Free Flint and Feather by Charlotte Gray

of dressing for dinner—which were part of Emily’s own life.
    But the rigour of their upbringing appears to have left Beverly and Eva prisoners of good breeding for the rest of their lives. “Ever correct, dignified, aristocratic,” an acquaintance said of Eva when she was in her sixties. “Even after the strangeness of first acquaintanceship had worn off and warmed, [she] seemed to cling with Indian tenacity to this correctness. Sometimes I could not understand, and felt aggrieved…”
    The younger two children, shielded from their parents by their elder siblings, were more extroverted. Allen was a bumptious little boy who was his father’s favourite because he loved to dress up and play at soldiers. Only Emily’s opposition had prevented GeorgeJohnson from naming his elder son after his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, and he always called Allen “Kleber,” after Napoleon’s general. (He also nicknamed Beverly “Boney.”) George roared with laughter when he caught six-year-old Allen stealing out of the front door with his father’s gun, powder and shot bag. But like Beverly, Allen was sent off to the forbidding brick Mohawk Institute, with its freezing dormitories and scratchy grey wool uniforms. Like Beverly, he hated it. Less malleable than his elder brother, Allen ran away to his grandparents’ house on the reserve, knowing that the kindly old couple would let him stay. By now, however, his mother had mellowed slightly; when she discovered him hiding in her mother-in-law’s kitchen, she told him he could come home to Chiefswood.
    Prom an early age, Allen Johnson demonstrated a talent for amateur dramatics.
    Pauline, the baby of the brood, was named by her father after Napoleon’s favourite sister, Pauline Borghese (subsequently Duchess of Guastalla). From birth, Pauline Johnson was her mother’s favourite. Emily was particularly protective of Pauline because her younger daughter’s health was precarious, and because as soon as she began to speak, she demonstrated a taste for poetry. She was four before she finally graduated from the black walnut cradle next to her parents’ bed. Emily, who had watched her sister Eliza’s children die, fretted over every cold and earache. Pauline was indulged in a way the older children never were. Each night her mother sang her to sleep, and she was allowed to keep a pet chipmunk (in a cage), as well as her terrier, Chips, and a kitten called Mitten. There was no question of a residential or boarding school for her. Until she was fourteen, her skimpy education was gleaned from her mother, a couple of non-nativegovernesses (the second, Emily Muirhead, was the daughter of the Mayor of Brantford) and two unsatisfactory years in the little school on the reserve. By this point, Pauline was too far ahead in reading, and too fastidious in her behaviour, to mingle easily with the other Mohawk children. So she came home and worked her way alone through her parents’ library of Milton, Scott, Longfellow, Browning, Tennyson, Keats and Byron. She particularly enjoyed stories about the nobility of Indians written by her favourite authors. In later years, she often recommended to others both Canadian-born John Richardson’s Wacousta , the 1832 novel about an Englishman who assumes Indian identity, and The Song of Hiawatha , Longfellow’s epic poem about the mythical Ojibwa peacemaker.
    But Pauline’s fascination with Indian culture and folklore was essentially literary: she saw native myth through the eyes of non-native writers. Her grandmother, Helen Martin Johnson, had died when Pauline was five. George Johnson felt the loss of his mother deeply, both emotionally and politically; she had been an important ally in his role on the reserve. With the loss of the clan matriarch, his own family had begun to drift away from their Mohawk relatives. Increasingly, the only link was George’s father, John Johnson, who spent long periods at Chiefswood. The old man had plenty of time for his