Life on the Mississippi
a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley,
from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles. That issue
of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two
hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column;
an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say,
not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book.
One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans.
I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article
in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always
was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I
mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are
spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,
or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions
stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses,
out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and
many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with
their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and
comfortable-looking.
One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty
cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which
is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a
mansion-and-brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very
incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they
take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or
graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I
take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are
buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]}
the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and
few of the living complain, and none of the others.
CHAPTER 42
Hygiene and Sentiment
THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have
a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble,
generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks
and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a
thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching
into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all
at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and
are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business
streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those
people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do
after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides,
their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.
Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many
of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and
children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow
finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly
but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such
emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette
at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so
to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and
there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for
you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate,
and lasts like boiler-iron.
On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged
reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies.
Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's
reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up
an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do
that.
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying
all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot
accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it.
It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been
justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead
body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the
air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must
die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when
even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long
career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It
is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have
now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a
generation after St. Anne's death and burial, _made _several
thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply
compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint,
it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and
outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most
of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that
pays--like St. Anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit
of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principal of what
they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. A
Saint can never _quite _return the principal, however; for his dead body
_kills _people, whereas his relics _heal _only--they never restore the
dead to life. That part of the account is always left unsettled.
'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:
“The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results
in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with
not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the
_specific_ germs of the diseases from which death resulted.”
'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through
eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is
practically no limit to their power of escape.
'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported
that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two
per thousand--more than double that of any other. In this district were
three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than
three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity
of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease.
'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of
the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, _three
hundred years previously_, the victims of the pestilence had been
buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks
that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an
immediate outbreak of disease.'--_North American Review, No. 3, Vol.
135._
In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of
cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show
what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--
'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals
in the United States than the Government expends for public-school
purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the
liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during
the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to
resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the
combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!
These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and
expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of
property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'
For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the
ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious
as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than
burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum
cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they
would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a
muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would
resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for
two thousand years.
I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy
manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and
as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is
necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.
To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was
writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.
He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was
within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain
wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less
than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.
He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.
CHAPTER 43
The Art of Inhumation
ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not
seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. I
said--
'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now. Where did you get
all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address.'
He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched
pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on
it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B----, _Undertaker_.' Then
he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried
out--
'That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you
knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. Big
fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after
that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don't have
fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that
he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business! People don't
wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off right along--there
ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line. I just started in with
two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the
thing! I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't
care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell
house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.'
'Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?'
'Go-way! How you talk!' Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of
the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; 'Look here;
there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin.
There's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to jew you
down on. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person
don't say--“I'll look around a little, and if I find I can't do better
I'll come back and take it.” That's a coffin. There's one thing in this
world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't
take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he
can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That's
a coffin. And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to
worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin.
Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom, and the
nobbiest.