This was a Pandora’s, not a Christmas box. I wonder that all the inhabitants are not like the mad woman who rushed out of the insane asylum howling at us as we entered Castries harbor. St. Lucia was a martyred maid in the time of Diocletian, and lost her money and her eyes. The island bearing her name has suffered outrage and martyrdom and may well invoke her as the patroness of the poor and blind, for its inhabitants are afflicted with poverty and eye disease.
The land-locked harbor is the military key to the West Indies. Morne and Vigie are striking fortifications, and historic hill-tops in the back-ground have been bathed in the blood of those climbing the Calvary of death. They were drenched in mist and rain when we docked. Coal and not carnage is the leading industry now. Instead of shambles, all is soot. Ships come for fuel, not to fight. As at Nagasaki, Jamaica, St. Thomas and Martinique, women do the coaling. In place of Kingley’s poem, “Men must work and women must weep,” it is, “women must work and men must sleep.”
The coal wenches are amazing Amazons. How they wiggled and waltzed with coal-baskets on their heads, sweating, swearing, singing snatches of French songs and swaying to the music of a carnival band that came down to the boat and acted like madcap strolling players standing on heads and hands. The girls made a few cents a basket; if one greedily ran ahead out of turn, there was a “switchman” to lash her back in line. What coal-black Caryatides! Wonderful models—not of manners or morality—but muscles that would give a sculptor fits. Sure Mike Angelo would have wrestled with them, but Ben Cellini would have thought twice before he dared throw them about as he did his model whom he grabbed by the hair, kicked and mauled so she was compelled to anoint her wounds with bacon fat while he stood around and “larfed.” These husky, dusky damsels would have brained him with a lump of coal, thrown him in the sea, or mopped up the island with him. This holiday work gave the begrimed beauties extra money. They like work and carry their burdens on, not in their heads, the baskets often weighing 150 pounds each.
Streets of Castries are laid out in right angles, and many of the population were laid out in the streets at all angles. Every old soak fills up. I saw a black man and woman stagger along the walk, fall in the gutter, make love and wallow there like pigs. In the outskirts darky women were dragging their drunk lovers, brothers or husbands through the mud by heels or head or spreading them out like clothes to dry on doorsteps or windowsills. The squalor was stentorious and stercoraceous. Castries was a medley of noise, music and mud. The only bible commandment followed was the eleventh. “Thou shalt get stewed.” The patron saint of the city must be Saint Amant, the French seventeenth century bacchanalian bard who received inspiration for his drinking songs by imbibing enormous quantities of spirits which resulted in ebullitions like “La Debauche.” Alcaeus said, “Wine and truth”—and it was a very naked truth we saw in the Casino on the hill. Yes, it was quite “orgiferous.” What is an orgy? Listen to Gautier: