Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [70]
I rang the bell on the ancient door and waited for a few moments for someone to answer. I was met by the smiling face of a pretty young woman whose name tag read mary jo fairchild.
“Come in,” she said, “welcome!”
“Hi!” I said and stepped into the foyer. “I’m Cate Cooper.”
“And I am Mary Jo Fairchild. What can I do to help you today?”
“Well, I was hoping that I might be able to read the papers of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward.”
“Absolutely! That’s why we’re here. Just sign in there . . .”
I signed the guest book, followed her inside, and she explained the library’s rules to me. Purse goes in a locker after I give her five dollars, notes are only taken in pencil, no cell phones please, use only one file at a time . . . I thought that it was probably pretty standard protocol, not that I would have known the difference. Believe me. The process I thought would be so intimidating could not have been easier. In no time at all, I was seated at a large table reading a letter from Robert Frost himself to DuBose Heyward. I held the actual letter in my hands. It just seemed too wonderful to be true and I have to say, the moment made me feel a little light-headed. That was only the first file from the first box of documents and I had already bumped into Robert Frost. Amazing! What else was in these boxes? Plenty, I’d bet.
After Robert Frost, I tackled the file of correspondence between DuBose and George Gershwin, and there were many letters to read. There was one most important one though, the one that would change the Heywards’ life and seal their fate forever. In its text, Gershwin tells DuBose that he is thinking of setting Porgy to music, saying that the story is the most outstanding one he knows of about colored people. I read on. Every now and then I would flinch from the language Heyward used referring to people of color or the condescending tone in his letters to Dorothy but I had to keep reminding myself that he was using the accepted terminology and customs of his day. The 1920s were nearly a hundred years ago and many things were decidedly different then. Life in Charleston was multilayered and each of those strata followed a strictly prescribed code of conduct. I mean, the only time you’d see a black woman in a white woman’s house was if she was doing the laundry. On the other hand, DuBose had no compunction about visiting and participating in an African-American church service and bringing Gershwin there, too. There were social lines drawn all over town, neighborhood by neighborhood, races divided, ancestors compared, judgments made. But more than that, it was as though everyone worried that they were being watched by some invisible Etiquette Queen and King who would pulverize them to charred smoky bits if they stepped out of line.
Lord knows, DuBose stood on social ceremony in all his letters to Dorothy, being painfully correct, not too personal, and no one would have accused him of being romantic. To be honest, I gagged a little every time I read that DuBose sent his mother’s love along with his. I mean, for the life of me, I don’t know how Dorothy figured out he was serious about her unless they sneaked off behind the barn when they met at the MacDowell Colony and carried on like lovers do. And for some reason I doubted that there was very much hanky-panky happening between them. From their photographs they both looked pretty prim. And there were a lot of photographs of DuBose—studio portraits, to be specific. Apparently, he liked his own looks. Hmmm, I thought, what gentleman of that day had their portrait made so frequently?
I couldn’t wait to read Dorothy