Almost every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas ortim-tim, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life here,—whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the stories,—which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard.
I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write them;—others were written for me by creole friends, with better success. To obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast as they are related: they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation. The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation method;—the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,—at least in the same way; while frequent questioning may irritate the most good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining many curiosities of oral literature,—representing a group of stories which, whatever their primal origin, have been so changed by local thought and coloring as to form a distinctively Martinique folk-tale circle. Among them are several especially popular with the children of my neighborhood; and I notice that almost every narrator embellishes the original plot with details of his own, which he varies at pleasure.
I submit a free rendering of one of these tales,—the history of Yé and the Devil. The whole story of Yé would form a large book,—so numerous the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most characteristic of all. Yé is the most curious figure in Martinique folk-lore. Yé is the typical Bitaco,—or mountain negro of the lazy kind,—the country black whom city blacks love to poke fun at. As for the Devil of Martinique folk-lore, he resembles thetravailleurat a distance; but when you get dangerously near him, you find that he has red eyes and red hair, and two little horns under hischapeau-Bacouè, and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat.Y ka sam yon gouôs, gouôs macaque....
Ça qui pa té eonnaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;—he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.
Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;—he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number[54]of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.
Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat. And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,—at no great distance. He went to see what it was,—hiding himself behind the big trees as he got nearer to it.
All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great fire burning there,—and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very old;—he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found out that the old Devil was quite blind.
—The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full offeroce,—that is to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos (épi en pile piment),—just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look puzzled;—he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more courage;—he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;—he ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,—and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was so frightened he could not even cry out,Aïe-yaïe. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible voice:—"Atò, saff!—ou c'est ta moin!" (I've got you now, you glutton;—you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:—-"Carry me to your cabin,—and walk fast!"
... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread or vegetables or perhaps arégimeof bananas,—for it was getting dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to eat!—papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two hands for horror.
When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to Yé:—"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at him.
But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure something for the children to eat,—just some bread-fruit and yams,—the old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:—
—"Manman mò!—papa mò!—touttt yche mò!" (Mamma dead!—papa dead!—all the children dead!)
And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they were dead—raidi-cadave!. Then the Devil ate up everything there was on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt, and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:—
—"Toutt moune lévé!" (Everybody get up!)
Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full of dirt, and said to them:—[55]
—"Gobe-moin ça!"
And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them.
After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time.
Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great morne."
So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.[56]
Then he knocked at the sky as loud as he could till the Good-God put his head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:—
—"Eh bien!—ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?"
When Yé had recounted his troubles, the Good-God said:—
—"Pauv ma pauv!I knew it all before you came, Yé. I can tell you what to do; but I am afraid it will be no use—you will never be able to do it! Your gluttony is going to be the ruin of you, poor Yé! Still, you can try. Now listen well to what I am going to tell you. First of all, you must not eat anything before you get home. Then when your wife has the children's dinner ready, and you see the Devil getting up, you must cry out:—'Tam ni pou tam ni bé!' Then the Devil will drop down dead. Don't forget not to eat anything—ou tanne?"...
Yé promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;—then he said good-bye to the Bon-Dié (bien conm y faut), and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-God had told him: "Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"—"tam ni pou tam ni bé!"—over and over again.
—But before reaching home he had to cross a little stream; and on both banks he saw wild guava-bushes growing, with plenty of sour guavas upon them;—for it was not yet time for guavas to be ripe. Poor Yé was hungry! He did all he could to resist the temptation, but it proved too much for him. He broke all his promises to the Bon-Dié: he ate and ate and ate till there were no more guavas left,—and then he began to eatzicaquesand green plums, and all sorts of nasty sour things, till he could not eat any more.
—By the time he got to the cabin his teeth were so on edge that he could scarcely speak distinctly enough to tell his wife to get the supper ready.
And so while everybody was happy, thinking that they were going to be freed from their trouble, Yé was really in no condition to do anything. The moment the supper was ready, the Devil got up from his corner as usual, and approached the table. Then Yé tried to speak; but his teeth were so on edge that instead of saying,—"Tam ni pou tam ni bé," he could only stammer out:—-"Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan."
This had no effect on the Devil at all: he seemed to be used to it! He blew his breath on them all, sent them to sleep, ate up all the supper, filled the empty dishes with filth, awoke Yé and his family, and ordered them as usual;—
—"Gobe-moin ça!" And they had to gobble it up,—every bit of it.
The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Yé climbed the Montagne Pelée; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more he disturbed the poor Bon-Dié, all for nothing!—since each time on his way down he would fill his paunch with all sorts of nasty sour things, so that he could not speak right. The Devil remained in the house night and day;—the poor mother threw herself down on the ground, and pulled out her hair,—so unhappy she was!
But luckily for the poor woman, she had one child as cunning as a rat,[57]—a boy called Ti Fonté (little Impudent), who bore his name well. When he saw his mother crying so much, he said to her:—
—"Mamma, send papa just once more to see the Good-God: I know something to do!"
The mother knew how cunning her boy was: she felt sure he meant something by his words;—she sent old Yé for the last time to see the Bon-Dié.
Yé used always to wear one of those big long coats they calllavalasses;—whether it was hot or cool, wet or dry, he never went out without it. There were two very big pockets in it—one on each side. When Ti Fonté saw his father getting ready to go, he jumpedfloup!into one of the pockets and hid himself there. Yé climbed all the way to the top of the Morne de la Croix without suspecting anything. When he got there the little boy put one of his ears out of Yé's pocket,—so as to hear everything the Good-God would say.
This time he was very angry,—the Bon-Dié: he spoke very crossly; he scolded Yé a great deal. But he was so kind for all that,—he was so generous to good-for-nothing Yé, that he took the pains to repeat the words over and over again for him:—"Tam ni pou tam ni bé."... And this time the Bon-Dié was not talking to no purpose: there was somebody there well able to remember what he said. Ti Fonté made the most of his chance;—he sharpened that little tongue of his; he thought of his mamma and all his little brothers and sisters dying of hunger down below. As for his father, Yé did as he had done before—stuffed himself with all the green fruit he could find.
The moment Yé got home and took off his coat, Ti Fonté jumped out,plapp!—and ran to his mamma, and whispered:—
—"Mamma, get ready a nice, big dinner!—we are going to have it all to ourselves to-day: the Good-God didn't talk for nothing,—I heard every word he said!"
Then the mother got ready a nicecalalou-crabe, atonton-banane, amatété-cirique,—several calabashes ofcouss-caye, tworégimes-figues(bunches of small bananas),—in short, a very fine dinner indeed, with achopineof tafia to wash it all well down.
The Devil felt as sure of himself that day as he had always felt, and got up the moment everything was ready. But Ti Fonté got up too, and yelled out just as loud as he could:—-"Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"
At once the Devil gave a scream so loud that it could be heard right down to the bottom of hell,—and he fell dead.
Meanwhile, Yé, like the old fool he was, kept trying to say what the Bon-Dié had told him, and could only mumble:—
—"Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan!"
He would never have been able to do anything;—and his wife had a great mind just to send him to bed at once, instead of letting him sit down to eat all those nice things. But she was a kind-hearted soul; and so she let Yé stay and eat with the children, though he did not deserve it. And they all ate and ate, and kept on eating and filling themselves until daybreak—pauv piti!
But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had become swollen so big that Yé found he could not move him. Still, they knew they must get him out of the way somehow. The children had eaten so much that they were all full of strength—yo tè plein lafòce; and Yé got a rope and tied one end round the Devil's foot; and then he and the children—all pulling together—managed to drag the Devil out of the cabin and into the bushes, where they left him just like a dead dog. They all felt themselves very happy to be rid of that old Devil.
But some days after old good-for-nothing Yé went off to hunt for birds. He had a whole lot of arrows with him. He suddenly remembered the Devil, and thought he would like to take one more look at him. And he did.
Fouinq!what a sight! The Devil's belly had swelled up like a morne: it was yellow and blue and green,—looked as if it was going to burst. And Yé, like the old fool he always was, shot an arrow up in the air, so that it fell down and stuck into the Devil's belly. Then he wanted to get the arrow, and he climbed up on the Devil, and pulled and pulled till he got the arrow out. Then he put the point of the arrow to his nose,—just to see what sort of a smell dead Devils had.
The moment he did that, his nose swelled up as big as the refinery-pot of a sugar-plantation.
Yé could scarcely walk for the weight of his nose; but he had to go and see the Bon-Dié again. The Bon-Dié said to him:—
—"Ah! Yé, my poor Yé, you will live and die a fool!—you are certainly the biggest fool in the whole world!... Still, I must try to do something for you;—I'll help you anyhow to get rid of that nose!... I'll tell you how to do it. To-morrow morning, very early, get up and take a bigtaya[whip], and beat all the bushes well, and drive all the birds to the Roche de la Caravelle. Then you must tell them that I, the Bon-Dié, want them to take off their bills and feathers, and take a good bath in the sea. While they are bathing, you can choose a nose for yourself out of the heap of bills there."
Poor Yé did just as the Good-God told him; and while the birds were bathing, he picked out a nose for himself from the heap of beaks,—and left his own refinery-pot in its place.
The nose he took was the nose of thecoulivicou.[58]And that is why thecoulivicoualways looks so much ashamed of himself even to this day.
[54]In the patois, "yon rafale yche"—"a whirlwind of children."
[54]In the patois, "yon rafale yche"—"a whirlwind of children."
[55]In the original:—"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."
[55]In the original:—"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."
[56]A peaklet rising above the verge of the ancient crater now filled with water.
[56]A peaklet rising above the verge of the ancient crater now filled with water.
[57]The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique folklore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its reputation.
[57]The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique folklore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its reputation.
[58]Thecoulivicou, or "Colin Vicou," is a Martinique bird with a long meagre body, and an enormous bill. It has a very tristful and taciturn expression....Maig conm yon coulivicou, "thin as a coulivicou," is a popular comparison for the appearance of anybody much reduced by sickness.
[58]Thecoulivicou, or "Colin Vicou," is a Martinique bird with a long meagre body, and an enormous bill. It has a very tristful and taciturn expression....Maig conm yon coulivicou, "thin as a coulivicou," is a popular comparison for the appearance of anybody much reduced by sickness.
... Poor Yé!—you still live for me only too vividly outside of those strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak slopes above the clouds;—I have seen you climbing from plantation to plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master, though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;—I have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles to market, rather than labor in the fields;—I have seen you ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find a cabbage-palm,—and always hungry,—and always shiftless! And you are still a great fool, poor Yé!—and you have still your swarm of children,—yourrafale yche,—and they are famished; for you have taken into yourajoupaa Devil who devours even more than you can earn,—even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless brain,—the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the struggle for life. But you feel that law now;—you are a citizen of the Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;—and this new knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh!
It is only half-past four o'clock: there is the faintest blue light of beginning day,—and little Victoire already stands at the bedside with my wakening cup of hot black fragrant coffee. What! so early?... Then with a sudden heart-start I remember this is my last West Indian morning. And the child—her large timid eyes all gently luminous—is pressing something into my hand.
Two vanilla beans wrapped in a morsel of banana-leaf,—her poor little farewell gift!...
Other trifling souvenirs are already packed away. Almost everybody that knows me has given me something. Manm-Robert brought me a tiny packet of orange-seeds,—seeds of a "gift-orange": so long as I can keep these in my vest-pocket I will never be without money. Cyrillia brought me a package ofbouts, and a pretty box of French matches, warranted inextinguishable by wind. Azaline, the blanchisseuse, sent me a little pocket looking-glass. Cerbonnie, themàchanne, left a little cup of guava jelly for me last night. Mimi—dear child!—brought me a little paper dog! It is her best toy; but those gentle black eyes would stream with tears if I dared to refuse it.... Oh, Mimi! what am I to do with a little paper dog? And what am I to do with the chocolate-sticks and the cocoanuts and all the sugar-cane and all the cinnamon-apples?...
... Twenty minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill shadows are shrinking back from the shore;—the long wharves reach out yellow into the sun;—the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching the glow. Then, over the light-house—on the outermost line depending from the southern yard-arm of the semaphore—a big black ball suddenly runs up like a spider climbing its own thread....Steamer from the South!The packet has been sighted. And I have not yet been able to pack away into a specially purchased wooden box all the fruits and vegetable curiosities and odd little presents sent to me. If Radice the boatman had not come to help me, I should never be able to get ready; for the work of packing is being continually interrupted by friends and acquaintances coming to say good-bye. Manm-Robert brings to see me a pretty young girl—very fair, with a violet foulard twisted about her blonde head. It is little Basilique, who is going to make herpouémiè communion. So I kiss her, according to the old colonial custom, once on each downy cheek;—and she is to pray toNotre Dame du Bon Portthat the ship shall bear me safely to far-away New York.
And even then the steamer's cannon-call shakes over the town and into the hills behind us, which answer with all the thunder of their phantom artillery.
... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already waiting on the south wharf for the boat;—evidently she is to be one of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful figure,—a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows....
A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle Lys is going to New York to be a governess,—to leave her native island forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding good-bye to old Titine,—kissing her. "Adié encò, chè;—Bon-Dié ké béni ou!" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat recedes from the wooden steps.
... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the awnings shading the saloon-deck of theGuadeloupe. There are at least fifty passengers,—many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages containing parrots;—and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,—twosakiwinkis. These are from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp twittering, like birds,—all the while circling, ascending, descending, retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them to the hatch.
TheGuadeloupehas seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we have ample time,—Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,—to take one last look at the "Pays des Revenants."
I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for her,—for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire. And now at the moment of my going,—when I seem to understand as never before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the life to which I am bidding farewell,—the question comes to me: "Does she not love it all as I do,—nay, even much more, because of that in her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land, she has seen no other skies,—fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter ones....
... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!—nowhere beneath this sun!... Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!—the single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,—over the surging of the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,—all cool out of the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy, savage-sweet!—and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!—
And the mighty dreaming of the woods,—green-drenched with silent pouring of creepers,—dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of liana flowers!—
And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,—that as you mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,—that seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!—
And the violet velvet distances of evening;—and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning,—when all the heaven seems filled with vapors of a molten sun!...
How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint peaking of the colored town—sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red and yellow and white-of-cream—takes a sharpness in this limpid light as if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues—the black Christ on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange—among curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,—seeking by supremest charm to win back and hold its wandering child,—Violet-Eyes over there!... She is looking too.
I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,—curving far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy what that something is:—
—"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!—'tis a dim grey land thou goest unto,—a land of bitter winds,—a land of strange gods,—a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child—that land will have no power to lift thee up;—vast weight of stone will press thee down forever;—until the heavens be no more thou shalt not awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would find thee: thou shouldst live again!—we lift, like Aztec priests, the blood of hearts to the Sun."...
... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,—and bamboos peculiarly situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of my eyes. Nor is this all;—I have the every sensation of the very moment,—the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the warmth, the intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in me, but which I cannot communicate to others.
... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about thePays des Revenantscan only be for others, who have never beheld it,—vague like the design upon this fan.
Brrrrrrrrrrr!... The steam-winch is lifting the anchor; and theGuadeloupetrembles through every plank as the iron torrent of her chain-cable rumbles through the hawse-holes.... At last the quivering ceases;—there is a moment's silence; and Violet-Eyes seems trying to catch a last glimpse of her faithfulbonneamong the ever-thickening crowd upon the quay.... Ah! there she is—waving her foulard. Mademoiselle Lys is waving a handkerchief in reply....
Suddenly the shock of the farewell gun shakes heavily through our hearts, and over the bay,—where the tall mornes catch the flapping thunder, and buffet it through all their circle in tremendous mockery. Then there is a great whirling and whispering of whitened water behind the steamer—another,—another; and the whirl becomes a foaming stream: the mighty propeller is playing!.... All the blue harbor swings slowly round;—and the green limbs of the land are pushed out further on the left, shrink back upon the right;—and the mountains are moving their shoulders. And then the many-tinted façades,—and the tamarinds of the Place Bertin,—and the light-house,—and the long wharves with their throng of turbaned women,—and the cathedral towers,—and the fair palms,—and the statues of the hills,—all veer, change place, and begin to float away... steadily, very swiftly.
Farewell, fair city,—sun-kissed city,—many-fountained city!—dear yellow-glimmering streets,—white pavements learned by heart,—and faces ever looked for,—and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with your golden-throated bells!—farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light of summer everlasting!—craters with your coronets of forest!—bright mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery bamboo!—and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell, soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,—green golden cane-fields ripening to the sea!...
... The town vanishes. The island slowly becomes a green silhouette. So might Columbus first have seen it from the deck of his caravel,—nearly four hundred years ago. At this distance there are no more signs of life upon it than when it first became visible to his eyes: yet there are cities there,—and toiling,—and suffering,—and gentle hearts that knew me.... Now it is turning blue,—the beautiful shape!—becoming a dream....
And Dominica draws nearer,—sharply massing her hills against the vast light in purple nodes and gibbosities and denticulations. Closer and closer it comes, until the green of its heights breaks through the purple here and there,—in flashings and ribbings of color. Then it remains as if motionless a while;—then the green lights go out again,—and all the shape begins to recede sideward towards the south.
... And what had appeared a pearl-grey cloud in the north slowly reveals itself as another island of mountains,—hunched and horned and mammiform: Guadeloupe begins to show her double profile. But Martinique is still visible;—Pelée still peers high over the rim of the south.... Day wanes;—the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water. Pelée changes aspect at last,—turns pale as a ghost,—but will not fade away....
... The sun begins to sink as he always sinks to his death in the tropics,—swiftly,—too swiftly!—and the glory of him makes golden all the hollow west,—and bronzes all the flickering wave-backs. But still the gracious phantom of the island will not go,—softly haunting us through the splendid haze. And always the tropic wind blows soft and warm;—there is an indescribable caress in it! Perhaps some such breeze, blowing from Indian waters, might have inspired that prophecy of Islam concerning the Wind of the Last Day,—that "Yellow Wind, softer than silk, balmier than musk,"—which is to sweep the spirits of the just to God in the great Winnowing of Souls....
Then into the indigo night vanishes forever from my eyes the ghost of Pelée; and the moon swings up,—a young and lazy moon, drowsing upon her back, as in a hammock.... Yet a few nights more, and we shall see this slim young moon erect,—gliding upright on her way,—coldly beautiful like a fair Northern girl.
And ever through tepid nights and azure days theGuadelouperushes on,—her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath the stars,—steaming straight for the North.
Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,—beautiful Montserrat, all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the waist!—breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children are;—
And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through ocean-haze;—by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;—past ghostly St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the Saint's own Second Summer;—
Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,—shark-haunted, bounded about by huddling of little hills, blue and green.
Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"—all radiant with verdure though well nigh woodless,—nakedly beautiful in the tropic light as a perfect statue;—
Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left, and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,—old St. Thomas, watching the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned her port,—watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined patrician;—
And the vapory Vision of, St. John;—and the grey ghost of Tortola,—and further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin Gorda.
Then only the enormous double-vision of sky and sea.
The sky: a cupola of blinding blue, shading down and paling into spectral green at the rim of the world,—and all fleckless, save at evening. Then, with sunset, comes a light gold-drift of little feathery cloudlets into the West,—stippling it as with a snow of fire.
The sea: no flower-tint may now make my comparison for the splendor of its lucent color. It has shifted its hue;—for we have entered into the Azure Stream: it has more than the magnificence of burning cyanogen....
But, at night, the Cross of the South appears no more. And other changes come, as day succeeds to day,—a lengthening of the hours of light, a longer lingering of the after-glow,—a cooling of the wind. Each morning the air seems a little cooler, a little rarer;—each noon the sky looks a little paler, a little further away—always heightening, yet also more shadowy, as if its color, receding, were dimmed by distance,—were coming more faintly down from vaster altitudes.
... Mademoiselle is petted like a child by the lady passengers. And every man seems anxious to aid in making her voyage a pleasant one. For much of which, I think, she may thank her eyes!
A dim morning and chill;—blank sky and sunless waters: the sombre heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a blind grey sea.... What a sudden weight comes to the heart with the touch of the cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the dawn;—and then what foolish though irrepressible yearning for the vanished azure left behind!
... The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their perches with eyes closed.
... A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the sea, far to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the approach of land. And from it now floats to us something ghostly and frigid which makes the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a flood of dreams,—the fog of the Jersey coast.
At once the engines slacken their respiration. TheGuadeloupebegins to utter her steam-cry of warning,—regularly at intervals of two minutes,—for she is now in the track of all the ocean vessels. And from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,—the booming of some great fog-bell.
... All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has vanished;—we seem ringed in by a wall of smoke.... Out of this vapory emptiness—very suddenly—an enormous steamer rushes, towering like a hill—passes so close that we can see faces, and disappears again, leaving the sea heaving and frothing behind her.
... As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I feel something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,—a tiny black hand,—the hand of asakiwinki. One of the little monkeys, straining to the full length of his string, is making this dumb appeal for human sympathy;—the bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me with the oddest look of pleading. Poor little tropical exiles! I stoop to caress them; but regret the impulse a moment later: they utter such beseeching cries when I find myself obliged to leave them again alone!...
... Hour after hour theGuadeloupeglides on through the white gloom,—cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her whistle, ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark comes flitting to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot.... How strange it must all seem to Mademoiselle who stands so silent there at the rail!—how weird this veiled world must appear to her, after the sapphire light of her own West Indian sky, and the great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea!
But a wind comes;—it strengthens,—begins to blow very cold. The mists thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all revealed again with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea.
... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,—grey sky of Odin,—bitter thy winds and spectral all thy colors!—they that dwell beneath thee know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,—the azure splendor of southern day!—but thine are the lightnings of Thought illuminating for human eyes the interspaces between sun and sun. Thine the generations of might,—the strivers, the battlers,—the men who make Nature tame!—thine the domain of inspiration and achievement,—the larger heroisms, the vaster labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all the witchcrafts of science!...
But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which is Self, yet also infinitely more than Self,—incomprehensibly multiple,—the complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities belonging to the unknown past. And the lips of the little stranger from the tropics have become all white, because that Something within her,—ghostly bequest from generations who loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a more radiant world,—now shrinks all back about her girl's heart with fear of this pale grim North.... And lo!—opening mile-wide in dream-grey majesty before us,—reaching away, through measureless mazes of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,—the mighty perspective of New York harbor!...
Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;—'tis only a magical dusk we are entering,—only that mystic dimness in which miracles must be wrought!... See the marvellous shapes uprising,—the immensities, the astonishments! And other greater wonders thou wilt behold in a little while, when we shall have become lost to each other forever in the surging of the City's million-hearted life!... 'Tis all shadow here, thou sayest?—Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast with that glory out of which thou camest, Lys—twilight only,—but the Twilight of the Gods!...Adié, chè!—Bon-Dié ké bént ou!...
More than a hundred years ago Thibault de Chanvallon expressed his astonishment at the charm and wonderful sense of musical rhythm characterizing the slave-songs and slave-dances of Martinique. The rhythmical sense of the negroes especially impressed him. "I have seen," he writes, "seven or eight hundred negroes accompanying a wedding-party to the sound of song. They would all leap up in the air and come down together;—the movement was so exact and general that the noise of their fall made but a single sound."
An almost similar phenomenon may be witnessed any Carnival season in St. Pierre,—while the Devil makes his nightly round, followed by many hundred boys clapping hands and leaping in chorus. It may also be observed in the popular malicious custom of the pillard, or, in creole,piyà.Some person whom it is deemed justifiable and safe to annoy, may suddenly find himself followed in the street by a singing chorus of several hundred, all clapping hands and dancing or running in perfect time, so that all the bare feet strike the ground together. Or thepillard-chorusmay even take up its position before the residence of the party disliked, and then proceed with its performance. An example of such apillardis given further on, in the song entitledLoéma tombé.The improvisation by a single voice begins the pillard,—which in English might be rendered as follows:—
(Single voice) You little children there!—you who were by theriver-side!Tell me truly this:—Did you see Loéma fall?Tell me truly this—(Chorus, opening)Did you see Loéma fall?(Single voice)Tell me truly this—(Chorus)Did you see Loéma fall?(Single voice, more rapidly)Tell me truly this—(Chorus, more quickly)Loéma fall!(Single voice)Tell me truly this—(Chorus)Loéma fall!(Single voice)Tell me truly this—
(Chorus, always more quickly, and more loudly, all the hands clapping together like a fire of musketry) Loéma fall! etc.
The same rhythmic element characterizes many of the games and round dances of Martinique children;—but, as a rule, I think it is perceptible that the sense of time is less developed in the colored children than in the black.
The other melodies which are given as specimens of Martinique music show less of the African element,—the nearest approach to it being inTant sirop; but all are probably creations of the mixed race.Marie-Clémenceis a Carnival satire composed not more than four years ago.To-to-tois very old—dates back, perhaps, to the time of thebelles-affranchies.It is seldom sung now except by survivors of the old régime: the sincerity and tenderness of the emotion that inspired it—the old sweetness of heart and simplicity of thought,—are passing forever away.
To my friend, Henry Edward Krehbiel, the musical lecturer and critic,—at once historian and folklorist in the study of race-music,—and to Mr. Frank van der Stucken, the New York musical composer, I owe the preparation of these four melodies for voice and piano-forte. The arrangements ofTo-to-toandLoéma tombéare Mr. Van der Stucken's.
(Creole werds)