第64章

A MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE.

This group of dusky children of the captivity is copied out of a little sketch-book which I carried in many a roundabout journey, and will point a moral as well as any other sketch in the volume.

Yonder drawing was made in a country where there was such hospitality, friendship, kindness shown to the humble designer, that his eyes do not care to look out for faults, or his pen to note them.How they sang; how they laughed and grinned; how they scraped, bowed, and complimented you and each other, those negroes of the cities of the Southern parts of the then United States! My business kept me in the towns; I was but in one negro-plantation village, and there were only women and little children, the men being out a-field.But there was plenty of cheerfulness in the huts, under the great trees--I speak of what I saw--and amidst the dusky bondsmen of the cities.I witnessed a curious gayety; heard amongst the black folk endless singing, shouting, and laughter; and saw on holidays black gentlemen and ladies arrayed in such splendor and comfort as freeborn workmen in our towns seldom exhibit.What a grin and bow that dark gentleman performed, who was the porter at the colonel's, when he said, "You write your name, mas'r, else Iwill forgot." I am not going into the slavery question, I am not an advocate for "the institution," as I know, madam, by that angry toss of your head, you are about to declare me to be.For domestic purposes, my dear lady, it seemed to me about the dearest institution that can be devised.In a house in a Southern city you will find fifteen negroes doing the work which John, the cook, the housemaid, and the help, do perfectly in your own comfortable London house.And these fifteen negroes are the pick of a family of some eighty or ninety.Twenty are too sick, or too old for work, let us say: twenty too clumsy: twenty are too young, and have to be nursed and watched by ten more.And master has to maintain the immense crew to do the work of half a dozen willing hands.No, no; let Mitchell, the exile from poor dear enslaved Ireland, wish for a gang of "fat niggers;" I would as soon you should make me a present of a score of Bengal elephants, when I need but a single stout horse to pull my brougham.

This refers to an illustrated edition of the work.

This was an account given by a gentleman at Richmond of his establishment.Six European servants would have kept his house and stables well."His farm," he said, "barely sufficed to maintain the negroes residing on it."How hospitable they were, those Southern men! In the North itself the welcome was not kinder, as I, who have eaten Northern and Southern salt, can testify.As for New Orleans, in spring-time,--just when the orchards were flushing over with peach-blossoms, and the sweet herbs came to flavor the juleps--it seemed to me the city of the world where you can eat and drink the most and suffer the least.At Bordeaux itself, claret is not better to drink than at New Orleans.It was all good--believe an expert Robert--from the half-dollar Medoc of the public hotel table, to the private gentleman's choicest wine.Claret is, somehow, good in that gifted place at dinner, at supper, and at breakfast in the morning.It is good: it is superabundant--and there is nothing to pay.Find me speaking ill of such a country! When I do, pone me pigris campis:

smother me in a desert, or let Mississippi or Garonne drown me! At that comfortable tavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse than which a better was never eaten at Marseilles: and not the least headache in the morning, I give you my word; on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet refreshing thirst for claret and water.They say there is fever there in the autumn: but not in the spring-time, when the peach-blossoms blush over the orchards, and the sweet herbs come to flavor the juleps.

I was bound from New Orleans to Saint Louis; and our walk was constantly on the Levee, whence we could see a hundred of those huge white Mississippi steamers at their moorings in the river: "Look,"said my friend Lochlomond to me, as we stood one day on the quay--"look at that post! Look at that coffee-house behind it! Sir, last year a steamer blew up in the river yonder, just where you see those men pulling off in the boat.By that post where you are standing a mule was cut in two by a fragment of the burst machinery, and a bit of the chimney-stove in that first-floor window of the coffee-house, killed a negro who was cleaning knives in the top-room!" I looked at the post, at the coffee-house window, at the steamer in which Iwas going to embark, at my friend, with a pleasing interest not divested of melancholy.Yesterday, it was the mule, thinks I, who was cut in two: it may be cras mihi.Why, in the same little sketch-book, there is a drawing of an Alabama river steamer which blew up on the very next voyage after that in which your humble servant was on board! Had I but waited another week, I might have....These incidents give a queer zest to the voyage down the life-stream in America.When our huge, tall, white, pasteboard castle of a steamer began to work up stream, every limb in her creaked, and groaned, and quivered, so that you might fancy she would burst right off.Would she hold together, or would she split into ten million of shivers? O my home and children! Would your humble servant's body be cut in two across yonder chain on the Levee, or be precipitated into yonder first-floor, so as to damage the chest of a black man cleaning boots at the window? The black man is safe for me, thank goodness.But you see the little accident might have happened.It has happened; and if to a mule, why not to a more docile animal? On our journey up the Mississippi, I give you my honor we were on fire three times, and burned our cook-room down.

The deck at night was a great firework--the chimney spouted myriads of stars, which fell blackening on our garments, sparkling on to the deck, or gleaming into the mighty stream through which we labored--the mighty yellow stream with all its snags.