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Chapter 42
Hygiene and Sentiment

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses – sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase ‘city of the dead’ has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but indestructible ‘immortelle’ – which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross’s bars – kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.

On sunny days, pretty little chameleons – gracefullest of legged reptiles – creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changes of color – as to variety – are not up to the creature’s reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen. But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after St. Anne’s death and burial, made several thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that pays – like St. Anne – you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe – they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. A Saint can never quite return the principal, however; for his dead body kills people, whereas his relics heal only – they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account is always left unsettled.

‘Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote: “The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the specific germs of the diseases from which death resulted.”

‘The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.

‘During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand – more than double that of any other. In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease.

‘In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, three hundred years previously, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.’ —North American Review, No. 3, Vol. 135.

In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead: —

‘One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880! These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.’

For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap¹⁹ – so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years.

I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless. To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child. He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into. He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.

Chapter 43
The Art of Inhumation

ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. I said —

‘But you used to look sad and oldish; you don’t now. Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address.’

He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while I read, ‘J. B – , Undertaker.’ Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried out —

‘That’s what’s the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you knew me – insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. Big fire, all right – brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don’t have fires often enough – a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business! People don’t wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off right along – there ain’t any dull spots in the undertaker line. I just started in with two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the thing! I’ve worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don’t care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.’

‘Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?’

‘Go-way! How you talk!’ Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; ‘Look here; there’s one thing in this world which isn’t ever cheap. That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in this world which a person don’t ever try to jew you down on. That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in this world which a person don’t say – “I’ll look around a little, and if I find I can’t do better I’ll come back and take it.” That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in this world which a person won’t take in pine if he can go walnut; and won’t take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won’t take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That’s a coffin. And there’s one thing in this world which you don’t have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that’s a coffin. Undertaking? – why it’s the dead-surest business in Christendom, and the nobbiest.

‘Why, just look at it. A rich man won’t have anything but your very best; and you can just pile it on, too – pile it on and sock it to him – he won’t ever holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he’ll bust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman. F’r instance: Mrs. O’Flaherty comes in – widow – wiping her eyes and kind of moaning. Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says —

‘“And fhat might ye ask for that wan?”

‘“Thirty-nine dollars, madam,” says I.

‘“It ‘s a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like a gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it. I’ll have that wan, sor.”

‘“Yes, madam,” says I, “and it is a very good one, too; not costly, to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes, as the saying is.” And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually, “This one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid – well, sixty-five dollars is a rather – rather – but no matter, I felt obliged to say to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy – ”

‘“D’ye mane to soy that Bridget O’Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?”

‘“Yes, madam.”

‘“Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O’Flaherties can raise; and moind you, stick on some extras, too, and I’ll give ye another dollar.”

‘And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don’t forget to mention that Mrs. O’Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars’ worth of hacks and flung as much style into Dennis’s funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin. And of course she sails in and goes the O’Shaughnessy about four hacks and an omnibus better. That used to be, but that’s all played now; that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up hacks so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up. He don’t allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times, what must you be in an epidemic?’

He shook his head.

‘No, you’re off, there. We don’t like to see an epidemic. An epidemic don’t pay. Well, of course I don’t mean that, exactly; but it don’t pay in proportion to the regular thing. Don’t it occur to you, why?’

No.

‘Think.’

‘I can’t imagine. What is it?’

‘It’s just two things.’

‘Well, what are they?’

‘One’s Embamming.’

‘And what’s the other?’

‘Ice.’

‘How is that?’

‘Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice; one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come. Takes a lot of it – melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war-prices for attendance. Well, don’t you know, when there’s an epidemic, they rush ‘em to the cemetery the minute the breath’s out. No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with Embamming. You take a family that’s able to embam, and you’ve got a soft thing. You can mention sixteen different ways to do it – though there ain’t only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts of it – and they’ll take the highest-priced way, every time. It’s human nature – human nature in grief. It don’t reason, you see. Time being, it don’t care a dam. All it wants is physical immortality for deceased, and they’re willing to pay for it. All you’ve got to do is to just be ca’m and stack it up – they’ll stand the racket. Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn’t give away; and get your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred – that’s what he’s worth. There ain’t anything equal to it but trading rats for di’monds in time of famine. Well, don’t you see, when there’s an epidemic, people don’t wait to embam. No, indeed they don’t; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say – hurts it like hell-th, health, see? – Our little joke in the trade. Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any – I mean, when you’re going by, sometime.’

In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself, if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him.

With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject. As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner —

‘I wouldn’t worry about that, if I had your chances.’ Much he knew about it – the family all so opposed to it.

Chapter 44
City Sights

THE old French part of New Orleans – anciently the Spanish part – bears no resemblance to the American end of the city: the American end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.

The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful – with a large cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. They are become bric-a-brac.

The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South’s finest literary genius, the author of ‘the Grandissimes.’ In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it.

With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things – vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.

We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices. There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles. The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment.

We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did not visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public ‘shook’ him, and turned aside and wept. When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became.

Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures – such was our course and the surroundings of it. There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite.

And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds. We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water – the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways.

We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano. Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city. He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame. In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish – large ones; as large as one’s thumb – delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed. The other dishes were what one might get at Delmonico’s, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose.

In the West and South they have a new institution – the Broom Brigade. It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume, and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket. It is a very pretty sight, on private view. When they perform on the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires, it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. I saw them go through their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision. I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom, except sweep. I did not see them sweep. But I know they could learn. What they have already learned proves that. And if they ever should learn, and should go on the war-path down Tchoupitoulas or some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes. But the girls themselves wouldn’t; so nothing would be really gained, after all.

The drill was in the Washington Artillery building. In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson’s last interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another —

First Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Last Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.

Jackson Accepting Lee’s Invitation to Dinner.

Jackson Declining Lee’s Invitation to Dinner – with Thanks.

Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.

Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.

Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.

It tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, ‘Here are Lee and Jackson together.’ The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson’s last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn’t, for there wasn’t any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.’ It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, ‘Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.’

I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says ‘honah,’ and ‘dinnah,’ and ‘Gove’nuh,’ and ‘befo’ the waw,’ and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England. Many Southerners – most Southerners – put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound. For instance, they say Mr. K’yahtah (Carter) and speak of playing k’yahds or of riding in the k’yahs. And they have the pleasant custom – long ago fallen into decay in the North – of frequently employing the respectful ‘Sir.’ Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say ‘Yes, Suh’, ‘No, Suh.’

But there are some infelicities. Such as ‘like’ for ‘as,’ and the addition of an ‘at’ where it isn’t needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, ‘Like the flag-officer did.’ His cook or his butler would have said, ‘Like the flag-officer done.’ You hear gentlemen say, ‘Where have you been at?’ And here is the aggravated form – heard a ragged street Arab say it to a comrade: ‘I was a-ask’n’ Tom whah you was a-sett’n’ at.’ The very elect carelessly say ‘will’ when they mean ‘shall’; and many of them say, ‘I didn’t go to do it,’ meaning ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ The Northern word ‘guess’ – imported from England, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original – is but little used among Southerners. They say ‘reckon.’ They haven’t any ‘doesn’t’ in their language; they say ‘don’t’ instead. The unpolished often use ‘went’ for ‘gone.’ It is nearly as bad as the Northern ‘hadn’t ought.’ This reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the North) a few days ago: ‘He hadn’t ought to have went.’ How is that? Isn’t that a good deal of a triumph? One knows the orders combined in this half-breed’s architecture without inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern. To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, ‘Where is John gone?’ This form is so common – so nearly universal, in fact – that if she had used ‘whither’ instead of ‘where,’ I think it would have sounded like an affectation.

We picked up one excellent word – a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – ‘lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish – so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen.’ It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying —

‘Give me something for lagniappe.’

The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor – I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely.

When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans – and you say, ‘What, again? – no, I’ve had enough;’ the other party says, ‘But just this one time more – this is for lagniappe.’ When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his ‘I beg pardon – no harm intended,’ into the briefer form of ‘Oh, that’s for lagniappe.’ If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says ‘For lagniappe, sah,’ and gets you another cup without extra charge.