The Century
Magazine
Feburary 1886

from The Dance in Place Congo
Up at the other end of Orleans street, hid only by
the old padre's garden and the cathedral, glistens the
ancient Place d'Armes. In the early days it stood for all
that was best; the place for political rallying, the retail
quarter of all fine goods and wares, and at sunset and by
moonlight the promenade of good society and the haunt of
true lovers; not only in the military, but also in the most
unwarlike sense the place of arms, and of hearts and hands,
and of words tender as well as words noble.
The Place Congo, at the opposite end of the street, was
at the opposite end of everything. One was on the highest
ground; the other on the lowest. The one was the rendezvous
of the rich man, the master, the military officer--of all
that went to make up the ruling class; the other of the
butcher and baker, the raftsman, the sailor, the quadroon,
the painted girl, and the negro slave. No meaner name could
be given the spot. The negro was the most despised of human
creatures and the Congo the plebian among negroes. The
white man's plaza had the army and navy on its right and
left, the court-house, the council-hall and the church at
its back, and the world before it. The black man's was
outside the rear gate, the poisonous wilderness on three
sides and the proud man's contumely on its front.
Before the city overgrew its flimsy palisade walls, and
closing in about this old stamping-ground gave it set
bounds, it was known as Congo Plains. There was wide room
for much field sport, and the Indian villagers of the
town's outskirts and the lower class of white Creoles made
it the ground of their wild game of raquette. Sunday
afternoons were the time for it. Hence, beside these
diversions there was, notably, another.
The hour was the slave's term of momentary liberty, and
his simple, savage, musical and superstitious nature
dedicated it to amatory song and dance tinctured with his
rude notions of supernatural influences.
THE CALINDA.
There
were other dances. Only a few years ago I was honored with
an invitation, which I had to decline, to see danced the
Babouille, the Cata (or Chacta), the Counjaille, and the
Calinda. Then there were the Voudou, and the Congo, to
describe which would not be pleasant. The latter, called
Congo also in Cayenne, Chica in San Domingo, and in the
Windward Islands confused under one name with the Calinda,
was a kind of Fandango, they say, in which the Madras
kerchief held by its tip-ends played a graceful part.
The true Calinda was bad enough. In Louisiana, at least,
its song was always a grossly personal satirical ballad,
and it was the favorite dance all the way from there to
Trinidad. To dance it publicly is not allowed this side the
West Indies. All this Congo Square business was suppressed
at one time; 1843, says tradition.
The Calinda was a dance of multitude, a sort of vehement
cotillion. The contortions of the encircling crowd were
strange and terrible, the din was hideous. One Calinda is
still familiar to all Creole ears; it has long been a
vehicle for the white Creole's satire; for generations the
man of municipal politics was fortunate who escaped
entirely a lampooning set to its air.
In my childhood I used, at one time, to hear, every
morning, a certain black marchande des
calas--peddler-woman selling rice croquettes--chanting
the song as she moved from street to street at the sunrise
hour with her broad, shallow, laden basket balanced on her
head.
In other words, a certain Judge Preval gave a
ball--not an outdoor Congo dance--and made such Cuffees as
could pay three dollars a ticket. It doesn't rhyme, but it
was probably true. "Dance, dance the Calindá!
Boujoum! Boujoum!"
The number of stanzas has never been counted; here are a
few of them.
"Dans l'equirie la 'y' avé grand gala;
Mo cré choual la yé t b'en
étonné.
Miché Preval, li té capitaine
bal;
So cocher Louis, té maite
cérémonie.
Y avé des négresse belle
passé maitresse,
Qui volé bel-bel dans l'ormoire momselle.
. . . . . .
Ala maite la geole li trouvé si
drole,
Li dit, "moin aussi, mo fé bal ici."
Ouatchman la yé yé tombé la
dans;
Yé fé gran' déga dans
léquirie la." etc.
"It was in a stable that they had this gala
night," says the song; "the horses there were greatly
astonished. Preval was captain; his coachman, Louis, was
master of ceremonies. There were negresses made prettier
than their mistresses by adornments stolen from the ladies'
wardrobes (armoires). But the jailer found it all so
funny that he proposed to himself to take an unexpected
part; the watchmen came down"--
No official exaltation bought immunity from the jeer of
the Calinda. Preval was a magistrate. Stephen Mazureau, in
his attorney-general's office, the song likened to a
bull-frog in a bucket of water. A page might be covered by
the roll of victims. The masters winked at these gross but
harmless liberties and, as often as any others, added stanzas of their own invention.
The Calinda ended these
dissipations of the summer Sabbath afternoons. They could
not run far into the night, for all the fascinations of all
the dances could not excuse the slave's tarrying in public
places after a certain other bou-djoum! (that was
not of the Calinda, but of the regular nine-o'clock evening
gun) had rolled down Orleans street from the Place d'Armes;
and the black man or woman who wanted to keep a whole skin
on the back had to keep out of the Calaboose. Times have
changed, and there is nothing to be regretted in the change
that has come over Congo Square. Still a glamour hangs over
its dark past. There is the pathos of slavery, the poetry
of the weak oppressed by the strong, and of limbs that
danced after toil, and of barbaric love-making. The rags
and semi-nakedness, the bamboula drum, the dance, and
almost the banjo, are gone; but the bizarre melodies
and dark lovers' apostrophes live on; and among them the
old Counjaille song of Aurore Pradère
AURORE
PRADÉRE. |
CHO. |
Aurore Pradère, pretty maid,
(ter)
She's just what I want and her I'll have. |
SOLO. |
Some folks say she's too pretty, quite;
Some folks they say she's not polite;
All this they say--Psha-a-ah!
More fool am I!
For she's what I want and her I'll have. |
CHO. |
Aurore Pradère, pretty maid,
(ter)
She's just what I want and her I'll have. |
SOLO. |
Some say she's going to the bad;
Some say that her mamma went mad;
All this they say--Psha-a-ah!
More fool am I!
For she's what I want and her I'll have. |
Mr. Ware and his associate compilers have neither of
these stanzas, but one very pretty one; the third in the
music as printed here, and which we translate as
follows:
SOLO. |
A muslin gown she doesn't choose,
She doesn't ask for broidered hose,
She doesn't want prunella shoes,
O she's what I want and her I'll have. |
CHO. |
Aurore Pradère, etc. |
The Century Magazine
April 1886
from Creole Slave Songs
One of the best of these Creole love-songs--one that
the famed Gottschalk, himself a New Orleans Creole of pure
blood, made use of--is the tender lament of one who sees
the girl of his heart's choice the victim of chagrin in
beholding a female rival wearing those vestments of extra
quality that could only be the favors which both women had
coveted from the hand of some one in the proud master-caste
whence alone such favors could come. "Calalou," says the
song, "has an embroidered petticoat, and Lolotte, or Zizi,"
as it is often sung, "has a--heartache." Calalou, here, I
take to be a derisive nickname. Originally it is the term
for a West Indian dish, a noted ragout. It must be intended
to apply here to the quadroon women who swarmed into New
Orleans in 1809 as refugees from Cuba, Guadeloupe, and
other islands where the war against Napoleon exposed them
to Spanish and British aggression. It was with this great
influx of persons neither savage nor enlightened, neither
white nor black, neither slave nor truly free, that the
famous quadroon caste arose and flourished. If Calalou, in
the verse, was one of these quadroon fair ones, the song is its own explanation.
"Poor little Miss Zizi!" is what it
means--"She has pain, pain in her little heart." "À
li" is simply the Creole possessive form; "corps à
moin" would signify simply myself. Calalou is wearing a
Madras turban; she has on an embroidered petticoat; [they
tell their story and] Zizi has achings in her heart. And
the second stanza moralizes: "When you wear the chain of
love"--maybe we can make it rhyme:
"When love's chains upon thee lie
Bid all happiness good-bye."
Poor little Zizi! say we also. Triumphant Calalou!
We see that even her sort of freedom had its tawdry
victories at the expense of the slave. A poor freedom it
was, indeed: To have f. m. c. or f. w. c. tacked in small
letters upon one's name perforce and by law, that all might
know that the bearer was not a real freeman or freewoman,
but only a free man (or woman) of color,--a title that
could not be indicated by capital initials; to be the
unlawful mates of luxurious bachelors, and take their pay
in muslins, embroideries, prunella, and good living, taking
with them the loathing of honest women and the salacious
derision of the blackamoor; to be the sister, mother,
father, or brother of Calalou; to fall heir to property by
sufferance, not by law; to be taxed for public education
and not allowed to give that education to one's own
children; to be shut out of all occupations that the master
class could reconcile with the vague title of gentleman; to
live in the knowledge that the law pronounced "death or
imprisonment at hard labor for life" against whoever should
be guilty of "writing, printing, publishing, or
distributing anything having a tendency to create
discontent among the free colored population": that it
threatened death against whosoever should utter such things
in private conversation; and that it decreed expulsion from
the State to Calalou and all her kin of any age or
condition if only they had come in across its bounds since
1807. In the enjoyment of such ghastly freedom as this the
flesh-pots of Egypt sometimes made the mouth water and
provoked the tongue to sing its regrets for a past that
seemed better than the present.
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