God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than
God seems the sick-nurse--at least in that part of the country, under
those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and
uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black,
steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing
hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step--the
flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of
the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and
thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon
it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of
balm to some woe.

She said she had, and in truth she had, no other name than "little
Mammy"; and that was the name of her nature. Pure African, but bronze
rather than pure black, and full-sized only in width, her growth
having been hampered as to height by an injury to her hip, which
had lamed her, pulling her figure awry, and burdening her with a
protuberance of the joint. Her mother caused it by dropping her when a
baby, and concealing it, for fear of punishment, until the dislocation
became irremediable. All the animosity of which little Mammy was
capable centered upon this unknown but never-to-be-forgotten mother of
hers; out of this hatred had grown her love--that is, her destiny, a
woman's love being her destiny. Little Mammy's love was for children.

The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one would
infer) took place in--it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!--took
place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader's
auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying
and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech--a