Studies in The South and West, With Comments on Canada. Warner Charles Dudley
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supported on either side by the ancient Spanish courthouse, the most interesting specimens of Spanish architecture this side of Mexico. When the court is in session, iron cables are stretched across the street to prevent the passage of wagons, and justice is administered in silence only broken by the trill of birds in the Place d’.rmee and in the old flower-garden in the rear of the cathedral, and by the muffled sound of footsteps in the flagged passages. The region is saturated with romance, and so full of present sentiment and picturesqueness that I can fancy no ground more congenial to the artist and the story-teller. To enter into any details of it would be to commit one’s self to a task quite foreign to the purpose of this paper, and I leave it to the writers who have done and are doing so much to make old New Orleans classic.
Possibly no other city of the United States so abounds in stories pathetic and tragic, many of which cannot yet be published, growing out of the mingling of races, the conflicts of French and Spanish, the presence of adventurers from the Old World and the Spanish Main, and especially out of the relations between the whites and the fair women who had in their thin veins drops of African blood. The quadroon and the octoroon are the staple of hundreds of thrilling tales. Duels were common incidents of the Creole dancing assemblies, and of the cordon bleu balls—the deities of which were the quadroon women, “the handsomest race of women in the world,” says the description, and the most splendid dancers and the most exquisitely dressed—the affairs of honor being settled by a midnight thrust in a vacant square behind the cathedral, or adjourned to a more French daylight encounter at “The Oaks,” or “Les Trois Capalins.” But this life has all gone. In a stately building in this quarter, said by tradition to have been the quadroon ball-room, but I believe it was a white assembly-room connected with the opera, is now a well-ordered school for colored orphans, presided over by colored Sisters of Charity.
It is quite evident that the peculiar prestige of the quadroon and the octoroon is a thing of the past. Indeed, the result of the war has greatly changed the relations of the two races in New Orleans. The colored people withdraw more and more to themselves. Isolation from white influence has good results and bad results, the bad being, as one can see, in some quarters of the town, a tendency to barbarism, which can only be counteracted by free public schools, and by a necessity which shall compel them to habits of thrift and industry. One needs to be very much an optimist, however, to have patience for these developments.
I believe there is an instinct in both races against mixture of blood, and upon this rests the law of Louisiana, which forbids such intermarriages; the time may come when the colored people will be as strenuous in insisting upon its execution as the whites, unless there is a great change in popular feeling, of which there is no sign at present; it is they who will see that there is no escape from the equivocal position in which those nearly white in appearance find themselves except by a rigid separation of races. The danger is of a reversal at any time to the original type, and that is always present to the offspring of any one with a drop of African blood in the veins. The pathos of this situation is infinite, and it cannot be lessened by saying that the prejudice about color is unreasonable; it exists. Often the African strain is so attenuated that the possessor of it would pass to the ordinary observer for Spanish or French; and I suppose that many so-called Creole peculiarities of speech and manner are traceable to this strain. An incident in point may not be uninteresting.
I once lodged in the old French quarter in a house kept by two maiden sisters, only one of whom spoke English at all. They were refined, and had the air of decayed gentlewomen. The one who spoke English had the vivacity and agreeability of a Paris landlady, without the latter’s invariable hardness and sharpness. I thought I had found in her pretty mode of speech the real Creole dialect of her class. “You are French,” I said, when I engaged my room.
“No,” she said, “no, m’sieu, I am an American; we are of the United States,” with the air of informing a stranger that New Orleans was now annexed.
“Yes,” I replied, “but you are of French descent?”
“Oh, and a little Spanish.”
“Can you tell me, madame,” I asked, one Sunday morning, “the way to Trinity Church?”
“I cannot tell, m’sieu; it is somewhere the other side; I do not know the other side.”
“But have you never been the other side of Canal Street?”
“Oh yes, I went once, to make a visit on a friend on New-Year’s.”
I explained that it was far uptown, and a Protestant church.
“M’sieu, is he Cat’olic?”
“Oh no; I am a Protestant.”
“Well, me, I am Cat’olic; but Protestan’ o’ Cat’olic, it is ‘mos’ ze same.”
This was purely the instinct of politeness, and that my feelings might not be wounded, for she was a good Catholic, and did not believe at all that it was “‘mos’ ze same.”
It was Exposition year, and then April, and madame had never been to the Exposition. I urged her to go, and one day, after great preparation for a journey to the other side, she made the expedition, and returned enchanted with all she had seen, especially with the Mexican band. A new world was opened to her, and she resolved to go again. The morning of Louisiana Day she rapped at my door and informed me that she was going to the fair. “And”—she paused at the door-way, her eyes sparkling with her new project—“you know what I goin’ do?”
“No.”
“I goin’ get one big bouquet, and give to the leader of the orchestre.”
“You know him, the leader?”
“No, not yet.”
I did not know then how poor she was, and how much sacrifice this would be to her, this gratification of a sentiment.
The next year, in the same month, I asked for her at the lodging. She was not there. “You did not know,” said the woman then in possession—“good God! her sister died four days ago, from want of food, and madame has gone away back of town, nobody knows where. They told nobody, they were so proud; none of their friends knew, or they would have helped. They had no lodgers, and could not keep this place, and took another opposite; but they were unlucky, and the sheriff came.” I said that I was very sorry that I had not known; she might have been helped. “No,” she replied, with considerable spirit; “she would have accepted nothing; she would starve rather. So would I.” The woman referred me to some well-known Creole families who knew madame, but I was unable to find her hiding-place. I asked who madame was. “Oh, she was a very nice woman, very respectable. Her father was Spanish, her mother was an octoroon.”
One does not need to go into the past of New Orleans for the picturesque; the streets have their peculiar physiognomy, and “character” such as the artists delight to depict is the result of the extraordinary mixture of races and the habit of out-door life. The long summer, from April to November, with a heat continuous, though rarely so excessive as it occasionally is in higher latitudes, determines the mode of life and the structure of the houses, and gives a leisurely and amiable tone to the aspect of people and streets which exists in few other American cities. The French quarter is out of repair, and has the air of being for rent; but in fact there is comparatively little change in occupancy, Creole families being remarkably adhesive to localities. The stranger who sees all over the French and the business parts of the town the immense number of lodging-houses—some of them the most stately old mansions—let largely by colored landladies, is likely to underestimate the home life of this city. New Orleans soil is so wet that the city is without cellars for storage, and its court-yards and odd corners become catch-alls of broken furniture and other lumber. The solid window-shutters, useful in the glare of the long summer, give a blank appearance to the streets. This is relieved, however, by the queer little Spanish houses, and by the endless variety of galleries and balconies. In one part of the town the iron-work of the balconies is cast, and uninteresting in its set patterns; in French-town much of it is hand-made, exquisite in design, and gives to a street vista a delicate lace-work appearance. I do not know any foreign town which has on view so much exquisite wrought-iron work as the old part of New Orleans. Besides the balconies, there are recessed galleries, old dormer-windows,