Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country — The Goose Creek Voice; The Leaping Poll

THE GOOSE CREEK VOICE

This is the low-doored house among funereal trees, Where one May dusk they brought Louise, With music slow, And sobbing low, The old slaves crooning eerily.

She died asleep and weeping wearily.

She had a poppy-strange disease;

A beauty that was more than carnal, How durst they leave her in the charnel?

She might be sleeping eerily!

Hush!

They have locked her in the tomb, Among the silences and wilting bloom;

Life's melody of voices drifts away-- Mistaken!

Was it an owlet in the thorns that moaned?

The churchyard moonlight turns ash-gray-- Hush!

Pale Louise!

The dead must not awaken.

Something a twittering cry is uttering.

Is that a bird there on her breast, Lost in the fragrant gloom, Wakening to morning twilight in the tomb?

No bird--it is her folded hands a-fluttering!

I think I should have died to see her rise Among the withered wreaths And spider-cluttered palls Of her dead uncles' funerals, While streams of horror fed the blue lakes of her eyes.

I known I would have died to see her rise.

_Over the fields a voice calls from the tomb,_ _Pleading and pleading drearily,_ _But all the slaves have fled_ _And left her talking to her coffined dead,_ _And whimpering eerily.

_ _The young birds die_ _To see old hands thrust from the window-slit,_ _Clutching the light in handfuls of despair;_ _Stark fear has stroked the color from her hair,_ _While from the window comes_ _The babbled whisper of her prayer.

_ _Night is like spiders in her mouth;_ _By day they spin a film across her eyes.

_ _Now night; now day--_ _The birds come back;_ _It is another year:_ _The withering voice they fear_ _Has nothing more to say.

_ But yet once more Her kinsmen came With nodding plume and pall And music slow, And, sobbing low, They fluttered back the door, and lo!

-- She leaned against the slit-window Her web-like, bony hands against the wall, And all about her, like a summer cloud Rippled her leprous hair, One bleached and shuddering shroud.

H.

A.

THE LEAPING POLL

At early morning when the earth grows cold, When river mists creep up, And those asleep are nearest death, She died.

The feather would not flutter in her breath;

And those who long had watched her slipped away, Too weary then to weep;

They could do that next day-- They left her lonely on the bed, Under a long, glistening sheet, in feeble tallow-shine, Rigid from muffled feet to swathèd head.

This in old days before the Turkish cure Had driven out the pox;

Next morning, while slave carpenters Were hammering at the oblong box, The sun revived her and she breathed again, Like Lazarus, and in later years grew beautiful, And was the mother of strong men.

These things her father, master of an ancient place, Pondered, and read of men in antique times Who wakened in the charnel from a trance.

Often his eyes would rest on her askance, And fear grew on him, and strange dreams he had a-bed, Till waking and asleep he turned his head, Front-back, front-back, from side to side, Looking for Death.

At last, one night He heard crisp footfalls in his room, And stared his soul out in the gloom, Peering until he died.

But when they broke the seals upon his will, They found each codicil and long bequest Was held in trust until The heirs should carry out his last request-- To burn his body (naming witnesses);

And they, all eagerness to share, Prepared to carry out this strange behest.

A pile of lightwood on the river bank, Neighbors on horseback, and the slaves, With teeth as white as eyeballs, rank on rank, Watched on the pyre the form wrapped in a shroud, Lonely among the lolling tongues of flames-- The smoke streamed, trailing in a saffron cloud, The greedy noise of fire grew loud, Then, "whiff," the shroud burned with a flare: The dead man's eyes looked down Like china moons upon the crowd.

They saw him slowly shake his head, The thing denied that it was dead, While from the blacks arose a babblement of prayer.

Surely the head must stop-- Not till the fire caved!

Then from the very top The loosened poll came with a leap, Bounding three times, it took the river-steep;

Down, down the river bank--all they Ran after it like school boys for a ball.

God!

How the thing could roll!

It seemed the devil kicked the leaping poll.

At last it stopped at bay, Staring across a tidal flat, Where spider lilies frightened day.

They buried it within a lonesome wood, With trembling hands, beneath a foreign stone.

But there were some who said It moved its lips;

And when they went away, the earth stirred And they heard it moan.

Now it comes leaping down the tunnel roads Where the moss hangs like stalactites, Screaming out curses, snapping at the toads;

Negroes who pass there on the moonless nights Behind them hear a sound that stops their breath.

The keen wind whistles through its teeth, And the white skull goes bounding by Looking for Death.

H.

A.

THE BLOCKADE RUNNER