SOCIAL LIFE IN OLD NEW ORLEANS
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR AT TWENTY-TWO
Painted by Moïse]
SOCIAL LIFE IN
OLD NEW ORLEANS
_Being Recollections of my Girlhood_
BY
ELIZA RIPLEY
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXII
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
_To_
MY CHILDREN
_and_
MY CHILDREN’S CHILDREN
_and to_
THEIR CHILDREN TO COME
FOREWORD
Far more vivid than the twilight of the days in which I dwell, there
rises before my inner eye the vision, aglow in Southern sunshine, of the
days that are gone, never to return, but which formed the early chapters
of a life that has been lived, that can never be lived again.
Many of the following stories are oft-told tales at my fireside—others
were written to record phases of the patriarchal existence before the war
which has so utterly passed away.
They have been printed from time to time in the pages of the New Orleans
_Times-Democrat_, the editor of which has very kindly consented to their
publication in this form.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. NEW ORLEANS CHILDREN OF 1840 1
II. NEW ORLEANS SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS IN THE FORTIES 7
III. BOARDING SCHOOL IN THE FORTIES 14
IV. PICAYUNE DAYS 23
V. DOMESTIC SCIENCE SEVENTY YEARS AGO 31
VI. A FASHIONABLE FUNCTION IN 1842 42
VII. NEW YEAR’S OF OLD 50
VIII. NEW ORLEANS SHOPS AND SHOPPING IN THE FORTIES 58
IX. THE OLD FRENCH OPERA HOUSE 65
X. MURAL DECORATIONS AND PORTRAITS OF THE PAST 71
XI. THOUGHTS OF OLD 80
XII. WEDDING CUSTOMS THEN AND NOW 87
XIII. A COUNTRY WEDDING IN 1846 94
XIV. THE BELLES AND BEAUX OF FORTY 101
XV. AS IT WAS IN MY DAY 107
XVI. FANCY DRESS BALL AT THE MINT IN 1850 116
XVII. DR. CLAPP’S CHURCH 120
XVIII. OLD DAGUERREOTYPES 125
XIX. STEAMBOAT AND STAGE SEVENTY YEARS AGO 130
XX. HOTEL AT PASS CHRISTIAN IN 1849 140
XXI. OLD MUSIC BOOKS 146
XXII. THE SONGS OF LONG AGO 153
XXIII. A RAMBLE THROUGH THE OLD CITY 159
XXIV. “OLD CREOLE DAYS” AND WAYS 173
XXV. A VISIT TO VALCOUR AIME PLANTATION 182
XXVI. THE OLD PLANTATION LIFE 191
XXVII. PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED 200
XXVIII. A MONUMENT TO MAMMIES 209
XXIX. MARY ANN AND MARTHA ANN 216
XXX. WHEN LEXINGTON WON THE RACE 245
XXXI. LOUISIANA STATE FAIR FIFTY YEARS AGO 250
XXXII. THE LAST CHRISTMAS 256
XXXIII. A WEDDING IN WAR TIME 264
XXXIV. SUBSTITUTES 273
XXXV. AN UNRECORDED BIT OF NEW ORLEANS HISTORY 280
XXXVI. CUBAN DAYS IN WAR TIMES 287
XXXVII. “WE SHALL KNOW EACH OTHER THERE” 295
XXXVIII. A RAMBLE THROUGH NEW ORLEANS WITH BRUSH AND EASEL 303
XXXIX. A VISIT OF TENDER MEMORIES 320
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 331
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Author at Twenty-two _Frontispiece_
Richard Henry Chinn _Facing_ 10
Market Doorway 24
A New Orleans Yard and Cistern 33
Door in the French Market _Facing_ 38
Courtyard on Carondelet Street 45
The Old French Opera House 66
Typical Old New Orleans Dwelling 73
A Creole Parterre 81
St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans 111
Augusta Slocomb Urquhart _Facing_ 118
Steamboat on the Mississippi 131
American Stagecoach 137
Seal of the City of New Orleans 160
Exchange Alley 163
Henry Clay _Facing_ 168
Arlington Plantation on the Mississippi _Facing_ 192
James Alexander McHatton _Facing_ 258
The Calaboose 281
A Courtyard in the French Quarter 305
“Behold a Wrecked Fountain” 308
“A Queer House Opposite” 311
St. Roch 316
The Author _Facing_ 324
A New Orleans Cemetery 326
SOCIAL LIFE IN OLD NEW ORLEANS
I
NEW ORLEANS CHILDREN OF 1840
“Children should be seen and not heard.” Children were neither seen nor
heard in the days of which I write, the days of 1840. They led the simple
life, going and coming in their own unobtrusive way, making no stir in
fashionable circles, with laces and flounces and feathered hats. There
were no ready-made garments then for grown-ups, much less for children.
It was before California gold mines, before the Mexican war, before money
was so abundant that we children could turn up our little noses at a
picayune. I recall the time when Alfred Munroe descended from Boston upon
the mercantile world of New Orleans, and opened on Camp Street a “one
price” clothing store for men. Nobody had ever heard of one price, and
no deviation, for anything, from a chicken to a plantation. The fun of
hectoring over price, and feeling, no matter how the trade ended, you had
a bargain after all, was denied the customers of Mr. Alfred Munroe. The
innovation was startling, but Munroe retired with a fortune in course of
time.
Children’s clothes were home-made. A little wool shawl for the shoulders
did duty for common use. A pelisse made out of an old one of mother’s, or
some remnant found in the house, was fine for Sunday wear. Pantalettes
of linen, straight and narrow and untrimmed, fell over our modest little
legs to our very shoetops. Our dresses were equally simple and equally
“cut down and made over.” Pantalettes were white, but I recall, with a
dismal smile, that when I was put into what might be called unmitigated
mourning for a brother, my pantalettes matched my dresses, black
bombazine or black alpaca.
Our amusements were of the simplest. My father’s house on Canal Street
had a flat roof, well protected by parapets, so it furnished a grand
playground for the children of the neighborhood. Judge Story lived next
door and Sid and Ben Story enjoyed to the full the advantages of that
roof, where all could romp and jump rope to their heart’s content. The
neutral ground, that is now a center for innumerable lines of street
cars, was at that time an open, ungarnished, untrimmed, untended strip
of waste land. An Italian banana and orange man cleared a space among the
bushes and rank weeds and erected a rude fruit stall where later Clay’s
statue stood. A quadroon woman had a coffee stand, in the early mornings,
at the next corner, opposite my father’s house. It could not have been
much beyond Claiborne Street that we children went crawfishing in the
ditches that bounded each side of that neutral ground, for we walked, and
it was not considered far.
The Farmers’ and Traders’ Bank was on Canal Street, and the family of Mr.
Bell, the cashier, lived over the bank. There were children there and a
governess, who went fishing with us. We rarely caught anything and had no
use for it when we did.
Sometimes I was permitted to go to market with John, way down to the
old French Market. We had to start early, before the shops on Chartres
Street were open, and the boys busy with scoops watered the roadway from
brimming gutters. John and I hurried past. Once at market we rushed from
stall to stall, filling our basket, John forgetting nothing that had been
ordered, and always carefully remembering one most important item, the
saving of at least a picayune out of the market money for a cup of coffee
at Manette’s stall. I drank half the coffee and took one of the little
cakes. John finished the repast and “dreened” the cup, and with the
remark, “We won’t say anything about this,” we started toward home. We
had to stop, though, at a bird store, on the square above the Cathedral,
look at the birds, chaff the noisy parrots, watch the antics of the
monkeys, and see the man hang up his strings of corals and fix his shells
in the window, ready for the day’s business. We could scarcely tear
ourselves away, it was so interesting; but a reminder that the wax head
at Dr. De Leon’s dentist’s door would be “put out by this time,” hurried
me to see that wonderful bit of mechanism open and shut its mouth, first
with a row of teeth, then revealing an empty cavern. How I watched,
wondered and admired that awfully artificial wax face! These occasional
market trips—and walks with older members of the family—were the sum of
my or any other child’s recreation.
Once, and only once, there was a party! The little Maybins had a party
and every child I knew was invited. The Maybins lived somewhere back of
Poydras Market. I recall we had to walk down Poydras Street, beyond the
market, and turn to the right onto a street that perhaps had a name, but
I never heard it.
The home was detached, and surrounded by ample grounds; quantities of
fig trees, thickets of running roses and in damp places clusters of
palmetto and blooming flags. We little invited guests were promptly on
the spot at 4 P. M., and as promptly off the spot at early candlelight.
I am sure no débutantes ever had a better time than did we little girls
in pantalettes and pigtails. We danced; Miss Sarah Strawbridge played
for us, and we all knew how to dance. Didn’t we belong to Mme. Arraline
Brooks’ dancing school?
The corner of Camp and Julia Streets, diagonally across from the then
fashionable 13 Buildings, was occupied by Mme. Arraline Brooks, a
teacher of dancing. Her school (studio or parlor it would be called now)
was on the second floor of Armory Hall, and there we children—she had
an immense class, too—learned all the fancy whirls and “heel and toe”
steps of the intricate polka, which was danced in sets of eight, like
old-time quadrilles. Mme. Arraline wore in the classroom short skirts and
pantalettes, so we had a good sight of her feet as she pirouetted about,
as agile as a ballet dancer.
By and by, at a signal from Miss Sarah, who had been having a
confidential and persuasive interview with a little miss, we were all
placed with our backs to the wall and a space cleared. Miss Sarah struck
a few notes, and little Tenie Slocomb danced the “Highland fling.” Very
beautiful was the little sylph in white muslin, her short sleeves tied
with blue ribbons, and she so graceful and lovely. It comes to me to-day
with a thrill, when I compare the companion picture—of a pale, delicate,
dainty old lady, with silvered hair and tottering step, on the bank of a
foreign river. It is not easy to bridge the seventy years (such a short
span, too, it is) between the two. Then the march from “Norma” started us
to the room for refreshments. It is full forty years since I have heard
that old familiar air, but for thirty years after that date I did not
hear it that the impulse to march to lemonade and sponge cake did not
seize me.
Alack-a-day! Almost all of us have marched away.
II
NEW ORLEANS SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS IN THE FORTIES
Of course, seventy years ago, as in the ages past and to come, convents
were the places for educating young girls in a Catholic community.
Nevertheless, there have always been schools and schools, for those whom
it was not expedient or convenient to board in a convent. In New Orleans
the Ursuline Convent was too remote from the majority of homes for these
day scholars, so there were a few schools among the many that come to
my mind to-day, not that I ever entered one of them, but I had girl
friends in all. In the thirties St. Angelo had a school on Customhouse
Street, next door to the home of the Zacharies. His method of teaching
may have been all right, but his discipline was objectionable; he had
the delinquent pupils kneel on brickdust and tacks and there study
aloud the neglected lesson. Now, brickdust isn’t so very bad, and tacks
only a trifle worse, when one’s knees are protected by stockings or
even pantalettes, but stockings in those days did not extend over the
knee, and old St. Angelo was sure to see that the pantalettes were well
rolled up. This method of discipline was not acceptable to parents whose
children came home with bruises and wounds. That dominie retired from
business before the forties.
Mme. Granet had a school for girls in the French municipality. Elinor
Longer, one of my most intimate friends, attended it, and she used to
tell us stories that convulsed us with laughter about Madame’s daughter.
Lina had some eye trouble, and was forbidden to “exercise the tear
glands,” but her tears flowed copiously when Madame refused to submit to
her freaks. Thus Lina managed, in a way, to run the school, having half
holidays and other indulgences so dear to the schoolgirl, at her own
sweet will.
At the haunted house (I wonder if it is still standing and still
haunted?) on Royal Street, Mme. Delarouelle had a school for
_demoiselles_. Rosa, daughter of Judge John M. Duncan, was a scholar
there. I don’t think the madame had any boarders, though the house was
large and commodious, even if it was haunted by ghosts of maltreated
negroes. The school could not under those circumstances have continued
many years, for every child knew it was dangerous to cross its portals.
Our John told me he “seed a skel’ton hand” clutching the grated front
door once, and he never walked on that side of the street thereafter. He
even knew a man “dat seen eyes widout sockets or sockets widout eyes, he
dun know which, but dey could see, all de same, and they was a looken
out’en one of the upstairs winders.” With such gruesome talk many a child
was put to bed in my young days.
Doctor, afterward Bishop Hawks, when he was rector of Christ Church, then
on Canal Street, had a school on Girod Street. It was a temporary affair
and did not continue over a season or two. It was entirely conducted by
Mrs. Hawks and her daughters, so far as I know, for, as before mentioned,
I attended none of the schools.
In 1842 there was a class in Spanish at Mr. Hennen’s house, on Royal
Street, near Canal. Señor Marino Cubi y Soler was the teacher of
that class; a very prosaic and painstaking teacher he was, too,
notwithstanding his startlingly high flown cognomen. Miss Anna Maria and
young Alfred Hennen and a Dr. Rhodes, from the Belize, as the mouth of
the Mississippi is called, with a few other grown-ups, formed the señor’s
class. I was ten years old, but was allowed to join with some other
members of my family, though my mother protested it was nonsense for a
child like me and a waste of money. Father did not agree with her, and
after over sixty years to think it over, I don’t either. When the señor’s
class dispersed I imagine the text-books, of which, by the way, he was
author, were laid aside. But years and years thereafter, during the war,
while traveling in Mexico, some of the señor’s teaching came miraculously
back to me, bringing with it enough Spanish to be of material help in
that stranger country.
Another teacher wandered from house to house with his “Telemaque” and
“colloquial phrases,” giving lessons in French. Gimarchi, from the name,
may have been partly, at least, Italian, but he was a fine teacher of
the sister language. _Por supuésto_, his itinerary was confined to the
American district of the city.
Is it any surprise that the miscellaneous education we girls of seventy
years ago in New Orleans had access to, culminated by fitting us for
housewives and mothers, instead of writers and platform speakers,
doctors and lawyers—suffragettes? Everybody was musical; every girl had
music lessons and every mother superintended the study and practice
of the one branch deemed absolutely indispensable to the education of
a _demoiselle_. The city was dotted all over with music teachers, but
Mme. Boyer was, par excellence, the most popular. She did not wander
from house to house, but the _demoiselles_, music roll in hand, repaired
to her domicile, and received instruction in a music room barely large
enough to contain a piano, a scholar and a madame who was, to say the
least, immense in bulk, the style of Creole who appears best in a black
silk _blouse volante_.
[Illustration: RICHARD HENRY CHINN
Painted by Hardin]
Art was not taught, art was not studied, art was not appreciated. I mean
by art the pencil and the brush, so busily wielded in every school now.
No doubt there were stifled geniuses whose dormant talent was never
suspected, so utterly ignored were the brush and the palette of the lover
of art. I call to mind the ability evinced by Miss Celestine Eustis in
the use of the pencil. She occasionally gave a friend a glimpse of some
of her work, of which, I regret to say, she was almost ashamed, not of
the work, but of the doing it. I recall a sketch taken of Judge Eustis’
balcony, and a group of young society men; the likenesses, unmistakably
those of George Eustis and of Destour Foucher, were striking.
M. Devoti, with his violin in a green baize bag, was a professor of
deportment and dancing. He undertook to train two gawky girls of the most
awkward age in my father’s parlor. M. Devoti wore corsets! and laced, as
the saying is, “within an inch of his life.” He wore a long-tail coat,
very full at the spider waist-line, that hung all round him, almost to
the knees, so he used it like a woman’s skirt, and could demonstrate to
the awkward girls the art of holding out their skirts with thumb and
forefinger, and all the other fingers sticking out stiff and straight.
Then curtsey! throw out the right foot, draw up the left.
Another important branch of deportment was to seat the awkwards stiffly
on the extreme edge of a chair, fold the hands on the very precarious
lap, droop the eyes in a pensive way. Then Devoti would flourish up and
present, with an astonishing salaam, a book from the center table. The
young miss was instructed how to rise, bow and receive the book, in the
most affected and mechanical style. Another exercise was to curtsey,
accept old Devoti’s arm and majestically parade round and round the
center table. The violin emerged from the baize bag, Devoti made it
screech a few notes while the trio balanced up and down, changed partners
and promenaded, till the awkwards were completely bewildered and tired
out. He then replaced the violin, made a profound bow to extended skirts
and curtseys, admonished the pupils to practice for next lesson, and
vanished. Thus ended the first lesson. Dear me! Pock-marked, spider-waist
Devoti is as plain to my eye to-day as he was in the flesh, bowing,
smiling, dancing with flourishing steps as in the days of long ago.
Were those shy girls benefited by that artificial training? I opine
not. This seems to modern eyes, mayhap, a whimsical exaggeration;
nevertheless, it is a true picture. Devoti’s style was indeed the “end
of an era”; he had no successor. Turveydrop, the immortal Turveydrop
himself, was not even an imitator. These old schools and teachers march
before my mind’s eye to-day; very vivid it all is to me, though the last
of them, and perhaps all those they tried to teach, have passed away.
Children who went to Mme. Granet and Mme. Delarouelle and Dr. Hawks and
all the other schools of that day, sent their daughters, a decade or
two later, to Mme. Desrayoux. Now she is gone and many of the daughters
gone also. And it is left to one old lady to dig out the past, and
recall, possibly to no one but herself, New Orleans schools, teachers and
scholars of seventy years ago.
III
BOARDING SCHOOL IN THE FORTIES
I wonder if the parents of the present do not sometimes contrast the
fashionable schools in which their daughters are being educated with the
fashionable schools to which their aged mothers, mayhap grandmothers,
were sent sixty and more years ago? Among my possessions that I
keep—according to the dictum of my grandchildren—“for sentimental sake,”
is a much-worn “Scholar’s Companion,” which they scorn to look at when I
bring it forth, and explain it to be the best speller that ever was; and
a bent, much overworked crochet needle of my schooldays, for we worked
with our hands as well as with our brains. The boarding school to which I
refer was not unique, but a typical New England seminary of the forties.
It was both fashionable and popular, but the young ladies were not, as
now, expected to appear at a 6 o’clock dinner in a low neck (oh, my!)
gown.
Lately, passing through the now much expanded city to which I was sent,
such a young girl, on a sailing ship from New Orleans to New York in the
early spring of 1847, I spent a half hour walking on Crown Street looking
for No. 111. It was not there, not a trace of the building of my day
left; nor was one, so far as I know, of the girls, my old schoolmates,
left; all three of the dear, painstaking teachers sleeping in the old
cemetery, at rest at last were they. Every blessed one lives in my
memory, bright and young, patient and middle-aged—all are here to beguile
my twilight hours....
The school routine was simple and precise, especially the latter. We
had duties outside the schoolroom, the performance of which was made
pleasant and acceptable, as when the freshly laundered clothes were
stacked in neat little piles on the long table of the yellow room on
Thursdays, ready for each girl to carry to her own room. There were also
neat little stacks on each girl’s desk, of personal articles requiring
repairs, buttons to replace, holes to patch, stockings to darn, and in
the schoolroom on Thursday afternoons—how some of us hated the work!—it
was examined and passed upon before we were dismissed. The long winter
evenings we were assembled in the library and one of the teachers read to
us. I remember one winter we had “Guy Mannering” and “Quentin Durward,”
Sir Walter Scott’s lovely stories. We girls were expected to bring some
work to occupy our fingers while listening to the readings, with the
comments and explanations that illuminated obscure portions we might not
comprehend.
There was an old-fashioned “high boy” (_haut bois_) in the library, in
the capacious drawers of which were unmade garments for the missionary
box. Woe unto the young lady who had no knitting, crocheting or
hemstitching of her own to do! She could sew on red flannel for the
little Hottentots! After hymn singing Sunday afternoons there was reading
from some suitably saintly book. We had “Keith’s Evidences of Prophecy”
(I have not seen a copy of that much-read and laboriously explained
volume for more than sixty years). The tension of our minds produced
by “prophecy” was mitigated once in a while by two goody-goody books,
“Lamton Parsonage” and “Amy Herbert,” both, no doubt, long out of print.
There also were stately walks to be taken twice a day for recreation;
walks down on the “Strand,” or some back street that led away from
college campus and flirtatious students. Our school happened to be too
near the college green, by the way. We marched in couples, a teacher
to lead who had eyes both before and behind, and a teacher similarly
equipped to follow. With all these precautions we—some of us were
pretty—were often convulsed beyond bounds when “we met by chance, the
only way,” on the very backest street, a procession of college fellows
on mischief bent, marching two and two, just like us. In bad weather we
were shod with what were called “gums” and wrapped in coats long and
shaggy and weighing a ton. Waterproofs were a later invention. Wet or
dry, cold or warm, those exercises had to be taken to keep us in good
physical condition. I must mention in this connection that no matter what
ailed us, in stomach or back, head or foot, we were dosed with hot ginger
tea. I do not remember ever seeing a doctor in the house, or knowing of
one being summoned. The girls hated that ginger tea, so no doubt many an
incipient headache was not reported.
With the four spinsters (we irreverently called No. 111 Old Maids’ Hall)
who lived in the house, there were scraggly, baldheaded, spectacled
teachers from outside—a monsieur who read Racine and Molière with us and
taught us _j’aime, tu aime_, which he could safely do, the snuffy old
man; a fatherly sort of Turveydrop dancing master, who cracked our feet
with his fiddle bow; a drawing master, who, because he sometimes led his
class on sketching trips up Hillhouse Avenue, was immensely popular,
and every one of us wanted to take drawing lessons. We did some water
colors, too; some of us had not one particle of artistic talent. I was
one of that sort, but I achieved a Baltimore oriole, which, years after,
my admiring husband, who also had no artistic taste, had framed and
“hung on the line” in our hall. Perhaps some Yankee may own it now, for
during the war they took everything else we had, and surely a brilliant
Baltimore oriole did not escape their rapacity!
Solid English branches were taught by the dear spinsters. We did not
skin cats and dissect them. There was no class in anatomy, but there
was a botany class, and we dissected wild flowers, which is a trifle
more ladylike. Our drilling in chirography was something to marvel at in
these days when the young people affect such complicated and involved
handwriting that is not easily decipherable. And grammar! I now slip up
in both grammar and rhetoric, but I have arrived at the failing age. We
spent the greater part of a session parsing Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and
at the closing of that book I think we knew the whole thing by heart.
Discipline was, so to say, honorary. There were rules as to study and
practice hours, and various other things. Saturday morning, after the
“Collect of the day” and prayers, when we were presumed to be in a
celestial frame of mind, each girl reported her infringement of rules—if
she was delinquent, and she generally was. That system served to make us
more truthful and conscientious than some of us might have been under a
different training.
It was expressly stipulated that no money be furnished the pupils. A
teacher accompanied us to do necessary shopping and used her discretion
in the selection. If one of us expressed the need of new shoes her entire
stock was inspected, and if a pair could be repaired it was done and
the purchase postponed. Now, bear in mind, this was not a cheap, second
rate school, but one of the best known and most fashionable. There were
several young ladies from the South among the twenty or so boarders.
The Northern girls were from the prominent New York families—Shermans,
Kirbys, Phalens, Pumpellys and Thorns. This was before the fashionables
of to-day came to the fore.
Speaking of reporting our delinquencies, we knew quite well that it was
against the custom, at least, to bring reading matter into the school.
There was a grand, large library of standard works of merit at our free
disposal. In some way “Jane Eyre” (just published) was smuggled in and
we were secretly reading it by turns. How the spinsters found it out we
never knew, but they always found out everything, so we were scarcely
surprised one Saturday morning to receive a lecture on the pernicious
character of the book “Jane Eyre,” so unlike (and alas! so much more
interesting than) Amy Herbert, with her missionary basket, her coals
and her flannel petticoats. We were questioned, not by wholesale, but
individually, if we had the book? If we had read the book? The first two
or three in the row could reply in the negative, but as interrogations
ran down the line toward the guilty ones they were all greatly relieved
when one brave girl replied, “Yes, ma’am, I am almost through, please let
me finish it.” Then “Jane” vanished from our possession.
When the Church Sewing Society met at our house, certain girls who were
sufficiently advanced in music to afford entertainment to the guests were
summoned to the parlor to play and sing, and incidentally have a lemonade
and a jumble. I was the star performer (had I not been a pupil of Cripps,
Dr. Clapp’s organist, since I was able to reach the pedal with my foot?).
My overture of “La Dame Blanche” was quite a masterpiece, but my “Battle
of Prague” was simply stunning. The “advance,” the “rattle of musketry,”
the “beating of drums” (did you ever see the music score?) I could render
with such force that the dear, busy ladies almost jumped from their
seats. There were two Kentucky girls with fine voices also invited to
entertain the guests. Alas! our fun came to an end. On one occasion when
I ended the “Battle of Prague” with a terrific bang, there was an awful
moment of silence, when one of the ladies sneezed with such unexpected
force that her false teeth careered clear across the room! Not one of the
guests saw it, or was aware that she quietly walked over and replaced
them, but we naughty girls were so brimful of fun that we exploded with
laughter. Nothing was said to us of the unfortunate contretemps, but the
musical programmes were discontinued.
College boys helped to make things lively for us, though we did not
have bowing acquaintance with one of them. Valentines poured in to us;
under doors and over fences they rained. The dear spinsters laughed
over them with us. Thanksgiving morning, when the front door was opened
for the first time, and we were assembled in the hall ready to march
to 11 o’clock church service, a gaunt, skinny, starved-to-death turkey
was found suspended to the door knob, conspicuously tied by a broad red
ribbon, with a Thanksgiving greeting painted on, so “one who ran could
read.” No doubt a good many had read and run, for there had been hours
allowed them. The dear spinsters were so mortified and shocked that we
girls had not the courage to laugh.
By reason of my distance from home, reached by a long voyage on a sailing
ship—the first steamer service between New York and New Orleans was in
the autumn of 1848, and the Crescent City was the pioneer steamer—I spent
the vacations under the benign influence of the teachers, always the only
girl left, but busy and happy, enjoying all the privileges of a parlor
boarder. I still have a book full of written directions for knitting
and crocheting, and making all sorts of old-timey needle books and
pincushions, the initial directions dated 1846, largely the collection
and record of more than one long summer vacation at that New England
school. What girl of to-day would submit to such training and routine?
What boarding school, seminary or college is to-day conducted on such
lines? Not one that you or I know. The changes in everything, in every
walk of life, from the simple in my day and generation to the complicated
of the present, sets me to moralizing. Like all old people who are not
able to take an active interest in the present, I live in the past,
where the disappointments and heartaches, for surely we must have had
our share, are forgotten. We old people live in the atmosphere of a day
dead—and gone—and glorified!
IV
PICAYUNE DAYS
The first time I ever saw a penny was at school in Yankeeland in 1847.
It was given me to pay the man for bringing me a letter from the
postoffice—10 cents postage, 1 cent delivery, in those days. People had
to get their mail at the office. There was no free delivery. Certain
neighborhoods of spinsters, however—the college town was full of
such—secured the services of a lame, halt or blind man to bring their
letters from the office to their door once a day for the stipend of a
penny each.
There was no coin in circulation of less value than a picayune where
was my home. A picayune, which represented so little value that a miser
was called picayunish, at the same time represented such a big value
that we children felt rich when we had one tied in the corner of our
handkerchief. At the corner of Chartres and Canal Streets was a tiny
soda fountain, where one could get a glass of soda for a picayune—or
mead. We children liked mead. I never see it now, but, as I recall,
it was a thick, honey, creamy drink. We must have preferred it because
it seemed so much more for a picayune than the frothy, effervescent,
palish soda water. It was a great lark to go with Pa and take my glass of
mead, while he ordered ginger syrup (of all things!) with his soda. The
changing years bring gold mines, greenbacks, tariffs, labor exactions and
_nouveaux riches_, and a penny now buys about what a picayune did in my
day. One pays a penny for ever so big a newspaper to-day. A picayune was
the price of a small sheet in my time.
[Illustration: MARKET DOORWAY.]
Many of us must remember the colored _marchandes_ who walked the street
with trays, deftly balanced on their heads, arms akimbo, calling out
their dainties, which were in picayune piles on the trays—six small
celesto figs, or five large blue ones, nestling on fig leaves; lovely
popcorn tic tac balls made with that luscious “open kettle” sugar, that
dear, fragrant brown sugar no one sees now. Pralines with the same sugar;
why, we used it in our coffee. A few years ago, visiting dear Mrs. Ida
Richardson, I reveled in our breakfast coffee. “I hope you preserve your
taste for brown sugar coffee?” she said. I fairly jumped at the treat.
But a _marchande_ is passing up the street, and if I am a little girl, I
beg a picayune for a praline; if I am an old lady, I invest a picayune
in a leaf with six _figues célestes_. Mme. Chose—I don’t give any more
definite name, for it is a sub rosa venture on her part—had a soirée
last night. Madame buys her _chapeaux_ of Olympe, and her _toilettes_
from Pluche or Ferret, and if her home is way down, even below Esplanade
Street, where many Creoles live, she is thrifty and frugal. So this
morning a chocolate-colored _marchande_, who usually vends picayune
bouquets of violets from madame’s _parterre_, has her tray filled with
picayune stacks of broken nougat pyramid and candied orange and macaroons
very daintily arranged on bits of tissue paper. I vividly recall
encountering way down Royal Street, where no one was loitering to see me,
this chocolate _marchande_, and recognizing the delicacies of a ball the
previous night. I was on my way to call on Mrs. Garnet Duncan, the dear,
delightful woman who was such a _gourmande_, and I knew how delicious
were those sweets; no one could excel a Creole madame in this confection.
So I invested a few picayunes in some of the most attractive, carrying
off to my sweet friend what I conveniently could. How she did enjoy them!
And how she complained I had not brought more! The _mesdames_ of that
date are gone; gone also, no doubt, are the _marchandes_ they sent forth.
It was a very picayunish sort of business, but labor did not count, for
one was not paying $20 a month for the reluctant services of a chocolate
lady.
Then again, in the early morning, when one, _en papilottes_, came down
to breakfast, listless and “out of sorts,” the chant of the cream cheese
woman would be heard. A rush to the door with a saucer for a cheese, a
tiny, heart-shaped cheese, a dash of cream poured from a claret bottle
over it—all this for a picayune! How nice and refreshing it was. What
a glorious addition to the breakfast that promised to pall on one’s
appetite.
Picayune was the standard coin at the market. I wonder what is now?
Soup bone was _un escalin_ (two picayunes), but one paid for the soup
vegetables, a bit of cabbage, a leek, a sprig of parsley, a tiny carrot,
a still tinier turnip, all tied in a slender package. A _cornet_ of fresh
gumbo _filé_, a bunch of horse-radish roots, a little sage, parsley,
herbs of every sort in packages and piles, a string of dried grasshoppers
for the mocking bird, “_un picayun_,” the Indian or black woman squatting
on the _banquette_ at the old French Market would tell you.
A picayune was the smallest coin the richly appareled madame or the poor
market negro could put in the collection box as she paused on her way at
the Cathedral to tell her beads. There was no occasion for the priest
to rebuke his flock for niggardliness. They may have been picayunish,
but not to the extent of the congregation of one of the largest Catholic
churches I wot of to-day, where the fathers were so tired counting
pennies that it was announced from the pulpit: “No more pennies must be
put in the box. We spend hours every week counting and stacking pennies,
and it is a shocking waste of time. If you are so destitute that you
can’t afford at least a nickel to your church, come to the vestry, after
mass, and we will look into your needs and give you the relief the church
always extends to her poor.”
The shabby old negro, with her heavy market basket, returning home, no
doubt needing the prayers of her patron saint or some other churchly
office, filched the picayune from the carefully counted market money. I
know, no matter how carefully my mother doled the market fund to John,
he always contrived to secure a picayune out of it, and for no saint,
either, but for old Coffee-stand Palmyre.
Do not we old ladies remember the picayune dolls of our childhood? The
wooden jointed dolls, the funny little things we had to play with, every
feature, even hair and yellow earrings, painted on little, smooth bullet
heads. They could be made to sit down and to crook their arms, but no
ingenuity could make them stand a-loney. How we loved those little wooden
dolls! We do not see a pauper child, not even a poor little blackie,
with a picayune doll nowadays. I really believe we—I am talking of old
ladies now—were happier, and had more fun with our picayune family than
the little girls of the present day have with their $10 dolls, with glass
eyes that are sure to fall out and long curls that are sure to tangle. We
had no fears about the eyes and hair of our picayunes.
The picayune, whose memory I invoke, was a Spanish coin, generally worn
pretty thin and often having a small hole in it. I remember my ambition
was to accumulate enough picayunes to string on a thread for an ornament.
It is unnecessary to say that in those thrifty days my ambition was not
gratified. It is more than fifty years since I have seen one of those old
6¼ cent picayunes. I have a stiff, wooden corset board that I sometimes
take out to show to my granddaughter when I find her “stooping,” that
she may see the instrument that made grandma so straight. I would like
to have a picayune to add to my very limited collection of relics. They
flourished at the same era and have together vanished from our homes and
shops.
We all must have known some “picayune people.” There was a family living
near us who owned and occupied a large, fine home on St. Joseph Street,
while we and the Grimshaws and Beins lived in rented houses near by.
They had, besides, a summer home “over the lake” (and none of us had!).
Often, on Mondays, a fish, or a quart of shrimp, or something else in the
“over the lake” line, was sent to one of us, for sale. We used to laugh
over the littleness of the thing. A quart of shrimp for a picayune was
cheap and tempting, but none of us cared to buy of our rich neighbor. The
climax came when an umbrella went the rounds for inspection. It was for
raffle! Now, umbrellas, like pocket handkerchiefs, are always useful and
never go out of fashion. With one accord, we declined chances in the
umbrella.
I feel I am, for the fun of the thing, dragging forth a few skeletons
from closets, but I do not ticket them, so no harm is done. In fact, if I
ever knew, I have long since forgotten the name to tack onto the umbrella
skeleton. And the fashionable madame who sent out on the streets what a
lady we knew called the “perquisites” of her soirée supper has left too
many well-known descendants. I would scorn to ticket the skeleton of that
frugal and thrifty madame. There are no more umbrellas for a picayunish
skeleton to raffle, no more such delicious sweets for the madame to stack
into picayune piles, and, alack-a-day! no more picayunes, either.
V
DOMESTIC SCIENCE SEVENTY YEARS AGO
Housekeeping is vastly simplified since the days when my mother washed
her teacups and spoons every morning. I love the old way; however, I
do not practise it. If my grandchildren were to see the little wooden
piggin brought me on a tray after breakfast, and see me wash the silver
and glass they would think grandma has surely lost her mind. That purely
domestic housewifely habit lasted long after my mother had passed away.
It still is the vogue in many a New England household, but no doubt is
among the lost virtues South. When I was a young lady and occasionally
(oh, happy times!) spent a few days with the Slocombs, I always saw Mrs.
Slocomb and her aged mother, dear old Mrs. Cox, who tremblingly loved to
help, pass the tea things through their own delicate hands every morning.
So it was at Mrs. Leonard Matthews’, and so it was in scores of wealthy
homes.
Though we had ever so many servants, our family being a large one, my
semi-invalid mother, who rarely left her home and never made visits, did
a thousand little household duties that are now, even in families where
only one or two servants are kept, entirely ignored by the ladies of the
house. After a dinner party or an evening entertainment, and my father
was hospitably inclined—much beyond his means—my mother passed all the
silver, glass and china through her own delicate fingers, and we did not,
as I recall after all this lapse of years, have anything of superlative
value. It was not a matter of thrift or economy on her part, but a matter
of course; everybody did the same.
After a visit to a New England family several years ago I was telling
a Creole friend of the lovely old India china that had been in daily
use over three generations. The reply was: “Oh, but they did not have
a Christophe.” No doubt they had had several Christophes, but they
never had a chance to wash those valuable cups. In the days of long ago
housewives did not have negligées with floating ribbons and smart laces.
They had calico gowns that a splash of water could not ruin.
[Illustration: A NEW ORLEANS YARD AND CISTERN.]
Household furniture—I go back full seventy years—was simple and easily
cared for. Carpets were generally what was known as “three-ply.” I don’t
see them now, but in places, on humble floors, I see imitation Brussels
or some other counterfeit. The first carpet I ever saw woven in one
piece, like all the rugs so plentiful now (and that was at a much later
date) was on the parlor floor of the Goodman house, on Toulouse Street,
the home so full of bright young girls I so loved to visit. There was
no concern to take away carpets to be cleaned and stored in the summer.
Carpets were taken to some vacant lot and well beaten. The neutral green
on Canal Street, green and weedy it was, too, was a grand place to shake
carpets; no offense given if one carried them beyond Claiborne Street
where were no pretentious houses. Then those carpets were thickly strewn
with tobacco leaves, rolled up and stored in the garret, if you had one.
Every house did not boast of that convenience.
Curtains were not satin damask. At the Mint when Joe Kennedy was
superintendent, and his family were fashionable people, their parlor
curtains were some red cotton stuff, probably what is known as turkey
red; there was a white and red-figured border; they were looped over gilt
rods meant to look like spears and muskets, in deference, I suppose, to
the military side of that government building, for there were sentinels
and guards stationed around about that gave the whole concern a most
imposing and military air.
I remember at the Breedloves’ home there were net curtains (probably
mosquito net), with a red border. They were thought rather novel and
stylish. There were no madras, no Irish point, no Nottingham curtains
even, so one did not have a large variety to choose from.
People had candelabras, and some elaborate affairs—they called them
girandoles—to hold candles; they had heavy crystal drops that tinkled
and scintillated and were prismatic and on the whole were rather fine.
The candles in those gorgeous stands and an oil lamp on the inevitable
center-table were supposed to furnish abundance of light for any
occasion. When my sister dressed for a function she had two candles to
dress by (so did I ten years later!), and two dusky maids to follow her
all about, and hold them at proper points so the process of the toilet
could be satisfactorily accomplished. Two candles without shades—nobody
had heard of shades—were sufficient for an ordinary tea table. I was
a grown girl, fresh from school, when I saw the first gaslight in a
private house, at Mrs. Slocomb’s, on St. Charles Street. People sewed,
embroidered, read and wrote and played chess evenings by candlelight, and
except a few near-sighted people and the aged no one used glasses. There
was not an oculist (a specialist, I mean) in the whole city.
Every woman had to sew. There were well-trained seamstresses in every
house; no “ready-mades,” no machines. Imagine the fine hand-sewing on
shirt bosoms, collars and cuffs. I can hear my mother’s voice now, “Be
careful in the stitching of that bosom; take up two and skip four,” which
I early learned meant the threads of the linen. What a time there was
when the boys grew to tailor-cut pantaloons! Cut by a tailor, sewed at
home, what a to-do there was when Charley had his first tail-coat; he
could not sit on the tails, they were too short, so he made an uproar.
I recall also how I cried when sister’s old red and black “shot silk”
dress was made over for me, and I thought I was going to be so fine (I
was nine years old then and was beginning to “take notice”). The goods
fell short, and I had to have a black, low neck, short-sleeve waist. In
vain I was told it was velvet and ever so stylish and becoming. I knew
better. However, that abbreviated dress and those abbreviated tails did
duty at the dancing school.
But we have wandered from house furnishings to children’s clothes. We
will go upstairs now and take a look at the ponderous four-poster bed,
with its awful tester top, that covered it like a flat roof. That tester
was ornamented with a wall paper stuff, a wreath of impossible red and
yellow roses, big as saucers, stamped on it, and four strands of same
roses reaching to the four corners of the monstrosity. The idea of
lying, with a raging fever or a splitting headache, under such a canopy!
However, there were “swells” (there always are “swells”) who had testers
covered with silk.
I hear a rumor that furniture covered with horse-hair cloth is about to
come to the fore again. Everybody in my early day had black haircloth
furniture; maybe that was one reason red curtains were preferred, for
furniture covered with black haircloth was fearfully funereal. However,
as no moth devoured it, dust did not rest on its slick, shiny surface,
and it lasted forever, it had its advantages. Every household possessed a
haircloth sofa, with a couple of hard, round pillows of the same, the one
too slippery to nap on and the others regular break-necks.
[Illustration: DOOR IN THE FRENCH MARKET.]
Butler’s pantry! My stars! Who ever heard of a butler’s pantry, and
sinks, and running water, and faucets inside houses? The only running
water was a hydrant in the yard; the only sink was the gutter in the
yard; the sewer was the gutter in the street, so why a butler’s pantry?
To be sure there was a cistern for rainwater, and jars like those
Ali Baba’s forty thieves hid themselves in. Those earthen jars were
replenished from the hydrant, and the muddy river water “settled” by the
aid of almond hulls or alum.
Of course, every house had a storeroom, called pantry, to hold supplies.
It was lined with shelves, but the only light and air was afforded by a
half-moon aperture cut into a heavy batten door. We had wire safes on
the back porch and a zinc-lined box for the ice—nothing else—wrapped
in a gray blanket, gray, I presume, on the same principle we children
preferred pink cocoanut cakes—they kept clean longer than the white! Ice
was in general use but very expensive. It was brought by ship from the
North, in hogsheads.
For the kitchen there were open fireplaces with a pot hanging from a
crane, skillets and spiders. We don’t even hear the names of those
utensils now. By and by an enterprising housewife ventured on a cook
stove. I have a letter written by one such, dated in New Orleans in 1840,
in which she descants on the wonders achieved by her stove. “Why, Susan,
we baked three large cakes in it at one time.” In the old way it required
a spider for each cake.
There were no plated knives, but steel, and they had to be daily scoured
with “plenty brickdust on your knife board,” but those knives cut like
razors. There was no bric-a-brac, few pictures, nothing ornamental in
the parlors. One house I remember well had a Bunker Hill monument,
made, I guess, of stucco, and stuck all over with gay seashells; it was
perhaps 25 or 30 inches high; it made a most commanding appearance on the
center-table. When my sister made a tiresomely long call at that house it
amused me to try to count the shells.