A Hurricane Brings Odd Guests to His Colony for the Governor, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville—Voodoo in Rag-time
SHOUTING of white men, screaming of black ones, startled Anthony as he came down the main street of the port town called New Orleans in honor of the regent duke of France.
"That must be a brawl in the slave-mart," was his first thought as he began to run. He wanted to be at hand if the Sieur de Bienville needed him to help quell it.
Several bad colonists, with worse slaves, had joined the Mississippi French by crossing over from the West Indies in small boats at amazing risk. They navigated from point to point in fair weather through the Gulf of Mexico. The heavy seas were avoided when possible. The waterways in the protected channels between the coast-line islands had made the voyage possible. Vessels now entered the Mississippi by way of the east through Lake Pontchartrain, a much safer path than through the Delta.
They had brought with them blackamoors and several kegs of rum.
New Orleans had not been glad to see them. But the Sieur de Bienville had given each slave-owner a parcel of land on which to build shelters and lay out gardens. He hoped to keep the masters busy and the negroes so separated that they would work quietly. He tried to make both classes add to the usefulness of the port. The very good plan did not prove a success. In less than a week here were the new-comers back in the heart of the town, turning the orderly market-place into a scene of riot. Drunken owners were beating drunken servants.
The scandalized settlers had already called out their French soldiers against the renegades from the West Indies. The uniformed ranks passed Anthony at double-quick as he hurried along. By the time he had gained the open square where the auction-block stood the unpopular white immigrants, doubly guarded, were on their way to the only prison the settlement could boast.
The slaves still lay about in disgraceful sodden heaps. The Sieur de Bienville, self-possessed and active, was already giving commands to have them carried to the different plantations where they belonged. By the marks on their ears they were sorted out like cattle at a fair.
Young de Bienville, passionately ashamed atsuch a scene and full of pity for the ill-treated blacks, was going among them and examining their injuries.
"To make these poor creatures suffer so lessens their usefulness for days. Ten thousand livres' worth of damage has been done to valuable human chattels in the last half-hour," he cried, indignantly. "When I shall have power to dictate a black code, and strength to enforce it, no slave shall be abused nor given rum to drink."
He looked to Anthony for sympathy. He did not get it, for that witness of the reformer's vow was leaning over a prostrate bleeding slave. Anthony's face was not sorrowful, but full of the liveliest interest. This slave was old and wizened and, what was a rare thing to see, his wool was as white as a dandelion puff. Anthony gazed at him as though he had found a gem.
"What now?" demanded the Sieur de Bienville, shocked at Anthony's callous pose.
"Listen!" whispered Anthony, "listen! He groans in a high minor key. 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, whatisthe 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 deBienville 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-smotheredfire 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 Anthonyhad 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 charminto 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 wayacross 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 sameplace, 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.