Mr. Asa F. Tift has a tough mind. Mrs. Asa F. Tift has a tender heart. Both have sharp tongues. They have been quarreling into the night.
This is the reason for their dissension. Ten days ago, the gunboats USS Mohawk and USS Wyandotte escorted into Key West harbor two slave ships they had captured in waters north of Cuba, the Williams and the Wildfire, carrying altogether three hundred candidates for slavery, both male and female, including numerous children. A party of the Engineer Corps based at Fort Taylor, under command of Captain E. B. Hunt, has fenced in a barracoon to hold the Negroes until it can be determined what to do with them; and with remarkable speed, after that, Captain Hunt’s carpenters have thrown up a crude dormitory, comprising nine rooms twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet in size, in each of which approximately thirty-five Negroes, sorted according to age, are, as Mrs. Tift will have it, incarcerated.
Mrs. Tift early became aware of the pitiable state of these “human souls, just like you and me,” as she keeps referring to the captives, to her husbands annoyance. Recently Mr. Tift learned that his wife, without asking his permission, has banded together with the wives of Messrs. Stephen R. Mallory, Winer Bethel, and Henry Mulrennan, and perhaps others, to press the engineers to build a hospital shed, which the army workmen have now, in fact, brought to completion; it measures one hundred fourteen feet by twenty-one feet, and it is already crammed with one hundred eighty patients suffering from ailments ranging from pinkeye and fungus of the scalp to far more serious illnesses, such as scurvy and typhus and even, in two cases, an unmentionable venereal disease. The ladies have also managed to persuade Drs. Skrine, Weedon, and Whitehurst to care for these sick folk and generously to defer until later the question of how much the United States Government will be obligated to pay them for their services.
The issue between this husband and wife is embedded in the fact that Mr. Asa F. Tift, who came here years ago from Georgia, considers himself a Southern Gentleman. So, it goes without saying, do Messrs. Mallory, Bethel, and Mulrennan, the husbands of Mrs. Tift’s meddlesome cohorts; and so, for that matter, do other good solid citizens of the town, such as Messrs. William Pinckney, Joseph B. Browne, William Curry, and Peter Crusoe, to name only a few of Mr. Tift’s friends. These are men of substance, culture, and refinement, with mercantile and other business interests. In summertime they scrupulously wear fresh-laundered suits of white linen duck, and in winter, on the Sabbath and all holidays, frock coats and tall silk hats. Some moved here from St. Augustine, some came from Virginia and the Carolinas, and some from the Bahamas. They are all firm states’ righters, and they are dead set against the federal government’s practice of intercepting slavers. They are scornful of the “riffraff” in town who celebrated with such vulgar obstreperousness, just last week, the news in the Gazette that the Republican convention in Chicago had nominated to run for President the darling of the antislavery states, Mr. Lincoln.
Mr. Tift says to his wife that these Negroes are property, which the United States Navy is piratically stealing from rightful owners.
Mrs. Tift says to her husband that he is mistaken. These are not chattels but “human souls, just like you and me, my dear Asa.” To Mr. Tiffs ear, the modifier “dear” is, at this moment, supererogatory, if not actually provocative.
Mrs. Tift and her friends have been visiting the barracoon every day. They have been shocked to see the way Captain James M. Brannan of the First Artillery, who is now in effect the commandant of the barracoon, is feeding the Negroes. The captives get only one meal a day, seated on the ground in circles of ten around crude tin buckets containing boiled rice and chunks of fatback. That is all they are given. Each Negro has a spoon and must dip into the common pot.
The aforementioned ladies, under a dark cloud of their husbands’ disapproval, have gone out into the town and have rallied the women of Key West, no matter what their husbands may think of Lincoln or states rights or abolitionism, to tasks of mercy. Already scores of women have begun flocking each morning to the enclosure, carrying nutritious foods—fruits from the trees in their yards; eggs that have been laid in innumerable bosky places by the towns many chickens; and spinach greens and lettuces and plantains from their kitchen gardens. They have also been contributing armfuls of clothing, appalled as they have been by the lack of modesty of the captives, who wear nothing but skimpy clouts. Indeed, a delightful entertainment for a fairly large audience of idle men and young boys, as well as members of the Corps of Engineers equipped with spyglasses on the parapet of nearby Fort Taylor, has been afforded by the daily washdown in the sea taken by the captives, men and women alike, quite unashamed, in their birthday suits. These poor ignorant people must be covered!
As the Tifts’ disagreement wears on, tears spring into Mrs. Tiffs eyes. This afternoon, she tells her husband, she dropped in at the hospital shed in the encampment, and there she saw “a sight that would break even your heart, Asa dear.” The patients have no beds or cots, as in a normal infirmary. They lie, many of them groaning in pain and fear, on a bare wooden floor. Huddled in a seated position against one wall, Mrs. Tift says, she came across a mother with a sick baby. The mother was herself a mere child. Dr. Skrine, who was showing Mrs. Tift around, estimated her age as “twelve or thirteen, at most.” The infant was probably suffering—“I can only guess,” Dr. Skrine said—from some typhus-like ailment. Also probably starving, since the mother was obviously ill-equipped to nurse.
“Asa, the young mother was so proud of her baby, and so delicate in the way she brushed away the moisture on its face with her fingers. You can’t tell me that those two poor sick defenseless little creatures are just boughten things.”
“No sign of a father within a hundred miles, Yd wager,” Mr. Tift scornfully says.
Mrs. Tift, weeping now from both pity and frustration, tries to tell her husband how pathetic the baby’s tiny head was, limply declining onto the mother’s childish, fruitless breast.
“Revolting,” Mr. Tift says.
The baby has died, and Mrs. Tift has made it her business to have this, the first death among the captives, announced in the Gazette. The morning after her altercation with her husband—in other words, two days ago—Mrs. Tift went straight back to the hospital shed in the barracoon, carrying a jug of milk and some soft cloths to serve as nappies. She found the mother sitting on the floor exactly as she had been the previous day, leaning against a stud of the wall, hugging her baby and gently caressing its cheeks. Mrs. Tift saw at once that something was amiss. The mother seemed not to be able, or not to be willing, to see her as she leaned forward, offering the milk. Mrs. Tift hurried off to find whichever doctor was on duty.
Without even touching the infant, Dr. Whitehurst said, “It is no longer with us.” He leaned forward to take the baby from the mothers arms, but the child-mother clutched the tiny corpse to her bosom and began to scream. For six hours, she fiercely refused to give it up. Then, Mrs. Tift heard later, it was taken from her forcibly.
The baby’s funeral is this morning. Much to Asa F. Tiffs disgust, Mrs. Tift has taken the lead in arranging everything. The article in the Gazette roused great sympathy among the women of the town. Mrs. Tift took up a subscription for a decent deal coffin—so very small!—to be hammered up by Solomon Bertal, one of the ship’s carpenters at the waterfront. She overcame the most stubborn sort of resistance on the part of Captain Brannan to her proposal that armed men from his artillery company should escort the entire boodle of captives to a plot at some distance from the barracoon, out on Whiteheads Point, which could serve as a burial ground for Negroes, for the infant’s funeral.
That march is now in fact taking place. At the head of the procession, escorted there by the committee of ladies, is the child-mother, decently covered by a white shift that Mrs. Tift has borrowed from the youngest daughter of Mrs. Mulrennan. Next comes a foursome of Negro men, dressed in new white denim trousers that Mrs. Tift has bought for the purpose, bare-chested, carrying the little coffin on their shoulders. Then come the mass of captives, most of them, unsuitably for a funeral, nearly naked. They are flanked by soldiers with guns. A large number of curious townspeople follow behind.
The captives gather around the six-foot-deep grave, which was dug yesterday by a squad of able-bodied male captives. Reverend Simon Peter Richardson of the Methodist Episcopal Church South stands at the head of the pit, and he sonorously says, “Brothers and sisters, we are gathered together here—”
Now he pauses, evidently feeling that he is not being given due respect by the Negroes, for some female voices have begun to make a strange wailing sound, which soon takes a curious turn toward melody. Men’s voices join in. Some throats cry out with prolonged moans. Reverend Richardson is looking aghast. The singing grows louder and louder. Bare feet rise and fall, slapping the ground in time with the insistent repetitious throbbing of what would sound to the townspeople’s ears like a chorus of irrepressible joy were it not for the unearthly moans that punctuate and underlie the song. There is a terrible radiance in the pulsating music, and we see the captives dipping, turning, stamping, their limbs resonating to the sounds that thrum from their chests.
The emotion in their song and in their swaying is palpable, soaring, ferocious, but to the people of Key West it is deeply enigmatic. To Reverend Richardson, it appears to be blasphemous, and with wild gestures he commands that the coffin be lowered forthwith into the pit. The four bearers, themselves singing, pick it up—it is a light thing—and, with Reverend Richardson waving his arms over them almost as if he were conducting the unbearable heathen music, they literally throw the box into the hole.
At that moment, as if cut by a huge machete, the chant stops. There is complete silence. Without a word, without a whisper, in appalling stillness, the Negroes turn and start walking back to their captivity.