GRANDE POINTE.
CHAPTER I.
A STRANGER.
From College Point to Bell’s Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or “coasts,” are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations. Midway on the northern side, lie the beautiful estates of “Belmont” and “Belle Alliance.” Early one morning in the middle of October, 1878, a young man, whose age you would have guessed fifteen years too much, stood in scrupulously clean, ill-fitting, flimsy garments, on the strong, high levee overlooking these two plantations. He was asking the way to a place called Grande Pointe. Grand Point, he called it, and so may we: many names in Louisiana that retain the French spelling are habitually given an English pronunciation.
A tattered negro mounted on a sunburnt, unshod, bare-backed mule, down in the dusty gray road on the land-side of the embankment, was his only hearer. Fifteen years earlier these two men, with French accents, strangers to each other, would hardly have conversed in English; but the date made the difference. We need not inexorably render the dialect of the white man; pretty enough to hear, it would often be hideous to print. The letter r, for instance, that plague of all nations—before consonants it disappeared; before vowels the tongue failed of that upward curve that makes the good strong r’s of Italy and Great Britain.
The negro pointed over his mule’s ears.
“You see Belle Alliance sugah-house yondeh? Well, behine dah you fine one road go stret thoo the plantation till de wood. Dass ’bout mile, you know. Den she keep stret on thoo de wood ’bout two mile’ mo’, an’ dat fetch you at Gran’ Point’. Hole on; I show you.”
The two men started down the road, the negro on his mule, the stranger along the levee’s crown.