A Florida Sketch Book - Bradford Torrey
I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when the
planter returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that he
took a genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a great
many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of
woodpeckers. He knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, he
thought I should have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida people
say La_fay_ette) to find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird," he
said, referring to a kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called the
French mocking-bird; he catches other birds." The last remark was of
interest for its bearing upon a point about which I had felt some
curiosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, as I had seen many
loggerhead shrikes, but had observed no indication that other birds
feared them or held any grudge against them. As he rode off he called my
attention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp. "They
are very shy," he said. Then, from further away, he shouted once more to
ask if I heard the mocking-bird singing yonder, pointing with his whip
in the direction of the singer.
For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that the
grosbeak would again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more planted
fields,--climbing more barbed-wire fences, and stopping on the way to
enjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white-crowned
sparrows,--and skirted once more the muddy shore of the cane-swamp,
where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding. That brought me
to the road from which I had made my entry to the place some days
before; but, being still unable to forego a splendid possibility, I
recrossed the plantation, tarried again in the glade, sat again on the
wooden fence (if that grosbeak only _would_ show himself!), and thence
went on, picking a few heads of handsome buffalo clover, the first I had
ever seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I came again to the
six-barred gate and the Quincy road. At that point, as I now remember,
the air was full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaring
over the fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along the road were
white-crowned and white-throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April),
orchard orioles, thrashers, summer tanagers, myrtle and paim warblers,
cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger-heads,
yellow--throated vireos, and sundry others, but not the blue grosbeak,
which would have been worth them all.
Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory as
to the exact appearance of that bird. "Feathers around base of bill
black," said the book. I had not noticed that. But no matter; the bird
was a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient reason that it could not be
anything else. A black line between the almost black beak and the
dark-blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturally
would escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. And yet, while I
reasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed,
doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I should
never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion. At
best, the evidence was worth nothing for others. If only that excellent
Mr. ----, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whose
pardon I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free in
this rehearsal of the story),--if only Mr. ---- could have left me alone
for ten minutes longer!
The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven be
thanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw other
blue grosbeaks and heard them sing. But that was not on a cotton
plantation, and is part of another story.
A FLORIDA SHRINE.
All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the most
conveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with which
guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern
themselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever
been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the
world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at all
events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but
I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental
interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion
that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so,
vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he
"interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized
citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor"--a
model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants,
perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of "the big
house"--a story-and-a-half cottage--amid the flowering shrubs. Here
lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and--worthy
son of a worthy sire--alderman and then mayor of the city of
Tallahassee. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades
of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate,
and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature
of the reluctant sex.
The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! when
I spoke of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he
told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in
Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor.
The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband's death, and
lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant
sneered,--politely,--and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge
----, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that
indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once,
the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.
The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince
had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts
(and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the
worthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there,
if my sentiment had been _all_ wasted (but there was no question of
tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way
thither a pleasant one--first down the hill in a zigzag course to the
vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through
the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther
side. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that
road to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the
ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of
frost.
In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry,
and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was
cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and
the chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the man
do that."
She answered on the instant. "I would," she said, "if I had a man to
_make_."
"I'm sure you would," I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of
her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable
_naivete_ the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died
a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow
under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to
do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not
good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld
all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went
farther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no
occasion for haste.
When I had skirted a cotton-field--the crop just out of the ground--and
a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white
water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I
met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.
"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat
servants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him,"
he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah." That was
a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough.
He spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The old
man had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing."
He didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored
person at all." Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah,
he didn't miss your fault." But his servants never were "ironed." He
"didn't believe in barbarousment."
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had
not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"
was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright,"
though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "They
ain't got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do
'em no good."
I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it," he
exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I
inquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know it
that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was
too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.
I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his old
master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer
("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things. He had lived a
long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it
over. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a
while a patient listener.
This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored
people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who
expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white
people ("I's been taughted a heap," he said), and believed that the
salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But
he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few
persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a
Yankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk.
The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he
only meant to flatter me.
If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the
going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate
itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has
fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and
occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a
larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman
whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will,
the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking
at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those
fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in
descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he
averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and
from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a
"fine old mansion" must be different from his.
The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have
made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;
those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were
now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one
visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the
grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina
wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the
confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle
vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds,
cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the
trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who
thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with
a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved me
from absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there an
agreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows,
the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite the
water-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly
pine-tree,--enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee
roses,--a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemed
really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead
of coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had
meant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some
years in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate,
which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn't any
better off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, his
children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to
hear. If the pessimists are right,--which may I be kept from
believing,--the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with,
though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree.
When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one car
which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the
driver beside it, but no mules.
"Are you going to start directly?" I asked.
"Yes, sah," he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shouted
in a peremptory voice, "Do about, there! Do about!"
"What does that mean?" said I. "Hurry up?"
"Yes, sah, that's it. 'Tain't everybody that wants to be hurried up; so
we tells 'em, 'Do about!'"
Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys
stepped upon the rear platform.
"Where you goin'?" said the driver. "Uptown?"
They said they were.
"Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you'll git hurt and cost this
dried-up company more money than you's wuth."
They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the front
corner. "Sit down there," he said, "right there." They obeyed, and as he
turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw
more of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say."
Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistent
accompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill.
WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE.
I arrived at Tallahassee, from Jacksonville, late in the afternoon,
after a hot and dusty ride of more than eight hours. The distance is
only a hundred and sixty odd miles, I believe; but with some bright
exceptions, Southern railroads, like Southern men, seem to be under the
climate, and schedule time is more or less a formality.
For the first two thirds of the way the country is flat and barren.
Happily, I sat within earshot of an amateur political economist, who,
like myself, was journeying to the State capital. By birth and education
he was a New York State man, I heard him say; an old abolitionist, who
had voted for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors down to
Hayes--the only vote he was ever ashamed of. Now he was a "greenbacker."
The country was going to the dogs, and all because the government did
not furnish money enough. The people would find it out some time, he
guessed. He talked as a bird sings--for his own pleasure. But I was
pleased, too. His was an amiable enthusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed,
from all that bitterness, which an exclusive possession of the truth so
commonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; but
he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of
the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the
ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep
our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His
discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he
said, "_I_ call it the _late_ Republican party," it was with a chuckle
so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a
pretty stiff partisan could have taken offense. Even his predictions of
impending national ruin were delivered with numberless merry quips and
twinkles. Many good Republicans and good Democrats (the adjective is
used in its political sense) might have envied him his sunny temper,
joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For something
in his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merry
greenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I was
not in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a
tone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortable
property at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, was
his humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own
jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity.
Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily,
too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for flowering
dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.
All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness
and the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, I
caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright
raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought,
till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing
within reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess was
afterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all
their attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time
for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the
five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe
the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that
task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most
troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_),
partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after
every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk
exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do
not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times
worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a
certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but
impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of
extreme perturbation.
Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it
remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden
change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the
nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably
exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two
months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land
rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!
My spirits rose with it. By and by we passed extensive hillside
plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at
work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a
South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of
southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a
land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And
when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike
houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying
under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country."
As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it: a
typical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old city
metamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by
"Northern enterprise," whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, and
whose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being for
sale. It is compactly built on a hill,--the state capitol crowning the
top,--down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the open
country all about. The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it is
comparatively comfortable to walk in them--a blessing which the
pedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida: at St.
Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of the
city itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and,
for any considerable distance, all but impossible. Here at Tallahassee,
it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations from
without.
I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that I
did nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the way
the advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, and
returning to my lodgings with a handful of "banana-shrub"
blossoms,--smelling wonderfully like their name,--which a good woman had
insisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her the
name of the bush. It was my first, but by no means my last, experience
of the floral generosity of Tallahassee people.
The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishment found the city
enveloped in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom I
went in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner. He did
not know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but he
thought it did not indicate foul weather. For a man so slightly
acquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably good
prophet; for though, during my fortnight's stay, there must have been at
least eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rain
fell.
That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory. For one thing, the
mocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I had
never heard mocking-birds before. That they really did surpass their
brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much to
assert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, to
come upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if any
one, must be competent to speak.
"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of
a mocking-bird against a European nightingale," says Mr. Thompson,[1] "I
should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of
Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile.... I have found no birds
elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty
miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee,
to some miles west of Mobile."
[Footnote 1: _By-Ways and Bird-Notes_, p. 20.]
I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small,
straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into a
plantation lane. It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean;
by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest of
quiet landscapes: broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and before
me, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on the
other by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines,
shrubs, and tall trees. The tender and varied tints of the new leaves,
the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the red
earth of the wayside--I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshine
on them. In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal
grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the
volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop
overhead,
"Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray,"
and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could
really do when they set out. He did his work well; the love notes of the
flicker could not have been improved by the flicker himself; but, right
or wrong, I could not help feeling that the cardinal struck a truer and
deeper note; while both together did not hinder me from hearing the
faint songs of grasshopper sparrows rising from the ground on either
side of the lane. It was a fine contrast: the mocker flooding the air
from the topmost bough, and the sparrows whispering their few almost
inaudible notes out of the grass. Yes, and at the self-same moment the
eye also had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was skimming over the field,
while up in the sky soared a pair of hen-hawks.
In the wood, composed of large trees, both hard wood and pine, I had
found a group of three summer tanagers, two males and one female,--the
usual proportion with birds generally, one may almost say, in the
pairing season. The female was the first of her sex that I had seen, and
I remarked with pleasure the comparative brightness of her dress. Among
tanagers, as among negroes, red and yellow are esteemed a pretty good
match. At this point, too, in a cluster of pines, I caught a new
song--faint and listless, like the indigo-bird's, I thought; and at the
word I started forward eagerly. Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird's
southern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunting, a beauty which I
had begun to fear I was to miss. I had recognized my first tanager from
afar, ten days before, his voice and theme were so like his Northern
relative's; but this time I was too hasty. My listless singer was not
the nonpareil, nor even a finch of any kind, but a yellow-throated
warbler. For a month I had seen birds of his species almost daily, but
always in hard wood trees, and silent. Henceforth, as long as I remained
in Florida, they were invariably in pines,--their summer quarters,--and
in free song. Their plumage is of the neatest and most exquisite; few,
even among warblers, surpass them in that regard: black and white
(reminding one of the black-and-white creeper, which they resemble also
in their feeding habits), with a splendid yellow gorget. Myrtle warblers
(yellow-rumps) were still here (the peninsula is alive with them in the
winter), and a ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely voice with the
simple trills of pine warblers, while out of a dense low treetop some
invisible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun melody. It should
have been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), only
its tune was several times too long.