‘Coughing, etc.’ The ‘etc.’
stands for an unpleasant word there, a word which
she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes
prints. You will find it in the following description
of a steamboat dinner which she ate in company with
a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy, well-born,
ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual
harmless military and judicial titles of that old day
of cheap shams and windy pretense—
’The total want of all the usual courtesies
of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the
viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth
phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting,
from the contamination of which it was absolutely
impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner
of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade
seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more
frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with
a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were
not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors
of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be
anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.’
Chapter 30 Sketches by the Way
It was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming
full, everywhere, and very frequently more than full,
the waters pouring out over the land, flooding the
woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in
places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about,
of men’s hard work gone to ruin, and all to
be done over again, with straitened means and a weakened
courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous
one;—hundreds of miles of it. Sometimes
the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep,
in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles
without farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any
kind; which meant that the keeper of the light must
come in a skiff a great distance to discharge his
trust,—and often in desperate weather.
Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed,
in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes
by women, if the man is sick or absent. The Government
furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month
for the lighting and tending. A Government boat
distributes oil and pays wages once a month.
The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless
as ever. The island has ceased to be an island;
has joined itself compactly to the main shore, and
wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate.
No signs left of the wreck of the ‘Pennsylvania.’
Some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one
day, no doubt, and be surprised.
We were getting down now into the migrating negro
region. These poor people could never travel
when they were slaves; so they make up for the privation
now. They stay on a plantation till the desire
to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat,
and clear out. Not for any particular place;
no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to
be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer
the rest of the conundrum for them. If it will
take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty.
If not, a shorter flight will do.
Copyrights
Life on the Mississippi, Part 6. from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
