The Youths Chattered In African Tongue,
And Wore Talismans About Their Necks.
They
were, to say the least, verging on barbarism.
The experience gathered among the blacks of
other lands impressed
Me with the well-founded
belief, that in more than one place in the south
would the African Fetich be set up and
worshipped before long, unless the church bestirs
herself to look well to her home missions.
In all my travels, outside of the cities, in the
south it has not been my good fortune to find an
educated white man preaching to negroes, yet
everywhere the poor blacks gather in the
log-cabin, or rudely constructed church, to listen to
ignorant preachers of their own color. The
blind leading the blind.
A few men of negro extraction, with white
blood in their veins, not any more negro than
white man, consequently not negroes in the true
sense of the word, are sent from the negro
colleges of the south to lecture northern
congregations upon the needs of their race; and these
one-quarter, or perhaps three-quarters, white
men are, with their intelligence, and sometimes
brilliant oratory, held up as true types of the
negro race by northerners; while there is, in
fact, as much difference between the
pureblooded negro of the rice-field and this false
representative of "his needs," as can well be
imagined.
An Irishman, just from the old country,
listened one evening to the fascinating eloquence
of a mulatto freedman. The good Irishman had
never seen a pure-blooded black man. The
orator said, "I am only half a black man. My
mother was a slave, my father a white planter."
"Be jabbers," shouted the excited Irishman,
who was charmed with the lecturer, "if you are
only half a nigger, what must a whole one be
like!"
The blacks were kind and civil, as they usually
are when fairly treated. They stood upon the
dike and shouted unintelligible farewells as I
descended the canal to Alligator Creek. This
thoroughfare soon carried me on its salt-water
current to the sea; for I missed a narrow
entrance to the marshes, called the Eye of the
Needle (a steamboat thoroughfare), and found
myself upon the calm sea, which pulsated in
long swells. To the south was the low island
of Cape Roman, which, like a protecting arm,
guarded the quiet bay behind it. The marshes
extended from the main almost to the cape,
while upon the edge of the rushy meadows, upon
an island just inside of the cape, rose the tower
of Roman Light.
This was the first time my tiny shell had
floated upon the ocean. I coasted the sandy
beach of the muddy lowlands, towards the
lighthouse, until I found a creek debouching from
the marsh, which I entered, and from one
watercourse to another, without a chart, found my
way at dusk into Bull's Bay. The see was
rolling in and breaking upon the ashore, which I was
forced to hug closely, as the old disturbers of my
peace, the porpoises were visible; fishing in
numbers.
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