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Authors: Sally Denton
Tags: Fiction
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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
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
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