... Poor Yé!—you still live for me only too vividly outside of those strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak slopes above the clouds;—I have seen you climbing from plantation to plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master, though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;—I have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles to market, rather than labor in the fields;—I have seen you ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find a cabbage-palm,—and always hungry,—and always shiftless! And you are still a great fool, poor Yé!—and you have still your swarm of children,—your rafale yche,—and they are famished; for you have taken into your ajoupa a Devil who devours even more than you can earn,—even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless brain,—the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the struggle for life. But you feel that law now;—you are a citizen of the Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;—and this new knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh!
[LYS]
I
It is only half-past four o'clock: there is the faintest blue light of beginning day,—and little Victoire already stands at the bedside with my wakening cup of hot black fragrant coffee. What! so early?... Then with a sudden heart-start I remember this is my last West Indian morning. And the child—her large timid eyes all gently luminous—is pressing something into my hand.
Two vanilla beans wrapped in a morsel of banana-leaf,—her poor little farewell gift!...
Other trifling souvenirs are already packed away. Almost everybody that knows me has given me something. Manm-Robert brought me a tiny packet of orange-seeds,—seeds of a "gift-orange": so long as I can keep these in my vest-pocket I will never be without money. Cyrillia brought me a package of bouts, and a pretty box of French matches, warranted inextinguishable by wind. Azaline, the blanchisseuse, sent me a little pocket looking-glass. Cerbonnie, the màchanne, left a little cup of guava jelly for me last night. Mimi—dear child!—brought me a little paper dog! It is her best toy; but those gentle black eyes would stream with tears if I dared to refuse it.... Oh, Mimi! what am I to do with a little paper dog? And what am I to do with the chocolate-sticks and the cocoanuts and all the sugar-cane and all the cinnamon-apples?...
II
... Twenty minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill shadows are shrinking back from the shore;—the long wharves reach out yellow into the sun;—the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching the glow. Then, over the light-house—on the outermost line depending from the southern yard-arm of the semaphore—a big black ball suddenly runs up like a spider climbing its own thread.... Steamer from the South! The packet has been sighted. And I have not yet been able to pack away into a specially purchased wooden box all the fruits and vegetable curiosities and odd little presents sent to me. If Radice the boatman had not come to help me, I should never be able to get ready; for the work of packing is being continually interrupted by friends and acquaintances coming to say good-bye. Manm-Robert brings to see me a pretty young girl—very fair, with a violet foulard twisted about her blonde head. It is little Basilique, who is going to make her pouémiè communion. So I kiss her, according to the old colonial custom, once on each downy cheek;—and she is to pray to Notre Dame du Bon Port that the ship shall bear me safely to far-away New York.