There Is Confusion Read online

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Morgan Jerkins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN 9780593134429

  Ebook ISBN 9780593134436

  modernlibrary.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover photograph: Getty/New York Daily News Archive

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction by Morgan Jerkins

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  About the Author

  There is confusion worse than death,

  Trouble on trouble, pain on pain—

  —TENNYSON

  INTRODUCTION

  MORGAN JERKINS

  There is a moment early on in There Is Confusion that perfectly encapsulates one of the main protagonists of the novel: “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.” If these particular lines were taken out of context, they may not arouse your interest, because Joanna could be anyone. She could be a country girl on her way to the big city or a woman determined to climb her way to the top of a social hierarchy by whatever means necessary.

  But Joanna Marshall is different. She is only one generation removed from slavery. Her father, Joel, was born enslaved in Richmond, Virginia, and moved to New York, where he married a schoolteacher and opened a restaurant that was popular with both whites and Blacks alike. The expository background of the Marshall family is both inspiring and crucial to the importance of There Is Confusion as a whole. Audiences are reading about a generation of Black people who are free for the first time in American history: free to move however they choose without a pass, free to read and write without punishment, free to love and marry. And it is with this overwhelming sense of freedom fought by these African Americans that Jessie Redmon Fauset has provided an intimate view of the challenges in both personal and professional matters of how Black people can define liberty after being denied the right for so long.

  Joanna Marshall is, for all intents and purposes, special. She descends from a line of African Americans who escaped poverty relatively quickly post slavery, and as such, she believes more in meritocracy than in the confines of her race and gender. Since childhood, Joanna was destined to be someone no matter how much people around her—even her siblings—are exhausted by her ambition. She surrounds herself only with like-minded people and is hell-bent on her family maintaining their enviable social position, even if that means, for example, meddling in her brother’s affairs when she sees him getting too close to another woman who is not of the new Black middle class. But that rigidity is what also puts her in a bind, for though she is striving to make a name for herself as a dancer in the Big Apple, she constantly puts a distance between her and the man who loves her, Peter Bye. Fauset writes, “There was always plenty to do. Love,—the desire to give it and receive it was tugging persistently at the cords of her being, but she [Joanna] had been too long the slave of Ambition to listen consciously to that.” She wants Peter to be better and better—better for himself, but mainly better for her, and this obsession with success is almost a detriment. But how can anyone blame her? Opportunities for Joanna have broadened in ways that her grandparents could not have dreamed of. Her own father has defied the odds, so how could she not think that she would be anything else but successful? Yet at the same time, history beckons. Both the Marshalls and the Byes are constantly reminded that racism exists as they pursue professional mobility, and that the horrors of slavery aren’t too far gone even if the institution has ended. The endeavoring to carve out one’s individuality while tethered to ancestry and history is what makes this novel both appropriate and profound.

  In an essay written for The World Tomorrow, just two years before the release of There Is Confusion, her debut, Fauset writes, “Being colored in America at any rate means: Facing the ordinary difficulties of life, getting education, work, in fine getting a living plus fighting everyday against some inhibition of natural liberties.” With this, her ability to create such complex and persistent Black characters through fiction is evident. Like Joanna, Jessie Redmon Fauset was raised by a successful man who was earnest in making sure that his daughter have a well-rounded education. Fauset got accepted to Bryn Mawr College, but when the school discovered that she was “colored,” the administration worked to get her a scholarship at Cornell University, where she transferred to and ultimately graduated from in 1905 with a degree in classical languages. She was the second Black woman accepted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the oldest academic honor society in the United States. She then went on to get her master’s in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Like Joanna, Fauset was also part of the Black middle class, and There Is Confusion shuffles between Philadelphia and New York City, two cities where the author both lived and worked.

  The fight for Fauset’s talent to be heard is strengthening, as is evident with the republication of this novel, which will provide a well-deserved afterlife for her. Although Fauset served as literary editor of The Crisis, W.E.B. DuBois’s magazine, where she published both Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, she is arguably one of the least known Harlem Renaissance artists to the general public. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been attempts in the past. It wasn’t until the seventies, during second-wave feminism, that Fauset reemerged to public consciousness. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander and Deborah E. McDowell are two notable writers in the eighties who wrote of Fauset’s significance. Black women writers are being “rediscovered” long after their deaths. Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered by Alice Walker, and Harriet E. Wilson was rediscovered by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Kathleen Collins is another one whose work has been revived thanks to her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins. There will be others down the line because, unfortunately, the general public tends not to give many Black female artists their flowers while alive. To illustrate this neglect, for instance, when Fauset was at a party in celebration of There Is Confusion, wher
e she was supposed to be the guest of honor, she wasn’t introduced by the master of ceremonies, Alain Locke, until the end of the dinner. And it is this lack of attention to her talent and contributions that Fauset not only became an afterthought during that evening but for decades to come.

  But we are lucky now. In There Is Confusion, through Joanna Marshall and the intersection of her life with two other families, readers will be able to see the cloistered lives of Black people in all their fullness. There is an emphasis on how class, even among Black communities, is obsessed over, how race and gender are forced to be reckoned with, and how love and all of its inscrutableness can put a damper on and rip at the seams of what it can mean to be both Black and free. There Is Confusion is both a novel of its time and our time, echoing among those, like myself, who must wrestle with inheriting a contradictory history even as we fight for our humanity.

  MORGAN JERKINS is the author of the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing: Living At the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America and the senior editor at ZORA, a new digital publication for women of color. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, ELLE, and The Atlantic, among many others. Her next book, Wandering in Strange Lands: Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, is forthcoming from Harper in 2020, and she teaches regularly at Columbia University. She is based in Harlem.

  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, wh
ich 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 ball-games 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.