By Winifred Black
Well, well, well—who do you think walked up to my doorstep this very morning and rung the bell? Little Miss Louisiana from the Bayou Tech. Yes, indeed, she certainly “deed.”
Pretty as a peach she was, too, as she stood there on the porch with her blue eyes shining and a look, half shy, half daring, on her dear little roguish face.
“I’m here on a visit,” she said, “and I promised Mother and Daddy I’d come to see you, and I brought you some home-made pinoche and a whole lot of moss from the Bayou and so many messages and—"
In she came and what a visit we did have!
She’s here to select her trousseau—oh, yes, she’s going back to the Bayou to live, she wouldn’t’ feel quite at home anywhere else. I suppose she looks like her mother. I’ve never seen her mother—thought she did send me so many loving messages and I know she speaks like her father.
What a day we did have of it—the day we met the man from the Bayou Tech—years ago!
We were in New Orleans at Mardi Gras time, two of us, and we were doing all the sights and of course, we had to go to breakfast on Sunday morning at Begue’s.
A Wisp of Ribbon
Funny little place, Begue’s—up a pair of winding stars over a market—just a garret, really, festooned with cobwebs at that, such cookery, such food, such gaiety, such a long table crowded with laughing people and Papa Begue at the head of it, such stories, such songs, such laughter!
Everybody spoke to everybody at Begue’s and when you had finished, you must write a little verse or epigram in the great book Papa Begue handed round—oh, a fine place, Begue’s—and well worth the visit in those days.
The two of us were a bit late and we had to sit in the corner at a little table and crowded in with us was a tall young man, a little shy, a little uncomfortable in such unaccustomed surroundings.
He was from the Bayou Tech, he said, and after a while, he told us about it—the dark Bayou fringed with gray ghost-like trees, hung with gray fog-like moss, and the flowers that grew along the edge of it, ad he had always lived there, he said and always should.
His little wife was born there too. And he and she had planned to come to New Orleans on their wedding trip, but there was an illness in the family and their wedding trip was cut short and now he had come down to see about—well, a—that is, a—he had a little shopping to do and some people to see and he had promised Sally-Lou that he would breakfast at Begue’s and come home and tell her every bite he had to eat, and who sat at the table with him and what they said and what they wrote in the great book.
And he copied the simple little verses the two of us wrote and we sat for two or three hours and talked like disembodied spirits sitting on a cloud.
We should never see him again, or he, us. And so we spoke our hearts and he spoke his. Such a handsome fellow he was, so tall and straight and so much a man—he showed us a picture of his little wife and when he took the picture out a little wisp of baby-blue ribbon came with it and he blushed crimson—the man from Bayou Tech—and said, “Ir—a—now—a, I’m to match this.”
And we spent the day together in quaint old New Orleans, wandering in and out of shops, and when we got back to the hotel and left the man from Bayou Tech—the Other One told me that it was true what we thought about the baby ribbon, the man had whispered to him and he was so happy and so worried and so excited, he hardly knew what to do.
There She Was!
And when we got home to the North, we sent a postcard to little Mrs. Bayou Tech and she sent us some snapshots of their lovely little home and then—one day we got a letter and little Miss Louisiana had arrived and was christened and the baby-blue ribbon just exactly matched her eyes—and we promised to go down and visit the Bayou Tech, but dear me, the years slipped by and somehow we never went.
And there she was—on my door-step this morning-little Miss Louisiana from Bayou Tech and her eyes still matched the blue of that baby ribbon we caught a glimpse of, so long and long ago.
Wasn’t it nice for little Miss Louisiana from the Bayou Tech to take time to come and see me? And she’s going to bring her sweetheart’s picture for me to see.
I do home he looks something like—the Man from Bayou Tech.
From the Fayetteville Observer, June 5, 1922. The photo is Winifred Black, author of the story, although I would have liked to see Little Miss Louisiana, the Man from Bayou Tech and Mrs. Bayou Tech.
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