Uncle Tom's Cabin
had done ever since she came there, to the great amazement of the
chambermaid, she prepared for a vigorous onslaught on the cupboards and
closets of the establishment of which she had the keys.
The store-room, the linen-presses, the china-closet, the kitchen and
cellar, that day, all went under an awful review. Hidden things of
darkness were brought to light to an extent that alarmed all the
principalities and powers of kitchen and chamber, and caused many
wonderings and murmurings about “dese yer northern ladies” from the
domestic cabinet.
Old Dinah, the head cook, and principal of all rule and authority in
the kitchen department, was filled with wrath at what she considered an
invasion of privilege. No feudal baron in _Magna Charta_ times could
have more thoroughly resented some incursion of the crown.
Dinah was a character in her own way, and it would be injustice to her
memory not to give the reader a little idea of her. She was a native
and essential cook, as much as Aunt Chloe,—cooking being an indigenous
talent of the African race; but Chloe was a trained and methodical one,
who moved in an orderly domestic harness, while Dinah was a self-taught
genius, and, like geniuses in general, was positive, opinionated and
erratic, to the last degree.
Like a certain class of modern philosophers, Dinah perfectly scorned
logic and reason in every shape, and always took refuge in intuitive
certainty; and here she was perfectly impregnable. No possible amount
of talent, or authority, or explanation, could ever make her believe
that any other way was better than her own, or that the course she had
pursued in the smallest matter could be in the least modified. This had
been a conceded point with her old mistress, Marie’s mother; and “Miss
Marie,” as Dinah always called her young mistress, even after her
marriage, found it easier to submit than contend; and so Dinah had
ruled supreme. This was the easier, in that she was perfect mistress of
that diplomatic art which unites the utmost subservience of manner with
the utmost inflexibility as to measure.
Dinah was mistress of the whole art and mystery of excuse-making, in
all its branches. Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do
no wrong; and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and
shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain
her own immaculateness entire. If any part of the dinner was a failure,
there were fifty indisputably good reasons for it; and it was the fault
undeniably of fifty other people, whom Dinah berated with unsparing
zeal.
But it was very seldom that there was any failure in Dinah’s last
results. Though her mode of doing everything was peculiarly meandering
and circuitous, and without any sort of calculation as to time and
place,—though her kitchen generally looked as if it had been arranged
by a hurricane blowing through it, and she had about as many places for
each cooking utensil as there were days in the year,—yet, if one would
have patience to wait her own good time, up would come her dinner in
perfect order, and in a style of preparation with which an epicure
could find no fault.
It was now the season of incipient preparation for dinner. Dinah, who
required large intervals of reflection and repose, and was studious of
ease in all her arrangements, was seated on the kitchen floor, smoking
a short, stumpy pipe, to which she was much addicted, and which she
always kindled up, as a sort of censer, whenever she felt the need of
an inspiration in her arrangements. It was Dinah’s mode of invoking the
domestic Muses.
Seated around her were various members of that rising race with which a
Southern household abounds, engaged in shelling peas, peeling potatoes,
picking pin-feathers out of fowls, and other preparatory
arrangements,—Dinah every once in a while interrupting her meditations
to give a poke, or a rap on the head, to some of the young operators,
with the pudding-stick that lay by her side. In fact, Dinah ruled over
the woolly heads of the younger members with a rod of iron, and seemed
to consider them born for no earthly purpose but to “save her steps,”
as she phrased it. It was the spirit of the system under which she had
grown up, and she carried it out to its full extent.
Miss Ophelia, after passing on her reformatory tour through all the
other parts of the establishment, now entered the kitchen. Dinah had
heard, from various sources, what was going on, and resolved to stand
on defensive and conservative ground,—mentally determined to oppose and
ignore every new measure, without any actual observable contest.
The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great
old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it,—an arrangement
which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to exchange for the
convenience of a modern cook-stove. Not she. No Puseyite,[1] or
conservative of any school, was ever more inflexibly attached to
time-honored inconveniences than Dinah.
[1] Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), champion of the orthodoxy of
revealed religion, defender of the Oxford movement, and Regius
professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
When St. Clare had first returned from the north, impressed with the
system and order of his uncle’s kitchen arrangements, he had largely
provided his own with an array of cupboards, drawers, and various
apparatus, to induce systematic regulation, under the sanguine illusion
that it would be of any possible assistance to Dinah in her
arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a
magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes
could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old
shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of
_vertu_, wherein her soul delighted.
When Miss Ophelia entered the kitchen Dinah did not rise, but smoked on
in sublime tranquillity, regarding her movements obliquely out of the
corner of her eye, but apparently intent only on the operations around
her.
Miss Ophelia commenced opening a set of drawers.
“What is this drawer for, Dinah?” she said.
“It’s handy for most anything, Missis,” said Dinah. So it appeared to
be. From the variety it contained, Miss Ophelia pulled out first a fine
damask table-cloth stained with blood, having evidently been used to
envelop some raw meat.
“What’s this, Dinah? You don’t wrap up meat in your mistress’ best
table-cloths?”
“O Lor, Missis, no; the towels was all a missin’—so I jest did it. I
laid out to wash that a,—that’s why I put it thar.”
“Shif’less!” said Miss Ophelia to herself, proceeding to tumble over
the drawer, where she found a nutmeg-grater and two or three nutmegs, a
Methodist hymn-book, a couple of soiled Madras handkerchiefs, some yarn
and knitting-work, a paper of tobacco and a pipe, a few crackers, one
or two gilded china-saucers with some pomade in them, one or two thin
old shoes, a piece of flannel carefully pinned up enclosing some small
white onions, several damask table-napkins, some coarse crash towels,
some twine and darning-needles, and several broken papers, from which
sundry sweet herbs were sifting into the drawer.
“Where do you keep your nutmegs, Dinah?” said Miss Ophelia, with the
air of one who prayed for patience.
“Most anywhar, Missis; there’s some in that cracked tea-cup, up there,
and there’s some over in that ar cupboard.”
“Here are some in the grater,” said Miss Ophelia, holding them up.
“Laws, yes, I put ’em there this morning,—I likes to keep my things
handy,” said Dinah. “You, Jake! what are you stopping for! You’ll cotch
it! Be still, thar!” she added, with a dive of her stick at the
criminal.
“What’s this?” said Miss Ophelia, holding up the saucer of pomade.
“Laws, it’s my har _grease_;—I put it thar to have it handy.”
“Do you use your mistress’ best saucers for that?”
“Law! it was cause I was driv, and in sich a hurry;—I was gwine to
change it this very day.”
“Here are two damask table-napkins.”
“Them table-napkins I put thar, to get ’em washed out, some day.”
“Don’t you have some place here on purpose for things to be washed?”
“Well, Mas’r St. Clare got dat ar chest, he said, for dat; but I likes
to mix up biscuit and hev my things on it some days, and then it an’t
handy a liftin’ up the lid.”
“Why don’t you mix your biscuits on the pastry-table, there?”
“Law, Missis, it gets sot so full of dishes, and one thing and another,
der an’t no room, noway—”
“But you should _wash_ your dishes, and clear them away.”
“Wash my dishes!” said Dinah, in a high key, as her wrath began to rise
over her habitual respect of manner; “what does ladies know ’bout work,
I want to know? When ’d Mas’r ever get his dinner, if I was to spend
all my time a washin’ and a puttin’ up dishes? Miss Marie never telled
me so, nohow.”
“Well, here are these onions.”
“Laws, yes!” said Dinah; “thar _is_ whar I put ’em, now. I couldn’t
’member. Them ’s particular onions I was a savin’ for dis yer very
stew. I’d forgot they was in dat ar old flannel.”
Miss Ophelia lifted out the sifting papers of sweet herbs.
“I wish Missis wouldn’t touch dem ar. I likes to keep my things where I
knows whar to go to ’em,” said Dinah, rather decidedly.
“But you don’t want these holes in the papers.”
“Them ’s handy for siftin’ on ’t out,” said Dinah.
“But you see it spills all over the drawer.”
“Laws, yes! if Missis will go a tumblin’ things all up so, it will.
Missis has spilt lots dat ar way,” said Dinah, coming uneasily to the
drawers. “If Missis only will go up stars till my clarin’ up time
comes, I’ll have everything right; but I can’t do nothin’ when ladies
is round, a henderin’. You, Sam, don’t you gib the baby dat ar
sugar-bowl! I’ll crack ye over, if ye don’t mind!”
“I’m going through the kitchen, and going to put everything in order,
_once_, Dinah; and then I’ll expect you to _keep_ it so.”
“Lor, now! Miss Phelia; dat ar an’t no way for ladies to do. I never
did see ladies doin’ no sich; my old Missis nor Miss Marie never did,
and I don’t see no kinder need on ’t;” and Dinah stalked indignantly
about, while Miss Ophelia piled and sorted dishes, emptied dozens of
scattering bowls of sugar into one receptacle, sorted napkins,
table-cloths, and towels, for washing; washing, wiping, and arranging
with her own hands, and with a speed and alacrity which perfectly
amazed Dinah.
“Lor now! if dat ar de way dem northern ladies do, dey an’t ladies,
nohow,” she said to some of her satellites, when at a safe hearing
distance. “I has things as straight as anybody, when my clarin’ up
times comes; but I don’t want ladies round, a henderin’, and getting my
things all where I can’t find ’em.”
To do Dinah justice, she had, at irregular periods, paroxyms of
reformation and arrangement, which she called “clarin’ up times,” when
she would begin with great zeal, and turn every drawer and closet wrong
side outward, on to the floor or tables, and make the ordinary
confusion seven-fold more confounded. Then she would light her pipe,
and leisurely go over her arrangements, looking things over, and
discoursing upon them; making all the young fry scour most vigorously
on the tin things, and keeping up for several hours a most energetic
state of confusion, which she would explain to the satisfaction of all
inquirers, by the remark that she was a “clarin’ up.” “She couldn’t hev
things a gwine on so as they had been, and she was gwine to make these
yer young ones keep better order;” for Dinah herself, somehow, indulged
the illusion that she, herself, was the soul of order, and it was only
the _young uns_, and the everybody else in the house, that were the