Even then, whenever a tired and blown horse was found in the morning, it was prima facie evidence that a hog had disappeared from the pen during the night. We could not, with all our endeavors, find watchmen equal to coping with the thieves.
Holiday afternoons the negroes were permitted to dance on the hard and firm patio in front of their barracoon. Their music consisted of two tombos—hollow logs with skins stretched tightly over one end, somewhat like a drum.
The heavy instrument is suspended by a strap from the neck of the player, who strides and beats upon it with the flat palms of his hard black hands, occasionally scratching variations with the tough thumb-nail. The two tombos make a mournful, monotonous thrumming, beating time in regular cadence, and are accompanied by a dry bladder containing a few shells or stones, which is rattled by an old, tattooed African woman, whose cracked voice adds a melancholy wail, producing a peculiarly penetrating repetition of the same dull sound, that lingers in the ear long after the vibrations have ceased.
The musicians ready, and the circle formed, a woman glides into the arena, and, catching her flowing train with each hand, sways round and round with a shuffling, half-sliding motion, turning her face from side to side, and sweeping the long dress clear of the ground at every step.
After making the circuit once or twice, one of the men bounds into the circle and follows her from side to side with outstretched arms, as though offering her an embrace. She deftly eludes the advance, casting backward glances from the corners of her eyes to tempt him on. Occasionally he falls, first upon one knee, then upon the other, throwing himself into the most amazing attitudes, sometimes falling prone upon the ground and rolling over, to catch the hem of her dress as she passes, both dancers with every step and gesture keeping wonderful time with the weird tum-tum of the tombos; when fatigued, or another ambitious couple step forward, they retire. The same performance was repeated and repeated; the same sliding, shuffling, and postulating in rhythm to the atrabilious noise, that often drove me with aching nerves to the far end of the avenue of palms, and there, long after the tap of the bell—a signal that the dance must be over—the diabolical tombo beat a devil’s tattoo in my head.
The Chinese did not mingle with the negroes, either in their work or socially, though subject to the same rules and regulations in regard to their hours of labor and hours of rest. On Sundays they would array themselves in clean clothes, add the ornamentation of a string of tweezers and ivory tooth-picks around their necks, and in groups of twos and threes saunter about in a listless manner, scarcely pausing to see the Africans dancing, and often giving little evidence of animation save the perpetual use of large fans. In their own barracoon they were inveterate gamblers, and, if two or more were seen squatting together, they were surely at their besetting vice. If one “lay out” or “outfit,” or whatever it may be called, was taken from them, another was quickly substituted.
They gambled with a few little sticks, or grains of rice, or lemon-seeds. And frequently, Monday morning, a Chinaman presented himself to work clad in a coffee-sack, the scamp having risked and lost the very clothes off his back; and it was next to impossible to make him tell which one of his countrymen had won the garments.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE GOOD OLD PRIEST—RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION OF THE NEGROES—THE SEÑORA’S GHOST.
The old cura (priest) in the village had the spiritual surveillance of all the inhabitants of his partido (district); and we were often notified to discharge certain duties we owed the church, of which, being heretics, we were ignorant. I think the fine for failing to have a slave child christened before it was six months old, was nearly one hundred dollars. Every six months the cura admonished us to send to the village church the babies with their mothers, and an escudo ($2.12¹⁄₂) for each child. The kindly old man then sprinkled the little blackies, gave the escudos back to the mothers, and perhaps never saw the new church-members again until they went up with the next generation of babies. The good old priest is dead now; but he saved many souls that way during the thirty-five years he was cura at the village, and sprinkled several generations, for in Cuba they marry early and often. Many stories reached us of his kindly, priestly offices to the poor and distressed, as well as to the wealthy, in their hour of need. When the former owners of Desengaño had forty cases of small-pox on the plantation at one time, and the place was rigidly quarantined—not even a physician being permitted to minister to them—the cura went to perform his religious offices; he said no human authority could keep him from that stricken family, and the blessed Virgin, or his patron saint, or some supreme power, I do not remember now what, would shield and protect him. So he went and staid with them, and when the long agony culminated in the death of the aged mother of the family, the cura, in defiance of law, carried her body to the village cemetery to be deposited in consecrated ground.
No one ever went to him in the hour of need, black or white, that his benevolence did not assist. He never came to Desengaño after it passed into heretic hands; but he had long been accustomed to get the lime from there to whitewash the church and his own house. And every year or two when we fired the lime-kiln, he wrote us to send enough lime to whiten the sacred edifice and he would in return pray for us, and, when we died, say a mass or two.