-
2. The Education of a Young Poet
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 The Education of a Young Poet Josephine Pinckney grew into a honey-haired child with a mass of artfully twirled ringlets. Large sad-looking eyes of a type once called “soulful” dominated her round face. Dressed in laces with chubby feet squeezed into Mary Janes, she was Captain Tom’s delight. He wrapped her in an envelope of affluence remote to the experiences of most young southerners of her generation. Tours of Europe, summers at New England resorts, camp in the New Hampshire woods, beautiful bespoke clothes all set her apart from friends and even family members. During the Christmas season of 1902, seven-year-old Josephine reported to a motherless Virginia cousin whose own holiday was probably rather meager, “I received so many xmas presents that I had a tree of my own.”1 Camilla Pinckney’s desires had been honed by deprivation; her taste, by her years in Richmond, a town rebuilt from wartime ruin in the Victorian style, brownstone and massive. None of the several houses in Charleston that Captain Tom rented after they left Fairfield suited her. In 1907, he agreed to buy 21 King Street. Pinckney moved his family of three into the most arrogantly Victorian house in the city, a four-story Italianate palazzo whose brownstone exterior was set off by wide Charleston porches. Carved shells and other marine motifs decorated the window surrounds of the second floor. Built about 1856, 21 King Street towered over its neighbors. At the time the Pinckneys moved in, some old-time Charlestonians still called the mansion “O’Donnell’s Folly,” an unkind jest at the nouveau riche Irish contractor who lost his ladylove to another while building this over-elaborate love offering.2 The interior of the Pinckney home was as extravagant as the exterior. On the first floor, two large, paneled drawing rooms ran en suite, illuminated by huge chandeliers hanging from fourteen-foot high ceilings. The dining room and library could both be opened for parties. Large plaster decorations with classical motifs adorned the walls; ceiling medallions bore the image of popular songstress Jenny Lind who once visited Charleston. Since the expansive rooms dwarfed the Pinckney ’s delicate Federal-era antiques, Captain Tom bought Camilla the more up-todate heavy mahogany furniture she coveted while on a trip to Chicago.3 Elderly Captain Tom installed Charleston’s first elevator in a private home. 24 | A Talent for Living Sparkling fresh paint and energetically polished brass lamps made the house even more conspicuous in a town well known during this era as “too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.” To stroll the narrow streets and alleyways of Charleston during Josephine Pinckney’s childhood was to feel like a tourist at Pompeii, to be made witness to a great calamity. The mummified remains of past splendor, a “somber and shadowy magnificence,” loomed over the city and invited names such as “Death on the Atlantic.”4 During the first decade of the twentieth century, many of the old Low Country families finally hit bottom after years of depression , boll weevil, and bad cotton weather. They sadly pulled the shutters on their ancestral plantations and crowded in with relatives in their moldering houses in town. Camilla offended local sensibilities by flaunting her wealth. The most notable aspect of the aristocratic code was the aversion to “talking rich or poor,” as one of Charleston’s social arbiters, Louisa McCord Stoney, explained to her own daughter in 1915. “This is the greatest test of your gentility—that good old-fashioned self-respecting courtesy that we Southerners and old fashioned Northerners still cherish.”5 Josephine developed into an acute little observer of adults and their foibles. She could fathom drama even in a Sunday dinner. “When I was growing up,” she recollected, “family dinners were the chief form of entertainment in the South. Not that anyone regarded them as social or as necessarily entertaining.”6 Living as the only child in her forbidding house, and in such different circumstances from most of her playmates, left young Josephine with feelings of isolation and profound loneliness which haunted her all her life. As an adult, she would refer to her emotional seclusion as her “ivory tower.” Over time, the ivory tower would become her personal metaphor for the distance she always felt even from her closest friends. She believed that members of her social circle treated her differently, deferentially, with less familiarity and less candor, than they...