Read Online Faith and Betrayal by Sally Denton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sally Denton
Tags: Fiction
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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
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
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