As hot a day as ever blazed on the lowlands of Louisiana,
blazed once in mid-April on the plantation of Mr. Torwood
Lafitte, parish of Avoyelles, in the Red River region. Perhaps
it was because the heat was so unseasonable that it
seemed as if never, not even in midsummer, had there been so
hot a day. One might have been pardoned for imagining that
heat not of this world. Mr. William Tassle, overseer to
Lafitte, was a profane man, but he might have been considered
as only a profane poet aiming at the vivid expression
of a mystical dark truth, when, speaking of the day, he said it
was as hot as Hell.
It was the Sabbath, but an active fancy, brooding over the
general condition of man and nature on Mr. Lafitte’s plantation,
might have thought it rather the Devil’s Sabbath than
the Sabbath of the Lord. Through the vaporous atmosphere,
simmering with the heat, swarming with insect life, and reeking
with the dense, sickly sweetness of tropic plants and
flowers, the fierce sun poured a flood of stagnant, yellow light,
which lay in a broad and brassy glare over the low landscape.
Veiled by the cruel radiance, rose afar in the west and north
the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and in the southern distance the
solemn masses of gloom formed by the cotton-woods, live-oaks
and cypresses of the Great Pacondrie Swamp. The eye
wandering backward from the depths of the morass, saw the
smouldering fire of the atmosphere envelop the enormous
trees, draped everywhere with long streamers of black moss,
and kindle the broad palmetto bottoms, and the multi-colored
luxuriance of tropical vegetation, which sprang into ranker life
beneath the vivid and sullen ray. The sluggish tide of the
bayou basked with snaky gleams in the quivering lustre; the
red marl of the plantation where mules and negroes were toiling
painfully under the oaths and blows of the drivers and overseer,
darkly glowed in it; the bright, rank green of the lawn
before the mansion was aflare with it; and the mansion itself,
with its rose and jasmin vines drooping around the posts
of the veranda, looked scorched to a deeper brown in the
hot, thick, yellow, intolerable glare.
Shadows that day were the demons of the landscape.
Shadows of intense and peculiar blackness, so compact
that they seemed to have a substantial being of their own,
lurked in the yellow light around and beneath every object. A
dark fancy might have dreamed them a host of devils, disguised
as shadows, and mustered to prevent the escape of a soul from
Hell. Black with a strange blackness, shaped to an ugly goblin
resemblance of the thing they accompanied, they were scattered
like a host of demon sentries all over the scene, and had
watch and ward of everything. The gaunt, stilted bittern standing
motionless near the water, had his black goblin duplicate
beneath him on the glistering clay. The mud-hued, warty-hided,
abominable alligator, as he raised himself on his short legs, had
his black, misshapen, shadow-caricature to lumber up with him
on the trodden mire, and it went with him as he took his lumpish
plunge into the foul bayou. Every plant or shrub had its
scraggy imp of shadow sprawling beneath it, and darting and
dodging as if to catch it whenever it moved. Every tree—cypress,
live-oak, sycamore, cotton-wood, or gum, all solemnly
draped with black moss—had its scrawny phantom to toss and
flicker fantastically with the tangled motion of a hundred darting
arms, if the branches or their streamers swayed in the
furnace-breath of the light wind. Every fallen trunk, or log,
or stump, or standing post had its immovable, black sentinel
shape of shadow projected beyond it, or crouching by its side.
Along the running fences on the plantation ran black, spectral
bars on the red marl. In the fields, among the new-sprung
corn, sown with the pain and sweat of slaves, a demon-crop
of shadow mocked with its ugly color and fantastic shape
the green beauty of the pennoned grain. The reeking mules,
panting and straining, with drooping heads, as they dragged
the groaning ploughs through the soil of the cotton fields, or
pulled the clanking harrows over the furrowed rows, had their
monstrous jags of sooty shadow, like the malformed beasts of
a devil’s dream, jerking along with shapeless instruments
beside them. The black drudges, men and women, plodding
and tottering in the sweltering heat, behind the ploughs,
beside the harrows, or dropping seed into the drills, had
hunched and ugly goblin dwarfs of shadow, vigilantly dogging
their footsteps, and bobbing and dodging with their more
active movements. The burly overseer on horseback had his
horsed demon of lubber shadow, which aped his every gesture
and movement, ambling fantastically with him hither and
thither among the rows, and grotesquely motioning into
squirms of phantom glee the shadows of the writhing slaves
on whom his frequent whip-lash fell. Up around the planter’s
mansion, shadows as fantastical, as black and demoniacal as
these, wavered or lay in the fierce, yellow glow. And among
them all there was none uglier or more seemingly sentient than
one within the room opening on the veranda—a black,
hellion shape which floated softly as in a pool of oil, on an
oblong square of sluggish sunshine shimmering on the floor,
just behind the chair of Mr. Lafitte.
Angry words had been uttered in that room within the last
few minutes—angry at least on the part of Madame Lafitte,
who sat away from the sunlight, opposite her husband, with a
table laid with fruit and wine between them. She was of the
superbest type of southern beauty—and there is no beauty
more exquisite; but now her lovely olive face was dusky white
with fury and agony—its pallor heightened by contrast with
her intense black hair, which she wore in heavy tresses drooping
almost to the broad gold ornaments in her ears. Silent
at present, she sat with her white arms tightly clasped below
her bosom, which convulsively rose and fell beneath its muslin
folds, and with dilated nostrils, and pale lips curved with hate
and grief, kept her dark eyes, lustrous with passion, fixed on
the evil visage of her husband.
“You are well named,” she broke forth again, her voice, a
rich contralto, trembling with vehemence; “but you are
worse than your pirate namesake. Worse than the worst of
that Baratarian crew. Lafitte! Lafitte, indeed! You are
worse than he. Worse than Murrell. Worse than anybody.
Devil that you are!”
She paused again, speechless with fury. The tornado which
many thought the brassy flare upon the landscape portended,
had its proper fulfillment in the raging whirl of passions within
her. Mr. Lafitte sat at ease, slowly tilting his chair to and
fro, the jewelled fingers of his brown left hand clasped around
the stem of a crystal goblet on the table, his right hand
carelessly thrust into a side pocket of his white coat, and regarded
her with a sardonic smile on his dark visage, while
slipping to and fro in the sluggish pool of light upon the
floor, his shadow, like a black familiar, moved with an oily
motion behind him.
“Anything more, my angel?” he asked in a soft, smooth,
courteous voice, habitual with him: “any more epithets?
Pray continue. Go on, light of my life, go on. Indulge your
own Lafitte—your pirate lover. He loves to hear you.”
Maddened by his calm mockery, she did not reply, but kept
her blazing eyes fixed upon his face. A weaker man than
Mr. Lafitte might have shrunk from that gaze. But its
burning fire was wasted on his eyes as flame upon asbestos.
Strange eyes had Mr. Lafitte—true tokens of the nature
which else his other features might have betrayed less surely.
His form was muscular and manly, and his face, though dark
and sinister, might have been justly called handsome, if only
for the richness of its brunette complexion. Dark, wavy
auburn hair, which he wore long, and a thick moustache of the
same color, drooping over the mouth, conferred a certain
lordly grace upon the countenance. The nose, not finely cut,
was bold, aquiline, and deeply curved in the nostrils, and the
line of the jaw and chin was vigorous and masterful. In the
full visage, suffused with the dense and sultry glow of a highly
vascular organization, tropic passions basked in strong repose.
But the motor passion of all was evident in the eyes. Large
eyes which at a yard’s distance might have seemed grey, but
nearer were tawny and flecked with minute blood-specks.
Steadfast, watchful, glossy, unwinking eyes—without depth,
without sympathy—obdurate, rapacious and cruel—they confirmed
the expression of the receding brow above them,
which, broad and full, with a marked depression down its
centre, was thus divided into two lobes, and bore resemblance
to the forehead of the tiger. A physiognomist, looking at
that face, would have declared Mr. Lafitte a man organized
for ferocity as the beast he resembled is organized. A believer
in the doctrine of transmigration might have held that the
spirit of a tiger dwelt in his frame, and looked out of those
tawny, blood-specked orbs.
It looked out of them now as with a feline playfulness he
spoke his smooth taunts, meanwhile swaying slowly to and
fro in his chair, as though balancing for a spring.
“Go on, my beautiful one,” he continued. “Favor me
with more of those choice similitudes. Choice? And yet—as
a matter of taste, my angel, purely as a matter of taste—that
phrase—pirate, though bold and graphic, I admit,
might be artistically improved. Corsair, now. What do you
think of corsair? Is not corsair better, more poetical, more
Byronesque? Yes,” he went on reflectively, as though the
proposed change were a matter of vital seriousness, “yes,
corsair is a finer word. Soul of my soul, let it be corsair.
Suffer Lafitte to be your Conrad; you shall be his Zuleika.
Have I ‘one virtue,’ my Zuleika? You will readily concede
me the ‘thousand crimes,’ I know, but have I the ‘one
virtue?’”
“Why,” she wailed passionately, taking no heed of his
badinage; “why am I treated thus! Why am I kept here
on this hateful plantation, in this remote parish, without life,
without society, without pleasure of any kind. Nothing but
this routine of dull farm life. No faces but your servants’
and your overseer’s around me. No company but these
planters, these planters’ wives, these planters’ daughters, these
people that ride over here sometimes, that I fatigue myself
with visiting, that I care nothing about, anyway. Bad
enough to come here once a year for the hot months—but
three years, winter and summer, have I spent here. Three,
Lafitte. Not once have I been in New Orleans for three
years. Not once near the house where seven years of marriage
with you were endurable with friends, with society, with
life, with pleasures, with things I cared for, and which diverted
me. Cut off from them all. You go when you please.
Weeks, months, you are away, and leave me here sick, mad,
frantic with ennui. Here, up the river, alone, what have I
here to enjoy?”
“Here, my Josephine,” he replied, in an unruffled voice;
“here, do you ask? What have you here? Here you have
books, novels, without end, music in reams, your guitar, your
piano, this elegant simplicity, this charming country prospect,
your own sweet thoughts, the pleasures of imagination, the
pleasures of memory, the pleasures—yes, even the pleasures of
hope. And then, too,” sinking his voice to a softer tone,
while his smile became a shade more sardonic and his eyes
more cruel, “then, too, you have me.”
“You,” she raved, her pallid face convulsed with the
refluent fury, and her eyes flashing. “You! Yes, I have
you. Whom I hate, whom I loathe, whom I abhor! Yes, I
have you; you who torture me.”
“I who torture you?” interrupted Mr. Lafitte blandly.
“And yet, my angel, they say we are a model couple. They
are never tired of talking of my unvarying gallant courtesy to
you. You, yourself, could not name this moment in a court of
law one word or action that would seem incompatible with the
tenderest affection for you.”
“I know it,” she moaned. “Yes, that is the misery of it.
I am insulted, I am profaned, I am outraged, I am tortured
till I could go mad, or kill myself; and it is all done—my
God! I know not how. Done with smoothness and calmness
and courtesy; done with civility; done with sweet stabbing
words. Others could only see the sweetness; none but I can
feel the stabs. But they kill me daily, and you know it.
Subtle and sweet is your cruelty to me—cruel, cruel devil that
you are! Cruel to me, cruel to your slaves, cruel to everyone.”
“Cruel to my slaves, eh,” said Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly, his
voice still equable, his face still wearing its sardonic smile:
“Cruel to you and cruel to my slaves. Antony, for example.”
“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as
of one whose sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote
from her, or as nothing to her own, “Antony is one. I saw
the wretch just now, as I went down to the cabins. There
you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head bleeding
where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the
flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish
that would treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like
his brother before him. He might as well be in Hell as on this
plantation. They might all as well be in Hell—as they are.
Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too, there they
are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it
on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches.
Listen to that!”
Softened by the distance, but heard distinctly in the sultry
stillness, came up from the cotton-fields a confusion of dismal
screeches. Madame Lafitte sullenly listened, till they wailed
away, the planter meanwhile calmly drinking his goblet of iced
claret, and then filling the glass again from a slender bottle
standing in a cooler on the table.
“These are the sounds I have to listen to, day after day,
and year after year,” hoarsely murmured Madame Lafitte, her
bosom heaving convulsively above her clasped arms, and her
eyes burning with dark fire in the pale gloom of her face.
“Every hour in the day they come from the field. All
through the evening from the gin-house. Day and night,
night and day, the yelling of those unhappy creatures is dinned
into my ears. That is my music.”
Mr. Lafitte, who had resumed his former attitude, and was
still tilting his chair, paused, with his eyes fixed upon his wife,
and shook with long, silent, devilish merriment, his black
familiar wobbling meanwhile in the pool beneath him. Then,
in his softest, smoothest voice, he began to curse and swear, if
what was rather a flood of profane exclamations may be so
described. All names held sacred, grotesquely conjoined with
secular names and titles, and poured forth in fluent and rapid
succession, composed the outflow of a profanity inexpressibly
awful, both from its nature and from the smooth and serene
tones in which it found utterance. Madame Lafitte listened
to him aghast, for she had never heard this from his lips
before, and a dim, blind foreboding that it portended some
horrible change in his attitude toward her, filled her soul.
Ending it presently in another spasm of chuckling merriment,
as if what seemed a mere depraved desire for blasphemy was
satisfied, Mr. Lafitte took up the conversation.
“It is positively delightful, Josephine,” he remarked, “to
hear you lamenting the trouncing of the dear negroes. But,
not to dwell upon this touching outbreak of philanthropy, permit
me—for I feel refreshingly wicked to-day—permit me to
ask you, my angel, if you know what made me marry you?”
She looked at him for a moment with a face of mingled
wonder, scorn and loathing.
“What made you marry me?” she repeated, “your love, I
suppose—at least, what you call love.”
“Indeed, no Josephine,” he coolly replied. “It was not love
at all. What makes a man keep a mistress? For that was
it, and nothing more.”
At this atrocious declaration, Madame Lafitte, the very inmost
temple of her soul profaned and defiled, as it never had
been till then, bowed her head in an agony of shame.
“Yes, Josephine,” he continued, “that was it. You were
a queen of a girl when I first saw you. Young, innocent, gentle,
enchanting, the most beautiful woman then, as I think
you are now, that I ever beheld, and though your family was
poor, you were accomplished as few of your sex ever become.
I wanted you for one of my mistresses, and I got you at the
little expense of a marriage ceremony. A strict moralist
might say that, at best, you were only my— ah, the coarse
word! but in this country you are called my wife. And,
apropos, do you know what they call this union of ours, contracted
on my part from such a motive? They call it holy
matrimony.”
Mr. Lafitte, with a negrine ptchih, went off in a spasm of
devilish merriment, keeping his eyes fixed on the bowed and
pallid face of the woman opposite him.
“You were in love with young Raynal when I married
you,” he continued, “and you were bullied and badgered by
your amiable family into wedlock with me. Of that, however,
I will not speak now. But suppose, Josephine, that you wish
a divorce. How are you going to get it? On what grounds?
Now apropos of my mistresses: by the law of Louisiana, were
you false to me, I could get a divorce from you. By the same
laws—oh, how I love them!—you could only get that divorce
from me if I kept my mistress in your dwelling, or publicly
and openly. Suppose you emigrated to another State where
they grant divorces on the ground of the husband’s infidelity.
Could you get a separation then? No. Why not? Because
you have no evidence, and I have taken good care that you
can have none. Ha! my dear, what do you think of your
position?”
“My God, my God!” she moaned, “what have I done
that I should be outraged thus! How have I borne this life—how
can I bear it! I tell you, Lafitte,” she cried, raising
her voice, hoarse with anger and agony, into a higher key,
and throwing out her arms with a furious gesture, “I tell you
that this life is Hell. I know now, what I wondered when I
was a child—where Hell is and what it looks like. It is here
and it looks like this. This is one of its chambers, and this
one of its mansions. These walls, those books, those pictures,
this furniture, that fruit, that wine, they all belong to it.
Those are its flowers clambering around the windows—this is
its light and these are its shadows—this scorching heat is the
heat of it, that sun is the sun of it, these slaves swelter in it—I,
a slave like them, am tortured in it, and you are the fiend
of it, hard, cruel, sensual, heartless, pitiless devil that you
are!”
Flinging her arms together again in a convulsive clasp on
her bosom, her frame shuddering, her breath coming and
going in quick gasps through her clenched teeth, which
gleamed behind lips deadly white and tensely drawn, she
glared at him with fixed nostrils and flaming eyes, like a beautiful
maniac. Save that he had ceased his balancing, that his
eyes were a shade more tigerish, and that his form crouched
slightly forward in his chair, Mr. Lafitte was as cool and collected
as ever, and his face wore the same sardonic smile.
“Now Josephine,” he remarked in a tone more nonchalant,
serene and soft than before, if that could be, “let me close
this delightful conversation by a few brief observations on the
value of opportunity. First, with regard to the dear negroes.
I am a rich, but I have my little desire to be a very rich
planter. Therefore I lay plans for a large cotton crop, on
which, by the way, I have heavy bets pending. In order that
I may have the large crop, which means a great deal of
money, and in order that I may win my bets, which are considerable,
I make the dear negroes work furiously. But in
order that they shall work with due ardor, and lest that tender
bond of fidelity and devotion to their master’s interests
which the good divines up north expatiate so eloquently upon—lest
that should not sufficiently inspire them, I get my excellent
William Tassle to stimulate them with a plantation
whip, and I stimulate them myself with another when I feel
like it, which I often do. And they labor like angels—dear
me! how they do spring to it, to be sure! It is enchanting.
Indeed I get a great deal out of them. But in order that I
may get a great deal out of them, I must flog them up handsomely
at their work, and punish them profusely after their
work if their work has not been what the ardent soul of
Lafitte could wish. Hence the cruelty, as you harshly call it,
my Josephine—hence the floggings, the paddlings, the buckings,
hence the howlings that annoy you, my angel, and which,
by the way, I really cannot help, since the black beasts will
make a clamor—unless, indeed, I could induce some of those
cursedly ingenious Yankees to invent me a patent anti-howling
machine for their abominable throats. Positively, it is an
idea, and I must reflect upon it. But see now. In doing all
this, I only avail myself of my legal opportunities. Could I
do it if I had not my opportunities? Alas, no. Could I do
it up North? Alas, no. I should not have my opportunities.
I should have to calculate, and circumvent, and plot and
scheme till my poor brain would be fatigued, and then be
bothered and baffled with strikes for higher wages, and ten
hour systems, and God knows what else. Now here, thanks
to our good Livingstone, who was really a fine jurist, I have
a code which gives me all the advantages and puts my black
laborers completely and comfortably under my thumb. They
have no opportunities, and so they work without wages and
are well flogged into the bargain. I have my opportunities,
which I improve, and hence they work for me. Ha! it is
charming! They get their two plantation suits a year, their
three and a half pounds of bacon and their peck of meal
apiece a week, which is not costly, and keeps them in working
order. They are up early and down late, and so profits accrue.
Hence the value of opportunities with regard to the dear
negroes—my little exactions of whom wound your sensibilities,
my angelic Josephine.”
He paused to drink his claret slowly and refill his glass,
keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who sat secretly wondering
what he meant by all this devilish frankness.
“Now,” resumed the planter, “observe again the value of
opportunities in relation to yourself, ma chère. I marry you.
Good. We live in much elegance, to your soul’s delight, in
New Orleans. Good again. But one fine day I bring you
up here, and here I keep you, where you don’t want to stay.
Why do you stay, then? Ah! the beautiful social system
gives me the opportunity to make you. Could you bring me
up here? Oh, no. Could you make me stay? Oh, no.
The beautiful social system does not give you that opportunity.”
“No,” she cried, “it gives me nothing.”
“And why?” he continued. “Is it because you are
morally, mentally, or in any way, my inferior? Oh, no.
Why, then? Simply because you are a woman. You are less
than I by virtue of your sex, my angel. Ha! it is curious.
The beautiful social system makes you something like my slave,
dear wife. I bring my negroes here, and I bring you here.
None of you want to come, but you can’t help yourselves, and
so come you do. But my negroes cannot bring me here. No.
Nor can you bring me here. No. Do my negroes run away?
I set Dunwoodie’s hounds after them, and run them down.
Do you run away? That dear old Mrs. Grundy sets her
hounds after you, and runs you down. Ah!”
He paused to drink a little claret, keeping his eyes fixed
upon her face.
“Meanwhile,” he pursued, “I keep you in perpetual torment,
as you say. Try divorce. You have no cause in law,
for I take care to give you none. My little, delicate, subtle,
intangible, polite aggravations—all my skillful outrages and
profanations of your soul and body, which drive you mad, or
kill you slowly like poison, are not recognized in law. My
courteous, maddening words and actions, which work, it is
true, the effect, and worse than the effect, of the most brutal
physical cruelty—they are all perfectly legal. It is doubtful
whether they could even be stated for the purposes of a
divorce suit. They are so subtle, so veiled in good nature,
courtesy, kindness, legality, that if they were stated, people
probably would laugh at you, and think you dishonest or
deranged. At all events, though they slowly madden or murder
you, they constitute no breach of holy matrimony.”
“They do,” she cried. “I do not care what the law says;
such matrimony as I live in is not holy. It is”—
“Ah, no, dear Josephine,” he interrupted. “Decidedly
you are wrong. Go to court—swear that you hate me, loathe
me, abhor me—swear that life is insupportable with me, and
plead for release, and the blessed old law will tell you that
you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony! Go to any
southern State—go to South Carolina, and state my refined
and delicate cruelty. Why, Judge Somebody or other, in the
next State, boasts that it is the unfading honor, as he calls it,
of South Carolina, that she never has granted a divorce for
any cause whatever. Well, go North—go to New York, for
instance. Why, their great Panjandrum up there, the ‘Tribune’
man—what’s his name—Greeley—he will tell you that
you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony. Bless him!”
said Mr. Lafitte, piously. “I love him. I love him well. I
hate him for his Abolitionism: I love him for his views on
holy matrimony. I hate him because he tries to weaken my
power over my slaves: I love him because he tries to
strengthen my power over you, my angel. So do the rest of
them. Go to any State you like, and they will all tell you that
you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony. Every one,
except that naughty, naughty Indiana. Ah, the bad State!
The wicked, wicked State, that says a discordant marriage is
hell, and saves people from it at the expense of holy matrimony!
But you couldn’t go there even with your complaint
of cruelty, for you haven’t a single witness—not one; and if
you had, you wouldn’t go there, and presently I’ll tell you
why. Meanwhile, the result is, that there’s no help for you anywhere.
As for alleging any little infidelities on my part, that
is clearly absurd. Thanks to our good Edward Livingstone’s
code, you can get no testimony from the yellow girls, for
slaves are not witnesses, you know, in law; and as for getting
any legal testimony on that point, that I take care you can’t
get, and your convictions are not evidence, my angel. Then,
too, observe how the beautiful social system favors me. My
little gaieties are reported, for instance, in New Orleans.
Well, society does not taboo me. Mrs. Grundy smiles blandly
upon me still. The men laugh, and say, ‘Ah, Lafitte, you
gay dog!’ The women are soft as cream, and sweet as sugar.
Whereas you—suppose even a whisper of that sort about you—even
an idle rumor—ah, what a fine howl! You are quite
finished at once, my dear.”
He shrugged his shoulders, and elevated his eyebrows with
a grimace of mock pity, keeping his carnivorous eyes still fixed
upon the raging silence of her face.
“And now,” he went on, “why do I keep you here? Why
do I torture you daily? I answer—are you listening, my
cherished one?—I answer that it is my little vengeance.
Harken, Josephine. You and that handsome young Raynal
were in love with each other when I first saw you. You were
both poor. Raynal has got rich since, but he was then poor
as charity. I, on the contrary, was wealthy, and your family
wouldn’t let you marry Raynal, but were anxious that you
should marry me, for they wanted to make a rich match for
you. You liked me well enough then, for you only knew the
best side of me, which the ladies say is charming; but you did
not love me. I pressed my suit, however, and your family
worried and drove you—poor young girl of fifteen, that you
were—till, unable—for I will be strictly fair to you, Josephine—unable
to resist longer, you yielded, and I got you.”
“Yes, you got me with a lie,” she passionately cried.
“Never would I have yielded, had you and they not lied me
into believing Raynal had abandoned me and engaged himself
to another.”
“Oh,” returned Mr. Lafitte, with a leer, “you have found
that out, have you? No matter. I got you, and you discovered
your mistake in yielding as time passed on. Then,
the year before I brought you here, when you were in much
suffering—for I will be just to you, Josephine—you and
Raynal had a little correspondence. Ha! you thought I did
not know it! But I found it out. Your treacherous young
Creole wench sold me your secret, and I took copies of every
letter you wrote before I let her carry them to Raynal. I
took copies also of his before they went to you. They are all
eloquent, and I love to read them. And they put you both
in my power, my lady!”
He saw that the blow struck home. She sat mute and still
as marble, but all expression had gone from her face; the fire
had faded from her eyes; her arms, still clasped on her bosom,
were relaxed; and her bosom had ceased to heave. The
planter watched her with an infernal smile on his dark
visage.
“With those letters in my possession,” he continued, “you
could not seek release even in Indiana. For writing them, you
have to be tortured most exquisitely till you die, as before you
wrote them, you had to be tortured for having loved Raynal.
And yet, Josephine, I believe you and Raynal to be people of
honor, and, though you loved, to have written those letters
with innocent hearts. You were in loveless suffering, and you
wanted the consolation a friend could give, and which Raynal
gave. See how justly I state it! I will go further—I will
admit that the letters are such as two friends might have
written to each other. There is really nothing wrong in them.
But they are full of passages which are too equivocal to be
read in a court of law. There innocent words are made to
seem guilty. And those letters, without much twisting, would
convict you of conjugal infidelity, my beloved Josephine.”
He looked at her with fiendish enjoyment, but she sat still,
and her face did not change.
“Ah yes, ma chère!” he observed after a long pause, slowly
beginning his rocking again, and thus setting in motion the
lurking shadow beneath him—“you and that dear handsome
young Raynal are certainly compromised. Still there is one
consolation for you, Josephine. Really a great consolation.
Namely, that you are reputably married. You have the
honorable position of a legal wife, my dear. Is it not consoling?”
He sat for a full minute sardonically smiling at her. She
did not turn away, nor did her face lose its blank immobility.
“That is your consolation, sweet wife,” he continued. “It
is the— Hallo, there! Tassle, is that you? Come in.”
He had the ear of a cat to have heard the steps of the overseer
coming up the grassy lawn. It was a full half minute
before the heavy sluff of boots was audible to an ordinary
ear. Then came their lazy thud on the veranda, and the
overseer lounged in. A short, stocky, burly man, with heavy,
sallow, stolid features. He had a broad, straw hat set back
on his head, was dressed in coarse, light clothes, and was
revolving tobacco in his open mouth.
“Ha!” said Mr. Lafitte, “it is he. Good William Tassle.
Faithful William Tassle. Excellent William Tassle.”
The overseer, with his dull eye fixed on the planter, stopped
chewing, and closing his mouth, slowly smiled.
“It is hot, my Tassle,” blandly observed Mr. Lafitte.
“Hot as—beg pardon, madame”—said Mr. Tassle, checking
himself in a torrid comparison, with a rude gesture of
deference to the planter’s wife, who took no notice of his
presence. “It singes a man’s nostrils to breathe it, Mr.
Lafitte.”
“Yes?” replied the planter, as if the fact were of great
interest. “Then how it must singe that Antony’s nostrils,
William. That poor Antony. We must have him up here.
I must admonish him. Fetch him along, Tassle. And Tassle”—the
overseer, who was going, paused—“just bring that iron
collar that hangs in the gin-house. You know.”
The overseer nodded, and chewing stolidly, lounged out into
the yard, where stood the kitchen, smoke-house, and other
outbuildings, and going on through the orchard, emerged
upon a blinding space where a row of white-washed cabins,
with the gin-house hard by, glared in the hot light. A few
negro children, half naked, with a lean and sickly old hound,
were grouped in the shade of the gin-house. Near them, in
the full blaze of the sunlight, a negro man, in coarse plantation
clothes of a dirty white, sat on the ground in a squatting
posture, feebly shaking his bare head, to keep off the swarm of
insects that tormented him. This was Antony. He was
bound in a peculiar manner—bucked, as the plantation slang
has it. The ankles were firmly lashed together—the knees
drawn up to the chest—the wrists also firmly pinioned and
passed over the knees, and between the elbow-joints and the
knee-pits, a short stick was inserted, thus holding movelessly
in a bundle of agonizing cramp the limbs of the victim. This
infernal torture—practised by the tyrants of our marine on
their sailors—that class whose helplessness and wrongs most
nearly resemble those of slaves—practised also on wretched
criminals by the tyrants of our jails—Antony had endured
from midnight till now, about two o’clock in the afternoon.
Nine years Lafitte’s chattel, he had been badly used from
time to time, and, of late, dreadfully. He had learned to read
and write a little before he had come to the plantation, and a
week before the present time he had picked up a scrap of
newspaper on which was a fragment of one of those declamations
about liberty, which southern politicians are fools enough
to be making on all opportunities, amidst a land of slaves.
The fragment had some swagger about the northern oppression
of the South, which Antony did not understand any more
than anybody else; but it rounded up with Patrick Henry’s
famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” which he understood
very well; for from that moment Liberty or Death was a
phrase which spoke like a voice in his mind, urging him to
escape from his bondage. The next thing was to write a pass,
make a package addressed to the house of Lafitte Brothers,
New Orleans, and with this evidence of his assumed mission
endeavor to reach that city, where he meant to smuggle himself
into the hold of some vessel northward bound.
Clad in an old suit of Mr. Tassle’s, which he had taken from
the gin-house, and boldly riding away the night before, on a
mare borrowed from Mr. Lafitte’s stables, he had been suddenly
met on a turn of the road—unaccountably met at midnight—by
his master and the overseer, who seized him and
found his forged credentials upon him. At once, he had been
violently beaten over the head with their whip-stocks driven
back to the plantation, reclothed in his plantation suit, securely
bound, and left with horrid threats of torment on the
morrow. The morrow had come, and here he was in utter
misery, half crazy, and more than half fancying that he was
in Hell.
Mr. William Tassle, his tobacco revolving slowly in his open
mouth, stood and stolidly surveyed him. A pitiable object,
truly! His face was bruised and swollen, and from wounds
in his brow and cheek, made by the blows of the whip-handles,
a dull ooze of blood, thinned by his sweat, had spread its stain
over the whole countenance. Around the wounds buzzed and
clung greedy clusters of black flies, hardly driven off by the
feeble motions of his head, and returning every instant. His
dark face, ashen grey and flaccid under the crimson stain, and
faint with suffering, wore a look of dumb endurance; his eyelids
drooped heavily over his downcast eyes; and his breath
came in short gasps through the bloody froth that had gathered
on his loose mouth. His wrists were cut with the tight
cords that bound them, and his hands were discolored and
swollen, as were his ankles. Even the overseer felt a sort of
rude pity for him.
“Well, Ant’ny,” said Mr. Tassle, slowly, pausing and turning
his head aside to eject a vigorous squirt of tobacco juice,
which lit upon a small chip and deluged a fly thereon, throwing
the insect into quivering spasms of torture; “you’re in for it,
you poor, mis’ble devil. Yer master’s goin’ to admonish ye, so
he says. Know what that means, don’t ye? It’s all up with
you, Ant’ny.”
The dumb, bruised face, with its blood-shot eyes, feebly
turned up to his for a moment, then drooped away.
“Come, now,” said Mr. Tassle, cutting the negro’s bonds
with two strokes of a jack-knife, “up with ye.”
Antony, suddenly released from his cramped posture, fell
over; then made a feeble effort to crawl up on his hands and
knees, tottered, sank down, and lay panting. Mr. Tassle
started with alacrity for the gin-house, the black piccaninnies
scampering and tumbling over each other in their scramble to
get away, and the old hound sneaking after them. Presently
he came back with a bucket of water and a gourd. Antony
raised himself and drank from the gourd; then sat up, panting,
but relieved.
“Strip,” said Mr. Tassle.
Antony tried, and was helped roughly by the overseer, who
then dashed the bucket of water over his naked body. It revived
him, for he presently began to wipe himself feebly with his
trowsers. In the midst of this operation, Mr. Tassle seized
him, rolled him over from the wet ground to a dry spot, and
began to rub his arms and knees vigorously with his horny
hand, chewing and expectorating rapidly as he did so. Soon
the arrested circulation began to be restored, and Antony, getting
his clothes on, was able to walk up and down in a brisk,
tottering walk, the calves of his legs loosely shaking, and his
legs trembling with exhaustion.
“That’ll do,” said Mr. Tassle, at length; “you’ll be ready
for your floggin’ right soon. Here, you dam cuss of a nigger,
drink a swallow of this. That’ll set you up.”
Antony took the proffered whisky-flask—Mr. Tassle’s pocket
companion—and gulped the liquor. It went to his poor,
famished heart like fire, and shot some vigor through his
numbed veins.
“Damned if I aint a philanthroper,” growled Mr. Tassle.
“Lettin’ a hell-bent cuss of a sooty nigger drink my whisky.
No matter. Have it out o’ yer hide, Ant’ny, afore supper
time. Now pick up yer feet for the house. Yer master has to
settle with yer.”
Antony went on to the house, Mr. Tassle following, and
contemplatively regarding, as he spat and chewed, the shaking
calves of the negro’s legs, which he had a chance to do, as the
old trowsers, too short in the first instance, were now split up
the backs, nearly to the knees, and feebly flapped as the slave
tottered on. Antony himself, giddy with his long exposure in
the sun, and with the glow of the liquor he had drank, felt his
poor mind wander a little, and was conscious of nothing so
much as of the queer tattered shadow that bobbed around him,
and which he half fancied would trip him up if he were to try
to run away now.
An indefinite sense, which fell upon him as he entered the
house, and slowly walked through the passage, that this
guarding shadow had fallen behind and left him, was succeeded
by a sense as vague, that the shadow he now saw lurking
in the sunlight on the floor beneath his master’s chair,
was the same, and that it had gone on before when he came
into the passage, and would leap from that place and chase
him were he to flee. Dimly conscious of this fancy, he kept
his hot eyes fixed upon the shadow—conscious also of a dreadful
sullen hatred rising in his heart, and prompting him to
spring upon his tyrant and strangle him, though he died for it
afterward. Beyond this, he was vaguely aware that Tassle
had put something that clanked on the table, and had gone;
and that the madame, as he would have called her, was present,
sitting very still, and apparently indifferent to him or anything
that might happen to him.
Suddenly he heard the smooth and quiet voice of his master,
seeming nearer to him than it should have seemed.
“Well, Antony, so it appears that I have a learned nigger
on my plantation. Cousin to the learned pig, I suppose. Did
you ever hear of the learned pig, Antony?”
“Never did, Marster.”
“Indeed. Then you never heard what happened to him?”
“Never did hear, Marster.”
“Ah! Indeed! Well, he ran away, and was caught, and
flogged, and bucked, to begin with. Just like you, Antony.
After which he was treated so that he wished he was dead,
Antony. Just as you are going to be, my learned nigger.
Do you understand?”
“Yes, Marster.”
In this colloquy, Mr. Lafitte’s voice was as smooth and
tranquil as though he were promising his servant pleasures
instead of pains. Antony had answered mechanically, in a
voice as quiet and subdued as his tyrant’s, with the slightest
possible quaver in his husky tones.
“So you can read and write, Antony,” said the planter,
after a pause.
“A little bit, Marster.”
“A little bit, eh? Yes. Come, now, let’s have a specimen.
Here’s the ‘Picayune,’ with something that suits your
case.” Mr. Lafitte took the paper from the table as he spoke.
“A little bit of abolition pleasantry that your British friends
fling at the South, and this booby editor circulates. Here,
read it out.”
Antony saw his master’s hand extending the paper to him,
with the thumb indicating a paragraph. Moving nearer, he
mechanically took the paper. The print swam dizzily before
his eyes, as, with a halting voice, he slowly read aloud what
was, in fact, one of the most pungent anti-slavery sarcasms of
the day:
“‘From the—London—Morning Advertiser. One million
dollars—reward. Ran away—from—the—subscriber—on the
18th August—a likely—Magyar fellow (Antony boggled terribly
over ‘Magyar’ which he thought must mean mulatto),
named—Louis—Kossuth. He is—about—45—years old—5
feet—6 inches—high. Dark—complexion, marked—eyebrows,
and—grey eyes.’”
“Not a bad description of you, Antony,” interpolated Mr.
Lafitte. “Quite like you, in fact. Go ahead.”
Antony stammered on, losing the place, and beginning
lower down.
“‘Captains and—masters—of vessels—are—particularly—cautioned—against—harboring—or—concealing—the
said—fugitive—on
board—their ships—as the—full—penalty—of
the law—will—be—rigorously—enforced.’”
“You see, Antony,” again interrupted the planter. “You
reckoned, I suppose, on getting off in a ship, when your nice
scheme got you to New Orleans. Didn’t you, my nigger Kossuth?
You’d be advertised though, and caught, just like him.
Go on.”
Unheeding this sally of Mr. Lafitte’s cheerful fancy, Antony
went on, losing the place again, and getting to the bottom of
the paragraph.
“‘N.B.—If the—fellow—cannot—be taken—alive—I
will pay—a—reward—of (Antony boggled again over the
‘250,000 ducats’ named, and called it twenty-five dollars), for
his—scalp. Terms as—above. Francis—Joseph—Emperor—of—Austria.’”
“Good,” said the planter. “Your scalp, you woolly-headed
curse, wouldn’t bring that in the market, or I’d have it off, and
your hide with it. Lay the paper down. You read atrociously.”
Antony laid the paper on the table, and without looking at
his master, fixed his blurred eyes on the floor again.
“You see,” continued the planter, “how runaways get
served. You have been told both by Tassle and myself that
even if you got North you’d be sent back. We’ve got a Fugitive
Slave Law now for runaway niggers, and back they come.
You go to Philadelphia. That good Ingraham—that good
Judge Kane—that dear Judge Cadwallader—they send you
back. You go to New York. Lord! There everybody
sends you back! You go to Boston. That dear Ben Hallett
grabs you. That good Sprague—that good Curtis—all these
good people grab you, as they grabbed that nigger Sims, and
back you come. Yet you try it, you foolish Antony. Your
cursed brother got off from me nine years ago, and so you
think you’ll try it too. Fine fellows both of you. He
leaves Cayenne pepper in his tracks, which plays the devil
with the hounds, and off he gets. But you’ve had to smart
for him. All you’ve got since has been on his account. Now
you’ll get something on your own. I’ll teach you to steal my
horse and make off for the river with your forged pass and
package. Do you see this?”
Lifting his dizzy eyes to the level of his master’s hand,
Antony saw that it held a heavy iron collar with a prong, on
which he read in stamped letters, Lafitte Brothers, New
Orleans.
“My brother had a nigger that wore this collar once,” said
the smooth, cruel voice, “and now you’ll wear it. If you
ever get away again, which I’ll take care you never will,
people will know who you belong to, my fine boy. Kneel
down here.”
Antony felt the sullen hatred seethe up in his heart, and his
brain reeled.
“I won’t have that collar on me, Marster,” he huskily
muttered. “You may kill me, Marster, but I won’t have
that collar on me.”
“You won’t, eh?” returned Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly. “Oh,
well then, if you won’t, you won’t. By the way,” he pursued,
carelessly taking the paper from the table, and fanning himself
gently, “do you know how I knew you were going to run
away? I’ll tell you. I was standing near the gin-house last
night when you came there to steal Tassle’s old clothes, and I
heard you say to yourself—‘Now for liberty or death.’ Ah,
ha, Antony, you shouldn’t talk aloud! Tassle and I saw you
go to the stable and take the mare, and then we saddled and
headed you off, my nigger. That’s the way of it. Pick up
that paper.”
Raising his eyes to his tyrant’s feet, Antony saw the folded
paper there where it had been dropped. Approaching, he
painfully stooped to pick it up, when he felt himself seized,
thrown down upon his knees, and the collar, which opened in
the centre on a strong hinge, was around his neck! He
struggled to free himself, but he was held, and the collar
closed. In an instant a key of peculiar wards inserted in one
of the cusps of this devilish necklace, shot a bolt into the
socket of the other, and Mr. Lafitte, taking out the key, and
putting it into his pocket, quietly spat in the face of the man
whose neck he had just fettered, and spurning him violently
with his foot, hurled him backward from his knees with a
dreadful shock over on the floor.
Stunned for a moment, Antony lay motionless on his side.
He knew that his master had risen, for as he turned his head,
he saw the hideous shadow dart suddenly from the pool, and
vanish, as though it had entered the planter. On his feet
the next instant, with a dark cloud of blood bellowing in his
brain, he saw with bloodshot eyes, Lafitte standing before
him, with a calm, infernal smile on his visage, and all the tiger
in his tawny orbs. The next second Madame Lafitte swept,
like a superb ghost, between him and his revenge.
“Stay, Josephine,” yelled the planter, his voice no longer
issuing smooth and soft from the throat, but tearing up from
his lungs in a loud, harsh snarl—“remain here. This entertainment
is for you. You object to the howls of my black
curs. I bring one here—into this room—whose howls shall
split your ears.”
She turned, as he spoke, on the threshold of the room, and
advancing toward him, paused. For one instant she stood,
imperial in her beauty, her magnificent form drawn to its full
height, her haughty brow corrugated, her eyes burning like
bale-fires, her outraged blood flooding her countenance with
one vivid crimson glow. The next instant she strode forward,
and smote him a sounding buffet on the face. Then, without
a word, and with the step of an empress, she swept from the
room.
Lafitte turned purple and livid in spots, and tottering back,
fell into his chair. Struck! By her! Before his slave!
Glaring up, he met the blood-shot eyes of Antony.
“Dog!” he yelled; “you are there, are you! Wash my
spittle from your face with this!”
For a second, Antony stood holding his breath, with the
wine the planter had dashed into his face, dripping from him,
and steaming in his nostrils. For a second afterward, he
stood unwincing, the fragments of the shattered goblet which
followed, stinging his flesh. The next, his whole being rose in
a wild, red burst of lightning, and the throat of Lafitte was in
his right hand, his left crushing back the hand which had
struck at him with a bowie-knife as he sprung. With his right
knee set solid on the abdomen of the planter, pinning the writhing
form to the chair, he saw the devilish face beneath him
redden in his gripe, and deepen into horrible purple, and
blacken into the visage of a fiend, with bloody, starting eyeballs,
and protruding tongue. Still keeping that iron clutch
of an aroused manhood on his tyrant’s throat, he heard the
mad, hoarse gurgle of his agony, and felt the struggling limbs
relax and lose their vigor beneath him. And then yielding to
an impulse of compassion his master never knew, and which
rose louder than the bellowing voices of his revenge, he
unclasped his hold, and saw the body slide flaccid and gasping
to the floor.
Away, Antony! The bitter term of your bondage is over,
and there is nothing now but Liberty or Death for you!
Death? Ay, Death in the land of Liberty for the man who
repays long years of outrage with one brave grip on the
throttle of his oppressor! Death, when the savage planters
muster to avenge their fellow, and drag you down to yon
bayou, to shriek and scorch your life away among the sappy
fagots of the slow fire! Death like this, or else by gnawing
famine, or the beasts and reptiles of the swamp whose beckoning
horrors soon must close around you! Liberty or Death—and
Liberty a desperate chance, a thousand miles away.
He stood for an instant, panting, with a wild exultation
pouring like fire through his veins. Then snatching the heavy
bowie-knife from the floor, he sprang from the room, and leaped
on the veranda just as the overseer, who had come up again
from the fields, had set one foot on the steps to ascend. Flying
against him full shock, he threw him backward clear and clean
off his feet, and saw his head bounce with a terrific concussion
on the grass as he sped on over the stunned body. He did not
pause, nor look behind, but flew with the rush of a race-horse
for the swamp. The light wind had risen, and the grain in
the fields and the scattered trees on either side, and in the
skirting woods beyond, and all the lurking shadows, waved,
and tossed, and lifted under the sultry vault, as he sped his
desperate course, while the hot landscape rushed to meet him,
and ran whirling by, closing around and behind him, and seeming
to follow as he flew. Across the lawn, its grass and wildflowers
sliding dizzily beneath him—up with a flying leap
across the fence, which vanished below him—and down with a
light shock on the red plantation marl which rose to meet
him, and reeled from under him as he bounded on. Away,
with frantic speed, over rows of cotton-plants, bruised beneath
his feet, and gliding from under him—away, with a
wilder leap, as the loud shouts of the slaves in full chorus struck
his ear, and he saw them all, men and women, with open
mouths and upthrown arms, stand with the mules and ploughs
in the field on one side, and vanish from his flying glimpse as he
fled by. Away, with every nerve and sinew desperately strung—with
his pained heart knocking against his side—with his
held breath bursting from him in short gasps—with the sweat
reeking and pouring down his body, and dropping in big drops
from his face, to be caught upon his clothes in his speed—with
the bright knife, as his last refuge, clutched in his grasp—with
the one thought of Liberty or Death burning in the
whirl of his brain. Past the plantation now, his feet thudding
heavily on a hard, black soil—on, with the swarming hum of
innumerable insects, murmurously swirling by—on, with the
light and rapid current of the hot south wind cool on the pain
and fervor of his face, and swiftly purring in his ears—on, over
rushing grass and flowers, and stunted shrubs and butts of
trees—up again with a furious leap over a fence that sinks,
and down again with a heavy thump on ground that rises—on
and away at headlong speed over a field of monstrous
stumps, scattering the light chips as he flies—in now with a
bound among the bright-green leaves of a thick palmetto
bottom, and on with a rush through the swish, swish, swish of
their loud and angry rustle, as he crashes forward to the still
gleam of the bayou. Now his feet swash heavily on a grassy
turf that yields like sponge, and water fills his shoes at every
bound. Now the water deepens, and he sinks above his
ankles or midway to his knees, as he splashes forward with
headlong velocity, half-conscious and wholly careless in his
desperate exultation that black venomous water-snakes
writhe up behind him as he plunges through their pools.
Now he bounds over a bank of black mire, and swerves in his
course as something like a dirty log changes to an alligator,
and lumbers swiftly toward him with yawning jaws. And
now splashing through the green slime of the margin, he
bursts with a plunge into the glistening waters of the bayou,
and swims with vigorous strokes, while the gaunt bittern on
the bank beyond scrambles away with squawking screams.
Swimming till the water shoals, he flounders on again through
slime to mire, and over another bog of pools and water-plants
and spongy sod, till gaining the outskirts of the dense forest,
and reaching a patch of damp, black earth under an enormous
cypress-tree, he slackens his pace, stops suddenly, and
throwing up his arms upon the trunk, drops his head upon
them, panting and blowing—and the first mile-heat of the
dreadful race for Liberty or Death is run!
For a few minutes, exhausted with the terrible speed he
had maintained, Antony leaned upon his arms with closed
eyes, his breath suffocating him, his heart painfully throbbing,
his limbs aching and trembling, and the water dripping from
his clothes and trickling away on the black soil in small
streams. The trees whispered over him as he panted beneath
them, and their mysterious murmurs were the only sounds,
save his own stertorous breathings, that were heard in the
dead stillness. Recovering his breath in a few minutes, he
lifted his head and turned around, letting his pained arms fall
heavily by his side. He was no longer oppressed with heat,
for the plunge in the bayou had cooled him; but his whole
body ached not only with the exertions of the last few
minutes, but from the previous torture of the bucking, and
already his strength, heavily taxed by his long abstinence
from food (for it was now more than fifteen hours since he
had eaten), and only sustained by the intense excitement he
had undergone, began to flag. His brain reeled and whirled
still, and his apprehension was confused and dull. Gradually
he began to be more sensible of the sore and swollen condition
of his wrists and ankles, of the smart of the wounds in his
forehead, and the stinging of the fragments of glass in his
face. There was one sore spot in his chest just beneath his
shoulder, which for a few moments he was at a loss to account
for, till he suddenly remembered that his tyrant’s foot had
struck him there when he had kicked him over upon the floor.
At the same instant he felt the chafe of the iron collar on
his neck, and raising his hand suddenly, it struck against the
blunt point of the prong. Gnashing his teeth with rage as
the scene in that room rose in his mind, he seized the collar
with both hands, and with a fierce imprecation, strove to rend
it asunder. But the lock remained firm, and convulsed with a
bitter sense of humiliation, as he thought of that accursed
badge of his servitude inexorably riveted to his neck, the
miserable man burst into tears.
It was but a brief spasm, and summoning up new courage
to his failing heart as he remembered that his dreadful journey
lay still before him, he cast his eyes around into the swamp.
Softened by the foliage of the wilderness of gigantic trees, and
duskily lighting the long streamers of melancholy moss which
greyed their green, the sultry sunlight, slanting athwart the
enormous trunks, and tinting with sullen brilliance the scarlet,
blue and yellow blossoms of parasitical plants which sprinkled
the boles and branches in thick-millioned profusion, glistered
on the muddy shallows of the morass, whose dismal level,
broken here and there by masses of shadow, and huge bulks
of fallen timber, stretched far away, like some abominable
tarn of slush and suds, into vistas of horrid gloom. Here and
there, stranded on shoals of mire, or basking on pieces of
floodwood, alligators, great and small, sunned their barky
hides; while from every shallow pool, or wriggling around
drifting logs or trunks of fallen trees, the venomous moccasin-snakes,
whose bite is certain death, lifted their black devilish
heads by scores, and made the loathsome marsh more loathsome
with their presence. Over the frightful quagmire
brooded an oppressive stillness, broken only by the mournful
and evil whispering of the trees, or by the faint wriggling
plash of the water-serpents. Thick, sickly odors of plants and
flowers, blent with the stench of the morass, burdened the
stagnant air, through whose languid warmth chill breaths
crept from the dank and dense arcades of the forest. Vast,
malignant, desolate and monstrous, loomed in the eyes of the
wretched fugitive, the awful road to Liberty or Death.
His soul shrank from treading it. The fire had faded from
his heart, and in that moment death by his own hand, for he
would not be captured, seemed preferable to the terrors of the
fen. Faint, weak, famished, weary unto agony, his whole
body one breathing ache, his spirit all unnerved with the sense
of his past and present misery, and nothing but despair before
him, how could he hope to go on and live. Yet he could not
remain here. Soon the hounds would be on his track—they
would cross the bayou he had swam, and strike his trail. He
must plunge still further into the swamp to distance them, or
he must die here by the knife in his hand.
He turned and looked over the bayou far up the lowland to
the plantation a mile away. Suddenly he started, clutching
the knife with a firm grasp, his eyes flashing, his teeth and
nostrils set, and his manhood once again flooding his heart
with fire. Figures near the mansion—figures on horseback,
guns, flashing in the sun, in their hands—one, two, three,
four, five, six—six mounted horsemen—and, lower down on
the lawn, what are those things running in circles? Hark!
Far off a long, harsh, savage, yelling bay. The hunt is afoot,
and the hounds have struck the trail! Away, Antony, for
Liberty or Death!
Eyes flashing, teeth and nostrils set, every nerve and sinew
valorously strung, he turned with a leap, and rushed straight
into the morass. Before the headlong, desperate courage of
his charge, the loathsome tenants of the swamp gave way.
Plunging from the floodwood, the affrighted alligator trundled
off, and the startled moccasins slipped and writhed from his
path at the noise of his coming. Hark, again! Nearer than
before the booming yell of the hounds. Speed, Antony! It
is the Sabbath of the Lord our God, and we hunt you down.
What man shall there be among us that shall have one slave,
and if it fly into the morass on the Sabbath day, shall he not
set hounds upon it and hunt it down? Speed on, dark chattel!
The good Christians of St. Landry and Avoyelles are
spurring hard upon your trail, and in the land over which the
memory of Christ stretches like the sky, well-doing such as
theirs is lawful on the Sabbath as on every other day!
Splashing and swashing on over the slushy surface of the
quagmire, now sinking no deeper than the soles of his shoes,
now plashing up to his shins, now to his knees, now nearly to
his thighs, now bounding upon logs and fallen trunks, or rushing
over masses of brushwood and briers, which switched and
stung his ankles, he could still hear, at brief intervals, the
savage yowling of the hounds. As yet there was no safety,
for the dogs could still scent his trail, here and there, on the
shoals of mire or clumps of bog over which he had passed.
His hope was in reaching deeper water, or arriving at some
broad bayou which would effectually impede their course.
Goaded by his imminent peril, for he soon heard the long
yells much nearer, and knew that the cruel brutes were
rapidly gaining on him—he floundered frantically on, his heart
leaping in his throat at every howl, and the sweat gathering
in cold drops on his face. Soon, to his great joy, the foul
lagoons began to deepen, the water reaching more uniformly
above his knees, and at length he came upon a space through
which he floundered for more than half an hour, sinking to his
thighs at every plunge, and knew by the confused and
lessening clamor of the dogs, that he was leaving them. He
did not slacken his pace, though the depth of the water made
it still more difficult to travel, till at last he entered a horrid
grove of gloom, where the pyramidal clumps from which shot
up the straight, dark pillars of the cypresses, were submerged
in the inky flood, and sinking above his hips, he was forced to
move more slowly. Fiercely plunging on through the cold
black tarn, over a soft bottom of leaves and moss, which sank
loathsomely beneath his tread, like a subfluvial field of sponge,
he heard again the harsh yells of the dogs, and they now
seemed nearer than before. He strove, but vainly, to move
on faster, and his fancy ran riot as he thought of the hounds
slopping on through the fen, and coming into sight of him.
Already, in his delirious fancy, he heard the wild and savage
yowls of that moment, and the exulting halloos of his pursuers.
The dogs would leap into the shallow ponds—they would
swim faster than he could wade—he would hear their savage
panting close behind him—he would turn and feel them flop
upon him, and their sharp teeth crush into his flesh—he would
strike them with his bowie-knife—he would see the black
water redden with their blood—they would overbear him and
drag him down with yelling, and howling, and frantic splashing
and struggling, while the shouting planters would come
riding through the swamp and seize him. Lashed into frenzy
by the anticipated drama, he brandished the knife, with a
hoarse cry, and staggering forward, suddenly sank to his arm-pits.
An instant of alarm, succeeded by wild joy, for the
water had deepened, and striking out, he swam. Clogged by
his heavy shoes, now filled with mud, and soaked to an added
weight with water, it was hard swimming; but his fear and
fury gave him superhuman energy, and nerved with unnatural
vigor his weakened thews. He swam for a long time, with
the solemn night of the dense cypress dusking his form and
shadowing the tarn. At length the dreadful twilight of the
grove began to lighten, and far beyond he saw the sunlight
illuminating the grey and green of the trees, and the many
colored parasites and flowers, and shining on the mud and
water of the marsh. Presently he struck bottom, and wading
again for a long distance, emerged at length into the sunlight,
among the shallows and mud-shoals, and rushed on as before, till
at last, as the sun was near its setting, he stood on the banks
of an unknown river, which, whispering sullenly past its margin
of sedge and water-flowers, moved, with an imperceptible
motion, through the solemn and horrible wilderness of forest.
He stood gazing across it with a haggard and mournful
countenance. The croak of frogs came faintly from its border,
and mingled with the distant quacking of crowds of mallard
ducks from the opposite shore, the vague hooting of owls in
the swamp beyond, and the occasional plunge of an alligator
from the adjacent margin. Dreary and ominous sounds, which
yet hardly disturbed the stagnant stillness around him. The
wind had lulled, and no whisper came from the bearded trees,
which stood like boding shapes on every side. Hope was faint
in the heart of the fugitive. Relieved from the engrossment
of the immediate peril, his spirit began to come under the sole
dominion of the brooding horrors around him, and as he vainly
pondered on the dark problem of his deliverance, Death seemed
ever gathering slowly toward him, and Liberty lessening in ever-growing
distance.
Liberty or Death. The historic phrase came to him again
like a voice that urged him forward. He paused only a little
longer, to tear a strip from his coarse shirt and tie the bowie-knife
at the back of his neck to the iron collar. Then tearing
another strip, he pulled off his heavy brogans, shook the mud
out of them, and passing the strip through the eyelets, he also
secured them to the collar, one on each shoulder. So accoutred,
he braced himself anew for effort, and taking up a slender
sapling from the ground to beat the pools between him
and the bayou—for he now feared the moccasins—in a few
moments he was in the water, steadily swimming forward, with
the sapling held in his teeth.
Gaining the opposite bank, he stopped on a patch of black
mire, to put on his shoes, and then went forward, beating the
path before him. Dreadful apprehensions of the beasts and
reptiles which inhabited the swamp, now crowded on his mind,
while to add to his distress, the sunlight in the forest spaces
was stealing rapidly upward from the foliage of the loftiest
trees. Quickening his pace, he staggered on through the
haunted dusk of the tree-trunks, with the hooting of the
swamp owls, the quacking of innumerable ducks, the bellowing
and plunging of alligators, the screeching and screaming of
strange, semi-tropic birds, the howling of distant beasts, and
the multitudinous croak of frogs, sounding on every side
around him.
He broke into a heavy run, came at length to a thinner
part of the forest, and presently emerged upon a vast open
space of quagmire, stretching two or three miles away, with
scattered trees standing and leaning in all directions in its
broad expanse. Here he paused.
The sun had sunk behind the distant forest, tinging the
misty sky far up the zenith with lowering red, and suddenly,
as by some fell enchantment, the swamp had become a sullen
slough of blood. Shadows of inky blackness stretched athwart
the red expanse, and the distorted trees that crossed and intercrossed
each other here and there, were giant eldritch
shapes of unimaginable things. Lank and hairy—all askew
and bristling—clothed as with fearful rags—with monstrous
heads ahunch in unnatural places, and shaggy jags of drooping
beards, and dusky arms grotesquely forked and twisted,
and huge lengths of gaunt body that abruptly splayed and
sprawled in malformed feet—they loomed from the fen of
murky gore against the angry color of the sky, like some
black congress of ambiguous mongrel wizards whose spell was
on the scene. All around beneath them, protruding from the red
lagoons, huge butts of logs, gnarled stumps, and black knees
of cypress, squatted and crouched like water-fiends. Through
the dusky air, laden with the damp smell of the swamp, frightful
brown bats whirled clacking to and fro in the red light like
lesser demons on the wing. From every side came hootings
and croakings, screechings and wailings, howlings and bellowings
and sullen plunges, like the riotous clamor of devils at
some tremendous incantation. A sense of supernatural horror
pervaded all, and weighed upon the appalled heart of the
trembling fugitive.
He hesitated a few moments whether to cross this dreary expanse,
or strike off into the denser forest, but decided to go
forward. Whipping a pool before him which did not move,
he was just setting his foot in it, when the venomous face of
a moccasin rose at him with a dark slapping flash. He sprang
back simultaneously, and saw the monster vanish, feeling at
the same time a sharp pang just above his ankle. He was
bitten! All was over!
Stooping slowly, with a wild terror shuddering through his
veins, he looked at the wounded limb. But no, there was no
bite. The snake had missed him. In his backward leap, he
had struck his leg against the upturned spike of a broken
branch which lay behind him. The revulsion in his spirit at
this discovery was so great that he broke into a quaver of
hysterical laughter, which echoed dismally through the swamp,
and woke such an answering chorus of demoniacal hooting
and screeching in the adjacent boughs, that he was affrighted,
and turning away from the open space, he was about to rush
into the forest on his flank, when he saw with a leap of heart,
two round glistening balls in the dark foliage of a tree a few
yards before him, and something long and dark crouching
along the bough. It was a panther! He wheeled at once
with a bound, and fled headlong into the red morass.
Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged
along through the inky water, quivering at every step lest he
should feel the sting of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe
of the alligator. It was a long journey across the open fen.
The red light had faded from sky and water, and the full
moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens when
he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous
orb of silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached
the solid sable gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness.
An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey
across the open fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange
man, with a single dog, had followed him, at a considerable
distance the whole way. A strange man, silent, with a
silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without
coming, or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that
this was so, though he did not dare to turn his head to see if
it was so. He knew too just how the man looked—a dark
figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also dark, by his
side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!
The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees
again. Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here
and there by an uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight,
or the blue flicker of a dancing and vanishing fen-light,
he found the water still ankle or knee deep, and the walking
difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees and stumps
and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants
of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all
about him, and in the branches overhead, there were such
plungings and crashings, and such a clamor of flutterings and
hootings and screechings, that his blood ran cold. He held
his course, however, hoping to come upon some dry spot in the
great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do to
escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for
his body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was
drenched from head to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking,
he shivered with cold. His vitals were weak and aching
for want of food; his head was light with sleeplessness; and
insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and horror-laden
mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed
heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to
iron, and that he would soon be unable to raise them for their
weight, and would be obliged to stand there in the quagmire.
Then in the glimmering darkness the moccasins would rise
from the pools and surround him in a circle. They would
gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each
other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of
devilish serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in
the branches all the panthers would gather, savagely grinning
at him, and every one would have the visage of Lafitte. Then
all at once the writhing wall of snakes would sway forward, and
strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and strike again
with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly
swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers
would look on with the face of his master, and laugh
softly with the smooth voice of his master. And the writhing
wall would dilate and expand till every snake was vaster
than an anaconda, and the mass together would fall away at
every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the sky,
and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its
monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would
rise and resound through space, and the panthers and the
tigers would dilate with the rest, and look on with enormous
faces like his master’s, and their smooth laughter would grow
louder and louder into smooth thunders of laughter, and the
bristling and the striking and the swelling and the shrieking
and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and forever.
“Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”
The words burst from him suddenly, as he felt the horrible
fancy rush upon him with dreadful reality, and almost master
him. All aghast with a new terror at the foreign and incongruous
effect of his own tones in that haunted darkness, and
amidst the unhuman voices around him, he was utterly appalled
and confounded the next instant at the frightful clamor which
rose with a simultaneous outburst, volleying tumultuously
around him on every side like the multitudinous rush and
uproar of devils when the silence of the magic circle has been
broken and the enchanter is to be torn to pieces. Whooping,
hooting, screaming, wailing, yelling, whirring, flapping, cackling,
howling, bellowing and roaring—all rose together in a long
continued and reverberating whirl and brawl, filling the darkness
with a deafening din. Staggering madly forward, the
terrified fugitive broke into a blind and frantic run, feeling as
in a horrible dream, that the pools had changed to ground which
was sloping rapidly up to strike him in the face and stop him;
till at last with a sudden lightening of the darkness, something
caught his feet and threw him headlong, and with an awful
sense that he was seized, and with the hideous tintamar swirling
downward like the gurgling roar of water in the ears
of a drowning man, he swooned away.
Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life
revived. How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew
not. He felt that he was lying on bare, damp ground, and
that the moonlight was around him. The din had sunk into
confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing distantly
through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air
around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness
filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror,
mixed with consciousness of all he had passed through, and
of the place he was in, began to invade the silent vacancy,
and crept upon him as from afar. Shuddering slightly, with
icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood, he slowly raised
himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a vague
relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling
on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed
with giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight
and sable shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage
of a ground-vine, in which his foot was still entangled.
Disengaging the limb without rising from his knees, he continued to
gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense of awe, as
he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of the
forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal
cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas,
diminishing in interminable perspective, the ground stretched
in vast mosaics of sable and silver, bunched and ridged with
low flowers and herbage and running vines, all moveless and
colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight, and in the solemn shadow,
as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the enormous clustered
columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like a massive
shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred
with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses
of gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen
glory, spread aloft and interwove like the groined concave of
some tremendous gothic roof, while from the leaf-embossed and
splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses drooped heavily, like
black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles. The air was
dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors from
the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered
with crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered
bluely down the arcades in the morass; and all around
from the bordering quagmire, and from the crypts and vaults
of the shadows, the demon-voices of the region, sounding from
above and below, and rapidly swelling into full choir, chanted
in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and
aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly
pomp, the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark
imagination might have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration
of the monstrous crime against mankind which centered
in this region, was pealing through the vaulted aisles and
arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy of human
souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his wide
and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs
of slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer,
while their own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual
comforts thrive around them. Peopling the vast and drear
nocturnal solitudes, under the moonlit arches, here they might
come, while the screaming, hooting, bellowing chant resounded,
and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse of base
powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great
object of government to be the protection of property in man,
and wield the mighty engine of the state for the oppression of
the weak; placemen who suck on office, deaf and blind to the
interests of the poor; scurvy politicians, intent on pelf and
power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate away
the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural
law, who decree that black men have no rights that white
men are bound to respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of
the learned and the brave, who prate with learned ignorance
of manifest destiny and inferior races, to justify against all
human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor; hide-bound
priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors,
or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save
the Union; traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening
with never-sated avarice, and furious against liberty
and justice as lesseners of their gains; these, and their rabblement
of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and kidnappers, and men-hunters,
and slave-law commissioners—here they might assemble
to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might
prosper, and love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness,
and man degrade into the brute and fiend. Fit place and
time, and fit surroundings for such rites as these; fitter far
than for the trembling murmurs of a solitary slave, kneeling
in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the forlorn agony of
his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.
Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the
cathedrals he had seen many years before when he was a slave
in New Orleans; some dim sense that he was on his knees in
the attitude of supplication, had mixed with the overwhelming
consciousness of his helplessness, his wretchedness, and his
danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently, in uncouth
words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and
despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed
with perils, and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac
clamor of the forest rose louder and louder as he went on,
breaking his communion with God, till at length, appalled by
the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his feet, uncomforted
and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.
He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly
gone that he tottered. His setting forward again was a mere
mechanical action, but it continued for some minutes before
the dull thought came to him that his movement was useless.
In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to climb a tree, where,
lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he would be safer
and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the
advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his
strength was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages
of exhaustion.
Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till
morning, when there would be less danger of wild beasts, and
he might dare to repose. He sat for a long time shuddering
with cold, and watching intently all about him, lest some
panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or twice,
with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at
length, affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping
off into slumber, he strove to occupy his mind by observing
minutely the various details of the scene before him. He had
been busy at this for some time, when he became suddenly and
quietly perplexed with the feeling that there was something he
ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or define
what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the
hole of a gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf
palmettoes, slightly silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and
from time to time he saw, without receiving any impression
therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the palmetto leaves.
Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought to
have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he
strove to shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What
could it be? As suddenly and quietly as before it came to him,
and at the same moment his eye took in the meaning of that
curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was the smell of
smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now,
and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little
strength returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at
the misty ringlets lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly
was smoke; he smelled now very distinctly the dry scent of
burning wood. Who could have a fire in the heart of the
swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious fancies
rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here
with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession,
he resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go
forward and solve the mystery; and taking the knife from the
back of his neck, he cautiously approached the palmettoes, his
blood thrilling, and his heart beating, and all the forest resonant
around him. Peering through the leaves, he saw with
amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in
front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A
sort of fright fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering
instantly, he again advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke
in a voice faint both from weakness and trepidation:
“Ho, there! Ho, you in there! You there, whoever you
are!”
There was no answer, nor movement, but at the sound of
his voice, a tremendous uproar burst forth again in the forest.
Desperate at this, he again spoke in a louder tone:
“Ho, now, you in there! You just say who you are. I’m
coming in now!”
No answer, but the uproar in the branches and from the
swamp increased like a tempest. Strung up now to his highest
pitch, Antony clutched his knife, and setting his teeth hard,
plunged in through the hole.
It was densely dark within. The immense cypress was completely
hollow, as he could feel, for stretching out his arms he
encountered nothing. He began to grope about, but stopped
suddenly, thinking it better to get a light. Quite overcome
by the strangeness of his discovery, and by the novel circumstance
of a fire being found smouldering before an empty tree,
he stooped down through the low entrance to the brands, and
blowing upon one till it flamed, withdrew himself again into
the tree, and looked around. Suddenly, with a hoarse gasp
of horror, he tottered back, falling from his squatting posture
over upon the ground, and dropping the brand, which at once
went out, leaving him in utter darkness. In that instant he
had caught a glimpse, by the fitful flame, of a lank figure,
duskily clothed, lying on its back, with a mop of thick white
hair, a leathern face hideously grinning, and glassy eyes which
had met his; and he felt like one who had entered the lair of a
fiend.
So paralyzed was he with affright, that instead of scrambling
out of the tree, he sat motionless, leaning back on his hands,
with his blood curdling, and cold thrills crawling under his
hair. A wild fancy that he would be instantly sprung upon
by this thing, held him still and breathless. But all remained
silent and moveless, and at last, venturing to stir, he got up
on one knee, and pressed his hands on his heart to stop its
mad beating. By degrees his courage came back to him, or,
at least, his dreadful fear became blended with desperation.
Then came wild wonder at the horrible strangeness of that
figure, and slowly this melted into a savage and frenzied curiosity.
Seizing the smoking brand from the earth, he backed
out through the hole (for he absolutely did not dare to turn
his back to the dread tenant of the cavern), and, once outside,
blew upon the stick till it reflamed. Waiting a moment till
the light burned strongly, he thrust it through the hole, and
holding it above his head, glared with starting eyes upon the
face of the figure.
He saw in a moment that it was nothing unearthly—only
the form of an aged woman, and of his own race. Instantly
it struck him that she was a fugitive, probably a dweller in the
swamp. Reëntering the tree, he approached and held the
blazing brand over her countenance. With a terrible sensation
of awe he saw that it was the countenance of the dead.
She lay on a couch of the forest moss, her gaunt figure
decently composed, with the hands crossed, as if she had
known that she was dying. She was apparently very old; the
woolly hair was white; the black face was deeply wrinkled,
and much emaciated; the mouth was open, and had fallen
back, showing the white teeth, which were perfectly sound as
in her youth; and the glassy eyes were unclosed and fixed
aslant with that look which had so terrified the fugitive. He
felt no terror now, however, only awe; for with the discovery
of the truth, the hideousness of the face was gone. Bending
down, he touched the cheek. It was still tepid—almost
warm; the life had not been long extinct, a fact of which the
smouldering brands of the fire she had kindled was another
evidence. Poring upon the features, a confused feeling
gathered in his mind that he had seen them before, and he
strove to resolve it into certainty. Suddenly, as the flickering
of the burning brand he held brought out a new expression on
the dark, withered lineaments, it flashed upon him that this
was old Nancy. She had been a slave on Mellott’s plantation,
near Lafitte’s, and had disappeared five or six years
before, after a terrible whipping. They had hunted the
swamp for her without avail, and it was supposed that she
had perished. Here she had lived, however, and here she was
now, all her earthly troubles over.
Turning away from the body in wild wonderment, the fugitive
looked around him. The space within the tree must have
been at least six feet in diameter. It had been hollowed out
by time in the form of an upright cone, the apex of which was
at least a dozen feet above the ground. The hole had probably
been eaten out by a sort of dry rot, or perhaps by insects,
for the wooden walls were not damp, nor was the corrugated
floor. The only furniture was the couch of Spanish moss on
which the body lay, a block of wood fashioned for a seat out
of the butt end of a log, and a long paddle, bladed at both
ends, which leaned upright against the wall. Looking
around further, Antony noticed some little niches cut in the
walls, with the handle of a hatchet sticking out of one of
them. On the blade was a parcel wrapped in cotton cloth, in
which he found three or four corn-cob pipes, a bundle of dried
tobacco-leaf, bunches of matches, and two or three knick-knacks
of no great use. Evidently Nancy had made occasional
excursions from her hiding-place, for these things must all
have been borrowed from the race of the taskmasters. This
was still more evident as Antony pursued his observations. In
another niche, he found at least half a peck of corn done up in
a cloth, and in a wooden quart measure there was some more,
parched. His hunger rose so suddenly and fiercely at sight
of the food that he at once crammed a handful of the parched
corn into his mouth, and with the measure in his hand, continued
to crunch, although his throat was so swollen with his
long fast that he could scarcely swallow. Continuing his
search while he ate, he found in a third niche an oblong tin
pan and a gourd, but in the pan, to his astonishment and
delight, there was a dead opossum and a small fish. They
were both fresh—Nancy must have captured them that very
day. She had lived a woodman’s life in the heart of the
morass, setting her fishtraps on the bayou, and catching the
smaller animals in the forest. Forgetting to pursue his search
further in the desire to appease his ravening hunger, Antony
only paused to lay one of the pieces of cotton cloth over the
face of the dead, and then set to work to rake the fire into a
bed of coals, and hastily dressing the meat with his bowie-knife,
broiled it, and ate with the eager voracity of a man
half starved.
A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of
all enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from
himself, was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the
embers, in the dusky glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked
food, tasting of smoke and cinders, as to some wild wolf that
gnawed his vitals. In the darkness behind him lay the swart
corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror in his mind.
Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a dull,
stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the
swollen pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of
the sleeplessness in his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his
wet clothes, the filthy smell of the muck and slime that
covered him, and all was mixed confusedly with a dimmer
apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen
smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear
forest.
His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all
his sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The
fierce gnawing at his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention,
as if something huge and bloated lay dead within him.
His horror of the corpse had grown stronger even than the
heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit, and he
now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to
be buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk
from the labor of making it a grave.
Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the
hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near
the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil
with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak
and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out
the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it,
and left it to its rest.
The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises
when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them
dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely
empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block,
watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer
faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he
arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to
keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon
the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a
dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming
and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still
and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.
He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept
a minute, but at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting
eyes through the brown dusk of the hollow, he was confused
at seeing the palmetto leaves at the entrance plainly
visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that it was
broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly,
a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and
made him gasp with pain. He remained for a minute supporting
himself on his hands, and then slowly and painfully arose.
Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even worse off in
body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and
every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were
much swollen where the ropes of the bucking had cut them.
He felt as if he had been switched all over with nettles, from
the stings and scratches of the thorns and briers through which
he had travelled. His face pained him especially, the atoms
of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its wounds and
bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at
that moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar.
His flesh was raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost
the first thing he did was to tie one of the pieces of cotton
cloth around his neck for the edge of the iron to rest on.
Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and fro, gasping
and panting at every step with pain.
After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier,
and stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him
that Nancy must have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles
he had found in the hollow confirmed his belief. To get
away from the swamp was his fixed purpose, and in that
land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat, he might
avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.
Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the
question was, where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree
to commence a search for it, he saw it right at the base of the
trunk under the palmettoes. But Nancy’s periagua was a
canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of slender wattles.
Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods
of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some
visiting tribe from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the
boats Antony had ever seen among them were periaguas. At
all events here it was, and elated with its discovery, the fugitive
instantly brought forth the paddle, the hatchet, the bowie-knife,
the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and placed them
in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that
might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton
cloth hanging out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it
came—an old blue cotton gown. Turning over the moss, he
uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an old pair of grey trowsers,
a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and one stocking.
Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him
with a change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers
into the canoe, and lifting the latter, plunged out through the
palmettoes into the forest.
A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight
that it was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had
he been in the enforced habits of plantation life to rise at
daybreak, that on waking in the hollow he naturally thought
he had awakened at the usual morning hour. He shuddered
now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost,
when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting,
might be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte
would, in his burning lust for vengeance, hunt the swamp for
weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and he must at once speed
away.
He stood for a moment debating which direction to take,
when looking down he happened to see a spot where the earth
had been harrowed by the claws of some wild beast, and upon
the scratches was the distinct imprint of a naked foot. It
came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had
made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue
a track, in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping
along painfully with the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously,
for by the sudden slipping and rustling in the grass
and herbage he knew that snakes were around him, suddenly
his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a
leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole
frame. He had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay
in a faint glimmer of sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth.
The sluggish reptile quivered slightly throughout its mottled
length, and lifting its head with venom in its sparkling eyes
and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and swiftly slid
from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that
he was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite
of himself at every buzzard that flew from his path, or small
animal that crossed it, and feeling that everything was watching
him, and that the multitudinous chatter of the birds that
filled the forest was concerning him, he went on his way.
Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from
his path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou.
A fallen tree lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half
way across; a rotten log floated in the water; stumps and
snags projected here and there; waifs of moss, slivers of
branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of forest
debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the
shadows.
Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself
with the old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers.
Then laying the canoe on the water, where it lightly danced,
he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle in the middle, and
plying the blades first on one side and then on the other, shot
slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.
Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to
left, and darted with an uncertain forward motion, trembling
beneath him like a living thing that shared his agitation.
Black banks of mud, pierced here and there with alligator
holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps and
masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees
and trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy
pride, and the vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness
of massive trunks uplifting their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden
branches, spread and loomed in solemn and splendid confusion
on either side as the boat lightly darted on its sinuous
course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from
floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the
margin as it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from
the banks squawking and screaming; strange birds of gorgeous
plumage flew rustling through the branches; scarlet-gilled
black buzzards rose and soared with broad and steady
wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped
and swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward,
now on one side, now on the other, on sped the brown
canoe, while the shadows grew inkier on the sombre water,
and again under the red reflection of the sky, the dull bayou
became a stream of blood.
Awed by the solemn desolation of the scene, the gloomy
color of the water, the gathering darkness of the wooded fen,
the motions and the voices all around; troubled at the thought
of the long and perilous distance that stretched between him
and his far bourn of safety; yet with a fearful joy and a sustaining
hope within, the fugitive oared his swift darting skiff at
length into the river he had swam last the day before. The
red glow had died from sky and water, and the moon silvered
greyly the stream as he paddled on between the black forest
on either side. Heading his prow to the east, and plying his
paddle vigorously, he flew lightly up the stream. Voices of
bird and beast called and answered weirdly in the darkness of
the black shores; trees towered and leaned in ambiguous sable
shapes over the dusky stream, and watched him as he shot
swiftly by; the solemn sky spread far above him like a
doubtful thought, half-boding, yet clearing slowly into deep-withdrawn
tranquillity, in the increasing lustre of the tawny
moon. Overarched and palisaded by the phantom sentience
of the hour, his dark skiff, gliding and darting with light tremors
and waverings still held its way like a dumb intelligence
over the mysterious water.
Hours went on, and save the scattered hooting and
screeching of owls in the forest, and the occasional clacking
of some vagrant bat whirling by, the moonlit night was still.
Only once the fugitive oared his canoe in to the shore, where
on a low projecting bluff under a great tree, he lit a small fire,
and hastily parching some corn in the pan, ate a hurried
meal. Then slaking the fire, he entered the canoe again, and
paddled on.
An hour or two later he turned the skiff into a narrow
bayou which debouched into the stream, thus changing his
course to the north. His object was to gain the Red River,
where he hoped to smuggle himself on board some steamboat,
and getting to New Orleans, escape from the steamboat, and
hide himself in the hold of some northern vessel. It was his
former plan, and he still clung to it with tenacity, bitterly
aware of its hazards and dangers, yet unable to think of a
better. The bayou he was now in was very narrow, hemmed
in on either side by the forest and the fen, and much obstructed
by stumps, snags, fallen trees and lodgments of logs. To steer
his course through these in the uncertain darkness, for the
branches almost shut out the moonlight, was difficult, and
several times he was obliged to clamber on the fallen timber,
and pull the canoe over, or shove aside the huddled floodwood
to clear a passage. But his efforts brought him at length to
a sluggish stream, which he judged to be the Pacoudrie—the
stream he had swam first in his escape the day before, but at
a point several miles below the Lafitte plantation. He was
now approaching dangerous ground, and his heart began to
beat faster. Turning his prow eastward again, he paddled
down the stream, looking for another debouching bayou. He
soon came upon one, into which he turned, heading north, and
through which his passage was as dark and impeded as before.
He exerted himself to the utmost, and at last, heated and
panting, he saw that he was leaving the morass, and that the
moonlit ground, thinly scattered over with trees, and thickly
covered with verdurous underwood, was gradually rising on
either side of him. The bayou, too, grew deeper and less
impeded, and presently he saw on his left, beyond a cluster of
huge trees, the grain of a plantation, and further up, a mansion
with outbuildings. Who lived there he did not know—he
only knew that he was again in the region of his enemies.
Light thrills shot through his heated blood, and the canoe
yawed and trembled beneath him, as if conscious of danger.
Paddling forward, he saw before him in the clear moonlight,
for the trees on either side were thinly scattered now, a huge
trunk fallen sheer across the stream, sloping down obliquely,
with its crown of branches dipping in the water, and barring
half the passage. From the other side, crossing the first
trunk, a leafless tree, withered or blasted, had also fallen, and
lay, dipped in the water, half way across, with its broken
boughs sticking upward like jagged spikes or horns. Steering
to the left of these, with the intention of shooting through the
space under the large trunk, he gave three or four vigorous
strokes of the paddle on either side of the skiff. The canoe
darted forward, quivering with the impetus of the strokes—stopped
suddenly with a tearing and griding shock, and
yawed around, with the water welling up swiftly through its
bottom. Antony, who was kneeling on one knee, had just
time to spring up, catch at the trunk before him, and lift himself
up on it. When he turned, the rim of the canoe was
settling in the water. It had struck one of the jagged spikes
just below the surface, which had ripped its bottom, and it
had gone down forever.
Sitting on the tree, stupefied at this unexpected accident,
Antony watched the circling ripples on the moonlit water
where his boat had sunk, and thought with bitter regret that
he was now without a single weapon to fight his way against
any opposing white man, or to end his own existence, should
the odds be against him. His hatchet had sunk with the
boat, and his knife also. With a fierce imprecation, he rose,
ran up the trunk, sprang ashore, and pausing only to wrench
off a branch, and strip it of its leaves for a club to defend himself,
rushed on through the underwood.
Heading to the northeast, he gained the plantation, and
running over rows of corn and springing cotton-plant, pale in
the paling moon, he struck upon a fenced road lying between
the plantation, with another road diverging from it in the
course he was travelling. Into the latter he turned, but afraid
to take the open path, he kept within the fences and hedges
skirting its side, ready if he saw anybody in the distance to
hide in the rows, or if anybody came upon him, to fight till he
was killed.
Rushing on, haggard with apprehension and desperate resolution,
with his teeth set, his large nostrils dilated, and his
glaring eyes roving warily about him, he came to a plantation
divided from the one he was on by a hedge of the osage-orange,
and with a similar hedge skirting the road. To break through
this would be difficult, so he took the road and ran on, with
the fresh wind of the coming morning blowing upon him, and
increasing his fear with the thought of the new dangers the
daybreak would bring. It was a large plantation, and it took
him some time to arrive at its terminus, at which a road
diverged from the one on which he was journeying. He
reached this road, and there, clad in shabby light clothes, and
coming down the path, not three yards distant from him, was a
man!
Antony swung up his club, and stood with opened nostrils
and glaring eyes, his black face alive with fierce courage. The
man halted, and looked at him with a sullen scowl. In the
blank pause all life seemed to have died from the air, and the
moon lay faded in a vacant, sky, ghast and grey in the pale
light of the morning. The man was a large, gaunt fellow,
with a harsh and sallow taciturn face, but to the dark, half
demented fancy of the fugitive, he dimly seemed a devil, and
the place was still vaguely Hell.
“See here, nigger,” he said, in a stern, strident voice, “yer
a runaway. There’s their name as owns yer on yer collar, and
I know Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, want yer. I’m goin’
down in the first boat, and yer comin’ with me, right away,
and no fuss. What yo’ say, nigger?”
He drew a revolver from his breast, and held it idly, watching
the fugitive with a scowl. Sense flickered through the
mind of Antony. Here was a chance to get safely down the
river—beyond, a chance to give his captor the slip when he
reached the city. He flung his club away.
“I’ll go with ye, Marster,” he said, sullenly.
The man put up his pistol.
“What’s yer name, boy?” he asked.
“Bill, Marster.”
“Bill, eh? You’re the Fugitive Slave Bill, I suppose,” said
the man, with a dull grin.
“Yes, Marster.”
“Well, Bill, I collect bills for a livin’, and I reckon I’ve
collected you, Bill. Hope I’ll collect something on yer, too.
Come along.”
Antony followed him. Not a word further was said on
either side. Meanwhile, around them the pallor of the sky
lightened into daybreak; horns sounded over the plantations;
the black gangs were coming forth into the fields on every
side; the birds darted and sang; the fragrant wind blew freshly
from the east, and the life of day began anew.
Weary, and sore, and aching, with insane fancies flitting
through the horrible lethargy which was creeping on his mind,
Antony followed his taciturn captor, and just as the rising
sun shot a low, broad splendor over the landscape, they came
to a solitary landing-place, with a shanty and a wood-pile, on
the border of the wide, gleaming river.
It was all a dim, dread dream. In it came a huge monster,
puffing, and snorting, and clanking, vomiting clouds of black
smoke, and lifting and washing back the drifting trees and
logs and refuse on the shining surge. Then a dream of hurry
and tumult, a great heaving mass, a swarm of people, an air
blind with light and heavy with smoke, a roar of voices laughing,
and talking, and hallooing, the clanging of a bell, piles of
cotton and goods of all sorts, the clank of engines, the wallowing
of water, ponderous snorting, and heaving, and surging,
all mixed together in inextricable confusion, and he
who dreamed it vaguely knew that he was sitting, like one
drugged, on a heaving deck, with heaps of merchandise around
him. Gradually he sank away into a still heavier lethargy, in
which everything became even more dim and distant, and
from thence he slid into a blank and stupid sleep.
Once again the dream seemed to swim heavily into that
death-like slumber—a vague, spectral dream, in which some
one gave him a hunch of corn bread, which he ate slowly in a
glimmering light, remotely conscious of a dark figure standing
near, of distant voices, a far-off snorting and clanking, a shuddering
motion beneath him, and formless bulks around him.
Presently it drowsily dissolved into darkness and silence.
Like one who dreams of awaking, he awoke again, and
stupidly strove to remember where he was and what had befallen
him. In the dull gleam of a hanging lantern, he saw
masses of bales and boxes, casks and furniture, and miscellaneous
merchandise, lying in murky gloom. A few dark,
uncouth forms of sleeping men, heavily breathing, were strewn
about in various grotesque attitudes on the piles of cotton.
In the stillness, he heard the regular snort and clank of the
engine, the rushing of the water, and felt with a dull giddiness
the floor rocking and swaying in long, regular undulations.
Somehow, a minute afterward, he found himself out on the
edge of the deck, sick and dizzy, steadying himself against a
heap of bales, and looking out on a broad, dim river, rolling
in mighty, languid surges under a large, low, yellow moon.
Logs and trees and masses of chaff and refuse lifted blackly in
the tawny light on the long swells. All around the water
fled by, churned into a mill-race of seething froth and foam.
Beyond was a huge steamboat; black smoke trailing from its
double funnels; fire flaring from them and from its escape-pipes;
balls of light gleaming from hanging lanterns here and
there; light streaming out from the rows of oblong windows,
and from every hole and cranny; the strong current beaten up
into a flood of foam beneath its wheel; and the darks and
lights of an inverted phantom steamboat hung below it in the
water. Far away were low, black shores, with here and there
a gaunt spectral tree, and dull lights glimmering. He was on
the mighty tide of a river which ran through Hell.
Sick and dizzy, and with a horror on his mind, he staggered
back with the heavy drowse on all his faculties, through the
tortuous lane of cotton-bales, and sinking down on one of
them, fell into his former lethargy.
He did not sleep through the night, but lay in utter torpor,
thinking of nothing, fearing and hoping nothing, only vaguely
conscious of where he was, and of the forms around him.
Overstrung for many years with the unnatural toils of a slave,
and still more tensely overstrung with the terrible labors of his
journey through the morass—overstrung both in body and
spirit, as few but slaves ever are—he had sunk back, now that
a season of relaxation had come, into lassitude as excessive as
were the fatigues and agitations of which it was the reaction.
Safe for the present, with no immediate stimulus to urge him
into activity, he lay, body and spirit, as in the sentient sleep
of the tomb.
Toward morning he sank away again into a heavy, dreamless
slumber. Once during the day he dreamed that he was
aroused by some one whom he did not recognize, and bidden
to come along and get something to eat. In his dream he
tried to shake the stupor from his bleared eyes, which even the
dim light among the bales pained, and to obey. But the
drowse was heavy upon him, and he could only mumble out
that he didn’t want to eat, and the dream instantly dissolved
in oblivion. He was left undisturbed, for his captor was
not without pity for him, and saw that he was terribly
fatigued.
But late that night, when midnight was two hours gone,
and the moon was westering palely from the sky, the trump
of Liberty or Death sounded again in the ear of the fugitive,
and his spirit arose from its tomb. A hand shook him, a
voice shouted in his ear that they were near the city, and
instantly springing to his feet, with fresh blood leaping through
his veins, with new pulses throbbing in his heart, and all his
faculties awake and alive, and armed with their utmost cunning,
their fullest courage, and their most desperate resolution,
he followed his captor out on deck. The boat was within a
mile of the city, which lay beyond a forest of masts and
hulls, and scattered lights hung in the rigging, or glimmering
on the levee, dark and silent, with its roofs and spires massed
against the purple sky, and glittering in the moon. The night
was hot and still, and a heavy languor hung over the great
breadth of regular rolling swells. Ships lay at anchor all
about the stream, lifting with the lifting of the surge, and
here and there a flat-boat with lights on board, and the men
plying their long sweeps, lazily steered its way on the drift
between the hulls. Antony watched the scene, with his heart
fiercely beating at the thought of the coming trial.
Meanwhile the boat, with her bell ringing, was slowly clanking
and snorting on through the foaming and brattling flood
around her bows and wheels, and the passengers were pouring
forth, men, women and children, on her decks. The fugitive
stood silently by his captor, on the lower forward deck, amidst
the tumult and crowding of the risen multitude, biding his
time. The moment the boat touched the levee he was determined
to quietly slip aside from his companion and lose himself
in the crowd. To this end he stood a little to one side of
him, watching his every movement.
Suddenly the clatter of conversation and the trampling of
feet were stricken still by a wild yell, above which was heard
the slow, impassive snort and clank of the engine, and the
brattling wash of the water. Then burst forth a shrill clamor
of cries and screams from the after deck, followed by a trampling
rush which threw all forward, as by a galvanic shock, into
mad confusion; then behind the pouring crowd, suddenly lightened
a red flare, followed by a tremendous volume of black smoke,
and at once, amidst terrific disorder, uprose a dreadful storm of
yells and screams from the horror-stricken multitude. The next
instant the uproar of voices was stifled in a multitudinous
choking and gasping, as the thick, poisonous smoke swept over
the decks, and presently up shot a sheeting burst of clear
flame, with shrivelling ringlets of black vapor writhing and
vanishing away in it, lighting the ghastly pallor of the hundreds
of terrified faces, all turned one way, and throwing its
lurid glare on the churning froth and the lifting swells, and on
the myriad masts and spars and rigging of the surrounding
vessels, which started out suddenly in lines and bars of tawny
splendor against a background of gloom.
Even in that awful moment Antony did not lose sight of
his captor. With his whole soul fiercely bent on getting away
from him, he saw him start back and shout with terror. With
his eye fixed upon him, he heard the rapid jabber of a terrified
man behind him shrieking out that a lantern had fallen and broken,
setting fire to a pool of turpentine which had leaked from a
barrel on the after deck, and the fire spreading at once to the barrel,
it had burst and flooded the boat with flame. Still watching
him, he heard the screamed order to reverse the engines, and
amidst howls and cries of anguish and despair, and cursing
and praying, and the heavy thump of men and women falling
in swoon upon the deck, or trampling and fighting over each
other in their frantic desperation, while the advancing flame
leaped and writhed, crackling and bristling and roaring furiously
on—amidst all the horror and Bedlam confusion of that
minute—for it was but one—standing still, with his eye
riveted on his captor, he heard the ponderous clank, the long
wash and wallow, and felt the boat drift backward to gain
the middle of the stream. That instant he sprang backward,
and rushing through the crowd, kicked off his shoes, and
leaped into the river.
He emerged presently from his plunge, amidst a shower of
fiery cinders, with the lifting surges all aglare around him, and
struck boldly forward for the levee, seeing at a glance the burning
mass drift behind him, and all the illuminated ships at the
piers and in the stream suddenly alive with shouting figures.
Turning for an instant, and treading water, he saw the boat
clanking backward, with her black funnels rising from a leaping
and coiling mountain of smoke and flame, her passengers
all huddled forward in a dense, shrieking mass, black against
the fiery glow, and figures jumping into the water—which was
already dotted with dark, swimming forms, and looked like a
turbulent sea of flame ignited from the spectre of a burning
boat below its surface. Among the swimming figures there
was, perhaps, not one but was his enemy—not one who would
not hale him back to the bondage from which he was struggling
away. Turning again, he swam on, heading against the
ponderous current which would bear him down past the city
and out to sea. Boats were putting out in all directions from
ships in the stream, and from the shore, to pick up the swimmers,
many of whom were swimming in front of him, or clinging
to pieces of drift-wood or furniture. To avoid being
picked up by any of the boats was a necessary part of his
task, for they, too, were manned by his enemies. Reaching a
large brig anchored in the stream, with a few sailors standing
on the bulwarks and in the rigging, watching the burning vessel,
he resolved to cling to its rudder a few moments to recover
breath, and as he approached it, looking up through the
shadow, made luminous by the wan light of the moon, and the
reflected glare of the water, he read on the stern, in white letters,
the words, “Soliman, Boston.” His heart throbbed
wildly, and clinging to the rudder under an overhanging boat,
he listened to the talking on the deck above him, and presently
heard a voice say:
“Devilish lucky we weren’t set afire, Jones, and we just
ready to sail.”
Just ready to sail! He heard those words with his brain
aflame. His chance had come. Setting his knees to the
slippery rudder, he began to climb. It was hard work, for
the helm was coated with sea-slime, but at length he got his
toes upon the slight projection of one of the iron clamps that
bound the wood together, and scrambling upward, laid hold
of the boat swinging astern, and softly clambering in, remained
still, and listened. He had not been discovered. The talking
above him was still going on, and presently he heard the
tramp of the two men as they moved away forward. Raising
himself in the boat, he cautiously peered in at the cabin window.
A swinging lamp was burning within, and all was
quiet. He put in his head, looked around him for a moment,
and then stealthily got in. Going to the cabin door, he
peered out on the deck. Everybody was at the bows, standing
on the bulwarks and in the rigging in the wild glare, watching
the steamboat, which was now one mass of leaping flame,
half a mile away up the river. Cries and screams and
shouts were resounding from the water in all directions.
Looking at the deck, he saw that the hatch nearest him was
open, and nerved to desperation, and almost choking with
excitement, he went lightly forward, his bare feet making no
sound, and, unseen by any one, so intent was the general gaze
on the conflagration, stooped and dropped into the hold.
He fell on a cotton-bale, three or four feet from the top,
and lay in the thick darkness, reeking with sweat, and listening,
with a wild jumping in his throat, for any sound that
might tell him his entrance had been observed. He heard
none. The talking went on above him, and it was all about
the burning steamboat. He knew that he must not remain
where he was, for there he could be seen, and in a moment he
began to grope for a hiding-place. He was in a sort of
square well, formed by the cotton-bales around him. Above
them was a horizontal space under the deck, and clambering
out of the well, he wormed himself into this, a few feet forward,
and lay, panting and fatigued, hot, wet, hungry and
thirsty, half stifled by the foul and musty air of the hold,
and by the smell of the bilge, but safe for the present.
He lay in a sort of stupor, and gradually heard all sounds
die away. For a little while his mind was filled with strange
recollections of the passions and events of the last hour; then
lying prone in the foul and musty darkness, he lapsed into a
sleep haunted with dreams, in which he was again rushing
through the swamp, which somehow changed into rolling
water on which a steamboat was burning, and he was holding
up Madame Lafitte, who suddenly turned and bit him on the
hand. Starting up in the thick darkness, he struck his head
against the deck, and then remembering where he was, lay
still. The hatch had been closed. In the darkness he heard
light scampering and squealing, and felt the ship shuddering
beneath him.
He forgot his dream in the wild whirl of emotion with
which he became aware that the vessel was on her way. Presently
he felt a sort of pricking in his hand, and touching the
spot, found that it was wet, and, as he again heard the scampering
and squealing, he knew that a rat had bitten him.
Startled a little at the new danger of being set upon by these
vermin, and suspicious of poison, he sucked the wound, resolving
to keep awake now as long as he could. He did not
know how long he had slept, but he could hear the incessant
snort, snort, snort, of a steamboat, with the long unbroken
wash of the vessel, and knew that the brig was in the tow of a
steam-tug, and so not yet out of the river.
At length there was a change in the noises. Orders were
shouted above, heavy feet were rushing about, there was a
bustle of pulling and hauling, griding and flapping, thudding
of ropes on deck, chanting of sailors, amidst the receding snort
of the steam-tug, and in the darkness, Antony felt the vessel
lean and roll and stagger with a sound of swiftly rushing
water, and knew that she was standing out to sea.
Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll
be mean enough to do it? That was his constant thought
now, and it came in those words to his mind. He knew the
penalties imposed on any captain who took away a fugitive in
his vessel. He had thought of them before, but dimly; now
they came to him vividly, and he trembled. He was resolved
to remain in the hold as long as he could, but he knew
the time would come when he must leave his hiding-place, and
face the captain. His plan was to tell him all he had suffered,
to show him his wounds and scars, to beg him on his knees not
to send him back to the Hell he had escaped from. Who
would do it? Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone
through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it?
Soon the motion of the vessel threw him, already sickened
by the horrible smells and closeness of the hold, into agonies
of sea-sickness, and he lay on the bales vomiting violently,
and feeling as if his soul were rending his aching body
asunder. By and by, he crawled down into the well-like
cavity under the hatch, where there was a little more room to
breathe in, and there he lay without food, without drink,
almost without air, for three days.
Days of sickness too loathsome to be described, too dreadful
for permitted language to convey. Days of utter prostration,
of griping pain, of wrenching convulsions, of horror indescribable,
of tortured death-in-life. Days when the ropy and
putrid air was sucked into the feeble lungs as if it were some
strangling substance; when the oppressed heart beat slowly
with dull knocks as though it would burst the bosom, and the
bosom labored as though it were loaded down with tons of
iron. Days when sleep came down like a weight of lead upon
the brain, and struggled with infernal dreams, and was broken
to fight off an ever-returning swarm of rats—invisible vermin
that swarmed over his invisible body when it lay still, and
were heard squeaking and pattering off in the sightless darkness
when he feebly flung about his limbs to beat them away.
Days whose mad, disgustful horror was desperately borne for
the hope of liberty, for the hatred of slavery—borne till he
could bear it no longer, and he resolved to beat upon the
hatch and cry aloud to let those above him know what a hell
of agony raged beneath their feet.
How long he had been immured he did not know. Count
time by anguish, and it might have been centuries. Fearful of
discovering himself till he was too far from the land from
which he had fled to be returned, he had resolved to endure
till endurance became impossible. For this he had clung to
life, for this he had silently borne the horrors of his tomb, for
this he had striven a hundred times against the desire to end
his imprisonment by shouting aloud to those above him.
Now when heavy torpor and gradual giddiness were stealing
upon him, and the instinct of his soul told him death was
drawing near, he roused himself for the long deferred
effort.
The ship was staggering heavily, and he heard the trampling
of feet on the deck as, with dizzily reeling brain, he
feebly and slowly crawled up on his hands and knees. His
strength was almost gone. An infant newly born could have
been hardly more helpless than he found himself. He slowly
lifted one hand to lay it on the bales beside him—lifted it a
few inches like something over which he had no command—and
it fell heavily, and losing his balance he tumbled down on
his side. An awful feeling stole across his mind that he had
delayed too long—that his resolution had outlived his physical
powers. Turning over on his back, feebly panting, slowly
suffocating, he drew in his breath for a wild cry for help. It
rushed from him in a hoarse whistling whisper. His voice had
left him!
He lay still now, painfully breathing, but resigned to die.
Quietly—quietly—the fears and desires of the present, the
hopes of the future withdrew, and the vision of all his past
floated softly through his tranquil brain. It faded, and he
lay rushing on a fast-rushing tide, and dilated with a wonderful
and mystic change. Power and beauty and joy ineffable
began to glow and spread divinely through his being with the
vague beauteous glimmer of a transcendant life afar. All
fierce and dark and sorrowful passions and emotions gone—all
sense of pain and horror and disgust fled forever—himself
happier, greater, nobler than he had ever dreamed—he lay
swiftly drifting to the last repose.
What sound was it that jarred so dully on his failing ear?
What sudden light was it that fell upon him? What faces
were those that looked on him so strangely from above, and
vanished with cries that brought down darkness and silence on
him once more?
O blue sky of the nineteenth century, what is this? O
pale, fresh light streaming into the noisome hold, what is this?
O wonder-stricken, silent faces, gazing aghast upon that swart
and loathsome figure lying in the shallow well, with an iron
collar on its neck, what does this mean?
The men stood staring at the motionless body on the bales
below them, and then, lost in a trance of wonder, stared at
each other. Their wild amazement at the sight which met
their eyes when they had unbattened the hatch, had burst
forth in one cry, and then left them still and dumb. Presently
there was a sound of heavy, hurrying feet, and the captain,
a short, powerfully-built man, came flying over the deck,
with strong excitement working in his sun-burnt face, reached
the hold, looked in, turned livid with rage, slapped his straw
hat down on his head with both hands, and rushed away cursing
and raving like a madman. It was highly natural. A
commercial Christian of the nineteenth century breed, the
captain had been educated to think of nothing but his ship
and trade, and his special reflection was of the penalties that
would ensue if it became known that he had carried away a
slave from New Orleans.
Recovering from their amazement, the sailors, with uncouth
and profane ejaculations of horror and pity, lifted the inanimate
body of Antony, disgusting even to their rude senses,
and touching even to their rude sensibilities, out of the hold.
They had hardly laid it on deck when the captain came rushing
back again, shouting with oaths an order for a look-out
up aloft, with the hope of meeting some vessel bound for the
city he had left that would take the slave back. Then giving
the prostrate body a furious kick, he rushed away again,
storming and stamping and swearing.
At the direction of the mate, the sailors took the faintly-breathing
body of Antony forward to the galley, where the
black cook busied himself in reviving the fugitive. Half a
dozen times a day the captain came to the spot where the feeble
man reclined, and glared at him without saying a word. On
the third day, Antony being then weak but able to stand and
talk, the captain demanded him to give an account of himself.
Feebly standing before him, with all the vigor gone from
his emaciated form, and with the deep marks of awful suffering
graven on his wasted lineaments, Antony told his story.
As he finished, imploring the captain in earnest and broken tones
not to send him back, the mate, who stood by, turned away with
his mouth twitching, saying it was a damned shame. The captain
burst into a fit of passion, and stamped on the deck, gesticulating
with clenched hands.
“A damned shame, is it, Mr. Jones?” he roared, perfectly
livid with rage. “I should think it was! Rather! A
blasted nigger to smuggle his ugly carcass aboard my brig—what
d’ye think they’ll say about it at Orleans, and what’ll
they do about it, Mr. Jones, and what’ll Atkins say when he
hears of it, Mr. Jones, and a load of cotton aboard from the
very house whose junior partner owns this dingy curse, Mr.
Jones! Look at the name of the house on his neck, man.
Blast ye,” he howled, turning upon Antony, and shaking both
fists at him, “I’d send ye back, you beggar, if they were to
fry ye in your own black blood when they got ye! Send ye
back? If I don’t, may I be eternally”—
He finished the sentence by a gasp, and dashed both
clenched fists into the haggard and imploring face of the fugitive,
who fell to the deck, covered with blood. Shouting and
cursing, the infuriated captain leaped on him, and seizing him
by the hair, beat his head against the planks; then jumped
to his feet, capering like a madman, and brandishing his
clenched fists. The mate stood looking away to the horizon,
with a mute, flushed face, and two or three of the sailors
standing not far distant, dumb witnesses of this brutal scene,
glanced at each other with mutinous brows. Striding off a
dozen paces, the captain turned again, bringing down his
clenched fist with a slap into the palm of his hand, and stamping
with his right foot on the deck as he shouted:
“Keep a sharp look-out, Mr. Jones! The first vessel that
heaves in sight for New Orleans shall take him if it costs me a
hundred dollars. And if he gets to Boston, I’ll tie him hand
and foot, and send him or fetch him back the first chance, or
my name’s not Bangham!”
He foamed off into the cabin. Who’ll send me back after
all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it?
Antony had received his answer.
