The St. John's River is one of the most picturesque and beautiful streams in the world. Its bluffs never rise higher than fifty or sixty feet; it has no abrupt precipices; the whole formation about it is tertiary and drift or modern terrace; but its first eighty miles from its mouth are broad as a bay of the sea, and its narrow upper course above Pilatka, where current supersedes tide, is all one dream of Eden,—an infinitely tortuous avenue, peopled with myriads of beautiful wild-birds, roofed by overhanging branches of oak, magnolia, and cypress, draped with the moss that tones down those solitudes into a sort of day-moonlight, and, in the greatest contrast with this, festooned by the lavish clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,—the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,—the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers of bewildering fragrance.
To the hunting, fishing, and exploration of such a river I was never sorry that I had brought my own boat. It was one of the chefs-d'[oe]uvres of my old schoolmate Ingersoll,—a copper-fastened, clinker-built pleasure-boat, pulling two pairs of sculls, fifteen feet long, comfortably accommodating six persons, and adorned by the builder with a complimentary blue and gilt backboard of mahogany and a pair of presentation tiller-ropes twisted from white and crimson silk.
In this boat I and the companion of my exile took much comfort. When we intended only a short row,—some trifle of ten or twelve miles,—we always pulled for ourselves; but on long tours, where the faculties of observation would have been impaired by the fatigue of action, we employed as our oarsman a black man whom I shall call Sol Cutter,—not knowing on which side of the lines he may be at present.
Sol, when we first discovered him, was hovering around the Jacksonville wharves, looking for a job. It is so novel to see that kind of thing in the South, that I asked him if he was a free negro. He replied, that he was the slave of a gentleman who allowed him to buy his time. He said "allowed"; but I suspect that the truer, though less delicate, way of putting it would have been to say "obliged" him to, for the sake of a living. Sol's "Mossa Cutter" had remaining to him none of the paternal acres; and it never having occurred to him, that, when lands and houses all are spent, then learning is most excellent, he possessed none of that nous which would have enabled a Northern man to outflank embarrassments by directing his forces into new channels. Having worked a plantation, when he had no longer any plantation to work he was compelled to send his negroes into the street to earn an eleëmosynary living for him. This was no obloquy. How many such men has every Southern traveller seen,—"sons of the first South Carolina families,"—parodying the Caryatides against the sunny wall of some low grog-shop during a whole winter afternoon,—their eyes listless, their hands in their pockets, their legs outstretched, their backs bent, their conversation a languid mixture of Cracker dialect and overseer slang, their negroes' earnings running down their throats at intervals, as they change their outside for a temporary inside position,—and all the well-dressed citizens addressing them cheerfully as "Colonel" and "Major," without a blush of shame, as they go by! Goldwin Smith was right in pointing at such men as one of the former palliations for the social invectives of the foreign tourist,—though any such tourist with brains need not have mistaken them for sample Americans, having already been in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The trouble is, that foreign tourists, as a rule, do not have brains. At any rate, they may say to us, as Artemus Ward of his gifts of eloquence,—"I have them, but—I haven't got them with me."
Sol Cutter paid his master eight dollars a week. As he had to keep himself out of his remainder earnings, he was naturally more enterprising than most slaves, and I took a fancy to him immediately. From the day I found him, he always went out with me on my long rows.
The middle of a river six miles wide is the safest place that can be found at the South for insurrectionary conversation. Even there I used to wonder whether the Southerners had not given secret-service money to the alligators who occasionally stuck their knobby noses above the flood to scent our colloquies.
Sol was pulling away steadily, having "got his second wind" at the end of the first mile. I was sitting with tiller-ropes in hand, and studying his strong-featured, but utterly expressionless face, with deep curiosity. His face was one over which the hot roller of a great agony has passed, smoothing out all its meaning.
"So your master sells you your time?"
"Yes, Mossa." (Always "Mossa" never "Massa," so far South as this.)
"Do you support your wife and children as well as yourself?"