XVAS IT WAS IN MY DAY
I am like the deaf old lady who, when asked why she took a box at the opera when she could not hear, replied, “I can see.” So it is on piazzas at summer hotels, I do not overhear remarks, so perforce the pleasure of gossip is denied me, but “I can see,” and no doubt do observe more than those who have the other faculty to play upon; also I see and moralize. Last summer in the mountains didn’t I see young girls, young society girls, educated girls who ought to have known better, with bare heads and bare arms playing tennis in the hot sun; and, worse still, racing over the golf links? I could see them from my window, equally exposed, chasing balls and flourishing clubs. The sun in August is pitiless even on those breezy mountains, so I was scarcely surprised when one young girl was overcome by heat and exposure, and was brought to her mother at the hotel in a passing grocer’s cart or lumber wagon. I tell my grandchildren who want to “do like other girls” that isnot the way “other girls” did in my day. Grandma may be so old that she forgets, but she moralizes all the same. These athletic girls come back to city homes so sunburnt and with such coarse skin they have to repair to a skin specialist, and have the rough cuticle burnt off with horrid acids, and be polished up before the society season opens.
There are, of course, extremes, but years ago young ladies took more care of their complexions and of their hair, too. Years back of years, I don’t know how they did. In my day we girls loved to visit the granddaughter of a voluble dame and listen to the old lady’s talk, just like I am talking now. She thought we were criminally careless with our “skins,” as she called it. Why, when she was young, her skin was so thin and clear that “one saw little blue veins meandering her neck.” We always heard something as reminiscent in that house to laugh over till we saw the old lady again, and heard something equally remarkable of her youth. She was living in the past, as I am now, as I return to my experiences. One young girl visited me, ever so many years ago, who wore one of those awful, long, scoop sunbonnets all the time she was not at table or in bed. She looked like the proverbial lily. I used to wish she would take off that sunbonnet and say something, for she was dumb asa lily. I have entirely forgotten her name, though she was my guest for a whole stupid week; but I recall she was a relative or friend of the Morses. I don’t know Mr. Morse’s name; he was called Guncotton Morse, for he invented an explosive of that name, which the United States Government appropriated during the war.
Years after this young girl’s visit to me I called on the charming Morse family in Washington. He was then urging his “claim.” Every Southerner in Washington was after a “claim” at that time. I nearly broke my neck falling over a green china dog or a blue china cat in their dark parlor. Enterprising Morse barricaded himself behind his explosive, but I think he failed in his fight. I find I have wandered from the girls having their skins burned off to the Morses and their blue china cat!... In my days there were no specialists except cancer doctors. I think they always flourished—there were no skin specialists. A doctor was a doctor, nothing more nor less, and he was supposed to know all that was necessary of the “human form divine.” He did, too, for people did not have the new-fangled diseases of to-day. A woman’s hospital! Oh, heavens! Only last week I saw a friend, old enough to know better, but we never are so old we don’t want to rid our faces of pimples and wartsand wrinkles. This friend was a sight. I was really alarmed for her. She had been to a specialist. Her face was fiery red, all the skin removed by acid. Yesterday I saw her again, cured of sunburn and all the ills skin is heir to. Her complexion was that of the lily girl who wore the scoop sunbonnet. I do not advise you to try the experiment. It is shockingly painful, and does not always prove a success.
When I was a little girl, more than seventy years ago, mother made me, for summer romps in the country, gloves of nankeen, that well covered the wrist, had a hole for the thumb and a deep flap to fall over the hand. It was lucky they were easily made, and nankeen was not expensive, for I hated them and had a way of losing them in the currant bushes. Maybe you never saw nankeen? Gentlemen’s waistcoats were often made of it, and little boys’ trousers. If I lost my scoop sunbonnet one day—and it was surprising how easily I lost it!—it was sewed on the next. There were no such things as hatpins—and we had pigtails anyway, so they would have been of no use. Such tortures were inflicted when we were running wild over the blue grass farm, but no doubt the little Creole girls on the lakeshore were similarly protected. The hair specialist was not in evidence either.
St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans.
St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans.
St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans.
Ladies had their hair done up with bandoline andpomatums made of beef’s marrow and castor oil and scented with patchouli; hair was done into marvelous plaits and puffs. A very much admired style which Henriette Blondeau, the fashionable hair dresser, achieved, was a wide plait surrounding a nest of stiff puffs. It was called the “basket of fruit.” The front locks were tiny, fluffy curls each side the face and long ringlets to float over the shoulders. We all remember Henriette Blondeau. She dressed my sister’s hair in the early forties, and she dressed mine ten years later, and I met her in the hall of the St. Charles Hotel, plying her trade, twenty years later still, the same Henriette, withthe same ample apron, the tools of her trade sticking out from her pockets. Now, almost forty years later still, she walks the streets of New Orleans no more. I hope she rests somewhere in the old French cemetery, for she knew and gossiped with so many who are taking their long sleep in that peaceful spot.
Mother made—no doubt your grandmother did, too—the pomade that was used on our hair. It was used, too, very freely; our locks plastered down good and smooth and flat. You may wonder how long hair so treated could last; just as long as hair ruffled the wrong way and marcelled with warm irons lasts our girls to-day. Mother’s pomade was made of beef’s marrow and castor oil. After the marrow was rendered to a fluid state, oil was added, then perfume, the whole beaten in a deep bowl until perfectly cold and white. Mother would beat and beat, add a few drops more of essence of bergamot, smell and smell and beat and smell, until she had to call a fresh nose to see if it was all right. I remember being told to try my olfactories on the soft, creamy stuff. A naughty brother gave my head a blow that sent my little pug-nose to the bottom of the bowl! My face was covered to the ears, and while mother scraped it with a spoon and scolded Henry, she was entreating me not to cry and have tearsspoil her pomade. Maybe I might have forgotten how the stuff was made and how it looked, but for that ridiculous prank of the dearest brother ever was.
I have a sweet little miniature of that brother Henry, namesake of my father’s dear friend, Henry Clay, with the queer collared coat and flourishing necktie of the day, and his long, straight hair well plastered with mother’s good pomade. The dear man went to Central America, on a pleasure tour to the ruins of Uxmal in 1844. The vessel on which he sailed for home from Campeache, in September of that year, disappeared in the Gulf. We never had any tidings of how, or when, or where. I remember the firm of J. W. Zacharie was consignee of that ill-fatedDoric, and how tenderly Mr. Zacharie came to my stricken mother, and how much he did to obtain information, and how for weeks after all hopes were abandoned my mother’s heart refused to believe her boy was indeed lost. Every night for months she placed with her own trembling hands a lamp in the window of Henry’s room, to light him when he came. She never gave up some remnant of hope. So far as I know, only one friend of that dear brother, one contemporary, is living now, in New Orleans. She is the last of her generation; I am the last of mine.
In those days there were few patent medicines, washes and lotions. There was a Jayne’s hair tonic, and somebody’s chologogue, that was a fever cure much in evidence on plantations, for quinine and blue mass pills—others, too—were made by hand. I have made many a pill. We had an old negro woman who was daft on the subject of medicine. There was not an earthly thing the matter with Hannah—she was just a chronic grumbler, begging for “any kind of pill.” I doctored her successfully, making for her bread pills, rolling them in a little rhubarb dust to give them a nasty taste. They did her a world of good. Mother made our lip salve (didn’t your grandmother?) of white wax and sweet oil. We did not have cold cream in those days.
When by accident, or some other way, our faces tanned, a wash overnight of sour buttermilk was all that was required. It was not very pleasant, and nobody wanted to occupy the room with you on sour buttermilk night. Reason obvious. Kentucky belles, who were noted for their rosy cheeks, often increased the bloom by a brisk rubbing of the leaves of the wild mullein. Except rice powder (and that is not a cosmetic) no cosmetics were in use.
We can recall at a later date than my girlhood a lady from somewhere up the coast married afinicky cotton broker in New Orleans. They made a wedding trip to Paris, and she returned with her face enameled. I don’t think it could have been very skillfully done, for she had to be so careful about using the muscles of the face that she was absolutely devoid of expression. Once, in a moment of forgetfulness or carelessness, she “cracked a smile,” which cracked the enamel. She returned to Paris for repairs. I saw her on the eve of sailing, and do not know if she ever returned.