Have been to Hospital, No. 1, at the request of a mother
whose young son had died there. She is in great anxiety to learn something of
his last words, and whether he died a Christian. I have just written her
the facts, that there was no outward evidence of the same, but that she must
trust the Good Father that it was "well with him."
All the patients whom I have mentioned in my journal, are
better. Even the one with ulcers is improving. As for William he has applied
for a furlough, and expects soon to go home.
Day before yesterday a girl came to school who had just the
look and complexion of a snuff-dipping refugee. She, also, like them, wore a
dress of the same color, derived from some kind of bark. Her manner was as
listless and her expression as vacant. Wishing much to know whether she could
claim our superior race as her own, or whether a few drops of the black blood
in her veins had procured perhaps from her father and master the fiat— "only
a niggar!" I made known my curiosity to one of the teachers, with my
perplexity as to how I should obtain the coveted information, without wounding
her feelings.
"Oh! you need not fear that," was the reply,
"they're used to it, and expect to be asked whether they're niggars or
not." I could not do it, however, without considerable circumlocution; and
commenced by asking if she could buy herself a book, whom she lived with,
&c. After some time the questions eliminated the fact that though she
didn't know whether she was free, or a “refugee," her own second name, or
the age, she did know that she had lived most of her life in
Texas, where she had always worked out of doors, had hoed corn, and ploughed
that she lived with the same people now—that her father she had never heard
anything of—that her mother was black, "though not real black," and
finally that she herself was a "niggar," which nobody else could have
told by her features or complexion.
A lady who stopped over night, on her way home from Bridgeport,
where she has been stationed with her husband in charge of sanitary stores,
relates the following:
She said that sitting a few days since in the rooms where
were the stores of the Christian Commission, she saw a woman, when half a mile
distant, who had a long stick in her hand. She supposed that being weary
perhaps, with a long walk, she had picked it up to serve the office of a cane. But
after entering, and engaging for some time in jovial conversation and laughter
with some neighbors, she found there, she made known her errand. She wanted to
beg a shirt, pair of stockings and a coffin for her husband, and the stick was
the measure of his body. My informant asked the age of the
deceased husband, and she replied:
"Well, now, I never rightly axed him how old he was.
but I reckon he mought be nigh on to thirty or forty!"
SOURCE: Elvira J. Powers, Hospital Pencillings:
Being a Diary While in Jefferson General Hospital, Jeffersonville, Ind., and
Others at Nashville, Tennessee, as Matron and Visitor, pp. 72-4
