... Poor Yé!--you still live for me only too vividly outside of those
strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the
long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak
slopes above the clouds;--I have seen you climbing from plantation to
plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you
wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master,
though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;--I
have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles
to market, rather than labor in the fields;--I have seen you
ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find
a cabbage-palm,--and always hungry,--and always shiftless! And you
are still a great fool, poor Yé!--and you have still your swarm of
children,--your _rafale yche_,--and they are famished; for you have
taken into your _ajoupa_ a Devil who devours even more than you can
earn,--even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless
brain,--the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid
yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old
creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for
yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has
abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong
and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of
righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the
struggle for life. But you feel that law now;--you are a citizen of the
Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve
if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;--and this new
knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh!
[Illustration]