white sombrero, at his high-heeled boots with the lone star stitching in the top, at his wide-skirted coat and the diamond in his shirt front and at his skin that had been ruddied by sun and whipped by wind and stung by desert sand. They said, “Ah, a visitor from Texas, I see.” The inflection was not flattering. He had a room at the St. Charles Hotel, that favorite rendezvous of Louisiana planters and Texas cattle men. Its columned façade, its magnificent shining dome, its famous Sazaracs made from the potent Sazarac brandy, all contributed to its fame and flavor. From here he laboriously composed a letter to her, written in his round, schoolboyish hand and delivered in style by a dapper Negro in hotel uniform. He had spent an entire morning over it.
D EAR L ADY ,
You might be a countess like you said but you are a queen to me. I did not go for to hurt your feelings when I said that about how I did not understand about you. I guess back in Texas we are kind of raw. Anyway I sure never met anybody like you before and you had me locoed. I think about you all day and all night and am fit to be tied. You were mighty kind to me there in Begué’s eating house and I acted like a fool and impolite as though I never had any bringing up and a disgrace to my Mother. If you will let me talk to you I can explain. I have got to see you or I will bust the house in. Please. You are the most beautiful little lady I ever met.
Ever your friend and servant,
C LINT M AROON .
This moving epistle was wasted effort. Clio never saw it. Delivered into the hands of the ubiquitous Kakaracou, it was thrust into her capacious skirt pocket and brought out that evening under the kitchen lamplight. But reading was not one of Kaka’s talents. Discretion told her to throw the letter into the fire. Curiosity as to its contents proved too strong. Over the kitchen supper table with Cupide she drew out the sheet of paper and turned it over in her skinny fingers. She had deciphered the signature, and this she had torn off in the touching belief that without it the letter’s source would be a mystery to its reader.
It was characteristic of Kaka’s adaptability that, after an absence of more than fifteen years, the old New Orleans Negro patois and accent were creeping back into her speech. Gombo French, Negro English, Cajun, indefinably mixed; the dropped consonants, the softly slurred vowels, the fine disregard for tenses. Naturally imitative and a born mimic, she was likely to fit her speech to the occasion. Weary, she unconsciously slipped back into the patois of her childhood. To impress shopkeepers and people whom she considered riffraff, such as Clint Maroon, she chattered a voluble and colloquial French of the Paris boulevards and the Paris gutters. Her accent when speaking pure English was more British than American, having been copied from Clio’s own. Clio’s English had been learned primarily from the careful speech of Sister Felice at the convent. And Sister Félice had come by her English in London itself, during her novitiate. Not alone Kaka, but Clio and Cupide were adept in these lingual gymnastics. They were given to talking among themselves in a spicy ragoût of French, English and Gombo that was almost unintelligible to an outsider.
Kaka now fished the crumpled letter out of her capacious pocket, smoothed it, and turned upon Cupide an eye meant to be guileless and which would not for a moment have deceived a beholder much less astute than the cynical Cupidon.
“I find letter today in big armoire in hall I guess must be there many years hiding heself.”
“What’s it say?”
Kaka rather reluctantly pushed it across the table to him. St. Charles Hotel. New paper, palpably fresh ink. Cupide, his fork poised, read it aloud in a brisk murmur. Intently the old woman leaned forward to hear. Finished, Cupide said. “Tu mentis comme un arracheur de dents.” You lie like a dentist. And went on with his supper.
“What does
D EAR L ADY ,
You might be a countess like you said but you are a queen to me. I did not go for to hurt your feelings when I said that about how I did not understand about you. I guess back in Texas we are kind of raw. Anyway I sure never met anybody like you before and you had me locoed. I think about you all day and all night and am fit to be tied. You were mighty kind to me there in Begué’s eating house and I acted like a fool and impolite as though I never had any bringing up and a disgrace to my Mother. If you will let me talk to you I can explain. I have got to see you or I will bust the house in. Please. You are the most beautiful little lady I ever met.
Ever your friend and servant,
C LINT M AROON .
This moving epistle was wasted effort. Clio never saw it. Delivered into the hands of the ubiquitous Kakaracou, it was thrust into her capacious skirt pocket and brought out that evening under the kitchen lamplight. But reading was not one of Kaka’s talents. Discretion told her to throw the letter into the fire. Curiosity as to its contents proved too strong. Over the kitchen supper table with Cupide she drew out the sheet of paper and turned it over in her skinny fingers. She had deciphered the signature, and this she had torn off in the touching belief that without it the letter’s source would be a mystery to its reader.
It was characteristic of Kaka’s adaptability that, after an absence of more than fifteen years, the old New Orleans Negro patois and accent were creeping back into her speech. Gombo French, Negro English, Cajun, indefinably mixed; the dropped consonants, the softly slurred vowels, the fine disregard for tenses. Naturally imitative and a born mimic, she was likely to fit her speech to the occasion. Weary, she unconsciously slipped back into the patois of her childhood. To impress shopkeepers and people whom she considered riffraff, such as Clint Maroon, she chattered a voluble and colloquial French of the Paris boulevards and the Paris gutters. Her accent when speaking pure English was more British than American, having been copied from Clio’s own. Clio’s English had been learned primarily from the careful speech of Sister Felice at the convent. And Sister Félice had come by her English in London itself, during her novitiate. Not alone Kaka, but Clio and Cupide were adept in these lingual gymnastics. They were given to talking among themselves in a spicy ragoût of French, English and Gombo that was almost unintelligible to an outsider.
Kaka now fished the crumpled letter out of her capacious pocket, smoothed it, and turned upon Cupide an eye meant to be guileless and which would not for a moment have deceived a beholder much less astute than the cynical Cupidon.
“I find letter today in big armoire in hall I guess must be there many years hiding heself.”
“What’s it say?”
Kaka rather reluctantly pushed it across the table to him. St. Charles Hotel. New paper, palpably fresh ink. Cupide, his fork poised, read it aloud in a brisk murmur. Intently the old woman leaned forward to hear. Finished, Cupide said. “Tu mentis comme un arracheur de dents.” You lie like a dentist. And went on with his supper.
“What does
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