Suburban Sketches | Page 4

cars arrive,--the young with
a harmless swagger, and the old with the generic limp which our
Autocrat has already noted as attending advanced years in their race.
They seem the natural human interest of a street so largely devoted to
old clothes; and the thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence
where the pawnbrokers' windows display the forfeited pledges of
improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yet to redeem a whole

race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth, and still held
against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the Father of Lies.
How gayly are the young ladies of this race attired, as they trip up and
down the side walks, and in and out through the pendent garments at
the shop doors! They are the black pansies and marigolds and
dark-blooded dahlias among womankind. They try to assume
something of our colder race's demeanor, but even the passer on the
horse-car can see that it is not native with them, and is better pleased
when they forget us, and ungenteelly laugh in encountering friends,
letting their white teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to
their ears. In the streets branching upwards from this avenue, very little
colored men and maids play with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on
the wooden pavements of the entrances to the inner courts. Now and
then a colored soldier or sailor-- looking strange in his uniform, even
after the custom of several years-- emerges from those passages; or,
more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years, and cased in shining
broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick sidewalk, cane in hand,--a
vision of serene self-complacency, and so plainly the expression of
virtuous public sentiment that the great colored louts, innocent enough
till then in their idleness, are taken with a sudden sense of depravity,
and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same moment,
perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuffling with an admirer through
one of the low open windows, suspends the strife, and bids him, "Go
along now, do!" More rarely yet than the gentleman described, one may
see a white girl among the dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is
uncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and who,
though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale
anomaly which may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds.
An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift,
seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive
and impudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly
wickedness of a low American street. A gayety not born of the things
that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart--a ragged
gayety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or
the conscience, and which affects the countenance and the whole
demeanor, setting the feet to some inward music, and at times bursting
into a line of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh--gives tone to

the visible life, and wakens a very friendly spirit in the passer, who
somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and is half persuaded that
the orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown in the soft
atmosphere of those back courts.
It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was
from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge
to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was a
matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee
soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a
certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to ask
for references. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless eye
that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered
her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of
civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was
doubly estranged by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness
mixed with that of the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an
Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for
the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pair on the
other side.
The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she
conjured from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the
flitting Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius,
and was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious
talent. Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed
flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat