—At mid-day the màchanne-mangé comes, with her girls,—carrying trays of fried fish, and akras, and cooked beans, and bottles of mabi. The blanchisseuses buy, and eat with their feet in the water, using rocks for tables. Each has her little tin cup to drink her mabi in.... Then the washing and the chanting and the booming of the fessé begin again. Afternoon wanes;—school-hours close; and children of many beautiful colors come to the river, and leap down the steps crying, "Eti! manman!"—"Sésé!"—"Nenneine!" calling their elder sisters, mothers, and godmothers: the little boys strip naked to play in the water a while.... Towards sunset the more rapid and active workers begin to gather in their linen, and pile it on trays. Large patches of bald rock appear again.... By six o'clock almost the whole bed of the river is bare;—the women are nearly all gone. A few linger a while on the Savane, to watch the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the last to leave the channel: they ask her if she has not forgotten "to lock up the river."
—"Ou fèmé lapòte lariviè, chè—anh?"
—"Ah! oui, chè!—moin fèmé y, ou tanne?—moin ni laclé-à!" (Oh yes, dear. I locked it up,—you hear?—I've got the key!)
But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,—times of want or of plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it sang one hundred thousand years ago.... "Why do they not sing to-day?" I once asked during the summer of 1887,—a year of pestilence. "Yo ka pensé toutt lanmizè yo,—toutt lapeine yo," I was answered. (They are thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons, while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun, mist and rain, washing the linen of the living and the dead,—white wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for them that pass into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,—sometimes slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,—sometimes suddenly,—in the twinkling of an eye.
For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,—the treachery of the stream!... Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelée. Pelée gives them warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks; and thin streams swell to raging floods which burst suddenly from the altitudes, rolling down rocks and trees and wreck of forests, uplifting crags, devastating slopes. And sometimes, down the ravine of the Roxelane, there comes a roar as of eruption, with a rush of foaming water like a moving mountain-wall; and bridges and buildings vanish with its passing. In 1865 the Savane, high as it lies above the river-bed, was flooded;—and all the bridges were swept into the sea.
So the older and wiser blanchisseuses keep watch upon Pelée; and if a blackness gather over it, with lightnings breaking through, then—however fair the sun shine on St. Pierre—the alarm is given, the miles of bleaching linen vanish from the rocks in a few minutes, and every one leaves the channel. But it has occasionally happened that Pelée gave no such friendly signal before the river rose: thus lives have been lost. Most of the blanchisseuses are swimmers, and good ones,—I have seen one of these girls swim almost out of sight in the harbor, during an idle hour;—but no swimmer has any chances in a rising of the Roxelane: all overtaken by it are stricken by rocks and drift;—yo crazé, as a creole term expresses it,—a term signifying to crush, to bray, to dash to pieces.
... Sometimes it happens that one who has been absent at home for a brief while returns to the river only to meet her comrades fleeing from it,—many leaving their linen behind them. But she will not abandon the linen intrusted to her: she makes a run for it,—in spite of warning screams,—in spite of the vain clutching of kind rough fingers. She gains the river-bed:—the flood has already reached her waist, but she is strong; she reaches her linen,—snatches it up, piece by piece, scattered as it is—"one!—two!—five!—seven!";—there is a roaring in her ears—"eleven!—thirteen!" she has it all... but now the rocks are moving! For one instant she strives to reach the steps, only a few yards off;—another, and the thunder of the deluge is upon her,—and the crushing crags,—and the spinning trees....
Perhaps before sundown some canotier may find her floating far in the bay,—drifting upon her face in a thousand feet of water,—with faithful dead hands still holding fast the property of her employer.
[27]It was I who washed and ironed and mended;—at nine o'clock at night thou didst put me out-of-doors, with my child in my arms,—the rain was falling,—with my poor straw mattress upon my head!... Doudoux! thou dost abandon me!... I have none to care for me.
[28]See Appendix for specimens of creole music.