“Does Papa understand that?”
“I don’t think he cares. That’s just how he is.”
Other things we did, or didn’t do, also must have made us seem strange to the people of Williamsburg. The streets were deserted on Sunday mornings because everybody was in church. Papa told us about the neighbor lady—the one with the peacocks—who’d stopped by the grocery one morning soon after he and Mama had arrived. “Mrs. Blanchard said she assumed that with an Irish name like O’Keeffe we’d be going to the Catholic church, and then she said, ‘Of cohss, mos’ ever’body heah is eithuh Bap-tist or E-pis-co-pa-li-an.’” He mimicked her drawl perfectly.
Papa used to go to Mass at the little stone Catholic church in Sun Prairie on special holidays—I begged to go with him, because I thought it was pretty—and Mama sometimes drove into Madison to the “E-pis-co-pa-li-an” church where she and Papa were married, but as a rule we weren’t a churchgoing family, and that didn’t sit well with people in this town.
Mama fit into Williamsburg society better than the rest of us, because she carried herself like an aristocrat. In a way she was an aristocrat, thanks to her father, the Hungarian count who left and never came back. Soon after Mama and Papa moved to Virginia, she had been invited to a stylish afternoon tea at the home of our neighbor, Mrs. Blanchard. The weather had not yet turned unbearably hot, as it was when I arrived, and the black silk faille dress that Mama reserved for special occasions would have to do. With gloves and a hat, of course.
“Your mother was wearing her fine old Totto jewelry,” Auntie reported proudly. “The gold and emerald brooch and earrings. That started a rumor that she is somehow related to Tsar Nicholas of Russia.”
“But that’s not true!” I said.
“Of course it’s not true, and she denied it, but I don’t think they quite believed her. If not Tsar Nicholas, then it must be one of the other Romanovs, they decided. And so now she’s acceptable to the ladies of Williamsburg.”
Maybe Mama was acceptable, but I surely was not.
I had been there for scarcely a month. We had just finished breakfast; everyone else had gone off to do their chores, and I was clearing the dining room table. Mama came in and saw that I was alone. “Georgie, I want to talk to you,” she said.
I paused, my hands full of dirty dishes.
“Perhaps you should not go out by yourself every morning before the sun comes up,” she said. “Young ladies here don’t do that. The neighbor ladies have seen you out walking alone, and they’ve spoken to me about it.”
“They have? What did they say?”
“Well, they think it’s unusual behavior, and they wonder about it.”
“Why is it unusual? I don’t think it’s unusual!” I insisted. “It’s the best time of the day, while it’s still cool. The sky is so lovely then. The birds are singing. And no one comes along to bother me.”
It was true—no one had bothered me. If there were any girls my age in Williamsburg, they must have been well hidden behind those hedges. I hadn’t thought much about it. The town itself was dull, but the countryside was lushly beautiful. I took my sketchbook whenever I went out on the morning walks that seemed to bother the neighbors. I was painting again, spending hours every day in the room I’d commandeered as my studio or painting in plein air whenever the fancy struck me. That must have really bothered people! There were times when I wished I had a friend like Lena. Ida and Nita were around, but they had each other. Mostly, anyway, I was content to be on my own.
“Georgie, please listen carefully to what I’m telling you.” Mama followed me into the kitchen, took the dishes out of my hands, and set them on the table. “There’s an old saying, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. The same could be said about Williamsburg. This is not Sun Prairie, and people here don’t like to get their hands dirty. They inherit the property and hire Negroes to do the work. They don’t regard your father as a gentleman, because he is the proprietor of a grocery. They wouldn’t be doing such a thing.” She paused, watching me pour hot water from a kettle on the stove into a tub and toss in the soap. Then she continued, “It might be helpful to your father’s business if you would make an effort to speak and act more like the other young ladies here.”
“The grocery needs help?” I dipped cold water from the barrel into the tub and began to scrub dried egg yolk off the plates.
“The feed and grain business, too. It’s been slow getting started,” she said. “Economic conditions weren’t quite what we’d hoped for, and”—she hesitated, then went on—“and for some reason, people just don’t come around to buy there. Some Negroes are his customers, and I suspect that has something to do with it. White people don’t seem to want to patronize stores that cater to colored people. But it’s more than that. We must make every effort to fit in. That’s all I’m asking you to do.”
I didn’t understand that kind of thinking, nor could I see how my behaving differently would change anything. I stacked the clean dishes in a second tub to be rinsed. “What would you have me do?” I asked curiously.
“At the very least, wear shoes and stockings—going barefoot is so unladylike—and put on a nice dress. You might even consider letting me curl your hair.”
“You want me to become somebody else!” I cried. “I don’t want to curl my hair! It’s far too hot for stockings, and I detest the silly clothes the girls wear—petticoats and lace and ribbons and tiny buttons on everything. I’d feel ridiculous, Mama.”
“All right, Georgie,” Mama said with a sigh. “I won’t ask it of you again.”
She turned her face away. I’d disappointed her, but I didn’t see that whatever I did was going to help Papa’s business.
At the end of summer Francis began classes at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Ida and Nita were enrolled at a private day school, and Mama hired a tutor to come to Wheatlands to teach Catherine and Alexius and Claudie.
Without consulting me, Mama decided that I should attend a girls’ boarding school that she’d heard offered excellent instruction in art. The headmistress herself was an artist and taught the classes. But there were no vacancies when Mama applied for my admission to the fall term.
“I’m sorry, Georgie,” Mama said, when she finally got around to telling me her plans. “Your name is on the waiting list for next spring. I hope you won’t mind very much staying home for a few months.”
I didn’t mind at all! I saw it as a chance to draw and paint to my heart’s content.
But early in September Mama received a letter from the headmistress of the Chatham Episcopal Institute, informing her of a cancellation. Did Mrs. O’Keeffe wish to send her daughter to Chatham immediately? Classes had already begun, but it was not too late to enroll.
Three days later I was sent away. Again. This would be my third school in three years, and all I’d really wanted was to stay at home and paint and draw whatever I chose.
7
Chatham, Virginia—Fall 1903
EARLY ON A STIFLING MORNING IN SEPTEMBER, I left Williamsburg in a carriage to Norfolk, boarded a train from Norfolk to Lynchburg, and in Lynchburg caught a jitney that let me off by the courthouse in the center of Chatham. The sun had already set.
“That’s your school, up yonder,” the jitney driver said, pointing out a white clapboard mansion on a hilltop silhouetted against a lavender sky.
I climbed the winding path to the mansion, set down my suitcase by the front entrance, and rang the bell. When no one came after I’d rung a second time, I pushed open the door and stepped uncertainly into a reception room, dimly lit and silent.
Tired and hungry, I wandered down a hallway toward a brightly lit room. I found a dozen girls engrossed in their studies at long wooden tables.
“Hello,” I said.
They looked up from their books and stared at the strange creature who had suddenly appeared in their midst. I was dressed in a light brown skirt and unfitted jacket with a row of tortoise shell buttons. I’d sewn ever
y stitch of it myself over the summer. My hair was combed straight back from my forehead and plaited in a single thick braid that hung down my back, the end tied with a black grosgrain ribbon, the way I’d always worn it.
“Good evening,” one of the girls ventured carefully, as if she thought I had just stumbled off the boat from a foreign country and didn’t speak the local language. “May we help you?” She spoke in that thick-as-honey way they have of talking in the South.
“I’m Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m a new student.” I wished they’d quit gawking at me.
A motherly-looking woman arrived in a flutter, caroling, “You must be Miss O’Keeffe! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Chatham! We’re so happy you’re here!” She turned to the girls at the table. “Miss O’Keeffe comes to us from Williamsburg. I know you’ll make her feel at home.”
“I’m actually from Wisconsin,” I said. “Sun Prairie.” My voice was clear and crisp as creek water.
A willowy girl with china blue eyes rose. “I’ll show Miss O’Keeffe where she is to sleep, Miss Drummond.”
Her blond hair fell in a cascade of curls caught up with a large satin bow. She looked like a pretty box of bonbons.
“My name is Susan Young,” the girl murmured. “Miss Drummond is our housemother.”
I followed Susan Young up steep, narrow stairs to an attic room with two long rows of cots, almost the same as at Sacred Heart. A potbellied stove squatted in the center of the room, and four washbasins were lined up at one end.
“It’s hot and stuffy up here right now, but come winter, the place is an icebox if we don’t keep the stove going all night. We’re all expected to help carry firewood from the woodpile and stoke the fire, but at least we don’t have to chop it. Billy’s our custodian, and he’ll take care of that,” Susan assured me. “I’m afraid you won’t find any luxuries here, and few comforts either. Mrs. Willis is hardening us for whatever lies ahead in our lives.”
I could not imagine what might possibly lie ahead in Susan’s life that she needed to be hardened for. “Mrs. Willis?” I asked.
“The headmistress. She’s also the art teacher.”
“I’m here for the art instruction.”
Susan looked a little surprised. “Well, you surely won’t be disappointed, Miss O’Keeffe.”
“Please just call me Georgia.”
“Of course—Georgia,” she said, smiling. “And you must call me Susan.” Her teeth were a row of perfect pearls.
She led me downstairs to a room next to the kitchen outfitted with a couple of laundry sinks and three large tin tubs. “This is where we take our weekly baths on Saturdays. Willie Mae and her helper do our bedsheets, but we must wash our own underthings.”
Susan took a lantern down from a peg, and we made our way out to the yard behind the mansion to find the two outdoor privies before the tour ended back in the kitchen. We sat at the help’s table, where the cook, a Negro woman Susan addressed as Elsie, served me a plate of green beans and ham and cornbread left from supper. The help at the Institute would all turn out to be Negroes, like all the servants in Williamsburg. There hadn’t been a single colored person in Sun Prairie, and not many in Madison either.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I was ravenous. Susan sipped tea while I ate. “There’s a rule for everything, and if there isn’t a rule, there’s a tradition,” she said. Lights out at ten o’clock, rise at six, breakfast at a quarter to seven. Grace before meals. Evening Prayer after supper, followed by supervised study. No walking out in the countryside or down to the village alone, or even in pairs—students always to be accompanied by a teacher when they leave the school grounds. School uniforms worn on Sundays, everyone marching down the hill in a column, seniors in the lead, for Morning Prayer at Emmanuel Episcopal. Weekly letters home.
Most of the rules were not much different from the ones we’d had at Sacred Heart in Madison. A few were new. Apparently no one censored letters for undesirable content or bad grammar—a good thing, in my opinion—but some of the rules, like not walking alone, seemed completely unreasonable. “What do they think will happen if one of us walks down to Main Street in Chatham to buy a new comb, or just to look around?” I asked.
“It simply isn’t done. It could get you a questionable reputation, and that would reflect poorly on the Institute. I can tell you’re not a Southerner,” she said, as though that explained the silly rule. “You’ll get used to our customs.”
I don’t think so, I thought.
Then she added, “You’re here in time for the Scholars’ Frolic. It’s the first of our monthly dances.”
“Dances? But this is a girls’ school. Where do the boys come from?”
“There are no boys, but we still have dances. Half of us dress in our uniforms. You’ll get yours soon. They’re navy blue with red trim. The style is rather masculine. You might not object to it as much as the rest of us do. We wear them to church and on formal occasions.”
I thought wistfully of the long black dress and veil I’d worn at Sacred Heart.
“The rest of us get to dress up in our party frocks for the dances,” Susan went on. “Miss Cornwall, the music teacher, plays the piano, and we dance with each other. Then, at the next dance—that will be the Autumn Celebration in October—we’ll switch places. Those of us who wore uniforms at the Scholars’ Frolic will wear our dresses at the Autumn Celebration, and vice versa. The hardest thing when we’re learning new dances is remembering how to lead. That’s the boy’s part.”
Another ridiculous tradition! “I guess dancing the boy’s part is harder,” I allowed. “But what’s the point?”
“The point is, we must learn to dance well, for when we eventually go out in society and dance with young men. That’s what all of us girls dream about, as I’m sure you do, too, Georgia.”
She was wrong about that. I’d never once dreamed of “going out in society” and dancing with young men.
I liked Mrs. Willis as soon as I met her. She was tall and always wore a green smock to class. One side of her face was paralyzed, and I wondered how that had happened.
On my first day in her art class, she came by my easel to observe. Mama must have told her I’d taken art lessons since I was ten years old, and she didn’t have to watch for long to see that I already understood the basics: how to blend colors, which brush to use, how much detail to include and how much to leave out.
By the end of the week I had my own table in the art studio and permission to work there after supper when the other girls had supervised study in the dining hall. Either I worked alone in the studio, standing at my easel for hours at a stretch, totally absorbed in my painting, or I was poking around the studio, staring out the window, doing nothing at all. There was no in-between.
Mrs. Willis understood that. A strict headmistress who enforced all the rules, she turned out to be much more flexible as an art teacher and allowed me to work at my own pace, obeying my own rhythms.
I wore my tan skirt and jacket to church on my first Sunday—my uniform had not yet been issued. After we’d marched up the hill after the service, we sat on long benches at the plain wooden tables in the school dining room, bowed our heads, and murmured, “Bless this food and us to Thy loving service,” which wasn’t much different from what we said at Sacred Heart. Then Elsie set a steaming pot at one end of the table, and we took turns serving ourselves.
“What is it?” I asked, ladling a thick soup into my bowl.
“Brunswick stew,” answered a plump, dark-haired girl named Lucille.
“Made with fresh squirrel,” added Earnestine, who might have been pretty if her teeth hadn’t been so crooked.
Squirrel? Back on our farm in Sun Prairie I’d tamed a couple of the bushy-tailed creatures to eat nuts out of my hand. I thought of their bright eyes while they waited for their treat, and I laid my spoon back in the bowl.
“Earnestine is teasing,” said Susan. “In colonial times Brunswick stew was made with squirrel, but now it’s chic
ken, and all the other things that good Virginia cooks add to the pot—tomatoes and lima beans, corn and okra.”
I’d never heard of okra but decided not to betray any more ignorance.
“And a big ham bone,” Lucille said.
“The same ham bone Elsie cooks with the collards.”
Collards?
“It may be the oldest ham bone in the state of Virginia.”
A plate of biscuits was handed around. The stew was quite tasty. I still didn’t know what okra and collards were, but I had seconds.
The girls did not hide their opinion of my clothes. Lucille pronounced my tan suit “unfashionable.” Earnestine and a few others, not including Susan, even formed a committee and told me in a sugary manner that they had some ideas for helping me to dress properly. As though those girls didn’t look foolish in all their ruffles and laces and bows! “You should wear clothes that are properly fitted,” advised chubby Lucille, “to show off your tiny waist.”
Earnestine informed me that my braid was childish—“It makes you look ten years old.”
Even Susan, who didn’t like to be critical of anyone, laughed at my accent, even though they were the ones who spoke almost unintelligibly. Hardly anyone in Wisconsin would have understood a word they said!
The girls probably meant to be helpful, but I ignored their advice.
The politeness of these Southern girls made me want to shock them, or at least to rile them up. After we’d been subjected to an especially dull sermon by the rector of Emmanuel Episcopal and had given thanks for whatever Elsie was serving for Sunday dinner, I sighed dramatically and said, “She must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing week after week, year after year.”
“Who? The rector’s wife?” Earnestine asked. The chicken with dumplings was being passed around, and she took an extra helping.
“No,” I said. “I’m talking about God. She must be bored to death by now, don’t you think?”
Everyone stared at me, forks poised in midair.
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