into conversation about the country. "A lovely country," he called it,
and I agreed with him. He inquired where I was from, and I mentioned
that I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region a
strong contrast. "Yes," he returned; and, pointing to the grass, he
remarked upon the richness of the soil. "This yere land would fertilize
that," he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder," said
I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a
qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, it
will, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which I
must on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine house
at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of
trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the
road for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, like
this. "For forty miles," he said. That was farther than I was ready to
walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of the
plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the
pleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and
before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes,
dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the
nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing,
with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,--with pieces of
wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an
opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he
and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him--a full
half-mile away, perhaps--another man was ploughing with a mule; and in
another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in
his wake. A colored boy of seventeen--I guessed his age at
twenty-three--came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire
about the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was planted
with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting
ready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of Captain
H., paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule,
if I understood him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a long time about
one thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian River
country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was
born. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goes
smack to St. Augustine," he replied; "I ain't tried it." It was an
unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he was
right; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahassee
to St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles. With company of
my own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walk
its whole length.[1] My young man was in no haste. With the reins (made
of rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forward
axle of his cart, he seemed to have put himself entirely at my service.
He had to the full that peculiar urbanity which I began after a while to
look upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes,--a gentleness of
speech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, such
as sits well on any man, whatever the color of his skin.
[Footnote 1: But let no enthusiast set out to walk from one city to the
other on the strength of what is here written. After this sketch was
first printed--in _The Atlantic Monthly_--a gentleman who ought to know
whereof he speaks sent me word that my informants were all of them
wrong--that the road does not run to St. Augustine. For myself, I assert
nothing. As my colored boy said, "I ain't tried it."]
In that respect he was like another boy of about his own age, who lived
in the cabin directly before us, but whom I did not see till I had been
several times over the road. Then he happened to be at work near the
edge of the field, and I beckoned him to me. He, too, was serious and
manly in his bearing, and showed no disposition to go back to his hoe
till I broke off the interview,--as if it were a point of good manners
with him to await my pleasure. Yes, the plantation was a good one and
easily cultivated, he said, in response to some remark of my own. There
were five in the family, and they all worked. "We are all big enough to
eat," he added, quite simply. He had never been North, but had lately
declined the offer of a gentleman who wished to take him there,--him and
"another fellow." He once went to Jacksonville, but couldn't stay. "You
can get along without your father pretty well, but it's another thing to
do without your mother." He never meant to leave home again as long as
his mother lived; which was likely to be for some years, I thought, if
she were still able to do her part in the cotton-field. As a general
thing, the colored tenants of the cabins made out pretty well, he
believed, unless something happened to the crops. As for the old
servants of the H. family, they didn't have to work,--they were
provided for; Captain H.'s father "left it so in his testimonial." I
spoke of the purple martins which were flying back and forth over the
field with many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes that hung from a
tall pole in one corner of the cabin yard, for their accommodation. On
my way South, I told him, I had noticed these dangling long-necked
squashes everywhere, and had wondered what they were for. I had found
out since that they were the colored man's martin-boxes, and was glad to
see the people so fond of the birds. "Yes," he said, "there's no danger
of hawks carrying off the chickens as long as the martins are round."
Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I found him ploughing between
the cotton rows; but he was too far away to be accosted without
shouting, and I did not feel justified in interrupting him at his work.
Back and forth he went through the long furrow after the patient ox, the
hens and chickens following. No doubt they thought the work was all for
their benefit. Farther away, a man and two women were hoeing. The family
deserved to prosper, I said to myself, as I lay under a big
magnolia-tree (just beginning to open its large white flowers) and idly
enjoyed the scene. And it was just here, by the bye, that I solved an
interesting etymological puzzle, to wit, the origin and precise meaning
of the word "baygall,"--a word which the visitor often hears upon the
lips of Florida people. An old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned him
about it, told me that it meant a swampy piece of wood, and took its
origin, he had always supposed, from the fact that bay-trees and
gall-bushes commonly grew in such places. A Tallahassee gentleman agreed
with this explanation, and promised to bring home some gall-berries the
next time he came across any, that I might see what they were; but the
berries were never forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, on one
of my last trips up the St. Augustine road, as I stood under the large
magnolia just mentioned, a colored man came along, hat in hand, and a
bag of grain balanced on his head.
"That's a large magnolia," said I.
He assented.
"That's about as large as magnolias ever grow, isn't it?"
"No, sir; down in the gall there's magnolias a heap bigger 'n that."
"A gall? What's that?"
"A baygall, sir."
"And what's a baygall?"
"A big wood."
"And why do you call it a baygall?"
He was stumped, it was plain to see. No doubt he would have scratched
his head, if that useful organ had been accessible. He hesitated; but it
isn't like an uneducated man to confess ignorance. "'Cause it's a
desert," he said, "a thick _place_."
"Yes, yes," I answered, and he resumed his march.
The road was traveled mostly by negroes. On Sunday afternoons it looked
quite like a flower garden, it was so full of bright dresses coming home
from church. "Now'-days folks git religion so easy!" one young woman
said to another, as they passed me. She was a conservative. I did not
join the procession, but on other days I talked, first and last, with a
good many of the people; from the preacher, who carried a handsome cane
and made me a still handsomer bow, down to a serious little fellow of
six or seven years, whom I found standing at the foot of the hill,
beside a bundle of dead wood. He was carrying it home for the family
stove, and had set it down for a minute's rest. I said something about
his burden, and as I went on he called after me: "What kind of birds are
you hunting for? Ricebirds?" I answered that I was looking for birds of
all sorts. Had he seen any ricebirds lately? Yes, he said; he started a
flock the other day up on[1] the hill. "How did they look?" said I.
"They is red blackbirds," he returned. This was not the first time I had
heard the redwing called the ricebird. But how did the boy know me for a
bird-gazer? That was a mystery. It came over me all at once that
possibly I had become better known in the community than I had in the
least suspected; and then I remembered my field-glass. That, as I could
not help being aware, was an object of continual attention. Every day I
saw people, old and young, black and white, looking at it with
undisguised curiosity. Often they passed audible comments upon it among
themselves. "How far can you see through the spyglass?" a bolder spirit
would now and then venture to ask; and once, on the railway track out in
the pine lands, a barefooted, happy-faced urchin made a guess that was
really admirable for its ingenuity. "Looks like you're goin' over
inspectin' the wire," he remarked. On rare occasions, as an act of
special grace, I offered such an inquirer a peep through the magic
lenses,--an experiment that never failed to elicit exclamations of
wonder. Things were so near! And the observer looked comically
incredulous, on putting down the glass, to find how suddenly the
landscape had slipped away again. More than one colored man wanted to
know its price, and expressed a fervent desire to possess one like it;
and probably, if I had ever been assaulted and robbed in all my solitary
wanderings through the flat-woods and other lonesome places, my
"spyglass" rather than my purse--the "lust of the eye" rather than the
"pride of life"--would have been to thank.
[Footnote 1: He did not say "upon" any more than Northern white boys
do.]
Here, however, there could be no thought of such a contingency. Here
were no vagabonds (one inoffensive Yankee specimen excepted), but
hard-working people going into the city or out again, each on his own
lawful business. Scarcely one of them, man or woman, but greeted me
kindly. One, a white man on horseback, invited, and even urged me, to
mount his horse, and let him walk a piece. I must be fatigued, he was
sure,--how could I help it?--and he would as soon walk as not. Finding
me obstinate, he walked his horse at my side, chatting about the
country, the trees, and the crops. He it was who called my particular
attention to the abundance of blackberry vines. "Are the berries sweet?"
I asked. He smacked his lips. "Sweet as honey, and big as that,"
measuring off a liberal portion of his thumb. I spoke of them half an
hour later to a middle-aged colored man. Yes, he said, the blackberries
were plenty enough and sweet enough; but, for his part, he didn't
trouble them a great deal. The vines (and he pointed at them, fringing
the roadside indefinitely) were great places for rattlesnakes. He liked
the berries, but he liked somebody else to pick them. He was awfully
afraid of snakes; they were so dangerous. "Yes, sir" (this in answer to
an inquiry), "there are plenty of rattlesnakes here clean up to
Christmas." I liked him for his frank avowal of cowardice, and still
more for his quiet bearing. He remembered the days of slavery,--"before
the surrender," as the current Southern phrase is,--and his face beamed
when I spoke of my joy in thinking that his people were free, no matter
what might befall them. He, too, raised cotton on hired land, and was
bringing up his children--there were eight of them, he said--to habits
of industry.
My second stroll toward St. Augustine carried me perhaps three
miles,--say one sixty-sixth of the entire distance,--and none of my
subsequent excursions took me any farther; and having just now commended
a negro for his candor, I am moved to acknowledge that, between the sand
underfoot and the sun overhead, I found the six miles, which I spent at
least four hours in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice that
distance would have been over New Hampshire hills. If I were to settle
in that country, I should probably fall into the way of riding more, and
walking less. I remember thinking how comfortable a certain ponderous
black mammy looked, whom I met on one of these same sunny and sandy
tramps. She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and truly
picturesque man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, feminine
readers will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair of
clothes-line reins. She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel;
and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance. Why would
not an equipage like that be just the thing for a naturalistic idler?
Not far beyond my halting-place of two days before I came to a Cherokee
rosebush, one of the most beautiful of plants,--white, fragrant, single
roses (_real_ roses) set in the midst of the handsomest of glossy green
leaves. I was delighted to find it still in flower. A hundred miles
farther south I had seen it finishing its season a full month earlier. I
stopped, of course, to pluck a blossom. At that moment a female redbird
flew out of the bush. Her mate was beside her instantly, and a nameless
something in their manner told me they were trying to keep a secret. The
nest, built mainly of pine needles and other leaves, was in the middle
of the bush, a foot or two from the grass, and contained two bluish or
greenish eggs thickly spattered with dark brown. I meant to look into it
again (the owners seemed to have no great objection), but somehow missed
it every time I passed. From that point, as far as I went, the road was
lined with Cherokee roses,--not continuously, but with short
intermissions; and from the number of redbirds seen, almost invariably
in pairs, I feel safe in saying that the nest I had found was probably
one of fifteen or twenty scattered along the wayside. How gloriously the
birds sang! It was their day for singing. I was ready to christen the
road anew,--Redbird Road.
But the redbirds, many and conspicuous as they were, had no monopoly of
the road or of the day. House wrens were equally numerous and equally at
home, though they sang more out of sight. Red-eyed chewinks, still far
from their native berry pastures, hopped into a bush to cry, "Who's he?"
at the passing of a stranger, in whom, for aught I know, they may have
half recognized an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran across the
road a little in front of me, and in another place fifteen or twenty
red-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in a
treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw
flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,--like the traditional
militia company, all officers. _They_ did not gossip, of course (it is
the male that sports the red), but they made a lively noise.
As for the mocking-birds, they were at the front here, as they were
everywhere. During my fortnight in Tallahassee there were never many
consecutive five minutes of daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, I
could not hear at least one mocker. Oftener two or three were singing at
once in as many different directions. And, speaking of them, I must
speak also of their more northern cousin. From the day I entered Florida
I had been saying that the mocking-bird, save for his occasional mimicry
of other birds, sang so exactly like the thrasher that I did not believe
I could tell one from the other. Now, however, on this St. Augustine
road, I suddenly became aware of a bird singing somewhere in advance,
and as I listened again I said aloud, with full persuasion, "There!
that's a thrasher!" There was a something of difference: a shade of
coarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as we
say of human singers,--a _something_, at all events, and the longer I
hearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. And
so it was,--the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seen
many. Probably the two birds have peculiarities of voice and method
that, with longer familiarity on the listener's part, would render them
easily distinguishable. On general principles, I must believe that to be
true of all birds. But the experience just described is not to be taken
as proving that _I_ have any such familiarity. Within a week afterward,
while walking along the railway, I came upon a thrasher and a
mocking-bird singing side by side; the mocker upon a telegraph pole, and
the thrasher on the wire, halfway between the mocker and the next pole.
They sang and sang, while I stood between them in the cut below and
listened; and if my life had depended on my seeing how one song differed
from the other, I could not have done it. With my eyes shut, the birds
might have changed places,--if they could have done it quickly
enough,--and I should have been none the wiser.
As I have said, I followed the road over the nearly level plateau for
what I guessed to be about three miles. Then I found myself in a bit of
hollow that seemed made for a stopping-place, with a plantation road
running off to the right, and a hillside cornfield of many acres on the
left. In the field were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of one sat a
sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-bellied
woodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his hole
calling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what other
birds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, and
resumed his clatter. Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for
their rarity, and for the wonderful color--a shade deeper than is ever
seen at the North, I think--of the male's blue coat. In a small thicket
in the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a
ruby-crowned kinglet,--a tiny thing that within a month would be singing
in Canada, or beyond,--an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermit
thrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I found
scattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one of
them sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee in
Florida who--in some moods, at least--would have given more for a dozen
bars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of the
mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern
performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to
render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a _singer_, a voice to
reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman
school,"--so he called it,--hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had
called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he
said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own
feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of
what has grown dear to me through early and long-continued association.
The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher,
and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and the
wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the
mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have
heard music at all. The question is one of taste, it is true; but it is
not a question of familiarity or favoritism. All praise to the mocker
and the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge in
comparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with
tones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity which
the Fates--the wise Fates, who will have variety--have put forever
beyond his appreciation and his reach.
Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land
of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so.
Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars
through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on
this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the
climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw
none here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana
and white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses
(vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms to
all who would have them. The cross-vine (_Bignonia_), less freehanded,
hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes of
several kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelike
blueberry (_Vaccinium arboreum_), loaded with its large, flaring white
corollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found one
tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with
rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when
he talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these.
He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailing
arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth
violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine,
Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that
bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen
covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.
It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in
Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially
in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or
three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of
hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared
with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which
it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in
evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On
this pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--I
can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms,
and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably the
round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small
scattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I have
forgotten them.
Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a garden
of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the
valley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southern
highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed
by that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" which
too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a
public nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with
pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing
and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted
just outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after
climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural
hedges,--trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,--not dense
enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from
the Gulf," as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient
to afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to find
the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when,
for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad
to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland.
I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that
certain plants--the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no
others--were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With
the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed.
I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked
half so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle,
rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a
sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests in
them! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for my
botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.