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dogs.
Onto an alluvium of beastlike hopefulness
and African fear there had sifted the words of
the Scripture; their faith, therefore, was
Christian. Go down, Moses, they would sing,
low and in unison. The Mississippi served them
as a magnificent image of the sordid Jordan.
The owners of that hard-worked land and
those bands of Negroes were idlers, greedy
gentlemen with long hair who lived in widefronted
mansions that looked out upon the
river—their porches always pseudo-Greek with
columns made of soft white pine. Good slaves
cost a thousand dollars, but they didn't last
long. Some were so ungrateful as to sicken and
die. A man had to get the most he could out of
such uncertain investments. That was why the
slaves were in the fields from sunup to
sundown; that was why the fields were made to
yield up their cotton or tobacco or sugarcane
every year. The female soil, worn and haggard
from bearing that impatient culture's get, was
left barren within a few years, and a formless,
clayey desert crept into the plantations.