There Is Confusion Read online

  “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 dam
n 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.”