The delighted negroes went to mass as to their
favorite _Calenda_; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the
priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness,
appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great _Gree-gree;_
the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and
gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their
midnight serpent-worship. The priests were white men, for the
negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were
fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the
official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the
negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the
African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error.
The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen
gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day's
toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds. But the curates
declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual
association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper. On the
whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself
up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the
noises in a church. He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing
away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite.
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