The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named Cuañon-Araferrobré, and the act of sacrifice the Acuá Meropó. The singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Bastón Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God is great; with, at the last, silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongó.
The ñañigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with native costumes and instruments—atables and marugas and ecous, a flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambás were destroyed and hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalíe, resting below my box through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?
* * *
A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the resonant bos and bongos of ñañiguismo. Havana, for a moment, seemed like a cemetery—its own marble cemetery of Colon—where a black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I speculated about that same spirit in another connection—in its influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.
Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and its shadowed measures.
The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it—it was their voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated West a fresh earthen tonic chord.
The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth, at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had, in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short impressions—stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy, resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth writing.
Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana and through the ñañigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be laid—not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes. A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of course, would touch it—it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned. A magnificent project:
A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep ruined field—but perhaps this was South Carolina—infinitesimal ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal city—the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana from its farthest view to its most intimate façade, and I was grateful to whatever had made it.
In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism, sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the reason—the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped their work, their responsibilities, to join the passing chorus of hope.