GREYTOWN WAS A TYPICAL EAST COAST PORT—LOW, SWAMPY AND UNATTRACTIVE—WITH BLACK COMPLEXIONS PREVAILING
Once upon a time—when this whole shore from Costa Rica to Guatemala was a part of the British “Mosquito kingdom,” of which British Honduras is the only remnant—this was a thriving city. Walker, the Filibuster, made it his base of supplies. In the days of the gold rush to California, Nicaragua was one of the favorite cross-continental routes. In those times, as the residents of to-day expressed it, “Greytown was Greytown.” Now it was only Greytown. Prosperity had fled. The inhabitants lived, as tropical natives so frequently live, without visible occupation. A visitor, especially a gringo, was a curiosity. The entire population—descendants of Great Britain’s former negro empire—rushed to the doorways to stare. Buxom wenches climbed upon their window-sills with a mountainous display of anatomy to ask one another in Jamaican English:
“Who the mon is? Who the mon is?”
I found the lodging house, but it was closed.
“Dey all go off for a lark,” advised a neighbor.
But eventually I found another hotel, kept by a Nicaraguan, who was quite amazed at the sight of a prospective guest. He had one large room, laden with canvas cots, and already occupied by a blind negro with the stupid countenance of a half-wit, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the town celebrity.
He was a musician. When some one led him downstairs and placed a mandolin in his hands, he played it as I had never dreamed the instrument could be played. He was a true genius. If his accompanist gave the wrong chord upon the guitar, he would fly into a rage. When, as a joke, some one told him that I played better than he, his indignation knew no limit. His eyelids snapped open and shut, exposing empty sockets, and he screamed like a maniac. He refused positively to play another piece so long as I was present. Thereafter he seemed to sense my return, even when I tiptoed into the room, and would cease abruptly to demand in Spanish:
“Has that gringo come back?”
But he warmed toward me when mediators informed him that I wished to take his picture. All Greytown was eager to be photographed. Seeing my camera, the blacks would call out, “Draw me portrait, sah?” There were many old colored men here who could recall the days when Greytown flourished. They were very dignified and formal, as befits a patriarch, and with the peculiar vanity of the oldest living resident everywhere, each was extremely proud that he hadn’t had sufficient ambition to move out of one place for sixty or seventy years. They now spent most of their time sitting about the rum shops, waiting for some one to buy them a drink.