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the theatre as a member of her party. Her brave seafaring brother!
    As she picked out the cotton with her right hand, she stored the harvest in her cupped left hand, beside the hairbrush handle, humming to herself.
    “I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
Old time dar am not forgotten;
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land!
In Dixie whar I was born in,
Early on one frosty mornin’…”
    With her ready grasp of modern history, Mrs. Albert Comstock had been heard to remark what a pity it was that the Civil War had ended slavery, as the darkies — she used this word (at least, in public) instead of “niggers” to demonstrate her daringly liberal views for the benefit of Mrs. William Boemer — had been having such a good time on the plantations. She visualized the plantations as rather like well-tended orchards: regular sun-dappled rows of identically shaped trees, ripe red fruit, apples, cherries, glowing in the soft, fresh greenery, stretching neatly away to the horizon, a darkie Paradise before the Fall as they — laughing for sheer delight — gathered clumps of cotton that were as clean and white as washing laid out to dry. In the fall the leaves would turn red and gold, and shrivel, become thin and papery and blow away, leaving the branches bare. There would be music at dusk as the trees darkened, and big white grins — they were like thoughtless, carefree children — would gleam like the fruit that had once been there in the daytime as they sang and danced in their joy.
    “Some folks like to sigh,
Some folks do, some folks do;
Some folks long to die,
But that’s not me nor you …”
    They were as happy as the day was long, and the day was long in Dixie.
    “… Away, away, away down south in Dixie!
Away, away, away down south in Dixie! …”
    “What a shame … What a shame …”
    Regular visitors were already beginning to nod their heads in agreement. Others would sense an announcement coming on. Mrs. Albert Comstock tended to announce something rather than merely state it; it was surely a mere oversight that she had failed to install liveried trumpeters in her household, all lined up tidily in a neat line, ready, at a moment’s notice, to produce a fanfare before her every utterance.
    (Deep breaths, inflated cheeks, puckered-up lips.)
    Tarantara!
    “I believe I’m correct in saying that it’s not as cold today as it was yesterday.”
    (Breathe, inflate, pucker.)
    Tarantara!
    “I don’t like Mrs. Italiaander’s new hat.”
    (Breathe, inflate, pucker.)
    Tarantara!
    “What a shame that the war spoiled it all.”
    She nodded to herself at the picture she had created in her mind, the lost prelapsarian wonderland.
    “What a shame …”
    Jewelry rattled as heads nodded in polite — or enthusiastic — agreement, earrings swaying, feathers vibrating.
    Sometimes Alice wasn’t sure whether what was being regretted was the loss of Dixie as a place of perpetual darkie jollity, or the appearance of more and more darkie faces on the streets of New York. Mrs. Albert Comstock — Alice was convinced — was under the impression that minstrel shows were performed by genuine darkies, and not by white men with burned cork on their faces, and this had colored — how apt a word could be — her picture of them. She had once met Booker T. Washington at Mrs. William Boemer’s in Gramercy Park, and — naturally — assumed that he was being introduced to her, and not she to him. She was equal to the occasion. She knew how to speak to such people. “Have you been black for long?” she asked him chattily, in that informal way she had with the lower orders. She prided herself on her ability to put people at their ease. It was a gift granted to the naturally aristocratic. She later confided to Mrs. Goodchild that Booker T. Washington was not as authentic-looking as some of the other darkies she had seen. He wasn’t
very
black, not really black enough to be totally convincing, and there had been — she’d no