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Two Years in the French West Indies

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> Two Years in the French West Indies




In the market-place--a broad paved square, crossed by two rows of
tamarind-trees, and bounded on one side by a Spanish piazza--you
can study a spectacle of savage picturesqueness. There are no
benches, no stalls, no booths; the dealers stand, sit, or squat upon
the ground under the sun, or upon the steps of the neighboring
arcade. Their wares are piled up at their feet, for the most
part. Some few have little tables, but as a rule the eatables
are simply laid on the dusty ground or heaped upon the steps of
the piazza--reddish-yellow mangoes, that look like great apples
squeezed out of shape, bunches of bananas, pyramids of bright-
green cocoanuts, immense golden-green oranges, and various other
fruits and vegetables totally unfamiliar to Northern eyes.... It
is no use to ask questions--the black dealers speak no dialect
comprehensible outside of the Antilles: it is a negro-English
that sounds like some African tongue,--a rolling current of
vowels and consonants, pouring so rapidly that the inexperienced
ear cannot detach one intelligible word, A friendly white coming
up enabled me to learn one phrase: "Massa, youwancocknerfoobuy?"
(Master, do you want to buy a cocoanut?)

The market is quite crowded,--full of bright color under the
tremendous noon light. Buyers and dealers are generally black;
--very few yellow or brown people are visible in the gathering.
The greater number present are women; they are very simply,
almost savagely, garbed--only a skirt or petticoat, over which
is worn a sort of calico short dress, which scarcely descends two
inches below the hips, and is confined about the waist with a
belt or a string. The skirt bells out like the skirt of a
dancer, leaving the feet and bare legs well exposed; and the head
is covered with a white handkerchief, twisted so as to look like
a turban. Multitudes of these barelegged black women are walking
past us,--carrying bundles or baskets upon their heads, and
smoking very long cigars.

They are generally short and thick-set, and walk with surprising
erectness, and with long, firm steps, carrying the bosom well
forward. Their limbs are strong and finely rounded. Whether
walking or standing, their poise is admirable,--might be called
graceful, were it not for the absence of real grace of form in
such compact, powerful little figures. All wear brightly colored
cottonade stuffs, and the general effect of the costume in a
large gathering is very agreeable, the dominant hues being pink,
white, and blue. Half the women are smoking. All chatter loudly,
speaking their English jargon with a pitch of voice totally
unlike the English timbre: it sometimes sounds as if they were
trying to pronounce English rapidly according to French
pronunciation and pitch of voice.

These green oranges have a delicious scent and amazing
juiciness. Peeling one of them is sufficient to perfume the skin
of the hands for the rest of the day, however often one may use
soap and water.... We smoke Porto Rico cigars, and drink West
Indian lemonades, strongly flavored with rum. The tobacco has a
rich, sweet taste; the rum is velvety, sugary, with a pleasant,
soothing effect: both have a rich aroma. There is a wholesome
originality about the flavor of these products, a uniqueness
which certifies to their naif purity: something as opulent and
frank as the juices and odors of tropical fruits and flowers.

The streets leading from the plaza glare violently in the strong
sunlight;--the ground, almost dead-white, dazzles the eyes....
There are few comely faces visible,--in the streets all are black
who pass. But through open shop-doors one occasionally catches
glimpses of a pretty quadroon face,--with immense black eyes,--a
face yellow like a ripe banana.

... It is now after mid-day. Looking up to the hills, or along
sloping streets towards the shore, wonderful variations of
foliage-color meet the eye: gold-greens, sap-greens, bluish and
metallic greens of many tints, reddish-greens, yellowish-greens.
The cane-fields are broad sheets of beautiful gold-green; and
nearly as bright are the masses of _pomme-cannelle_ frondescence,
the groves of lemon and orange; while tamarind and mahoganies are
heavily sombre. Everywhere palm-crests soar above the wood-lines,
and tremble with a metallic shimmering in the blue light. Up
through a ponderous thickness of tamarind rises the spire of the
church; a skeleton of open stone-work, without glasses or
lattices or shutters of any sort for its naked apertures: it is
all open to the winds of heaven; it seems to be gasping with all
its granite mouths for breath--panting in this azure heat. In
the bay the water looks greener than ever: it is so clear that
the light passes under every boat and ship to the very bottom;
the vessels only cast very thin green shadows,--so transparent
that fish can be distinctly seen passing through from sunlight to
sunlight.

The sunset offers a splendid spectacle of pure color; there is
only an immense yellow glow in the west,--a lemon-colored blaze;
but when it melts into the blue there is an exquisite green
light.... We leave to-morrow.

... Morning: the green hills are looming in a bluish vapor: the
long faint-yellow slope of beach to the left of the town, under
the mangoes and tamarinds, is already thronged with bathers,--all
men or boys, and all naked: black, brown, yellow, and white. The
white bathers are Danish soldiers from the barracks; the Northern
brightness of their skins forms an almost startling contrast with
the deep colors of the nature about them, and with the dark
complexions of the natives. Some very slender, graceful brown
lads are bathing with them,--lightly built as deer: these are
probably creoles. Some of the black bathers are clumsy-looking,
and have astonishingly long legs.... Then little boys come down,
leading horses;--they strip, leap naked on the animals' backs,
and ride into the sea,--yelling, screaming, splashing, in the
morning light. Some are a fine brown color, like old bronze.
Nothing could-be more statuesque than the unconscious attitudes
of these bronze bodies in leaping, wrestling, running, pitching
shells. Their simple grace is in admirable harmony with that of
Nature's green creations about them,--rhymes faultlessly with the
perfect self-balance of the palms that poise along the shore....

Boom! and a thunder-rolling of echoes. We move slowly out of
the harbor, then swiftly towards the southeast.... The island
seems to turn slowly half round; then to retreat from us. Across
our way appears a long band of green light, reaching over the sea
like a thin protraction of color from the extended spur of
verdure in which the western end of the island terminates. That
is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon it, in
very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on
her beam-ends,--the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been
broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are
splintered off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; all
her upper parts have taken a yellowish-white color,--the color of
sun-bleached bone.

Behind us the mountains still float back. Their shining green
has changed to a less vivid hue; they are taking bluish tones
here and there; but their outlines are still sharp, and along
their high soft slopes there are white specklings, which are
villages and towns. These white specks diminish swiftly,--
dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,--finally vanish. Then
the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a
dream of mountains;--it turns at last gray as smoke, and then
melts into the horizon-light like a mirage.

Another yellow sunset, made weird by extraordinary black, dense,
fantastic shapes of cloud. Night darkens, , and again the
Southern Cross glimmers before our prow, and the two Milky Ways
reveal themselves,--that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one
which stretches over the black deep behind us. This alternately
broadens and narrows at regular intervals, concomitantly with the
rhythmical swing of the steamer, Before us the bows spout: fire;
behind us there is a flaming and roaring as of Phlegethon; and
the voices of wind and sea become so loud that we cannot talk to
one another,--cannot make our words heard even by shouting.



IX.


Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,--
a great semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills
all green from the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest
clouded summit. The land has that up-tossed look which tells a
volcanic origin. There are curiously scalloped heights, which,
though emerald from base to crest, still retain all the
physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must be lava under
that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of bright
green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray-stretches a long
chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these
elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by
filaments--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying
color through distance, these hill-chains take a curious
segmented, jointed appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-
bodies.... This is St. Kitt's.

We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long
wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the
town of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.

It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted.
There are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many
bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes,
and unfamiliar things the negroes call by incomprehensible
names,--"sap-saps," "dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less
reflection of light than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness;
no Spanish buildings, no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow
streets are gray or neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen
tone. Most of the dwellings are timber, resting on brick props,
or elevated upon blocks of lava rock. It seems almost as if some
breath from the enormous and always clouded mountain overlooking
the town had begrimed everything, darkening even the colors of
vegetation.

The population is not picturesque. The costumes are
commonplace; the tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and
sombre blues and grays are commoner than pinks, yellows, and
violets. Occasionally you observe a fine half-breed type--some
tall brown girl walking by with a swaying grace like that of a
sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not frequent. Most of
those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many stores are
kept by yellow men with intensely black hair and eyes,--men who
do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine
buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer
the visitor is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and
its palms, its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees,
and its beautiful little mountains. From some of these trees a
peculiar tillandsia streams down, much like our Spanish moss,--but
it is black!

... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the
island look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones,
all very green, and connected by strips of valley-land so low
that the edge of the sea-circle on the other side of the island
can be seen through the gaps. We steam past truncated hills, past
heights that have the look of the stumps of peaks cut half down,
--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical verdure.

Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other
volcanic forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like
clouds. Those are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the
subterranean fires.

It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great
mountain flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest,
with clouds packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the
second highest displays the most symmetrical crater-form I have
yet seen. All are still grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through
the blues break long high gleams of green.

As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to
sky; the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial
green. On the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in
white, red, and brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high
chimneys are distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold-
green surfaces.

We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but
to become a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little
while it continues green;--but it is a hazy, spectral green, as
of colored vapor. The sea today looks almost black: the south-
west wind has filled the day with luminous mist; and the phantom
of Nevis melts in the vast glow, dissolves utterly.... Once more
we are out of sight of land,--in the centre of a blue-black
circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly against the immense
light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that flames up very
high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue.



X.


Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the
purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges,
heightens without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an
island! Its outlines begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings
of color. Shadowy valleys appear, spectral hollows, phantom
slopes of pallid blue or green. The apparition is so like a
mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself one is looking at
real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have
shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many
miles beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again.

... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it
until it materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness
to the islands we have already passed--one dominant height, with
massing of bright crater shapes about it, and ranges of green
hills linked together by low valleys. About its highest summit
also hovers a flock of clouds. At the foot of the vast hill
nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth. The single
salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of
echoes.

Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that
fringes the wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their
base;--it has a curtain of palms before it. Approaching, you
discern only one or two façades above the sea-wall, and the long
wharf projecting through an opening ing in the masonry, over
which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar plantation.
But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily
bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little
burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,
--steep, irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise
of tiny courts everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or
displaying above their stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes
of cacti. All is old-fashioned and quiet and queer and small.
Even the palms are diminutive,--slim and delicate; there is a
something in their poise and slenderness like the charm of young
girls who have not yet ceased to be children, though soon to
become women....

There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading
starward into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come
astern and quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one
passenger ashore; and as they scream and gesticulate, half naked,
their silhouettes against the sunset seem forms of great black apes.

... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm
wind blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and
soporific. Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one
is sheltered from it profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship
rocks over immense swells; night falls very black; and there are
surprising displays of phosphorescence.



XI.


... Morning. A gold sunrise over an indigo sea. The wind is a
great warm caress; the sky a spotless blue. We are steaming on
Dominica,--the loftiest of the lesser Antilles. While the
silhouette is yet all violet in distance nothing more solemnly
beautiful can well be imagined: a vast cathedral shape, whose
spires are mountain peaks, towering in the horizon, sheer up from
the sea.

We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder
at the loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of
green and blue and gray;--a strangely abrupt peaking and heaping
of the land. Behind the green heights loom the blues; behind
these the grays--all pinnacled against the sky-glow-thrusting up
through gaps or behind promontories. Indescribably exquisite the
foldings and hollowings of the emerald coast. In glen and vale
the color of cane-fields shines like a pooling of fluid bronze,
as if the luminous essence of the hill tints had been dripping
down and clarifying there. Far to our left, a bright green spur
pierces into the now turquoise sea; and beyond it, a beautiful
mountain form, blue and curved like a hip, slopes seaward,
showing lighted wrinkles here and there, of green. And from the
foreground, against the blue of the softly outlined shape, cocoa-
palms are curving,--all sharp and shining in the sun.

... Another hour; and Martinique looms before us. At first it
appears all gray, a vapory gray; then it becomes bluish-gray;
then all green.

It is another of the beautiful volcanic family: it owns the same
hill shapes with which we have already become acquainted; its
uppermost height is hooded with the familiar cloud; we see the
same gold-yellow plains, the same wonderful varieties of
verdancy, the same long green spurs reaching out into the sea,--
doubtless formed by old lava torrents. But all this is now
repeated for us more imposingly, more grandiosely;--it is wrought
upon a larger scale than anything we have yet seen. The
semicircular sweep of the harbor, dominated by the eternally
veiled summit of the Montagne Pelee (misnamed, since it is green
to the very clouds), from which the land slopes down on either
hand to the sea by gigantic undulations, is one of the fairest
sights that human eye can gaze upon. Thus viewed, the whole
island shape is a mass of green, with purplish streaks and
shadowings here and there: glooms of forest-hollows, or moving
umbrages of cloud. The city of St. Pierre, on the edge of the
land, looks as if it had slided down the hill behind it, so
strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in cascades of
masonry,--with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and
enormous palms poking up through it,--higher even than the creamy
white twin towers of its cathedral.

We anchor in limpid blue water; the cannon-shot is. answered by
a prolonged thunder-clapping of mountain echo.

Then from the shore a curious flotilla bears down upon us.
There is one boat, two or three canoes; but the bulk of the craft
are simply wooden frames,--flat-bottomed structures, made from
shipping-cases or lard-boxes, with triangular ends. In these sit
naked boys,--boys between ten and fourteen years of age,--varying
in color from a fine clear yellow to a deep reddish-brown or
chocolate tint. They row with two little square, flat pieces of
wood for paddles, clutched in each hand; and these lid-shaped
things are dipped into the water on either side with absolute
precision, in perfect time,--all the pairs of little naked arms
seeming moved by a single impulse. There is much unconscious
grace in this paddling, as well as skill. Then all about the
ship these ridiculous little boats begin to describe circles,
--crossing and intercrossing so closely as almost to bring them
into collision, yet never touching. The boys have simply come
out to dive for coins they expect passengers to fling to them.
All are chattering creole, laughing and screaming shrilly; every
eye, quick and bright as a bird's, watches the faces of the
passengers on deck. "'Tention-là !" shriek a dozen soprani.
Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the
boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering,
tumbles an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond
the little fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple
head-foremost out of their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In
the blue water their lithe figures look perfectly red,--all but
the soles of their upturned feet, which show nearly white.
Almost immediately they all rise again: one holds up at arm's-
length above the water the recovered coin, and then puts it into
his mouth for safe-keeping; Coin after coin is thrown in, and as
speedily brought up; a shower of small silver follows, and not a
piece is lost. These lads move through the water without
apparent effort, with the suppleness of fishes. Most are
decidedly fine-looking boys, with admirably rounded limbs,
delicately formed extremities. The best diver and swiftest
swimmer, however, is a red lad;--his face is rather commonplace,
but his slim body has the grace of an antique bronze.

... We are ashore in St. Pierre, the quaintest, queerest, and
the prettiest withal, among West Indian cities:
all stone-built and stone-flagged, with very narrow streets,
wooden or zinc awnings, and peaked roofs of red tile, pierced by
gabled dormers. Most of the buildings are painted in a clear
yellow tone, which contrasts delightfully with the burning blue
ribbon of tropical sky above; and no street is absolutely level;
nearly all of them climb hills, descend into hollows, curve,
twist, describe sudden angles. There is everywhere a loud murmur
of running water,--pouring through the deep gutters contrived
between the paved thoroughfare and the absurd little sidewalks,
varying in width from one to three feet. The architecture is
quite old: it is seventeenth century, probably; and it reminds
one a great deal of that characterizing the antiquated French
quarter of New Orleans. All the tints, the forms, the vistas,
would seem to have been especially selected or designed for
aquarelle studies,--just to please the whim of some extravagant
artist. The windows are frameless openings without glass; some
have iron bars; all have heavy wooden shutters with movable
slats, through which light and air can enter as through Venetian
blinds. These are usually painted green or bright bluish-gray.

So steep are the streets descending to the harbor,--by flights
of old mossy stone steps,--that looking down them to the azure
water you have the sensation of gazing from a cliff. From
certain openings in the main street--the Rue Victor Hugo--you
can get something like a bird's-eye view of the harbor with its
shipping. The roofs of the street below are under your feet, and
other streets are rising behind you to meet the mountain roads.
They climb at a very steep angle, occasionally breaking into
stairs of lava rock, all grass-tufted and moss-lined.

[Illustration: LA PLACE BERTIN (THE SUGAR LANDING), ST. PIERRE,
MARTINIQUE.]

The town has an aspect of great solidity: it is a creation of
crag-looks almost as if it had been hewn out of one mountain
fragment, instead of having been constructed stone by stone.
Although commonly consisting of two stories and an attic only,
the dwellings have walls three feet in thickness;--on one street,
facing the sea, they are even heavier, and slope outward like
ramparts, so that the perpendicular recesses of windows and doors
have the appearance of being opened between buttresses. It may
have been partly as a precaution against earthquakes, and partly
for the sake of coolness, that the early colonial architects
built thus;--giving the city a physiognomy so well worthy of
its name,--the name of the Saint of the Rock.

And everywhere rushes mountain water,--cool and crystal clear,
washing the streets;--from time to time you come to some public
fountain flinging a silvery column to the sun, or showering
bright spray over a group of black bronze tritons or bronze
swans. The Tritons on the Place Bertin you will not readily
forget;--their curving torsos might have been modelled from the
forms of those ebon men who toil there tirelessly all day in the
great heat, rolling hogsheads of sugar or casks of rum. And often
you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking-fountains
contrived at the angle of a building, or in the thick walls
bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares: glittering
threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone. Some
mountain torrent, skilfully directed and divided, is thus
perpetually refreshing the city,--supplying its fountains and
cooling its courts.... This is called the Gouyave water: it is
not the same stream which sweeps and purifies the streets.

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