The Grandissimes Read online

  CHAPTER IV

  FAMILY TREES

  In the year 1673, and in the royal hovel of a Tchoupitoulas village notfar removed from that "Buffalo's Grazing-ground," now better known asNew Orleans, was born Lufki-Humma, otherwise Red Clay. The mother of RedClay was a princess by birth as well as by marriage. For the father,with that devotion to his people's interests presumably common torulers, had ten moons before ventured northward into the territory ofthe proud and exclusive Natchez nation, and had so prevailed with--sooutsmoked--their "Great Sun," as to find himself, as he finally knockedthe ashes from his successful calumet, possessor of a wife whosepedigree included a long line of royal mothers--fathers being of littleaccount in Natchez heraldry--extending back beyond the Mexican originof her nation, and disappearing only in the effulgence of her greatoriginal, the orb of day himself. As to Red Clay's paternal ancestry, wemust content ourselves with the fact that the father was not only thediplomate we have already found him, but a chief of considerableeminence; that is to say, of seven feet stature.

  It scarce need be said that when Lufki-Humma was born, the mother aroseat once from her couch of skins, herself bore the infant to theneighboring bayou and bathed it--not for singularity, nor forindependence, nor for vainglory, but only as one of the heart-curdlingconventionalities which made up the experience of that most pitiful ofholy things, an Indian mother.

  Outside the lodge door sat and continued to sit, as she passed out, hermaster or husband. His interest in the trivialities of the moment may besummed up in this, that he was as fully prepared as some men are in morecivilized times and places to hold his queen to strict account for thesex of her offspring. Girls for the Natchez, if they preferred them, butthe chief of the Tchoupitoulas wanted a son. She returned from thewater, came near, sank upon her knees, laid the infant at his feet, andlo! a daughter.

  Then she fell forward heavily upon her face. It may have been muscularexhaustion, it may have been the mere wind of her hasty-temperedmatrimonial master's stone hatchet as it whiffed by her skull; aninquest now would be too great an irony; but something blew out her"vile candle."

  Among the squaws who came to offer the accustomed funeral howlings, andseize mementoes from the deceased lady's scant leavings, was one who hadin her own palmetto hut an empty cradle scarcely cold, and therefore anecessity at her breast, if not a place in her heart, for theunfortunate Lufki-Humma; and thus it was that this little waif came tobe tossed, a droll hypothesis of flesh, blood, nerve and brain, into thehands of wild nature with _carte blanche_ as to the disposal of it. Andnow, since this was Agricola's most boasted ancestor--since it appearsthe darkness of her cheek had no effect to make him less white, orqualify his right to smite the fairest and most distant descendant of anAfrican on the face, and since this proud station and right could nothave sprung from the squalid surroundings of her birth, let us for amoment contemplate these crude materials.

  As for the flesh, it was indeed only some of that "one flesh" of whichwe all are made; but the blood--to go into finer distinctions--theblood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, wasthe blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which,before it yielded its Mexican splendors to the conquering Aztec, thronedthe jeweled and gold-laden Inca in the South, and sent the sacred fireof its temples into the North by the hand of the Natchez. For it is ashort way of expressing the truth concerning Red Clay's tissues to sayshe had the blood of her mother and the nerve of her father, the nerveof the true North American Indian, and had it in its finest strength.

  As to her infantine bones, they were such as needed not to fail ofstraightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in handsand feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possiblybetween the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been anIncaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune herimpressible little cranium should escape the cradle-straps, theshapeliness that nature loves would soon appear. And this very fortunebefell her. Her father's detestation of an infant that had not consultedhis wishes as to sex prompted a verbal decree which, among otherprohibitions, forbade her skull the distortions that ambitious andfashionable Indian mothers delighted to produce upon their offspring.

  And as to her brain: what can we say? The casket in which Nature sealedthat brain, and in which Nature's great step-sister, Death, finally laidit away, has never fallen into the delighted fingers--and the remarkablefineness of its texture will never kindle admiration in the triumphanteyes--of those whose scientific hunger drives them to dig for _craniaAmericana_; nor yet will all their learned excavatings ever draw forthone of those pale souvenirs of mortality with walls of shapelier contouror more delicate fineness, or an interior of more admirablespaciousness, than the fair council-chamber under whose dome the mindof Lufki-Humma used, about two centuries ago, to sit in frequentconclave with high thoughts.

  "I have these facts," it was Agricola Fusilier's habit to say, "byfamily tradition; but you know, sir, h-tradition is much more authenticthan history!"

  Listening Crane, the tribal medicine-man, one day stepped softly intothe lodge of the giant chief, sat down opposite him on a mat of plaitedrushes, accepted a lighted calumet, and, after the silence of a decenthour, broken at length by the warrior's intimation that "the ear ofRaging Buffalo listened for the voice of his brother," said, in effect,that if that ear would turn toward the village play-ground, it wouldcatch a murmur like the pleasing sound of bees among the blossoms of thecatalpa, albeit the catalpa was now dropping her leaves, for it was themoon of turkeys. No, it was the repressed laughter of squaws, wallowingwith their young ones about the village pole, wondering at theNatchez-Tchoupitoulas child, whose eye was the eye of the panther, andwhose words were the words of an aged chief in council.

  There was more added; we record only enough to indicate the direction ofListening Crane's aim. The eye of Raging Buffalo was opened to see avision: the daughter of the Natchez sitting in majesty, clothed inmany-colored robes of shining feathers crossed and recrossed withgirdles of serpent-skins and of wampum, her feet in quilled and paintedmoccasins, her head under a glory of plumes, the carpet ofbuffalo-robes about her throne covered with the trophies of conquest,and the atmosphere of her lodge blue with the smoke of embassadors'calumets; and this extravagant dream the capricious chief at onceresolved should eventually become reality. "Let her be taken to thevillage temple," he said to his prime-minister, "and be fed by warriorson the flesh of wolves."

  The Listening Crane was a patient man; he was the "man that waits" ofthe old French proverb; all things came to him. He had waited for anopportunity to change his brother's mind, and it had come. Again, hewaited for him to die; and, like Methuselah and others, he died. He hadheard of a race more powerful than the Natchez--a white race; he waitedfor them; and when the year 1682 saw a humble "black gown" dragging andsplashing his way, with La Salle and Tonti, through the swamps ofLouisiana, holding forth the crucifix and backed by French carbines andMohican tomahawks, among the marvels of that wilderness was found this:a child of nine sitting, and--with some unostentatious aid from hermedicine-man--ruling; queen of her tribe and high-priestess of theirtemple. Fortified by the acumen and self-collected ambition of ListeningCrane, confirmed in her regal title by the white man's Manitou throughthe medium of the "black gown," and inheriting her father'sfear-compelling frown, she ruled with majesty and wisdom, sometimes adecreer of bloody justice, sometimes an Amazonian counselor ofwarriors, and at all times--year after year, until she had reached theperfect womanhood of twenty-six--a virgin queen.

  On the 11th of March, 1699, two overbold young Frenchmen of M.D'Iberville's little exploring party tossed guns on shoulder, andventured away from their canoes on the bank of the Mississippi into thewilderness. Two men they were whom an explorer would have been justifiedin hoarding up, rather than in letting out at such risks; a pair to leanon, noble and strong. They hunted, killed nothing, were overtaken byrain, then by night, hunger, alarm, despair.

  And whe
n they had lain down to die, and had only succeeded in fallingasleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves withbow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsakenstrength and beauty, and fell sick of love. We say not whether withZephyr Grandissime or Epaminondas Fusilier; that, for the time being,was her secret.

  The two captives were made guests. Listening Crane rejoiced in them asrepresentatives of the great gift-making race, and indulged himself in adream of pipe-smoking, orations, treaties, presents and alliances,finding its climax in the marriage of his virgin queen to the king ofFrance, and unvaryingly tending to the swiftly increasing aggrandizementof Listening Crane. They sat down to bear's meat, sagamite and beans.The queen sat down with them, clothed in her entire wardrobe: vest ofswan's skin, with facings of purple and green from the neck of themallard; petticoat of plaited hair, with embroideries of quills;leggings of fawn-skin; garters of wampum; black and green serpent-skinmoccasins, that rested on pelts of tiger-cat and buffalo; armlets ofgars' scales, necklaces of bears' claws and alligators' teeth, plaitedtresses, plumes of raven and flamingo, wing of the pink curlew, andodors of bay and sassafras. Young men danced before them, blowing uponreeds, hooting, yelling, rattling beans in gourds and touching hands andfeet. One day was like another, and the nights were made brilliant withflambeau dances and processions.

  Some days later M. D'Iberville's canoe fleet, returning down the river,found and took from the shore the two men, whom they had given up fordead, and with them, by her own request, the abdicating queen, who leftbehind her a crowd of weeping and howling squaws and warriors. Threecanoes that put off in their wake, at a word from her, turned back; butone old man leaped into the water, swam after them a little way, andthen unexpectedly sank. It was that cautious wader but inexperiencedswimmer, the Listening Crane.

  When the expedition reached Biloxi, there were two suitors for the handof Agricola's great ancestress. Neither of them was Zephyr Grandissime.(Ah! the strong heads of those Grandissimes.)

  They threw dice for her. Demosthenes De Grapion--he who, traditionsays, first hoisted the flag of France over the little fort--seemed tothink he ought to have a chance, and being accorded it, cast anastonishingly high number; but Epaminondas cast a number higher by one(which Demosthenes never could quite understand), and got a wife who hadloved him from first sight.

  Thus, while the pilgrim fathers of the Mississippi Delta with Gallicrecklessness were taking wives and moot-wives from the ill specimens ofthree races, arose, with the church's benediction, the royal house ofthe Fusiliers in Louisiana. But the true, main Grandissime stock, onwhich the Fusiliers did early, ever, and yet do, love to marry, has keptitself lily-white ever since France has loved lilies--as to marriage,that is; as to less responsible entanglements, why, of course--

  After a little, the disappointed Demosthenes, with due ecclesiasticalsanction, also took a most excellent wife, from the first cargo of Houseof Correction girls. Her biography, too, is as short as Methuselah's, orshorter; she died. Zephyr Grandissime married, still later, a lady ofrank, a widow without children, sent from France to Biloxi under a_lettre de cachet_. Demosthenes De Grapion, himself an only son, leftbut one son, who also left but one. Yet they were prone to earlymarriages.

  So also were the Grandissimes, or, as the name is signed in all the oldnotarial papers, the Brahmin Mandarin de Grandissimes. That was onething that kept their many-stranded family line so free from knots andkinks. Once the leisurely Zephyr gave them a start, generation followedgeneration with a rapidity that kept the competing De Grapionsincessantly exasperated, and new-made Grandissime fathers continuallythrowing themselves into the fond arms and upon the proud necks ofcongratulatory grandsires. Verily it seemed as though their family treewas a fig-tree; you could not look for blossoms on it, but there,instead, was the fruit full of seed. And with all their speed they werefor the most part fine of stature, strong of limb and fair of face. Theold nobility of their stock, including particularly the unnamed blood ofher of the _lettre de cachet_, showed forth in a gracefulness ofcarriage, that almost identified a De Grandissime wherever you saw him,and in a transparency of flesh and classic beauty of feature, that madetheir daughters extra-marriageable in a land and day which was bearing awide reproach for a male celibacy not of the pious sort.

  In a flock of Grandissimes might always be seen a Fusilier or two;fierce-eyed, strong-beaked, dark, heavy-taloned birds, who, if theycould not sing, were of rich plumage, and could talk, and bite, andstrike, and keep up a ruffled crest and a self-exalting bad humor. Theyearly learned one favorite cry, with which they greeted all strangers,crying the louder the more the endeavor was made to appease them:"Invaders! Invaders!"

  There was a real pathos in the contrast offered to this family line bythat other which sprang up, as slenderly as a stalk of wild oats, fromthe loins of Demosthenes De Grapion. A lone son following a lone son,and he another--it was sad to contemplate, in that colonial beginning ofdays, three generations of good, Gallic blood tripping jocundly along inattenuated Indian file. It made it no less pathetic to see that theywere brilliant, gallant, much-loved, early epauletted fellows, who didnot let twenty-one catch them without wives sealed with the authenticwedding kiss, nor allow twenty-two to find them without an heir. Butthey had a sad aptness for dying young. It was altogether supposablethat they would have spread out broadly in the land; but they were suchinveterate duelists, such brave Indian-fighters, such adventurousswamp-rangers, and such lively free-livers, that, however numerouslytheir half-kin may have been scattered about in an unacknowledged way,the avowed name of De Grapion had become less and less frequent in listswhere leading citizens subscribed their signatures, and was not to beseen in the list of managers of the late ball.

  It is not at all certain that so hot a blood would not have boiled awayentirely before the night of the _bal masque_, but for an event whichled to the union of that blood with a stream equally clear and ruddy,but of a milder vintage. This event fell out some fifty-two years afterthat cast of the dice which made the princess Lufki-Humma the mother ofall the Fusiliers and of none of the De Grapions. Clotilde, theCasket-Girl, the little maid who would not marry, was one of an heroicsort, worth--the De Grapions maintained--whole swampfuls of Indianqueens. And yet the portrait of this great ancestress, which served as apattern to one who, at the ball, personated the long-deceased heroine_en masque_, is hopelessly lost in some garret. Those Creoles have sucha shocking way of filing their family relics and records in rat-holes.

  One fact alone remains to be stated: that the De Grapions, try to spurnit as they would, never could quite suppress a hard feeling in the faceof the record, that from the two young men, who, when lost in thehorrors of Louisiana's swamps, had been esteemed as good as dead, andparticularly from him who married at his leisure,--from Zephyr deGrandissime,--sprang there so many as the sands of the Mississippiinnumerable.