Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/428

420 affection, it is none the less genuine; the feeling is instinctive, and the instinct itself is hardly ever absent from among them. I do not put it forward as a matter of praise, I mention it as a fact. If Sir S. Baker's sweeping assertion regarding I forget how many negro tribes, that they have among them no acknowledged form of worship of the unknown, were exact, which it is not, the existence, the universality indeed, of baby-worship at any rate must be allowed, I think, even by that distinguished miso-African. Nor is this species of worship limited to the mother of the babes, or to the womankind at large; it is practised in the same degree by the men, who are not a whit behind the women in their love and care of children, especially the youngest.

But in the very fervour and ecstasy of her baby-worship, the negress-mother persists in worshipping her little divinity irreflectively, recklessly, and by a natural consequence often injuriously, sometimes destructively, to the baby-god itself. Heated from field-work, excited, overdone, she returns in the late afternoon to her cottage, and the first thing she does when arrived there is to catch up her little brown sprawler from the floor and put it to her breast. The result needs no guessing. Half an hour later she is howling as only a negress can howl over her offspring convulsed or dead. Or perhaps, just as she was about to give, in more orderly fashion, the nourishment that the infant has been faintly waiting for some time past, a friend comes in to invite her to a dance or merry-making close by. Off she goes, having made heaven knows what arrangements for the small creature's wants, or it may well be, in her eagerness for amusement, no arrangement at all; purposes to come back in an hour, stays away until midnight, and, on her return home, finds another midnight, the midnight that knows no sunrise, closed over her child. And thus, and more. On over-feeding, injudicious feeding; ailments misunderstood; quack-doctoring — always preferred by the ignorant to all others; on half-superstitious usages, not less injurious than silly; on violent outbursts of passion — the passions of a negress, and of a negro too, are at tropical heat, their rage absolute phrenzy — I need not dwell; suppose what you will, you will be short of the mark. But cease to wonder if, among the most kindly-hearted, child-loving, and, I may add, child-producing race in the world, births, however numerous, are less in computation than deaths, if one-third, at least, by statistical registration — one full half, if to its records be added unregistered fact — of the negro children in Dutch Guiana die even before they are weaned. The causes, ninety-nine out of a hundred, are those which I have stated or alluded to, and no other.

What is, then, to be done? An evil, or rather an agglomeration of evils like these, that threaten to cut down the main-stem of the future, to dry up the very roots, to destroy the existence of the colony, must be put an end to, all will agree ; but how?

There is a remedy, and a very simple one, tried before, and worth trying again. Let us go back in memory to the times when every individual negro life meant so many hundred forms to his owner, when the suppression of the "trade" had cut off the supply from without, and the birth of every slave child on the estate brought a clear gain to the planter, just as its death represented an actual and heavy loss hard to replace, not to the parents only, but to the owner of parents and children too. Negroes and negresses might be never so unthinking then, never so reckless about what concerned themselves alone, but their master took good thought that they should not be careless where his own interest was involved. And in few things was it so closely involved, especially after the treaties of 1815 and 1819, as in the preservation of infant life among the labouring stock, and no precaution was neglected that could ensure this, and supplement the defects of maternal care. Many means were adopted; but the chiefest of all was the appointment on every estate of one or more elderly women, appropriately styled "mammas," chosen from among the negresses themselves, and whose sole duty was to watch each over a given number of infantile negroes, for whose proper care, nourishment, and good condition generally this foster-mother had to answer, and for whose loss, if they drooped and died, she was called to strict account. The history of slave-institutions has been not inappropriately called the "devil's book;" but here, at any rate, is a leaf of it worth taking out for insertion in a better volume.

Now fill up this outline project with the proper colouring of qualifications, provisos, regulations, and the remaining supplemental details of theory wrought out into fact, and you will have a scheme for the preservation of infant negro life, or rather the hindrance of its prodigal and ruinous waste, more likely to succeed in its object