Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/424

416 and now the merry-makers who had dispersed to their evening meal reassembled on the gravel-walks and clean-kept open spaces of the garden in front of the dwelling-house to enjoy the sport of the hour for in the West Indies as in Africa, in Surinam no less than at Damascus, the night is the negro's own time; and no member of Parliament in the latter months of the session, no fashionable beauty in her fourth London season, can more persistently invert the solar allotment of the hours than does the negro votary of pleasure; and wherever and however pleasure be attainable, the negro is its votary.

Group by group, distinctly seen in the pale moonlight as if by day, only with an indistincter background, our creole friends flocked on. The preparations for the dance were soon made. Drums, fifes, a shrill violin, and a musical instrument some say of Indian, some say of negro invention, consisting of a notched gourd that when scraped by a small stick gives out a sound not unlike the chirping of a monster cricket, and accentuates time and measure after the fashion of triangles, were brought from heaven knows what repositories, and with them the tuneful orchestra was complete. The dancers ranged themselves; more than a hundred men and women, mostly young, all dressed in their choicest for the night's sport. The men, with few exceptions, were attired in white trowsers and shirts of various colours, with a predominance of red; some dandies had wrapped gay sashes round their waists, and most had provided themselves with sprigs of flowers, jauntily stuck in their hat-bands. The women's dresses consisted chiefly of loose white sacques, without the cumbrous under-layer of petticoats, or the other "troublesome disguises" that Europe conceals her beauties withal, and reserved their assortment of bright but rarely inharmonious colours for their fantastic turbans, some of which were arranged so as to give the effect of one or two moderate-sized horns projecting from the wearer's head, while other girls, with better taste, left an embroidered end hanging down on one side, Eastern fashion. Many of the women were handsome, shapely figures, full-limbed and full-bosomed; but — must I say it? — the particular charm of delicate feet and hands was universally wanting; nor indeed could it have been fairly looked for among a throng of field-laborers, female or male. As to faces, the peculiarities of the negro countenance are well known in caricature; but a truer pattern may be seen, by those who wish to study it, any day among the statues of the Egyptian rooms in the British Museum: the large gentle eye, the full but not over-protruding lips, the rounded contour, and the good-natured, easy, sensuous expression. This is the genuine African model; one not often, I am aware, to be met with in European or American thoroughfares, where the plastic African too readily acquires the careful look and even the irregularity of the features that surround him, but which is common enough in the villages and fields where he dwells after his own fashion, among his people, most common of all in the tranquil seclusion and congenial climate of a Surinam plantation. There you may find also a type neither Asiatic nor European, but distinctly African, with much of independence and vigour in the male physiognomy, and something that approaches, if it does not quite reach, beauty in the female. Rameses and his queen were cast in no other mould.

The governor and ourselves were seated with becoming dignity on the wide open balcony atop of the steps leading up to the hall-door, thus commanding a full view of the garden and the people assembled. Immediately in front of us was a large flower-bed, or rather a labyrinth of flower-beds, among which stood, like white goblins in the moonlight, the quaint statues before mentioned, methodically arranged after the most approved Dutch style, and flanked by two pieces of mimic artillery. Such was the centre-piece, and on either side there opened out a wide clear space, clean-swept and strewn with "caddy" the usual white mixture of broken shell, coral, and sand, and in each of these spaces to right and left a band of musicians, or rather noise-makers, squatted negro-wise on the ground. Round these centres of attraction the crowd soon gathered in a double group, men and women, all noisy, animated, and ready for the dance. The moon, almost at the full, glittered bright overhead, and her uncertain light, while giving full effect to the half-barbaric picturesqueness of attire and form in the shifting eddy of white-clad figures, served also to veil from too exact view the defects — and they were many — in the clothes, ornaments, and appearance