Here I am, she mused, a woman, a Negro. Life for me if I were white would be hard enough, but it’s going to be doubly so when I have race problems added to my own difficulties as a woman. She toyed idly with the notion as to what her lot would have been if she had been born white—if she were to cross over the line and forget the Negro blood in her body. The idea was not attractive. In New Orleans the women who attracted her most and whom she admired above all others were not white—at least, they were not Anglo-Saxon. They all lived in the Creole quarter and Jean had pointed out many of them who had Negro blood, some of them knowing it and others in ignorance of it. She had not needed Jean’s telling her to pick them out—there was something tangible yet intangible about them which indicated it to the observant eye—a warmth, a delicate humanness, an attractiveness which did not belong to the women who lived north of Canal Street.
And here in Atlanta she had watched them, noting the subtle differences even in those like herself whose skins were fair. No wonder that in New Orleans in the old days, as she had read in the books of French travelers, the men often deserted the balls where their wives and daughters were, and slipped away to those more resplendent ones where quadroon women held sway. Mimi remembered a comparison one of them had made between these who had Negro blood with the American women—“frank, warmhearted … with manners more interesting than the Americans … the roundness and beauty of shape in the women also contrasting with the straightness and angularity of American figures.”
She had asked Jean, in her innocence, to tell her about these balls but for some reason she could not explain he had evaded her question and seemed to be somewhat embarrassed by it. No, she concluded, with all its faults and petty unpleasant features, she would rather remain with her own people. They got, apparently, so much more out of the life they lived with all its barriers than those who had more but seemed infinitely less happy with it.