The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [28]
My only fond memory of Little Rock High School was that I achieved popularity among the other girls by painting for each of them an excellent copy of a Gibson girl as a reasonable likeness of themselves. I was the only “artist” any of them had ever even heard about.
When I told my father that I wanted to go away to the Chicago Art Institute to study art, he was horrified. Or, rather, he was at first very puzzled, because he didn’t know there was such a thing as an art college that would accept women, and then, when I showed him the brochure, he was scornful, and only later, after I had got up my nerve to tell him that I definitely intended to go, did he become horrified. He stormed and shouted. He railed and ranted. He sulked. He plotted: he told my older brothers of my intention, and they, all in college themselves at that time (Matthew had gone to Vanderbilt, Dallas was at Southern Methodist, while Henry settled for the University of Arkansas), filled my ears with stories of college life, how difficult it was, how impossible for the “fair sex,” who were always, if they could be admitted at all, viewed as ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.
“What’s an odalisque?” Daddy asked my brother Matthew.
“A concubine,” Matthew explained.
“Is that what you want to be?” my father demanded of me.
“If I could be one of the kind Ingres painted,” I told him.
“Who?”
When I gave up my dream of the Chicago Art Institute and instead actually began to make plans to apply for admission to the University of Arkansas, and needed my father’s signature on the application, he flatly refused and said he’d rather see me walking the streets. I did not particularly want to go to Fayetteville anyway; in that year, 1904, the University offered only two courses in art, both taught by a woman whose specialty was penmanship. At the last minute before the opening of the fall term, I applied for and was accepted at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, a women’s school in the college town of Conway, less than two hours by train from Little Rock. Somehow I got my father to sign the papers, perhaps by my promise to come home every weekend. And I did: I caught the 4:15 every Friday afternoon and went back on the 6:45 every Sunday P.M. The house went to hell during the week. I tried to persuade Cyrilla to assume my duties as manager of the household, but Cyrilla, while willing, wasn’t constitutionally strong enough and wasn’t able to give orders or instructions to Samuel and Ruby. Daddy kept complaining that the house was going to hell.
There was one teacher, Miss Opaline Dearasaugh, at 4-c F.A. (as it was called, pronounced Fourcie Effie), who was reasonably talented at drawing and could impart the rudiments of watercolor technique, so my time there wasn’t entirely wasted. But I reflected that the hours I spent in travel, going home every weekend, could have been better spent doing my homework and polishing my drawings, or, at worst, accepting one of the frequent invitations I received from the young men at Hendrix, a Methodist college in Conway. Most of the girls at Fourcie Effie were enrolled there because of its proximity to Hendrix, where they hoped to find an eligible swain. It did not take me long to discover that my classmates were less interested in the fine arts than in men, and that all of the girls were indeed ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.
Our first assignment in Miss Dearasaugh’s class was to do a self-portrait, and I’ve shown you the pastel I did in the mirror and have kept, and which you have called, I thank you, beautiful. I took no great pride in my features, but men—or boys—seemed to be quick to notice me…although slow to do anything about it. A Hendrix premedical