As they grew older, the association of the two girls, in spite of
the affection between them--perhaps because of it--began to
present almost daily problems and embarrassments. Ellen's health
was worse, her nerves were shattered, and she clung with more and
more insistence to this one healthy companion, who responded with
a tireless devotion. Coming in from her wholesome outdoor life
and her triumphs at school--where she always stood high--Ma'Lou
brought to the sick room a very wind of comfort and cheer, which
Mrs. Kendrick had not the heart to deny her pining young invalid.
Once, when she spoke apprehensively of the matter to her husband,
Scott Kendrick answered with astonishment:
"Why, Fanny, it's only a question of health--a little bodily
improvement. We'd break it off to-morrow if Ellen was well.
You'll see; there would never be any more of it if I could send
her away for that operation."
But the white people had not, as they supposed, this anxiety all
to themselves. The timid, conservative, colored mother regarded
the friendship with growing anxiety. And before Scott Kendrick
got together the money to send Ellen to Baltimore, Ezra Jackson's
wife had coaxed her husband into letting Mary Louise go North to
school. The Watauga public schools, with a term or two of Fiske,
at Nashville, afterward, had been good enough for the other
children. But the mother craved wider opportunities for this, her
youngest; money was freer with them now; and Mary Louise went to
a preparatory school, then to Oberlin.
Ellen Kendrick returned from the hands of the surgeons in
Baltimore much improved in health. She was sent back twice
afterward for treatment. Finally she walked as well as other
girls, and hastily made up her arrears of education, as best she
might, at a private school in Watauga. She would always be frail;
the invalid habit had gotten into both mind and body; she would
continue dependent, demanding; and somewhat irritable; yet there
was a fragile prettiness about her, and her very childishness had
its own charm.
Mary Louise Jackson passed one of two vacations at home; but, as
time went on, there were opportunities for her to have trips of
an educational nature, and one summer was spent at a Chautauqua
taking a special course, so that after the first break in their
association the two girls saw almost nothing of each other till
they were women grown. There had been some letters; yet what the
white girl had always demanded and received from her friend could
not come through the mails, and the neglected correspondence
finally died a natural death.
There was one person in Watauga, however, to whom Mary Louise
wrote, and from whom she received letters regularly--Ulysses
Grant Payson, the washerwoman's son, with whom she had gone to
school. Grant Payson was a sober, ambitious, industrious fellow,
who seemed to feel from childhood the weight of responsibility
for his people. A widow's only boy, he had worked hard and
studied hard. With a very fair mental endowment, he was able to
get what the Watauga public schools could give him, secure a few
years training at Nashville, then read law.
And, when, after her graduation, Mary Louise returned to her
father's home, a very well-educated young lady indeed, wearing
glasses and looking older than her years, she found Grant
established in a good practice, and with some other prospects
that were, for a colored man, flattering. Both families knew that
Grant wanted Ma'Lou. Whether the girl would marry him and settle
down in Watauga had been a matter of anxiety, often talked over
between the two mothers. For they also knew of and discussed
Ma'Lou's opportunity to take a position as private secretary to
one of the instructors in her college. They understood that it
was a situation which would pay fairly well, and give her
associates who gained an added glory in the minds of these humble
folk by their distance. In short, it would be a foothold in the
white people's world; and Grant Payson's mother trembled for her
son, while the mother of Mary Jackson feared to lose, once for
all, her daughter. The two Southern-bred black women could see in
such things as the girl reported only the wiping out of all race
barrier, the sudden achievement of equality. Had Mary Louise been
asked, no doubt she could have told them of a social ban at the
North quite as definite as that in Watauga, if different; but her
father's daughter kept a silence that was not without dignity
over what she found irremediable, in the North as in the South.
To warm-hearted Mary Louise, Watauga meant, of course, father and
mother; but directly after them--perhaps before them, in the
calendar of youth--it meant Ellen Kendrick and Grant Payson. And
the colored elders, looking on, felt that as these twin idols of
the girl turned out, so rose or fell the chances of keeping her
with them in Watauga.
Grant instituted at once a courtship as ardent and eager as it
was open and avowed. His people, florid and colorful in
temperament, are natural wooers, free of the language of
affection and adroit in its use. Grant was very much in love with
the girl, and she meant even more to him than that, since in
aspiring to her his ambition stepped hand in hand with his
affections.
Mary Louise received his advances with curious reservations, as
though there were positions and premises she defended against
him.
It was when the girl's visit was three weeks old that the
fine-looking, broad-shouldered, young colored man in his
well-fitting business suit--a goodly figure in the eyes of the
mother watching from her own room across the hall--left the
parlor where he and Mary Louise had been sitting all evening,
with so doleful a countenance that the older woman had a quickly
suppressed impulse to go to him and speak. She did open the
subject to the girl next morning, approaching it obliquely. In
her own day a very progressive person, she felt that her daughter
had far outstripped her, and she offered advice but timidly to
this tall, perfectly dressed young woman who seemed so competent
in all the affairs of life, and who knew so much more than she
did upon many subjects. But after a little profitless skirmishing
she came out with:
"Looks like you must have said something hard to Grant last
night--he never came in to say good-by to me. Ain't you going to
have him, Ma'Lou? Don't you care anything about him?"
"I care a great deal about Grant," Mary Louise told her, in a
voice of pain. "I could love him dearly--if I'd let myself. But,
mother, I just can't settle down to live here in Watauga. There's
nobody and nothing here for me."
The woman looked at her child, and her mind misgave her sorely
that she had done wrong to send the girl away among an alien
people, where she would learn to despise her own.
"You're still grievin' about Ellen Kendrick," she said finally.
"If I were you I wouldn't let that go the way it has. Don't--"
she hesitated, with eyes full of helpless solicitude upon her
daughter's face--"honey, don't wait for any sign from Ellen,
because you won't get it. You just take those postal cards that
you got for her on your Canadian trip, and some morning you step
over to the side door and ask for her, if you want to see her. I
know she thinks a great deal of you. She's stopped me on the
street more than once and asked all about you and what you were
doing. I don't see why you shouldn't go to the side door and go
in and have a nice little visit with her."
Mary Louise considered this suggestion at some length. She had
the wider outlook which some travel gives, and, in Oberlin, she
had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her
mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving
she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of
her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood,
overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down
in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to
the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick
answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that
suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having a
little party that evening, and the colored girl would perhaps be
in the way. Among the guests bidden were two young men, upon
either one of whom Mrs. Kendrick looked with a hopeful maternal
eye, and nothing could be less desirable than for her daughter to
seem to "even herself with negroes" in the eyes of these possible
suitors.
"Shall I stop and see Ellen a minute, or may I just leave these
with you, Mrs. Kendrick?" asked the tall, brown-skinned young
woman finally.
"Oh, come in--come right in here to the dining room and sit
down," said the mistress of the house, remembering with a twinge
how much she owed to this girl. "Ellen will be crazy about these.
She's got a postal card album, and she hasn't anything in it from
Canada. Ellen! Come downstairs, honey; Ma'Lou Jackson has brought
you something pretty."
But even as she called up the stairway, and heard the quick
response from above, it crossed Mrs. Kendrick's mind that her
daughter would not be willing to put these postal cards in her
album, for she would be ashamed to tell from whom they came.
She was annoyed when Ellen came flying down the stairs, her thin,
blond hair all about her shoulders, and caught both the
newcomer's hands--the mother feared for a moment that she would
kiss her old playmate.
"And then if somebody saw it through the window, and went and
told young Emery Ford or Mr. Hyatt, I don't know what on earth I
should do," reflected the careworn matron.
"Mamma, do come and look at these lovely postals," Ellen cried
effusively a little later, as her mother, plainly ill at ease,
passed through the room. "I'm going to pull out those that Cousin
Rob sent me from Texas, and put these in right after the
California ones. See here, mamma; isn't this one beautiful?
Ma'Lou was there a week. She's put a little cross over the hotel
where they stayed."
Mrs. Kendrick looked at the strong, well-developed figure of her
guest, and a certain dull anger arose in her mind. Why did health
and money both go to this inferior creature, when they were
lacking in higher quarters? Perhaps this prompted her query;
"That hotel? It's a big one, isn't it? Did they--could you----?"
She broke off, and Mary Louise supplied, innocently enough: "Oh,
they didn't let us travel during school term. This was a vacation
trip."
She had been long away from the South; in the protective
conditions of Oberlin she had been measurably free from the
wounding of race prejudice; and now she failed to realize that
Mrs. Kendrick's curiosity was as to whether she had been
permitted to go to a hotel with white people.
Old Dicey's place in the kitchen had long been supplied by a
negress of the newer generation--"the worst gossip and tattler in
town," if you might take her mistress's word for it. Mrs.
Kendrick now made her way thither, ostensibly to superintend the
preparation of the evening's refreshments, but in reality to try
to fix up an explanation of why Ezra Jackson's daughter sat
visiting in the dining room with the young lady of the house.
"Because if Penny goes out and tells her friends, every darky in
town'll be retailing the story to the folks that hire them, and
it'll soon be all over the place."
She came back into the dining room to find Ellen glowing with
enthusiasm. Yes, her mind was still that of a sick child; she had
dropped back into her old-time attitude toward Mary Louise.
"Mamma, Ma'Lou says that they used to give lunches at the
college, and fix the floral centerpiece so it would all come
apart, and each guest could draw a bunch of it with a ribbon. Oh,
I don't understand very well, but she can tell you--it's just
beautiful, and we could make it out of the chrysanthemums in the
side yard, she says."
Mrs. Kendrick looked uneasy. But there was no window in the
dining room which commanded the street except the side light of
the bay, and at it Ellen herself sat. Nobody passing would be apt
to see Mary Louise over in the room.
"I reckon we can't go into those things," she objected, a little
irritably. "I suppose Ma'Lou has seen a heap of fine doings up
North that we couldn't possibly attempt."
"But she's promised to make me a lot of cute little candies--like
potatoes, and put them in paper baskets--to go at each plate,"
put in Ellen, jealously.
The brown-faced girl nodded and laughed, with a quick flash of
white teeth. It was plain she was taking the attitude of an older
person talking to a child about a juvenile party to which there
could be no question of invitation, and Mrs. Kendrick's fears
rather subsided. She was safe, if only Ellen would show some
sense and judgment.
"Well, I must go on home, now, if I'm to make those candies and
have them ready by this evening," said Ezra Jackson's daughter,
getting to her feet. "They take a good while to harden properly."
Ellen went with her to the side door, clinging to her arm and
insisting on some last remark. Mrs. Kendrick, in an agony of
apprehension, hovered in the background.
"Oh, well," said the daughter of the house finally, "I won't
bother you any more about it now, Ma'Lou. It's hard for you to
explain just how to fix it, but you can show me when you come
over this evening. I'll have the chrysanthemums ready. You come a
little early--won't you, please?"
Mary Louise, in the doorway, glanced from mother to daughter in
some confusion. Would this do? Her own mother had cautioned her
to be certain to go to the side door.
"I--I don't know," she hesitated doubtfully. "I'll bring the
candies over, if you like, and I might be able to show you a
little about the table then." And again she looked from the face
of the girl who had been her childhood's most intimate friend and
associate to that of the woman who had accepted so much at her
childish hands.
"Why, I supposed you'd be here when I was giving the party,
Ma'Lou," argued Ellen petulantly. "I don't see why not! Isn't it
all right, mother?" she appealed sharply. "Shouldn't Ma'Lou come
over this evening?"
For one desperate moment Mrs. Kendrick sought to shape a policy;
Ellen's words sounded frightfully like an invitation to the
party. Would Mary Louise accept them so? Her worried, resentful
glance traveled over the tall, dignified figure, the correct,
quiet costume. Oh, it had no business to be as hard as this! But
she must make the girl understand; she could not run the risk of
injury to Ellen's belated social opportunities.
"Why--you see--we--" she began, in an agony of embarrassment, "we
can't--we can't--" Her voice failed her. She looked fleetingly at
Mary Louise, who returned the gaze with a look hurt, accusing,
difficult to meet. She drew her breath sharply, and began again
with more resolution. "We'll have an extra maid in to help with
the serving. If you don't mind staying in the dining room with
her--" She ceased and waited hopefully, to see if the girl
understood. There was an uncertain silence. She must finish.
"Ma'Lou, if you'd stay in the dining room with Tillie, and
wouldn't mind wearing a--cap--and apron like she does, why you
could come over and look on."
Ellen Kendrick had seen somebody coming down the street. It was
Emory Ford, and she flushed and dimpled and smiled as she bowed
to him, forgetting everything else, including the departing Mary
Louise, who, after one mute look at Mrs. Kendrick's flushed,
disturbed face, turned and walked with hanging head toward the
house on the corner.
Arrived at home, she went methodically to work upon the promised
candies and the little baskets that were to contain them. Ezra
Jackson's wife, noting the face of set misery, forbore long to
question her as she brought out the novel materials and pursued
her work.
The afternoon wore on. Mrs. Jackson was at work at her
sewing-machine in the front hall; but she could not keep out of
the kitchen, she made continual futile errands through it, giving
anxious, sidelong glances at the child over whom her heart
yearned.
Finally, when she could bear it no more, "Did--did something hurt
your feelings over there, Ma'Lou?" she asked huskily.
She spoke behind her daughter's shoulder. The girl set the last
finished basket in its place in the row before she turned to
answer. Then she showed a face so much more cheerful and composed
than the elder woman had dared hope for that the relief was
almost revulsion.
"Sit down, mother," said Mary Lou, pushing a chair with her foot.
"Sit there while I fill the baskets, and I'll tell you about it."
The mother sat and watched the deft brown fingers, and marveled
at the girl's collected manner, her quiet, even voice. For Ezra
Jackson's wife was shaken by alternate gusts of anger and hurt
pride, of shame and fear, as, with a judicial fairness
extraordinary in one of her years and sex, the girl went over the
details of that unhappy visit. The old teamster had given his
child a heritage of rare good sense. Early in the recital the
woman broke in bitterly with:
"And yet you're making candies for her party? Such as that is all
they want of you. I wouldn't do it. And I'd never step foot in
their house again!"
"Why, mother, I'd certainly make these. I promised them," said
Mary Louise mildly. She put the last tiny candy potato in place,
pushed back the basket, wiped her hands, and turned fully to her
mother. "But you're exactly right about not entering Judge
Kendrick's house again," she said, with increasing emphasis. "I
can't go in at the front door as a friend--that's true; I can't.
I certainly sha'n't go in at the back door as a
servant--and--I've thought it all out now--I see it plain--our
people make a great mistake when they hang around the side doors
of white folks. There's no way but----"
"Don't say it, honey!" gasped the mother "Wait a minute." This
was the end, and she could not quite face it. She was to lose her
youngest and dearest. Mary Lou was going back North to live among
the white people. Her head went down on the table the convulsed
face hidden in her arms. Then broke forth the cry of the blood:
"Oh, Lord! I reckon I'm just another fool nigger woman that's
raised a child too good for her own color. I wish I was dead--I
wish I was dead!"
"Mother--mother!" The girl flung herself on her knees beside the
chair, and caught at the other's dress. "Don't take on that way.
You don't understand. I'm--look around here--I'm glad of what
happened over there to-day. It's shown me the truth about a good
many things. We're all black people together. It's the only way
for us now. I'm not going back to be Professor Sheridan's
secretary--a black woman among white people. I'm going to marry
Grant--he's everything to me; these people are nothing--and
settle right down here in Watauga with him--and be happy and
useful. Mother, you didn't make any mistake in the way you
brought me up. I'll be a credit and a comfort to you yet."
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Vol. XXIII No. 1 JULY 1910