“Oh, you stupid! You know! You sing 244 plantation songs, and wear a red-and-white costume, and wave tambourines, and that sort of thing.”
“Do we black our faces?”
“We can if we like, but it isn’t necessary. We’re not to be nigger minstrels exactly. Coons are different. Of course, the songs are all about Sambos and Dinahs, but white people can sing them with quite as great effect. I believe the Bumble’s got some castanets and things put away that we could borrow.”
“So she has! Bags me the cymbals!”
“Pity nobody can play the banjo.”
“Never mind, we shall do very well with the piano.”
The committee having decided that their concert was to be a coon performance, the girls set to work accordingly to make preparations. All the songbooks in the school were ransacked to find plantation melodies, and after much discussion, not to say quarrelling, a programme was at length arranged, sufficiently spicy to entertain the girl portion of the audience, but select enough not to offend the easily shocked susceptibilities of Miss Gibbs, whose ideas of songs suitable for young ladies ran—in direct opposition to most of her theories—on absolutely Early Victorian lines.
“Gibbie’s notion of a concert is ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and ‘Cherry Ripe’, and perhaps ‘Caller Herrin’ if you want something lively,” pouted Ardiune.
“Yes, and even those have to be edited,” agreed Morvyth. “Don’t you remember when we were learning ‘Cherry Ripe’, she insisted on our changing 245 ‘Where my Julia’s lips do smile’ into ‘Where the sunbeams sweetly smile?’”
“And she wouldn’t let us sing ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’, and we knew it was just because it began: ‘Oh where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?’”