Three weeks gived me plenty of time to get acquainted with the Douglass household, which was run by Mr. Douglass’s two wives—a white one and a colored one. That was the first time I ever saw such a thing, two women married to one man, and both of ’em being of a different race. Them two women hardly spoke to one another. When they did, you’d a thunk a chunk of ice dropped into the room, for Miss Ottilie was a German white woman, and Miss Anna was a colored woman from the South. They was polite enough to each other, more or less, though I expect if they weren’t civilized, they’d a punched each other wobbly. They hated each other’s guts, is the real picture, and took their rage out on me, for I was uncouth in their eyes and needing barbering and learning of proper manners, ways to sit and curtsy and all them things. I gived them a lot of work in that department, for what few manners and ways Pie taught me out on the prairie was cow dung to these women, who didn’t use an outdoor privy, and never chewed tobacco or used words like “haw” and “git.” After Mr. Douglass introduced me to them and retired to his own scribbling—he scribbled, too, like the Old Man, them two scribbled in separate rooms—them two women stood me before ’em in the parlor and studied me. “Take them pantaloons off,” Miss Anna barked. “Throw them boots out,” Miss Ottilie throwed in. I allowed I’d do what they asked but would do it in private. They fought over it, which gived me time to slip off and change alone. But that drove Miss Anna mad, and she made a comeback two days later by dragging me into her kitchen to draw me a bath. I scooted out to the drawing room and runned to the white wife, Miss Ottilie, who insisted
Them two women would’a grinded each other up if I’d remained there long. But luckily they didn’t have time to fool with me much, being that every inch of movement in that house, every speck of cleaning, cooking, dusting, working, writing, pouring of lye, and sewing of undergarments revolved around Mr. Douglass, who walked about the house like a king in pantaloons and suspenders, practicing his orations, his mane of dark hair almost wide as the hallways, his voice booming down the halls. I once heard the mighty marching band at Tuskegee in Tennessee beating at a parade, and that band of two hundred strong, with drums beating and trumpets wailing was an enjoyment. But it weren’t nothing compared to the blasting of Mr. Douglass practicing his orations about the fate of the Negro race in his house.
Them women tried to outdo each other with the handling of him, even though he regarded them both like they was cooters and stink bombs. When he took meals, he took them alone at the big mahogany desk in his office. That man gobbled down more in one setting than I seen thirty settlers chunk down in three weeks out in Kansas Territory: steak, potatoes, collard greens, yams, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, chicken, rabbit, pheasant, buck meat, cake, biscuits, rice, cheeses of all types, and kneaded bread; he washed it down with milk, curd, peach juice, cow’s milk, goat’s milk, cherry juice, orange juice, grape juice. Neither did he turn away from alcohol libations and drinks of all sorts, of which several types was kept on hand at the house: beer, lager, wine, seltzer, even bottled water from various springs out west. That man put a hurting on a kitchen.
I was exhausted with being a girl a week into the stay, for a damsel out west on the trail could spit, chaw tobacco, holler, grunt, and fart, and gather no more attention to herself than a bird would snatching crumbs off the ground. In fact, your basic Pro Slaver found them behaviors downright likable in a girl, for there weren’t nothing better to a feller out on the plains than finding a girl who could play cards like a feller and clean up the bottom of a bottle of whiskey for him when he was pie-eyed. But in Rochester, by God, you couldn’t so much as doodle your fingers without insulting somebody on the question of a lady behaving thus and so, even a colored lady—
