Opposite Contraries Read Free Page B

stampeded down Wharf Street in front of her father’s store. He whisks her into a saloon and plops her onto the bar where she sits agog, torn between wanting to watch the wild animals carrying on outside and wanting to take in her first sight of the inside of a drinking establishment. The version of the story published in 1942 avoids the word “nigger” entirely (referring to the man as either a “black man” or “Negro”) and reworks the ending, changing the focus of the story from its emphasis on race to one highlighting the social disgrace represented by bars and saloons.
    At the same time, other expurgated sections of the journal indicate that Carr was not at all ignorant of race issues. She notes that people reacted more superficially to her paintings of Native imagery than to her newer landscape sketches, and implies it is because the creation was not all hers. And in a passage about a Mr. Shades who was obsessed with Native artifacts, whose“soul rolls around Indian designs, colours, robes”and who had “done his summer house up Indian,” Carr writes: “There is a falseness about a white man using those symbols to ornamenthimself. The Indian believed in them. They expressed him. The white is not expressing himself; he’s faking.” It would seem that Carr was quite conscious of the racism around her and was not reticent about chastizing white society for its intolerance and superior attitudes. However, she was not able to turn the critique on herself, tending instead to promote herself as the exception, a special friend and interlocutor for Native culture. She is conflicted and inconsistent. In discussing her friendship with Sophie Frank, Carr is doubly enigmatic, telling us very little about her beyond the usual stereotypes; Carr praises her lavishly and folds Sophie Frank’s character and story into her literary project while actually disguising the friendship and misrepresenting the real person to posterity.
    Nowhere is ambivalence in Carr more evident than in her handling of the subject of love. She is coy, suggestive and, in the end, deliberately (one suspects) gives us clues but not the whole story. On combing the journal manuscript, for example, while I did find the occasional phrase and clause deleted, none of them were of any moment except for one. In the published entry for January 9, 1938, the second-last line is missing six words. The passage begins with the reflection that her love had endured three crushing blows in life. This is followed by a sentence of six words that was twelve in the original:
    I have loved three souls, passionately
, passionately, two relatives and a lover.
    Her father, obviously, was one of the two relatives, and the nature of her relationship with him is explored in several entries as well as in a letter to Ira Dilworth. But the other relativeremains a complete mystery. Carr rarely mentions her brother Dick, who died in a tuberculosis sanatorium in California in 1899 shortly after she arrived in England (the news came with her first letter from home). A set of studio photographs dating from 1891 shows the brother and sister together. In one, they appear in a formal pose and street attire, but in the other, they are in a relaxed pose of easy and intimate affection. The gloves and hat are gone, and Carr stands behind her younger brother, who is seated, leaning into him, arms crossed and resting on his shoulder. This photo is impossibly little to go on, of course, and the very idea might seem to imply incestuous feelings on her part, though perhaps not. The expurgated journals and other writings in this volume indicate that her conflict with her father was not obviously the result of sexual abuse; they demonstrate that the conflict between them had an intellectual and emotional content that does not presuppose incest any more than it precludes it. Is it possible that Carr had a special relation with her brother that ended when he died and that his death was one of the