apart. The voyager seems to be in an unoccupied country, when suddenly the turn of the stream shows him a farm-house, with its little landing-wharf, boats, and perhaps a schooner moored at the bank, and behind it cultivated fields and a fringe of trees. In the blossoming time of the year, when the birds are most active, these scenes are idyllic. At a bend in the bayou, where a tree sent its horizontal trunk half across it, we made our next call, at the house of Mr Vallet, a large frame house, and evidently the abode of a man of means. The house was ceiled outside and inside with native woods. As usual in this region, the premises were not as orderly as those about some Northern farm-houses, but the interior of the house was spotlessly clean, and in its polish and barrenness of ornament and of appliances of comfort suggested a Brittany home, while its openness and the broad veranda spoke of a genial climate. Our call here was brief, for a sick man, very ill, they said, lay in the front room—a stranger who had been overtaken with fever, and was being cared for by these kind-hearted people.
Other calls were made—this visiting by boat recalls Venice—but the end of our voyage was the plantation of Simonette Le Blanc, a sturdy old man, a sort of patriarch in this region, the centre of a very large family of sons, daughters, and grandchildren. The residence, a rambling story-and-a-half house, grown by accretions as more room was needed, calls for no comment. It was all very plain, and contained no books, nor any adornments except some family photographs, the poor work of a travelling artist. But in front, on the bayou, Mr. Le Blanc had erected a grand ballroom, which gave an air of distinction to the place. This hall, which had benches along the wail, and at one end a high dais for the fiddlers, and a little counter where the gombo filé (the common refreshment) is served, had an air of gayety by reason of engravings cut from the illustrated papers, and was shown with some pride. Here neighborhood dances take place once in two weeks, and a grand ball was to come off on Easter-Sunday night, to which we were urgently invited to come.
Simonette Le Blanc, with several of his sons, had returned at midnight from an expedition to Vermilion Bay, where they had been camping for a couple of weeks, fishing and taking oysters. Working the schooner through the bayou at night had been fatiguing, and then there was supper, and all the news of the fortnight to be talked over, so that it was four o’clock before the house was at rest, but neither the hale old man nor his stalwart sons seemed the worse for the adventure. Such trips are not uncommon, for these people seem to have leisure for enjoyment, and vary the toil of the plantation with the pleasures of fishing and lazy navigation. But to the women and the home-stayers this was evidently an event. The men had been to the outer world, and brought back with them the gossip of the bayous and the simple incidents of the camping life on the coast. “There was a great deal to talk over that had happened in a fortnight,” said Simonette—he and one of his sons spoke English. I do not imagine that the talk was about politics, or any of the events that seem important in other portions of the United States, only the faintest echoes of which ever reach this secluded place. This is a purely domestic and patriarchal community, where there are no books to bring in agitating doubts, and few newspapers to disquiet the nerves. The only matter of politics broached was in regard to an appropriation by Congress to improve a cut-off between two bayous. So far as I could learn, the most intelligent of these people had no other interest in or concern about the Government. There is a neighborhood school where English is taught, but no church nearer than Abbeville, six miles away. I should not describe the population as fanatically religious, nor a churchgoing one except on special clays. But by all accounts it is moral, orderly, sociable, fond of dancing, thrifty, and conservative.
The Acadians are fond of their homes. It is not the fashion for the young people to go away to better their condition. Few young men have ever been as far from home as New Orleans; they marry young, and settle down near the homestead. Mr. Le Blanc has a colony of his descendants about him, within hail from his door. It must be large, and his race must be prolific, judging by the number of small children who gathered at the homestead to have a sly peep at the strangers. They took small interest in the war, and it had few attractions for them. The conscription carried away many of their young men, but I am told they did not make very good soldiers, not because they were not stalwart and brave, but because they were so intolerably homesick that they deserted whenever they had a chance. The men whom we saw were most of them fine athletic fellows, with honest, dark, sun-browned faces; some of the children were very pretty, but the women usually showed the effects of isolation and toil, and had the common plainness of French peasants. They are a self-supporting community, raise their own cotton, corn, and sugar, and for the most part manufacture their own clothes and articles of household use. Some of the cotton jeans, striped with blue, indigo-dyed, made into garments for men and women, and the blankets, plain yellow (from the native nankeen cotton), curiously clouded, are very pretty and serviceable. Further than that their habits of living are simple, and their ways primitive, I saw few eccentricities. The peculiarity of this community is in its freedom from all the hurry and worry and information of our modern life. I have read that the gallants train their little horses to prance and curvet and rear and fidget about, and that these are called “courtin’ horses,” and are used when a young man goes courting, to impress his mistress with his manly horsemanship. I have seen these horses perform under the saddle, but I was not so fortunate as to see any courting going on.
In their given as well as their family names these people are classical and peculiar. I heard, of men, the names L’Odias, Peigneur, Niolas, Elias, Homère, Lemaire, and of women, Emilite, Ségoura, Antoinette, Clarise, Elia.
We were very hospitably entertained by the Le Blancs. On our arrival tiny cups of black coffee were handed round, and later a drink of syrup and water, which some of the party sipped with a sickly smile of enjoyment. Before dinner we walked up to the bridge over the bayou on the road leading to Abbeville, where there is a little cluster of houses, a small country store, and a closed drug-shop—the owner of which had put up his shutters and gone to a more unhealthy region. Here is a fine grove of oaks, and from the bridge we had in view a grand sweep of prairie, with trees, single and in masses, which made with the winding silvery stream a very pleasing picture. We sat down to a dinner—the women waiting on the table—of gombo file, fried oysters, eggs, sweet-potatoes (the delicious saccharine, sticky sort), with syrup out of a bottle served in little saucers, and afterwards black coffee. We were sincerely welcome to whatever the house contained, and when we departed the whole family, and indeed all the neighborhood, accompanied us to our boats, and we went away down the stream with a chorus of adieus and good wishes.
We were watching for a hail from the Thibodeaux. The doors and shutters were closed, and the mansion seemed blank and forgetful. But as we came opposite the landing, there stood Andonia, faithful, waving her handkerchief. Ah me!
We went home gayly and more swiftly, current and tide with us, though a little pensive, perhaps, with too much pleasure and the sunset effects on the wide marshes through which we voyaged. Cattle wander at will over these marshes, and are often stalled and lost. We saw some pitiful sights. The cattle venturing too near the boggy edge to drink become inextricably involved. We passed an ox sunken to his back, and dead; a cow frantically struggling in the mire, almost exhausted, and a cow and calf, the mother dead, the calf moaning beside her. On a cattle lookout near by sat three black buzzards surveying the prospect with hungry eyes.
When we landed and climbed the hill, and from the rose-embowered veranda looked back over the strange land we had sailed through, away to Bayou Tigre, where the red sun was setting, we felt that we had been in a country that is not of this world.
VI.—THE SOUTH REVISITED, IN 1887
In speaking again of the South in Harper’s Monthly, after an interval of about two years, and as before at the request of the editor, I said, I shrink a good deal from the appearance of forwardness which a second paper may seem to give to observations which have the single purpose of contributing my mite towards making the present spirit of the Southern people, their progress in industries and in education, their aspirations, better known. On the other hand, I have no desire to escape the imputation of a warm interest in the South, and of a belief that its development and prosperity are essential to the greatness and glory of the nation. Indeed, no one can
