So Jean and Mary were married first by Father André at the little Catholic church Jean had always attended, and then by the Rev. George W. Brown of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, to which denomination Mary belonged.
To the marriage there arose storms of protest from the relatives and friends of both Mary and Jean. He was alternately reviled and pitied for marrying an outsider, one who, though respectable and worthy, yet was not of Creole blood. “Le pauvre Jean,” they wailed, “grief and drink have weakened his understanding.” From Mary’s relatives, her father in particular, there came an outburst that overshadowed the protest of Jean’s friends as a tornado outsweeps the gentle breeze of a woman’s fan. Mr. Robertson rushed to New Orleans, stormed, denounced, ridiculed, pleaded, but in vain. Mary met his every mood in kind until, wise from his years of political training, he yielded, remained for the Protestant ceremony, refused to attend the Catholic one, and returned to Chicago, where he boasted to his friends of the “high Creole society” into which his Mary had married.
For a year they were happy. Mary was too clever to attempt revolutionary changes in her new milieu, even in the home where the to her slipshod methods of management irked her sorely. Towards Mimi she adopted a conciliatory policy, sensing the girl’s latent hostility to her who had taken, in physical ways at least, the place so long filled by the adored Margot.
Mary made few friends among the intimates of Jean and Mimi. They with gentle but unmistakable signs let her know that despite her marriage to Jean she yet was and would ever remain an outsider. Time and time again Jean and Mimi received invitations to dinner, to parties which did not include Mary. The mellow old families, militantly proud of their Creole and Negro ancestry, yielded not an inch to that which went on in the world outside. Deadlines there were which they never permitted crossing. One of these was family. Another was colour. Mary offended in both. She was an outsider. And her skin was deep brown, in sharp contrast to the ivory tint of Jean and Mimi.
For the first year of her marriage Mary was oblivious of these things. She was too intelligent not to notice them but they either amused her or were ignored by her as evidences of narrow-mindedness by those who too long had lived in a world apart. She loved gentle, irresponsible Jean with her whole heart, with a woman’s inconsistency, though he offended in almost every particular the canons of efficiency and progress which were a part of her very being.
She was content to spend her time at home, learning to cook dishes new to her and dear to Jean, green trout and perch from the bayous, oysters fresh from the reefs, pompano and snappers and red fish from the Gulf, new and exotic vegetables and fruits, gumbo, Jambalaya, and combinations of all sorts of ingredients, generously spiced and seasoned. She gloried in the quaint old house and its furnishings—tenderly she cared for the old eighteenth-century piano of mahogany inlaid with brass, the Empire work table with ornately carved legs of St. Domingo mahogany that Jean’s great-grandfather had brought to Louisiana when he fled from the Insurrection of 1791 in San Domingo.
During the year of their marriage Jean had told her the story of the refugee a score of times. Time and again he related the tale of tempestuous days, of ruin facing the sugar-planters of the Delta, of commerce paralysed, of the cessation for twenty-five years of manufacture of marketable sugar. She had heard of the black Dominican refugees, of the Spaniards, Mendez and Solis, and their plants on the outskirts of New Orleans, one a distillery, the other a refinery for making syrup.
The indigo crop a failure, their efforts to granulate sugar a failure, they were faced with ruin, complete and absolute. Then came Etienne de Boré and several black Dominicans, among them Jean’s great-grandfather. Days of anxious experimentation. Days of hope. Days of failure. The day of the final test. The exultant cry, “It granulates!” Prosperity beyond the wildest dream. Four—five—seven years. Five million pounds of sugar marketed in one year by de Boré. Always Jean ended the story: “And that was done, my dear, by my great-grandfather—a Negro from San Domingo!” For the first year she succeeded in refraining from the comment that always came to her lips when she heard the story. It was: “And what about you, Jean Daquin, exhibiting some of your great-grandfather’s initiative?” And it was a long time before she could get used to pronouncing his name other than as “Gene Da-Kwinn.”
In time, however, Mme. Daquin tired even of the elaborately carved old four-posted mahogany beds, so high that one used a step to climb into them. Even the old silver, the garden, lost their fresh charm as she grew used to them. Like new toys they fascinated her for a while and, with her love for Jean, her mild affection for Mimi and her new duties, her mind was kept free from Jean’s backwardness and the continued coolness of Jean’s friends towards her. But when this newness wore off she began, at first gently and then with increasing vigour, to point out to him the opportunities for gain he was overlooking.
