American Isis Read Online Free Page B

providing correct answers.
    The next year Sylvia attended a performance in Boston of The Tempest. Aurelia dated the program 21 January 1945 and preserved it in the Smith archive, noting that her daughter had been “completely transported to the magic island of Prospero,” talking about the play on the train home. It was a brilliantly sunny day. To Aurelia, the play’s “stuff that dreams are made on” seemed reflected in the shining piles of snow. Sylvia was reading Shakespeare, entranced by a poet who once again brought the sea of her experience home to her.
    Full fathom five thy father lies;
    Of his bones are coral made;
    Those are pearls that were his eyes:
    Nothing of him that doth fade
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange.
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
    Ding-dong.
    Hark! now I hear them—ding-dong, bell.
    The sounds of this poem and the effect of the bell sounding a death knell create a magical resonance that could well captivate a child entranced not merely by poetry, but by all the wonderful sound effects on the radio—portentous music like the “William Tell Overture,” heralding the Lone Ranger’s appearance. Sylvia loved to create radio melodramas in the schoolyard, and she was already writing short stories and plotting novels, even as she tried to get the fingering right during her piano lessons at camp.
    And yet she still had time for fellow campers, taking on a new name, “Sherry,” and comforting a homesick girl. She assured Aurelia that her wonderful letters helped her daughter adjust to being away from home. Sylvia was “overwhelmingly happy” and eating well. If her accounts were accurate, she was stuffing herself. Why eat one bowl of tomato soup if she could down three? The same went for coffee cake and watermelon: She ate four slices of each. She reported her achievements, such as swimming sidestroke for a hundred yards and bravely diving into the cold water when everyone else malingered. Making new friends was a competitive activity. Joan Beales, for example, could play piano and violin and tap dance—and, most impressively, she sang on the radio. Ah, but she could not draw, Sylvia told Aurelia.
    One feature of camp life that separates Sylvia’s world from ours was the minstrel show. She dressed as a “pickaninny” and deemed her performance a “great success.” Sylvia had no Negro friends, to use the argot of those times. She would not have seen many African Americans in her neighborhood. As human beings, they were virtually invisible—not just to her, but to millions of Americans, as Ralph Ellison eloquently explained in Invisible Man. The most familiar Negro figure in Sylvia’s life would have been Rochester, Jack Benny’s sly factotum, who was always scheming to get a day off from serving his parsimonious employer. Benny’s half-hour Sunday night comedy program delighted millions, who took in stride an anodyne version of house slave humor. Audiences laughed at jokes about Rochester’s skin color—for example, his plea that Benny stop scraping the blackened toast in his servant’s hands because “Boss, you’re getting down to me.” The only other Negro role model was Mammy, Scarlett O’Hara’s house slave, who insists that her rebellious teenage charge behave with a propriety befitting a woman of her class and race.
    Caught up in what the movies purveyed as desirable daughterly behavior, Sylvia sought to please Aurelia and play the dutiful daughter to a mother as saintly as Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, Ellen, who was always a lady. Aurelia resembled the kind parent who enforced a strict moral regime not through punishment, but through martyrdom to principles. Sylvia’s postcards and letters from camp sound the continual theme of mother love. It was what saved her, Sylvia said, from her own “petty jealousies.” Sylvia ran to