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Updated: May 9, 2025
Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present; remembrances of home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible intensity, the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one mispronunciation without saying crasse for grace, and yellow Michel, who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue; and the bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping things; and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j; and the songs of the cane-fields, strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place; everything must have been changed; even the songs could not be the same.
True, Levine might die, or Hamilton make some brilliant coup, but she felt little of the buoyancy of hope as they left the cane-fields and drove among the dark hills to their new home. The house and outbuildings were on a high eminence, surrounded on three sides by hills. Below was a lagoon, which was separated from the sea by a deep interval of tidal mud set thick with mangroves.
We should not be likely to meet any one upon it; and it was our design to conceal our horses among the trees in the rear of the cane-fields. On such a night not even the negro 'coon-hunter would have any business in the woods. Creeping along with caution, we had arrived near the point where this wood-road debouched, when voices reached our ears. Some persons were coming down the road.
So north-eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leaving below the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel sharks; above the cane-fields and the plantain-gardens, and the cocoa-groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, far beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-east breeze.
Heathen superstition mingled with modern vice. In some instances men and women lived together without the ceremony of marriage. Beyond the village the cane-fields began, and beyond them, at the foot of the mountains, lived a better class of natives, moral and industrious. Here, too, were the cane-mills and the residences of the planters.
As he thought of his situation, the tears came into his eyes, and he wept bitterly. The future was dark and forbidding, as the past had been joyless and hopeless. They were tears of anger and resentment, rather than of sorrow. He almost envied the lot of the laborers, who toiled in the cane-fields.
Lafcadio Hearn, many years after the slaves were freed, described the scene in Martinique as viewed from the slopes of Mont Pélée: "We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields, and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening to the west.... Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands the whole atelier, as it is called, of a plantation slowly descending a slope, hewing the canes as they go.
We pass immense green cane-fields, protected from the visits of passing muleteers and peasants by a thick hedge of thorny coffee-bushes. The cane is but young yet; but the coffee-plant, with its brilliant white flowers, like little stars, is a beautiful feature in the landscape. At sunset we are rattling through the streets of the little town of Cordova.
What shall you do in this French matter, Alexander the Great? All the world is waiting to know. I should worry about you if I had time in this reeking town, where it is a wonder any man has health in him. Oh, for the cane-fields of St. Croix! But tell me, what is the policy to be strict neutrality?
For fifty-three years, I was told, he had lived and worked in Trinidad, always independent; so independent, indeed, that the very last year, when all but starving, like many of the coloured people, from the long drought which lasted nearly eighteen months, he refused all charity, and came down to this very estate to work for three months in the stifling cane-fields, earning or fancying that he earned his own livelihood.
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