Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [67]
I stopped by Mr. Spradling’s house to see if he had an extra copy of the News and Courier he could spare and he did indeed, for the price of a nickel. We were not regular customers but since the Donahue family was out of town he was happy enough for me to take it off his hands.
“How’s that playwrighting going?” he asked.
“Well. It’s going well.”
“That’s good. Give my regards to Mr. Heyward.”
“I’ll surely do that.”
Most people on the island and, to be honest, most people in South Carolina couldn’t understand why anybody in their right mind would pay money to go see a play about African Americans. But all those same people would not be able to answer that question unless they went to New York City to see a performance. In South Carolina it was against the law for African Americans to perform in a white theater. Not only did the general public rail against the idea of seeing actual blacks on the stage, but they also could not fathom what was so interesting about the Gullah culture that a gentleman like DuBose Heyward with all of his pedigree would waste his creative energy to write about such an insignificant topic. Insignificant! Can you fathom such a thing? They probably thought it was my Yankee influence bringing his talent to ruination. Not so. Not so at all.
DuBose was an intellectual who found the world of the Gullah people to be not only an endlessly fascinating subject but also that their culture was actually enviable. He longed, I mean longed to live that same spirited life he was forbidden to have. I think I mentioned that but you know, these days . . . I can’t remember everything quite as well as I used to.
Although, at times, DuBose could be very narrow-minded about social boundaries. But who doesn’t do a little talking out of both sides of their mouth? Back in early 1923, which wasn’t so long ago, I had written him saying I had a delightful lunch with a Negro woman. At the time, I was still studying at Columbia. He wrote me back in that tone he sometimes used, saying he knew I could not have seen this as an absolute impossibility because I am a benighted Yankee from the Midwest, whatever that meant! Was he forgiving me? Then he warned me she would be in my room next. I got the gist of what he was saying and didn’t like it. His words contradicted his wide-eyed soul. But there were scads of people who thought that way even in Ohio.
Unfortunately, it was the prevailing wind of the time in which we lived and although the wind had begun to shift, it wasn’t a change sufficient enough to make a noticeable difference in our society. So, I did what I normally did when something didn’t suit me. I ignored it, filed it in the back of my head, and wrote about it later on. After all, like my grandfather used to say, “The pen always has the last word.”
Fade to Darkness
Chapter Sixteen
Grandma
Old people can be sage-like and wonderful but they can also be as persnickety as the day is long. Obviously, I was still using Aunt Daisy’s car and she claimed she didn’t mind at all. But I thought I owed her the courtesy of letting her know I was going to take it downtown so I stopped by her house to tell her. I mean, I wasn’t driving her car to Miami or Albuquerque but I knew her meticulous (read: persnickety) nature and thought she’d appreciate knowing its whereabouts. And in her mind, going downtown, which was in reality a mere fifteen-minute ride, had become quite the trek. I also just wanted to see how she and Ella had fared during the night. They didn’t need caretakers. Yet. But while I was sloshing around in Dorothy Heyward’s bathtub that morning, singing “Summertime” over and over to the ethers, it occurred to me that considering all Aunt Daisy had done for Patti and me, a little unobtrusive oversight of