By George W. Cable.1
I. – Stage and Actors
This is a true story. But it is not mine; I take it all from a friend’s2 manuscript, which I have had for years and which lies before me now. It tells of a beautiful island lying some twelve hundred miles southeast-ward from the southern end of Florida; the largest of the Virgin group; the island of the Holy Cross. Columbus, on his second voyage of American discovery, sailing into the marvellous waters of the Caribbean sea, found this wonderful island. Its inhabitants called it Aye-Aye3; but he piously changed its title to Santa Cruz4, and bore away a number of its people to Spain as slaves, to show them what Christians looked like in quantity, and how they behaved to one another and to strangers. You can hear more about Santa Cruz from anybody in the rum business.
It has had many owners. As with the woman of numerous husbands, in the Sadducee’s riddle6, seven political powers have had this mermaid as bride. Spain, the English, the Dutch, the Spaniards again, the French, the Knights of Malta, the French again, who sold her to the Guinea Company, who in 1734 transferred her to the Danes, from whom the English captured her in 1807, but restored her again at the close of Napoleon’s wars, in 1815. Thus, at last, Denmark prevailed as the ruling power; but the English language remained the speech of the people. The two towns of the island are Christiansted on the north and Fredericksted on the south. It is about twenty-three miles long and six miles wide. Christiansted is the capital.
In 1848 there lived on Kongensgade, that is King Street, in Fredericksted, a little maiden named Dora. I have known her these many years, though I did not know her as a child or in the island. She is the author of the manuscript now lying before me, from the facts of which I shall not go aside from first to last, even though I have to end the story tamely without births, deaths, or marriages.
She dwelt with her aunts, Marion, Anna, and Marcia, and her grandmother7, and was just old enough to begin taking care of her dignity. I wish the story were even more about her than it is. Whether she was Danish, British, or United Statesish, she was often puzzled to know. When her grandmother, whose husband had belonged to a family which had furnished a signer of our Declaration, told her stories of the American Revolution8, Dora felt the glow of an American patriotism. But her grandmother had stories of English valor and renown as well, and when in telling these she warmed up to their heroic or momentous nature, she would remind Dora that her, the damsel’s, father and mother were born on this island under British sway, and “once a Briton always a Briton.” And yet again, Dora’s playmates would say—
“But you, yourself, were born when the island was already Danish; you are a subject of King Christian VIII.”
One of her playmates, much beloved of her, was invariably silent on this subject. He was a large and beautiful white cat, much more important to Dora than he is to this story, in which he appears but once, momentarily and quite parenthetically.
Kongensgade, though narrow, was one of the main streets that ran from the walls of an estate at the northeastern end of the town, to the lagoon and fort at the southwestern end. Dora’s home was a long, low cottage on the street’s southern side, its rear facing southward, seaward, on grounds that sloped downward to the street in front and rose and widened out extensively at the back, until they suddenly fell away in bluff’s to the beach. It had been built for the grandmother, a bridal gift from her rich husband. But now in her widowhood the wealth was gone, and only refinement and inspiring traditions remained.
At her husband’s death the estate left her was mainly slaves, whose sale or hire might have kept her in comfort. But a clergyman lately come from England convinced her that no Christian should hold a slave, and setting them free, she accepted a life of self-help and of no little privation. She was his only convert; his own zeal soon quieted; and there being no adequate public freedom provided either by law or custom for those whom private hands and consciences liberated, her ex-slaves merely hired their labor to less scrupulous employers, and yearly grew more worthless to themselves and the community.
Yet, to be poor on that island did not, of necessity, mean a sordid narrowing of life. The voices of nature were lofty, the beauties of land and sea were inspiring. You would have found the main room of Dora’s home furnished in mahogany black with age and mounted with brass. In a corner where the breezes came in by a great window, stood a jar big enough to have held one of Ali Baba’s thieves, into which trickled with a cool gurgle a thread of water from a huge dripping-stone set in a frame, while above these a shelf held native waterpots whose yellow and crimson surfaces were constantly pearled with dew evaporating through the porous clay. On a low mahogany press near by was piled the remnant of the father’s library; and there were silver snuffers, candlesticks, crystal shades, and such like on the ancient sideboard.
But it was not old mahogany, brass, silver, or family traditions that gave this room its finest charm. As you entered it from the street the glory of the sea met you and filled the place. There was no need, no whereabouts, for pictures. The living portraits of nature hung framed in wide high windows through which came in the distant boom of the surf on the rocks, and its salt breath perfumed with the blossoms of the cassia. A broad door led from it by a flight of stone steps to the couch-like roots of a gigantic turpentine tree whose deep shade gave harbor to birds of every hue. It was these things that lent the room such beauty that even strangers, entering it, exclaimed aloud in admiration.
And outside, round about, there was far more. To Dora, sitting often by that equatorial sea, the island’s old Carib name of Aye-Aye seemed the eternal consent of God to some seraphic spirit asking for this ocean pearl. All that poet or prophet had ever said of heaven became comprehensible in its daily transfigurations of light and color scintillated between wave, landscape, and cloud, its sea like unto crystal, and the trees bearing all manner of fruits. Fragrance, light, form, color, everywhere; fruits crimson, gold, and purple; fishes blue, orange, pink; shells of rose and pearl. Distant hills, clouds of sunset and dawn, sky and stream, leaf and flower, bird and butterfly, repeated the splendor, while round about all palpitated the wooing rhythm of the sea’s mysterious tides.
The beach! Along its landward edge the plumed palms stood sentinel, mingling their faint rustle with the lipping of the waters and the curious note of the Thibet-trees9 that shook their long dry pods like castanets in the evening breeze. By the water’s margin what treasures of the under world! Here a sponge, with stem bearing five cups; there a sea-fan large enough for a Titan’s use, yet delicate enough to be a mermaid’s. There were red-lipped shells; mystical eye-stone ; shell petals heaped in rocky nooks like rose-leaves; and, walking leisurely among all these in grotesque complacency, crabs, whose brilliancy and variety might baffle the painter. What was this the rector preached, about a fallen and degraded world? It seemed but empty words when the sunset glory was too much for human vision and the young heart trembled before its ineffable suggestions.
Dora often rode a pony. If she turned his way inland his steps were on a road lined on either side with majestic cocoa-palms, or in some tangled dell where a silvery cascade leaped through the deep verdure. On one side the tall mahogany cast its woody pears to the ground; on another the sandbox and calabash trees rattled their huge fruit like savages preparing for battle; here the banyan dropped its strange ropes, and yonder the tamarind waved its feathery streamers. Here was the india-rubber tree and here the bread-fruit; now and then a clump of the manchineel weighted the air with the luscious perfume of its poisonous apples, the banana rustled, or the bamboo tossed its graceful canes. By some stream winding down to the hidden sea she might espy the black washerwomen beetling clothes with big thick paddles. Or urging the pony, she would rise in exhilarating leaps from ridge to ridge, and reaching the top of Blue Mountain, look down, eleven hundred feet, upon the vast Caribbean dotted with islands, and, nearer by, the breakers curling in the noble bays or breaking under rocky cliffs. Northward, the wilderness; eastward, green fields of sugar-cane paling and darkling under the sweep of the breeze; southward, the wide harbor of Fredericksted, the town, and the black-skinned, red-shirted boatmen pushing their graceful boats about the harbor; westward, the setting sun; and presently everywhere the swift fall of the tropical night, with lights beginning to twinkle in the town, and the boats in the roadstead to leave long trails of phosphorescent foam.
We need not say that Nature had her rudenesses as well as her graces. There were sharks in the sea and venomous things, tarantulas, serpents, scorpions, ashore; and there was the hurricane. Every window and door was armed with strong outer shutters provided with stout bars, rings, and ropes, that came swiftly into vigorous use whenever, between July and October, the dire word ran through the town, “The barometer is falling.” Then candles and lamps had to be lighted indoors, and it was a time of delightful excitement to a courageous child. Dora would beg hard to have a single pair of shutters held slightly open by two persons ready to slam them shut in a second, and so snatched glimpses of the tortured, flying clouds, and writhing trees, while old Si’ [Sis, sister] Myra, one of the freed slaves who had not left the family, crouched in a corner muttering, “Lo’d sabe us! Lo’d sabe us!” Once Dora saw a handsome brig, whose captain had failed to leave the harbor as promptly as he should have done, staggering in upon the rocks where it seemed, almost, the masts might fall into her grandmother’s own grounds, and the grandmother told her that thus her, Dora’s, father had come and met, loved and won her mother.
One bright day, suddenly and without warning, the wonder-struck Dora felt the earth ?inch, throb, sink, and heave. The long pendent hooks on the shutters of the house swung outward, trees fell, the ground opened, the houses rocked and reeled, and the people ran out of them crying in terror, “Earthquake! earthquake!” But no great damage was done, and in a day or two the streets echoed the cheery morning cries of the many vendors of fruits, candies, sugarcane, alligator-pears and “hot harapas and cassava!” Harapas were thin pancakes made of bananas beaten to a batter.
These pedlers of dainties were, of course, blacks, male and female, and generally slaves. On Saturdays the negroes were allowed to hold a petty market for their own account, on an open square of the town thickly planted with great trees. Each one chose his tree, under which, in calabashes plain or carved, he spread his produce over the ground. If it rained—and rain in the tropics is tremendous—you may imagine the resulting mixture of fruits, fish, flesh, flowers, and fancy articles. Hard by in a special little grove was the “maroon market,” held exclusively by old negresses who could do no harder work than sell cakes and confections. Si’ Myra was often of their number. She was a native of Congo, and, like all such, had horrid superstitions. She believed the Obi priests could boil water without fire, and cause in many ways the most dreadful woes. She had added Danish myths to her own, and believed in the wehr-wolf.
“Yes, me chile! Dem nights w’en de moon shine bright and de dogs a-barkin’, you see twelb dogs a-talkin’ togedder in a ring and one in de middle. Dah dem wait till dem yerry [hear] him; den dem take arter him, but dem nebber catch him, me chile, and he git back afo day!”
Strangest, wildest, of all the slave practices, was the hideous misuse they were allowed, by Christian masters, to make of Christmas and Christmas week. It was then they danced the bamboula, by day and night. All through the year this saturnalia was prepared for in meetings held by night in the cabins of the principal leaders. The songs to which they danced were made of white society’s most current or private scandals reduced to satirical rhyme and rhythm, and to the rashest girl or most reckless man the warning was a serious one, “You will get yourself sung about at Christmas.” A king, queen, and royal retinue, chosen mainly for personal beauty or special ability to make good songs, were elected yearly. The dresses of these and of all was a strange mixture of savage splendor and silliest tawdriness, that exhausted the owners’ savings and pilferings of a twelvemonth. Good-natured “missies” and their daughters often helped make these outfits. They were of real velvet, silk, satin, cotton lace, false flowers, the brilliant seeds of the licorice and coquelicot, tinsel, beads, and pinchbeck. Sometimes mistresses even lent—firmly sewed to the clothing—their own jewelry. On Christmas eve, here and there throughout the town, eligible ground-floor rooms were hired and decorated with branches of the cocoa and other palms; or booths of these were built, adorned with oranges and boughs of cinnamon-berries, lighted with candles and lanterns, and furnished with seats for the king, queen, and musicians, and with buckets of rum punch. Then the “bulrush man” went his round. He was covered with capes and flounces of bulrushes from neck to heels, and crowned with a high waving fringe of them about his brows, rattled pebbles in calabashes, danced to their clatter, proclaimed the feast, and solicited of such white children as his dress did not terrify, for gifts from their store of holiday stivers.
Soon the dancers began to gather in the booths; women in gorgeous trailing gowns, the men bearing showy batons and clad in ornamented shirts or satin jackets, with a mongrel infant rabble, spawn of many races, at their heels. When the goombay—a flour-barrel with both heads out and a goatskin stretched over one end—boomed out its hoarse notes on the evening air, the town knew the bamboula dance had begun. The dancers formed in two confronting lines, the men facing the women, a leading couple improvising a song, all taking up the refrain, the goombay heating time, and the dancers with arms uplifted, rattling or tinkling in harmonious rhythm the various instruments: the woody seed-cases of the sandbox-tree set on long sticks and the lobes painted each a separate vivid color; basket-work rattles and calabashes filled with pebbles and shells; or hoops hung with bells. All these were adorned with floating ribbons. So the lines approached each other by two steps, receded, advanced again, and again receded, always in wild cadence according to the signals of voice and instrument; then bowing low till the two opposing ranks touched each other — twice — thrice; then straightening again, pirouetting and resuming the first movement, and now and then, with two or three turns or bows clashing their rattles together in perfect measure. As night darkened, the rude lights flared yellow and red upon the dusky forms bedizened with beads, bangles, and more grotesque trumpery. Faces, necks, arms melted and shone in the heat, the air throbbed voluptuously with the savage music, ribbons streamed, gross odors filled the place, the boom of the goombay dominated all, and children of the master race—for even such as Dora were often permitted to witness these orgies—without comprehending stood aghast. Outside, only a few steps away, the soft West Indian night lay in matchless loveliness on hills and sea; the grateful nostrils caught the ethereal fragrance of the pink blossoms of the pont-du-pont; the eyes looked up to see the radiant majesty of the stars; every sense and impulse was soothed by the exquisite refinement of the scene, into whose space and silence the faint, deep voice of the savage drum sobbed one grief and one prayer alike for the slave and for his master.
The revel always ended with New Year’s day. The next morning broke silently, and with the rising of the sun the clang of the plantation bell or the blowing of the conch called the bondman and bondwoman once more into the cane-fields. Then, alike in broadest noon and deepest night, the spectre of an anxious fear hovered about the master whenever he sat among his loved ones or wherever his pathway turned. Not often did the hand of oppression fall upon any slave with sudden illegal violence, or he or she turn to slaughter or poison the oppressor; but the slaves were in thousands, the masters were but hundreds, the laws were tyrannous, the public whipping-post stood among the town’s best houses of commerce, justice, and worship, with the thumb-screws close at hand; the Danish garrison was a mere squad, the well-drilled and finely caparisoned volunteer “troopers,” main stay as to armed force, were scarce a handful, the governor was mild and aged, and the two towns were the width of the island apart.
Governor-General of the Danish West Indies Peter Carl Frederik von Scholten
In the year of which we write, 1848, this anxiety was much increased. King Christian, induced, the planters believed, by English influence from Exeter Hall, had lately proclaimed a gradual emancipation of all slaves in his West Indian colonies. A squad of soldiers from the fort, as the custom was, had marched through the streets, halting at the principal corners, drawing a crowd by the beat of a drum—“beating the protocol,” they termed it—and reading the royal edict. After twelve years all slaves were to go free; their owners were to be paid for them; and meantime every infant of a slave was to be free from its birth. No one knows better than the practical statesman that measures for a gradual righting of an evil are apt to be disastrous. They rarely satisfy any class concerned. In this case the aged slaves bemoaned a land of promise they might not live to enter; younger slave parents dreaded the superior liberty of their children; and the planters doubted that they would ever see the pay for their losses, even if emancipation did not bring fire, rapine, and death.
One day, Dora, along with all Fredericksted, or “West-En’,” as the negroes called it—Christiansted was “ Bass-En’”—saw two huge British East Indiamen sail into the harbor. They came for no cargo; such ships never touched at Fredericksted. What could they want?
“Water,” they said, “ and rest.” They staid two weeks, their officers and men roaming the island, asking many questions, answering few, and becoming more and more each hour the object of feverish and irrational suspicions.
Gilbert, the young son of a neighbor who was an old friend of Dora’s grandmother, used often to drop in at her house.
“Mrs. H—10,” he said, one afternoon, as they looked out the seaward windows at the two big ships anchored so far from shore, “these fellows are here for no good. I meet them at all hours and on every road, talking to the negroes. Mark my word, they are putting them up to some deviltry. There comes a boat-load now.”
But Dora’s grandmother and Aunt Marion bade him fear nothing. “All the clergy,” they said, “are acting together, soothing the restlessness of the slaves, and showing them the duty and advantage of waiting patiently for their day of happiness.”
Whereat Dora asked, for information only, “How are the negroes ever going to be happy if they stay black?” The conversation was too deep for her, however, and was remembered mainly as the last one they had on that subject, in which she took any part.
Yet she understood much, and once said, when the talk ceased on her entering the room with a playmate, “We know what you are talking about; you’re afraid the negroes are going to rise. But they’ll never hurt us; Rachel and Tom, and Si’ Myra and Lotta, and Jule and Jack, and the others won’t let them.”
Still the great ships did no visible evil; the month, June, were by, and the minds of all seemed to grow more quiet. And then the event came.
II.—The Uprising.
Sunday, the second of July, was still and fair. The Sabbath was always a happy day to Dora. High-stepping horses prancing up to the church-gates brought friends from the plantations. The organ pealed, the choir chanted, the rector read, and read well; the mural tablets told the virtues of the churchyard sleepers, and out through the windows she could gaze on the clouds and the hills. After church came the Sunday-school. Its house was on a breezy height where the wind swept through the room unceasingly, giving wings to the children’s voices as they sang “From Greenland’s icy mountains,” or “ Now be the Gospel Banner.” But this Sunday promised unusual pleasure; Dora was to go with her Aunt Marion to dine soon after midday with a Danish family, at a real Danish West Indian dinner.
As she went to the house of feasting, she carried with her but one fear—that her hostess, Mrs. Valberg, would provide pigeon-pea-soup. For, look you, among the guests were to be some officers from the East Indiamen, and it was a negro saying, that whosoever ate of pigeon-pea-soup would never want to leave the island. But in due time the hostess asked,
“Will you have pigeon-pea-soup, or guava-berry soup?” And Dora, hoping to be imitated, chose the soup of the guava berries.
Whichever the officers took they liked, and after soup there was an elegant king-fish, and by and by the famous callalou, and many other delicious and curious viands. For the dessert appeared “red groat” that is, sago jelly flavored with guavas, crimsoned with the juice of prickly pears, and floating in milk; also other floating islands of guava jelly beaten with eggs. Pale green granadillas crowned the feast. These were eaten with sugar and wine, while before each draught of the wine the men would lift their glasses high, bow to right and left, and cry, “Skoal! skoal! ” As the company finally rose, Mr. and Mrs. Valberg shook hands with every guest in turn, these again saluting each other, and each two saying with every salute, “Vel be komme,” implying “may this feast do you good.” It made the end a glad one.
Late in the afternoon, Dora and her aunt started home. On the way two friends, a Mrs. Dale and her daughter, Kate, persuaded them to turn and take a walk on the north side road at the town’s western border. They went southward toward the lagoon near to where it formed a kind of moat behind the fort, and was spanned by a slight wooden bridge. While they went the sun slowly sank through a golden light toward the purple sea, among temples, towers, and altars of cloud.
As they neared this bridge two black men crossing it from opposite ways stopped and spoke to each other in low tones, yet Dora and her companions heard. Said one,
“Yes, me yerry it; dem say sich t’ing as nebber bin known befo’ goin’ be done in West-En’ town to-night.” And the other—
“Well, you look sharp, me frien’—
At this point they saw their auditors and parted abruptly, one looking troubled, the other one pleased and brisk.
Mrs. Dale and her daughter drew back, the latter asking,
“What does he mean, mother?”
“Oh, I suppose he’s speaking of some meeting to make Christmas songs,” said Mrs. Dale, indifferently.
“I think not,” said Dora’s aunt. “Let us go back; mother’s alone.”
Just then Gilbert came up. “I’ve come to find you, Mrs. Dale,” he said; “my mother sent me. You had better come home. The negroes have planned to rise to-night. Some free negroes have betrayed them. Their signal is to sound at eight o’clock, to call them together for an attack upon the town.”
Dora and her aunt and friends reached her home first. Her grandmother heard the news without open agitation.
“We’re in God’s hands. Gilbert, will you stop at Mr. K______’s and send Anna and Marcia home?”
When these two came Mr. K______ was with them and begged that the whole family return with him and pass the night at his house; but Dora’s grandmother thought they had better stay where they were. He went away to propose to his neighbors to put all the women and children into the fort, that the men might be the freer to defend them.
“ Marion,” said the grandmother, “let us have supper and prayers while there’s quiet.”
The simple meal was scarcely touched. Dora’s Aunt Marcia put bible and prayer-book by the lamp and closed all the heavy shutters on the front of the house. The wind had risen, and through the open windows on the seaward side the roll of the surf sounded in with the grandmother’s voice in “God is our refuge and strength.” Then all knelt; but the prayer was scarcely finished when Aunt Marion sprang to her feet crying, “The signal! I Hear the signal!”
Out in the still night a high mournful note blown on a bamboo pipe was answered by the deeper tone of a couch-shell, and presently the alarm was ringing from point to point on every side, from shells, pipes, horns, and now and then in the solemn clangor of great plantation bells. It came first from the south, then from the east, swept around to the north, and echoed from the western cliffs, springing from hilltop to hilltop, long, fierce, exultant. Dora saw her four kinswomen rise, stand listening, and grow pale. But presently the grandmother sat down in her easy chair.
“I will spend the night here,” she said.
Aunt Anna brought a rocking-chair and sat beside her; Marcia reclined on the sofa, Marion spread a pallet for Dora, and lying down at her side, bade her not fear, but sleep. And Dora slept.
Suddenly she was broad awake. There was a sound of horses’ feet, distant but approaching. It came from the southwestward, the direction of the fort. Aunt Marcia was unbarring the shutters and fastening the inner jalousies so as to look out unseen.
“ It’s nearly one o’clock,” said Aunt Anna, and Dora got up wondering how the world looked at that hour of the night. All gathered at the windows, hearkening to the nearing sound.
“Ah!” spoke Aunt Marcia, gladly, “it’s the troopers!”
There were only some fifty horsemen. Slowly, in the light of a half-hidden moon they came and passed, a dim mass, their horses’ hoofs ringing on the narrow macadamized road, swords clanking, and dark plumes nodding over still faces, while the distant war-signal from shell, reed, and horn called before, around, and after them in wild mockery.
Still later in the night came a knock at the door, and when it was warily opened Mr. K______ entered. He explained the passing of the troopers and the slowness of their march. They had hurried about the country all the earlier part of the night, he said, bringing their families together at points where a few men could defend them, and had come to the fort for ammunition and orders; but the captain of the fort, refusing even to admit them without orders from the governor, had bade them go to their homes.
“But,” Mr. K______ himself interposed, for he was present, “a swift courier can reach the governor in an hour and a half.”
“One will be sent as soon as it is light,” was the only answer.
The town militia, Mr. K______ went on to tell Dora’s grandmother and aunts, were without ammunition also. He was much excited, and believed the fort’s officers were conniving with the revolt. Presently he went away, saying that he had met one of the household’s servants, Jack, who would come soon to protect them. Jack did appear shortly before daybreak and mounted guard at the front gate.
“Go sleep, ole mis’s. Miss Mary Ann [Marion], you all go sleep. Chaw ! wha’ foo all you set up all night? Si’ Myra, you go draw watah foo bile coffee.”
The dreadful signals had ceased at last, and all lay down to rest; but Dora remained awake and saw through the great seaward windows the wonderful tropical dawn flush over the sea from a crystalline sky. But presently its heavenly silence was broken by the swift gallop of a single horse and a Danish orderly, heavily armed, passed the street-side windows. He was off at last for Christiansted.
Soon the clamor of conchs and horns began again. It was blent, now, with the sound of many feet and the harsh voices of swarming insurgents. Their long silence was explained; they had been sharpening their rude improvised weapons.
The first act of aggression was to break open a sugar storehouse. They took a barrel of sugar and another of rum, mixed them, killed a hog, poured in his blood, added gunpowder, and drank the compound. That was to make them brave. Then with barrels of rum and sugar they changed a whole cistern of water into punch, stirring it with their sharpened hoes and dipping it out with huge sugar boilers’ ladles and drinking themselves half blind.
Jack dashed in from the gate: “Oh, Miss Marcia, go look! dem a-comin’! Gin’ral Buddoe at dem head on he w’ite hoss.”
The women and Dora ran to the jalousies. In the street, coming southward toward the fort, were full two thousand blacks. They walked and ran, the women with their skirts tied up in fighting trim, and all armed with hatchets, hoes, sugar-cane bills and cutlasses. The bills were fitted on stout pole handles, and all their weapons had been ground and polished until they glittered horridly in the black hands and above the gaudy Madras turbans or bare woolly heads and bloodshot eyes.
“Dem goin’ to de fote to ax foo freedom,” exclaimed Jack.
At their head rode one large and powerful black man wearing a cocked hat with a long white plume. A big rusty sword clanked at his horse’s flank. This was “Gin’ral Buddoe.11” Just as he came opposite Dora’s window she saw a white man, alone, step out from the house across the way and lift his arms in a silent command to the multitude to halt. It was the Roman Catholic priest. In black robe and cap be mounted some steps, showed the cross, and began to warn and exhort. The crowd halted, gave attention for a moment, then howled, brandished their weapons, and pushed on. Aunt Marion dropped to her knees and in tears prayed aloud, “From battle, murder, and sudden death—”
But Dora, in a tone of expostulation, cried, “O Auntie! get up quick! Here comes Rachel ! Don’t let her see you praying! Better have them kill us than let them see us frightened!” But Rachel, and Tom as well, had already entered from the street.
“La! Miss Mary Ann, wha’ fur you cryin’? Who’s goin’ tech you?” asked Rachel. She held by its four corners a Madras kerchief full of sugar. “Da what we done come fur, to tell Mis’s Paula not be frightened.” Tom staid but a moment and was off again.
“Rachel,” said Dora’s grandmother, “ you’ve been stealing.”
“Well, Mis’s Paula! ain’t I gwine hab my sheah w’en dem knock de head out dem hogsitt an’ tramp de sugah under dah feet an’ mix a whole cisron o’punch?”
At Dora’s appeal Rachel told the events of the night. But as she talked a roar of voices without rose higher and higher, and Dora, running with Jack to the gate, beheld two smaller mobs coming round a near corner. The foremost crowd was dragging along the ground by ropes a huge object, howling, striking, and hacking at it. The other was behaving in the same way to something smaller tied to a stick of wood, and the air was full of their cries:
“To de sea! Frow it in de sea! You’ll nebber hole obbe [us] no mo’ foo w’ip! You’ll no ’queeze obbe no mo’! You’ll be drownded in de sea-watah! ”Their victims were the whipping-post and the thumb-screws.
Tom returned to say, “Dem done to’e up de cote-house and de jedge’s house, and now dem goin’ Bay Street foo tear up de sto’es ”
Gilbert came up from the fort telling what he had seen. The blacks had tried in vain to scale the ramparts by climbing upon one another’s shoulders, howling for freedom and defying the garrison to fire on them. But the officer in command had not dared to do so without orders from the governor, and his courier had not returned. Others were not so cautious. A leading merchant called out as he stood on the fort wall:
“Take the responsibility! Fire! Every white man on the island will sustain you, and you’ll end the whole thing here!”
Upon that word, off again up town had gone the whole black swarm, had sacked the bold merchant’s store, and seemed now, by the noises they still made, to be sacking others. “I have come,” said Gilbert, “with an offer of the ship captains in port to take the white people aboard their ships if matters grow no better.”
As he turned away, groups of negroes began to dash by laden with all sorts of “prog” [booty] from the wrecked stores. Dora’s grandmother had lain down, her aunts were trying to make up some sort of midday repast, and Dora was standing alone behind the jalousies, when a ferocious-looking negro came and rattled the jalousies with his bill.
“Lidde gal, gimme some watah.”
“Wait a minute,” said Dora, and left the room. She thought of hiding, but feared he might in that case burst in enraged and murder them all. So she brought a bowl of water.
“ Tankee, lidde missee,” he said, handed back the drained bowl, and went away. Tom was thereupon set to guard the gate.
He did it poorly. While he was diverted by something another negro slipped into the yard and sat down on the stone steps. He looked around the pretty, quiet enclosure, gave a tired grunt, and said, “Please, missee, lemme res’; I done bruk up.” He held in his hands the works of a clock, fell to studying them, and became wholly absorbed. Rachel asked him who had broken it. He replied:
“Obbe [our] Ca’lina no like de way it talkin’. She say, ‘W’at mek you say, night und day, night und day?’ Un’ she tuk her bill un’ bruk it up. Un’ Georgina chop’ up the pianneh ’case it wouldn’ talk foo her like it talk foo buckra. Da shame!”
But now came yells and cheers in the street, the rush and trample of hundreds of feet, and the cry, “De gulfnor! de gub’nor a-comin’!”
Dora and all her kindred hastened to the windows. In an open carriage with two official attendants, and surrounded by a mounted guard, the aged governor was coming down the street. He wore the uniform of a Danish general and was, amid the dark multitude that swarmed around him, a very imposing figure. The insignia of the order of Dannebrog were on his breast. The cavalcade could scarcely push through the dense crowd, and when one of the crowd bolder than the rest seized the horses’ reins the equipage stopped. The halt chanced to be before Dora’s house. The governor sat still, very pale.
Suddenly he rose, lifted his cocked hat from his silvery hair, and with graceful dignity bowed. Then he unfolded a paper with large seals attached, and in a trembling but clear voice began to read. In the name and by the authority of His Majesty Christian VIII., king of Denmark, he proclaimed freedom to every slave in the Danish West Indies.
The exclamations of amazed dismay from Dora’s aunts were drowned in the huzzas of the black mob.
“Free! free! God bless de Gub’norl Obbe is free!”
The retinue, unhindered now, moved again; but the crowd, giving no heed to the command to disperse to their homes, howled and surged after the carriage in transports of rejoicing. At the fort the proclamation, with the order to disperse, was read again. But it would have been absurd to suppose that a brutish mob threatening fire and slaughter, and suddenly granted all its real demands, would so suddenly return to quiet and laborious tasks made odious by slavery. Half mad with joy and drink, the multitude broke into small companies, some content to stay in town carousing, others roaming out among the island estates to pillage and burn. At this point it was that the governor, in not following emancipation with simple but prompt measures of police, really for the first time proved himself weak.
At evening Dora’s kinswomen and she, leaving the house in care of Jack and Tom, went to spend the night at the home of their good friend Mr. K______, where several neighbors were gathered with arms and ammunition. Their way led them by the ruined courthouse, where for several squares the ground was completely covered with torn records, books, and other documents, and every step rustled amid the dead leaves of an irrevocable past.
The night wore by in fitful sleep or anxious vigils. Near by, all was quiet; but the distant sky was in many places red with the glare of incendiary fires out among the plantations. At dawn, Mr. K______ with Gilbert and others, ventured out, and returned with sad tidings brought by a courier from Christiansted. At sound of the signal on Sunday night, the negroes had swarmed into that place by thousands. The next day they attacked the fort there in the same savage but impotent way in which their fellows had attacked this one at Fredericksted. The governor had just departed for Fredericksted, leaving word to do nothing in his absence. But the officer in command at the Christiansted fort was of a sturdy temper, and when the blacks swarmed upon him he opened fire with grapeshot, killing and wounding many. But this only defended the town at the expense of the country, into which the dark thousands scattered to break, pillage, and burn. Yet even so, no whites had been killed except two or three men who had rashly opposed them single-handed, although the whole island, outside the two towns, was, the courier said, completely at the mercy of the insurgents.
However, he also bore better news. A Danish man-of-war was somewhere near by in these seas, and a schooner had been sent to look her up. Another had gone to ask aid in the island of Porto Rico, which was but seventy miles away and heavily garrisoned by Spaniards. Still it was deemed wise to accept, for the women and children of Fredericksted and its neighborhood, the offer from the ships in harbor and send them at once on board, so that the militia and volunteer troopers might be free to unite with the Danish regulars to suppress the insurrection, or at least to hold it in check until a stronger force could extinguish it.
“I’ve told Tom,” said Mr. K______ to Dora’s kinswomen, “to have a boat ready at the beach to take us off to an American schooner. Pack no trunks, the vessel will not receive them; gather your lightest valuables in small bundles ; and be quick, for if a crowd gets there before you, you may be refused.” They hurried home over a thick carpet of archives and title-deeds, swallowed a sort of breakfast, and began the hard task of choosing the little they could take from the much they must leave behind, in a dear home that might soon, with all its contents, be only ashes. Dora’s big white cat had to be left. Dora was laying charge after charge upon Si’ Myr concerning the care of him, as with a long good-by hug she laid him on her bed, when Jack came to say the boat was waiting.
“See,” he said to Dora, “how easy I kin liff you troo de surf,” picked her up abruptly, and set her on a low wardrobe.
“Put me down!” she cried, with shrill resentment, and before a hand could be lifted the cat flew upon Jack and fastened on his throat with teeth and claws. Aunt Marcia, who stood near, tore the creature away and stanched the wounds, while poor Jack drolly commented on the superfluity of a watchdog for Dora’s protection.
On the schooner Dora and her aunts and grandmother found a kind welcome from the Yankee skipper, amid a confused crowd of friends and strangers, and a chaos of boxes, bundles, and trunks. Children were crying to go home, or viewing with noisy delight the wide roadstead dotted with boats still bringing the fleeing people and swarming round every anchored vessel to discharge their passengers; women were calling farewells and cautions to the men in the returning boats, and friends were meeting and telling in a babel of tongues the pathetic or ludicrous adventures and distresses of the hour.
Dora and her aunts met a friend, owner of the beautiful “North End” estate, and his wife and little daughter. They told a thrilling story. Except their housekeeper, a young English girl, they three, they said, were the only white persons on the place when on that dreadful Sunday night their slaves came to the house in force demanding “freedom papers.”
“Not under compulsion,” the master replied; “never!”
“Den Obbe set ebryt’ing on fiah! W’en yo’ house bu’n’ up we try t’ink w’at foo do wid you and de missie!” They rushed away toward the sugar works, yelling, “Git bagasse foo bu’n him out!”
The household hastily loaded all the firearms in the house, filled every available vessel with water, and piled blankets here and there for prompt use against fire. Then they made all possible show of unconcern, the wife playing her liveliest piano music until after midnight. Whether moved by this show, or some other cause, the blacks did not return, and the next day the family escaped to Fredericksted and to the schooner.
Dora’s grandmother and the wife of the American consul were the oldest ladies on the vessel. To them, therefore, at nightfall, was given the only sofa on board, and the rest of the weary throng dropped asleep on their boxes and bundles, in any sheltered nook or on the open deck. The boatswain let Dora make his locker her couch, and lent her a bag of something that felt like rope ends for a pillow. For three successive mornings she was wakened with—
“Sorry to disturb you, little miss, but I must get to my locker.”
Three days of heat, glare, hubbub, and anxious suspense dragged themselves away, and Thursday’s gorgeous sunset brought a change. The Danish frigate, bright with flags and swarming with men, sailed into harbor, dropped anchor, and wrapped herself in the thunder and white smoke of her salute. Soon a boat was lowered at her side, an officer in glittering uniform took its tiller-ropes, its long oars flashed, and it bore away toward the fort. But evening shades closed around it, night fell, a starry silence reigned, and when a late moon rose out of the sea Dora and her kinswomen slept.
Early the next morning it was known that Captain Erminger, the frigate’s commander, had assumed chief command over the whole island, declared martial law, landed his marines, and begun offensive operations against the insurgents. Soon the harbor was populous again with refugees returning home in boats. Tom came with his boat. Just as Dora and her kindred started landward a schooner came round the island bluffs, bringing the Spanish soldiers. At early twilight these landed and marched with much clatter through the empty streets to the town’s various points of entrance, there to mount guard, the Danes having gone to scatter the insurgents.
The plan was for the pursuing forces, in two bodies, to move toward each other from opposite ends of the island, spanning it from sea to sea and meeting in the centre, thus entirely disintegrating the bands of aimless pillagers into which the insurrection had already, of its own motion, dispersed. This simple task of military police was accomplished in a few days. Buddoe proved so devoid even of ordinary manhood and good sense, that he was almost at once ensnared by the baldest flatteries of two Danish residents of high social rank, and finding himself in the enemy’s hands without even the honor of armed capture, betrayed his confederates to save his own neck and disappeared. Only one small band of blacks made any marked resistance. Under a certain “Moses” they occupied a hill and tried to defend it by hurling down stones upon their assailants, but were soon captured. Many leaders of the movement were condemned and shot. Their execution is said to have been characterized, in most cases, by a total absence of fortitude. The majority were utterly unable to die with courage, and were shot while imploring mercy with agonized tears and cries.
In less than a week from the day of the white women’s and children’s flight to the vessels in the harbor, quiet and order were restored, and a meeting of planters was adopting rules and rates for the employment of the freed slaves. Some estates resumed work at once; on others the ravages of the torch had first to be repaired; some negroes refused to work; and it was months before all the windmills on the hills were once more whirling before the sea breezes. The Spaniards lingered long, but were finally relieved by a Danish regiment. Captain Erminger, of the frigate, was commended by the home government. The governor, although his act of emancipation was confirmed, was recalled, superseded, tried, and censured.
The planters got no pay for their slaves. Doubtless it was easy for government to argue that if the ex-master ought to be paid for his slave, then much more should the ex-slave recover back-pay for his labor; and that, after all, a general emancipation was only a moderate raising of wages that had been unjustly low and inequitably uniform. Both kings and congresses have that slovenly trick, of doing the easiest thing instead of the fair thing, and of letting two wrongs offset each other. Make haste, rising generations! And as you truly honor your fathers, bring to their graves the garlandry of juster laws, and kinder, purer days.
To different minds, and even to similar minds under the lights and shades of varying traditions, this true story— of Dora’s, not mine—will speak, no doubt, a varying counsel. To some it will seem plain that this lovely island of the Holy Cross was saved from the hideous carnage of a Haytian revolution only by the iron hand of military suppression. To others it will appear that the feeble-handed old governor’s rashly timorous proclamation was, after all, the true source of deliverance. Certainly, in any fair mind the story must at least raise the question whether even the most sudden and ill-timed concession of rights, if only backed by energetic police action, is not a prompter, surer cure for public disorder than whole batteries of artillery without the concession of rights. The most blundering and imbecile effort that can be contrived for the prompt undoing of a grievous wrong is safer than the shrewdest or strongest effort for its continuance. Meanwhile, with what patience doth God, as seen in nature, wait for man to learn his lessons. Beautiful Santa Cruz still glitters on the bosom of her crystal sea as she shone before the Carib danced on her snowy sands, and as she will still shine when some new and as yet unborn Columbus brings to her the Christianity of a purer day than ours.
- Cable, G. W., & Miller, D. (1892, December). A West Indian Slave Insurrection. Scribner’s Magazine, 12(6), 709-720.
- Dora Miller had been told by Cable that the byline on this would be hers since the story as published was largely hers. Her manuscript, Recollections of a West Indian Home and Slave-Insurrection is in the possession of Tulane University in New Orleans.
- Ay Ay – The River, from the Taíno, a Caribbean indigenous people
- Dora Richards Miller
- Saint Croix—Wikipedia
- “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
- Mary Huntington, wife of the late Hezekiah Huntington. Perhaps her middle name may have been Paula as she is referred to in the story. Genealogical data online including information from the Daughters of the American Revolution has her birth name as Mary Smith.
- Samuel Huntington was a jurist, statesman, and patriot in the American Revolution from Connecticut. As a delegate to the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He served as President of the Continental Congress from 1779 to 1781, President of the United States in Congress Assembled in 1781 (after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation), chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court from 1784 to 1785, and the 18th Governor of Connecticut from 1786 until his death. —Wikipedia
- Samanea saman, a species of flowering tree in the pea family. In English it is usually known as rain tree or saman. It is also known as monkey pod, giant thibet, inga saman, cow tamarind, East Indian walnut, soar, or suar.—Wikipedia.
- Huntington
- General Buddhoe is named in various online references as “freed slave and skilled craftsman Moses Gottlieb” [GoToStCroix.com] “said to have come from the British Islands, possibly from Barbados. He worked at Estate La Grange in St. Croix. Unlike most slaves he was taught to read and write and he also was a skilled sugar boiler.” [The St. Croix Source] In other references, he is named as “enslaved laborer John Gottlieb” [Danish National Archives] or “John Gottliff” born in 1820 on a large sugar plantation near Frederiksted. Some accounts have him deported without a trial to Trinidad from which he later made his way to New York City. Another rebellion leader has been identified as Moses Roberts of the Sprat Hall Estate. There is some thought that, over time, people began to think of John Gottlieb and Moses Roberts as the same person, hence the name Moses Gottlieb. (see also: John Gottliff: The Man Behind Buddoe)