Flight, page 4
She, too, was fascinated by Jean’s picture of the coming into being of the Creole.
“The white Louisianian will tell you the Creole is white with ancestry of French or Spanish or West Indian extraction. There may be some of that kind—but I’m not sure—but most Creoles are a little bit of everything and from that very mixture comes the delightful colourfulness which is their greatest charm. To them the cardinal sin is avarice or stinginess. Dalliance at love—too great devotion to the cup—poverty—all these are minor faults to be forgiven and forgotten. We are not a nation of shopkeepers, thank God, even though you and I, Mimi, are about to desert to the enemy.”
Many other stories he told her there. He told of that Governor Perier who armed Negroes in 1729 and sent them to fight that fear-inspiring tribe of Indians, the Chonchas, with whom the black slaves were becoming too friendly, and how, with an ease that should have frightened Perier, these blacks wiped out the Indian enemy. Proudly Jean told how this example and others gave impetus to the later freeing of the slaves which had come largely through their own efforts—the revolt of the slaves led by the Chickasaws and Banbaras and other stirring uprisings—gentle, kindly Jean—who would not have crushed an ant—exultantly told of carnage, of slaughter, of death.
He took great pride in telling Mimi of Jeannot, stalwart slave offered freedom by Kerlerec if he would become the public executioner, a job no white man would take. Mimi lived again the agony of Jeannot, now dead some one hundred and fifty years, who in horror and anguish cried out: “What! Cut off the heads of people who have never done me any harm?” She could almost see him pleading, even weeping, to be allowed to remain in bondage rather than become the public killer. No escape possible, the governor was adamant, he rose and said: “Very well, wait a moment.” Mimi shuddered as Jean told of Jeannot leaving the room, running to his cabin, seizing a hatchet in his left hand, laying his right hand on a block and chopping it off. She rejoiced that he, on exhibiting the bloody stump, created such emotion he was given his freedom anyhow.
Of Negro troops under Andrew Jackson in the famous battle of New Orleans, of the ability and courage of that Major Jean Daquin, San Domingan, quadroon whose Negro blood historians later forgot, he told her proudly. But it was sadly that he pictured the barriers, the Black Codes, the rising tide of hatred and bitterness that began to rise against the coloured Creoles and Americans. To Jean in his gentleness and love of peace these stories of dark days during and after the Civil War were horrible and painful but in his honesty he told of them while Mimi’s breath came quickly as he unfolded the scenes like sharply etched prints before her wondering eyes.
“It’s afternoon—Mary will be furious,” Jean at last exclaimed, almost with dismay.
They hurried to the gates and home.
“All this is behind you, Mimi,” Jean ended as they neared the house. “Remember it—take comfort in it when you’re depressed.—You’re a beautiful child—you’ll be a more beautiful woman,” he added. “You’ve warm blood in your veins—the warmth of old, old wine. Here you’d be safe but away from New Orleans I don’t know—I don’t know. I hope all will be well with us.”
Chapter III
Under the efficient management of Mme. Daquin, it was not long before they became adjusted physically to their new surroundings in Atlanta. “I wish you’d stop calling me ‘Madam Daquin,’” she querulously demanded one day of Mimi. “I don’t want people here being reminded constantly we’re outsiders or think we’re trying to put on airs. Call me ‘Mrs. Daquin’ or ‘mamma,’ or, if you insist on being high-toned, call me ‘mother.’”
Mimi vigorously protested, to herself and Jean, against either of the latter terms and compromised on “Mrs. Daquin.”
Soon after their arrival they received formal calls. These came usually in the afternoon and were more or less elaborate ceremonials. Mrs. Hunter, willowy spouse of the president of the Lincoln Mutual Life Insurance Company, came with her husband the Sunday after they reached Atlanta. She was cordial—very cordial. Mimi wondered why Mrs. Hunter felt it necessary to implant a slightly moist kiss upon her lips, though she permitted herself to be fondled by the effusive one without audible or visible protest. She submitted and that was all.
“What a darling little girl you have, Mrs. Daquin!” she exclaimed. “And what’s her name?” On being told she went on: “Mimi? How very cute. Just like a stage name or opera.”
“That’s where it does come from. La Bohème. Do you know the opera?” Mimi assured her.
“No, I can’t say I do no, I don’t believe I know that one,” Mrs. Hunter, somewhat embarrassed, answered. She did not feel altogether sure that Mimi wasn’t trying either to poke fun at her or test her learning.
“My real name’s Annette Angela Daquin—but no one ever calls me that. They only call me Mimi,” innocently replied Mimi.
Yet not sure of herself, Mrs. Hunter felt it necessary that she justify herself before this queer infant.
“We don’t get much chance here to see good plays or hear such music as comes this way. The only play I’ve seen was “Ben Hur and Mr. Hunter has never forgiven me for climbing up the back stairs to the peanut gallery at the Grand Opera House where the coloured people sit. That was grand, though, and almost worth the quarrel I had with Mr. Hunter about going.”
And Mrs. Hunter beamed at her husband in a benign fashion. Her duty done in commenting on Mimi’s cuteness and beauty, Mrs. Hunter turned her attention to Mrs. Daquin and subjects near to housewifely hearts. They wondered if there would be a late spring—“it’s been years since it’s been so cool in April as it is now,” affirmed Mrs. Hunter—they talked of the rising price of cloth and food and shoes—the art of cookery—“you must teach me some of those spicy dishes they tell me you have in New Orleans”—of local social life in Atlanta and how it compared with that in Louisiana.
Mimi listened alternately to the two and to the more restrained conversation of Jean and Mr. Hunter. The latter speculated, somewhat idly, as to the probable chances of Japan’s defeating Russia, Mr. Hunter told Jean of business prospects in the fall if cotton sold well. Her attention was caught, momentarily, by Mr. Hunter, who was deploring the general shiftlessness of the younger people in general and his own son in particular.
“I’ve always maintained that hard work’s what boys and girls need. When I was a youngster my daddy put me in the fields at six o’clock in the morning and I stayed there until six or seven o’clock at night. But these young ones coming along nowadays have got funny ideas. Take my own boy, for example. He’s pretty nearly seventeen and for the life of me, I can’t make him out. Always talking about doing something big but never knows from one day to the other what line he’s going to do big things in. I tell Molly,” he confided, leaning closer to Jean and lowering his voice, “it’s all her fault. She coddles him too much—”
“Now, William, you aren’t going into that here,” chided his wife, who had overheard him. “Carl’s nothing but a child as yet and he and Mildred are all we’ve got. He’ll come round all right.”
Back and forth the discussion raged, Mr. Hunter appealing to Jean for confirmation of his contentions, Mrs. Hunter relying on Mrs. Daquin for aid and succour. On only one point could they agree and that was Carl’s essential difference from other children. Not until Mrs. Daquin, in her desire to help Mrs. Hunter and thereby gain her favour, introduced the matter of religion did Carl Hunter’s name cease being bandied back and forth like a tennis ball between his parents.
Mrs. Hunter, tired of the argument over her son, swooped down upon the new topic with avidity. It was wholly a verbal swoop. It was difficult to imagine one of Mrs. Hunter’s proportions and dignity swooping in any other manner.
“I knew there was something I intended asking you and I almost forgot it. What church’re you planning to attend?”
“Well—er—that’s a problem we haven’t met yet,” Mrs. Daquin, somewhat flustered, replied. “You see, in Chicago I was a Baptist—and you know the Baptist saying, ‘Baptist born and Baptist bred, be a Baptist till I’m dead,’” she somewhat incorrectly quoted. “But my husband and his daughter, they’re Catholics—”
“Oh, indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Hunter, her eyebrows making a rapid ascent until they seemed to mingle with the hairs that straggled down from beneath her elaborate coiffure. Mrs. Hunter’s ears were not so keen as Mrs. Plummer’s the news regarding the religious beliefs of the Daquins had not reached her. Now she uttered the exclamation as though Mrs. Daquin had said: “My husband and his daughter have leprosy!” or “They suffer from epileptic fits.”
Mrs. Daquin unmistakably caught the implication—she flushed and twisted the handkerchief in her hands and laughed a silly, titterish and mirthless laugh. Mrs. Hunter turned and surveyed Jean and Mimi as though they were specimens of some new flora or fauna of a weird and unfamiliar species. Her inspection lasted but a minute but it was long enough to make Mimi squirm uncomfortably and she felt vaguely as though she had been caught in the act of doing some loathsome and criminal thing.
They did not pursue the subject. Mrs. Hunter rose soon afterwards, her husband following her lead.
“My dear, on Tuesday of next week I’m entertaining my club, the Fleurde-Lis—Mr. Hunter calls it ‘the eating brigade’ but that’s because he’s jealous, we don’t let any men attend our affairs except once a year. You must come, for there you’ll meet the right people—it’s fatal to get mixed up with the wrong crowd,” she smilingly warned.
Mrs. Daquin eagerly accepted the invitation, too eagerly Mimi thought. As she bade the Hunters a formal good-bye, she was thinking to herself: “Why can’t she accept the attentions of Mrs. Hunter as though she were used to decent society instead of fawning all over herself?”
After the Hunters had left, there was a silence which was unbroken until they sat at supper. Mrs. Daquin several times looked inquiringly at Jean as though she were about to speak but each time desisted. Mimi noticed the words shut off as they were about to be said but knew the flood would not be long in coming. She was right.
“What are you and Mimi going to do about attending church, Jean?” began Mrs. Daquin. “There’s no coloured Catholic church here and you saw from Mrs. Hunter’s manner that—er—well, we aren’t going to get along as well here as we might if—” The abrupt ending of her uncompleted sentence and the eloquent silence which followed it were sufficient.
“You mean you think we should give up our religion to make money and get into ‘society’?” queried Jean in astonishment, his last word tinged ever so slightly with irony.
“Well, I don’t mean exactly that,” his wife answered. “But you can’t attend a white Catholic church here and I just thought you might—well, you might refrain from mentioning you’re a Catholic, for you can see from the way Mrs. Hunter acted it puts you in a different—er—it makes you different from the others,” she ended lamely.
“What if it does make us different?” Jean demanded, almost belligerently. “Coloured people here, from what I’ve seen, are always talking about ‘prejudice’ and they’re just about as full of prejudice against Catholics, Jews and black Negroes as white people themselves. You can do what you want, Mary, but Mimi and I will stick to our own religion. And I’m sure we can attend some Catholic church here, so that’s an end to that.”
There was no mistaking the tone. Being a wise woman, Mrs. Daquin dropped the subject. Afterwards, Mimi hugged Jean in the hallway.
“You were gorgeous, papa Jean. That’s one time you bearded the lioness. And if you did it oftener—there’d be fewer times you’d have to do it.” Jean grinned at her happily, proud of her approval.
Chapter IV
“I meant to tell you on Sunday,” telephoned Mrs. Hunter the latter part of the week, “to bring your lovely little girl with you to my party next Tuesday. Mrs. Adams is bringing her girl, Hilda, and the two of them can play together.”
And so it was that Mimi, dressed in her best dress, a pale yellow confection of lawn, set out with Mrs. Daquin for Mrs. Hunter’s house and the Fleur-de-Lis Club meeting. Mrs. Daquin, too, dressed carefully and elaborately. She spent an hour arranging her hair in the style of the day, brushed back from the forehead high over a “rat” that made her head appear as though soldiers had thrown up breastworks, carefully smoothed over. From behind this amazing rampart peeped coyly a lacy hat perched perilously on the back of the head. Mrs. Daquin’s modified leg o’-mutton sleeves, her lightly fitting waist with high neck supported by whale-bone stays, her long skirt flaring wide and with a train were all of the latest design, as were the half-mittens of black lace from which Mrs. Daquin’s fingers, short and round, emerged shyly like little fat sausages. She knew her sex—she would be on inspection and much depended on the first impression. She was determined that that first glance should establish her as one of the elect.
Mrs. Hunter had said “four o’clock sharp.” Mrs. Daquin and Mimi therefore arrived at the Hunter domicile, a huge pile of towers and turrets and bulging bay windows adorned at the most unlikely and unlooked-for places with startling varieties of woodwork, at twenty minutes of five. Mrs. Daquin knew the value of a dramatic entrance, of the desirability of being just late enough to have permitted everybody else’s arrival prior to her own.
She was not wrong. In the warm April afternoon the door and windows were open. As they ascended the steps there floated out to them the hum of well-bred voices, pitched at just the right angle. Mrs. Hunter rushed to greet them and from the sudden stilling of the animated conversation Mimi knew the talk had been about her step-mother and herself. They were conducted around the large living-room and presented to each of the carefully dressed women who sat in a circle whose circumference was only a little less than that of the room. “Pleased to meet you’s” “Happy to form your acquaintance’s,” “My compliments” and “How do you do’s” greeted Mrs. Daquin; “What a pretty little girl’s,” and “How cute’s” were Mimi’s portion.
The ordeal ended, Mrs. Daquin subsided into a chair near Mrs. Hunter’s standing approximately at the point where they had started on their circumnavigation of the room. The buzzing conversation began again. Mimi listened to the exchange of recipes and ideas, discussions of the best manner in which jams and jellies and rolls should be prepared, gentle arguments as to the relative desirability of this store or that one.
Mimi looked around the room for Hilda Adams but there were no younger people except herself. She began to feel out of place, to wish she were at home with her sewing or at her piano. Knowing there was no escape she began to examine the women around her. She remembered few of their names but that did not worry her. She noticed that none of the women present were darker than a light brown, their complexions varying from that shade to one indistinguishable from white. Just as this fact came to her she caught a snatch of conversation from a group near her that linked itself startlingly with her own observation.
A slender, very slender, woman with lips which she pressed together closely whenever she began or ended a sentence was talking.
“ … it seems Mrs. Adams has been going to the Grand Opera House and buying seats in the orchestra, ‘passing’ for white, and seeing all the plays that’ve been coming here. Well, the other day, as she was going in, some coloured person saw her and went and told the manager. She tried to bluff it out but it didn’t work—they made her get out.”
“Serves her right,” sweetly commented one of the informative one’s companions, satisfaction in her tone. “Going where she isn’t wanted. She always did think she knew more than the rest of us. They tell me she and Hilda wash their own clothes after dark and hang them up in the yard when nobody can see them—and then get up before daybreak to take them in—Oh! how do you do, Mrs. Adams?—I didn’t see you come in. And how sweet you look! That’s a beautiful new dress you’ve on,” she broke off as the subject of their conversation came up.
Mimi wondered how so miraculous a change could come over the group which now chatted easily and cordially, very cordially, with her who had been ejected from the local theatre and who laundered her clothes after nightfall. She felt a deep warmth within her for this woman who, because she wanted so avidly the entertainment, the touch with the world of ideas, the stimulus that came from the plays which came to Atlanta, and which her race barred her from seeing respectably, made her run the risk of discovery. And to the same degree that she felt a yearning to touch, to smile at Mrs. Adams and thereby let her know that she sympathized with her, did Mimi detest with a burning intensity the pettiness and envy of her detractors.
So engrossed had she been in Mrs. Adams, Mimi had not seen Hilda, who stood silent just beyond her mother. Mrs. Adams started to move away to another group and the motion brought Mimi face to face with a girl of her own age with wide, placid black eyes. Hilda and Mimi stood looking at each other, each caught and held fast by some power, neither of them knew what nor even that there was such a power holding them. For a minute—an hour—a century they stood there unable either to move or speak. The spell was broken when Hilda smiled shyly and moved toward Mimi. At that instant Mrs. Adams turned to Mimi.
