When he cries with pain his wailings take the form of a most unusual
rhythm, as if he were singing to express his woe. These blacks are
different from our own slaves. They have another form of patois and
they may also have a new kind of music."
The Sieur de Bienville's blue eyes went dark with disgust. "You are
all ears and tongue, Tony; you act as though you had no soul." And he
stalked away, resolving to add to his code, "Slaves shall be authorized
to give information against heartless masters."
Anthony's curiosity was not really unkind. It was a matter of business.
He was the one whom the French settlers expected to act as interpreter
for them in a land where every Indian tribe spoke a different language
and every set of blacks had another jargon. For that reason Anthony
was usually attended by some Indian boy whom he had picked up on one
of his many exploring voyages with the Sieur de Bienville. Any such
Indian acted as a tutor to Anthony in his own particular dialect and
as a servant to his master's whims. So it happened that Anthony was
now attended in the market-place by a red slip of a Chouacha. And when
the white-headed blackamoor could not be brought to consciousness at
once it was the Chouacha who bathed and dressed the wounds caused by a
metal-tipped whip and who carried the sighing, singing wretch to a cot
in Anthony's own cabin.
The Sieur de Bienville would have been still further provoked and
perplexed could he have seen how Anthony spent the whole day hanging
over his patient. When he found that his voice could not mimic the
delicate falsetto notes which came through the old darky's thick lips,
he got out his violin and caught many of the curious sobbing sounds.
In the intervals of nursing he practised on its strings the elusive
strains of this weird music.
Within the next few days the men from the West Indies were forced to
put up some of their slaves for sale, to pay the expenses of their
debauch. So Anthony again hastened to the market-place to see what was
going on.
Atop of the block in the noise and jostling of a rapidly moving
auction stood, one after another, several splendid blackamoors shining
like lacquered teakwood, grinning good-naturedly, and rolling white,
conceited eyes which told that each knew he was worth a bag of livres.
Oddly enough, they had none of the humility which marked the French
slaves. Something over-confident, reckless, defiant, was in the manner
of them all.
"Tell me, Tony, what _is_ the stir among these people?" demanded the
Sieur de Bienville. "I don't understand it and I don't like it. Is
there mischief coming?" He was giving serious attention to this sale of
blacks. He was lieutenant of the governor; much care fell upon him. He
was thinking: "I am going to replace this haphazard handling of live
men with a better system. It will be both humane and economical to
enforce a set of rules to protect a slave from violence and the master
from loss."
His thoughts began to take the form of that book of regulations which
were afterward completed by French statesmen, approved by the king,
made laws under the famous title of the Black Code, and finally
enforced throughout the valley of the Great River.
He never thought of such a thing as freeing all the blacks. Slavery of
negroes was a part of the social system of those days. No one dreamed
of questioning its right. The Sieur de Bienville was one of the first
men on the continent to demand justice or mercy for a blackamoor.
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne--for that was the Sieur de Bienville's name--was
a French-Canadian aristocrat, fair, beautiful, rich, and carefully
reared. In his noble impulse was the beginning of the development of
the captive race.
More than a hundred years after this time another youth, dark, plain,
poor, and self-educated, of that pioneer American race which followed
the French to the Mississippi, left his flatboat at the dock in New
Orleans and came to stand in this same market-place. Like the Sieur de
Bienville, he felt his heart contract with pity, his sense of justice
stir. He used the blunt speech of the modern midwest instead of the
elegant French of the early south, but he was of the same mind when he
said of that slavery which the auction-block revealed, "If I ever have
a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard!"
Like Bienville, too, he carried out his resolution. During the Civil
War when north and south were quarreling as to whether freedom or
slavery should prevail, this same American pioneer set his signature,
_Abraham Lincoln_, to an Emancipation Proclamation. Because of his
power as President of the United States and commander of the army and
navy he freed four million slaves.
But the Sieur de Bienville did not want any such great change. His
plans, as he watched the auction, were for minor reforms, and he kept
a wary eye on the restless slaves all about him. His stockades, his
soldiers, his armament for the protection of his settlers, were in
perfect order. Plots and mutiny among the blacks were not uncommon.
Anthony was waiting for a bid to be set upon the white-headed one whom
he had rescued and who was to be sold for debt. "Damaged goods," quoth
he, "will be sold at a bargain. Such are 'poor men's slaves.' I'll buy
my tuneful cripple."
When the little old man was hoisted to the block, he stared at the
crowd of slaves in a manner both cunning and defiant. They answered
as though he had spoken, by a curious stirring among themselves.
He drew them toward him as by a magnet; he was full of a sense of
power. Anthony and the Sieur de Bienville could make nothing of this
under-current among all the blacks.
After having bought him at half-price and having spent many more hours
jabbering with him, fiddling his one tune in gayer syncopated time and
trying to tame him, the Picard du Gay made up his mind that he had
spent his money for a cotton-crowned sinner who had some evil work in
hand and who would bear watching.
When, therefore, the black slipped like a shadow from their gallery at
dusk, Anthony beckoned the Chouacha and together they took his trail.
It was a gloomy evening, and so sly was he in looking back that they
had to follow at long distances.
On the crooked path he made they almost lost him. If it were not for
other black prowlers--very many of them--going to the same lonesome
group of moss-bearded live-oaks, even the Indian might have missed him
altogether.
The grove was surrounded by numerous sentinels. Alone Anthony could not
have stolen in. But no black man can outwit an Indian on his native
ground, so the Chouacha set his moccasined feet on dry twigs, crisp
palmetto, and grinding rocks without making a sound, and Anthony in
similar gear followed him, unheard and unseen, to a clump of bushes
overlooking the meeting-place.
There was a mystic, wavering, half-smothered fire in the center of the
group, which included, to Anthony's alarm, both the West-Indian blacks
and the New Orleans negroes. There was an appalling crowd of them. The
ancient one, Anthony's own, was the center of the horde and its chief
spirit.
Slaves were not allowed to carry weapons, not even heavy sticks, yet
this old man was passing around knives enough to arm them all. Anthony
clasped his hand to his belt. His own knife was gone! The slaves had
stolen from their masters! This display of knives augured ill for some
one. The whole concourse looked sinister, the old leader horribly so.
Anthony began to be worried. Unarmed slaves in mutiny were bad enough,
but if each carried an unsuspected knife he might do dreadful murders.
Together this band of plotters could destroy the colony.
The Chouacha was stolid, but even he could see that a massacre was on
foot. Anthony tried to tell himself that this meeting might be only
some savage fresh-meat feast or barbecue. While his better thoughts
said this, the cold sinking pit of his stomach told him otherwise.
The Picard du Gay had seen many red dances, but never a black one. His
numbed brain could not give in detail afterward the little he witnessed
of this. The old man led the singing of that same moaning, diabolical
song which Anthony had caught on his fiddle-strings. All the slaves
singing it marched round him, while he alone danced barefooted in and
out of the living fire, treading down the coals as though they were
leaves. He conjured with toads; he drooled incantations; his nose-ring
flopped; his amulets rattled.
The sultriness of the swamp oppressed the watchers. The air was heavy
and ominously still, as though a storm were coming. Anthony began to
have all sorts of ticklings; something might be crawling on his neck
or coiling round his ankles. He wanted to get away and run to tell the
French of possible danger. He could not stir; the dance had hypnotized
him.
Something glistening slid along a tree on the opposite side of the
firelit group. It thrust a serpent's head into the light. The old man
rested a hand upon it. As the thing shook the man shook; as the man
shook all the blacks shook. Their bodies quivered, their eyes rolled,
the very ground seemed to tremble. Anthony felt the contagion spreading
over him from top to toe.
Voodoo! The wizened old blackamoor was a wizard! Voodoo!
"I go," whispered the Chouacha, "to rouse the town!"
Was Anthony afraid? Certainly not! Did he believe he could be changed
by an evil charm into a beast? Of course he didn't! But he hated
snakes; and in his nervousness he did an unwise thing. He leveled his
pistol through an opening in the bushes, drew a delicate bead on that
wavering demon, and with one quick, splitting, banging shot he blew
away the serpent's head.
The voodoo doctor was almost stunned. A full moment of tense silence
followed this unexpected sorcery. Then the sky was crossed from side to
side with a great white bolt of fire. By its light all saw the distant
Chouacha running. Then came crash on crash of thunder in the sudden
darkness. On the ears of the frenzied voodoo dancers it beat like the
summons of a tom-tom. The voodoo himself answered with a shout.
Brandishing their knives, they followed him in a roaring mob as he
started after the Chouacha to hoodoo their masters and all the race of
whites.
The Sieur de Bienville, always suspicious of the colonists from the
West Indies, was armed, as usual, and ready to respond at once to the
Chouacha's alarm.
He had often given the soldiers orders not to shoot any valuable
negroes who might run amuck. They were to be clubbed into submission,
but not killed. Now he changed his command to: "Powder and ball! Shoot
to kill!" The Chouacha's warning was not a minute too soon.
What a struggle that was! The negroes had not believed the whites
would be ready. The whites had not imagined the negroes would be so
well armed. The clash was something of a surprise to both. There have
been many bloody uprisings among the New World blacks, many pathetic
and losing rebellions, but none fraught with such consequences as the
memorable one in New Orleans. Were white men to hold the Mississippi
port and its lands for their kind of civilization, or was New France to
become a negro republic as Santo Domingo and Haiti did? That was what
the quarrel meant. That was why it became a fight to the death on both
sides.
If after two centuries of development and training a President of
the United States could say of the American soldiers who helped the
island of Cuba win her freedom, "Our colored troops fought well at
San Juan," what might not be said of the desperate bravery with which
the West-Indian fanatics fought that long-ago battle in the streets
of New Orleans when the voodoo doctor led them to make a strike for
themselves? Here also the blacks fought well--too well for the safety
of their cruel masters.
The howling of the storm, darkness broken by the awful lightning,
accompanied the mob as it attacked and the French citizens as they
defended themselves.
At the same time, during that strange and terrible hour there came
laboring out of the Gulf, as vanguard of the wind, an old ship seeking
a place of shelter. She was rickety and rotten, ancient and condemned,
fit for no decent use. And so she had been taken to hold a cargo of the
veriest misery on earth, a tribe of stolen blacks.
Some sorely hurt by the pitching ship, some dying, some already dead,
all without hope during the long, hard voyage, the ill-fated ship bore
them through the Great River's mouth and to the port at New Orleans
where raged this battle of the races.
A flash showed her coming on like some huge swollen image in a dream,
magnified by clouds and lightning. The plotters and the planters alike
paused in mid-action to blink at what they could not believe they
really saw. By the next flash the hurricane had struck the town--a
chaos of wind and rain, falling houses, rending trees.
No fighting could go on.
Another flash, and a great waterspout, child of the hurricane, could be
seen whirling up the river; another, and the waterspout had struck the
ship, beat her down, crushed her!
Anthony's ears never forgot the shrieks of the drowning wretches flung
from the ship into the water, nor the roar of the storm as, breaking
through the forest in front of her, it tore its way across country.
After a few dreadful moments a bright moon seemed to jump into the sky.
All was clear and quiet again. The tropical storm had come and gone in
the space of a few minutes. Both whites and blacks, turned from their
purpose by the appalling accident, rushed to the salvage of the human
wreckage. Many from the ship were hauled ashore; some were washed away.
All were in distress. The square of the slave-mart was turned for the
second time within the week into an outdoor hospital.
When the excited blacks had rushed from their attack to the rescue of
the slaves caught in the rigging of the broken ship, the voodoo tried
in vain to rally them to fighting-pitch. They were bent on getting out
the drowning men, their brothers.
Then he secretly called aside his most devoted band of zealots.
Pointing out the Chouacha and reminding them that the Indian had been
the one they saw running through the lightning flash to set the town to
arms, he swore them to eternal vengeance against all Indians and sent
them scurrying back through the forest to the Chouachas' village.
Here the voodoo doctor's afrites caught the peaceful natives by
surprise, butchered many of them, set their town on fire, and,
returning in violent haste to New Orleans, tried for the second time
to draw the negroes into battle. But it was too late. Some were in
manacles, some in jail, and some meekly caring for the victims of the
slave ship.
This attack on the Indian village made all Indians the enemies of the
negroes for many generations; and since this hatred forbade the two
races from uniting against the French, the voodoo's worst deed was
the one which best protected the town from the possibility of other
mutinies, for, whatever the negroes planned in revolt, the revengeful
Indians defeated it. Anything the Indians proposed to do unlawfully the
blacks told to the authorities for spite.
The voodoo's power was at an end.
He guessed that his intimates would be hanged (they promptly were) and
that he himself would be subjected to some of the dreadful torturing
punishments of that age. He preferred a dramatic taking-off. So in the
cold gray dawn in the sight of the still waking populace, red, black,
white, he ran out upon the rail of the slowly settling ship, sang his
wailing conjurer's song, and, plunging Anthony's knife to its hilt in
his heart, fell headlong into the Great River. Before the eyes of the
whole town his body spun round and round as it sank.
Even to-day, when the dawn is cold after a storm in the full of the
moon, there are times when some watchers think they see the ghost of
the voodoo whirling in the eddy at that same place, a wicked ghost
that has been hoodooed and can never get away from the scene of his
crime nor rest in peace because the bad he tried to do to the three
races of the Mississippi was turned by the fate of the slave ship into
lasting good for them all.
X
PRETTY PRINCESS
Maids of the Natchez Send Tomahawks to Surprise Fort Rosalie--Fashions
in Scalps
SAILORS clinging to the rigging with toes and fingers sang an echoing
chantey as one by one they furled the canvas wings of the frigate
coming through Lake Pontchartrain to anchor before New Orleans.
The frigate, a splendid ship of fifty guns, had belonged to one of
the Le Moyne brothers, de Iberville; another, de Châteauguay, was her
captain; and a third, de Bienville, was the governor of these colonies
she had come from France to supply. There was a large family of the
patriotic Canadian Le Moynes in active service throughout the New
World. Like all the lesser French nobles, each was called by the title
of the estate he owned instead of his parent's name.
News that the ship had been sighted spread so quickly that by the time
she had arrived not only the people of the town, but all the blacks
from the outlying plantations and many red natives of forest camps,
were on the dock to meet her.
The Sieur de Bienville kept a thousand details in his mind. "Run,
Tony," he commanded the Picard du Gay, "and offer your services as
interpreter to the Natchez chief of the White-Apple region. Be sure
that some of the uniformed officers do him homage; see that the
daughter and her attendant maids receive a present. Watch you, too, and
give the blacks the signal to bob and duck at the proper places."
At the same moment the White-Apple chief was saying to the
Apple-Blossom at his side: "Allow our white brothers to make friends.
Much is to be gained from a boat like this."
The coming of an overseas ship is a time of tense feeling in any
port at any age of the world. Fortunes stay or go, hearts rejoice or
break, with the destiny of an argosy. The New Orleans people and the
immigrants alike laughed and cried with the pleasure and excitement
of meeting. Whether they were kinsfolk or strangers, they chattered
together.
Many of these new settlers were farmers and artisans. They brought
implements for tilling the land and special tools for mechanical
trades. The Mississippi French had learned that if their towns were to
grow, somebody had to go to work.
A whole regiment of troops had come to supply the garrisons. Quantities
of munitions and stores to maintain them were in the hold. Several
priests and nuns were among the passengers. All were welcomed by cheer
after cheer.
On deck and on shore interest centered in an item of the cargo, a
bevy of girls, shipped from the mother country by the king as a gift
to the colony. Chaperoned by nuns, they came to the dock half-shyly,
half-boldly.
Anthony Auguelle, stationed with the Indians, was embarrassed. He
twisted his best cap round and round and dangled its plume. Four girls
were looking at him and he didn't know what to do. The every-day smile
which he used for officers, priests, red men, and negroes with such
good effect faded away. He was grave and awkward. The girls passed him
with indifferent tosses of their dainty heads.
His Majesty had sent them to persuade the too lively young bachelors
of the colony to settle down in sedate home life. They were penniless
orphans of Paris. Nothing could be lost by venturing into another
country; fortune and happiness might be gained thereby. Romance and
adventure called to them as it had to their brothers, and they had
answered blithely.
With no dowry except the tiny hand-trunks of personal needs with which
the crown had furnished them, they would have gone unclaimed in the
matrimonial markets of the capital. On the brink of the Great River
their ruffles and ribbons, coquettish headgear of lace, small, neat
shoes, their whole feminine charm, sent the pulses of backwoodsmen to
fluttering. Straightway each maid had her choice of a dozen suitors.
French overlords, even on the remotest borders, kept up the dignity
of the Empire by holding court in as formal an imitation of the royal
audience at Versailles as they could.
The hall at New Orleans, built of bark-covered logs, was large and
high. A mammoth fireplace at one end and a canopied dais with a
throne-like chair gave it an air of state. In its impressive atmosphere
the Sieur de Bienville received all the colonists as graciously as any
king could have done.
Immigrants from the poverty-stricken lower middle class of workaday
France were enchanted with the semi-tropical luxuriance of this new
land of parti-colored races. The elegance of the reception-chamber
appealed to their love of change. Where else in the wide world could
common people be associated so cordially with uniformed soldiers and
their gorgeous officers, be waited upon by fantastic blackamoors, be
introduced to a dusky princess more beautiful than any one they had
ever seen? She spoke to them in the French phrases Anthony had taught
her. Her maids danced with the officers the steps that his fiddle had
measured for them in his visits to the White-Apple plantation.
The governor patronized all the marriage ceremonies which the priests
performed for the king's maids. He presided over the fête which
followed.
The first days of the new colonists were happy ones. A fraternal policy
demanded that they be made to feel at ease and that the intelligent,
semi-barbarous Natchez be assured of the new-comers' kindness.
Anthony sulked. "I did not want one of the maids," he explained,
pettishly, "but I hate to be sniffed at."
"Neither was I chosen," replied the tactful Sieur de Bienville. "Let us
console each other by thinking how the hands of women will improve our
town of clumsy men. Then will be scrubbing and good cooking and clean
curtains and flower-gardens--"
Anthony interrupted: "And no dogs and no cock-fights and no fun of any
sort! I am going back to the wilderness!"
The Sieur de Bienville's laughing face went grave. "You are needed in
the Natchez forest, Tony. So much is at stake that I shall go with you.
The friendliness which you have begun with the restless White-Apple
must continue until we are sure of the tribe's allegiance. We will go
with the returning Indians to their village. It does not matter if
we French quarrel among ourselves; we can forget and make up again.
But when our traders offend the Indians, as has lately been done, the
natives remember and resent it, planning secret revenge."
"The Natchez welcome a dog as they do his master; game-chickens
abound," cried Anthony. "Let us go!" and away they both paddled with
the chief.
It seemed more like play than politics to be rowing up-stream in the
Natchez delegation through country where so many notable events were
to happen. They specially observed a bluff something over a hundred
miles above New Orleans where great red cypresses stood. Each was like
a painted post, or a _bâton rouge_, as they pronounced it. They planned
to build a fortress there, little dreaming that a capital city by the
name they gave would one day flourish on the spot. From Baton Rouge
for many miles north the banks they passed were within the century
to become the refuge of the three thousand French Acadians driven
out of Nova Scotia into such pathetic exile that the story of their
"Evangeline," as told by the poet Longfellow, will never be forgotten
as long as this bit of "Acadian coast" retains its name.
While Anthony played his fiddle to cement the peace between the
White-Apple people and the French, the Sieur de Bienville as a military
precaution put into perfect working order a tiny near-by outpost of
three stockaded log cabins which he had built some years before. His
brother Iberville had chosen the site. It was the first permanent
settlement on the Mississippi and was called Fort Rosalie. On its
foundation was afterward laid the American city of Natchez.
Since the Great River came out of the void and wet the feet of the
first dinosaur there has never been a dull minute upon it. Anthony's
gray eyes were always hunting for unusual sights.
"What is that?" he whispered to the Sieur de Bienville on the homeward
way as some heavy creature like a huge water-rat stirred among the
roots of a tree hidden under the bank.
"Paddle nearer, Tony. Faster! It may be a wounded man."