Part 14

Believing in these things, and withal unable to decide whether the sun revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun,[14] Père Labat was, nevertheless, no more credulous and no more ignorant than the average missionary of his time: it is only by contrast with his practical perspicacity in other matters, his worldly rationalism and executive shrewdness, that this superstitious naïveté impresses one as odd. And how singular sometimes is the irony of Time! All the wonderful work the Dominican accomplished has been forgotten by the people; while all the witchcrafts that he warred against survive and flourish openly; and his very name is seldom uttered but in connection with superstitions,--has been, in fact, preserved among the blacks by the power of superstition alone, by the belief in zombis and even goblins.... "_Mi! ti manmaille-là, main ké fai Pè Labatt vini pouend ou!_"...

[Footnote 11: Vol. III, p. 382-3. Edition of 1722.]

[Footnote 12: The parrots of Martinique he describes as having been green, with slate-colored plumage on the top of the head, mixed with a little red, and as having a few red feathers in the wings, throat, and tail.]

[Footnote 13: The creole word _moudongue_ is said to be a corruption of _Mondongue_, the name of an African coast tribe who had the reputation of being cannibals. A Mondongue slave on the plantations was generally feared by his fellow-blacks of other tribes; and the name of the cannibal race became transformed into an adjective to denote anything formidable or terrible. A blow with a stick made of the wood described being greatly dreaded, the term was applied first to the stick, and afterward to the wood itself.]

[Footnote 14: Accounting for the origin of the trade-winds, he writes: "I say that the Trade-Winds do not exist in the Torrid Zone merely by chance; forasmuch as the cause which produces them is very necessary, very sure, and very continuous, since they result _either from the movement of the Earth around the Sun, or from the movement of the Sun around the Earth, Whether it he the one or the other of these two great bodies which moves_..." etc.]

V

Few habitants of St. Pierre now remember that the beautiful park behind the cathedral used to be called the Savanna of the White Fathers,--and the long shadowed meadow beside the Roxelane, the Savanna of the Black Fathers: the Jesuits. All the great religious orders have long since disappeared from the colony: their edifices have been either converted to other uses or demolished; their estates have passed into other hands.... Were their labors, then, productive of merely ephemeral results?--was the colossal work of a Père Labat all in vain, so far as the future is concerned? The question is not easily answered; but it is worth considering.

Of course the material prosperity which such men toiled to obtain for their order represented nothing more, even to their eyes, than the means of self-maintenance, and the accumulation of force necessary for the future missionary labors of the monastic community. The real ultimate purpose was, not the acquisition of power for the order, but for the Church, of which the orders represented only a portion of the force militant; and this purpose did not fail of accomplishment. The orders passed away only when their labors had been completed,--when Martinique had become (exteriorly, at least) more Catholic than Rome itself,--after the missionaries had done all that religious zeal could do in moulding and remoulding the human material under their control. These men could scarcely have anticipated those social and political changes which the future reserved for the colonies, and which no ecclesiastical sagacity could, in any event, have provided against. It is in the existing religious condition of these communities that one may observe and estimate the character and the probable duration of the real work accomplished by the missions.

... Even after a prolonged residence in Martinique, its visible religious condition continues to impress one as something phenomenal. A stranger, who has no opportunity to penetrate into the home life of the people, will not, perhaps, discern the full extent of the religious sentiment; but, nevertheless, however brief his stay, he will observe enough of the extravagant symbolism of the cult to fill him with surprise. Wherever he may choose to ride or to walk, he is certain to encounter shrines, statues of saints, or immense crucifixes. Should he climb up to the clouds of the peaks, he will find them all along the way;--he will perceive them waiting for him, looming through the mists of the heights; and passing through the loveliest ravines, he will see niches hollowed out in the volcanic rocks, above and below him, or contrived in the trunks of trees bending over precipices, often in places so difficult of access that he wonders how the work could have been accomplished. All this has been done by the various property-owners throughout the country: it is the traditional custom to do it--brings good-luck! After a longer stay in the island, one discovers also that in almost every room of every dwelling--stone residence, wooden cottage, or palm-thatched ajoupa--there is a chapelle: that is, a sort of large bracket fastened to the wall, on which crosses or images are placed, with vases of flowers, and lamps or wax-tapers to be burned at night. Sometimes, moreover, statues are placed in windows, or above door-ways;--and all passers-by take off their hats to these. Over the porch of the cottage in a mountain village, where I lived for some weeks, there was an absurd little window contrived,--a sort of purely ornamental dormer,--and in this a Virgin about five inches high had been placed. At a little distance it looked like a toy,--a child's doll forgotten there; and a doll I always supposed it to be, until one day that I saw a long procession of black laborers passing before the house, every one of whom took off his hat to it.... My bedchamber in the same cottage resembled a religious museum. On the chapelle there were no less than eight Virgins, varying in height from one to sixteen inches,--a St. Joseph,--a St. John,--a crucifix,--and a host of little objects in the shape of hearts or crosses, each having some special religious significance;--while the walls were covered with framed certificates of baptism, "first-communion," confirmation, and other documents commemorating the whole church life of the family for two generations.

... Certainly the first impression created by this perpetual display of crosses, statues, and miniature chapels is not pleasing,--particularly as the work is often inartistic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque, and nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions of francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediævalism without its emotional sincerity, and which--amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms--jar on the æsthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,--something strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill or spring had its gracious divinity, and the boundaries of all fields were marked and guarded by statues of gods.

Instances of iconoclasm are of course highly rare in a country of which no native--rich or poor, white or half-breed--fails to doff his hat before every shrine, cross, or image he may happen to pass. Those merchants of St. Pierre or of Fort-de-France living only a few miles out of the city must certainly perform a vast number of reverences on their way to or from business;--I saw one old gentleman uncover his white head about twenty times in the course of a fifteen minutes' walk. I never heard of but one image-breaker in Martinique; and his act was the result of superstition, not of any hostility to popular faith or custom: it was prompted by the same childish feeling which moves Italian fishermen sometimes to curse St. Antony or to give his image a ducking in bad weather. This Martinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one day, feeling badly in need of a glass of tafia, perhaps, left the animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of the Virgin, with this menace (the phrase is on record):--

"_Moin ka quitté bef-la ba ou pou gàdé ba moin. Quand moin vini, si moin pa trouvé compte-moin, moin ké fouté ou vingt-nèf coudfouètt!_" (I leave these cattle with you to take care of for me. When I come back, if I don't find them all here, I'll give you twenty-nine lashes.)

Returning about half an hour later, he was greatly enraged to find his animals scattered in every direction;--and, rushing at the statue, he broke it from the pedestal, fixing it upon the ground, and gave it twenty-nine lashes with his bull-whip. For this he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment, with hard labor, for life! In those days there were no colored magistrates;--the judges were all _bêkés._

"Rather a severe sentence," I remarked to my informant, a planter who conducted me to the scene of the alleged sacrilege.

"Severe, yes," he answered;--"and I suppose the act would seem to you more idiotic than criminal. But here, in Martinique, there were large questions involved by such an offence. Relying, as we have always done to some extent, upon religious influence as a factor in the maintenance of social order, the negro's act seemed a dangerous example."...

That the Church remains still rich and prosperous in Martinique there can be no question; but whether it continues to wield any powerful influence in the maintenance of social order is more than doubtful. A Polynesian laxity of morals among the black and colored population, and the history of race-hatreds and revolutions inspired by race-hate, would indicate that neither in ethics nor in politics does it possess any preponderant authority. By expelling various religious orders;--by establishing lay schools, lycées, and other educational institutions where the teaching is largely characterized by aggressive antagonism to Catholic ideas;--by the removal of crucifixes and images from public buildings, French Radicalism did not inflict any great blow upon Church interests. So far as the white, and, one may say, the wealthy, population is concerned, the Church triumphs in her hostility to the Government schools; and to the same extent she holds an educational monopoly. No white creole would dream of sending his children to a lay school or a lycée--notwithstanding the unquestionable superiority of the educational system in the latter institutions;--and, although obliged, as the chief tax-paying class, to bear the burden of maintaining these establishments, the whites hold them in such horror that the Government professors are socially ostracized. No doubt the prejudice or pride which abhors mixed schools aids the Church in this respect; she herself recognizes race-feeling, keeps her schools unmixed, and even in her convents, it is said, obliges the colored nuns to serve the white! For more than two centuries every white generation has been religiously moulded in the seminaries and convents; and among the native whites one never hears an overt declaration of free-thought opinion. Except among the colored men educated in the Government schools, or their foreign professors, there are no avowed free-thinkers;--and this, not because the creole whites, many of whom have been educated in Paris, are naturally narrow-minded, or incapable of sympathy with the mental expansion of the age, but because the religious question at Martinique has become so intimately complicated with the social and political one, concerning which there can be no compromise whatever, that to divorce the former from the latter is impossible. Roman Catholicism is an element of the cement which holds creole society together; and it is noteworthy that other creeds are not represented. I knew of only one Episcopalian and one Methodist in the island,--and heard a sort of legend about a solitary Jew whose whereabouts I never could discover;--but these were strangers.

It was only through the establishment of universal suffrage, which placed the white population at the mercy of its former slaves, that the Roman Church sustained any serious injury. All local positions are filled by blacks or men of color; no white creole can obtain a public office or take part in legislation; and the whole power of the black vote is ungenerously used against the interests of the class thus politically disinherited. The Church suffers in consequence: her power depended upon her intimate union with the wealthy and dominant class; and she will never be forgiven by those now in power for her sympathetic support of that class in other years. Politics yearly intensify this hostility; and as the only hope for the restoration of the whites to power, and of the Church to its old position, lies in the possibility of another empire or a revival of the monarchy, the white creoles and their Church are forced into hostility against republicanism and the republic. And political newspapers continually attack Roman Catholicism,--mock its tenets and teachings,--ridicule its dogmas and ceremonies,--satirize its priests.

In the cities and towns the Church indeed appears to retain a large place in the affection of the poorer classes;--her ceremonies are always well attended; money pours into her coffers; and one can still witness the curious annual procession of the "converted,"--aged women of color and negresses going to communion for the first time, all wearing snow-white turbans in honor of the event. But among the country people, where the dangerous forces of revolution exist, Christian feeling is almost stifled by ghastly beliefs of African origin;--the images and crucifixes still command respect, but this respect is inspired by a feeling purely fetichistic. With the political dispossession of the whites, certain dark powers, previously concealed or repressed, have obtained formidable development. The old enemy of Père Labat, the wizard (the _quimboiseur_), already wields more authority than the priest, exercises more terror than the magistrate, commands more confidence than the physician. The educated mulatto class may affect to despise him;--but he is preparing their overthrow in the dark. Astonishing is the persistence with which the African has clung to these beliefs and practices, so zealously warred upon by the Church and so mercilessly punished by the courts for centuries. He still goes to mass, and sends his children to the priest; but he goes more often to the quimboiseur and the "_magnetise._" He finds use for both beliefs, but gives large preference to the savage one,--just as he prefers the pattering of his tamtam to the music of the military band at the _Savane du Fort_.... And should it come to pass that Martinique be ever totally abandoned by its white population,--an event by no means improbable in the present order of things,--the fate of the ecclesiastical fabric so toilsomely reared by the monastic orders is not difficult to surmise.

VI

From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with clouds of bright green here and there,--foliage of tamarind and corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home; but I look in vain for the light of Père Labat.

And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval valleys changed by thy will to green-gold seas of cane,--and the strong mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_"...

Eh, Père Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the appellation of the river still known as the Rivière des Pères. Also the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races of colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are passing away; the secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a "devil" (_yon diabe_),--cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together:--

"_Soh-soh!--yaïe-yah! Rhâlé bois-canot!_"

And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own. Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home.... "_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè Labatt ka vini pouend oi!_"

LA GUIABLESSE

I

Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable Me: it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital B).

From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a black crawling of unutterable spiders....

Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco: the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes, but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus. The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent, are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might be a maléfice which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side, might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-Mò_--may be quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and straight. They are almost everywhere,--shining along the skirts of the woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And the night-walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has other companionship. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other lands does not exist here after the setting of the sun,--the terror of Silence.... Tropical night is full of voices;--extraordinary populations of crickets are trilling; nations of tree-frogs are chanting; the _Cabri-des-bois_,[15] or _cra-cra_, almost deafens you with the wheezy bleating sound by which it earned its creole name; birds pipe: everything that bells, ululates, drones, clacks, guggles, joins the enormous chorus; and you fancy you see all the shadows vibrating to the force of this vocal storm. The true life of Nature in the tropics begins with the darkness, ends with the light.