[More than one early Texan was concerned with slave-running. Yoakum
[105] says that the three Bowies, Rezin, James, and John, made
sixty-five thousand dollars in this trade. Fannin also ran slaves,
operating from Cuba to Texas under the name of J. F. Walker. With him,
as with others, the Brazos was a port of entry. Writing from “Velasco,
Rio Brazos, Prov. Texas, Aug. 27, 1835,” he says: “My last voyage from
the island of Cuba (with 152) succeeded admirably.” [106] On May 26,
1837, it was reported from New Orleans to the British minister,
Pakenham, that “some slaves were brought from Cuba and landed in Texas
by the Am. Schooners Waterwich and Emperor. A some few Months ago a
Cargo was run at the Brazos River by a Vessel under the Texas Colors.”
[107] Until a few years ago the ruins of a house near Velasco were
pointed out as marking the habitation of a man whose business had been
the buying and distributing of smuggled slaves.
Charles D. Hudgins, a lawyer who grew up near the mouth of the Brazos,
says in his book of poems called The Maid of San Jacinto: “It is said
that shortly after Texas obtained her independence, a ship loaded with
slaves from Africa was chased into the Brazos by a United States man of
war; that she had a number of sick negroes on board; that the well
negroes were landed and hurried through the woods, while the sick ones
were weighed down with chains and thrown into the river.” [108]
However, Mr. Hudgins does not connect the “mysterious music” of the
Brazos with the slave ship, though such a connection is common in the
vicinity. He continues: “Three miles above the mouth of the Brazos
River is what is known as the haunted Labore. Twain causes conspire to
give rise to the superstition among the ignorant with regard to this
spot. The first is a grave near the bank of the stream; the second is a
peculiar humming noise, that can be heard there on still summer
nights—this noise is soft, like the notes of an Aeolian harp, and
superstition, coupling it with the grave, has woven many a tale of the
haunted Labore.”[108]—Editor.]
This legend is set down in the words of Mrs. A. F. Shannon of Velasco.
“This is the account I heard as a child of the music in the Brazos.
About 1836 or 1838 Texas passed a law forbidding the bringing of slaves
from Africa. But boats, slave runners they were called, used to come
from Africa to Cuba and wait there until they thought they could slip
across the Gulf. One of these ships with three hundred slaves nailed
down into the hold—they brought them over like freight—put into the
Brazos. But before it could reach the safety of the timber, it was
followed by—I don’t know exactly what it was, whether it was a revenue
cutter or what, but anyway a government boat. This boat gained on the
slave ship, and seeing that they were lost, the crew of the slave ship
scuttled it, and it went down with its three hundred negroes in the
hold, at Seaview Bend, about four miles from Quintana.
“When I was a child we could hear every evening at sunset the ringing
of a great bell. Very plain it was. The negroes called it ‘the death
bell.’ Mammy Kitty had stayed on with my grandmother after the Civil
War, and when I was a child was about eighty or ninety years old and
always sat in the ‘chimley corner.’ Every day when the bell tolled at
sunset I would run to Mammy Kitty and put my head in her lap. She would
run her hands over my head and croon until the bell stopped. The other
negroes whispered ‘the death bell,’ and stood still while it rang. They
thought the bell was ringing for the three hundred negroes in the
scuttled ship. And then whenever we passed over Seaview Bend we could
hear faint music like that of a guitar played at a distance. Since the
jetties have been built and there has been so much traffic on the
river, the music has gone away, and I have seen no one who has heard it
of late years. I know now that ‘the death bell’ must have been the
sunset bell of a big sugar plantation ten or twelve miles up the river.
The water carried the sound down. But I still hear the death bell
ringing in my ears and feel Mammy Kitty’s hand passing over my head.”