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5 A Grave for Love Whenever Josephine would become deeply involved in the local cultural affairs of Charleston, Camilla Pinckney would plan another trip. In the late summer of 1923, the Pinckneys returned to East Gloucester. Almost immediately, they became embroiled in a scandal that reverberated up and down the Atlantic seaboard. It all began innocently enough. Camilla wanted to attend the dedication of an old colonial church in Peterborough. Dreading the waste of a Sunday afternoon, Pinckney asked Allen if they could meet while Camilla was occupied. Her timing was excellent . Allen responded that the influential critic from the Boston Evening Transcript, William Stanley Braithwaite, was coming to the MacDowell Colony on publishing business and had agreed to stop by Allen’s studio for tea. Would she join them? Nothing short of a national emergency or a fearsome act of God could have prevented Pinckney from hobnobbing with this “kingmaker,” even though his mother had been a West Indian mulatto.1 The afternoon was perfect. About twenty of the colonists, including Padraic Colum, Louise Driscoll, Herbert Gorman, and Max Bodenheim sipped tea and shared the fruits of their summer work. A tall dignified gentleman, Braithwaite had an exotic look with his drooping mustache and pale, gold-toned skin. In Braithwaite’s party was Mary Sinton Leitch, head of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Apparently, “the Olympian company gave her swimming in the head,” according to Pinckney, for as soon as Leitch returned home she typed out an account transforming a casual gathering into a “grand event” and naming all the tea-drinkers. She sent her news flash to Addison Hibbard. Hibbard, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, wrote a syndicated weekly literary column about contemporary southern literature that was equal parts news, criticism, and gossip. In early September 1923, the story splashed across forty southern newspapers, insinuating that the much-vaunted Pinckney ladies had been subjected to the almost unthinkable horror of breaking bread with a presumptuous Negro man in a New England hotbed of bohemian libertinism. The man responsible for this heinous violation of a sacred code was Hervey Allen.2 A storm of outrage ensued. Pinckney found the whole episode hilarious; her mother was livid. Allen politely, but vigorously, denied that Braithwaite had 78 | A Talent for Living received any nourishment whatsoever on the grounds of MacDowell Colony. “Can’t you see us all assembled around the candles with the colored brother as the guest of honor?” he replied to Louisa Stoney who had sent him a scathing letter. Pinckney wrote to Amy Lowell with glee, explaining “the cream of the joke is that Mother—whose views on the colour question are pronounced to put it mildly—wasn’t even at the Colony, having gone to Peterborough for the dedication of a church and flocked exclusively with the pure in heart, such as Mr. Cram and the bishops congregated for the ceremony. It is unnecessary to describe her reaction.”3 Not long after the tea-party fiasco, DuBose Heyward arrived in East Gloucester . He stunned Pinckney with the news that he had fallen hopelessly in love with Dorothy Kuhns and planned to marry her as soon as possible. Pinckney reeled at this revelation. She had of course given Heyward no reason to hope that she would ever accept him. (He would remind her years later that “that my scalp was dangling around within your easy reach for a not inconsiderable space of time.”) Still, Heyward had been a comforting and undemanding presence in her life for nearly a decade. And the disapproving Camilla could not live forever.4 In September 1923, DuBose Heyward and Dorothy Kuhns married quietly in a Manhattan chapel.5 Pinckney declined to join the small group of well-wishers pleading a prior commitment. She sent one of her dearest friends a telegram from Keeseville, New York: “Dreadfully sorry impossible to be with you for the great occasion . . . Mother sends best wishes.” Seizing a chance to flee her pain, or was it embarrassment, she had accepted when her sometime boyfriend Gordon Miller and his sister, Marguerite, asked if they could pick her up as they drove from Charleston to Canada. While Heyward was pledging himself to Dorothy, Pinckney and the Millers cut a northward loop “through four kinds of mountains and six kinds of drinks” with prohibition-free Quebec the “zenith of the arc.”6 When the travelers stopped at the Equinox Inn in Manchester, Vermont, Pinckney wrote...

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