Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1871-08-23
BIGAMIsT BOWEN REDIyIyUs.
Extraordinary Reception of the
Martyr ON EdisfO Island, n. c.
The Darkfes Wiid with Enthusi.
asm Over Their Beloved.
From the Charleston News. August lO.l

Ine DarkteS WAIO WIN EntnuSt.
asm over Their Beloved.
From the Charleston News. August 1O.l
The belligerent Bowen has again as
sumed his war paint and feathers, and is
on the war path. His plan of campaign
is to lure the credulous colored masses
to retired groves upon the islands of the
sea by such devices as the seductive GIN
ger cake and the exuberant root beer,
and, having exhibited to them such dain-
ties to inaict upon them speeches from
improvised and rustic platforms, wherein
he lays his hand upon his heart, and begs
to know if they, his audience, whom he
is glad to call his brethren, can believe
of him, who thus addresses them, the
scandalous and wicked tales that are
spread broadcast by these malicious
emissaries of the Evil One, by which
he begs to be understood as meaning the
Democrats, whose hearts are deceitful
above all things and desperately wicked2 2
Whereupon his dusky audience, with a
lively sense of ginger cake to come, re-
spond with shouts of "Hear, hearl"
=" Ki yi" Bress de lamb" and in
divers other incoherent and irrele-
want manners, express their hearty
reverence for the gentle Bowen,
and their high appreciation of the
bovine barbecue. A love feast of this
character took place last Saturday
night at the camp ground on Edisto
Island, 1t is described with gushing en-
thusiasm by some of its attendants, and
from all accounts it must have been a
sort of cross between celored camp
meeting and Voudoo incarnation. The
ambitious Bowen exhorted and expostu-
lated, berated and besought and pumped
the excitement in his shouting audience
up TO fever heat. He argued and they
applauded, he gesticulated and they
roared, he danced and they prostrated
themselves in convulsions of delight
until the audience resolved itself into
promiscuous, squirming perspiring mass
of odoriferous enthusiasm. Men shouted
and women howled, the little pickanin-
nies lost their ginger cakes by being
crushed to Nubian jellies in the seething
mass; the saturnalian echoes resounded
from the trees and scared the solemn
owls down from their resting places, who
circled around the scene and gazed with
big-eyed wonder Next rush was made
for Bowen by the ELUSIVE shades, who
refused to be pacified except by shaking
hands with their new apostle. They
hustled him off of the platform,
and, stretching their numbers out
into two long lines, the shaking
of hands began. The martyred orator
passed down the center, his arms on
either side working up and down, as
seized by the dusky gauntlet, and ook-
ing like the levers of an erratic pump.
Old blind men, toothless and tottering,
came and put their hands on him be-
cause they wanted to see this man
Bowen;" women jostled out of the line
by the stronger men, reached their hands
through the ranks, plucked the hem of
Bowen garments, and shouted with
rapture, / touched 'uml" and mothers
brought rags and handkerchiefs, laid
them up against their new found Moses,
and took them away to lay on their sick
babies. In fact, the dusky mass did
everything that gushing idiots could do
under the strongest stimulant of excite
ment, and then the cakes and beer super
vening, they devoured them with eager
avidity, until, with the Disappearance of
the last ginger cake, and the squeezing
of the last beer bottle, they wended their
devious ways back to their various dens,
making night hideous as they passed
with crazy shouts of Bowen for Gov
ernorl oh, let my people go.