Roaming through the West Indies

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TO THE READER OF THIS VOLUME tu Kill b, ap ■,,, o

BY

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Overland to the West Indies 3

THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES II Random Sketches of Havana 25

Chapter I

WE concluded that if we were to spend half a year or more rambling through the West Indies we would get sea-water enough without taking to the ships before it was necessary. Our first dream was to wander southward in the sturdy, if middleaged, gasolene wagon we must otherwise leave behind, abandoning it for what it would bring when the mountains of central Cuba grew too difficult for its waning vigor. But the tales men told of southern highways dampened our ardor for that particular species of adventure. They were probably exaggerated tales. Looking back upon the route from the eminence of automobile-infested Havana, we are of the impression that such a trip would have been marred only by some rather serious jolting in certain parts of the Carolinas and southern Georgia, and a moderately expensive freight-bill from the point where lower Florida turns to swamps and islands. If our people of the South carry out the ambitious highway plans that are now being widely agitated, there is no reason that the West Indian traveler of a year or two hence should hesitate to set forth in his own car.

The rail-routes from the northeastern states are three in number, converging into one at something over five hundred miles from the end of train travel. Those to whom haste is necessary or more agreeable than leisure may cover the distance from our greatest to our southernmost city in forty-eight hours, and be set down in Havana the following dawn. But with a few days to spare the broken journey is well worth the enhanced price and trouble. A truer perspective is gained by following the gradual change that increasing length of summer gives the human race rather than by springing at once from the turmoil of New York to the regions where winter is only a rumor and a hear-say.

In the early days of October the land journey southward is like the running backward of a film depicting nature's processes. The rich autumn colors and the light overcoats of Pennsylvania advance gradually to the browning foliage and the wrapless comfort of the first autumn breezes, then within a few hours to the verdant green and simpler garb of full summer. There are reservations, however, in the change of human dress, which does not keep pace with that of the landscape. Our Southerners seem to be ruled in sartorial matters rather by the dictators of New York fashions than by the more fitting criterion of nature, and the glistening new felt fedora persists far beyond the point where the lighter covering would seem more suitable to time and place.

To the Northerner the first item of interest is apt to be the sudden segregation of races in the trains leaving Washington for the South. From the moment he surreptitiously sheds his vest as he rumbles across the Potomac the traveler finds his intercourse with his African fellow-citizens, be they jet black or pale yellow, circumscribed by an impregnable wall that is to persist until all but a narrow strip of .his native land has shrunk away behind him. Only as superior to inferior, as master to servant, or as a curiosity akin to that of the supercilious voyager toward the " natives " of some foreign land, is his contact henceforth with the other race. Stern placards point out the division that must be maintained in public buildings or conveyances ; custom serves as effectually in private establishments ; the very city directories fetch up their rear with the " Colored Department."

The tourist's first impression of Richmond will largely depend on whether his train sets him down at the disreputable Main Street station or at the splendid new Union Depot on the heights of Broad Street. Unfortunately, the latter is as yet no more nearly " union " than it is, in spite of a persistent American misnomer, a " depot," and his chances of escaping the medieval landing-place are barely more than " fifty-fifty." But his second notion of the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy cannot but be favorable, unless his tastes run more to the picturesque than to modern American civilization. He may at this particular season grumble at a sweltering tropical heat that appears long before he bargained for it, but the hospitable Richmonder quickly appeases his wrath in this regard by explaining that some malignant cause, ranging from the disturbance of the earth's orbit by the war just ended to a boiling Gulf Stream, has given the South the hottest autumn in — I hesitate to say how many decades. Nor, if he is new to the life below Mason and Dixon's Line, will he escape a certain surprise at finding how green is still the memory of the Confederacy.

The Southerner may have forgiven, but he has not forgotten, nor does he intend that his grandchildren shall do so.

In that endless stretch of sand, cotton, and pine-trees which is locally known as " Nawth Cahlina, sah," there are other ways of passing the time than by watching the endless unrolling of a sometimes monotonous landscape. One can get into conversation, for instance, with the train-crew far more easily than in the more frigid North, and listen for hours to more or less verdant anecdotes, which the inimitable Southern dialect alone makes worth the hearing. Or, if wise enough to abandon the characterless cosmopolitan Pullman for the local atmosphere of the day coach, one may catch such scraps as these — of special interest to big-game hunters — from the lips of fellow-passengers :

" Say, d' you hear about Bud Hampton ? "

" What Bud done now? "

" Why, las' week Bud Hampton shot a buck niggah 't weighed ovah two hunderd pound! "

This particular species of quarry seemed to grow blacker with each succeeding state. The two urchins in one-piece garments who lugged our hand-bags up the slope in Columbia made coal seem of a pale tint by comparison. At the corner of a main street so business-bent as to require the constant attention of a traffic policeman they steered us toward the door of a somewhat weather-worn establishment.

"This the best hotel?" I queried, a bit suspicious that the weight of their burdens had warped their judgment. " How about that one down the street?" It was a building of very modern aspect, looming ten full stories into the brilliant Southern heavens.

"Dat ain' no hotel, sah," cried the two in one breath, rolling their snow-white eyeballs, their black toes seeming to wriggle with pride at the magnificence it presented, " dat 's de sky-scrapah! "

It was in Columbia that we felt for the first time irrevocably in the South. Richmond had been merely an American city with a Southern atmosphere ; South Carolina's capital was the South itself, despite its considerable veneer of modern Americanism. One must look at three faces to find one indubitably white. Clusters of mahogany-red sugar-canes lolled in shady corners, enticing the black brethren to exercise their powerful white teeth. Goats drowsed in patches of sand protected from the insistent sunshine. Motormen raised their caps with one hand and brought their dashing conveyances to a sudden halt with the other at the very feet of their " lady acquaintances," whose male escorts returned the greeting with equal solemnity.

I puzzled for some time to know what far-distant city this one, with its red soil stretching away to suburban nothingness from the points where the street paving petered out, with its goats and sugar-cane, its variegated complexions, and frank contentment with life, was insistently recalling to memory. Then all at once it came to me. Purged of its considerable American bustle, Columbia would bear a striking resemblance to Asuncion, capital of far-off Paraguay. Even the wide-open airiness of its legislative halls, drowsing in the excusable inoccupancy of what was still mid-summer despite the calendar, carried the imagination back to the land of the Guarani.

An un-Northern spaciousness was characteristic of the chief hostelry, with its ample chambers, its broad lounging-room, its generously gaping spitoons, offering not too exacting a target to the inattentive fire of Southern marksmanship. The easy-going temperament of its management came as a relief from the unflinching rule-of-thumb back over the horizon behind us. The reign of the old-fashioned " American plan," synonymous with eating when and what the kitchen dictates rather than leaving the guest a few shreds of initiative, had begun again and was to persist for a thousand miles southward. But can some trustworthy authority tell us what enactment requires that the " choicest room " of the " best hotel" of every American city be placed at the exact junction-point of the most successful attempt to concentrate all its twenty-four hours of uproar? I ask not in wrath, for time and better slumber have assuaged that, but out of mere academic curiosity. In the good, old irresponsible days of my " hobo " youth the " jungle " beyond the railroad yards was far preferable to this aristocratic Bedlam.

The "sky-scrapah " loomed behind us for half an hour or more across the mighty expanse of rolling sand-and-pine-tree world, with its distance-purple tinge and its suggestion of the interior of Brazil, which fled northward on the next lap of our journey. The cotton-fields which interspersed the wilderness might have seemed patches of daisies to the casual glance, rather sparse and thirsty daisies, for this year the great Southern crop had sadly disappointed its sponsors. Powder-dry country roads of reddish sand straggled along through the endless stretches of scrub-pines, carrying here and there the sagging buggy and gaunt and dust-streaked horse of former days. I relegate the equine means of transportation to the past advisedly, for his doom was apparent even in these sparsely cultivated and thinly peopled regions. Before a little unpainted, wooden negro church that drifted by us there clustered twenty-eight automobiles, with a bare half-dozen steeds drooping limply on their weary legs in the patches of shade the machines afforded them. King Cotton, abetted by his royal contemporaries overseas, has drawn no color-line in deluging his favors on his faithful subjects. Forests of more genuine trees replaced the scrub growth for long spaces farther on ; here and there compact rectangles of superlatively green sugar-cane contrasted with the dead-brown patches of shriveled corn. In the smoking compartment of the coach placarded " White " shirt-sleeves and open collars were the rule, but the corresponding section of the " Colored " car indulged in no such disheveled comfort. The negroes of the South seem more consistent followers of Beau Brummel than their white neighbors.

We descended at Savannah in a hopeful frame of mind, for a recent report announced it the most nearly reasonable in its food prices of the fifty principal cities of our United States. Georgia's advantage in the contest with starvation was soon apparent. At the desk of the hotel overlooking a semi-tropical plaza the startled newcomer found staring him in the face a dire threat of incarceration, in company with the recipient, if he so far forgot himself as to offer a gratuity. There was something strangely familiar, however, about the manner of the grandson of Africa who hovered about the room to which he had conducted us, flecking away a speck of dust here, raising a curtain and lowering it again to the self-same height over yonder. I had no desire to spend even a short span of my existence in a Southern dungeon, along with this dusky bearer of the white man's burdens. But he would have made a most unsuitable spectator to the imperative task of removing the Georgian grime of travel. Enticing him into a corner out of sight of the key-hole I called his attention to the brilliancy of a silver coin. Instead of springing to a window to shout for the police, he snatched the curiosity in a strangely orthodox manner, flashed upon us a row of dazzlingly white teeth, and wished us a pleasant evening. Possibly I had read the anti-tipping ordinance too hastily; it may merely have forbidden the public bestowal of gratuities.

A microscopic examination might possibly have proved that the reckoning which was laid before us at the end of dinner showed some signs of shrinkage ; to the naked eye it was quite as robust as its twin brothers to the North. But of course the impossibility of leaving a goodly proportion of the change to be cleared away with the crumbs would account for Savannah's low cost of living. The lengthening of the ebony face at my elbow as I scraped the remnants of my bank-note together might have been due to the exertions of the patent-leather shoes that sustained it to contain more than their fair share of contents. - But it seemed best to make sure of the source of dismay ; we might have to eat again before we left Savannah.

" I understand you can't accept tips down here in Georgia ? " I hazarded, reversing the usual process between money and pocket. The increasing elongation of the waiter's expression branded the notion a calumny even sooner than did his anxious reply :

"Ah been taking 'em right along, sah. Yes, sah, thank you, sah. Dey did try to stop us makin' a livin', sah, but none of de gen'lemans do'n ferget us."

I can highly commend the anti-tipping law of Georgia ; it gives one a doubled sense of adventure, of American freedom from restraint, reminiscent of the super-sweetness of stolen apples in our boyhood days.

We liked Savannah ; preferred it, perhaps, to any of the cities of our journey southward. We liked the Southern hospitality of its churches, consistent with their roominess and their wide-open windows. We were particularly taken with the custom of furnishing fans as well as hymn-books, though we may have wondered a bit whether the segregation of the colored people persisted clear beyond St. Peter's gate. We were especially grateful to the genius of Oglethorpe, who had made this a city of un-American spaciousness, with every other cross street an ample boulevard, which gave the lungs and the eyes a sense of having escaped to the open country. Perhaps it was these wooded avenues, more than anything else, that made us feel we were at last approaching the tropics, where life itself is of more real importance than mere labor and business. Had we settled there, we should quickly have attuned ourselves to the domesticity of her business customs, — breakfast at nine, dinner from two to four, giving the mind harrassed with the selling of cotton or the plaints of clients time to compose itself in household quiet, supper when the evening breezes have wiped out the memory of the scorching sun. We liked the atmosphere of genuine companionship between the two sections of the population, despite the line that was sternly drawn between them where social intercourse might otherwise have blended together. The stately tread of the buxom negro women bearing their burdens on heads that seemed designed for no other purpose fitted into the picture our imaginations persisted in painting against the background of the old slave-market, with its barred cells, in defiance of the assertion of inhabitants that not a black man had ever been offered for sale there.

The man who conducted us to the top of Savannah's " sky-scrapah " — for every Southern city we visited boasted one such link between earth and heaven — was still frankly of the " rebel " turn of mind for all his youthfulness. He deplored the abolition of slavery. In the good old days a " niggah " was as valuable as a mule to-day ; no owner, unless he was a fool, would have thought of abusing so costly a possession any more than he would now his automobile. The golden age of the negro was that in which he was inspected daily, as soldiers are, and sternly held to a certain standard of outward appearance and health. To-day not one out of ten of them was fit to come near a white man. Laziness had ruined them ; their native indolence and the familiarity toward them of white men from the North had been their downfall. The South had no fear of race riots, however; those were things only of the North, thanks to the Northerner's false notion of the " nigger's " human possibilities. Why had the black laborers who had raised this pride of Savannah to its lofty fifteen stories of height always lifted their hats to him, their foreman, and addressed the Northern architects with the disrespect of covered heads? Wise men from " up east " soon learned the error of their ways in the treatment of the " niggah," after a few weeks or months of Southern residence. Slavery, in principle, was perhaps wrong, but it was the only proper system with negroes. Besides, we should not forget that it was not the South that had introduced slavery into the United States, but New England ! Many things, I knew, were chargeable to our northeastern states, but this particular accusation was new to me. Yet this son of the old South was a modern American in other respects, for all his out-worn point of view. His civic pride, bubbling over in a boasting that was not without a suggestion of crudity, alone proved that. Savannah was destined to become sooner or later the metropolis of America; it was already second only to New York in the tonnage of its shipping. I cannot recall offhand any American town that is not destined some day, in the opinion of its proudest citizens, to become the leader of our commercial life, nor one which is not already the greatest something or other of the entire country. No doubt this conviction everywhere makes for genuine progress, even though the goal of the imagination is but a will-o'-the-wisp. What breeds regret in my soul, however, is the paucity of our cities that aspire to the place of intellectual leaderio ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES

ship, as contrasted with the multitude of those which picture themselves the foremost in trade and commerce.

Possibly Savannah will some day outstrip New York, but I hope not, for it has something to-day the loss of which would be an unfortunate exchange for mere metropolitan uproar and which even its own leisurely ambitious people might regret when it was too late. This view from its highest roof, with its chocolate-red river winding away to the sea sixteen miles distant, and inland to swampy rice-fields and the abodes of alligators, that can be reached only by " bateau," with its palm-flecked open spaces and its freedom from smoke, raised the hope that it might aspire to remain what it is now incontestably, a " city of trees " and a pleasant dwelling-place.

There were suggestions in the over-languid manner of some of its poorer inhabitants that the hookworm was prevalent in Savannah. Well-informed citizens pooh-poohed the notion, asserting that " hookworm is just a polite Northern word for laziness." The particular sore spot of the moment was the scarcity of sugar. From Columbia onward it had been served us in tiny envelopes, as in war-days. That displayed in store windows was a mere bait, for sale only with a corresponding quantity of groceries. All of which was especially surprising in a region with its own broad green patches of cane. The unsweetened inhabitants explained the enigma by a reference to " profiteers," and pointed out the glaringly new mansions of several of this inevitable war-time gentry. Others asserted that the ships at the wharves across the river were at that very moment loading hundreds of tons of sugar for Europe and furnishing even Germany with an article badly needed at home. An old darky added another detail that was not without its significance :

" Dey 's plenty of sorghum an' merlasses right now, sah, but de white folks dey cain't eat nothin' but de pure white."

Men of a more thoughtful class than our guide of the " sky-scrapah " had a somewhat different view of the glories of the old South.

" Slavery," said one of them, '* was our curse and in time would have been bur ruination. Not so much because it was bad for the negroes, for it was n't, particularly. But it was ruining the white man. It made him a haughty, irresponsible loafer, incapable of controlling his temper or his passions, or of soiling his hands with labor. We have real cause to be grateful that slavery was abolished. But that does not alter the fact that right was on our side in the war with

OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES n

the North — the right of each State to dissolve its union with the others if it chose, which was the real question at issue, rather than the question of holding slaves, though I grant that we are better off bysticking to the union. If the South had won, the United States would be to-day a quarrelsome collection of a score of independent countries, unprogressive as the Balkans."

On a certain burning question even the most open-minded sons of the South were of the prevailing opinion.

" Whatever the North may think," said one of this class, " we are forced to hold the fear of lynching constantly over the negro. In the North you are having far more trouble with them than we. And why? Because you depend on the authorities to curb them. Down here a serious crime by a negro is the general, immediate business of every man with a white skin. We cannot have our wives or daughters appearing on the public witness-stand to testify against an attacking negro. The surest, fairest, most effective, and least expensive means of dealing with a black scoundrel is to hang him at once from the nearest limb and go home and forget it. It seems to be the prevailing notion in the North that we are more apt than not to get the wrong man. That does not happen in one case out of a hundred. Our police and our deputy sheriffs know the whole history, the habits, character, and hiding-place of every nigger in their districts. When one of the bad ones commits a serious crime, they know exactly where to look for him, and the citizens who go with them take a rope along. Without lynching we would live in mortal terror day and night. As it is, we have far less trouble with the negroes than you do in the North, and the vast majority of them get along better with us than they do with you."

Good friends squandered a considerable amount of time and gasolene to show us the region round about Savannah. Despite their warning that this floor-flat coast land was not the real Georgia, we found the mile after mile of cream-white roads, built of the oyster-shells that hang like the bluffs of mountain spurs above its coastal waters, teeming with interest to Northern eyes. The endless festoons of Spanish moss alone gave us the sense of having found a new corner of the world. Sturdy live-oaks were untroubled by these draperies of vegetation, though other trees seemed gradually to waste away beneath them. The dead-brown fields of corn had passed the stage where they would have been cut and shocked in the North, and the ears hung limply, awaiting the hand of the picker. Corn-stalks do not tempt animals that can graze all through the winter. The " crackers " whose ramshackle abodes broke the semi-wilderness carried the memory back to the peasants of Venezuela or of the Brazilian hinterland; their speech and their mode of life were but a degree less primitive, curious anachronisms in the bustling, ahead-of-date America of to-day. Here and there we passed what had once been a great plantation of the South, productive now chiefly of aggressive weeds. One such busy estate of slavery days had been revamped and partly restored to its pre-war condition. By a new generation of Southern planters? No, indeed ! It is to-day the rendezvous of slangy, dollar-worshipping youths from the North, who bring with them clicking cameras and pampered movie stars. Thus is the aggressive modern world constantly treading on the heels of the leisurely past.

Through the first hint of the brief southern twilight there came marching toward us under the festooned trees a long double-column of negroes, dressed in dingy cotton garments, with broad black-and-white stripes, clanging chains pending from their waists to their legs, shovels over their broad shoulders, and flanked by several weatherbrowned white men in faded khaki, carrying rifles. To our unaccustomed eyes they seemed a detail of some medieval stage-setting, long since abolished from the scenes of real life, at least in our western world. Our hosts, however, accepted the group as a consistent bit of the landscape, scarcely noticeable until our interest called their attention to it.

" One of our far-famed Georgia chain-gangs," laughed the man at the wheel, " which so frequently arouse the wet-eyed pity of your Northern philanthropists. A little experience with the ' poor victims ' usually shows them that the system is not so satanic as it looks from the strained perspective of the North. You can take my word for it that at least half those niggers steal something else as soon as possible, once they are freed, so they can come back again to this comfortable life of irresponsibility and three square meals a day."

The scarcity of towns farther south was less surprising within sight of the soil they must feed on than in the geographies of our school-days. The region reminded me of tropical Bolivia, with its thinly wooded pampas alternating with swamps, its reddish, undomesticated-looking cattle grazing through a wilderness scattered with palm-trees. Gaunt razor-backed hogs foraged savagely for nourishment among the forest roots about each " cracker's " weather-painted hermitage. Other signs of animal life were rare, except the first buzzards of the tropics we were approaching, lazily circling over the tree-tops. The single grass-grown track sped constantly away behind us, as if even this way-station local saw few reasons to halt in so uncultivated a landscape. One of those narrow reddish rivers that seem to form the boundaries between all our southern states rumbled past beneath us, and the endless brown, swampy flat-lands of Florida, punctuated here and there with clusters of small wooden houses, inconspicuous in their drab setting as animals of protective coloring, rolled incessantly away into the north.

Jacksonville, the " gateway to Florida," is not so Southern in aspect as Savannah. The considerable percentage of Northerners among its inhabitants and its bustling pursuit of material fortune give it a " business-first " atmosphere we had not encountered since leaving Richmond. Negroes, too, were scarcer in proportion to white men, and destined to become more so as we proceeded, a phenomenon equally noticeable in Brazil as the traveler approaches the equator. The reason, of course, is plain, and similar in the two countries. In slavery days neither our most southern state nor the region of the Amazon were far enough developed to draw many ship-loads of Africans, and their more recent exploitation has brought an influx of fortune-seekers, chiefly white in color. The creamy shell roads about " Jax," as the tendency to short cuts and brevity has dubbed Florida's most northern city, race smoothly away in all directions through endless vistas of straight yellow pines, interspersed with patches of lilac-hued water hyacinths, and strewn with spider-like undergrowth that quenches its thirst from the humid air. To the casual glance, at least, the sandy soil does not hold great promise, but it is highly productive, for all that. As proof thereof it is sufficient to mention that the saw-mills that furnished lath at a dollar a thousand a few years ago command eight times that in these days of universally bloated prices.

Trainmen in light khaki garb pick up the south-bound express for its long run of more than five hundred miles through the peninsular state. A brick highway, inviting to motorists, parallels the railroad for a considerable distance, and surrenders its task to an efficient, if blacker, route farther on. There are other evidences than this that Florida is more conscious of her appeal to Northern excursionists than are several of her neighbors along the Atlantic seaboard.

St. Augustine is perhaps more attractive, in her own way, than even Savannah, at least to the mere seeker after residential delights. But she is scarcely a part of the American South, as we of the North picture it. The nasal twang of our middle West, or the slurred " r " of New England are far more often heard on her streets and verandas than the leisurely drawl of what was once the Confederacy. Tasks that would fall only to the lot of the black man in Georgia or the Carolinas are here not beneath the dignity of muscular Caucasian youths. Above all she has a Spanish tinge that marks her as the first connecting-link with the vast Iberian civilization beyond. The massive fortress fronting the sea, the main square that still clings to its ancient name of " Plaza de la Constitucion," carry the thoughts as quickly back to the days of buccaneers and the dark shadows of the Inquisition as those where the Castilian tongue holds supreme sway. Here the very stones of protective walls and narrow back streets are impregnated with rousing tales of conscienceless governors from old Spain and revolts of the despised criollos against the exactions of the ruling " Goths."