Strange True Stories of Louisiana Part 17

FOOTNOTES: [27] Long since burned down.

[28] The similarity in the surnames of Salome and her master is odd, but is accidental and without significance.

IX.

THE EVIDENCE.

We need not linger over the details of the trial. The witnesses for the prosecution were called. First came a Creole woman, so old that she did not know her own age, but was a grown-up girl in the days of the Spanish governor-general Galvez, sixty-five years before. She recognized in the plaintiff the same person whom she had known as a child in John F.

Miller's domestic service with the mien, eyes, and color of a white person and with a German accent. Next came Madame Hemin, who had not known the Mullers till she met them on the Russian ship and had not seen Salome since parting from them at Amsterdam, yet who instantly identified her "when she herself came into the court-room just now." "Witness says,"

continues the record, "she perceived the family likeness in plaintiff's face when she came in the door."

The next day came Eva and told her story; and others followed, whose testimony, like hers, we have antic.i.p.ated. Again and again was the plaintiff recognized, both as Salome and as the girl Mary, or Mary Bridget, who for twenty years and upward had been owned in slavery, first by John F. Miller, then by his mother, Mrs. Canby, and at length by the cabaret keeper Louis Belmonti. If the two persons were but one, then for twenty years at least she had lived a slave within five miles, and part of the time within two, of her kindred and of freedom.

That the two persons were one it seemed scarcely possible to doubt. Not only did every one who remembered Salome on shipboard recognize the plaintiff as she, but others, who had quite forgotten her appearance then, recognized in her the strong family likeness of the Mullers. This likeness even witnesses for the defense had to admit. So, on Salome's side, testified Madame Koelhoffer, Madame Schultzheimer, and young Daniel Miller (Muller) from Mississippi. She was easily pointed out in the throng of the crowded court-room.

And then, as we have already said, there was another means of identification which it seemed ought alone to have carried with it overwhelming conviction. But this we still hold in reserve until we have heard the explanation offered by John F. Miller both in court and at the same time in the daily press in reply to its utterances which were giving voice to the public sympathy for Salome.

It seems that John Fitz Miller was a citizen of New Orleans in high standing, a man of property, money, enterprises, and slaves. John Lawson Lewis, commanding-general of the State militia, testified in the case to Mr. Miller's generous and social disposition, his easy circ.u.mstances, his kindness to his eighty slaves, his habit of entertaining, and the exceptional fineness of his equipage. Another witness testified that complaints were sometimes made by Miller's neighbors of his too great indulgence of his slaves. Others, ladies as well as gentlemen, corroborated these good reports, and had even kinder and higher praises for his mother, Mrs. Canby. They stated with alacrity, not intending the slightest imputation against the gentleman's character, that he had other slaves even fairer of skin than this Mary Bridget, who nevertheless, "when she was young," they said, "looked like a white girl." One thing they certainly made plain--that Mr. Miller had never taken the Muller family or any part of them to Attakapas or knowingly bought a redemptioner.

He accounted for his possession of the plaintiff thus: In August, 1822, one Anthony Williams, being or pretending to be a negro-trader and from Mobile, somehow came into contact with Mr. John Fitz Miller in New Orleans. He represented that he had sold all his stock of slaves except one girl, Mary Bridget, ostensibly twelve years old, and must return at once to Mobile. He left this girl with Mr. Miller to be sold for him for his (Williams's) account under a formal power of attorney so to do, Mr.

Miller handing him one hundred dollars as an advance on her prospective sale. In January, 1823, Williams had not yet been heard from, nor had the girl been sold; and on the 1st of February Mr. Miller sold her to his own mother, with whom he lived--in other words, _to himself_, as we shall see.

In this sale her price was three hundred and fifty dollars and her age was still represented as about twelve. "From that time she remained in the house of my mother," wrote Miller to the newspapers, "as a domestic servant" until 1838, when "she was sold to Belmonti."

Mr. Miller's public statement was not as full and candid as it looked.

How, if the girl was sold to Mrs. Canby, his mother--how is it that Belmonti bought her of Miller himself? The answer is that while Williams never re-appeared, the girl, in February, 1835, "the girl Bridget," now the mother of three children, was with these children bought back again by that same Mr. Miller from the entirely pa.s.sive Mrs. Canby, for the same three hundred and fifty dollars; the same price for the four which he had got, or had seemed to get, for the mother alone when she was but a child of twelve years. Thus had Mr. Miller become the owner of the woman, her two sons, and her daughter, had had her service for the keeping, and had never paid but one hundred dollars. This point he prudently overlooked in his public statement. Nor did he count it necessary to emphasize the further fact that when this slave-mother was about twenty-eight years old and her little daughter had died, he sold her alone, away from her two half-grown sons, for ten times what he had paid for her, to be the bond-woman of the wifeless keeper of a dram-shop.

But these were not the only omissions. Why had Williams never come back either for the slave or for the proceeds of her sale? Mr. Miller omitted to state, what he knew well enough, that the girl was so evidently white that Williams could not get rid of her, even to him, by an open sale. When months and years pa.s.sed without a word from Williams, the presumption was strong that Williams knew the girl was not of African tincture, at least within the definition of the law, and was content to count the provisional transfer to Miller equivalent to a sale.

Miller, then, was--heedless enough, let us call it--to hold in African bondage for twenty years a woman who, his own witnesses testified, had every appearance of being a white person, without ever having seen the shadow of a t.i.tle for any one to own her, and with everything to indicate that there was none. Whether he had any better right to own the several other slaves whiter than this one whom those same witnesses of his were forward to state he owned and had owned, no one seems to have inquired.

Such were the times; and it really was not then remarkable that this particular case should involve a lady noted for her good works and a gentleman who drove "the finest equipage in New Orleans."

One point, in view of current beliefs of to-day, compels attention. One of Miller's witnesses was being cross-examined. Being asked if, should he see the slave woman among white ladies, he would not think her white, he replied:

"I cannot say. There are in New Orleans many white persons of dark complexion and many colored persons of light complexion." The question followed:

"What is there in the features of a colored person that designates them to be such?"

"I cannot say. Persons who live in countries where there are many colored persons acquire an instinctive means of judging that cannot be well explained."

And yet neither this man's "instinct" nor that of any one else, either during the whole trial or during twenty years' previous knowledge of the plaintiff, was of the least value to determine whether this poor slave was entirely white or of mixed blood. It was more utterly worthless than her memory. For as to that she had, according to one of Miller's own witnesses, in her childhood confessed a remembrance of having been brought "across the lake"; but whether that had been from Germany, or only from Mobile, must be shown in another way. That way was very simple, and we hold it no longer in suspense.

X.

THE CROWNING PROOF.

"If ever our little Salome is found," Eva Kropp had been accustomed to say, "we shall know her by two hair moles about the size of a coffee-bean, one on the inside of each thigh, about midway up from the knee. n.o.body can make those, or take them away without leaving the tell-tale scars." And lo! when Madame Karl brought Mary Bridget to Frank Schuber's house, and Eva Schuber, who every day for weeks had bathed and dressed her G.o.dchild on the ship, took this stranger into another room apart and alone, there were the birth-marks of the lost Salome.

This incontestable evidence the friends of Salome were able to furnish, but the defense called in question the genuineness of the marks.

The verdict of science was demanded, and an order of the court issued to two noted physicians, one chosen by each side, to examine these marks and report "the nature, appearance, and cause of the same." The kindred of Salome chose Warren Stone, probably the greatest physician and surgeon in one that New Orleans has ever known. Mr. Grymes's client chose a Creole gentleman almost equally famed, Dr. Armand Mercier.

Dr. Stone died many years ago; Dr. Mercier, if I remember aright, in 1885.

When I called upon Dr. Mercier in his office in Girod street in the summer of 1883, to appeal to his remembrance of this long-forgotten matter, I found a very n.o.ble-looking, fair old gentleman whose abundant waving hair had gone all to a white silken floss with age. He sat at his desk in persistent silence with his strong blue eyes fixed steadfastly upon me while I slowly and carefully recounted the story. Two or three times I paused inquiringly; but he faintly shook his head in the negative, a slight frown of mental effort gathering for a moment between the eyes that never left mine. But suddenly he leaned forward and drew his breath as if to speak. I ceased, and he said:

"My sister, the wife of Pierre Soule, refused to become the owner of that woman and her three children because they were so white!" He pressed me eagerly with an enlargement of his statement, and when he paused I said nothing or very little; for, sad to say, he had only made it perfectly plain that it was not the girl Mary Bridget whom he was recollecting, but _another case_.

He did finally, though dimly, call to mind having served with Dr. Stone in such a matter as I had described. But later I was made independent of his powers of recollection, when the original doc.u.ments of the court were laid before me. There was the certificate of the two physicians. And there, over their signatures, "Mercier d.m.p." standing first, in a bold heavy hand underscored by a single broad quill-stroke, was this "Conclusion":

"1. These marks ought to be considered as _noevi materni_.

"2. They are congenital; or, in other words, the person was born with them.

"3. There is no process by means of which artificial spots bearing all the character of the marks can be produced."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Handwritten conclusion number 3 and signatures of Mercier dmp and Dr. Stone.]

XI.

JUDGMENT.

On the 11th of June the case of Sally Miller _versus_ Louis Belmonti was called up again and the report of the medical experts received. Could anything be offered by Mr. Grymes and his a.s.sociates to offset that? Yes; they had one last strong card, and now they played it.

It was, first, a certificate of baptism of a certain Mary's child John, offered in evidence to prove that this child was born at a time when Salome Muller, according to the testimony of her own kindred, was too young by a year or two to become a mother; and secondly, the testimony of a free woman of color, that to her knowledge that Mary was this Bridget or Sally, and the child John this woman's eldest son Lafayette. And hereupon the court announced that on the morrow it would hear the argument of counsel.

Salome's counsel besought the court for a temporary postponement on two accounts: first, that her age might be known beyond a peradventure by procuring a copy of her own birth record from the official register of her native Langensoultz, and also to procure in New Orleans the testimony of one who was professionally present at the birth of her son, and who would swear that it occurred some years later than the date of the baptismal record just accepted as evidence.

"We are taken by surprise," exclaimed in effect Roselius and his coadjutors, "in the production of testimony by the opposing counsel openly at variance with earlier evidence accepted from them and on record. The act of the sale of this woman and her children from Sarah Canby to John Fitz Miller in 1835, her son Lafayette being therein described as but five years of age, fixes his birth by irresistible inference in 1830, in which year by the recorded testimony of her kindred Salome Muller was fifteen years old."

But the combined efforts of Roselius, Upton, and others were unavailing, and the newspapers of the following day reported: "This cause, continued from yesterday, came on again to-day, when, after hearing arguments of counsel, the court took the same under consideration."

It must be a dull fancy that will not draw for itself the picture, when a fortnight later the frequenters of the court-room hear the word of judgment. It is near the end of the hot far-southern June. The judge begins to read aloud. His hearers wait languidly through the prolonged recital of the history of the case. It is as we have given it here: no use has been made here of any testimony discredited in the judge's reasons for his decision. At length the evidence is summed up and every one attends to catch the next word. The judge reads:

"The supposed ident.i.ty is based upon two circ.u.mstances: first, a striking resemblance of plaintiff to the child above mentioned and to the family of that child. Second, two certain marks or moles on the inside of the thighs [one on each thigh], which marks are similar in the child and in the woman. This resemblance and these marks are proved by several witnesses.

Are they sufficient to justify me in declaring the plaintiff to be identical with the German child in question? I answer this question in the negative."

What stir there was in the room when these words were heard the silent records lying before me do not tell, or whether all was silent while the judge read on; but by and by his words were these: