All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the most conveniently accessible of those “points of interest” with which guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at all events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he “interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor”—a model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of “the big house”—a story-and-a-half cottage—amid the flowering shrubs. Here lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and—worthy son of a worthy sire—alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallahassee. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant sex.
The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! When I spoke of my morning’s pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor. The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband’s death, and lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant sneered,—politely,—and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge ——, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once, the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.
The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts (and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the worthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there, if my sentiment had been all wasted (but there was no question of tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way thither a pleasant one—first down the hill in a zigzag course to the vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther side. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.
In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and the chips flew; but I could not help saying, “You ought to make the man do that.”
She answered on the instant. “I would,” she said, “if I had a man to make.”
“I’m sure you would,” I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable naivete the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went farther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for haste.
When I had skirted a cotton-field—the crop just out of the ground—and a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.
“Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?” I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat servants, as his father had been before him. “I was borned on to him,” he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was “a gentleman, sah.” That was a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough. He spoke from a slave’s point of view. Murat was a good master. The old man had heard him say that he kept servants “for the like of the thing.” He didn’t abuse them. He “never was for barbarizing a poor colored person at all.” Whipping? Oh, yes. “He didn’t miss your fault. No, sah, he didn’t miss your fault.” But his servants never were “ironed.” He “didn’t believe in barbarousment.”
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes (“my people” was his word) were on the wrong road. They had “sold their birthright,” though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. “They ain‘t got no sense,” he declared, “and what sense they has got don’t do ’em no good.”
I told him finally that I was from the North. “Oh, I knows it,” he exclaimed, “I knows it;” and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I inquired. “Oh, I knows it. I can see it in you. Anybody would know it that had any jedgment at all. You’s a perfect gentleman, sah.” He was too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.
I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night—about his old master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer (“he was a perfect dog, sah!”), and sundry other things. He had lived a long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it over. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a while a patient listener.
This patriarch’s unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white people (“I’s been taughted a heap,” he said), and believed that the salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a Yankee. “Are you a legislator-man?” he asked, at the end of our talk. The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he only meant to flatter me.
If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will, the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking at everything through very blue spectacles. “Have you seen any of those fine old country mansions,” he asked, “about which we read so often in descriptions of Southern, life?” He had been on the lookout for them, he averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a “fine old mansion” must be different from his.
The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it; those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor—for one visitor, at least—to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the grounds; stood between the last year’s cotton-rows, while a Carolina wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds, cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who thrust their heads out of the windows of her “big house;” and then, with a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved me from absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there an agreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows, the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite the water-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly pine-tree,—enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee roses,—a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemed really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead of coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had meant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some years in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate, which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn’t any better off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, his children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to hear. If the pessimists are right,—which may I be kept from believing,—the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with, though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree.
When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one car which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the driver beside it, but no mules.
“Are you going to start directly?” I asked.
“Yes, sah,” he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shouted in a peremptory voice, “Do about, there! Do about!”
“What does that mean?” said I. “Hurry up?”
“Yes, sah, that’s it. ‘Tain’t everybody that wants to be hurried up; so we tells ‘em, ‘Do about!’”
Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys stepped upon the rear platform.
“Where you goin’?” said the driver. “Uptown?”
They said they were.
“Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you’ll git hurt and cost this dried-up company more money than you’s wuth.”
They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the front corner. “Sit down there,” he said, “right there.” They obeyed, and as he turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw more of him, “I ain’t de boss, but I’s got right smart to say.”
Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistent accompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill.
Hintergrund und Einführung des Autors
Diese Erzählung ist ein reflektierender Reisebericht, der einen Besuch auf dem Murat-Anwesen in Tallahassee, Florida, beschreibt. Die Geschichte fängt die Eindrücke und Begegnungen des Autors während der Reise ein und verbindet historische Fakten mit persönlichen Beobachtungen. Das Murat-Anwesen ist mit einem Prinzen Murat verbunden, angeblich dem Sohn des Königs von Neapel, der dort gelebt haben und in der lokalen Politik aktiv gewesen sein soll. Der Autor entdeckt jedoch, dass vieles davon eher Legende als Tatsache ist, was die Komplexität von Geschichte und Erinnerung offenbart.
Der Autor, der aus der Perspektive eines Besuchers aus dem Norden schreibt, bietet Einblicke in den Süden nach dem Bürgerkrieg, einschließlich sozialer Dynamiken, Rassentrennung und der sich verändernden Landschaft. Der Ton ist kontemplativ und manchmal ironisch und lädt die Leser ein, kritisch über Geschichte, Identität und die Geschichten, die wir erzählen, nachzudenken.
Detaillierte Interpretation und Bedeutung
Im Kern erforscht diese Geschichte Themen wie Geschichte versus Mythos, den Lauf der Zeit und die menschlichen Geschichten hinter Orten und Wahrzeichen. Das Murat-Anwesen dient als Symbol für verblasste Pracht und die Vermischung von Kulturen und Geschichten im amerikanischen Süden. Die anfängliche romantisierte Sicht des Autors auf Prinz Murat, der dort lebte, steht im Gegensatz zur Realität und verdeutlicht, wie Geschichten durch Zeit und Perspektive umgestaltet werden können.
Die Begegnungen mit den Einheimischen, insbesondere Afroamerikanern, bieten einen ergreifenden Blick auf das Erbe der Sklaverei und Emanzipation. Die respektvollen Erinnerungen des alten Dieners an Prinz Murat als „guten Herrn“ stehen im Gegensatz zum Skeptizismus und den Kämpfen der jüngeren Generation. Die Hoffnung des Witwers auf Gesellschaft und der Optimismus des skandinavischen Bauern fügen menschliche Erfahrungsebenen hinzu und zeigen Widerstandsfähigkeit und Anpassung in sich verändernden Zeiten.
Lektionen und Erkenntnisse für Schüler
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Kritisches Denken über Geschichte: Diese Geschichte lehrt die Schüler, historische Erzählungen zu hinterfragen und zu untersuchen, anstatt sie für bare Münze zu nehmen. Sie zeigt, wie sich Mythen um historische Persönlichkeiten und Orte ranken können und wie wichtig es ist, verschiedene Perspektiven zu suchen.
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Empathie und Verständnis: Durch die Gespräche des Autors mit Einheimischen lernen die Schüler Empathie und den Wert, den Geschichten anderer zuzuhören, insbesondere denen mit unterschiedlichem Hintergrund oder aus verschiedenen Generationen.
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Reflexion über Wandel und Kontinuität: Die Geschichte regt dazu an, darüber nachzudenken, wie sich Orte und Gesellschaften im Laufe der Zeit verändern und wie sich Menschen an neue Realitäten anpassen, während sie Erinnerungen und Traditionen festhalten.
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Wertschätzung der Natur und des Ortes: Die lebendigen Beschreibungen der Landschaft, der Vögel und Pflanzen laden die Schüler ein, die natürliche Welt und ihre Rolle bei der Gestaltung der menschlichen Erfahrung zu schätzen.
Anwendung dieser Lektionen im Leben
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Im Lernen: Die Schüler können üben, historische Fakten aus verschiedenen Quellen zu recherchieren, Konten zu vergleichen und ihre eigenen fundierten Meinungen zu entwickeln. Dies hilft beim Aufbau von kritischem Denken und analytischen Fähigkeiten.
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In sozialen Interaktionen: Indem sie die Erfahrungen und Geschichten anderer wertschätzen, können die Schüler Empathie und Aufgeschlossenheit kultivieren, wichtige Eigenschaften für respektvolle Kommunikation und Freundschaft.
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In der persönlichen Entwicklung: Die Reflexion über Wandel und Widerstandsfähigkeit kann die Schüler dazu inspirieren, sich Herausforderungen mit Hoffnung und Anpassungsfähigkeit zu stellen, wobei sie erkennen, dass Wachstum oft durch die Überwindung von Schwierigkeiten entsteht.
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Im Umweltbewusstsein: Die Wahrnehmung der Schönheit der Natur um sie herum kann ein Gefühl der Verantwortung und Fürsorge für die Umwelt fördern.
Positive Werte aus der Geschichte kultivieren
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Respekt vor Geschichte und Menschen: Auch wenn Geschichten unvollkommen oder unvollständig sind, ist es wichtig, die Vergangenheit und diejenigen, die sie erlebt haben, zu respektieren.
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Neugier und Aufgeschlossenheit: Neugier auf die Wahrheit und die Bereitschaft, von verschiedenen Perspektiven zu lernen, bereichern das Verständnis.
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Freundlichkeit und Mitgefühl: Der sanfte Umgang des Autors mit den Menschen, denen er begegnet, ist ein Vorbild für Freundlichkeit und Respekt, Eigenschaften, die die Schüler nachahmen können.
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Geduld und Reflexion: Die langsame, nachdenkliche Reise zum Murat-Anwesen erinnert uns an den Wert, sich Zeit zu nehmen, um die Details des Lebens zu beobachten, zu denken und zu schätzen.
Indem sich die Schüler intensiv mit dieser Geschichte auseinandersetzen, verbessern sie nicht nur ihre Lese- und Verständnisfähigkeiten, sondern entwickeln auch ein tieferes Verständnis von Geschichte, Kultur und menschlicher Natur – Lektionen, die ihnen in allen Lebensbereichen zugute kommen werden.
