By Julia’s description it was the identical face that had been painted on glass in Mr Reilly’s shop. When I told her about it, we broke into a run of perfect terror, hurrying towards the nearest bright light.
I thought it over afterwards. Perhaps Julia had become aware of my long-buried fear, which then became confused in her imagination with childhood memories of New Orleans; and it stood out so vividly that she really believed that she had seen the face grinning at her. She mentioned no pipe; but then the pipe could be discounted as extraneous.
After supper, an American called Hank, a New York banker’s son, burst into the house, in a state of semi-collapse. Since he came of age Hank had fallen down on every job found for him by his father, and now drifted about Europe as a remittance-man. He wanted to write, though without an inkling of how to begin, and was more than a bore about his problems. Hank told me once: ‘The night before I sailed my father said a very cruel thing to me. He said: “Hank, you’re a good watch, but there’s a part missing somewhere.”’ As a regular time-piece Hank was certainly a dead loss; and the place of the missing part had been filled by an erratic ancillary movement which by-passed time altogether. For instance, a few days before this, Hank had begun to jabber hysterically about a terrifying earthquake, and wondered whether the world were coming to an end. Next morning the papers mentioned a very limited earthquake in Southern Spain, which had swung pictures on walls, dislodged cornices from half a dozen buildings in a small town, and made several girls in the telephone exchange faint for terror. Now, Hank could hardly have felt the distant shock, although Majorca is said to form part of a range, mostly submerged, which continues south-westward to the mainland; but he had certainly caught the emotion of the frightened telephone girls.
‘What’s new, Hank?’ I asked coldly.
‘I’ve had a most horrible experience,’ he gasped. ‘Give me a drink, will you? I took a car to Sóller this afternoon. The heel had come off my walking shoe and I wanted to get it fixed. You know Bennasar the shoemaker, off the market square? I was just about to go in when I happened to look through the window…’
Julia and I glanced at each other. We both knew what Hank was going to say. And he said it: ‘I saw a frightful face…’
That made us feel more scared than ever.
Soon afterwards Julia went off on a rambling tour through France, Austria and Italy, and next year revisited Majorca with her mother. That was September 1952. She found me collaborating in a film-script with Will Price. Will comes from Mississippi; but New Orleans is one of his family’s stamping grounds, so he and Mrs Fiennes were soon discussing third and fourth cousins. One day as we all sat outside a café, Julia happened to mention Hank. ‘Who’s Hank?’ the others wanted to know. We explained, and Julia repeated the story of the New Orleans face. Her mother gasped and shook her roughly: ‘Darling, why in Heaven’s name didn’t you tell me about it at the time?’
‘I was terrified.’
‘I believe you’re making it up from something I told you, sweetie. I saw the same face myself before you were born – and the rusty iron gate – and the creepers and the shutters.’
‘You never told me anything of the sort. Besides, I saw it myself. I don’t have other people’s visions. You mustn’t confuse me with Hank.’
It occurred to me: ‘Probably her mother had the vision, or whatever it was, first. And then Julia as a child must have heard her telling the story to somebody, and incorporated it in her own private nightmare world.’
But Will eased back in his chair and, turning to Mrs Fiennes, asked in the playful Southern accent that they were using: ‘Honey, did you ever hear them up there in the old attic, sloshing water all over the place?’
None of us understood what he meant.
That night, when we were sitting about, drinking coñac, Will raised his voice: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your permission to spin a yarn?’
‘Why, of course.’
Will started: ‘A good many years ago my father’s law firm, Price & Price, acted for the mortgagees of a bankrupt property in Mississippi. Money was not forthcoming, so my father consented to take his fees in real estate – about eighty acres of almost worthless land at Pond near Fort Adams. Fort Adams was once a prosperous river port for the cotton country east of the River; the town itself was perched on the high bluffs which overhang the water hereabouts. But the River suddenly chose to change course five miles to the west and left Fort Adams with a wide frontage of swamp, so that all trade moved along to Natchez and Baton Rouge, which were still ports. These bluffs form the edge of a three-hundred-mile line of hills raised, they say, by prehistoric dust storms blowing in from the Great Plains, and cut up by streams and swamps. There used to be dozens of rich plantations in the hills, but when the River deserted Fort Adams they were abandoned and allowed to revert to jungle.
‘A victim of this catastrophe was Pond, a village that had got its name from the cattle-pond which its leading citizen, old man Lemnowitz, dug and surrounded with two-storey frame stores and warehouses. It used to be a tough job to fetch cotton over the hills from the plantations in the interior. The bales were loaded on enormous, sixteen-wheeled wagons drawn by from six to ten yoke oxen. Teamsters and planters would camp at Pond before making the final drive up-hill to Fort Adams. Old man Lemnowitz hired them extra oxen for the effort, and carried on a thriving trade in supplies of all sorts which he had hauled up from the River in the off-season.
‘There were still traces of ancient wealth near Pond when I visited it – ruins of the ante-bellum mansions and slave-quarters, with huge, twisted vines writhing up through the floors – and at Pond itself Lemnowitz’s warehouse, formerly a sort of Macy’s, was still in business under the same name. But only one corner was now occupied: by a small, not very elegant, store that sold tobacco, notions, staples and calico. It also called itself the Pond Post Office.
‘The rest of Pond was jungle. My mother had come down there to see whether Price & Price owned any camellias; because sometimes these old planters collected rare flowers, and camellias could still be found growing wild in their deserted gardens. No! No orchids in that area, but camellias had been imported from all over the world, including even the Chinese mountains where they originally belonged. I was there to keep my mother company and check the land lines. Well, I went to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Lemnowitz store, and before I could get my change, a Thing walked in.
‘It was undoubtedly human, in a weird way – walked upright and had the correct number of limbs. It even strode up to the counter and held out a dime for a can of snuff. But for the rest… The face was a glazed greenish white, with four fangs that crossed over the lips, and a protruding underlip. It had dark-brown hair, dripping with wet, under a black felt hat – the sort that gave the po’ white trash from Georgia their nick-name of “wool-hats”. Long arms ending in gauntlets – the local work-gloves of canvas and leather with stiff cuffs – which hung below its knees as it walked. Muddy “overhawls”, leather brogans called “clod-hoppers”, and a stink as if fifty cess-pools had been opened simultaneously. I said nothing, except perhaps “Oh!” What would any of you have said in the circumstances? Imagine the dark cavern of a mouldering warehouse behind you, with acres of empty shelves lost in the gloom, and then in It comes through the door with the blazing sun behind it. When It vanished again, I ran to the window to make sure that my mother had not fainted, and then tip-toed back to the counter. “What was that?” “Why, that was only a Whitaker Negro,” Mr Lemnowitz said casually. “Never seen one before?” He seemed to be enjoying the situation.’
As Will told the story my old terrors came alive again. ‘Well, what was it really?’ I croaked.
‘I guess it was just a Whitaker Negro,’ said Will. ‘Later, I decided to check up on my sanity. Mr Lemnowitz told me that for a couple of nickels Boy Whitaker, who was only a half-Whitaker, would guide me to where his folk lived. And he did. There are, or were, several families of Whitaker Negroes nea
r Pond, tucked away in the jungle swamps where nobody ever ventures, not even the Sanitary Inspector. You have to understand the geography of these hills and reckon with their amazing verdancy and complete lack of vistas. One can march in a straight line up and down hills and over swamps for scores of miles without seeing a self-respecting horizon. The jungle is so thick in places that whole families have grown up and died within a mile of neighbours whose existence they didn’t even suspect; and we Mississippians are noted for our gregariousness. I don’t know how I ever reached the place myself, because I was working to windward and the stench spread for half a mile around the place. I nearly threw up even before I arrived. They live tax-free and aren’t mentioned in the census, and don’t of course have to send their kids to school, still less get drafted for military service. The kids live in wallows under their huts, which are built on piles: apparently they don’t come out much until they’re fourteen years old or so – can’t stand the sun. A good documentary sequence could be taken of a sow and her litter wallowing in the slime with a bunch of young Whitaker monsters: you could title it Symbiosis – which is what we call a “fo’bit” word.
‘The adults make a sort of living by raising hogs and chickens: enough to keep them in snuff and brogans and gauntlets and other necessities. The hair proved to be mostly spanish-moss clapped wet on the head to keep it cool – it comes grey-green and goes dark when you soak it; but their real hair is also long, brown and wavy, not kinky in the usual negroid style. The brogans and gauntlets were filled with water. You see, they have no sweat-glands – that’s their trouble. It’s a hereditary condition and their skin needs to be kept wet all the while, or they die. They’re Negroes; but said to be mixed with Choctaw Indian, also perhaps a strain of Chickasaw and Natchez.’
Someone asked: ‘Didn’t the snuff get a bit damp, Will?’
Will answered blandly: ‘No, sir, it did not! Snuff is “dipped” not snuffed, in those parts. It’s sold in cans about an inch and a half high. The lid of the can is used to dip a little snuff into the buccal pouch – which is another “fo’bit word” meaning the hollow under your nether lip, excuse me for showing off.’
Most of the coñac-drinkers grinned incredulously, but Will turned to me: ‘Did you ever hear of Turtle Folk? That’s what they call whites afflicted by the same disease. There are quite a few cases up and down the Mississippi – Natchez, Vicksburg, Yazoo City, Baton Rouge – kept a close secret, though. Once I was in a house at Natchez where they kept a turtle-man in the attic, and I heard him sloshing water about overhead. That was what Julia must have seen in New Orleans, and Mrs Fiennes before her. And I guess what you saw in Limerick was a portrait of a turtle-man brought back from the South as a curiosity.’
We asked Will: ‘How did they get there? And why are they called “Whitaker Negroes”?’
He answered: ‘I was coming to that. Around 1810, or so the story goes, a big planter named George Whitaker grew disgusted with his labour problems. He was an intelligent, wide-eyed, gullible New Englander, with Christian leanings, who wanted to reform the South and incidentally get even richer than he already was. He disliked the business of buying slaves and breeding them like cattle – with the result, he said, that they had no traditions, no morals, and no discipline but what could be instilled into them by fear. Ideally, he thought, a planter should be able to take a long vacation, like a European landlord, and come back to find work proceeding smoothly under coloured overseers – only petty crimes to punish, and the crops properly harvested. He argued that if the early slave-traders had kept families and clans together under their African chiefs, the labour problem would not have existed. Then it occurred to him: “Why not experiment?” And he went down to New Orleans, where he interviewed the famous pirate Jean Lafitte. “Sir,” he said, “I wish you to visit Africa on my behalf and bring me back a whole tribe of Negroes. Two hundred is the figure I aim at, but a hundred would do. I’ll pay you two hundred dollars a head: men, women and children. But mind, it must be a whole tribe, not samples from a score of them, or I don’t buy.”
‘George was a serious man, and Jean Lafitte decided to take his offer. He sailed to the Gold Coast with his brother Pierre on the next tide and there, almost at once, as luck would have it, surprised a whole tribe on the march. The Negroes had been expelled from somewhere in the interior, and being in a pretty poor way, offered no resistance. The Lafittes got two hundred of them aboard, made ingenious arrangements for their welfare on the voyage, and brought across alive one hundred and fifty – smuggled them through Fort Adams and the Bayou St John until Pond came in sight. This constituted, you see, fraudulent evasion of the 1808 Federal embargo on the importation of slaves; so two hundred dollars a head was not an unreasonable price, considering the risk. But think of it in terms of modern money! Well, Mr Lemnowitz told me, at Pond, that when George Whitaker saw the livestock that the Lafittes had brought back from Africa, and realized they were now his responsibility – though because of their constitution, of no more use as field workers than the bayou alligators – he turned deathly white. He paid Jean Lafitte without a word; then he went home, made out his will, bequeathing the bulk of his land to the then “Territory of Mississippi” – after which he and his young wife jumped into the River, hand in hand, and were not seen again.
‘Someone took over the plantation, but allowed the Whitakers to remain in a swamp and make out as best as they could. And they hung on there long after the Whitaker mansion was swallowed up by the jungle. Their “forty” is tax-free and inviolable because the original deed of gift represented taxes paid in perpetuity. About fifteen years ago a Whitaker went crazy – they are none of them very bright – and hit the trail for he didn’t know where. He travelled from swamp to swamp, living off the land, and eventually reached the town of Woodville which is not very far away as the crow flies, but a thousand miles as the jungle grows. The good people of Woodville, who normally publish an extra of their local paper only when a war is declared or a President assassinated, hurried one through the press with the banner headline: “MAN FROM MARS!” because the poor wretch was half-dead and couldn’t explain himself, and all the horses in the town were bolting, and the women screaming their heads off.’
‘And the Choctaw blood?’
‘The Choctaws and Chickasaws were the local Indians, who obligingly moved away from the neighbourhood to make room for cotton. I was told that a few rogue males stayed behind in the swamps, mostly pox-cases, and intermarried with the Whitaker Negroes for want of other women.’
‘Did your mother find any camellias?’
Will, detecting a hint of irony in the innocent question, answered: ‘Thank you, ma’am. She got a lapful.’
Then he turned to me again. ‘Do you know anyone on Time magazine?’
‘Only the editor,’ I said. ‘I happened to rent Tom Matthews a house here in 1931, while he was still a book reviewer.’
‘Then ask him to send you a copy of a piece about Turtle Folk published that year’
‘I certainly will.’
And in due course of time Tom sent me the medical column of Time, December 14th, 1931, and this is what I read:
TURTLE FOLK
At Houston, Miss., A Mrs C. keeps a tub of water in her back yard for an extraordinary purpose. It is a ducking tub for her five-year-old son. Every time he feels uncomfortable he jumps in, clothes and all. Mrs C. does not scold. For that is the only way the boy can keep comfortable. He lacks sweat glands, which in normal people dissipate two to three quarts of cooling perspiration every day.
Mrs C. has another son, an infant, who likewise lacks sweat glands. He is too young to go ducking himself. So she dowses him from time to time with scuppers of water. Neither child can sleep unless his night clothes and mattress are wet. They take daytime naps in their damp cellar, with moist sacks for pillows.
Nearby at Vardaman, Miss., are two farmer brothers similarly afflicted. Each works alternate half days. While one plows the other soaks himself in
a creek. Every once in a while the worker saunters to the creek for a cool dowsing. The brothers have a sister who dunks herself in the cistern back of their house.
They have a sweatless neighbour woman who must also wet herself for comfort.
At Vicksburg, Miss., there is a seventh of these folk who, like turtles, must periodically submerge themselves. The Vicksburg case is a 12-year-old boy, handled by Dr Guy Jarrett. The others are cases of Dr Ralph Bowen of Memphis.
Dr Bowen last week had on hand a medical report concerning the phenomenon. The seven suffer from ‘hereditary ectodermal dysplasia of the anhydrotic type’. That is, they lack sweat glands, and the lack is hereditary. However, the seven Mississippi cases are related only as indicated above. This suggests that the failing is not so uncommon as heretofore believed (only 23 cases have been reported in medical literature). The ailment must often escape medical attention. Along with the lack of sweat glands goes a lack of teeth. None of the seven Mississippi cases has more than two teeth.
Tom also sent me a typescript from Time’s research files:
FROM ANDREWS’ DISEASES OF THE SKIN
Hereditary ectodermal dysplasia
There are numerous anomalies of the epidermis and appendages due to faulty evolution of the epiblastic layer of the blastoderm. The term ‘ectodermal defect’ has been limited to those conditions arising from incomplete development of the epidermis or its appendages, or its absence in circumscribed areas, thus excluding the keratodermias and the nevi. Atrichosis congenitalis with or without deformities of the nails and teeth is common, and is accompanied at times by nevi and other congenital anomalies. Congenital absence or malformation of the nails and teeth is also of frequent occurrence, and in circumscribed areas it is not out of the ordinary to find that the sebaceous and sweat glands are absent or impaired. In restricted areas there may be a complete absence of the epidermis and appendages at birth. It is more rare to encounter cases of extensive deformation or complete absence of all, or nearly all, of the cutaneous structures originating from the epiderm, to which group the term ‘congenital ectodermal defect’ is given. Guilford, an American dentist, was the first to report a case of this kind. The appearance of these patients is typical and conspicuous, as they have a facies that is suggestive of congenital syphilis. The skin is hairless, dry, white, smooth, and glossy. The teeth are entirely absent or there may be a few present, but the development is always defective.