Pompy Hemmings is a young female servant in the Santon household in South Carolina in the 1830s. She lives with other maidservants in the barns in the backyard. Master Santon owns a large rice plantation where he spends most of his days overseeing the running of his farm. His wife, Madam Sophrina on the other hand spends her days at home running the household and hosting parties while she is not traveling to New York and Boston to shop. The Santons have three children, Marcus, Jefferson, and Emily who are already adults.
Pompy works with other three black women one of whom is very old, older than her own mother would have been had she lived. There is a lot of work every day: cleaning and washing for the master’s household; cooking for the household and the slaves in the plantations; and going to the market. The four women wake up at the crack of dawn and start the days work, which goes on endlessly until almost midnight especially when Madam Sophrina or her daughter is hosting a party. Miss Emily is getting married to the son of another plantation owner and this is why today the four women are as busy as a swarm of bees, making sure everything is excellent just as Miss Emily likes it. After the party though, Pompy is tired, she will enter her feelings and observations in a diary just as she had done since she learned how to write (Fox-Genovese, 56).
“I am not sure I can be able write tonight, am so tired I can hardly lift a finger. Tonight was nasty missy Emily’s party- how people love her parties. She and her betrothed were being formally engaged. I cannot believe she is getting married; she is one beast less to deal with in the house. Poor old Lucretia, she will finally have some peace, missy was always on her back calling her an old dog and making her run up and down the stairs like a child despite her age. I pity the maids that are going to serve her in her husband’s household. You know, she is worse than her mother and a little better than the mighty and beastly Master Marcus. Listen to me, who is better than the other in this house? Except of course Master Davis but, nobody should ever know what happened yesterday at the barn (Weiner, 65).
Sometimes I wonder why life has to be so unfair, especially to my mother; she died just like many other slaves in this region; from an attack of the dreadful disease, bilharzia contracted from the rice paddies. It is a time like this when I feel so lousy that I think of my father too or should I just say my supposedly father. No matter how he treated me I still think of him, he did not deserve to die like that, of a brutal beating from that old jerk Omando, the slave overseeras he tried to escape to the north, thank God the judge sentenced him to the hangman’s noose, or I would have killed him myself. When I remember those dreadful times when my father would yell at my mother and beat me senseless, I thank God because though am still a slave they treat me better at the house. I know it is because apparently am master Santon’s illegitimate daughter, that is why am light-skinned. You see, skin color matters a lot in this part of the world, it even got me a substantial education, that’s until I grew strong enough to be a maid. I wonder whether it will allow me to vote one day (Edgar, 125 & Fox-Genovese, 68).
Speaking of voting, I heard cubby, what sort of a name is that, I bet madam Sophrina was in a good mood to name her after her dead dog. Anyway, she was saying that the slaves are planning another one of those dreadful strikes, what a disaster could that end up being. God keep my brothers safe from all this, we have been through enough since the death of my little sisters last summer from mumps. I don’t want to start crying again so I better try to have some rest tomorrow is going to be another crazy day” (Edgar, 139).
Works cited
Edgar Walter. South Carolina: A History. Columbia. University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the plantation household: Black and white women of the old south. New York. Chapel Hill, 1988.
Weiner, Marli F. Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation women in South Carolina, 1830-80.Urbana. University of Illinois Press, 1998.