Complete Short Stories (26 page)

New Orleans,
February 1st, 1955.

DEAR
R
OBERT
G
RAVES
,

We spent an interesting day tracking down the Whitaker-negroes, after camping for a night in the Mississippi woods – a wretched night because this was the hardest
frost of the winter. But the early morning sun was startlingly warm and the fields beautiful; no wind blew and thin, erect strings of smoke came from the small shacks along the road.

Pond is not on the map, so we took the road to Fort Adams until we came to a very lovely old plantation home, where one Rip White directed us to the Whitaker plantation. But he was far more anxious to tell us about
his own house, which ‘had been granted to Henry Stewart, son of Mary Queen of Scots about 180 years ago’. Henry was ‘a contender to the Throne’, so they shipped him off to America, where he was given this plantation of 2,200 acres to keep him quiet and occupied. The house did have a royal air, but I was a little troubled by the discrepancy in date between Mary Queen of Scots and King George III,
and between the names Stewart and Stuart!

When we reached the plantation, we met Mr Whitaker, the owner, who was going somewhere in a hurry, but told us that the old mansion some way back in the fields had been demolished a few years before. (Its place was now taken by a large, hard-looking, unromantic modern bungalow.) He also told us that the land had been split up at the same time between
the various Whitaker sons – which didn’t seem to coincide with Will Price’s story that the land had been deeded to the State,
unless perhaps a brother of the man who committed suicide had contested the deed of gift and won it back. Anyhow, Mr Whitaker advised us to ask Mrs Ray about the story; she had raised all the Whitaker whites for two or three generations.

Dear old Mrs Ray gave us interesting
recollections of what her mother and father had told her as a child: how, when the overseer had whipped a slave over a log for not picking enough cotton, the rest would creep out of the plantation after dark and go into a ‘holler’ – bending their heads low down so as not to be heard, they would sing and pray for freedom. But she had no stories about Whitaker-negroes.

At Woodville, a small town
on the way to Pond, we visited the Court House to look for records of the original George Whitaker. There we found an intelligent official, Mr Leek, who had actually met some of the Whitaker-negroes, when he helped them to fill up questionnaires during the Second World War. He told us that they were dying out fast. In winter, he said, they wore ordinary clothes; in summer, heavy underclothes soaked
in water. The Court House records, however, did not show that any Whitaker land had been deeded to the State since 1804, when they began. Mr Leek’s explanation of why the Whitaker-negroes were so called was that the first sufferer had ‘Whitaker’ as his Christian name.

At last we reached Pond. Pond Post Office is a big, barn-like structure which, as in the days of trading-posts, carries everything
and deals in sacks of flour and rolls of cotton; the large, serene pond mentioned by Will Price lay at the foot of the hill. Mr Carroll Smith, the postmaster in succession to Mr Lemnowitz, sold us some safety-pins. He was small and silver-haired, with sensitive brown eyes. At first he showed a certain reticence when we questioned him, but gradually shed it. He confirmed that very few Whitaker-negroes
are left, and said that they lived on the plantations, not in the swamps. Nowadays, only one member of a family of five or six children would inherit the disease. Occasionally a Whitaker-negro visited the Post Office, which was always an unpleasant experience, because the glandular excretions emitted through his mouth conveyed an appalling odour of decay. Mr Smith had never heard the story
of George Whitaker’s suicide and believed, with Mr Leek, that the original sufferer was an immigrant negro from Virginia. He suggested that we should visit a Mr McGeehee in Pinckneyville, the nearest village, who had a couple of Whitaker-negroes working for him. He would say no more on the subject, after that, though we talked for some time about share-cropping. So we drove on.

Mr McGeehee’s
plantation was very English, with a tree-lined driveway running through park-like meadows (where Herefords and Red Devons grazed) to a big, unpretentious house. Mr McGeehee
himself was most hospitable; so was his mother, a gentle old lady, looking like a pressed flower. We chatted politely in the spacious drawing-room about farming and children and plantation houses; but both the McGeehees remained
emphatic that we must not meet the two Whitaker-negroes working for them. Mr McGeehee, very rightly, felt responsible for his employees and said that too many sightseers had come to stare at the pair recently, which made them sensitive. So my husband and I did not press the point; and, in any case, we felt the point slipping away from us. A group of people with a strange history, living in odd
conditions and with a bizarre inheritance, are one thing; and a few sufferers from skin disease, who happen to have been born into normal families, are quite another.

In the 1930s, apparently, Will Price found them living in a group, and this was natural because they are not popular with the other negroes, for obvious reasons; and he must have gone there in the summer, when their distinctive
habits were more conspicuous. As for the story of their origin, it seems probable that Mr Lemnowitz heard it from some source, now lost, which was as untrustworthy as that of Rip White’s legend about ‘Henry Stewart, the Contender to the Throne’.

A novel feature of the countryside which may interest you is that plantation owners have begun to import Brahmini cattle – instead of orchids – from
the Far East. These withstand heat and drought better than other breeds, and make good store cattle; I saw many of them grazing in the fields – silky-grey in colour, with huge horned heads. The bulls were humped like camels, and added a richness to the Pond landscape.

Yours sincerely,
Anna Lobstein.

This calm and practical travelogue has dispelled my haunting nightmare for ever. Terror gives
way to pity; the pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte, together with the rogue Choctaws and Chickasaws, are banished to the realms of macabre legend. Only the hospitable Mr McGeehee and his gentle old mother, who resembles a pressed flower, are left on the stage; in charge of two sensitive sufferers from hereditary ectodermal dysplasia of the anhydrotic type, whose principal purpose in life is to herd
silky-grey Brahmini cattle in lush parkland – a far more agreeable example of
symbiosis
than the one reported by Will Price.

– TRíN-TRíN-TRíN!

–
Speak to me!

– Is that the house of Gravés? Can one talk with Don Roberto?

– At the apparatus! On behalf of whom?

– I am Don Blas Mas y Mas.
-

– A thousand pardons, Don Blas. In consequence of the bad telephone connection I did not fix in my mind that it was you.

– How do you find yourself, Don Roberto?

– Very rickety well, thanks be to God!

– I celebrate
it. And your graceful spouse?

– Regrettably she is a trifle catarrhed.

– I much lament it. And the four beautiful children?

– For the present, thanks be to the saints, well enough. I feel overwhelmed by your amicable inquiries. But you, Don Blas? How goes it with you?

– A stupidity has occurred to me. I am speaking from my uncle’s private clinic, having broken my arm in various places.

–
Ai, Ai, Ai! I feel it painfully… What a most disgraceful event! I wager that it somehow had relations with motor-bicycles.

– Mathematically correct, Don Roberto!

– Does the arm molest you so much as to prevent you from recounting me the accident?

– Confiding it to so formal and sympathetic a friend as Don Roberto would be an alleviation, although truly the wound is painful enough. Well, it
began on San Antonio’s festival when I was strolling along the Borne with that shameless robber Francisco Ferragut.

– The celebrated racing cyclist who finished first of his class during the Tour of Majorca?

– The identical one. As you know, Francisco is a formidable jokester and said to me there on the Borne: ‘Come to watch me eat pastries!’ I answered: ‘Is that such a rare thing?’ He explained
that it was not the technique of eating that would be of interest, so much as the technique of eating without payment. Nothing! We went across the street and there he gazed into the display window of a travel agency. I asked: ‘Are we obliged
to fly to Sweden for your pastries?’ ‘Patience!’ he answered. ‘All fishermen have first to wait for a bite.’ Presently a servant girl passed with a tray and
entered the Widow Dot’s pastry shop. Francisco said: ‘There’s a fish under that rock !’

PAUSE

– Are you listening, Don Roberto?

– Attentively. Continue, please!

– And you remember what day that was?

– You mentioned San Antonio, if I do not deceive myself.

– Exact! Well, when the girl comes out, carrying her tray heaped with exquisite pastries, he stops her and says: ‘Pretty girl, I recognize
you, surely? You work in the house of Don Antonio… ? Don Antonio…?
Caramba!
What has happened to my memory today?’ The girl murmurs helpfully: ‘He calls himself Don Antonio Amaro,’ and Francisco exclaims: ‘What a fool I am! Of course: Don Antonio Amaro! Now, child, I have a most important message for Don Antonio – please pay attention! Say that Doctor Eusebio Busquets after all regrets with much
pain his inability to obsequiate Don Antonio on his name day according to the kind invitation handed him yesterday – Doctor Eusebio Busquets, understand? – but he is obliged to perform a critical throat operation at the precise hour named for the feast. Nevertheless, assure him that I have now taken the liberty of eating his health with one of these delicious pastries.’ Then he seizes the largest
and creamiest of the confections on the tray, crams it into his mouth, and says thickly: ‘Now, don’t forget the name, please – Doctor Eusebio Busquets!’

– I am a stupid Englishman, I do not see how your accident is related…

– We are coming to that. Being ashamed to stand and watch Francisco play the same trick on two dozen or so innocent servant girls, who would be coming with trays from all
the big houses of the vicinity to collect pastries each for her own Don Antonio, I called a taxi and went after the girl…

– Who was very pretty, a real salad? They always are in your histories.

– She was no exception. And on overtaking her, I handed her a pastry which I had bought, of the identical class stolen, and explained that Don Francisco was a robber and a charlatan, etcetera, etcetera,
and that I had chivalrously come to save her from playing a ridiculous part before her employers, and having three pesetas docked from her wages…

– In short, you asked her what afternoon she would be free to come for a spin to Cas Catalá on the back of your new motor-bike?

– You are not by any means so stupid as you pretend, Don Roberto.

– And eventually you crashed with her on the pillion?

– Little by little, please! No, no, that would have been a very vulgar and quotidian history.

– Pardon me, dear Blas! Of course nothing quotidian or vulgar could ever
happen to
you
in these amorous hazards.

– Do not laugh at me, I am in great pain. But listen, it was a comedy! Three days later I met the girl by the Cavalry Barracks at about two o’clock; she climbed up behind and I set off. Well,
we precipitated ourselves with a noise like a dawn bombardment down the Marine Drive, but as we reached the Hotel Mediterráneo, she said: ‘Friend, excuse me, I must dismount for a moment !’ I did not ask why, because that question might perhaps embarrass a simple girl; I merely stopped and let her get down. She crossed the street and, while pausing to light a cigarette, I suddenly heard the noise
of a motor-bike starting up. I looked around casually to see what make it might be, and there was Francisco Ferragut with my sweetheart on the pillion of his racer roaring back to Palma, and she was waving good-bye at me.

– O la, la, la! A trifle violent, such behaviour in simple girls, eh?

– I grew cross, I confess it to you, and went in pursuit. Francisco had 100 metres start, but he’s a smart
boy and trusted in his bike to escape; it was more powerful than mine – yet, on the other hand, he carried twice the weight. Then followed a transcendental chase through the streets of Palma, where there is a pretended speed limit of twenty kilometres an hour. We both drove forward magisterially, registering at least 140 and causing much emotion on both sides of the Avenue until we reached the
Barón de Pinopar turning, where a khaki-coloured military auto cut in, caught my rear lamp and sent me into an irrecoverable roll. These soldiers, they think the world is theirs! They always behave as if manoeuvring on the battlefield where civilians have no right to exist. In effect, the bicycle was shattered. I was thrown against a plane-tree, they continued their journey without a backward glance!

–
How infamous! Some people should be refused permission to hold a driving licence. And the girl? What?

– Nothing… Nothing at all… I met her again five minutes later in the
Mare Nostrum
emergency ward. Francisco had shocked with an air force lorry half a minute later; he was rendered unconscious; she fractured only a rib or two. So, before he recovered his senses, I magnanimously arranged for
her to be translated here with me to my uncle’s clinic, and after a week of interesting convalescence we now understand each other divinely well. She loves me with madness and repudiates that it would ever have been possible for her to abandon me; she was merely about to lure Francisco far out into the country, and there be revenged on him for his love of sweet things by dropping a spoonful of sugar
into his petrol tank. She and I are now securely affianced.

–
In a fortunate hour! I celebrate it…!