Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [48]
News of the murder forced Mary Chesnut to reexamine many of her previous assumptions about the “placid, docile, kind and obedient” slaves she had known. “Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of Negroes. I had never injured any of them; why should they want to hurt me? Two thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to Negroes, because they are so in our power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing.” But as of this day, she confessed, “I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?” While Mary Chesnut and her sister, Kate Williams, sat up late that night and discussed the murder, Kate’s maid (“a strong-built, mulatto woman … so clever she can do anything”) dragged a mattress into the room and insisted that she spend the night with her mistress. “You ought not to stay in a room by yourself these times,” she told her. “Missis, as I have a soul to be saved, I will keep you safe. I will guard you.” When the maid left for more bedding, Kate turned to her sister and exclaimed, “For the life of me, I cannot make up my mind. Does she mean to take care of me, or to murder me?” Unable to sleep, whether because of the murder or the maid’s presence, or both, Kate went into her sister’s bedroom, and the two women tried to comfort each other, both of them haunted by “the thought of those black hands strangling and smothering Mrs. Witherspoon’s grey head under the counterpane.” One month later, the details of the murder remained as vivid in Mary Chesnut’s mind as if it had occurred the day before. “That innocent old lady and her grey hair moved them not a jot. Fancy how we feel. I am sure I will never sleep again without this nightmare of horror haunting me.… If they want to kill us, they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers.” And yet, she confided to her diary, although “we ought to be grateful that anyone of us is alive, … nobody is afraid of their own Negroes, I find everyone, like myself, ready to trust their own yard. I would go down on the plantation tomorrow and stay there even if there were no white person in twenty miles. My Molly and all the rest I believe would keep me as safe as I should be in the Tower of London.”
But as she had feared, the specter of Mrs. Witherspoon’s death remained with them, manifesting itself in different ways at different times. There was the day, for example, when Mary Chesnut’s mother-in-law had “bored” her with incessant talk about “the transcendant virtues of her colored household”; that night, the woman suddenly warned everyone at the dinner table not to touch their soup: “It is bitter. There is something wrong about it!” The family tried to calm her and continued with their meal, while the black waiters “looked on without change of face.” Kate whispered to her sister, “It is cousin Betsey’s fate. She is watching every trifle, and is terrified.” Afterwards, Kate told Mary of a Dr. Keith, “one of the kindest of men and masters,” who had discovered one day that his slaves were slowly trying to poison him and had thrown a cup of tainted tea in the face of a suspected servant; the next morning, the doctor was found with his throat cut. “Mrs. Witherspoon’s death,” Mary Chesnut noted, “has clearly driven us all wild.” On Christmas Day 1861, she duly recorded that the slaves charged with the murder of her cousin had been hanged. That same day, the servants rushed in with cries of “Merry Christmas” and “Christmas Gift.” “I covered my face and wept.”
Despite the confidence she still reposed in her own servants, Mary Chesnut began to entertain doubts about what she might expect of them in the future. Nearly a year after Mrs. Witherspoon’s death, with all the terror that had generated, she found herself reading a book about the Sepoy Mutiny in India, in which the Bengal Army had turned