The Sunday herald and weekly national intelligencer., 1891-03-08
Special Correspondence Of suNpAY HrRA1p.

clarionet floats gaily across the mud of the
Crescent City. 1t is two hours after nightfall.
Your correspondent is wandering in a romantic
frame of mind about those narrow streets Of
the French quarter which lie just northwest OF
where the old fortified palisade stood in 1898.
He has been pacing up and down the streets
between the high whtewashed walls which in
close the different sections of that ancient
metropolis, the Cemetery of Saint Louis, where
the dead are entombed above ground in little
brick cells; he has leaned refectively against
the damp, gray walls of the parish prison and
tried to conjecture how many ten-cent glasses
of the current absynthe of the realm are required
to drive man to murder; he has crossed Congo
Square, where of yore the slaves were wont to
dance away the eventide, and, with light, fan
tastic tread, to acquire that prominence of the
heel which the ribald of the present day pro-
fess to observe in their descendants; and now
the bursts of eloquent sentiment which from
such impressions, ought to have arisen in his
mind, but have not, are soothed out of i'm
pending existence by the dismal toots and
grunts of an orchestra near at hand
He draws near to low wooden building,
from the window of which flood of light would
be streaming were not the window blockaded
by the forms of two or three policemen, who
less unseemly badinage with some persons in
side.
He enters and finds himself to have come in
startlingly abrupt contact with a dance-hall Of
the most Senegambian description.
Now, why should such place be called a
dive? No reason seems altogether sufficient.
1t might be because some of the costumes worn
therein are more suitable for an aquatic than
for terrestrial existence; it might be because
the denizens thereof have such skill in dive
vesting man of his loose changes but, on the
whole, it is perhaps wisest to accept the ex-
planation of friend of the writer, young
man of photographed ambition, at present
sophomore in Squeehoocken University, who
regards the word ssdive =" as an allusion to the
inevitable dance and mere corruption of the
French phrase, ''Ballet advertisement"
Be that as it may, the scene is striking. The
two public rooms of the building swarm
ing with negroes and mulatoes of all ages and
both sexes. A few white men loaf in now and
then from mere curiosity, meanwhile keeping
their arms down by their sides in most rigidly
military fashion in order to protect their
pockets--a proceeding for which there is no
necessity, by the way, in such a selfishly jolly
crowd but a goggle-eyed Chinaman who comes
peering curiously about the place is SO ridi-
culed by the girls that he beats hasty retreat.
Another dance begins. Same tune, same
figures Men dance with men, women with
Is.
When the sexes really desire to mingle socially
they take drink. All plain drinks, five cents.
This dance is enough to make man collapse
who has been reading for months in the New
York papers of the sinuosity of Carmencita and
.Otero. Sinuosity let us say rather squirm
Whose has never seen good-szed snake swim
ming rapidly through the water can form but
faint idea of the spinal possibilities of these
swathey damses. And the whole dance Is
nothing but an alienation of chassez while the
music plays suffering staccato, and squirm
during long rest which ends with an emphatic
grunt of the trombone. One might believe
himself in Dahomey were not the dancers so
thickly clad in garments which bear traces OF
long and unwashed Caucasian wear.
A black boy armed with a broomstick thumps
upon the floor He is the scommissary" CIV
ing the signal for new dance. The black
crowd falls away from the bar and groups it.
self about the dancers, jabbering merrilY in
French and English. Your correspondent es-
capes from side door just as gingerbread
.colored lady, with huge brass door key hang
ing from the fringe of her crocheted shawl, ad-
dresses him with:
''Parle- tu-la Creole ?"
He don't parler the Creole. He only knows
Just enough about that language and the
speakers thereof to be bit wise in his own
conceit.
The word Creole is used in France, in the
French West Indies, and in South America to
designate hybrid persons of part negro blood.
That this is perfectly proper use of the word,
as well as the most general use, is beyond ques-
tion. But let it never be forgotten that in
Louisiana the word has an exceptional mean
ing-that is, a person of American birth and
pure French colonial descent. The Confusion
into which one is likely to fall with regard to
the definition is increased by the circumstance
that many people, especially women, who are in
part of remote African descent, but who show
no greater traces of it in darkness of skin, In
hair or in eyes than might be ascrlbed to Latin
blood, are prompted by vanity to call them
selves Creoles, and by the fact that the better
educated aud aristocratic Creoles speak French,
while their old negro dependents and the lower
classes with whom they are in contact speak
'Hd Creole"
This dialect, ''la Creole" is said by drum
mers, bar-keepers in up-riyer towns, and such
like accomplished lngulsts to be utterly unlike
real French, and every such worthy whom the
writer met had story about: "Begad,
know'd a man what had bin six months in
Paris am he went ter Moo Orleens and couldn't
understand q word. See?" 1t is probable,
however, that any man of intelligence whose
knowledge of French has passed beyond the
boardingschool stage can learn to understand
the Creole patois in short time and without
any conscious study.
And oh, the beauty of the Creole women
Walk out some sunny morn and view them as
they hasten from their shopping in the centre
of The city and turn their steps toward their
homes on the Rue Esplanade.
See, there is one directly in front OF us. Let
us follow and feast our eyes. SO crowded is the
street that We shall be unnoticed, and our
Anglo Saxon curiosity shall bring no look OF
reproachful irritation to those deep-brown eyes.
What carriage has she What form What