THE DEATH BELL OF THE BRAZOS
Reading edition
By Bertha McKee Dobie
However, Mr. Hudgins does not connect the “mysterious music” of the Brazos with the slave ship, though such a connection is common in the vicinity. He continues: “Three miles above the mouth of the Brazos River is what is known as the haunted Labore. Twain causes conspire to give rise to the superstition among the ignorant with regard to this spot. The first is a grave near the bank of the stream; the second is a peculiar humming noise, that can be heard there on still summer nights—this noise is soft, like the notes of an Aeolian harp, and superstition, coupling it with the grave, has woven many a tale of the haunted Labore.”4—Editor.]
This legend is set down in the words of Mrs. A. F. Shannon of Velasco.
“This is the account I heard as a child of the music in the Brazos. About 1836 or 1838 Texas passed a law forbidding the bringing of slaves from Africa. But boats, slave runners they were called, used to come from Africa to Cuba and wait there until they thought they could slip across the Gulf. One of these ships with three hundred slaves nailed down into the hold—they brought them over like freight—put into the Brazos. But before it could reach the safety of the timber, it was followed by—I don’t know exactly what it was, whether it was a revenue cutter or what, but anyway a government boat. This boat gained on the slave ship, and seeing that they were lost, the crew of the slave ship scuttled it, and it went down with its three hundred negroes in the hold, at Seaview Bend, about four miles from Quintana.
“When I was a child we could hear every evening at sunset the ringing of a great bell. Very plain it was. The negroes called it ‘the death bell.’ Mammy Kitty had stayed on with my grandmother after the Civil War, and when I was a child was about eighty or ninety years old and always sat in the ‘chimley corner.’ Every day when the bell tolled at sunset I would run to Mammy Kitty and put my head in her lap. She would run her hands over my head and croon until the bell stopped. The other negroes whispered ‘the death bell,’ and stood still while it rang. They thought the bell was ringing for the three hundred negroes in the scuttled ship. And then whenever we passed over Seaview Bend we could hear faint music like that of a guitar played at a distance. Since the jetties have been built and there has been so much traffic on the river, the music has gone away, and I have seen no one who has heard it of late years. I know now that ‘the death bell’ must have been the sunset bell of a big sugar plantation ten or twelve miles up the river. The water carried the sound down. But I still hear the death bell ringing in my ears and feel Mammy Kitty’s hand passing over my head.”