College, he got a job with the Mutual Life Insurance Company in Hamilton. His colleagues there were often unaware of his Mohawk blood, since his skin was pale, his eyes grey-blue and his thick hair brown rather than black. In company Bev was awkward, but when he was at a piano or on a stage he shone. He could play any tune, from Chopin to Sullivan, and he loved to take the male lead in productions by the Garrick Dramatic Club in Hamilton. Girls flirted with Beverly,
As adults, the Johnson siblings [L to R: Pauline, Beverly, Allen and Eva) formed a close-knit group as they navigated between two worlds.
but even his sisters found him remote. He was secretive about his family to colleagues and about his social life to friends.
Evelyn seemed remote to people outside the family, too. She tended to hunch her shoulders, press her lips together and keep her own counsel. She dressed in starchy white or dull black gowns, and always disappeared in a crowd. She never found it easy to make new friends. Her family knew that Eva’s cool exterior came from lack of confidence and an obsession (instilled by Emily) with the need to be “proper.” Eva played the organ at church each Sunday and helped Emily provide dainty teas for visitors to Chiefswood. Unlike her siblings, she made an effort to keep in touch with old friends on the reserve, such as the Styres and Buck families. She knew that people found her pleasant but stuffy compared to her extroverted younger sister; she once overheard an acquaintance remark, “You’ll like Eva, but Pauline you’ll love.”
As the two girls entered their twenties, the truth of this remarkbecame painfully obvious to Eva. She had one intense relationship with a young native man, but she broke off their engagement when she heard a rumour that her fiancé was too fond of the bottle. Nobody else ever proposed to her. Meanwhile, male admirers—Indian and immigrant—flocked round her younger sister. Pauline once quipped, “Eva is like the sun, she dazzles the men. I am like the moon, I drive them crazy.” The young men who congregated at Chiefswood these days always seemed more interested in going crazy than in being dazzled. Eva tried not to resent Pauline’s looks and popularity, but she was sensitive to every slight and never forgot a grudge. Her sensitivity made for a lifetime of prickly relations between the sisters.
Mohawk features predominated in the looks of both Evelyn and her younger brother, Allen: they were dark-skinned and dark-eyed, with what Eva described as “straight black Indian hair.” In many ways, Allen was the most easygoing of the four Johnsons. His brother and sisters berated him for his lie-abed laziness; he admitted in a letter to a friend, “Procrastination is one of my worst faults.” Peggy Webling, a young Englishwoman who met the Johnsons in the late 1880s, described him as “handsome in his dark, stealthy way, and he danced divinely.” He had few ambitions, but luckily his father had useful contacts. When Allen left school, his father managed to get him a job as a cashier in a Hamilton warehouse owned by Senator James Turner, a family friend. Allen immediately joined his brother in the Garrick Dramatic Club and the Hamilton lacrosse club, and took up rowing. He was not as good-looking as Bev, but he was more popular with Pauline’s girlfriends because he was more fun. “The Brantford girls,” recalled Peggy Webling, “used to call him the Black Prince.”
Pauline finally made her visit to her friend Charlotte Jones in London in the fall of 1881. “I do not exaggerate,” the vivacious twenty-year-old wrote to her hostess in October, “when I say that of all the visits I have ever made, my first to you will ever rank among the most enjoyable and I only regret that when you come to Chiefswood I will be unable to entertain you as handsomely as I would wish.” Over the next few months, Pauline also made visits to her cousin Katie Howells in thevillage of
As adults, the Johnson siblings [L to R: Pauline, Beverly, Allen and Eva) formed a close-knit group as they navigated between two worlds.
but even his sisters found him remote. He was secretive about his family to colleagues and about his social life to friends.
Evelyn seemed remote to people outside the family, too. She tended to hunch her shoulders, press her lips together and keep her own counsel. She dressed in starchy white or dull black gowns, and always disappeared in a crowd. She never found it easy to make new friends. Her family knew that Eva’s cool exterior came from lack of confidence and an obsession (instilled by Emily) with the need to be “proper.” Eva played the organ at church each Sunday and helped Emily provide dainty teas for visitors to Chiefswood. Unlike her siblings, she made an effort to keep in touch with old friends on the reserve, such as the Styres and Buck families. She knew that people found her pleasant but stuffy compared to her extroverted younger sister; she once overheard an acquaintance remark, “You’ll like Eva, but Pauline you’ll love.”
As the two girls entered their twenties, the truth of this remarkbecame painfully obvious to Eva. She had one intense relationship with a young native man, but she broke off their engagement when she heard a rumour that her fiancé was too fond of the bottle. Nobody else ever proposed to her. Meanwhile, male admirers—Indian and immigrant—flocked round her younger sister. Pauline once quipped, “Eva is like the sun, she dazzles the men. I am like the moon, I drive them crazy.” The young men who congregated at Chiefswood these days always seemed more interested in going crazy than in being dazzled. Eva tried not to resent Pauline’s looks and popularity, but she was sensitive to every slight and never forgot a grudge. Her sensitivity made for a lifetime of prickly relations between the sisters.
Mohawk features predominated in the looks of both Evelyn and her younger brother, Allen: they were dark-skinned and dark-eyed, with what Eva described as “straight black Indian hair.” In many ways, Allen was the most easygoing of the four Johnsons. His brother and sisters berated him for his lie-abed laziness; he admitted in a letter to a friend, “Procrastination is one of my worst faults.” Peggy Webling, a young Englishwoman who met the Johnsons in the late 1880s, described him as “handsome in his dark, stealthy way, and he danced divinely.” He had few ambitions, but luckily his father had useful contacts. When Allen left school, his father managed to get him a job as a cashier in a Hamilton warehouse owned by Senator James Turner, a family friend. Allen immediately joined his brother in the Garrick Dramatic Club and the Hamilton lacrosse club, and took up rowing. He was not as good-looking as Bev, but he was more popular with Pauline’s girlfriends because he was more fun. “The Brantford girls,” recalled Peggy Webling, “used to call him the Black Prince.”
Pauline finally made her visit to her friend Charlotte Jones in London in the fall of 1881. “I do not exaggerate,” the vivacious twenty-year-old wrote to her hostess in October, “when I say that of all the visits I have ever made, my first to you will ever rank among the most enjoyable and I only regret that when you come to Chiefswood I will be unable to entertain you as handsomely as I would wish.” Over the next few months, Pauline also made visits to her cousin Katie Howells in thevillage of
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