“Once it vas very fine house,” said the French overseer, with a shrug of his shoulders; “but des soldats; dey vas so had as you see nevare. Dey pasture deir horses on our flowers and stable dem on dis marble pavement. I am désolée,” he continued, “to have not ze power to entertain you as I should like, but dey took all our liqueurs, and drank our champagnes—sacre—as if dey tought is vas lager beer. Dey broke all our dishes; and Monsieur Paine, he buried ze silver to save it, and found it again nevare.”
Still, the old place disclosed unexpected treasures of claret, which it gladdened the heart of the Creole to see us taste; and the house servants succeeded in making the spacious but half-furnished bed-chambers comparatively comfortable.
Next morning, while the new proprietor was looking into the arrangements made in accordance with his orders, for stocking the place and beginning operations, I busied myself with explorations. From the front gallery, into which the glass-door of my bed-room opened, I looked out upon a broad, brick pavement, running through the garden to the public road which, here, as for hundreds of miles up the Mississippi, everywhere, skirts the levee. In the middle of it was a brick column, three or four feet high, serving as a pedestal for a leaden sun-dial, which had formerly been set with accurate care in mortar on its top. During the military occupation, the soldiers had amused themselves by firing from the gallery at this dial, and one too good shot had struck it fairly in the center leaving its deep indentation, and breaking the whole dial loose from its bed in the mortar.
The garden had evidently taken much of the time and no small share of the profits of the former proprietor. Even yet, notwithstanding the destruction by the troops and the neglect during the war, many of the rarest shrubs and flowers were in luxuriant growth. It was still January. I had left Washington in the midst of a heavy snow storm, and the telegraph brought accounts of continued cold weather; but in this deserted garden we plucked bouquets of rare flowers, growing in the open air, which scarcely a green-house in Washington could have equalled. Fig and banana trees were of course abundant. Oranges had been served at breakfast which had been plucked from the trees last fall; and, in the edge of the garden, we now found others on which the oranges were still hanging in spite of the winter’s frosts. Most of these were wild; but several trees, bearing fruit that after all its exposure was still pleasant to the taste, had escaped the gathering of the soldiers and the after-gleaning of the negroes. China trees, filled with mocking birds, formed a short avenue in front of the house; and in a corner of the garden was one of the rarities, which the Creole overseer delighted to exhibit, a cork tree, already quite large, which in a few years might furnish all the corks they wanted for bottling their own wines from the wood. The green-house was in utter ruin. The soldiers had amused themselves by shattering its glass-roof; and the shelves, on which the potted plants had been placed, were rotted away and broken down.
“Jim,” the sugar-maker, called me from the flowers to see the sugar-house. He was a middle-aged, shrewd looking negro, who had been sold here by one of the Virginia patriarchs at a very early day. He could remember learning a trade in Virginia; “but I’s been heah so long I dunno much ’bout de ole place. I’d like to go back to see it, for pears like it was mity fine place to live; but I wouldn’t stay dare now. Dis is my home.”
To the right of the house stood the “quarters,” a double row of dilapidated frame cabins, each containing two rooms, with a porch in front, covered by the projecting roof. Each room was supposed to furnish accommodations for five adults. If they were all in one family, very well; if not, two or three families must go together. For these five persons there was, in the single room, space for a couple of bedsteads, a little table, two or three chests, and as many chairs. Each had a fire-place, a door and a hole in the wall opposite, closed by a wooden shutter, which they called a window. “These quarters ought to be whitewashed,” said the proprietor. “Wait till the niggers all get back and they’ll do it themselves, and we’ll save that expense,” replied the agent.
Beyond the quarters, in a large field well-set in Bermuda grass, stood the sugar-house. Everything about it seemed damp and soggy. We approached it over ground yielding to our tread from the moisture, and ascended to the door by a wooden stair case, covered with a slimy growth of fungus, and half-rotted away.
Within stood a fine engine, which “Jim” exhibited with pride. “Eberything dar, sah. Dem brasses you see gone, I done locked up to keep de niggers from stealing ’em. De pipes and de valves, all locked up safe, sah. I ken set her a runnin in a day, sah, and you don’t need to send to Orleans once for nuffin.” Near the engine were the boiling pans, and in a long “L” of the building was the wide trough into which the fluid was run off for cooling and crystallization. Everything here seemed scrupulously neat, although the fact that the negroes had worked the place by themselves, last year would not generally have been taken as a guaranty for cleanliness.
“Jim” was greatly disgusted with his last year’s effort to make the niggers work. “I sposed, now we’s all free, dey’d jump into de work keen, to make all de money dey could. But it was juss no work at all. I got so ’scouraged sometimes I’s ready to gib it all up, and tell ’em to starve if dey wanted to. Why, sah, after I’d ring de bell in the mornin’ ’twould be hour, or hour ’n half ’fore a man’d get into de fiel’. Den dey’d work along maybe an hour, maybe half hour more; and den dey’d say Jim, aint it time to quit? I say, ‘No, you lazy dog, taint ten o’clock,’ Den dey’d say, ‘Jim, I’s mighty tired,’ and next thing I’d know, dey’d be pokin’ off to de quarters. When I scold and swear at ’em, dey say, ‘we’s free now, and we’s not work unless we pleases.’ Sah, I got so sick of deir wuflessness dat I sometimes almost wished it was old slavery times again.”