The Quadroon: Adventures in the Far West. Reid Mayne
river, do I behold wealth widely diffused, intelligence broadcast, and comfort for all. Here, in almost every house, do I meet the refined taste of high civilisation – the hospitality of generous hearts combined with the power to dispense it. Here can I converse with men by thousands, whose souls are free – not politically alone, but free from vulgar error and fanatic superstition; here, in short, have I witnessed, not the perfectedness – for that belongs to a far future time – but the most advanced stage of civilisation yet reached upon the globe.
A dark shadow crosses my eye-glance, and my heart is stung with sudden pain. It is the shadow of a human being with a black skin. He is a slave!
For a moment or two the scene looks black! What is there to admire here – in these fields of golden sugar-cane, of waving maize, of snow-white cotton? What to admire in those grand mansions, with their orangeries, their flowery gardens, their drooping shade-trees, and their soft arbours? All this is but the sweat of the slave!
For a while I behold without admiring. The scene has lost its couleur de rose; and a gloomy wilderness is before me! I reflect. Slowly and gradually the cloud passes away, and the brightness returns. I reflect and compare.
True, he with the black skin is a slave – but not a voluntary slave. That is a difference in his favour at least.
In other lands – mine own among them – I see around me slaves as well, and far more numerous. Not the slaves of an individual, but of an association of individuals – a class – an oligarchy. Not slaves of the corvée – serfs of the feud – but victims of its modern representative the tax, which is simply its commutation, and equally baneful in its effects.
On my soul, I hold that the slavery of the Louisiana black is less degrading than that of the white pleb of England. The poor, woolly-headed helot is the victim of conquest, and may claim to place himself in the honourable category of a prisoner of war. He has not willed his own bondage; while you, my grocer, and butcher, and baker – ay, and you, my fine city merchant, who fondly fancy yourself a freeman – ye are voluntary in your serfdom; ye are loyal to a political juggle that annually robs ye of half your year’s industry; that annually requires some hundred thousands of your class to be sloughed off into exile, lest your whole body should gangrene and die. And all this without even a protest. Nay, worse – you are ever ready to cry “crucify” to him who would attempt to counteract this condition – ever ready to glorify the man and the motion that would fix another rivet in your fetters!
Even while I write, the man who loves you least; he who for forty years – for all his life, in fact – has been your systematic enemy, is the most popular of your rulers! Even while I write the Roman wheel is revolving before your eyes, squibs and crackers sound sweetly in your ears, and you are screaming forth your rejoicings over the acts of a convention that had for its sole object the strengthening of your chains! But a short twelve months ago, you were just as enthusiastic for a war that was equally antagonistic to your interests, equally hostile to the liberties of your kind! Miserable delusion!
I repeat what I have uttered with a feeling of solemnity. On my soul, I hold that the slavery of the Louisiana black is less degrading than that of the white pleb of England.
True, this black man is a slave, and there are three millions of his race in the same condition. Painful thought! but less painful when accompanied by the reflection that the same broad land is trodden by twenty millions of free and sovereign men. Three millions of slaves to twenty millions of masters! In mine own land the proportion is exactly reversed!
The truth may be obscure. For all that, I dare say there are some who will understand it.
Ah! how pleasant to turn from these heart-stirring but painful thoughts to the calmer contemplation of themes furnished by science and nature. How sweet was it to study the many novel forms that presented themselves to my eyes on the shores of that magnificent stream! There is a pleasaunce even in the retrospect; and as I now sit dreaming over them far away – perhaps never more to behold them with mortal eye – I am consoled by a fond and faithful memory, whose magic power enables me to recall them before the eye of my mind in all their vivid colouring of green and gold!
Chapter Eight
The “Coast” of the Mississippi
As soon as we had fairly started, I ascended to the “hurricane-deck,” in order to obtain a better view of the scenery through which we were passing. In this place I was alone; for the silent pilot, boxed up in his little tower of glass, could hardly be called a companion.
I make the following observations:
The breadth of the Mississippi river has been much exaggerated. It is here about half a mile wide. Sometimes more, occasionally less. (This average width it preserves for more than a thousand miles from its mouth.) Its waters run at the rate of three or four miles to the hour, and are of a yellowish cast, with a slight tincture of “red.” The yellow colour it derives from the Missouri, while the deeper tint is obtained by the influx of the “Red.”
Driftwood floats thickly upon its surface; here in single logs, there in raft-like clusters. To run a boat against one of these is attended with danger, and the pilot avoids them. Sometimes one swimming below the surface escapes his eye; and then a heavy bumping against the bows shakes the boat, and startles the equanimity of the less experienced passengers. The “snag” is most dreaded. That is a dead tree with heavy roots still adhering. These, from their weight, have settled upon the bottom, and the débris gathering around holds them firmly imbedded. The lighter top, riven of its branches, rises towards the surface; but the pressure of the current prevents it from attaining to the perpendicular, and it is held in a slanting position. When its top rises above the water, the danger is but trifling – unless in a very dark night – it is when the top is hidden a foot or two below the surface that the snag is feared. Then a boat running upon it up-stream, is lost to a certainty. The roots firmly imbedded in the bottom mud, prevent the pile from yielding; and the top, usually a spiky one, penetrates the bow timbers of the boat, sinking her almost instantly. A boat properly “snagged” will go down in a few minutes.
The “sawyer” is a log fixed in the water similarly to the snag, but kept bobbing up and down by the current, thus suggesting the idea of a sawyer engaged at his work – hence the name. A boat getting aground upon a sunken log crosswise, is sometimes snagged upon its branches, and sometimes broken into two pieces by the pressure of her own weight.
Among the drift, I notice odd matters that interest me. Stalks of sugar-cane that have been crushed in the press-mill (a hundred miles farther up I should not meet these), leaves and stems of the maize plant, corn-cobs, pieces of broken gourd-shell, tufts of raw cotton, split fence-rails, now and then the carcase of some animal, with a buzzard or black vulture (Cathartes aura and atratus) perched upon it, or hovering above.
I am within the geographical range of the alligator but here the great Saurian is seldom seen. He prefers the more sluggish bayous, or the streams whose shores are still wild. In the rapid current of the Mississippi, and along its well-cultivated banks, he is but rarely observed by the passing traveller.
Alternately the boat approaches both shores of the river (“coasts” they are called). The land is an alluvion of no very ancient formation. It is a mere strip of terra firma, varying in breadth from a few hundred yards to several miles, and gradually declining from the banks, so that the river is actually running along the top of a ridge! Beyond this strip commences the “Swamp,” a tract that is annually inundated, and consists of a series of lagoons and marshes covered with coarse grass and reeds. This extends in some places for a score of miles, or even farther – a complete wilderness of morass. Some portions of this – where the inundation is only annual – are covered with dark and almost impenetrable forests. Between the cultivated strip on the immediate bank of the river, and the “Swamp” in the rear, runs a belt of this forest, which forms a kind of background to the picture, answering to the mountain-ranges in other lands. It is a high, dark forest, principally composed of cypress-trees (Cupressus disticka). But there are other kinds peculiar to this soil, such as the sweet-gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), the live-oak (Quercus vivens), the tupelo (Nyssa aquatica), the water-locust (Gleditschia