A Study in Colour/Dedication
To
my dear friend
Camille Olivia Elisabeth G. DeL,
I dedicate this little book.
To you, and to you alone, these little sketches of West Indian life of right belong, for without you they would certainly have remained for ever floating in the vague annals of negro life. You will remember how they began.
Often as we drove along the dusty lanes, and passed the picturesque little negro huts, round which children of all shades and sizes played, you would say, "How I wish I knew the daily life of this strange people! What are their wants and cares, their joys and sorrows?"
Your words set me thinking, and when you left us, and had gone home to dear old England, I thought still more.
As I pondered I began to regard with a new interest the dusky servants that came and went about the house. The servant question is to the full as engrossing a topic in the West Indies as at home, but it was not from a domestic, but from a human point of view that I was considering them.
Gradually I made friends with them; I found they were only too willing to talk about themselves, when once their first constraint was over, and they realised that I was truly interested in their histories; and as they talked there broke on me glimpses of a life so strange and fantastic, that at first I could hardly realize its existence.
Elita was a coloured girl of whom I heard a great deal from many of the servants. She was quite a beauty among her own people, and her tragical fate was spoken of with the greatest regret. I wrote her story out exactly as they told it to me.
I used to read what I had written, with, of course, certain reservations, to some of the servants afterwards, and they were delighted at hearing "stories all 'bout ourselves, Missus," and used to criticise most freely, and tell me where I had made mistakes, and how I was to alter them. When it was right and they were satisfied they used to be so pleased and say, "Dat quite right 'last, Missus, dat 'xactly de way we lib." Then I felt proud, even although my audience consisted of but my brown nurse and a tattered and disreputable-looking old negress, cleaner-in-general to the household.
If you can join your approval to theirs, I shall feel that these little stories have received more than their fair share of praise.
I do not, indeed, feel towards them as a mother, but rather as one who, finding them wandering neglected and forlorn, took pity on the little foundlings, and, clothing them in simplest words, now sends them out into the wide world to seek their fate. It is from knowledge of your own universal good will and sympathy that I ask you to be godmother to the poor little waifs.
Santa Anna, West Indies.