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- Herausgeber: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an African-American editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Jessie Redmon Fauset
THERE IS CONFUSION
Illustrated
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an African-American editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history.
Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble; pain on pain
—Tennyson
CHAPTER I
JOANNA’S FIRST consciousness of the close understanding which existed between herself and her father dated back to a time when she was very young. Her mother, her brothers and her sister had gone to church, and Joanna, suffering from some slight childish complaint, had been left home. She had climbed upon her father’s knee demanding a story.
“What sort of story?” Joel Marshall asked, willing and anxious to please her, for she was his favorite child.
“Story ’bout somebody great, Daddy. Great like I’m going to be when I get to be a big girl.”
He stared at her amazed and adoring. She was like a little, living echo out of his own forgotten past. Joel Marshall, born a slave and the son of a slave in Richmond, Virginia, had felt as a little boy that same impulse to greatness.
“As a little tyke,” his mother used to tell her friends, “he was always pesterin’ me: ‘Mammy, I’ll be a great man some day, won’t I? Mammy, you’re gonna help me to be great?’
“But that was a long time ago, just a year or so after the war,” said Mammy, rocking complacently in her comfortable chair. “How wuz I to know he’d be a great caterer, feedin’ bank presidents and everything? Once you know they had him fix a banquet fur President Grant. Sent all the way to Richmond fur ’im. That’s howcome he settled yere in New York; yassuh, my son is sure a great man.”
But alas for poor Joel! His idea of greatness and his Mammy’s were totally at variance. The kind of greatness he had envisaged had been that which gets one before the public eye, which makes one a leader of causes, a “man among men.” He loved such phrases! At night the little boy in the tiny half-story room in that tiny house in Virginia picked out the stories of Napoleon, Lincoln and Garrison, all white men, it is true; but Lincoln had been poor and Napoleon unknown and yet they had risen to the highest possible state. At least he could rise to comparative fame. And when he was older and came to know of Frederick Douglass and Toussaint L’Ouverture, he knew if he could but burst his bonds he, too, could write his name in glory.
This was no selfish wish. If he wanted to be great he also wanted to do honestly and faithfully the things that bring greatness. He was to that end dependable and thorough in all that he did, but even as a boy he used to feel a sick despair,—he had so much against him. His color, his poverty, meant nothing to his ardent heart; those were nature’s limitations, placed deliberately about one, he could see dimly, to try one’s strength on. But that he should have a father broken and sickened by slavery who lingered on and on! That after that father’s death the little house should burn down!
He was fifteen when that happened and he and his mother both went to work in the service of Harvey Carter, a wealthy Virginian, whose wife entertained on a large scale. It was here that Joel learned from an expert chef how to cook. His wages were small even for those days, but still he contrived to save, for he had set his heart on attending a theological seminary. Some day he would be a minister, a man with a great name and a healing tongue. These were the dreams he dreamed as he basted Mrs. Carter’s chickens or methodically mixed salad dressing.
His mother knew his ideas and loved them with such a fine, albeit somewhat uncomprehending passion and belief, that in grateful return he made her the one other consideration of his life, weaving unconsciously about himself a web of such loyalty and regard for her that he could not have broken through it if he would. Her very sympathy defeated his purpose. So that when she, too, fell ill on a day with what seemed for years an incurable affection, Joel shut his teeth and put his frustrated plans behind him.
He drew his small savings from the bank and rented a tiny two and a half room shack in the front room of which he opened a restaurant,—really a little lunchstand. He was patronized at first only,—and that sparingly—by his own people. But gradually the fame of his wonderful sandwiches, his inimitable pastries, his pancakes, brought him first more black customers, then white ones, then outside orders. In five years’ time Joel’s catering became known state wide. He conquered poverty and came to know the meaning of comfort. The Grant incident created a reputation for him in New York and he was shrewd enough to take advantage of it and move there.
Ten years too late old Mrs. Marshall was pronounced cured by the doctors. She never understood what her defection had cost her son. His material success, his position in the church, in the community at large and in the colored business world,—all these things meant “power.” To her, her son was already great. Joel did not undertake to explain to her that his lack of education would be a bar forever between him and the kind of greatness for which his heart had yearned.
It was after he moved to New York and after the death of his mother that Joel married. His wife had been a school teacher, and her precision of language and exactitude in small matters made Joel think again of the education and subsequent greatness which were to have been his. His wife was kind and sweet, but fundamentally unambitious, and for a time the pleasure of having a home and in contrasting these days of ease with the hardships of youth made Joel somewhat resigned to his fate.
“Besides, it’s too late now,” he used to tell himself. “What could I be?” So he contented himself with putting by his money, and attending church, where he was a steward and really the unacknowledged head.
His first child brought back the old keen longing. It was a boy and Joel, bending over the small, warm, brown bundle, felt a gleam of hope. He would name it Joel and would instil, or more likely, stimulate the ambition which he felt must be already in that tiny brain. But his wife wouldn’t hear of the name Joel.
“It’s hard enough for him to be colored,” she said jealously guarding her young, “and to call him a stiff old-fashioned name like that would finish his bad luck. I am going to name him Alexander.”
Alec, as he was usually called, did not resemble his father in the least. He was the average baby and the average boy, interested in marbles, in playing hookey, in parachutes, but with no determination to be a dark Napoleon or a Frederick Douglass. Two other children, Philip and Sylvia, resembled him, and Joel Marshall, now a man of forty, gave up his old ideas completely and decided to be a good business man, husband and father; not a bad decision if he had but known it.
Then Joanna came; Joanna with a fluff of thick, black hair, and solemn, earnest eyes and an infinite capacity for spending long moments in thought. “She’s like you, Joel,” Mrs. Marshall said. And because the novelty of choosing names for babies had somewhat worn off, she made no objection to the name Joanna, which Joel hesitatingly proposed for her. “She certainly should have been named for you,” the mother told him a month later; “see how she follows you with her eyes. She’d rather watch you than eat.”
And indeed from the very beginning Joanna showed her preference for her father. The two seemed to have a secret understanding. After the first child, Mrs. Marshall had fretted somewhat over the time and strength expended in caring for the other little Marshalls, but she never had any occasion to worry about Joanna. Joel had his office in his residence, and after Joanna was dressed and fed, all she wanted was to lie in her carriage and later to ride about on the kiddie-car of that day in her father’s office, where she watched him with her solemn eyes.
Joel never forgot the first time she asked him for a story. He was in the habit of regaling his youngsters with tales of his early life, of himself, of boys who had grown up with him, of ballgames and boyish pranks. The three older children had a fine catholicity of taste. “Tell us a story,” was all they asked, its subject made no difference to them.
But on that certain Sunday before Joanna was five years old she perched herself on her father’s knee and commanded astoundingly:
“Tell me a story, Daddy, ’bout somebody great.”
Joel didn’t know what she meant at first, so far removed was he from the thought of his old dream. And yet the question did seem something like an echo, faint but recognizable of a longing that had once loomed large in his life.
“Great,” he repeated. “How do you mean great, Baby? Tall, great big man, like Daddy, hey?” He stood six feet and was broad with it.
Joanna shook a dissenting head. “No, not great that way. I want to hear about a man who did things nobody else could do,—maybe he put out a fire,” she ended doubtfully, “but I mean something greater than that.”
Joel had her taught to read after that. She was a little frail for school, and did not start until later than the other children, though she was far the most studious. So she had three or four years of solid reading, and always her choice of subject was of some one who had overcome obstacles and so stood out beyond his fellows.
At first she thought nothing of color, and it was not until she had gone to school and learned something of discrimination that she began to ponder.
“Didn’t colored people ever do anything, Daddy?” But Joel was prepared for that. He told her himself of Douglass and Vesey and Turner. There were great women, too, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, women who had been slaves, he explained to her, but had won their way to fame and freedom through their own efforts.
Joanna had a fine sense of relativity. Young as she was, she could understand that the bravery and courage exercised by these slave women was a much finer and different thing from that exercised for instance by Florence Nightingale. “They were like Joan of Arc,” she thought to herself, “Joan, wonderful Joan with the name almost like mine.” Only an innate, almost too meticulous sense of honesty had kept her from changing her own name to the shorter form.
She used to lie in her bed at night, straight and still with her eyes fixed on the stretch of sky visible even from a house in Fifty-ninth Street and dream dreams. “I’ll be great, too,” she told herself. “I’m not sure how. I can’t be like those wonderful women, Harriet and Sojourner, but at least I won’t be ordinary.”
She spoke to her father like a little piping echo from the past, “Daddy, you’ll help me to be a great woman, somebody you’ll be proud of?”
Her words made him so happy; they renewed his life. She was so completely like himself, and he could help her. “Thank God,” he used to murmur over his books that daily showed an increase in his earnings.
He took Joanna everywhere with him. One Easter Sunday a great colored singer, a beautiful woman, sang an Easter anthem in his church, lifting up a golden voice among the tall white lilies. Afterwards she went home with Mr. and Mrs. Marshall and stayed to dinner. Joanna never moved her eyes from her during the ride home.
After dinner she stood in front of the singer in the comfortable living-room. “I can sing like you,” she said gravely, “and I can remember the tune of most of that hymn you sang this morning. Listen.”
And with no further introduction she sang most of the anthem. She was only ten then, yet her voice was already free of the shrillness of childhood and beginning to assume that liquid golden quality which so distinguished it later.
Madame Caldwell gasped. She had won her own laurels through bitter experience in various studios, meeting insult, indifference and unkindness with an unyielding front, which brought her finally consideration, a grudging interest, sometimes a genuine appreciation.
She was well on her way to recognition now. Colored people acclaimed her all over the country and she had some local reputation in her home town where black and white alike were very proud of her.
“But no daughter of mine,” she used to say bitterly, “if she has the voice of an angel shall go through what I have suffered.”
Yet when she heard Joanna sing that Easter Sunday, she seized Joel Marshall’s arm. “Get her a teacher, Mr. Marshall. She has a voice in ten thousand. Poor child, how you will have to work!”
But Joanna wasn’t listening, her eyes sought her father’s. Both of them knew at once that the road to glory was stretching out before her.
CHAPTER II
JOANNA WAS like her father not only so far as ambition was concerned but also in her willingness to work. She had a fine serious mind, a little slow-moving at first, but working with a splendid precision that helped her through many a hard place. Her quality of being able to stick to a problem until she was satisfied served in the long run as well as her sister Sylvia’s greater quickness and versatility. Eventually, too, Joanna’s laboriousness and native exactness produced in her the result of an oft-sharpened knife. The method which she applied to one study, she remembered to apply to another, and if this failed then she was able to make combinations.
Usually she had to have things explained to her from the very beginning, either by a teacher or through directions in a book. But to offset this slowness she had a good sense of logic, a strong power of concentration, and a remarkably retentive and visualizing memory.
Sylvia and she, destined to be such perfect friends in their maturity, were not very sympathetic in their childhood. The older girl was thoughtless, quick to jump at conclusions, natively witty and strongly disinclined toward seriousness. “Joanna makes me sick,” was her constant cry, “always thinking of her lessons and how important she’s going to be when she’s grown-up. So tiresome, too, wanting to talk about what she’s going to do all the time, with no interest in your affairs.”
Which was not quite true, for Joanna was mightily interested in people who had a “purpose” in life. Otherwise not at all. This was where she differed most from her father. With Joel success and distinction had been his dream, his dearest wish. But always he had realized that there were other things which might interfere. With Joanna success and distinction were an obsession. It never occurred to her that life was anything but what a man chose to make it, provided, of course, he did choose to make it something. Her brothers’ and Sylvia’s haphazard methods were always incomprehensible to her, and this gave her the least touch of the “holier than thou” manner.
Her mother insisted on each child’s learning to do housework. Even the boys were not exempt from this, indeed they rather liked it. Sylvia made no complaint though she occasionally bribed Alec or Philip to do her stint for her. Joanna never complained, either, yet she made up her mind early that as a woman she would never do this kind of work. Not that she despised it, she simply considered it labor lost for a person who like herself might be spending her time in more beautiful and more graceful activities. Yet in spite of her dislike, she always lingered longest over her work, and the room or the silver which she had cleaned always looked the best. It is true she never learned to iron especially well, but this was about the only thing in which she yielded place to Sylvia.
Sylvia was like a fire-fly in comparison with Joanna’s steady beaconlike flood of light. Sylvia dashed about, worked as quickly as she thought and produced immediate and usually rather striking results. Sylvia with a ribbon, or a piece of lace and a ready needle and thread could give the effect of possessing two dresses, whereas she had only the one. Sylvia dressed the dolls, hiring Joanna’s remarkable and usually disregarded assembly of these so that she might make them new clothes. She drove an honest bargain. If Joanna would let her play store with her dolls for a week, one of them could keep the new dress which Sylvia would have made for her; Joanna’s dolls were usually in Sylvia’s care.
Yet when Joanna did sew or knit, her stitches and pieces bore inspection much better than Sylvia’s. By the same token, however, they missed Sylvia’s dash.
In one thing only did Joanna show real abandon, that was in dancing. Sylvia was as light as thistle-down on her feet, but Joanna was like the spirit of dancing. She had grace, the very poetry of motion, and she could dance any step however intricate if she saw it once.
“If you want to get Joanna to play,” Maggie Ellersley, Sylvia’s chum and school-mate would say impatiently, “you must start some singing or dancing game. She wouldn’t play ‘I Spy’ or ‘Pussy wants a corner’ with you for worlds.”
Any sort of folk-song or dance, though she did not know them by that name, delighted the child. Usually she held herself aloof, but in summer down on Fifty-ninth Street Joanna was one with the children in the street, singing, dancing, jumping rope in unexpected and fancy ways.
Sylvia’s and Maggie’s and even her brothers’ rougher scoffing affected her not at all, not only because she had the calm self-assurance which is the first step toward success, but also because of old Joel’s strong belief in her.
Joel believed that all things were possible. “Nothing in reason,” he used to tell Joanna, “is impossible. Forty years ago I was almost a pauper in Richmond. Look at me to-day. I spend more on you in a month, Joanna, than my mother and I ever saw in a five-year stretch. One hundred years ago and nearly all of us were slaves. See what we are now. Ten years ago people would have laughed at the thought of colored people on the stage. Look at the bill-boards on Broadway.”
It was in the first part of the century when Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, Ada Overton and others were at their zenith. Old Joel believed them the precursors of greater things. Since Joanna’s gifts were those of singing and dancing, he hoped to make her famous the country over. Of course he would have preferred a more serious form of endowment. But such as it was, it was Joanna’s, and must be developed. Joel Marshall believed in using the gifts nearest at hand.
“And don’t think anything about being colored,” he used to say.
“It might be different if you lived in some other part of the country, but here in this section it may not interfere much more than being poor, or having some slight deformity. I have often noticed,” said Joel, who had used his powers of observation to no small advantage, “that having some natural drawback often pushes you forward, that is if you’ve got anything in you to start with. It might even happen,” he added, launched now on his favorite theme, “that your color would add to your success. Depend on it if you’ve got something which these white folks haven’t got, or can do something better than they can, they’ll call on you fast enough and your color will only make you more noticeable.”
Joanna used to listen interestedly. Not that in those early years she always understood fully everything her father said, but his talk created for her a kind of atmosphere which created in turn a feeling of assurance and self-confidence which was really superb.
Another theory of Joel’s which he had worked out for himself, and which in no small degree contributed to Joanna’s education was his early understanding of the natural rights of men inherent in the mere fact of living. He told Joanna that no class of men remained static throughout the ages,—he had not used these words, it is true, but he had come pretty near it. Somewhere in those early days of his in odd scraps of reading he had learned that Greece had once been enslaved; that Russia had but recently freed her serfs; that England possessed a submerged class.
“All people, all countries, have their ups and downs, Joanna,” he would tell her gravely, “and just now it’s our turn to be down, but it will soon roll round for our time to be up, or rather we must see to it that we do get up. So everyone of us has something to do for the race. Never forget that, little girl.”
Joanna was a memorable type in these days. A grave child, brown without that peculiar luminosity of appearance which she was to have later on, and which Sylvia already possessed. She had a mop of thick black hair which was actually heavy, so much so that the back of her head bulged. Joanna knew next to nothing at this time of those first aids to colored people in this country in the matter of conforming to average appearance. If she had known them, it is doubtful if she would have used them, for she had the variety of honesty which made her hesitate and even dislike to do or adopt anything artificial, no matter how much it might improve her general appearance. No hair straighteners, nor even curling kids for her.
“Joanna’s ways are so straight, they almost sway back,” Sylvia used to say aptly. And indeed Joanna wanted one to see her at her very worst. She did not like to take people by surprise. But as her worst included a pair of very nice brown eyes, with thick, if somewhat short, and curling lashes, an unobtrusive nose, small square hands and exquisite feet, it was not hard to look at. She was always intensely susceptible to beautiful people and to beautiful things. It was the beauty inherent in Joel’s ideals, and in all ideals which really underlie success, that most attracted her. And this passion for beauty while informing and indeed molding her character, yet by a strange twist influenced adversely and warped her sympathies.
CHAPTER III
IT WAS Joanna’s love for beauty that made her consciously see Peter Bye. It is true that almost as soon as she saw him she lost sight of him again, for the boy did not come up to her requirements which, even at the early age at which these two met, were quite crystallized. Joanna liked first of all fixity of purpose. The phrase “When I grow up, I’m going to be” was constantly on her lips. She got into the habit of measuring people, “sizing them up” Joel would have said, in accordance with the amount of steadfastness, perseverance and ambition which they displayed. She had little time for shiftless or “do-less” persons. Sylvia used to say, half angrily, “Joanna, when the bad man gets you, he isn’t going to torture you. He’s just going to shut you up with lazy, good-for-nothing folks. That will be torture enough for you.”
Peter Bye, in spite of the dark arresting beauty which first drew Joanna’s glance to him across the other white and pink faces in the crowded schoolroom, was undoubtedly shiftless. “Not lazy,” Joanna said to herself, looking at him from under level brows before she dismissed him forever from her busy mind. “It’s just that he doesn’t care; he just doesn’t want to be anybody.”
She was too young to understand the power of that great force, heredity. She had no notion of the part which it played in her own life. Peter was the legitimate result of a heredity that had become a tradition, of a tradition that had become warped, that had gone astray and had carried Peter and Peter Bye’s father along in its general wreckage.
It is impossible to understand the boy’s character without some knowledge of the lives of those who had gone before him.
As far back as the last decades of the eighteenth century there had been white Byes and black Byes in Philadelphia. The black Byes were known to be the chattels of Aaron and Dinah Bye, Quakers, who without reluctance had set free their slaves, among them black Joshua Bye, the great-grandfather of Peter. This was done in 1780 according to the laws of Pennsylvania, which thus allowed the Quakers to salve their consciences without offending their thrifty instincts.
Aaron Bye, most people said, was unusually good to his slaves. He had something of the patriarchal instinct and liked to think of himself as ruler over the destiny of many people, his wife’s, his children’s and more completely that of his slaves. Certainly he was very kind to Joshua’s mother, Judy. She was a tall, straight, steely, black woman with fine inscrutable eyes, a thin-lipped mouth and a large but shapely nose. She bore about her a quality of brooding, of mystery, embodying the attraction which she exercised for many men, white and black. But apparently she knew little of this. Her only weakness, if such it might be called, was an inexplicable attachment to the white Bye family. She married, a few years before receiving her freedom, a man named Ceazer, a proud, surly, handsome individual, who refused to adopt the surname of his master; he had belonged to white people named Morton. Since even after freedom Judy would not hear to leaving the Bye family, Aaron Bye greatly pleased by this loyalty offered the position of coachman to Ceazer, which the latter, with his customary surliness, accepted. Later he not only threw up his job, but ran away, vanishing finally into legend.
His was a strange truculent character; he hated slavery, hated all white people, hated particularly the Mortons, hated ineffably Aaron Bye. He wanted nothing at his hands. Once he knocked down another Negro who referred to him as “Mist’ Bye’s man.” He was no man’s man, he assured the stricken narrator, least of all the man of that damn Quaker. His enmity went to ridiculous lengths. Aaron Bye taught Joshua how to write and gave him a little black testament for a prize. In it he wrote “The gift of Aaron Bye.” Joshua, delighted, wrote his own name under the inscription and ran and showed it to his mother. She, it turned out, had not been watching his making of pothooks without purpose. Underneath her boy’s name she fashioned in halting crazy characters her single attempt at writing, her own name, Judy Bye. Nothing would serve Joshua then but that he must have Ceazer’s name in the book, too. Remembering that his father could not write, Joshua wrote out himself with a fine flourish “Ceazer Bye” and showed the name to its owner, entreating him to make his mark beside it. Ceazer took up the pen in his strong, wiry fingers.
“Which one ob dese did you say were mine?”
Joshua pointed it out, waiting for the cross. Ceazer made a mark, it was true, but it was a thick broad line drawn through his name with a fury which almost tore the thin page. He was no Bye!
It was not long after this that he disappeared, a strange, brooding, intractable figure.
Joshua, although born in slavery, had never known the institution in its more hideous aspects. He had been a very little boy when his freedom came to him. And Ceazer, old Judy told him, had fought in the Revolution! So that Joshua knew more of warfare to set people free than of slavery for which war was later to be waged. From him his son Isaiah heard almost nothing of the old régime, though there were many vestiges of it on all sides. All he knew was that Joshua had kept on working for Dinah and Aaron Bye after his emancipation, and that they had given him on the occasion of his marriage to Belle Potter a huge Family Bible, bound in leather and with an Apocrypha. On the title-page was written in a fine old script: To Joshua and Belle Bye from Aaron and Dinah Bye. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
For a long time to Isaiah, who used to pore absorbedly as a boy over this book with its pictures and long old-fashioned S, this inscription savored of vineyards and orchards. The white Byes, as a matter of fact, were the possessors of very fine peach-orchards in the neighborhood of what is now known as Bryn Mawr, and Isaiah, even as a little fellow, had been taken out there to pick peaches.
His father Joshua had spent his life in making those orchards what they were; a born agriculturist, he had an uncanny knowledge of planting, of grafting, of fertilizing. Many a farmer tried to inveigle him from Aaron Bye. But although Joshua’s wages were small, he had inherited his mother’s blind, invincible attachment for the Byes. His place was with Aaron.
It was young white Meriwether Bye, youngest son of Aaron’s and Dinah’s ten children, who told Isaiah what the inscription meant. Joshua had not married until he was nearly fifty and his single son, black Isaiah, and white Meriwether were boys together. Meriwether used to come to the Bye house at Fourth and Coates Streets, which is now Fairmount Avenue, as often as Isaiah used to appear at the Bye house at Fourth and Spruce.
Isaiah showed the inscription to Meriwether, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
“Yes,” said young Merry tracing the letters with a fat finger, “that’s our family motto.” Isaiah wanted to know what a motto was.
“Something,” Meriwether told him vaguely, “that your whole family goes by.” The black boy thought that likely.
“Everybody knows Bye peaches, ain’t that so? ’Cause of that everybody knows the Byes.”
Meriwether, though impressed by this logic, didn’t think that that was what was meant. A subsequent conversation with his father confirmed his opinion.
“It means this, Ziah,” he said one hot July afternoon walking home with the colored boy from the brick-yard where Isaiah worked, “it means it shows the kind of stuff you are. It means— now—you see a bare tree in the winter time don’t you, and you don’t know what it is? But you do perhaps know an apple blossom when you see it, or a peach blossom. In the spring you see that tree covered, let’s say, with apple blossoms. Well, you know it’s an apple tree.”
“But what’s that got to do with us?” Isaiah wanted to know. He was interested, he could not tell why, but his slow-working mind clung to its first idea. “Your father wrote it in the book he gave my father. My father hasn’t any fruit trees.”
Isaiah never forgot the answer Meriwether made him in the unconscious cruelty of youth. “When it comes to people,” said the young Quaker, “it means pretty much the same thing. Now when I grow up, I’m going to be a great doctor,” his chest swelled, “but nobody will be surprised. They’ll all say, ‘Of course, he’s the son of Aaron Bye, the rich peach-merchant. Good stock there,’ “he involuntarily mimicked his pompous father; “and I’ll be good fruit. That’s the way it always is: good trees, good fruit; rich, important people, rich important sons.”
“What’ll I be?” asked Isaiah Bye, grotesquely tragic in his tattered clothes, the sweat rolling off his shiny face, so intent was his interest.
“Well,” Meriwether countered judicially, “what could you be?” He pondered a moment, his own position so secure that he was willing to do his best by this serious case. “Your father and your father’s father were slaves. ’Course your father’s free now but he’s just a servant. He’s not what you’d call his own man. So I s’pose that’s what you’ll be, a good servant. Tell you what, Isaiah, you can be my coachman. I’ll be good to you. And when you’re grown up,” said Meriwether with more imagination than he usually displayed, “I’ll point you out to some famous doctor from France and say, ‘His father was a good servant to my father, and he’s been a good servant to my father’s son.’ How’ll you like that?” Meriwether tapped him fondly if somewhat condescendingly on the arm.
“You’ll never,” said Isaiah Bye, drawing back from the familiar touch, “you’ll never be able to say that about me.” And he turned and ran down the hot street, leaving Meriwether Bye gaping on the sidewalk.
After that his father could never persuade him to enter again the Bye house, or the Bye orchards. Fortunately his mother upheld him here. “’Tain’t as though he had to work for them old Byes,” she said straightening up her already straight shoulders. “He makes just as much and more in the brick-yard and in helpin’ Amos White haul.”
“I know that,” Joshua would reply impatiently, “but old Mist’ Aaron says—now—he likes to have his own people workin’ roun’ him. And I don’t like to disappoint him.”
Belle Bye told Isaiah. “I’m not one of his own people, Ma,” he answered stubbornly, “and after that I’m not ever goin’ back.” Belle was rejoiced to hear this. She would have been an insurgent in any walk of life. Joshua was the genuine peasant type— the type, black or white, which believes in a superior class and yields blindly to its mandates. But Belle had seen too many changes even in her thirty-five years—she was far younger than Joshua—not to know that many things are possible if one just has courage.
Isaiah, on being questioned, told his mother with considerable reluctance about his conversation with Meriwether. Belle, while regretting the breach, understood. She had been glad to have her boy the associate of young white Bye. Without expressing it to herself in so many words she had realized that association with Meriwether was an education for Isaiah. Already he was talking more correctly than other colored boys in his group, his manners were good, and though his work was of the roughest kind, his vision was broad, he knew there were other things.
“I don’t believe,” his mother told him wisely, “that you kin go as fur as you dream. Too many things agin you fur that, boy. But you kin die much further along the road than when you was born. Never forget that.”
So Isaiah was saved from the initial mistake of aiming too high and of coming utterly to smash. Yet he accomplished wonders. Who shall say how he increased his slender store of knowledge? How he learned to read wise books borrowed and bought as best he might? How he learned geography and history that made his heart-beats go wild since it told him of the French Revolution and how a whole nation once practically enslaved arose to a fuller, richer life?
The inspiration for all this lay in those careless words of young Meriwether. Although Isaiah met the young fellow many times after that incident, and apparently with friendliness, he never in his heart forgave him. Like Ceazer he developed a dislike for white people and their ways which developed, however, into a sturdy independence and an unyielding pride. No amount of contumely ever made him ashamed of his slave ancestry. On the contrary, to measure himself against old Ceazer and Judy gave him ground for honest pride. “See what they were and how far I’ve gone,” he used to say, pleasantly boastful.
He resented as few sons of freedmen did the assurance with which the white Byes took their wealth and position and power. “Hoisted themselves on the backs of the black Byes.” He resented especially the ingratitude of Aaron Bye to Joshua.
For himself he asked nothing; being content to fight his own way “through an onfriendly world.”
The white Byes had gone far, but the black Byes having now that greatest of all gifts, freedom, would go far, too. They would be leaders of other black men.
The upshot of all this was that Isaiah Bye opened a school for colored youth down on Vine Street. No name and no figure in colored life in Philadelphia was ever better beloved and more revered than his.
CHAPTER IV
ISAIAH DID not marry until he was thirty-one, which was an advanced age for his times. Even then he had married earlier than his father. Old Joshua, who died long before Isaiah’s marriage, had been inordinately proud of his one son.
“Jes’ wouldn’t work fer white folks,” Joshua used to say, “that weren’t good enough fer him.”
Isaiah and Miriam Sayres Bye had one son. “Meriwether,” Isaiah wrote in Aaron and Dinah Bye’s old gift, and under it in a script as fine and characteristic as that of the original inscription: “By his fruits shall ye know—me.” It was a strange but not unnatural bit of pride, the same pride which had made him name this squirming bundle of potentialities, “Meriwether,— Meriwether Bye,” a boy with the same name which old white Aaron Bye’s son had borne and with as good chances. The Civil War was on the horizon then and Isaiah Bye, with that calm expectation of the unexpected which was his mother’s chiefest legacy, was sure that in that grand mêlée all his people would know freedom. So black Meriwether Bye, born like himself in freedom, would know nothing but that estate when he began to have understanding.
Isaiah had accumulated a little, though how that was possible, no one aware of his tiny stipend could guess. It is true he not only taught school, but he had outside pupils, ex-slaves, freedmen, men like himself born in freedom, but unable through economic pressure to enjoy it except in name,—all these crowded his home at night on Vine Street, and sweated mightily over primers and pothooks and the abacus. Twenty-five cents an hour he charged them, giving each a meticulous care such as would bring a modern tutor many dollars. He wrote letters, pamphlets, too, for that marvelous organization already well established, the A. M. E. Church. His wife had a sister whose husband kept a second-hand shop and from this source he earned an occasional dollar. When Meriwether was eight, Isaiah owned two houses in Pearl Street, the house in Vine Street, a half interest in his brother-in-law’s store and a plot in Mount Olivet Cemetery.
From the very beginning Meriwether knew he was to be a great man—a doctor, his father had said emphatically. And Meriwether repeated it by rote. He was a clever enough child though without his father’s solid trait of concentration. But he liked the idea of greatness—that and the profession of medicine came to be synonymous with him as it was already with his father. Otherwise it is likely that both of them would have seen earlier the boy’s inaptitude for the calling thus thrust upon him.
Meriwether went to his father’s school, to Mr. Jonas Howard’s catering establishment, which he loved, to Sunday-School and to his Uncle Peter’s second-hand store. In any one of these places he was at home. He might have made a good teacher, caterer, minister or storekeeper. Yet he meandered on, doing absolutely mediocre work, never failing, never shining, and always rather purposely waiting the day which should bring him to the Medical School.
He was waiting for something else, too, though this Isaiah never guessed. He was waiting for some sign of help or recognition from the white Byes. His father had told him of the slaveholder’s great debt to old Joshua; he had taken him riding past the Bryn Mawr peach orchards. “By rights part of them ought to belong to us. But I don’t mind, no sir-ee! Let ’em have ’em. See where we are to-day without their help. Think of it!”
Meriwether did think of it and did mind it. He learned that he had been named after the son of his grandfather’s patron and somehow it seemed impossible to him that that mere fact should not result in something tangibly advantageous. He lacked the imagination to understand the pride which actuated Isaiah to name his boy as he had. The year before Meriwether was to enter medical school, Isaiah, fortunately for himself, died.
A few months later Miriam died, too. Meriwether was left sole heir to the three houses and two or three hundred dollars. He was tired of school and not at all displeased with the idea of being his own master. He would like a little vacation, he fancied, and a chance to see the world. Somebody told him of a good way to do this—why not get a job as train porter? The idea pleased him; there was travel, easy money, besides his little property in Philadelphia. And afterwards perhaps there would be the patron for whom he had been named, Dr. Meriwether Bye of Bryn Mawr.
Isaiah’s mother, Belle Bye, used to say, “Things you do expect and things you don’t expect are sure to come to pass.” It took Isaiah many years to see the reasonableness of this apparently unreasoned statement. Certainly one of the things he never expected to come to pass was that his boy Meriwether should, first, give up altogether his project of studying medicine and, second, that bit by bit, through sickness, gambling, and a hitherto unsuspected penchant for sheer laziness, he should run through his Philadelphia property, thus wiping away all that edifice of respectability and good citizenship which Isaiah Bye had so carefully built up.
Colored Philadelphia society is organized as definitely as, and even a little more carefully than, Philadelphia white society. One wasn’t “in” in those old days unless one were, first, “an old citizen,” and, second, unless one were eminently respectable,—almost it might be said God-fearing. Meriwether having been born to this estate suffered all the inconveniences coming to a member of a group at that time small and closely welded. His business was everybody’s business. His Uncle Peter had upbraided him for not studying medicine. Jonas Howard, the caterer, knew about his first real estate transfer. The young Howards and his cousins knew about his gambling and rebuked him admiringly. On one of his “runs” Meriwether spent a week in New York. This was in 1889. Not a single colored person knew him or cared about him. He rented a room in Fifty-third Street and made that his headquarters. Later he rented two rooms and married a young seamstress who died in 1891 when her boy was born.
Meriwether did do two things after that. First he wrote to Dr. Meriwether Bye telling him who he was and implying he would not disdain a little aid. It is doubtful if the doctor, who at that time was traveling in Europe with his tiny grandson, ever received the letter. Second, he took to drink. More than anything else he fell into a deep, ineluctable mood of melancholia. Here he was, Meriwether Bye, destined to be a great man, a famous physician. Why, he had been a man of property once, with money in the bank! And now he was just a poor nobody, picking up odd jobs, paying his room rent fearfully from week to week, sometimes pawning Isaiah Bye’s chased gold watch.
How he worked it out he himself could not have told. But he saw himself a martyr, “driven by fate” from the high eminence of his father’s dreams to his own poor realities. Think how he had struggled, sacrificed—he believed it—the fun and freedom of youth to come to this! “How,” said Meriwether Bye harking back to Sunday-School days, “how are the mighty fallen!” And how easily might they have remained mighty.
He named his boy Peter after his Uncle Peter, in whose second-hand shop in Philadelphia he had spent delightful hours.
Now see the perversity of human nature. Just as his father Isaiah Bye had talked to his son Meriwether about the reward of effort and faithful toil, just so Meriwether talked to Peter about the futility of labor and ambition. And in particular he talked to him about the ingratitude of the white Byes—of all white people.
“It makes no difference, Peter, what you do or how hard you work. The rewards of life are only for such or such. You may pour your heart’s blood out,”—he had a fine gift of rhetoric—“and still achieve nothing. Think of your great grandfather. Fate favors those whom she chooses. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.”
Or, “Peter, if life has any favors for you, she’ll give them to you without your asking for them. The world owes you a living, let it come to you, don’t bother going after it.”
How completely his son might be absorbing all this, Meriwether never knew, for Peter, vocal enough with his playmates and others, maintained an owlish silence when his father thus harangued him.
But his aunt knew. She was a tall, stout, yellow woman, with that ineffable look of sadness in her eyes characteristic of a certain type of colored people. She was the sister of Peter’s mother, and when Peter’s father died, suddenly, inconsequently, she accepted uncomplainingly his son along with her other burdens.
Peter was then twelve; extraordinarily handsome, vivid and alert. Miss Susan Graves riding home from the cemetery reflected that he might be not such a burden after all. Clearly he would soon want to be taking care of himself.
“Peter,” she said thoughtfully, “what do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” her nephew replied, temporarily removing his gaze from the window-pane where it had been glued for twenty minutes. “I’m not bothered about that, Aunt Susan. You see the world owes me a living.”
She noticed in him then the first fruits of his father’s shiftlessness. But far more deeply rooted than that was his deep dislike for white people. He did not believe that any of them were kind or just or even human. And although he could not himself have told what he wanted from the white Byes, if indeed he wanted anything, he grew up with the feeling that he and his had been unusually badly treated. His grandfather’s connection with white people resulted in pride, his father’s in shiftlessness; in Peter it took the form of a constant and increasing bitterness.
CHAPTER V
IT MAY seem a cold-blooded thing to say, but the dying of Meriwether Bye was about the best thing he could have done for his son, Peter. Certainly that was what Miss Susan Graves thought as she viewed rather grimly the small and motley collection of belongings which Peter transferred to her home in his little express wagon from his father’s former landlady, Mrs. Reading. The collection consisted of a well-worn extra suit of clothes, another pair of shoes, some underwear in sad need of patching, some books chiefly on physiology and anatomy, the Bye Family Bible, a little old black testament, and a box of letters. There was also a big railroad map which Peter lugged along under his arm and from which he stubbornly refused to be parted. Meriwether, in his brighter moods, used to refer to his “runs” as “business-trips” and would point out to Peter just where he would go on such and such a date. The boy learned a lot of geography in this way, and was talking to his playmates about Duluth and Jacksonville, Sacramento and Denver, before most of them knew that they personally were living in the country’s metropolis.
The books on medicine and anatomy had been well thumbed by Peter, too. Meriwether had received them from old Isaiah, his father, and had carried them around on his runs to impress his co-workers in the Pullman service.
Later he got into the habit of reading from them to Peter who always listened in the grave silence which he usually reserved for his father’s effusions. For some reason the little boy’s brain retained the various and amazing things which his father read to him from the dry old books. Long before he knew his multiplication tables he knew the names of the principal bones of the body and the course of the food. In fact these books were his first readers, for Meriwether, more interested in this dry stuff, now that it was too late to profit him anything, taught his boy how to pronounce the difficult names, so that the latter could read to him. Perhaps the poor fellow, dissolute and weak failure though he was, thought that some of the old “greatness” might still accrue to him by this fiction of studying at medicine.
The Bible was the one thing that Peter knew least about. He looked into it once or twice and hitting on Isaiah Bye’s tragically proud inscription: “By his fruits ye shall know—me,”
