[73]. The lost time would more than bring it down to this average.
[74]. They mostly took meal, of choice, and to simplify the calculation it alone is counted.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Among the Cotton Plantations—Rations and Ways of Work.
A day or two after my visit to the plantations just described, I started on a little horseback trip down the river. I was furnished with letters to a planter, nineteen or twenty miles down, and I supposed that the distance might be easily made in three hours. I left Natchez at two; but the delays at the ferry made it three before I reached the Louisiana side of the river. The February frosts had been keen, but the afternoon was oppressively warm. For miles along the bank of the river the horizon was blue and misty with the columns of smoke from the trash-gangs on the plantations. Here and there an ox-team was passed by the roadside, hauling willow-poles from the river banks to repair the fences. The negroes were at work on every plantation—the plows near the road, the trash-gang further back toward the swamp that everywhere shut in the view. Houses appeared at but rare intervals, not averaging one per mile. But few seemed to be more than the mere lodgings for the overseers. There were no poor whites in this country, from which the aristocratic planters had driven them. Behind or beside each house stretched the unvarying double row of quarters, with the little mud-floored porches in front, and the swarms of little picaninnies tumbling about in the sunshine. Every one had accommodations for at least a hundred negroes. Coveys of quails and broods of pigeons started up with a whir by the roadside; and, occasionally, from the fields came faintly the shout of some plowman to his team. Other sounds they were none—the country seemed almost as silent as the unbroken wilderness. Not a traveler was seen on the whole road.
I had miscalculated the strength of my horse, and nightfall found me six or seven miles from my destination. For some time the road had been leading along the top of a high levee, a little distance from the river. The plantations were very low and partially covered with water. Finally the levee led off directly into the cypress swamp at a point where the land had been thought too low to be worth clearing out. Briars grew over its sides and occasionally stretched across the path; the road was very rough, and to leave it, on either hand, was to ride down the side of the levee into the swamp. Finally the exhausted horse could carry me no further, and I was compelled to dismount and plod slowly along on foot. Now and then the whir of a covey of quails sounded startling in the darkness—on either hand could be heard the rush of ducks and geese in the water. There were deer in the swamps, I had been told, and likewise bears. The latter suggestion was scarcely a pleasant one.
By and by the darkness became less profound on the river side of the levee; and straining my eyes to make out the dimly defined objects, I saw what seemed a two thousand acre plantation, with a large set of negro quarters outside the levee. Outside or inside, I was determined to stop there. Starting down the side of the levee I soon found that the ground was swampy. Returning, and following along the beaten road, I presently came directly up to the river—stopped short, in fact, within half-a-dozen feet of its brink. Turning up the bank I started again for the quarters, now more clearly seen. It was no slight disappointment to discover that they were unoccupied! The plantation had been thrown outside the levee, on account of a change in the current of the river, had been abandoned for years, and was under water every spring!
Groping my way tediously back to the road, I started again down the river. Half an hour’s walk brought me to a light, glimmering through the open windows of some negro quarters. The blacks showed the way to the house—further back from the levee—and here explicit directions were given for the plantation I was seeking. I had only to go down the river a couple of miles further, then turn off through a gate, follow the road across a little lake and along its bank for a quarter of a mile. All went well till I crossed the lake. Then, near where I supposed the house ought to be, bright lights were shining, and a beaten path, through an open gate led to them, and so I walked half across the plantation to find that the trash-gang had been firing some dead cypress trees, and that, instead of the house, I was near the swamp!
It was after ten o’clock when at last, groping my way among the negro quarters, I reached the double cabin, fronting the street, where the overseer lived. No other person was at home, but the welcome was a hearty one. Fried bacon and corn-bread were speedily served up for supper, and the fatigues of the journey forgotten as the jovial overseer told his experiences in running off slaves to Texas, when the Yankees came, and his disgust, that after all his trouble, the whole work proved useless.
This plantation contained eight hundred acres of land cleared for cotton, besides a thousand or twelve hundred of timber-land, covered with hackberry, cypress, and cotton-wood; a portion of which ran down to the river bank and afforded an excellent site for a wood-yard. Plenty of negroes could be hired to chop wood for a dollar per cord. Half a dollar more would pay for its delivery on the river bank, where steamboats bought all they could get for five dollars per cord—thus affording the proprietor of the wood-yard a net profit of three dollars and a half on every cord.
Less than fifty hands had yet been hired on the plantation; not as many by at least thirty, the overseer said, as were absolutely needed to cultivate the eight hundred acres; but with this inadequate force the work on the plantation was further advanced than on any I had seen. The most cordial good-feeling seemed to exist between the negroes and the overseer. “Him allus good man in de ole slavery times. He allus did jussice to us niggers,” said one of them. For twenty years this man had done nothing but oversee negroes. He boasted of having made, one unusually good year, seventeen bales to the hand. Here he expected to make about twelve or thirteen—not less, if the high water did not interfere, than a bale to every acre of the whole eight hundred. The proprietors paid ten thousand dollars for the lease. Twenty thousand dollars would probably pay the running expenses, (including the hire of additional hands, if they could be got,) and the net profit therefore ought to be nearly or quite fifty thousand dollars in a favorable year.