The coal wenches are amazing Amazons. How they wiggled and waltzed with coal-baskets on their heads, sweating, swearing, singing snatches of French songs and swaying to the music of a carnival band that came down to the boat and acted like madcap strolling players standing on heads and hands. The girls made a few cents a basket; if one greedily ran ahead out of turn, there was a “switchman” to lash her back in line. What coal-black Caryatides! Wonderful models—not of manners or morality—but muscles that would give a sculptor fits. Sure Mike Angelo would have wrestled with them, but Ben Cellini would have thought twice before he dared throw them about as he did his model whom he grabbed by the hair, kicked and mauled so she was compelled to anoint her wounds with bacon fat while he stood around and “larfed.” These husky, dusky damsels would have brained him with a lump of coal, thrown him in the sea, or mopped up the island with him. This holiday work gave the begrimed beauties extra money. They like work and carry their burdens on, not in their heads, the baskets often weighing 150 pounds each.

Streets of Castries are laid out in right angles, and many of the population were laid out in the streets at all angles. Every old soak fills up. I saw a black man and woman stagger along the walk, fall in the gutter, make love and wallow there like pigs. In the outskirts darky women were dragging their drunk lovers, brothers or husbands through the mud by heels or head or spreading them out like clothes to dry on doorsteps or windowsills. The squalor was stentorious and stercoraceous. Castries was a medley of noise, music and mud. The only bible commandment followed was the eleventh. “Thou shalt get stewed.” The patron saint of the city must be Saint Amant, the French seventeenth century bacchanalian bard who received inspiration for his drinking songs by imbibing enormous quantities of spirits which resulted in ebullitions like “La Debauche.” Alcaeus said, “Wine and truth”—and it was a very naked truth we saw in the Casino on the hill. Yes, it was quite “orgiferous.” What is an orgy? Listen to Gautier:

“Oh, the orgy giving to the winds its heaving breasts, red with kisses; the orgy shaking out its perfumed hair upon its bare shoulders, dancing, singing, shouting, holding one hand out to this man and the other to that one; the orgy, hot courtezan, that yields readily to every fancy, that drinks punch and laughs, that stains the cloth and its gown, that dips its garland of flowers in a bath of Malmsey wine; the ribald orgy, showing its foot and its leg, letting its heavy head fall to right or left; the quarrelsome, blaspheming orgy, quick to snatch its stilleto from its garter; the quivering orgy, that has only to stretch out its wand and turn an idiot into a poet and a poet into an idiot; the orgy that duplicates our being, and sends fire running through our veins, sets diamonds in our eyes and rubies on our lips; the orgy, the only poetry that is possible in these prosaic days.”

The Casino orchestra was squeaking, the couples reeking; airs were lively like those of the girls. One temptress asked me to give her a good time—and my watch; another charmer wanted my gold charm; but discretion was the better part of virtue and valor. To escape with money and morals, we slid down hill after throwing them a few shillings to buy religious tracts to make tracks in a different direction. In town a crowd stood watching two women fighting and shaking their fists and naked breasts at each other till the sweet milk of kindness turned to sour hate.

I went to a local banker to change some money. He was not in his office or home, but his charming daughter was. We exchanged Christmas courtesies and coin. She said she disliked our high American exchange, the color line in United States, and praised the fact that blacks and whites in St. Lucia ate, slept and grew up together. I was sorely tried, for a long time resisted temptation, but eventually succumbed to the enticements of this Eve’s daughter. She made me drink a glass she had filled with old French rum, syrup, lime-juice and other good things. I can’t remember, except that it was eloquent of the time, place and occasion. O tempora, O mores! How blessings brighten as they take their flight. I write with a glass of water nearby, in spite of the Horatian dictum that songs are not able to live long or please that are written in draughts of water. But I am writing prose, not poetry.

The guide-book asserts that “modest sleeping accommodations can be found in this island.” If so, it is one of the few places in the West Indies where, by day and night, the traveler is offered sleeping accommodations far removed from sleep or modesty. Cricket is popular in Castries, but not the bed-bug and cockroach.

If one is socially inclined there is many a black beauty whose back steps “take hold on hell.” One is accosted noon and night. Boat traffic in the West Indies is not always legitimately commercial. At different isles girls come aboard to sell beads, fruit and themselves. A ship is often delayed in getting these moral derelicts and strumpet stowaways put off. Do not be surprised if at various ports, men board the ship and invite Americans going ashore for the night to come and stay with their sisters—a hospitality quite Mexican and Latin-American. This is “old stuff” to observing travelers, but not often referred to by the average writers and lecturers on the West Indies who profoundly inform you the sky is blue, the grass green and the water wet. True, but Columbus discovered that—is there nothing else to describe?

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A Dog Story

Two dogs, on a trip through the Minnesota woods, came upon a skunk.