Page:The New Negro.pdf/147

Rh her voice, at best a thing of angel-colors, uncaught by the shreds of patois going by her.

In fact, from Colon to Cocoa Grove, Miss Buckner, by the color-crazed folk who swam head-high in the bowl of luring life stirred by her, was a woman to tip one's hat toregal ritea woman of taste, culture, value. Executives at Balboa, pilots on the locks, sun-burned sea folk attested to that. They gloried at the languor of Miss Buckner's salon.

Of course, by words that came flashing like meteors out of Miss Buckner's mouth, one got the impression that Miss Buckner would have liked to be white; but, alas! she was only a mulatto. No one had ever heard of her before she and her innocent darlings moved into The Palm Porch. Of course, it was to be expected, the world being what it is, that there were people whoDe la Croix, a San Andres wine merchant, De Pass, a Berbice horse breedermurmured words of treason: that, out of their roving lives they'd seen her at a certain Bar in Matches Lane stringing out from over a broad, clean counter words of rigid cheer to the colonizing English barque men. . . but such, too, were cast to the dogs to be devoured as expressions of useless and undocumented chatter. Whether the result of a union of white and Negro, French or Spanish, English or Maroon. . . no one knew. And her daughters, sculptural marvels of gold and yellow, were enshrined in a similar mystery. Of their father and their ascension to the luxury of one, the least heard, so far as the buzzing community was concerned, the better. And in the absence of data tongues began to wag Norwegian bos'en. Jamaica lover. . . Island trumph. Crazy Kingston nights. . . . To the charming ladies in question, it was a subject of adoring indifference. Miss Buckner herself, who had a contempt for statistics, was a trifle hazy about the whole thing.

One of the girls, white as a white woman, eyes blue as a Viking maid's, strangely, at sixteen, had eloped, much to Miss Buckner's disgust, with a shiny-armed black who at one time had been sent to the Island jail for the proletarian crime of prædial larceny. Neighbors swore it was love at first sight. But it irked, piqued Miss Buckner. "It a dam' pity shame,"