“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.
On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech, without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.
When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink. Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.
There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend, unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But we knew no one in Canada.
When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words, I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight, won’t you?”
He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and eyebrows that might mean anything.
He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy. My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop—he was just plain discouraged of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it. When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”
The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.
We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes on as before.
The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always stayed around outside to watch?”