old Uncle Ike Lillison, Aunt Em'line's husband. Homesick tears blinded me. I was home! For home will always be where one's childhood was spent.

During my absence the little nursery farm had been absorbed into the Colored College campus, and Mother had built an attractive house downtown at the foot of University Hill and close to Adah Stephenson. We attended the newly organized Pilgrim Congregational Church, so I saw few of my former acquaintances.

I joined another Chautauqua reading-circle. My ambition to get further education revived. Soon I was being tutored in German, Latin, history, and mathematics by a retired minister. I cherished a dream of going to school again before my marriage. I even took a short business course, which was considered quite advanced in those days.

In spite of a mythical fiancé in the North, I found myself having what my daughters in later years would have called a "rush." There was a whole season of plays which I attended with one young man. There were flowers, kid gloves, and poems bound in limp leather, from another. But the peak of protestations came from a certain Scotchman who sent a carriage to take me for afternoon rides during my convalescence from one of my frequent illnesses. I'll admit that there were moments on those rides, with only Adah for a companion, when the idea of becoming an Illinois farmer's wife seemed a shade remote.

The old rheumatism persisted. I gladly accepted an invitation from Mrs. Strang to visit the Barrens once more. Matilda and her sister had gone back to Egypt to teach school. We wrote interminable letters which took three weeks to reach their destinations, while her mother and I consoled each other in our loneliness.

My loneliness was eventually somewhat alleviated, however, by a young doctor who made his professional calls mounted on a powerful white horse, and carrying his medicine and instruments in his saddle-bags. His devotion was proved when he invited me to go with him to his home-town commencement exercises sixteen miles away.

There wasn't a carriage in the Barrens [Lincoln, TN] -- the roads were too rutty. So the young doctor galloped the sixteen miles to his home and drove back sixteen miles with a shiny single buggy. The next morning he and I drove the sixteen miles to his home again. And after the program and a typical southern dinner, we turned around and drove the sixteen miles back to the Barrens, with the doctor's younger brother trailing us astride the white horse. The lad then climbed into the fancy buggy and drove the sixteen miles back!

I am sure that Mr. Strang must have sent a warning to a young man in Illinois. For shortly after this, Oliver arrived -- alarmed and most persuasive about the necessity for me to get out of this damp southern climate. He brought an invitation from Aunt Jane and Uncle William to return to them until I was thoroughly recovered. I was overjoyed at the idea. Although it was very unconventional, I made the journey north accompanied by my future husband.

Feverishly I began to work on my trousseau. A sixty-yard bolt of long-cloth and many five-yard lengths of lace were required for the dozen "sets" of underwear. A set meant three garments with matching trimming -- a combination suit, a corset cover, and a petticoat. When a lady dressed up, she always put on at least four ruffled petticoats with the weight dragging from her waist. Thus she achieved the still desirable rounded outline of the hoop-skirt, although hoops were now obsolete. Doctors, preachers, and press thundered against the evil of heavy, dragging skirts and tight lacing. But young women paid as little attention to admonitions then about what was good for them as they do today. When fancy petticoats and tight corsets went out of style, they were discarded; and not one instant before.

The making of these tucked, ruffled, lacetrimmed garments was a winter's task. My sewing experience had been limited. Some of the underthings didn't fit any too well, I remember. At least three special dresses had to be acquired: the wedding gown, the going-away and church dress, and the tea-gown in which one received callers. I had worn a black Henrietta-cloth mourning dress all winter, and my wedding colors were likewise to be subdued. The goods for my wedding dress had a history; I had seen it wrapped in tissue-paper all my life. It was a heavy blue-and-black brocaded silk which, with a check for two hundred dollars, had been sent to me by my father's foster-mother, Mary Jackson, known as "Aunt Polly." I was her namesake, although she was never called Mary, and I was never called Polly.

The other dress was a cadet-blue serge which I wore in my wedding picture. The pride of my heart was the pinkish-beige rep tea-gown with the Watteau pleat which began at the neck and ended in a long train-all very elegant for a farmer's wife.

I arranged with a village dressmaker to give me sewing lessons during the six weeks that she worked on my dresses. The wedding dress, with its stiffened, double box-pleated side-panels, and its high Elizabethan collar faced with creamy silk lace, seemed quite wonderful to me. My Julia Marlowe high shoes of the softest kid were an extravagance at four dollars. My fine handkerchief cost more than a dollar; never had I paid such prices!

The time passed quickly in preparations. I was of little assistance about the house, so absorbed was I in my sewing. I did surprise my Aunt Jane by knowing how to clean and cut up a chicken, which I had learned on the Nebraska farm where poultry was our chief meat. And "Anna Mary could sweep a room." Rather a meager stock of household accomplishments for a farmer's wife.

. . .

[After giving birth to her first child]  In a moment, we both sank into a profound slumber, completely oblivious of my general ignorance as a farmer's wife. I had gone a step higher. I was a mother -- albeit a young and very green one.

Why try to tell of the ever-old, ever-new marvels of that baby? She was mine -- a wonder of the ages! I named her Adah for my friend in the South.

When the nurse from town stepped out of the room for the last time, I was panic-stricken. I gazed with apprehension at the little blond creature with the most perfect, tiny nose in the world, sleeping serenely on a pillow in a big rocker drawn up close to the bed. How have earth's millions of babies survived the ignorance of their young mothers?

My mother offered to send me colored help from the South, and soon Georgianna Brown, whom I had known in my childhood, arrived to help out "Miss Annie." She was the sister of teh swift strawberry-picking John and a dozen others. Georgianna, who sat with her feet in the range even on the hottest days, strummin gher banjo, was vastly entertaining to all of Wool Street, for Negroes were rare in northern farming communities.

Georgianna had been educated at the mission school in Knoxville and had taught a colored country school deep in the backwoods. How we enjoyed hearing her tell of her struggles with her conscience when she taught that the world was round. She had to; the school books and county superintendent all said it was so; but Georgie would never actually believe it.

Once when I casually remarked that I must have been mistaken, but I thought I had heard her banjo strumming in the kitchen while she was out of the house, she turned gray-faced with terror. "Oh, Lawzy -- Miss Annie, dere sho' am trouble ahead, ef dat banjo hum by itse'f!" It took us hours to get this trembling product of advanced education and Christian teaching calmed down.

When cold weather came on, Georgianna grew homesick in the too-energetic North and left for Tennessee.

I spotted many a starched Sunday shirt-bosom with tears as I tried to make it look the way Aunt Em'line used to. I struggled over the molding board with two little heads bobbing in between. That pantry was a Plain of Esdraelon on many a hot day.

Surely now, two babies were sufficient to insure "Anna's settling down." My day usually began in the early dawn after a wakeful night. At the sound of the men clattering out the back door with the milk pails, I would tiptoe about at my dressing, as swift and noiseless as an Indian, and then -- with one eye on the crib and the other on the cradle, where there wasn't the flicker of an eyelid -- I would gain the other side of the door, only to be stopped by a shrieking duet. There was nothing to do but go back, wrap one in a shawl, bundle the other in a quilt, lug them out to the kitchen, dump one in a high-chair close to the stove, and cart the other around on my hip while I got breakfast with one hand.

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