As to the great truth, happiness depends upon what is in the soul of the man, not upon his surroundings.
But Batouala while he disliked work could exert himself to hunt or fight. His grievance was that which has moved men more than any other thro’ all the ages. He and his people were too heavily taxed. He gathered the people together and harangued them.
“A drunken crowd pressed up behind the group of which Batouala was the centre. They reviled the whites. Batouala was right, a thousand times right. Of old before the coming of the whites, they had lived happily. They had worked a little for themselves, they had eaten and drunk and slept. From time to time they had had bloody palavers and had plucked the livers from the dead to eat their courage and incorporate it in themselves. Such had been the happy days of old, before the coming of the whites.”[410]
Then follows a description of the great dance.
“Bissibingui was the handsomest of all. The strongest too. His muscles stood out. His eyes glowed like the brush on fire.... What had gone before was nothing. All the preceding noises and outcries, the confused dancing had only been a preparation for what was to come—the dance of love, scarcely ever danced but on this evening, when they were permitted to indulge in debauchery and crime.... Couples formed.... It was the immense joy of brutes loosed from all control.... A couple dancing fell to the ground.
Suddenly his fingers twitching about a knife in his hand, Batouala, the Mokoundji rushed upon this couple. He was foaming. His fist was raised for the blow. More nimble than monkeys, Bissibingui and Yassiguindjia leapt out of his reach. He pursued them. Ah, these children of a dog had the impudence to desire each other before his very eyes. He’d have the skin of that strumpet. As for Bissibingui ... Ah, wouldn’t the women make fun of him then. Yassiguindjia! The idea! Hadn’t he bought her with seven waist cloths, a box of salt, three copper collars, a bitch, four pots, six hens, twenty she goats, forty big baskets of millet, and a girl slave! Ah, he’d make Yassiguindjia take the test poison.”[411]
But the arrival of the commandant saves the guilty couple. Batouala, however, still plots the life of Bissibingui, who is plotting the robbery of his own people, as one of the commandant’s soldiery. In the great hunt Batouala hurls a javelin at his rival, misses him and is himself struck down by an infuriated passing panther. So the dark patriot falls and the black scalawag wins. It is an impressive picture of African life, the men, the women and the conjugality.
Turn we now to the coast of South Carolina, where in “The Black Border,” the scene is laid, for “Jim Moultrie’s Divorce,” the deepest in discernment of all the life like sketches of that moving book.
Jim, too, was a great hunter, an unwearied pursuer. No animal. But a black man. A believer in divorce, as almost all Negroes in America are, even in South Carolina, where the law refuses it.
At the end of a cold blustering day in February, after pushing his clumsy dug-out canoe into every creek and lead of the Jehossee marshes, to flush ducks for the white sportsman who had hired him, at sun set he is turning home. How the picture appeals to us of the coast.