A Nickel and a Prayer

CHAPTER 5. A Career

59 CHAPTER V A Career F ortune favored me. As a nurse maid for the three lovely children of Major and Mrs. Benjamin Rutledge1 in Charleston, I had employment in surroundings of a far more attractive type than any I had yet known. The Rutledge home stood on South Battery, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean; and except for the Smythe mansion, it was the most beautiful house I had ever seen. The Rutledges were a noble family. Mrs. Rutledge took a personal interest in my welfare, watched over the company I kept, and required me to be in every night by nine o’clock. I grew very fond of the family, and they were not ashamed to show their fondness for me. The entire atmosphere was diametrically different from the one I had known years earlier in the employ of Mrs. Wilson at Anderson. In this new position I was patiently shown how to perform each of my duties, and treated as an intelligent human being, not a useful robot. Years later in my present work, when it became my duty to supervise the training of young women for domestic service, I looked back to the days in the Rutledge household and felt grateful for that experience. It was while in the Rutledge household that it occurred to me that only the select lived hidden in the evergreens, amid beautiful gardens of flowers. I began to understand how wonderfully Nature had endowed the earth, and how a skilled landscape artist could assist Nature so to charm the human eye by a touch of cultivation. In the parks with the children I saw great oaks,  60 Chapter V the graceful elms draped in moss; the palm tree from which the palmetto fan is derived, and from which South Carolina takes its name, “The Palmetto State.” How wonderfully fragrant were the magnolia trees with their white blossoms, the harbinger to the Southerner that springtime has come. Like Paul the apostle2 I considered myself fortunate, indeed, to be in the “Big House” on the front, sharing these bounties with the family. As I grew older, the thought often ran through my mind whether the other servants downstairs in the rear of the mansion saw and appreciated these scenes of beauty, and enjoyed the peace of the God-made trees, as I was privileged to enjoy them. The Rutledges paid me better wages, which helped to send Rebecca and Rosa to Ferguson and Williams College. Rosa was given the job I once had at the school; and now that my sisters were under the influence of the Williamses, I could go ahead with my own ambitions. Mrs. Ella Hunt,3 an influential Negro woman, took an interest in me. With her suggestions I applied for admission to the Cannon Street Hospital and Training School for Nurses.4 There were eighty applicants on the list ahead of me; but because of Mrs. Hunt’s interest in me, I was accepted for training within a month after filing my application. Students in any well conducted hospital of the present day would be amazed at the strenuous manual labor exacted from the nurses at the Cannon Street Hospital. There were few servants. We nurses did most of the cooking and cleaning for the entire establishment. In time we became expert barbers; haircutting and shaving of the men patients devolved upon us in the absence of orderlies. There was no attempt to induct the young woman gradually into the more distasteful and repellent aspects of hospital work. My first afternoon in the hospital was spent in observing an appendectomy—a distressing and hopeless case, since the appendix had ruptured and gangrene had set in. At eleven o’clock that night I was called out of bed to prepare the dead man for burial. Together with three other nurses, I carried the corpse, swung in a sheet, down the stairs to the morgue. But I had my mother’s exuberant vitality and love of life; no experience, however gruesome, could discourage me. A Career 61 The methods of instruction were as direct and practical as those of the Squeers School.5 I had a thorough lesson in anatomy at an autopsy on the body of a Negro worker who had broken his neck in the phosphate mines. In autopsies the nurses assisted, using the scalpel and saw as frequently as did the lecturing surgeon. We examined every organ...