Also, I met here the renowned spirit medium Jim Spain, of whom I had heard my mother and my Aunt Nancy tell some tall stories—but Jim got on a horse, rode away, and I did not see him again that day. Jim Spain at this me was about thirty-five years old. He had come to the Lovell home when a young man—and just stayed. I don’t know if he had any relatives; though undoubtedly there was a time when he might have been blessed—or plagued—with kin.
At eventide—maybe it would define the hour better to say as dusk settled on the hills and hollows surrounding my Aunt’s home, making the hollows thick with semi-darkness—girls, in twos and threes, began coming in—in all about a baker’s dozen. That spirit medium had made the rounds spreading the news of my arrival. The girls were too nearly the same age—sweet sixteen—to be of one family. They were my relatives — or maybe just relatives of my relatives. They were all cousins. I asked one of the girls where had they all come from? She said, “Just over the east hill—apiece.” It was a steep hill.
The Lovell home, a double structure with the usual open spacious gallery separating the apartments—a typical Southern home—was near the junction of Buffalo creek on the north and a deep gulch between high wooded hills, flowing in from the south. The building spot, about the size of an ordinary town lot, had been leveled off some fifteen feet above the wash, with the west end of the dwelling resting on piles reaching down almost to the water level. To the east, the hill above the flattened space, was so steep and high that the sun did not» shine on the house until after ten o’clock. A cook-house stood in the yard about thirty feet south of the dwelling where family meals were prepared—presumedly by a colored cook.
After I had returned home, I learned that my Aunt Nancy had written my Aunt Harriet advising her to get rid of her Negro cook for the duration of my visit. Whatever possessed her to do this, I wouldn’t know—there was, in fact, no justification for it. I had no reason to be prejudice of Negroes. On the contrary, I may say I “owe my life” to a Negro — my mother said he was the blackest Negro she had ever seen—for having rescued me from the river after I had fallen off the deck of the boat, when coming to Kansas from Tennessee. I was about four years old—and still wearing dresses, in the fashion of the times. I was told that the Negro said he had saved my mother’s little darling girl. I didn’t like to be called a “little girl”—either with or without the “darling”—but this was no cause for me to forever dislike the colored folk.