Strangest, wildest practice of the slaves was the hideous4 misuse5 Christian6 masters allowed them to make of Chrismas Day and week. It was then they danced the bamboula, incessantly7. All through the year this Saturnalia was prepared for in meetings held at night by their leaders. The songs to which they danced were made of white society's scandals reduced to satirical rhyme; and to the rashest girl or man there was power in the warning, "You'll get yourself sung about at Christmas." Yearly a king, queen, and retinue8 were elected. The dresses of court and all were a mixture of splendor9 and tawdriness that exhausted10 the savings11 and pilferings of a twelvemonth. Good-natured "missies" often helped make these outfits12. They were of velvet13, silk, satin, cotton lace, false flowers, the brilliant seeds of the licorice and coquelicot, tinsel, beads14, and pinch-beck. Sometimes mistresses even lent--firmly sewed fast--their own jewelry15.
On Christmas Eve, here and there in the town, ground-floor rooms were hired and decorated with palm branches; or palm booths were built, decked with oranges and boughs16 of cinnamon berries, lighted with candles and lanterns and furnished with seats for the king, queen, and musicians, and with buckets of rum punch. Then the "bulrush man" went his round. Covered with capes17 and flounces of rushes and crowned with a high waving fringe of them, he rattled18 pebbles19 in calabashes, danced to their clatter20, proclaimed the feast, and begged such of us white children as his dress did not terrify, for stivers from our holiday savings.
Soon the dancers began to gather in the booths; women in gorgeous trailing gowns, the men bearing showy batons21 and clad in gay shirts or satin jackets, and with a mongrel infant rabble22 at their heels. When the goombay--a flour-barrel drum--sounded, the town knew the bamboula had begun. On two confronting lines, the men in one, the women in the other, a leading couple improvised
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