Memoir of plantation childhood: the medicine closet, doctoring the workers, hog butchering
Book 2, Page 16 ·1930–1960
Transcription
best she had for her best loved people — her own family. —
The closet opening off of Mauma Mim and Dad’s room was known as “the medicine closet”. It was always kept locked and was stocked with all house hold remedies — and the books: “Household Medicines” and “Till the Dr. Comes”. All the darkies on the plantation came to “the house” for doctoring. If it was beyond Mauma Mim’s care and her [knowledge] — the patient was put in a buggy and driven to the Dr. — who lived 6 miles away in Adams Run village.
I remember once a man was brought to the yard with a badly cut foot. The blood was coming out in spurts — and Mauma Mim realized that he would bleed to death before he reached the Dr. So she went ahead — following the directions for a cut artery — stopped the bleeding before sending him on.
One of the big events of the winter was when the weather turned cold enough to have the hogs butchered. They generally killed 8 or 10 hogs. Extra help was brought in — and Dad supervised the cutting up of the hogs. This was done on trestles in the cellar. Then next day Mauma Mim took over
AI Notes
Continuation of Amy FitzSimons’s plantation-childhood memoir. The first sentence completes the previous page’s thought about Mauma Mim’s china and silver: “best she had — for her best loved people — her own family.” Describes ‘the medicine closet’ opening off Mauma Mim and Dad’s room — always kept locked and stocked with household remedies and two reference books, Household Medicines and Till the Dr. Comes (a popular late-19th-c. domestic medical manual). All the plantation workers came to ‘the house’ for doctoring; if a case was beyond Mauma Mim’s skill, the patient was put in a buggy and driven the six miles to the doctor at Adams Run village. Once a man was brought to the yard with a badly cut foot, blood spurting; Mauma Mim followed the directions for a severed artery and stopped the bleeding before sending him on. Hog butchering each winter — 8 to 10 hogs, extra help brought in, Dad supervising the cutting-up on trestles in the cellar; next day Mauma Mim took over.
Mauma Mim is Mary Anne Perry FitzSimons (the writer’s mother); Dad is her husband Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr. — the terms Amy uses throughout the memoir on pp001–027. The period racial term in the original is preserved verbatim in the body transcription per the project’s faithful-transcription convention.