This was my mother’s youngest brother, the adored “Mannie”, who perished in the terrible yellow fever epidemic which carried off one eighth of the population.
Our six months in New Orleans were breathless ones, crowded with strong emotions and vivid impressions. The best people of the place were hospitable beyond belief, but there were some who resented the appointment of a Northern woman to the office my mother held; and she used to say,
“Satan has a fresh flower for me every morning when I come to my desk.”
Among our friends was Judge Charles Gayarré, the historian of Louisiana, a fine vigorous old man who did the honors of the city to all visiting literary folk. Among these was Charles Dudley Warner, who fell under the spell of the place and wrote delightfully about it. Then there was Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras. I still keep a valentine in his writing signed “Joch Keen.” He was a striking figure, with his long blond hair, high boots, velvet coat, and scarlet neckerchief. He often called in the evening when our work at the Exposition was done, and sometimes recited his verses, in a musical singsong. Miller’s “given” name was Cincinnatus Heine; he took the more fanciful Joaquin in memory of a Mexican bandit he had defended in the days when he practiced law. I was glad to learn from Miss Hewitt that the last lines of his noble poem to her grandfather Peter Cooper are engraved on the base of New York’s statue of that great citizen.
And wisest he in this whole wide land
Of hoarding till old and grey;
For all you can hold in your cold dead hand
Is what you have given away.
My mother founded in New Orleans that winter a literary club called the Pans. Two of the members, Grace King and Elizabeth Bisland, became well-known writers, and a third Pan, Henry Austin, made some reputation as a journalist. The Pans gave a reception for Mr. Warner, Joaquin Miller and other visiting literary men, but they took no notice of the most interesting of them all, George W. Cable. The feeling against Cable was then very strong. He was brought to call on us after dark, and we were warned not to speak of the visit, as he had come to New Orleans on some private business and his friends did not wish it known he was in the city.
“Some hot-blood would pick a quarrel with him and try to force him into a duel,” we were told. Though Cable had put New Orleans on the map with his stories, he was accused of having held his own people up to ridicule! He was a small, well-made man with keen dark eyes, a sweet voice, and a personality that took an audience by storm when he read his Creole dialect stories, or chanted the queer Gumbo songs of the Louisiana negroes.
“Quand patate la cuite, a pas mangé, a pas mangé li!” I can hear his very voice as I write the words from memory.
There was good opera that winter at the old Theater, where Adelina Patti made her débût as a child and won instant recognition. Colonel Mapleson’s Company gave many excellent productions. I recall a gala performance of the “Barber of Seville” when Joaquin Miller brought his friend Buffalo Bill into our box and presented him to my mother. Colonel Cody was dressed in cowboy fashion; his long hair reached his shoulders in loose curls. Big, bluff, manly, he was as dramatic a figure as any on the stage.
In mid-June the affairs of the Woman’s Department were finally wound up, and we left New Orleans. In the last days I had the forlorn sense that I was saying good-by forever to a city more foreign than the cities of Europe, and yet mine in a sense in which they could never be. I paid a last visit to the old French market. Hortense, the ancient quadroon who had sold me many trifles, gave me as a parting present a package of powdered saffron for “lagnappe”—or, as we should say more prosaically, thrown in for luck!