manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long
forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute
through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in
weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment,
had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting
it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually,
in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the
unmasking was involuntary and fateful.
One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an incomplete experiment in
chemistry where nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable stench
was evolved. Perhaps, with acute necessity, a successful clear result
would reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't happen in my
knowledge; I hadn't a thing in the world to do with it. What occurred to
me then was the useful fact that the present scene afforded the right,
the only, ending for my story, The Bright Shawl. It would have to be
tragic, but only indirectly; nothing, I had decided, should happen to my
principal character beyond a young moment of supreme romance. No, the
mishap, death, must envelop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd be
killed by a Spanish officer, through a woman--a woman in the bright
shawl of the dancer that had been preserved as a memento of tender
regard.
Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prostitute. Well--I had seen
her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval
flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender
neck: a figure, in my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had seen
her seated in a gay company. That finished the story, for the youthful
American, after a vain public effort to secure for himself the dignity
of a heroic end, would be ignominiously deported from Cuba. I had been
often asked how I arrived at my plots, but more often accused of never
reaching an intelligible plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of
giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself; but here was one
accounted for to a considerable degree. It had begun by an instinctive
attachment to a city, to Havana; and the emotions brought into being had
crystallized into a plan, for me, unusually concise.
There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a
version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of
letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way--Youth--but I
felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation
of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of
veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a single
intelligence discussing, explaining, himself was too marked. The great
trouble with the romantic novels up to the very present had been that
there was never a doubt of the ultimate happiness of all who should be
happy and the overwhelming misery of those who should be miserable. No
peril was the father of a thrill, because from its inception it was
plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the brave. The pleasure had from
witnessing a dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom
approached an art. But we'd improved that, an improvement expressed in
the utter loss of the word hero; no man, or woman, was now entirely safe
in the hands of his romantic author; the two manners had come creditably
together.
I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor,
and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I
gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the
upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of
powder, of explosive rice powder. There was no cutting in at that ball.
She was more than charming, too, with her mixed blood evident in her
carriage, her indolence, rather than in feature. She wore blue, a wisely
simple dress that showed small feet, like butterflies in their
lightness, and the instinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on her
throat.
An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone
could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I
told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate
clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her
mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length
through my mind--a different catastrophe, since she was denied the
reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In
Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor
cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba,
tormented by the strains of the danzon:
There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be
extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of
Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the Nanigos: in the
black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.
* * * * *
It was significant that the first organization of naniguismo in Cuba was
purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalies, for the white
race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This
society--tierra or juego--was formed during the administration of
General Tacon, in the village of Regla, and called Apapa Efi. It was,
against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too
many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the
mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of
their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efo
Macarara. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of
entering the fambas, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined
opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas
Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early
bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of
the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an
indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efo, was terminated by the
authorities, Spanish nobles and professional men were assisting in the
rites.
What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took
on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa
Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely
parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum.
And what, equally, in the Carabalie Bricamo was Dibo, God, became in
Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious
aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the
clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much
heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.
There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of
civilization, the nanigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they
should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts,
which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror.
Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning;
the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond
imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name
arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground--all
combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It
held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a
portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of
orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.
Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive
bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending
baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying
fish--the fish was a sacred Christian sign--in her jar of water. In
recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use,
and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his
praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efo in the Oldan, who in
turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded--with its
instrument--in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and
characters of modern naniguismo gathered. There were, necessarily,
changes in the Cuban form of worship--the skin of a goat was substituted
for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original
drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another
anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the
sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the
profession that God, Dibo, must be over everything, and a sacramental
singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisi llamba, and the
reply Ho Isueribo engomo ... Mocongo! while the Empego, the clerk of
the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping
handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms
of the initiates.
A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism--Come with me;
where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongo
is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to
choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial
of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made
from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led
by the Insue, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito
skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers,
was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a
cemetery.
The effort to end naniguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and
seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply
traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where nanigos
were confined and the cellars of Jesus Maria. Long before that the poet
Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the
Ground was judicially executed; and following the assassinations during
the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations
were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efo Primero, with
officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the
Abacua Efo was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in
apprehensions; and twenty-five nanigos were taken on Vista Hermosa
Street.
It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to
its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common
genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that
gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its
amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalie
Bricamo and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally
incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But
taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion,
of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common
terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the
ritual, in their order, were Insue, Illamba, Mocongo, Empego. In
naniguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansguere, a knife icua
rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embiguei, the night erufie, war
ochangana, the sun fanson, and worms cocorico. The language took short
rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido
amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique
Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga
quimagua sanga nampe, nampe sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of
the dead and flies to the sea.
The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and
held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as
black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death
to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named
Cuanon-Araferrobre, and the act of sacrifice the Acua Meropo. The
singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Baston
Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and
Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God is great; with, at the last,
silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongo.
The nanigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on
King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with
native costumes and instruments--atables and marugas and ecous, a
flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambas were destroyed and
hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the
persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that
veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalie, resting below my box
through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater
than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly
from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?
* * * * *
A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was
evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more
than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled
with the resonant bos and bongos of naniguismo. Havana, for a moment,
seemed like a cemetery--its own marble cemetery of Colon--where a black
spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I
speculated about that same spirit in another connection--in its
influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected
dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its
own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and
perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to
Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was
doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.
Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole
sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a
darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed
of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously,
charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro
contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of
all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly
approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and
its shadowed measures.
The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the
negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate
consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in
intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with
passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it
belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it--it was their
voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't
artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for
lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural
beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships
that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated
West a fresh earthen tonic chord.
The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed
setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth,
at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and
shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment
that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the
novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its
trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed
the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had,
in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short
impressions--stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was
that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the
familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy,
resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute
hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the
penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a
novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth
writing.
Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge,
in Havana and through the nanigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I
was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be
laid--not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by
tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes.
A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba,
pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And
what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of
course, would touch it--it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from
under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned.
A magnificent project:
A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep
ruined field--but perhaps this was South Carolina--infinitesimal ragged
patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and
half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country
with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in
hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive
ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the
heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't
desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and
man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't
concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the
Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire
justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was
perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal
city--the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana
from its farthest view to its most intimate facade, and I was grateful
to whatever had made it.
In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only
paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a
choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman
Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and
incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were,
in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for
one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism,
sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the
reason--the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud
pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what
I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running
through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was
common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the
streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped
their work, their responsibilities, to join the passing chorus of hope.
That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by
self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear
approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or
a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper,
would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty--disease and winter
and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation
through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant
release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no
transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they
constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the
humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a
universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity
from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that
vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalie Bricamo
that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairan abasi otete
alleri pongo--We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly
at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of
what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as
an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my
pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out
or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts
grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the
remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the
desire to be a part of that for which he cried.
* * * * *
Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught
with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to
board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden
partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines,
returning home from Camagueey, were indulging in a characteristic
humor--the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among
themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder,
disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged
threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the
others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure
was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way
into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of
dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the
whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others'
discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off,
I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of
the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity
that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I
had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in
Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes,
asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a
result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited space;
and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute
aversion for every individual and thing about me.
The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged
homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I
couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting
people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of
their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in
their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the
dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to
the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed
politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by
themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and
superstition and jealousy.
The Cubenos, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the
bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown
for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for
labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by
hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men
had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything
else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the
qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both
as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people
worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service
of which they performed the most heroic toil.