‘You tink I do obeah because I doan’t will let you go to prayer-meetin’! Dat just like white-man argument. Him tink de naygur can nebber be in de right. Old-time folk has little proverb: “Mountain sheep always guilty when jungle tiger sit to judge him.”’
Tom Dupuy laughed and nodded. ‘Well, good-night.—Down, Slot, down, good fellow; down, down, down, I tell you!—Good-night, Louis Delgado, and mind, whatever you do, no obeah!’
The negro watched him slowly round the corner, with a suspicious eye kept well fixed upon the reluctant stealthy retreat of the Cuban bloodhound; and as soon as Dupuy had got safely beyond earshot, he sat down in the soft dust that formed the bare platform outside his hut, and mumbled to himself, as negroes will do, a loud dramatic soliloquy, in every deep and varying tone of passion and hatred. ‘Ha, ha, Mistah Tom Dupuy,’ he began quietly, ‘so you go about always wid de Cuban bloodhound, an’ you laugh to see him spring at de troat ob de black man! You tink dat frighten him from come steal your cane an’ your mangoes! You tink de black man afraid ob de dog, yarra! yarra! Ha, dat frighten Trinidad naygur, perhaps, but it doan’t frighten salt-water naygur from Africa! I hab charms, I hab potion, I hab draught to quiet him! I doan’t afraid ob fifty bloodhound. But it doan’t good for buckra gentleman to walk about wid dog dat spring at de black man. Black man laugh to-day, perhaps, but press him heart tight widin him. De time come when black man will find him heart break out, an’ de hate in it flow over an’ make blood run, like dry ribber in de rainy season. Den him sweep away buckra, an’ bloodhound, an’ all before him; an’ seize de country, colour for colour. De land is black, an’ de land for de black man. When de black man burst him heart like ribber burst him bank in de rainy season, white man’s house snap off before him like bamboo hut when de flood catch it!’ As he spoke, he pushed his hands out expansively before him, and gurgled in his throat with fierce inarticulate African gutturals, that seemed to recall in some strange fashion the hollow eddying roar and gurgle of the mountain torrents in the rainy season.
‘Chicken doan’t nebber lub jackal, yarra,’ he went on after a short pause of expectant triumph; ‘an’ naygur doan’t nebber lub buckra, dat certain. But ob all de buckra in de island ob Trinidad, dem Dupuy is de very worst an’ de very contemptfullest. Some day, black man will rise, an’ get rid ob dem all for good an’ ebber. If I like, I can kill dem all to-day; but I gwine to wait. De great an’ terrible day ob de Lard is not come yet. Missy Dupuy ober in England, where de buckra come from. England is de white man’s Africa; de missy dar to learn him catechism. I wait till Missy Dupuy come back before I kill de whole family. When de great an’ terrible day ob de Lard arrive, I doan’t leave a single Dupuy a libbin soul in de island ob Trinidad. I slay dem all, an’ de missy wid dem, yarra, yarra!’
The last two almost inarticulate words were uttered with a yell of triumph. Hearing footsteps now approaching, he broke out into a loud soliloquy of exultation in his own native African language. It was a deep, savage-sounding West Coast dialect, full of harsh and barbaric clicks or gutturals; for Louis Delgado, as Tom Dupuy had rightly said, was ‘an imported African’—a Coromantyn, sold as a slave some thirty years before to a Cuban slave-trader trying to break the blockade on the coast, and captured with all her living cargo by an English cruiser off Sombrero Island. The liberated slaves had been landed, according to custom, at the first British port where the cutter touched; and thus Louis Delgado—as he learned to call himself—a wild African born, from the Coromantyn seaboard, partially Anglicised and outwardly Christianised, was now a common West Indian plantation hand on the two estates of Orange Grove and Pimento Valley. There are dozens of such semi-civilised imported negroes still to be found under similar circumstances in every one of the West India islands.
As the steps gradually approached nearer, it became plain, from the soft footfall in the dust of the bridle-path, that it was a shoeless black person who was coming towards him. In a minute more, the new-comer had turned the corner, and displayed herself as a young and comely negress—pretty with the round, good-humoured African prettiness of smooth black skin, plump cheeks, clear eyes, and regular, even pearl-white teeth. The girl was dressed in a loose Manchester cotton print, brightly coloured, and not unbecoming, with a tidy red bandana bound turban-wise around her shapely head, but barefooted, barelimbed, and bare of neck and shoulder. Her figure was good, as the figure of most negresses usually is; and she held herself erect and upright with the peculiar lithe gracefulness said to be induced by the universal practice of carrying pails of water and other burdens on the top of the head from the very earliest days of negro childhood. As she approached Delgado, she first smiled and showed all her pretty teeth, as she uttered the customary polite salutation of ‘Marnin’! sah, marnin’!’ and then dropped a profound courtesy with an unmistakable air of awe and reverence.
Louis Delgado affected not to observe the girl for a moment, and went on jabbering loudly and fiercely to himself in his swift and fluent African jargon. But it was evident that his hearer was deeply impressed at once by this rapt and prophetic inattention of the strange negro, who spoke with tongues to vacant space in such an awful and intensely realistic fashion. She paused for a while and looked at him intently; then, when he stopped for a second to take breath in the midst of one of his passionate incoherent outbursts, she came a step nearer to him and courtesied again, at the same time that she muttered in a rather injured querulous treble: ‘Mistah Delgado, you no hear me, sah? You no listen to me? I tellin’ you marnin’.’
The old man broke off suddenly, as if recalled to himself and common earth by some disenchanting touch, and answered dreamily: ‘Marnin’, Missy Rosina. Marnin’, le-ady. You gwine up to Gilead now to de prayer-meetin’?’
Rosina, glancing down at the Bible and hymn-book in her plump black hand, answered demurely: ‘Yes, sah, I gwine dar.’
Delgado shook himself vigorously, as if in the endeavour to recover from some unearthly trance, and went on in his more natural manner: ‘I gwine up too, to pray wid de bredderin. You want me for someting? You callin’ to me for help you?’