Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

THE DOOR TO THE COMPOSING-ROOM

65

field-hands, stable-men, house-servants, mammies and
pickaninnies, living in the same quarters in the same
way, singing the same songs by firelight in their cabins,
performing their several functions just as before emancipation; the only difference being that they were free
(although many of them did not seem to appreciate the
immensity of the fact) and were paid wages and had to
pay for the provisions they drew from the store.
I used to love to go to the cabins at night and listen to
the singing. The hymns were essentially African in cadence and wording, grotesquely devotional. They lacked,
of course, the artificiality of the minstrel stage renderings,
and were cruder and more spontaneous even than many
of the melodies the jubilee singers afterward introduced
to popularity. There was more recitative, more repetition,
less of evident attempt at characteristic artistry. I wrote
down the words of some of these songs that struck my
fancy, and wish they were now to be found. What I do
find is a couple of letters written from the plantation when
I was fourteen and printed in the Bath Times. It was my
earliest appearance in newspaper type and a paragraph
from one of the letters is reproduced here, partly to indulge a purely personal interest in the epoch and partly
for the sake of the statistical information it carries:
A large field when cotton is at its thickest resembles, to the
eye, a vast expanse covered with a mantle of dazzling snow.
Each plant bears three "pickings"; of these the second produces
the best quality, the third picking and gleanings being of a
much lower grade. The growth of the cotton is different in
plants from different seeds. It varies all the way from two feet
to the height of a tall man. For the negroes "picking time" is
a season of rejoicing. As they are paid by the amount picked,

their wages depend upon their industry and skill. The best
hands when cotton is thickest pick about one hundred and
fifty or two hundred pounds per day; and I have known of as
much as four hundred pounds being picked in a single day;
but this is very unusual. I do not think that taking the season