There Is Confusion Read online

  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 brickyard 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.