Some of the words might have been elusive had they been unfamiliar, but the annual agitation kept the songs of the river in mind; and even in safe sections, where many sat in peace beside the rising waters, they would take their pipes from their lips to catch up the danger-songs and sympathetically pass them along. Many a prayer went with them, too, from humble petitioners who knew whereof they prayed.
Such were an old black couple who sat one night upon the brow of the outer levee at Carrollton, since become an upper district of far-reaching New Orleans.
In strong contrast to the stirring scenes enacting below the city, all was peace and tranquillity here. A strong, new embankment, securely built several hundred feet inland, had some years before supplanted the outer levee, condemned as insecure, so that the white inhabitants of the suburb slept, intelligently safe behind a double barrier, for the condemned bank had stood the stress of so many seasons that much of the low land lying between the two levees was finally occupied by squatters, mostly negroes, this being free space, taking no rent of such as did not fear the ever-impending mortgage which the river held.
Of this class, quite apart from others, might have been seen almost any evening the old couple, Hannah and Israel, sitting upon the brow of the levee near the door of their low cabin, while, always within call, there played about them a fair-haired little girl and a dog.
When the beautiful child, followed by the dog, a fine Irish setter, would suddenly emerge in a chase from among the woodpiles about the cabin, there was a certain high-bred distinction in them both which set them apart from the rest of the picture.
Sometimes they would "play too hearty," as Mammy expressed it, and she would call: "Dat 'll do now, Blossom! Come lay down, Blucher!" and, followed closely by the dog, the child would coddle at the knees of the woman, who "made the time pass" with stories. Sometimes these would be folk-tales brought over from Africa, or reminiscences of plantation life, but more often, feeling her religious responsibility to the little one, old Hannah would repeat such Bible stories as "befitted a child's mind," such as "Ab'um an' Isaac," "Eden's Gyarden," or "De Prodigum Son."
Of them all, the Eden story was easily favorite, its salient mystery features affording fine scope for the narrator's power, while they held the imaginative child with the spell of all good wonder-tales. We get these stories so young and grow up with them so familiarly that when we finally come into a realization of them they hold no possible surprise and so their first charm is lost. Think of one story with such elements as a wonder-woman rising from a man's side while he slept—a talking serpent, persuasive in temptation as insidious in easy approaches—a flaming sword of wrath—a tree of knowledge—and the sounding voice of God as he walked through the garden "in the cool of the day"! Is not a single colloquialism of so venerable ancestry sufficient to dignify a language?
Herself a classic in that she expressed the eternal quality of maternal love incarnate, the old woman thus unconsciously passed along to the object of her devotion the best classic lore of the ages. And sunrise and sunset, star- and moon-land, and their reflection in the great water-mirror, were hers and the child's, without the asking. Nor were they lost, although to both child and woman they were only common elements in life's great benediction.
During the story-telling, which generally lasted until the sun sank across the river, but while its last rays still made "pictures of glory in the heavens" with the water's reflection,—pictures which served to illustrate many a narration, to inspire the speaker and impress a sensitive child,—the dog would stretch himself facing the two, and his intelligent and quizzical expression would sometimes make Mammy laugh in a serious place or change the drift of her story. Often, indeed, this had happened in the telling of certain animal tales which Mammy declared Blucher knew better than she and she even insisted that he occasionally winked at her and set her right when she went wrong.
In the early dusk, the old man Israel would come trudging in from the water and sometimes he would light his pipe and join Mammy's audience.