Everybody's Autobiography (36 page)

So we liked it all and of course we saw every one and among others Mary Garden came. It was a pleasure to meet her, Virgil Thomson had wanted her for Saint Theresa and we had talked about it and her but we neither of us knew her and anyway neither of us is really enterprising and so nothing happened then, this was several years before it was given.

It was pleasant meeting her we liked her and she liked us and we met again in California and had a pleasant time together.

And so Chicago was almost over and we were going further this time it was Texas we had never been there naturally not but now we were. Sherwood had told us a good deal about it that pleased us. There was the valley his description of that was delicious. He said the valley of the Rio Grande spoken of by all Texans as the valley is perfectly flat miles of flat land just of the same flatness on either side and yet just at one moment begins the valley, only a Texan has the feeling he knows when it is just ordinary flat land and when it is a valley, it is not like the separation between the states because that is ruled lines on a map no this was more delicate you just felt that and any Texan could feel that but not any other one. We liked it and alas we never saw it we never had a chance to get to the valley we ate the fruit it made there is so much way-side fruit in America, so much way-side so much way-side and we liked all that way-side, but we did not see the valley. And then
Sherwood told about how the Middle Western farmers came down for a little winter fishing in the South of Texas and how they called each other by their states, Sherwood was Virginia and he told how they talked and what they said and we wanted to have a Ford car and wander all over, we will wander all over.

But first we left for Texas. We flew from Chicago to Dallas, Texas, we were staying with Miss Ela Hockaday at the Hockaday School I like that name. There we ate too well almost too well the corn meal sticks and all the rest was very filling and the cook came from Louisiana and Louisiana cooking in Texas is almost the best.

We had a good time in Dallas I began almost to like Texas the best, but we did like so many places the best. Dallas is a pretty town the houses different from elsewhere, and we were interested in everything, of course it was early and the flowers were everywhere but they told us in the summer it was not easy gardening, one woman told us that she had at last decided not to keep a hospital for flowers any more, in some places you have to keep dahlias in the oven in some places you have to keep them in the refrigerator and in Texas in the summer there really seems almost nothing to do with them. We understood that very well in Bilignin we had tried to grow flowers that would not naturally grow there, I suppose it is quite natural to want to grow flowers that will not naturally grow there.

The girls at Miss Hockaday's school were very interesting, as we were staying there we got to know them. They did understand what I had written, and that was a pleasure to me and to them a very great pleasure. There was a nice story about Then and When.

One afternoon they were all together and I asked them to ask questions, their teacher said they had told her they had been puzzled by the portrait of When and that one of the girls had asked her to have me tell her. The portrait of When is in Fourteen Anonymous Portraits in Portraits and Prayers and I said to the teacher if she would find it I would read it, and I read it out loud to them
and I said but I do not quite see why you had any trouble in understanding that and I turned toward the girl and she seemed very troubled and that was all. The next day she came to me and she said of course anybody could understand the portrait of When no it was the portrait of Then and she had not wanted to say because of course they all did know the difference between When and Then. Ah I said the portrait of Then is more troublesome but still it is a portrait of Then. I liked it that they felt that way about it, there is the portrait of When and there is a portrait of Then. I liked them.

Since we left America we had not seen or heard anything of any Hockaday, they had sent us charming things to the boat when we went away but since then no word from any of them, and then just a few months ago a dozen of them came and we were delighted to have them, the Geographical History of America was just out and I read it to them I always like reading to Hockaday girls. It was funny about reading, I had never read anything aloud much, except all the letters of Queen Victoria to Alice Toklas when we were in Majorca at the beginning of the war and I had never thought of myself as reading and I had never read anything I had written and then when they asked me it seemed very strange to me and then somehow I came to like it, it sounds very interesting as I read it, quite so to me.

And so we liked Dallas Texas.

Once when I was walking I saw a car with Hockaday girls and a young man they asked me to come in I did and sat next to the young man I always like to sit beside the chauffeur naturally as I have always driven and rarely ever been driven it is natural enough to prefer to be in front besides it always is pleasanter to be there. I was interested in his car it had an automatic gear shift anyway he was an agent for it and we talked of going to Austin, Texas, to the University and he said would I like him to drive us it would be a pleasure to him and I said it would be a pleasure to us. So we
finally left Dallas and he and a young Hockaday girl and one of the teachers and Alice Toklas and I drove down to Austin, Texas. It was a pleasant drive and I was still interested in his car because there was nothing in front to be a bother as there is in every car and I was wondering would I have one to go back to Paris and then later I tried it in San Francisco and on the hills the change of gear is cautious, it does it slow and really I did not think it would do in the Ain, that is where we are in summer and there are hills and mountains there. But anyway going to Austin was perfect, Texas is a level surface and I liked the way they ploughed and always against the natural lay of the land and it was only after Austin that we began to see the wild flowers and the Texas cattle. Of course anybody who has always read Wild Western stories and I have read a great many of them knows all about the Texas cattle it was very exciting. But first there was Austin. When we got there we had dinner altogether and the young Hockaday girl said she had telephoned to a girl to ask her to come to dinner, she had said come I am here with Gertrude Stein and her friend had said Oh yeah, over the telephone.

After Austin we went on, some one from Houston sent their car to call for us at Austin and take us to Houston it had a Negro chauffeur and as I always sit in front we talked a lot together. We talked about the Negroes as they were in Texas. He said except as before the law they had nothing at all to complain of. I said what did he mean. Well he said any Negro has as good a chance as any white man or woman to get education to go in for a profession to earn a living to be taken care of to do whatever any man or woman wants to do in any ordinary way of living, only if by any chance he does something and the white man is against him and it comes up into court why then of course it is another thing then he does not get the same justice as a white man. What do you mean exactly I said to him explain it to me. Well he said if a white man gets drunk or something or anyway goes into the Negro quarter and
he does something and a Negro hits him or anything well then the Negro cannot get justice if it comes to be a thing that they have to go to court on. But I said if Negroes can go into any profession. Yes he said but that is just where the trouble comes in, now a Negro when he is in a profession he is not conscientious like a white man. Now what do you mean I asked him. Well he said now take doctoring. A Negro he gets to be a doctor just as good a doctor as a white man and then he begins practicing, now anybody falling sick he calls him, well sometimes he comes and sometimes he don't come you just can't count on him, now a white doctor any kind of white doctor no matter how poor you are or anything or if you are a colored or a white man it does not make any difference to him, perhaps he just as well had rather not come but if you call him and ask him to come he will always come. We all began having the colored doctor when he first began and then we found that if it did not suit him not all of them but a good many of them did not come and so we all went back to white men for doctoring. Do you think later they will change about this I asked him, I don't know he said I don't see how they can, they can't really come to think that it really is necessary to always come when anybody calls them and a white man even a very rich white man or a very important white man if he is a doctor will always come when you call him to come when you think you need him.

I liked talking and listening to him he was a very nice man and he took us pleasantly to Houston and we saw lots of wild flowers mostly blue ones and we saw the flat land and we saw the cattle not so many of them it had been a bad year for cattle as there had been too much cold weather and too much dry weather and as they do not in any way protect them they all died not all of them but a lot of them still it was a pleasure to see them and even see some cowboys and one cowgirl go toward them. It was a nice day and we came to Houston and went to a hotel where they gave us so
many rooms we could look out in every direction and it was near a park and it was a lovely spring.

I liked the women who came that evening one was eighty years old and had been driven all the way from Galveston and was going back again and she said she had read the things written by me for many years and said she had no more trouble understanding them than the young ones did, she said you see it is the middle-aged people that have no feeling, they are not young enough and not old enough to have any understanding. She was very charming and she gave me a great deal of pleasure.

Later when we were back here again some one wrote me that in the South they criticized a Texas author because he made Texas farm women quote Gertrude Stein's writings, and they said that was silly and the Texas farm women said not at all they had gone many miles to hear her and they could read her with pleasure, I did have that feeling with them they were what the Middle West used to be and New England before them and what Virginia remembered having been but did not remember it as that thing, there was Virginia in the Texas men and women but they were active and the country was active and they all had what was the Civil War American, I liked them.

Then we flew to Oklahoma, of course we had been over the bad lands, they come in nicely in every Western story and I never did think that I would ever see them certainly not fly over them, and they were just as bad as they had been called with nothing growing and a very strange color and not hills or flat land either they certainly were bad lands and they made reading the stories more real than ever. I like Western stories of Texas bad lands.

When I first heard about Oklahoma I always thought it was in the northwest, until I really saw it and saw it so close to Texas did I really believe that it is where it does exist. Oklahoma City with its towers that is its skyscrapers coming right up out of the flat oil country was as exciting as when going to Alsace just after the
armistice we first saw the Strasbourg Cathedral. They do come up wonderfully out of that flat country and it was exciting and seeing the oil wells and the funny shapes they made the round things as well as the Eiffel Tower ones gave me a feeling like I have in going to Marseilles and seeing the chimneys come out of the earth and there are no houses or anything near them, it always is a strange-looking country that produces that kind of thing, of course Alice Toklas' father had once almost had an oil well they dug and dug but naturally the oil did not gush, naturally not these things never do happen to any one one knows, if it could happen to them you would not be very likely to know them most naturally not. We did later see in California some small oil fields and the slow movement of the oil wells make it perfectly all right that in America the prehistoric beasts moved slowly. America is funny that way everything is quick but really everybody does move slowly, and the movement of the oil well that slow movement very well that slow movement is the country and it makes it prehistoric and large shapes and moving slowly very very slowly so slowly that they do almost stand still. I do think Americans are slow minded, it seems quick but they are slow minded yes they are.

The City of Oklahoma pleased me, I liked the stores there were very good stores there and good clothes in them and the men were very big men and they were all very different from the Texans, not a bit at all like the Texans, not a bit. And then we left Oklahoma in a dust storm, a real one. The airplane went right up through one and came out on top, it was like when we were above the clouds only such dirty ones and the sunset on top on top of this colored dust storm underneath was not exciting, it was discouraging, and then we came down at Fort Worth.

At Fort Worth we did strike a bad hotel very well at Fort Worth it was not a good hotel. There was another one perhaps at least they said yes it should have been the other one they had flowers for us at the other one but we had been taken to this one and it
was not a good one, we could not eat the mutton chops and there was nothing else we could eat and they tried again and we could not eat them. Next day we found a nice place where we could and did eat everything but by that time Miss Hockaday had driven over and showed us but before that was over we had gone to hear Porgy. This is the story of that.

They asked us to dinner to go later and hear the play Porgy done by the little theatre, there was a white little theatre and now a Princeton man had come down and started a Negro one and they asked us, the actors were amateur but they said it was interesting, it was being given in the little theatre that the whites had started and now they all said this was very interesting. We went to dinner. On one side of me was this young fellow and on the other side a bigger blond one, I did not know the name of either one of them.

We talked together the young man who was running the little theatre, and we talked of Four Saints and of Pinafore and Negroes as actors, and we liked each other and then we talked of airplanes, then the young man on the other side came into the conversation he spent all his time in airplanes so he and I began to talk about airplanes and then he said my mother wrote to me that she had met you I think in New York. Who is your mother and he said she was Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, oh I said in that case we met in Washington not in New York. I wanted to ask you he said I have wanted to ask you what you would advise for a man in my situation, I have he said always had the publicity of being the son of my father and it is very troubling, not for so long I said after all you are well over twenty so I imagine and your father has only been President for two years so considerable of your life has been spent in a normal state of not being very well known, no he said you do not understand, it has always been like that, now what can I do about it, forget it I said, after all here has been a chance to forget it if it was a worry to him because I had not known it, but that did not seem to be really what he wanted, besides I said you
can do nothing about it so why worry about it, yes I know he said and in almost a year my father is going to be the most unpopular man in America, well I said in that case forgetting it will be easier, not at all he said it will be that much worse they will remember it and I will not like it. There did not seem to be anything to be done about it and then the dinner was over.