E. Levi Brown's “At the Hermitage” was published in Harper's Monthly in 1893, and then included in William D. Howells and Henry Mills Alden's anthology, Shapes That Haunt the Dusk (1907). The story then sank into obscurity, and has not been collected again until now. No other published work by Brown has been discovered. Even the author's race and gender, concealed by the androgynous first initial, were unknown until recently, when the still unpublished research of Matthew Sivils revealed that Brown was an African American woman, the wife of a Southern minister.

The story takes us into a culture deeply steeped in conjure, of which the author must have had intimate knowledge. We see a curse thrown back on its perpetrator by a conjure doctor, as explained by Charles Chesnutt in his essay “Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South.” The intersecting families of the quarters and the big house also reveal the “degrading submissions,” as Thomas Jefferson called them, of slavery and its aftermath. The rivals Mim and Tina are both daughters of the decadent white aristocrat John, and there is even a hint that Tina also may be his mistress.

Text: William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden, Shapes That Haunt the Dusk: Harper's Novelettes(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), 249–77.

AT THE HERMITAGE

The October sun was shining hot, but it was cool and pleasant inside the mill. The brown water in Sawny Creek lapped softly against the rocks in its bed, and the sycamore and cottonwood trees, which grew from the water's edge up the steep, muddy banks, stood straight and motionless in the warm sunny air, no touch of autumn upon them yet; only the sweet-gums were turning slightly yellow, and the black-gums were tinging red. It wanted two hours of sunset, but blackbirds were on their way home, and the thickets were noisy with their crying.

Inside the moss-grown old mill there was music and dancing going on, for, comfortably reclining on a pile of cotton seed in the rough ginning-room, with thick festoons of cobwebs everywhere, and bits of dusty lint clinging to every splinter in its walls, a young man was playing a banjo, and two others, with naked feet, were dancing as if for their lives.