“This rain will do good to the corn,” said the overseer. “The niggers has had sceerce nothin’ to do leetly, as they ’eve clearied out the fields pretty well.”
At the ferry-house I was attended by one stout young slave, who was to row me over. Two flat-bottomed skiffs lay on the bank. The negro groped under the shed, and pulled out a piece of wood like a large spatula, some four feet long, and a small round pole a little longer. “What are those?” quoth I. “Dem’s oars, Massa,” was my sable ferryman’s brisk reply. “I’m very sure they are not; if they were spliced they might make an oar between them.” “Golly, and dat’s the trute, Massa.” “Then go and get oars, will you?” While he was hunting about we entered the shed at the ferry for shelter from the rain. We found “a solitary woman sitting” smoking a pipe by the ashes on the hearth, blear-eyed, low-browed and morose—young as she was. She never said a word nor moved as we came in, sat and smoked, and looked through her gummy eyes at chickens about the size of sparrows, and at a cat not larger than a rat which ran about on the dirty floor. A little girl, some four years of age, not over-dressed—indeed, half-naked, “not to put too fine a point upon it”—crawled out from under the bed, where she had hid on our approach. As she seemed incapable of appreciating the use of a small piece of silver presented to her—having no precise ideas in coinage or toffy—her parent took the obolus in charge, with unmistakeable decision; but still the lady would not stir a step to aid our guide, who now insisted on the “key ov de oar-house.” The little thing sidled off and hunted it out from the top of the bedstead, and when it was found, and the boat was ready, I was not sorry to quit the company of the silent woman in black. The boatman pushed his skiff, in shape a snuffer-dish, some ten feet long and a foot deep, into the water—there was a good deal of rain in it. I got in too, and the conscious waters immediately began vigorously spurting through the cotton wadding wherewith the craft was caulked. Had we gone out into the stream we should have had a swim for it, and they do say that the Mississippi is the most dangerous river in the known world, for that healthful exercise. “Why! deuce take you” (I said at least that, in my wrath), “don’t you see the boat is leaky?” “See it now for true, Massa. Nobody able to tell dat till Massa get in though.” Another skiff proved to be more staunch. I bade good-bye to my friend Roman, and sat down in my boat, which was forced by the negro against the stream close to the bank, in order to get a good start across to the other side. The view from my lonely position was curious, but not at all picturesque. The world was bounded on both sides by a high bank, which constricted the broad river, just as if one were sailing down an open sewer of enormous length and breadth. Above the bank rose the tops of tall trees and the chimneys of sugar-houses, and that was all to be seen save the sky.
A quarter of an hour brought us to the levée on the other side. I ascended the bank, and across the road, directly in front appeared a carriage gateway and wickets of wood, painted white, in a line of park palings of the same material, which extended up and down the road far as the eye could see, and guarded wide-spread fields of maize and sugar-cane. An avenue lined with trees, with branches close set, drooping and overarching a walk paved with red brick, led to the house, the porch of which was visible at the extremity of the lawn, with clustering flowers, rose, jessamine, and creepers clinging to the pillars supporting the verandah. The view from the belvedere on the roof was one of the most striking of its kind in the world.
If an English agriculturist could see six thousand acres of the finest land in one field, unbroken by hedge or boundary, and covered with the most magnificent crops of tasseling Indian corn and sprouting sugar-cane, as level as a billiard-table, he would surely doubt his senses. But here is literally such a sight—six thousand acres, better tilled than the finest patch in all the Lothians, green as Meath pastures, which can be turned up for a hundred years to come without requiring manure, of depth practically unlimited, and yielding an average profit on what is sold off it of at least 20l. an acre, at the old prices and usual yield of sugar. Rising up in the midst of the verdure are the white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices and sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the distance. My host was not ostentatiously proud in telling me that, in the year 1857, he had purchased this estate for 300,000l. and an adjacent property, of 8000 acres, for 150,000l., and that he had left Belfast in early youth, poor and unfriended, to seek his fortune, and indeed scarcely knowing what fortune meant, in the New World. In fact, he had invested in these purchases the greater part, but not all, of the profits arising from the business in New Orleans, which he inherited from his master; of which there still remained a solid nucleus in the shape of a great woollen magazine and country house. He is not yet fifty years of age, and his confidence in the great future of sugar induced him to embark this enormous fortune in an estate which the blockade has stricken with paralysis.
I cannot doubt, however, that he regrets he did not invest his money in a certain great estate in the North of Ireland, which he had nearly decided on buying; and, had he done so, he would now be in the position to which his unaffected good sense, modesty, kindliness, and benevolence, always adding the rental, entitle him. Six thousand acres on this one estate all covered with sugar-cane, and 16,000 acres more of Indian corn, to feed the slaves;—these were great possessions, but not less than 18,000 acres still remained, covered with brake and forest and swampy, to be reclaimed and turned into gold. As easy to persuade the owner of such wealth that slavery is indefensible as to have convinced the Norman baron that the Saxon churl who tilled his lands ought to be his equal.
I found Mr. Ward and a few merchants from New Orleans in possession of the bachelor’s house. The service was performed by slaves, and the order and regularity of the attendants were worthy of a well-regulated English mansion. In Southern houses along the coast, as the Mississippi above New Orleans is termed, beef and mutton are rarely met with, and the more seldom the better. Fish, also, is scarce, but turkeys, geese, poultry, and preparations of pig, excellent vegetables, and wine of the best quality, render the absence of the accustomed dishes little to be regretted.
The silence which struck me at Governor Roman’s is not broken at Mr. Burnside’s; and when the last thrill of the mocking-bird’s song has died out through the grove, a stillness of Avernian profundity settles on hut, field, and river.
CHAPTER XXXIV. Negroes—Sugar-cane plantations
Negroes—Sugar-cane plantations—The negro and cheap labour—Mortality of blacks and whites—Irish labour in Louisiana—A sugar-house—Negro children—Want of education—Negro diet—Negro hospital—Spirits in the morning—Breakfast—More slaves—Creole planters.