E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Melissa Er-Raqabi,
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| Transcriber's Notes: | Two variations, Sewee and Seewee, are used in this book, and havebeen left as in the original. Where poems cross a page boundary in the original, they have beenleft as one stanza except where the structure clearly indicatesotherwise. I have been unable to confirm with another source ifstanza breaks should occur in those places or not. |
CAROLINA CHANSONS
LEGENDS OF THE LOW COUNTRY
BY
DuBOSE HEYWARD AND HERVEY ALLEN
[2]THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
new york boston chicago dallas
atlanta san francisco
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
london bombay calcutta
melbourne
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
toronto
1922
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1922
to john bennett
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The thanks of the authors are due to the editors of The LondonMercury, The North American Review, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse,The Reviewer, The Book News Monthly, and Contemporary Verse forpermission to reprint many of the poems in this volume.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to many friends for first-handinformation and for the loan of letters, diaries, pictures, and oldnewspaper clippings.
PREFACE
In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yetlittle historical or cultural background, the material for this volumehas been gathered from a section that was one of the first to becolonized. Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed,leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudalcivilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with theeconomic system upon which it rested.
From this medley of early colonial discovery and romance, from thememories of war and reconstruction, it has been as difficult to choosecoherently as to maintain restraint in selection among the manygrotesque negro legends and superstitions so rich in imagery and music.Coupled with this there has been another task; that of keeping theselegends and stories in their natural matrix, the semi-tropical landscapeof the Low Coun