The morning was warm and beautiful. Mists were chasing each other on the river, and clouds were chasing each other in the sky. A rival steamer was passing us. The decks of both boats were black with spectators watching the race, and making comments upon it: “Look how she piles the water up ahead of her!” “She’ll open a gap of a mile between us in an hour!” and so forth.
The river was about half a mile in breadth. We were running down the broad current between high banks covered with forests, on one side, and sand-bars extending their broad yellow shelves out into the river, on the other. Sometimes the sand was on our right, then it shifted to our left; it was nearly always to be seen on one side, but never on both sides at once. The river is continually excavating one bank and making another opposite,—now taking from Arkansas to give to Mississippi, and now robbing Mississippi to pay Arkansas, and thus year after year forming and destroying plantations. I remember one point on the Arkansas shore where the bank rose forty feet above the water, and was covered with trees eighteen inches in thickness; of which a gentleman of the country said to me, “That is all a recent formation. Forty years ago the bed of the river was where that bank is.” The water was now tearing away again what it had so suddenly built up, trying to get back into its old bed.
We were making landings at every plantation where passengers or freight were to be put off, or a signal was shown from the shore. Sometimes a newspaper or piece of cloth was fluttered by negroes among the trees on the bank; or a man who wished to come on board, stood on some exposed point and waved his handkerchief or hat. There was never a wharf, but the steamer, rounding to in the current, and heading up stream, went bunting its broad nose against the steep, yielding bank. The planks were pushed out; the passengers stepped aboard or ashore, and the deck-hands landed the freight.
Dirtier or more toilsome work than this landing of the freight I have seldom seen. Heavy boxes, barrels of flour and whiskey, had to be lifted and rolled up steep paths in the soft sand to the summit of the bank. Often the paths were so narrow that but one man could get hold of the end of a barrel and lift it, while another hauled it from above, their feet sinking deep at every step. Imagine a gang of forty or fifty men engaged in landing boxes, casks, sacks of corn and salt, wagons, live-stock, ploughs; hurrying, crowding, working in each other’s way, sometimes slipping and falling, the lost barrel tumbling down upon those below; and the mate driving them with shouts and curses and kicks, as if they were so many brutes.
Here the plantations touched the river; and there the landing-place was indicated by blazed trees in the forest, where negroes and mules were in waiting.
Wooding-up was always an interesting sight. A long wood-pile lines the summit of the bank, perhaps forty feet above the river. The steamer lands; a couple of stages are hauled out: fifty men rush ashore and climb the bank; the clerk accompanies them with pencil and paper and measuring-rod, to take account of the number of cords; then suddenly down comes the wood in an amazing shower, rattling, sliding, bounding, and sometimes turning somersaults into the river. The bottom and side of the bank are soon covered by the deluge; and the work of loading begins in equally lively fashion. The two stages are occupied by two files of men, one going ashore at a dog-trot, empty-handed, and another coming aboard with the wood. Each man catches up from two to four sticks, according to their size or his own inclination, shoulders them, falls into the current, not of water, but of men, crosses the plank, and deposits his burden where the corded-wood, that stood so lately on the top of the bank, is once more taking shape, divided into two equally-balanced piles on each side of the boiler-deck.
The men are mostly negroes, and the treatment they receive from the mate is about the same as that which they received when slaves. He stands on the shore between the ends of the two stages, within convenient reach of both. Not a laggard escapes his eye or foot. Often he brandishes a billet of wood, with which he threatens, and sometimes strikes; and now he flings it at the head of some artful dodger who has eluded his blow. And all the while you hear his hoarse, harsh voice iterating with horrible crescendo: “Get along, get along! Out o’ the way’th that wood! out o’ the way, OUT O’ THE WAY! OUT O’ THE WAY! Git on, GIT ON, GIT ON!”
Meanwhile the men are working as hard as men can reasonably be expected to work; and how they discipline their souls to endure such brutality is to me a mystery.
Planters got off at every landing, by day and night; and although a few came aboard, the company was gradually thinning out. At one plantation a colony of sixty negroes landed. They had a “heap of plunder.” Beds and bedding, trunks, tubs, hen-coops, old chests, old chairs, spinning-wheels, pots, and kettles, were put off under the mate’s directions, without much ceremony. The dogs were caught and pitched into the river, much to the distress of the women and children, who appeared to care more for the animals than for any other portion of their property. These people had been hired for an adjoining plantation. The plantation at which we landed had been laid waste, and the mansion and negro-quarters burned, leaving a grove of fifty naked chimneys standing,—“monuments of Yankee vandalism,” said my Southern friends.
At one place a fashionably dressed couple came on board, and the gentleman asked for a state-room. Terrible was the captain’s wrath. “God damn your soul,” he said, “get off this boat!” The gentleman and lady were colored, and they had been guilty of unpardonable impudence in asking for a state-room.