“One must remember,” it warned, “that Martinique is a tropical country, and the act of exposing oneself to climbing a slope on foot or of blowing up a bicycle tire, even in the shade”—the paragraph was addressed to cyclists, for the writer would never have suspected a visitor to Martinique of deliberately turning pedestrian—“is dangerous. A tropical helmet,” he asserted on another page, “and a flannel stomach-band are indispensable.” How I have succeeded in covering many thousand miles of the tropics on foot without harnessing myself up in those indispensable contrivances is, no doubt, a mystery. As a matter of fact, the chatter of sedentary imaginations aside, tramping is no more risky in the West Indies than in the midsummer Catskills.
During the first few miles I met many fierce-looking mulattoes in flaring piratical mustaches and kinky Napoleon III beards, carrying in their hands big, sharp-pointed cane-knives, but every passer-by bade me a soft, kindly, respectful “Bon jour, monsieur”; they had not even the hypocritical obsequiousness or the occasional insolence of the British negro. Beyond Fond St. Denis the way descended somewhat along another beautiful valley, its slopes densely wooded, a small river boiling over the rocks at its bottom. The Pitons du Carbet bulked majestically into the sky overhead; a lower peak between them was completely covered with tree-ferns. Then the highway began to mount again, disclosing magnificent new panoramas at every turn. It was a soft-footed road, and in these higher reaches almost entirely untraveled. The rich center of the island was surprisingly uninhabited. The unfailing trade-wind swept down through the mountain passes to the left; hurrying clouds broke the fury of the tropical sun; there was splendid drinking water everywhere, usually carried out to the edge of the road in bamboo troughs stuck into the sheer mountain-side. The climb ended at two huts and a shrine, dignified with the name of Deux Choux, whence another highway descended to Robert, on the Atlantic. My own paused for a marvelous view back down the dense green valley to cloud-capped Pélée and a broad stretch of the Caribbean beyond St. Pierre, then came out on a tiny meadow with grazing cattle, a lonely little hut, and a temperate climate. A wonderfully symmetrical green peak stood directly overhead, with another, its summit lost in the clouds, breaking the horizon beyond. Martinique, one was forced to admit, was as beautiful in its small way as Porto Rico, even though it lacks the red-leafed bucaré, the color-splashes of orange-trees, and the snow-like tobacco-fields. A deep stillness reigned, emphasized rather than broken by the murmur of some distant little stream, the creaking of an insect far off in the wilderness, now and then a gust of wind which set the ferns and the bamboo plumes to whispering together. Once I thought I heard a groan, but it proved to be only the native boute I was smoking, struggling for air. Little wooden shrines were here and there set into the mountain walls, the garments of the dolls they inclosed tattered and weather-rotted.
Some eight miles from the capital a gap in the hills gave a wide-spreading view of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and all the southern half of Martinique, tumbled, mottled by sunshine and cloud shadows, more brown than this central region, the three little islands that mark the birthplace of a French empress dotting the dense-blue bay. Houses and people began to appear again, happy-go-lucky little huts, though with far more pride in their appearance than those of Haiti; then came the “summer villas” of the wealthier citizens of Fort de France, until the road became one long suburb. A branch to the right descended to the hot baths of Absalon; farther on another pitched downward to those of Didier, both at the bottom of an immense cleft in the hills, and an hour later I was plodding through the hot, dusty, crowded streets of gaily-turbaned Fort de France.
The people of the French Antilles have many of the characteristics of the continental Frenchman. His faults and his virtues are theirs, the former magnified, the latter shrunken, as is the way with the negro. In outward demeanor they have little in common with the British West Indian, still less perhaps with our own blacks. They are much less given to outbursts of insolence and are more courteous. But, like the Frenchman, they are impulsive and individualistic, hence one cannot generalize too broadly. I have met some of the most genuinely courteous persons in “French America,” mulattoes, capres, and even full negroes, with the outward evidences of a culture superior to that of any but our best class; I have met others who made me temporarily a firm believer in the righteousness of Judge Lynch. The former were decidedly in the majority; there were many who were rather over polite. But, like that of the French, their politeness is individual, never collective. After being treated with incredible courtesy by the few with whom one has come into personal contact, one is astounded to find the crowds almost brutal. The country people are, of course, more courteous than the corresponding classes in the capital; the women are, on the whole, less so than the men, another direct legacy from the French. The islanders have, too, something of that French custom of not showing surprise at strange sights or personal idiosyncrasies, that same quality that makes it so easy to live in Paris. A white man on foot, for instance, rarely seems to attract even a passing attention; in the British islands he is the constant butt of inquiry, comment, and crude attempts at ridicule, though he is an equally unusual sight in either group of islands. All these things are visibly the result of environment and the negro’s monkey-like faculty for imitation. From the capre up he takes on certain other qualities from his white parents, though they seldom equal the original. The one pleasant trait native to the negro—his gaiety and lack of gloom—is tempered in the French islands by a sort of Latin pensiveness, while his sense of personal dignity is distinctly higher than that among the former British slaves.
His superiority to the Haitian is ample proof of the advantage of having the negro ruled over by whites, even though that rule be faulty, instead of letting him run wild. He has more sense of responsibility, more industry, and a civic spirit which the Haitian has almost completely lost. All this tends to make him comparatively law-abiding. There are few country police in the French islands, and they are not numerous in the towns, yet the stranger may wander at will and rarely meet even with annoyance. Barrels of rum are left unguarded for weeks in the streets or on the wharves of Guadeloupe or Martinique, and the case is almost unknown of their being broached or in any way molested. Even our own land scarcely aspires to that high standard. White women may go freely anywhere with far less likelihood of meeting with disrespect than in many Caucasian lands.
The French negro’s superiority of deportment is partly due, no doubt, to the higher sense of equality he enjoys under the tricolor. The color line exists, but it is less direct, less tangible, more hidden than with us. When the white inhabitants speak of it at all it is apt to be in whispers. “Creoles” shake hands with, and show all the outward signs of friendship to their colored neighbors; bi-colored functions, business partnerships between the two races are common, yet the whites avoid social mixture as far as they dare. I say “dare” because that is exactly the word which seems to fit the case. The French appear to have a certain fear of their negroes, if not actual physical fear, at least a disinclination to show them discourtesy by referring to the matter of color. In fact, the colored population may be said to have the upper hand. The laws of the islands are made in France, but each of them sends a senator and two deputies to Paris, and equal suffrage gives the whites small chance of winning these offices; they have still less of being elected to municipal and colonial councils.
“It was a great mistake to give the negroes the vote,” more than one white islander assured me, in an undertone, “for it leaves us whites swamped beneath them. With negroes voting, justice goes almost invariably to the man who is a friend of the député, and the latter is never white.”
“Our colored population should be handled with a firm hand,” said a white colonial from the island of St. Martin, “but of course you cannot expect the French to do that.”
Fortunately for the whites, there is a considerable amount of friction between the negroes and the “gens de couleur,” and the blacks are often more friendly to the Caucasian element than to those partly of their own race.