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CAROLINA CHANSONS
LEGENDS OF THE LOW COUNTRY

BY

DuBOSE HEYWARD AND HERVEY ALLEN

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
new york boston chicago dallas
atlanta san francisco

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
london bombay calcutta
melbourne

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
toronto

1922

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1922

to john bennett

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The thanks of the authors are due to the editors of The London Mercury, The North American Review, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, The Reviewer, The Book News Monthly, and Contemporary Verse for permission to reprint many of the poems in this volume.

Grateful acknowledgment is also made to many friends for first-hand information and for the loan of letters, diaries, pictures, and old newspaper clippings.

PREFACE

In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized. Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

From this medley of early colonial discovery and romance, from the memories of war and reconstruction, it has been as difficult to choose coherently as to maintain restraint in selection among the many grotesque negro legends and superstitions so rich in imagery and music. Coupled with this there has been another task; that of keeping these legends and stories in their natural matrix, the semi-tropical landscape of the Low Country, which somehow lends them all a pensively melancholy yet fitting background. Not to have so portrayed them, would have been to sacrifice their essentially local tang. To the reader unfamiliar with coastal Carolina, the unique aspects of its landscapes may seem exaggerated in

these pages; the observant visitor and the native will, it is hoped, recognize that neither the colors nor the shadows are too strong. These poems, however, are not local only, they are stories and pictures of a chapter of American history little known, but dramatic and colorful, and in the relation of an important part to the whole they may carry a decided interest to the country at large.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void. It has been said, perhaps wisely, that the immediate future of American Poetry lies rather in the intimate feeling of local poets who can interpret their own sections to the rest of the country as Robinson and Frost have done so nobly for New England, rather than in the effort to yawp universally. Hence there is no attempt here to say, "O New York, O Pennsylvania," but simply, "O Carolina."

The South, however, has been "interpreted" so often, either with condescending pity or nauseous sentimentality, that it is the aim of this book to speak simply and carefully amid a babel of unauthentic utterance. Nevertheless, the contents of this volume do not pretend to exact historical accuracy; this is poetry rather than history, although the legends and facts upon which it rests have been gathered with much painstaking research and careful verification. It should be kept in mind that these poems are

impressionistic attempts to present the fleeting feeling of the moment, landscape moods, and the ephemeral attitudes of the past. Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded. Above all here is no pretence of propaganda.

As some of the material touched on is not accessible in standard reference, prose notes have been included giving the historical facts or background of legend upon which a poem has been based. These notes together with a bibliography will be found at the back of the volume.

If the only result of this book is to call attention to the literary and artistic values inherent in the South, and to the essentially unique and yet nationally interesting qualities of the Carolina Low Country, its landscapes and legends, the labor bestowed here will have secured its harvest.

DuBose Heyward—Hervey Allen.

Charleston, S.C.
December, 1921.

CONTENTS

CAROLINA CHANSONS

LEGENDS OF THE LOW COUNTRY

SÉANCE AT SUNRISE

Place the new hands
In the old hands
Of the old generation,
And let us tilt tables
In the high room
Of our imagination.

Let the thick veil glow thin,
At sunrise—at sunrise—
Let the strange eyes peer in,
The red, the black, and the white faces
Of the still living dead
Of the three races.

Let a quaint voice begin:

Voice of an Indian
"Gone from the land,
We leave the music of our names,
As pleasant as the sound of waters;
Gone is the log-lodge and the skin tepee,
And moons ago the ghost-canoe brought home
The latest of our sons and daughters—
Yet still we linger in tobacco smoke

And in the rustling fields of maize;
Faint are the tracks our moccasins have left,
But they are there, down all your ways."

Voice of a Slave
"We do not talk
Of hours in the rice
When days were long,
Nor of old masters
Who are with us here
Beyond all right or wrong.
Only white afternoons come back,
When in the fields
We reached the Mercy Seat
On wings of song."

Voice of a Planter
"Nothing moves there but the night wind,
Blowing the mosses like smoke;
All would be silent as moonlight
But for the owl in the oak—
Stairways that lead up to nothing—
Windows like terrible scars—
Snakes on a log in the cistern
Peering at stars...."

Spirit of Prophecy
"Dawn with its childish colors

Stipples the solemn vault of night;
Behind the horizon the sun shakes a bloody fist;
Mysteries stand naked by the lakes of mist;
Spirits take flight,
The medicine man,
The voodoo doctor—
Witches mount brooms.
The day looms.
Faster it comes,
Bringing young giants
Who hate solitude,
And march with drums—
Beat—beat—beat,
Down every ancient street,
The young giants! Minded like boys:
Action for action's sake they love
And noise for noise."

Voice of a Poet
"The fire of the sunset
Is remembered at midnight,
But forgotten at dawn.
While the old stars set,
Let us speak of their glory
Before they are gone."

H.A.

SILENCES[1]

You who have known my city for a day
And heard the music of her steepled bells,
Then laughed, and passed along your vagrant way,
Carrying only what the city tells
To those who listen solely with their ears;
You know St. Matthew's swinging harmonies,
And old St. Michael's tale of golden years
Far less like bells than chanted memories.

Yet there is something wanting in the song
Of lyric youth with voice unschooled by pain.
And there are breathing stillnesses that throng
Dim corners, and that only stir again
When bells are dumb. Not even bronze that beats
Our heart-throbs back can tell of old defeats.

But you who take the city for your own,
Come with me when the night flows deep and kind
Along these narrow ways of troubled stone,
And floods the wide savannas of the mind
With tides that cool the fever of the day:

One with the dark, companioned by the stars,
We'll seek St. Philip's, nebulous and gray,
Holding its throbbing beacon to the bars,
A prisoned spirit vibrant in the stone
That knew its empire of forgotten things.
Then will the city know you for her own,
And feel you meet to share her sufferings;
While down a swirl of poignant memories,
Herself shall find you in her silences.

Once coaches waited row on shining row
Before this door; and where the thirsty street
Drank the deep shadow of the portico
The Sunday hush was stirred by happy feet,
Low greetings, and the rustle of brocade,
The organ throb, and warmth of sunny eyes
That flashed and smiled beneath a bonnet shade;
Life with the lure of all its swift disguise.

Then from the soaring lyric of the spire,
Like the composite voice of all the town,
The bells burst swiftly into singing fire
That wrapped the building, and which showered down
Bright cadences to flash along the ways
Loud with the splendid gladness of the days.

War took the city, and the laughter died
From lips that pain had kissed. One after one

All lovely things went down the sanguine tide,
While death made moaning answer to the gun.
Then, as a golden voice dies in the throat
Of one who lives, but whose glad heart is dead,
The bells were taken; and a sterner note
Rang from their bronze where Lee and Jackson led.

The rhythmic seasons chill and burn and chill,
Cooling old angers, warming hearts again.
The ancient building quickens to the thrill
Of lilting feet; but only singing rain
Flutters old echoes in the portico;
Those who can still remember love it so.

D.H.

[1] [See the note on the chimes at back of book.]

PRESENCES

Despise the garish presences that flaunt
The obvious possession of today,
To wear with me the spectacles that haunt
The optic sense with wraiths of yesterday—
These cobbled shores through which the traffic streams
Have been the stage-set of successive towns,
Where coffined actors postured out their dreams,
And harlot Folly changed her thousand gowns.
This corner-shop was Bull's Head Tavern,
When names now dead on marble lived in clay;
Its rooms were like a sanded cavern,
Where candles made a sallow jest of day,
And drovers' boots came grinding like a quern,
While merchants drank their steaming cups of "tay."

Here pock-marked Black Beard covenanted Bonnet
To slit the Dons' throats at St. Augustine,
And bussed light ladies, unknown to this sonnet,
Whose names, no doubt, would rime with Magdalene.
And English parsons, who had lost their fames,
Sat tippling wine as spicy as their joke,
Larding bald texts with bets on cocking mains,
And whiffing pipes churchwardens used to smoke.
Here macaronis, hands a-droop with laces,

Dealt knave to knave in picquet or écarté,
In coats no whit less scarlet than their faces,
While bullies hiccuped healths to King and Party,
And Yankee slavers, in from Barbadoes,
Drove flinty bargains with keen Huguenots.

Then Meeting Street first knew St. Michael's steeple,
When redcoats marched with royal drums a-banging,
Or merchants stopped gowned tutors to inquire
Why school let out to see a pirate hanging;
And gentlemen took supper in the street,
When candle-shine from tables guled the dark,
While others passing by would be discreet
And take the farther side without remark,
Pausing perhaps to snuff the balmy savor
Of turtle-soup mulled with the bay-leaves' flavor:
These walls beheld them, and these lingering trees
That still preempt the middle of the gutter;
They are the backdrops for old comedies—
If leaves were tongues—what stories they might utter!

H.A.

THE PIRATES[2]

I stood once where these rows of deep piazzas
Frown on the harbor from their columned pride,
And saw the gallant youngest of the cities
Lift from the jealous many-fingered tide.
Flanked by the multi-colored sweeping marshes,
Among the little hummocks choked with thorn,
I saw the first, small, dauntless row of buildings
Give back the rose and orange of the dawn.
Above them swayed the shining green palmettoes
Vocal and plaintive at the winds' caress;
While, at the edge of sight, the fluent silver
Of sea and bay framed the wide loneliness.

Out of the East came gaunt razees of commerce
Troubling the dappled azure of the seas;
While sleeping marsh awoke, and vanished under
The thrusting open fingers of the quays.

Ever, and more, came ships, while others followed.
Feeling their way among unsounded bars,
Heaping their freights upon the groaning wharf-heads,
Filling their holds with turpentines and tars,

Until the little twisting streets all vanished
Into a blur of interwoven spars.

II

One with the rest, I saw the commerce dwindle,
High-bosomed, sturdy vessels take the main
And leave us, with the morning in their faces,
Never to come to any port again.
Slowly an ominous and pregnant silence
Grew deep upon the wharves where ships had lain.

Laughter rang hollow in those days of waiting,
And nameless fears came drifting down the night.
The tides swung in from sea, hung, and retreated,
Bearing their secrets back beyond our sight;
Till, like the sudden rending of a curtain,
The East reeled with the lightnings of a fight.

Never was a night so long with waiting.
Never was the dark more prone to stay.
And, in the whispering gloom, taut, listening faces
Hung in a pallid line along the bay.
Slowly at last the mists dissolved, revealing
A fearful silhouette against the day.

Blue on a saffron dawn, a frigate lifted
Out of the fog that veiled her fold on fold,

Taking the early sunlight on her cannon
In running spurts and rings of molten gold;
No flag of any nation at her masthead.
Small wonder that our pulses fluttered cold.

Never a shot she fired on the city,
But, when the night came blowing in from sea,
And our ruddy windows warmed the darkness,
Through the surrounding gloom we heard the free
Strong sweep and clank of rowing in the harbor,
And on the wharves raw jest and revelry.

She was the first, but many others followed;
Insolent, keen, and swift to come-about,
I have seen them go smashing down the harbor,
Loud with the boom of canvas and the shout
Of lusty voices at the crowded bulwarks,
Where tattooed hands were swinging long-boats out.

Up through the streets the roisterers would swagger,
Filling the narrow ways from wall to wall,
Scattering gold like ringing summer showers,
Ready with song and jest and cheery call
For those who passed; buying the little taverns
At any cost; opening wine for all.

There were rare evenings when we used to gather
Down in a coffee-house beside the square.

Morgan knew well our little favored corner;
Black Beard the sinister was often there;
And we have watched the night blur into morning
While Bonnet, quiet-voiced and debonnaire,

Would throw the glamor of the seas about us
In archipelagoes of mad romance;
Pointing a story with a line from Shakespeare,
Quoting a Latin proverb; while his glance,
Flashing across the eager, listening circle,
Fettered—blinded—held us in a trance.

Their bags of Spanish gold bribed our juries,
Bought dignified officials of the Crown;
Money and wine were ours for the asking;
The Orient flamed out in shawl and gown,
Until a sudden and unholy splendor
Irradiated all the quiet town.

Those were the days when there was open gaming,
And roaring song in tongue of every race.
Evil, as colorful as poison weeds,
Bloomed in the market place.
And those who should have known, shared in the revels,
And passed their neighbors with averted face.

Until one day a frigate entered harbor,
And passed the city, with a Spanish prize,

Then insolently came-about, despoiled her,
And fired her before our very eyes,
While the vagrant breezes left the streaming vapor
Like red rust on the clean steel of the skies.

III

All in the sullied hours,
While the pirates stood away
Out of the murk and horror
In a sheer white burst of spray,

Leaving the wreck to settle
Under its winding sheet,
I felt the city shudder
And stir beneath my feet.

Thrilling against the morning,
As audible as song,
I heard the city waken
Out of her night of wrong.

That was a day to cherish
When Rhett and a gallant few
Summoned the best among us;
Called for a daring crew.

New and raw at the business,
To the smithy's roar and clang,

We drove our aching muscles
And as we worked we sang,

Until one blowing morning
With summer on the sea,
The Henry to the windward,
The Sea Nymph down alee,

Flecking the wide Atlantic
With a flaring, lacy track,
We went, as glad as the winds are glad,
To buy our honor back.

IV

Over the wooded shore-line,
Where the hidden rivers stray
Down to the sea like timid girls,
I saw in the first faint gray

A burst of cloudy topsails
Go blowing swiftly by,
With the stars aswirl behind them
Like bright dust down the sky.

Gone were the days of waiting,
And the long, blind search was gone;
With a cheer we swung to meet them
On the forefoot of the dawn.

Out of the screening woodland
Into the open sound
The frigate crashed, then staggered
Careening, fast aground.

White water tugged behind us,
We felt the Henry reel
And spin as the hard impartial sand
Closed on her vibrant keel.

All through the high white morning,
While the lagging tide crawled out,
Fate held us bound and waiting,
While, turn and turn about,

We manned the fuming cannon
And bartered hell for hell,
While the scuppers sang with coursing life
Where the dead and dying fell.

Till, like the break of fever
When life thrills up through pain,
We felt the current stirring
Under the keel again.

Then it was hand to cutlass,
And pistols in the sash.
"All hands stand by for boarding,—
Now, close abeam and lash!"

Home from the kill we thundered
On the tail of the equinox,
To the thrum of straining canvas,
And the whine and groan of blocks.

Leaping clear of the shallows,
Chancing the creaming bars,
We heard the first faint cheering
As the late sun limned our spars.

Safe in the lee of the city
We moored in the afterglow,
The Sea Nymph and the Henry
With the buccaneers in tow.

Glad we had been in the going,
But God! it was good to come
Out of the sky-wide loneliness
To the walls and lights of home.

V

Under these shouldering rows of stone
That notch the quiet sky;

Under the asphalt's transient seal
The same old mud-flats lie;
And I have felt them surge and lift
At night as I passed by.

Yes, I have seen them sprawling nude
While an Autumn moon hung chill,
And the tide came shuddering in from sea,
Lift by lift, until
It held them under a silver mesh,
Responsive to its will.

Then slowly out from the crowding walls
I have seen the gibbets grow,
And stand against the empty sky
In a desolate, windblown row,
While their dancers swayed, and turned, and spun,
Tripping it heel and toe;

With a flash of gold where the peering moon
Saw an earring as it swung,
And a silver line that leapt and died
Where the salt-white sea-boots hung,
And the pitiful, nodding, silent heads,
With half of their songs unsung.

D.H.

[2] [See the note on the pirates.]

THE SEWEES OF SEWEE BAY[3]

"And these squaws, waiting in vain the return of their husbands, sought out braves among the other tribes, and so men say the Sewees have become Wandos."

"One flask of rum for fifty muskrat skins!
A horn of powder for a bear's is not enough;
A whole winter's hunting for some blanket stuff—
Ugh!" said the Sewee Chief,
"The pale-face is a thief!"

Ever, from the north-north-east,
The great winged canoes
Swept landward from the shining water
Into Bull's Bay,
Where the poor Sewees trapped the otter,
Or took the giant oysters for their feast—
Ever the ships came from the north and east.

Surely, at morning, when they walked the beaches,
Over the smoky-silver, whispering reaches,
Where the ships came from, loomed a land,
Far-off, one mountain-top, away
Where the great camp-fire sun made day:

"There are the pale-face lodges," they would say.
So all one winter
Was great hunting on that shore;
Much maize was pounded,
And of acorn oil great store
Was tried;
And collops of smoked deer meat set aside,
And skins and furs,
And furs and skins,
And bales of furs beside.

And all that winter, too,
The smoke eddied
From many a huge canoe,
Hollowed by flame from cypress trees
That with stone ax and fire
The Sewee shaped to the good shape
Of his desire.

So when next spring
The traders came from Charles Town,
Bringing a gift of blankets from the king,
The Sewees would not trade a pelt—
Saying, "We go to see
The Great White Father in his own tepee—
Heap, heap much rum!"
And then they passed the pipe of peace,
And puffed it, and looked glum.

The traders thought the redskins must be daft;
They saw the huge canoes,
And, wondering at their use,
Asked, "What will you do with these?"
And the chief pointed east across the seas;
And then the pale-face laughed.

And yet—
There was a story told
By one of Black Beard's men
Who had done evil things for gold,
That one morning, out at sea,
The fog made a sudden lift,
And from the high poop, looking through the rift,
He saw
Twenty canoes, each with six warriors,
Paddling straight toward the rising sun,
Where the wind made a flaw—
He swore he saw
And counted twenty hulls,
Circled about by screaming gulls—
Then such a storm came down
That some prayed on that hellion ship,
But he did not—
He was not born to drown.

This was the tale
Told with much bluster,

Over ale
And oaths,
At Charles Town.
He swore he saw the Indians in the dawn,
And he'd be danged!
And by Christ's Mother—
Take his rings in pawn!
But he was hanged
With poor Stede Bonnet, later on.

H.A.

[3] [See the note at the back of the book.]

LA FAYETTE LANDS[4]

That evening, gathered on the vessel's poop,
They saw the glimmering land,
And far lights moved there,
As once Columbus saw them, winking, strange;
Around the ship two darkies in a small canoe
Paddled and grinned, and held up silver fish.

Over the high ship's tumble-home
A pinnace slid,
Slow, lowered from the squealing davit-ropes,
And from a port a-square with lantern light,
The little, leather trunks were passed,
Ironbound and quaint; while down the vessel's side
With voluble advice, bon voyage and au revoir,
The chatting Frenchmen came—
Click-clap of rapiers clipping on hard boots,
Cocked hats and merry eyes.

The great ship backs its yards,
With drooping sails, await,
A spider-web of spars and lantern-lights,
While like a pilot shark, the slim canoe,

A V-shaped ripple wrinkling from its jaws,
Slides noiselessly across the swells,
Leading the swinging boat's crew to the beach;
And all the world slides up—
And then the stars slide down—
As ocean breathes; while evening falls,
And destiny is being rowed ashore.

The twilight-muffled bells of town, the bark of dogs,
The distant shouts, and smell of burning wood,
Fall graciously upon their sea-tired sense.
Wide-trousered, barefoot sailors carry them to land,
Tho' snake-voiced waves flaunt frothing up the beach;
The horse-hide trunks are piled upon a dune;
And there a little Frenchman takes his stand,
Hawk-faced and ardent,
While his brown cloak droops about him
Like young falcon plumes.

Gray beach, gray twilight, and gray sea—
How strange the scrub palmettoes down the coast!
No purple-castled heights, like dear Auvergne,
Against the background of the Puy de Dome,
But land as level as the sea, a sandy road
That twists through myrtle thickets
Where the black boys lead.

Far down a moss-draped avenue of oaks
There is a flash of torches, and the lights
Go flitting past the bottle panes;
A cracked plantation bell dull-clangs;
The beagles bay,
Black faces swarm, with ivory eyeballs glazed—
Court dwarfs that served thick chocolate, on their knees
In damasked, perfumed rooms at grand Versailles,
Were all the blacks the French had ever seen.

Major Huger, lace-ruffled shirt, knee-breeks,
A saddle-pistol in his hand,
Waits on the terrace,
Ready for "hospitality" to British privateers;
But now no London accent takes his ears,
No English bow so low, "Good evening, sair;
I am de la Fayette, and these, monsieur,
My friends, and this, le Baron Kalb."

Welcome's the custom of the time and land—
And these are noblemen of France!
Now is Bartholomew for turkeycocks,
Old wines decant, the chandeliers flare up,
The slave row brims with lights;
And horses gallop off to summon guests.

After the ship—how good the spacious rooms!
How strange mosquito canopies on beds!

Knights of St. Louis sniff the frying yams,
Venison, and turtle,—
The old green turtle died tonight—
The children's eyes grow wider on the stairs.

Down in the library,
The Marquis, writing back to old Auvergne,
Has sanded down the ink;
Again the quill pen squeaks:
"A ship will sail tomorrow back to France,
By special providence for you, dear wife;
Tonight there will be toasts to Washington,
To our good Louis and his Antoinette—
There will be toasts tonight for la Fayette...."
He melts the wax;
Look, how the candle gutters at the flame!
And now he seals the letter with his ring.

H.A.

[4] [See the note at the back of the book.]

THE PRIEST AND THE PIRATE[5]

a ballad of theodosia burr

And must the old priest wake with fright
Because the wind is high tonight?
Because the yellow moonlight dead
Lies silent as a word unsaid—
What dreams had he upon his bed?

Listen—the storm!

The winter moon scuds high and bare;
Her light is old upon his hair;
The gray priest muses in a prayer:

"Christ Jesus, when I come to die
Grant me a clean, sweet, summer sky,
Without the mad wind's panther cry.
Send me a little garden breeze
To gossip in magnolia trees;
For I have heard, these fifty years,
Confessions muttered at my ears,
Till every mumble of the wind
Is like tired voices that have sinned,

And furtive skirling of the leaves
Like feet about the priest-house eaves,
And moans seem like the unforgiven
That mutter at the gate of heaven,
Ghosts from the sea that passed unshriven.

And it was just this time of night
There came a boy with lantern light
And he was linen-pale with fright;
It was not hard to guess my task,
Although I raised the sash to ask—
'Oh, Father,' cried the boy, 'Oh, come!
Quickly with the viaticum!
The sailor-man is going to die!'
The thirsty silence drank his cry.
A starless stillness damped the air,
While his shrill voice kept piping there,
'The sailor-man is going to die'—
The huge drops splattered from the sky.

I shivered at my midnight toil,
But took the elements and oil,
And hurried down into the street
That barked and clamored at our feet—
And as we ran there came a hum
Of round shot slithered on a drum,
While like a lid of sound shut down
The thunder-cloud upon the town;

Jalousies banged and loose roofs slammed,
Like hornbooks fluttered by the damned;
And like a drover's whip the rain
Cracked in the driving hurricane.

Only the lightning showed the door
That like two cats we darted for;
It almost gave a man a qualm
To find the house inside so calm.

I sloshed all dripping up the stair,
Up to an attic room a-glare
With candle-shine and lightning-flare—
With little draughts that moved its hair
A wrinkled mummy sat a-stare,
Rigid, huddling in a chair.
I thought at first the thing was dead
Until the eyes slid in its head.

It seemed as if the Banshee storm
Knocked screaming for his withered form;
It shrieked and whistled like a parrot,
Clucking and stuttering through the garret.
With-out, the mailéd hands of hail
Battered the casements, and the gale
About his low roof shuddered, sighing,
As if it knew that he was dying.

It breathed like waiting beasts outside,
While soft feet made the shingles slide.

Then, like a blow upon the cheek,
The mummy's voice began to speak:

'Give me a priest! I'm going to die!'
The Banshee wind took up the cry:
'Give him a priest, he's going to die!'
The old house seemed to rock with laughter,
Shaking its sides and every rafter.

There was a terror in that room
Like faint light streaming from a tomb.
I tried three times before I spoke,
And then the bald words made me choke:
'Be quiet, man, for I am come
To bring you the viaticum!'—
I made the sign of holiness.
He rattled out a startled cry.
I whispered low, 'Confess, confess!'
His thin hands quivered with distress.
It is a bitter thing to die.

Just when a blast fell on the town,
I felt his lean claws clutch me down.
It seemed as if the hands of death
Were beating at my breast for breath;

His arms were like a twisted rope
Of rotten strands that tugged at hope.
'Listen, my father, listen well!'
The wind went tolling like a bell:

'She's lying fifty fathoms deep,
Where fishes like white birds go by
Through water-air in ocean-land;
She has a prayer-book in her hand—
Tonight she walks; tonight she spoke;
Her hair goes floating out and up,
Blown one way, with the water weeds,
Always one way, like amber smoke.

She asks the gift she gave to me—
This ring—I cannot get it off!'
His hand and hand fought like two claws—
'I hear her calling from the sea!'
His terror made my own heart pause.

His voice went moaning with the wind,
And groaned and rattled, 'I have sinned,'
And moaned and murmured at my ear
Of bat-winged angels standing near.

'The little schooner "Patriot"—
I can't forget the vessel's name;

We met her rounding Naggs Head Bank;
We made her people walk the plank,
Twelve men whose faces I forgot.

But there was one sweet lady there,
With lovely eyes and lovely hair,
Whose face has stayed like pain and care.
For every man she made a prayer;
And when the last had found the sea,
I cried to her to pray for me.

She prayed—and took this ring, and said:
"Wear this for me when I am dead."
She bowed her head, then steadfastly
She walked into the hungry sea.
But silent words were on her lips,
And there was comfort in her hand;
It was as if she walked a bridge
That led into a pleasant land.
All that was long and long ago,
So long ago this ring has grown
To be a very part of me,
One with my finger and the bone:'
His voice went trailing in a moan.

'This is her ring—
This is her ring!

I dare not die and wear the thing!'
His hand plucked at his finger thin
As if to ease him of his sin.
I gave a sudden gasping shout—
The wind that blew the window in
Had blown the candle out.

'Quick, father, quick!
The ring ... her name....'
There came a jagged spurt of flame;
The window seemed a furnace door
That gave upon a bed of ore;
The thunder rumbled out the muttered
Words that his failing tongue had uttered—
Another flash, a rending crack—
The old man crumpled like a sack;
I felt his stringy arms go slack.
How could he sit so dead, so still!
While wind snouts snuffed along the sill?

White shone his glimmering face, and dull
The sodden silence of the lull,
For when he died the wind had dropt;
And with his heart the storm had stopt,
All but a far-off mouthing sound
That seemed to sough from underground;
While silence paused to plan some ill,
Thwarted by thunder growling still.

All in the darkness of the place
With lightning playing on its face,
I fumbled with the corpse's ring
To which the dead hands seemed to cling;
The stiffening joints were loth to play—
After awhile it came away!

Out, like a sneak-thief through the gloom,
I tiptoed from the dead man's room;
The door behind me like a hatch
Banged—the white splash of my match
Made shadow shapes dance on the wall
As if the devil pulled the string.
The light ran melting round the ring;
Inside the worn script scrawled a-blur:
'J.A. to Theodosia Burr'
Confession is a sacred thing!
I'll keep his secret like the sea;
The ring goes to the grave with me."

H.A.

[5] [See the note at the back of the book.]

PALMETTO TOWN

Sea-island winds sweep through Palmetto Town,
Bringing with piney tang the old romance
Of Pirates and of smuggling gentlemen;
And tongues as languorous as southern France
Flow down her streets like water-talk at fords;
While through iron gates where pickaninnies sprawl,
The sound floats back, in rippled banjo chords,
From lush magnolia shade where mockers call.
Mornings, the flower-women hawk their wares—
Bronze caryatids of a genial race,
Bearing the bloom-heaped baskets on their heads;
Lithe, with their arms akimbo in wide grace,
Their jasmine nods jestingly at cares—
Turbaned they are, deep-chested, straight and tall,
Bandying old English words now seldom heard,
But sweet as Provençal.
Dreams peer like prisoners through her harp-like gates,
From molten gardens mottled with gray-gloom,
Where lichened sundials shadow ancient dates,
And deep piazzas loom.
Fringing her quays are frayed palmetto posts,
Where clipper ships once moored along the ways,

And fanlight doorways, sunstruck with old ghosts,
Sicken with loves of her lost yesterdays.
Often I halt upon some gabled walk,
Thinking I see the ear-ringed picaroons,
Slashed with a sash or Spanish folderols,
Gambling for moidores or for gold doubloons.
But they have gone where night goes after day,
And the old streets are gay with whistled tunes,
Bright with the lilt of scarlet parasols,
Carried by honey-voiced young octoroons.

H.A.

CAROLINA SPRING SONG

Against the swart magnolias' sheen
Pronged maples, like a stag's new horn,
Stand gouted red upon the green,
In March when shaggy buds are shorn.

Then all a mist-streaked, sunny day
The long sea-islands lean to hear
A water harp that shallows play
To lull the beaches' fluted ear.

When this same music wakes the gift
Of pregnant beauty in the sod,
And makes the uneasy vultures shift
Like evil things afraid of God,

Then, then it is I love to drift
Upon the flood-tide's lazy swirls,
While from the level rice fields lift
The spiritu'ls of darky girls.

I hear them singing in the fields
Like voices from the long-ago;
They speak to me of somber worlds
And sorrows that the humble know;

So if they sometimes seem a choir
That cast a chill of doubt on spring,
They have still higher notes of fire
Like cardinals upon the wing.

H.A.

THE LAST CREW[6]

I

Spring found us early that eventful year,
Seeming to know in her clairvoyant way
The bitterness of hunger and despair
That lay upon the town.
Out of the sheer
Thin altitudes of day
She drifted down
Over the grim blockade
At the harbor mouth,
Trailing her beauty over the decay
That war had made,
Gilding old ruins with her jasmine spray,
Distilling warm moist perfume
From chill winter shade.

Out of the south
She brought the whisperings
Of questing wings.
Then, flame on flame,
The cardinals came,
Blowing like driven brands

Up from the sultry lands
Where Summer's happy fires always burn.
Old silences, that pain
Had held too close and long,
Stirred to the mocker's song,
And hope looked out again
From tired eyes.

Down where the White Point Gardens drank the sun,
And rippled to the lift of springing grass,
The women came;
And after them the aged, and the lame
That war had hurled back at them like a taunt.
And always, as they talked of little things,
How violets were purpling the shade
More early than in all remembered Springs,
And how the tides seemed higher than last year,
Their gaze went drifting out across the bay
To where,
Thrusting out of the mists,
Like hostile fists,
Waited the close blockade—
Then, dim to left and right,
The curving islands with their shattered mounds
That had been forts;
Mounds, which in spite
Of four long years of rending agony
Still held against the light;

Faint wraiths of color
For the breeze to lift
And flatten into faded red and white.

These sunny islands were not meant for wars;
See, how they curve away
Before the bay,
Bidding the voyager pause.
Warm with the hoarded suns of centuries,
Young with the garnered youth of many Springs,
They laugh like happy bathers, while the seas
Break in their open arms,
And the slow-moving breeze
Draws languid fingers down their placid brows.
Even the surly ocean knows their charms,
And under the shrill laughter of the surf,
He booms and sings his heavy monotone.

II

There are rare nights among these waterways
When Spring first treads the meadows of the marsh,
Leaving faint footprints of elusive green
To glimmer as she strays,
Breaking the Winter silence with the harsh
Sharp call of waterfowl;
Rubbing dim shifting pastels in the scene
With white of moon

And blur of scudding cloud,
Until the myrtle thickets
And the sand,
The silent streams,
And the substantial land
Go drifting down the tide of night
Aswoon.

On such a night as this
I saw the last crew go
Out of a world too beautiful to leave.
Only a chosen few
Beside the crew
Were gathered on the pier;
And in the ebb and flow
Of dark and moon, we saw them fare
Straight past the row of coffins
Where the fifth crew lay
Waiting their last short voyage
Across the bay.

And, as they went, not one among them swerved,
But eyes went homing swiftly to the West,
Where, faint and very few,
The windows of the town called out to them
Yet held them nerved
And ready for the test.
Young every one, they brought life at its best.

In the taut stillness, not a word
Was uttered, but one heard
The deep slow orchestration of the night
Swell and relapse; as swiftly, one by one,
Cutting a silhouette against the gray,
They rose, then dropped out softly like a dream
Into the rocking shadows of the stream.

A sudden grind of metal scarred the hush;
A marsh-hen threshed the water with her wings,
And, for a breath, the marsh life woke and throbbed.
Then, down beneath our feet, we caught the gleam
Of folded water flaring left and right,
While, with a noiseless rush,
A shadow darker than the rest
Drew from its fellows swarming round the quay,
Took an oncoming breaker,
Shook its shoulders free,
And faced the sea.

Then came an interval that seemed to be
Part of eternity.
Years might have passed, or seconds;
No one knew!
Close in the dark we huddled, each to each,
Too stirred for speech.
Our senses, sharpened to an agony,
Drew out across the water till the ache

Was more than we could bear;
Till eyes could almost see,
Ears almost hear.
And waiting there,
I seemed to feel the beach
Slip from my reach,
While all the stars went blank.
The smell of oil and death enveloped me,
And I could feel
The crouching figures straining at a crank,
Knees under chins, and heads drawn sharply down,
The heave and sag of shoulders,
Sting of sweat;
An eighth braced figure stooping to a wheel,
Body to body in the stifling gloom,
The sob and gasp of breath against an air
Empty and damp and fetid as a tomb.
With them I seemed to reel
Beneath the spin and heel
When combers took them fair,
Bruising their bodies,
Lifting black water where
Their feet clutched desperate at the floor.

And as each body spent out of its ebbing store
Of strength and hope,
I felt the forward thrust,
At first so sure,

Fail in its rhythm,
Falter slow,
And slower—
Hang an endless moment—
Till in a rush came fear—
Fear of the sea, that it might win again,
Gathering one crew more,
Making them pay in vain.

Then through the horror of it, like a clear
Sweet wind among the stars,
I felt the lift
And drive of heart and will
Working their miracles until
Spent muscles tensed again to offer all
In one transcendent gift.

III

A sudden flood of moonlight drenched the sea,
Pointing the scene in sharp, strong black and white.
Sumter came shouldering through the night,
Battered and grim.
The curve of ships shook off their dim
Vague outlines of a dream;
And stood, patient as death,
So certain in their pride,
So satisfied

To wait
The slow inevitableness of Fate.

Close, where the channel
Narrowed to the bay,
The Housatonic lay
Black on the moonlit tide,
Her wide
High sweep of spars
Flaunting their arrogance among the stars.

Darkness again,
Swift-winged and absolute,
Gulping the stars,
Folding the ships and sea,
Holding us waiting, mute.
Then, slowly in the void,
There grew a certainty
That silenced fear.
The very air
Was stirring to the march of Destiny.

One blinding second out of endless time
Fell, sundering the night.
I saw the Housatonic hurled,
A ship of light,
Out of a molten sea,
Hang an unending pulse-beat,

Glowing, stark;
While the hot clouds flung back a sullen roar.
Then all her pride, so confident and sure,
Went reeling down the dark.

Out of the blackness wave on livid wave
Leapt into being—thundered to our feet;
Counting the moments for us, beat by beat,
Until the last and smallest dwindled past,
Trailing its pallor like a winding-sheet
Over the last crew and its chosen grave.

IV

Morning swirled in from the sea,
And down by the low river-wall,
In a long unforgettable row,
Man faces tremulous, old;
Terrible faces of youth,
Broken and seared by the war,
Where swift fire kindled and blazed
From embers hot under the years,
While hands gripped a cane or a crutch;
Patient dumb faces of women,
Mothers, sisters, and wives:
And the vessel hull-down in the sea,
Where the waters, just stirring from sleep,
Lifted bright hands to the sun,

Hiding their lusty young dead,
Holding them jealously close
Down to the cold harbor floor.

There would be eight of them.
Here in the gathering light
Were waiting eight women or more
Who were destined forever to pay,
Who never again would laugh back
Into the eyes of life
In the old glad, confident way.
Each huddled dumbly to each;
But eyes could not lift from the sea,
Only hands touched in the dawn.

"He would have gone, my man;
He was like that. In the night
When I awoke with a start,
And brought his voice up from my dream:
That was goodbye and godspeed.
I know he is there with the rest."

Brave, but with quivering lips,
Each alone in the press of the crowd,
Was saying it over and over.

The day flooded all of the sky;
And the ships of the sullen blockade

Weighed anchor and drew down the wind,
Leaving their wreck to the waves.
Hour heaved slowly on hour,
Yet how could the city rejoice
With the women out there by the wall!
Night grew under the wharves,
And crept through the listening streets,
Until only the red of the tiles
Seemed warm from the breath of the day;
And the faces that waited and watched
Blurred into a wavering line,
Like foam on the curve of the dark,
Down there by the reticent sea.

What if the darkness should bring
The lean blockade-runners across
With food for the hungry and spent....
Who could joy in the sudden release
While the faces, still-smiling, but wan,
Turned slowly to hallow the town?

D.H.

[6] [See the note at the back of the book.]

LANDBOUND

Bring me one breath from the deep salt sea,
Ye vagrant upland airs!
Over your forest and field and lea,
From the windy deeps that have mothered me,
To the heart of one who cares.

Clear to the peace of the sunlit park,
You bring with your evening lull
The vesper song of the meadow lark;
But my soul is sick for the seething dark,
And the scream of a wind-blown gull.

And bring to me from the ocean's breast
No crooning lullaby;
But the shout of a bleak storm-riven crest
As it shoulders up in the sodden West
And hurtles down the sky.

That, breathing deep, I may feel the sweep
Of the wind and the driving rain.
For so I know that my heart will leap
To meet the call of the strident deep,
And will thrill to life again.

D.H.

TWO PAGES
FROM THE BOOK OF THE SEA ISLANDS

page one

Shadows

There is deliberateness in all sea-island ways,
As alien to our days as stone wheels are.
The Islands cannot see the use of life
Which only lives for change.
There days are flat,
And all things must move slowly;
Even the seasons are conservative—
No sudden flaunting of wild colors in the fall,
Only a gradual fading of the green,
As if the earth turned slowly,
Or looked with one still face upon the sun
As Venus does—
Until the trees, the fields, the marshes,
All turn dun, dull Quaker-brown,
And a mild winter settles down,
And mosses are more gray.

All human souls are glasses which reflect
The aspects of the outer world;

See what terrible gods the huge Himalayas bred!
And the fierce Jewish Jaywah came
From the hot Syrian deserts
With his inhibitory decalogue.
The gods of little hills are always tame;
Here God is dull, where all things stay the same.

No change on these sea-islands!
The huge piled clouds range
White in the cobalt sky;
The moss hangs,
And the strong, tiring sea-winds blow—
While day on glistering day goes by.

The horses plow with hanging heads,
Slow, followed by a black-faced man,
Indifferent to the sun;
The old cotton bushes hang with whitened heads;
And there among the live-oak trees,
Peep the small whitewashed cabins,
Painted blue, perhaps, and scarlet-turbaned women,
Ample-hipped, with voices soft and warm
With the lean hounds and chocolate children swarm.

Day after day the ocean pumps
The awful valve-gates of his heart,
Diastole and systole through these estuaries;
The tides flow in long, gray, weed-streaked lines;

The salt water, like the planet's lifeblood, goes
As if the earth were breathing with long-taken breaths
And we were very near her heart.

No wonder that these faces show a tired dismay,
Looking on burning suns, and scarcely blithe in May;
Spring's coming is too fierce with life;
And summer is too long;
The stunted pine trees struggle with the sand
Till the eyes sicken with their dwarfing strife.

There are old women here among these island homes,
With dull brown eyes that look at something gray,
And tight silver hair, drawn back in lines,
Like the beach grass that's always blown one way;
With such a melancholy in their faces
I know that they have lived long in these places.
The tides, the hooting owls, the daylight moons,
The leprous lights and shadows of the mosses,
The funereal woodlands of these coasts,
Draped like a perpetual hearse,
And memories of an old war's ancient losses,
Dwell in their faces' shadows like gray ghosts.
And worse—
The terror of the black man always near—
The drab level of the ricefields and the marsh
Lends them a mask of fear.

page two

Sunshine

This is a different page.
Do you suppose the sun here lavishes his heat
For nothing, in these islands by the sea?
No! The great green-mottled melons ripen in the fields,
Bleeding with scarlet, juicy pith deliriously;
And the exuberant yams grow golden, thick and sweet;
And white potatoes, in grave-rows,
With leaves as rough as cat tongues;
And pearly onions, and cabbages
With white flesh, sweet as chicken meat.

These the black boatmen bring to town
On barges, heaped with severed breasts of leaves,
Driven by put-put engines
Down the long canals, quavering with song,
With hail and chuckle to the docks along,
Seeing their dark faces down below
Reduplicated in the sunset glow,
While from the shore stretch out the quivering lines
Of the flat, palm-like, reflected pines
That inland lie like ranges of dark hills in lines.
And so to town—
Weaving odd baskets of sweet grass,
Lazily and slow,
To sell in the arcaded market,
Where men sold their fathers not so long ago.

For all their poverty,
These patient black men live
A life rich in warm colors of the fields,
Sunshine and hearty foods,
Delighted with the gifts that earth can give,
And old tales of Plateye and Bre'r Rabbit;
While the golden-velvet cornpone browns
Underneath the lid among hot ashes,
Where the groundnuts roast,
Round shadowy fires at nights,
With tales of graveyard ghost,
While eery spirituals ring,
And organ voices sing,
And sticks knock maddening rhythms on the floor
To shuffling youngsters "cutting" buck-and-wing;
Dogs bark;
And dog-eyed pickaninnies peek about the door.

Sundays, along the moss-draped roads,
The beribboned black folk go to church
By threes and twos, carrying their shoes,
With orange turbans, ginghams, rainbow hats;
Then bucks flaunt tiger-lily ties and watchet suits,
Smoking cob pipes and faintly sweet cheroots.
Wagons with oval wheels and kitchen chairs screech by,
Where Joseph-coated white-teethed maidens sit
Demurely,
While the old mule rolls back the ivory of his eye.

Soon from the whitewashed churches roll away
Among the live oak trees,
Rivers of melancholy harmonies,
Full of the sorrows of the centuries
The white man hears, but cannot feel.

But it is always Sunday on sea-islands.
Plantation bells, calling the pickers from the fields,
Are like old temple gongs;
And the wind tells monodies among the pines,
Playing upon their strings the ocean's songs;
The ducks fly in long, trailing lines;
Skeows squonk and marsh-hens quank
Among the tidal flats and rushes rank on rank;
On island tufts the heron feeds its viscid young;
And the quick mocker catches
From lips of sons of slaves the eery snatches,
And trolls them as no lips have ever sung.

Oh! It is good to be here in the spring,
When water still stays solid in the North,
When the first jasmine rings its golden bells,
And the "wild wistaria" puts forth;
But most because the sea then changes tone;
Talking a whit less drear,
It gossips in a smoother monotone,
Whispering moon-scandal in the old earth's ear.

H.A.