Faith and Betrayal (6 page)

Now the Caribbean torridity blasted the passengers, with “nearly half of our company affected more or less with the prickly heat.” The ship’s captain provided a large tub of fresh water for “dipping” the children, who were covered from head to toe with an irritating rash. “The men amuse themselves after another fashion,” Jean Rio wrote. “They put on a thin pair of drawers and pour buckets of water over each other.”

On the evening of March 10 they caught their first glimpse of a stationary, revolving light. Passing within three miles of what Jean Rio identified as the Island of Great and Little Isaacs and Green Turtle Island—now-defunct names for islands off the coast of Cuba—they celebrated the first sight of civilization they had had in nearly ten weeks. The lighthouse was situated on an island forty miles long, an uninhabited stretch except for a harbor where dozens of small schooners were anchored.

“Passed Buch Island, also Double-Headed Shot,” Jean Rio wrote in her diary on March 12. “This is not exactly an island but a long chain of rocks.” The ship entered the Gulf of Mexico two days later, and from that point forward the climate was “immensely hot.” She counted seventeen sailboats of various sizes, elegant against the aquamarine bay. “I have often wondered and read of the beauty of Italian skies, but I am sure they cannot exceed in splendor that which, at this moment, arches over the Gulf of Florida, or Mexico, as it is mostly determined.”

The next day, the crew measured the fresh water on board the ship and calculated that there remained a twenty-three-day supply. Despite the delays on the open sea, the company was well supplied, and there was ample water for the final jaunt across the gulf to New Orleans. Jean Rio was taken with the scenery and the fact that they had almost arrived, and she refused to succumb to the pessimism and apprehension infecting many on board. “At seven in the evening a violent squall came on,” she wrote, “driving most of the passengers below. Myself, with a few others, remained on deck, bidding defiance to the rain for the sake of enjoying the night of lightning which was very beautiful, seeming to illuminate one half of the horizon at once.” Even though the night was as rough as “when skirting the Bay of Biscay,” she stayed up to watch the light show. When the rest of her family fell prey to seasickness, she remained absorbed in the momentous occasion. “To my astonishment,” she wrote upon awakening the following morning, “the sun was rising on our starboard now,” and the water was “a perfect mirror.”

At noon on March 18, a steamship came out to meet the boat and pull it in to anchor at the island of Belize. “A boat has come alongside us loaded with oysters, which have found a ready market,” she wrote. The houses in the village were reflected perfectly in the water. “There is a small schooner lying at anchor just by the landing place, and every rope and block in her rigging is seen reversed exactly as if standing on an immense looking glass.”

The next morning a steamer took the
George W. Bourne
in tow, pulling the battered but intact vessel 110 miles up the Mississippi River to New Orleans. “America at last!” Jean Rio wrote upon arrival in the city two days later.

To describe the scenery on each side of this mighty stream needs a better pen than mine. No description that I have ever read has done it anything like justice. Sugar and cotton plantations abound. The houses of the planters are built in cottage style, but large, with verandas on every side and beautiful gardens. At a little distance are the Negro huts, from thirty to fifty on each plantation. They are built of wood with a veranda along the front, painted white. And most have either jasmine or honeysuckle growing over them. Each cottage has a long piece of garden ground attached to it. In general appearance they are certainly very far superior to the cottages inhabited by the poor in England. Groves of orange trees are very numerous, the perfume from which is very delightful as the breeze wafts it toward us. Thousands of peach and plum trees are here growing wild and are now in full blossom. We saw plenty of wild geese, also foxes and a raccoon or two. Storks fly here in numbers, over our heads, and settle down on the riverside and stretch out their long necks, looking at us as if in astonishment. There is an endless variety of landscape. The only thing that detracts from its beauty is the sign of the hundreds of Negroes at work in the sun. Oh, slavery, how I hate thee!

Fifty-six days after clearing the Liverpool harbor, on March 20, 1851, the ship had reached America. Elder Gibson proudly wrote in his official report that no company of Saints had ever crossed the Atlantic with fewer catastrophes: “This pleasant voyage was marked by one marriage, three births, two converts among crew members, and the death of a small boy who was dying of consumption when he boarded the ship.”

Church officials cautioned the emigrants about swindlers who used what one writer described as “ardent spirits” to lower the Saints’ guard, and especially about the rich French cuisine that could wreak havoc on the stomachs of those who had subsisted for almost two months on little more than biscuits and oatmeal.

Eager to disembark, Jean Rio would spend the next two days at an opulent residence in the “Paris of the Bayous”—at that time the world’s fourth-ranking port, second only to New York City in the United States, and one of the wealthiest cities in the country. She carried a letter of introduction from her friend “Miss Longhurst of Grover Street, Bedford Square” to Miss Longhurst’s sister, Mrs. Blime, “the wife of a French gentleman residing here.” Bursting into tears at the sight of a countrywoman, Mrs. Blime gave Jean Rio a guided tour in a horse-drawn carriage through the wide but unpaved city streets.

“The roads themselves are not kept in order as they are in London,” Jean Rio wrote. “Just now the weather is hot and dry, so in crossing them you sink in dust up to the ankles. In wet seasons, I am told, they are one continuous canal. Great lumps of stone are placed across the ends of the streets, about two feet under, to enable foot passengers to go from one side to another.” It was the first time she had seen a city laid out in “exact squares, crossing each other at right angles. The spaces between the streets are called blocks.”

The flavor and culture of the city was unmistakably French, though the population seemed evenly split between the French and the “Negroes.” Never before in all her world travels had she seen a city so conspicuously divided between the rich and the poor. Palatial estates lined Bourbon and Royal streets, while the ubiquitous ramshackle slave quarters dotted the outlying areas. She was particularly taken with the attire of both the haves and the have-nots.

The higher class of citizens—there is no nobility in America, though never was there a people fonder of titles: colonels, majors, captains, judges, and squires being as plentiful as blackberries—the Upper-Ten dress very handsomely in European style, the ladies especially, and they dress their slaves even more expensively. I saw slave girls following their mistresses in the streets, clad in frocks of embroidered silk or satin, and elegantly worked muslin trousers, either blue or scarlet, Morocco walking shoes and white silk stockings, with a French headdress similar to that worn by the Savoyards, composed of silk with all the colors of the rainbow co-mingled. Jewelry glitters on their dusky fingers (which are plainly seen through their lace gloves) and in their ears. Their only business in the streets seems to be to follow the ladies who own them and carry their reticule.

Bonnets are not worn, but a queer-looking thing made of muslin, something like the Quakers’ bonnets except that the front is not rounded off. They are stiffened with cane or strips of pasteboard. The front is twelve inches deep, with a horseshoe crown, and curtain half a yard in depth, and when on the head answers the purpose of bonnet and shawl. I thought them the most odd-looking things I had seen, but was soon glad to avail myself of the comfort of one in this blazing sun.

Mrs. Blime provided her with sumptuous guest quarters, and Jean Rio, accustomed as she was to a lavish lifestyle, was stupefied by the opulence. “For breakfast they take coffee boiled in milk,” she wrote,

with eggs, ham, hung beef, dried fish, salads, hot soda cakes, bread and butter. For dinner we had boiled redfish, stewed pigs’ feet, rumsteaks, wild goose (rabbits and squirrels too are commonly eaten) with vegetables, pickles, and salad. Two tumblers are put to each plate, and wine and brandy are placed on the table and each takes which they please. The idea of pouring either in wine glasses they laugh at—even ladies will drink off a tumbler of port as if it was water. Pies, tarts, cheesecakes, candy, fruit, and ice cream are brought on table after the meats are removed. French brandy poured into a glass and most bountifully sweetened with pulverized sugar finishes the meal. Tea as a meal they know nothing about, but at seven o’clock they take supper, which is quite as luxurious an affair as the dinner. By ten o’clock everyone is in bed and the streets are deserted.

Her hostess explained that while most of New Orleans’s white inhabitants were Frenchmen, they were nearly all married to Englishwomen, and she suggested that Jean Rio could fashion a nice life for herself there rather than continuing on to this mysterious Zion. If Jean Rio entertained the notion at all, her extant diary does not reflect it.

Desirous to oblige her guest, Mrs. Blime agreed to Jean Rio’s wish to visit a slave market, and early the next morning arranged to attend the auction held in the city’s Customs House. Women were prohibited from entering the “slave market for males,” so Jean Rio satisfied herself with that for women.

It is a large hall, well lighted, with seats all around on which were girls of every shade of color, from ten or twelve to thirty years of age. To my utter astonishment they were singing as merrily as larks. I expressed my surprise to Mrs. Blime. “Ah,” she said, “though I as an Englishwoman detest the very idea of slavery, yet I do believe that many of the slaves here have ten times the comforts of the laborers in our own country, with not half the labor. I have been thirteen years in this country, and although I have never owned a slave or ever intend to do so, still I do not look upon slavery with the horror that I once did. There are hundreds of slaves here who would not accept their freedom if it was offered to them. For this reason: they would then have no protection, as the laws afford little or none to people of color.” I could not help thinking that my friend’s feelings had become somewhat blunted, if not hardened, by long residence in a slave state.

They returned to the Blime estate and engaged in a lively dialogue on the issue. Jean Rio learned that the conditions for slaves had changed dramatically since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and that African slaves had received far better treatment when New Orleans was a French colony than after the Americans took control. Jean Rio was confounded by the nuances. “From further conversation,” she wrote in her diary that night,

I found that if a free man marries a slave, all the children of that marriage are the property of the owner of the mother. But if a free woman marries a slave, the children are free. I was shown a gentleman of color who is what we should call “managing clerk” in one of the largest stores in this city. He is the property of a rich proprietor in the neighborhood. He pays his master $500 annually and his salary is $1,000. He is married to a free woman, quite a light mulatto, by whom he has a family. They live in a very handsome house, which is the property of the wife, as a slave is not allowed to possess real estate. They keep a carriage and four servants, and this is by no means a singular case. It is a common occurrence for masters to hire out their slaves in this way at a salary of from fifty to seventy dollars per month, out of which they pay their masters an agreed-upon sum. The rest is their own.

Struggling to understand an arrangement clearly more complex than she had gathered from the British literature on the subject, she remained unconvinced of its benign aspects as presented by her hostess. “In spite of all of this,” she wrote of the apologia, “the system is a horrible one to English minds. Well might Sterne [an apparent reference to Laurence Sterne, the English clergyman and author of
The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
] say, ‘Oh, Slavery, disguise thyself as thou wilt, thou art a bitter drought.’ ” Like many of her British compatriots, Jean Rio thought slavery a crime against humanity as well as a sin against God—a cruel and antiquated system that had been abolished throughout the British dominions nearly twenty years earlier.