There Is Confusion Read online

  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,” spelled it out laboriously,—he always had trouble in reading script,—and asked his father with some natural perplexity what it meant. But Meriwether snatched the book away from him with such a black look and took such pains to put it out of his reach, that Peter for a long time thought the Bible, or at any rate that inscription, must be something decidedly off color. He waited until his father had gone on his next “business-trip” before investigating again, but finding the book nowhere as exciting as his beloved Anatomy, he gave up the puzzle and attributed his father’s defection to the inscrutable whims and vagaries of the genus called parents. He valued that old Bible the least of all his possessions. That was the bitterest day of his life when he found out what it ought to mean to him.

  Miss Susan, though not an “old Philadelphian” herself, knew something of colored Philadelphia’s pride in the possession of family and tradition. She would have been glad of course if Meriwether Bye had left Peter some money. But of the two she would very much rather have had the Bible with its absolute assurance of the former standing and respectability of the black Byes. She had a family tradition of her own, for she was a member of the Graves family of Gravestown, New Jersey, a clan well known to colored people not only in that vicinity, but also throughout Pennsylvania.

  The story is that two white sisters in the middle of the eighteenth century fell in love with two of their father’s black slaves. The Negroes may have been African Princes for all any one knows to the contrary. Since nothing they could do or say would win their father’s consent to such a union, the girls ran away with their lovers, and married them, with or without benefit of clergy it is impossible to relate. Nature and God alike, instead of being disconcerted at this utter contravention of the laws of man, presented each couple with numerous children. When these reached mating age, finding themselves out of favor with both black and white of their community, the cousins solved the problem by marrying each other. The children of each generation did the same, whether driven to it by like necessity or not, history does not say. But by the time the next brood appeared a precedent had been established, and Graves married Graves not only as a matter of course, but as a matter of pride. They were able to do this, being automatically rendered free by the fact that a white woman had married a black man.

  Miss Susan Graves had not married for the simple and sufficient reason that in her day there were not enough male Graves to go around. She would as soon have thought of marrying outside her family as a Spanish grandee would have thought of marrying an English cockney. In those days the position of old maid had its decided disadvantages—few people if any gave her the benefit of the doubt that she might have remained single from choice. Yet Miss Susan Graves, in spite of three other offers, soared on family pride above all this and made her career that of housekeeper for the family of a wealthy merchant on Girard Avenue, in Philadelphia. (You must marry a Graves, but obviously you obtained work where you could find it.)

  There was a younger sister, Alice Graves, not as direct in purpose as Susan, yet in some respects curiously strong. She had always considered the Graves’ tradition silly: it was so unexciting marrying someone whom you had known and seen all your life. What was marriage for if not for a change?

  When the oldest son of Merchant Sharples of Girard Avenue married and went to New York, Susan Graves went along as housekeeper. And thither Alice Graves followed shortly to do sewing for that intricate but orderly household. Meriwether Bye, who had known both ladies in Philadelphia—for Miss Susan Bye was a frequent visitor both at his father’s and his Uncle Peter’s house—came to see them in his rare fits of loneliness, and between runs courted Alice Graves in Central Park. Of course it would have been better if Alice could have married a Graves, but Susan resigned herself easily to the matter—for Bye belonged to old stock and must, she thought, make good eventually. But she developed a strong dislike for him before his death, and took Peter not only for his mother’s sake but also to dispel if possible his father’s doubtless harmful influence.

  Peter was a surprise to his aunt. She found him kind but thoughtless, industrious on occasions but unspeakably shiftless, not too proud, not very grateful and with no sense of responsibility. His father of course spoke there. Yet the boy was indubitably charming, never complained, and usually did as he was told. Miss Susan found herself between two minds—she had an impulse to work her fingers to the bone and thus spare Alice’s beautiful son the tussle with poverty which he must know, and again a desire to speak and act forcibly and drive him into an acknowledgment of what her loyalty to her sister was leading her to do for a homeless, friendless lad. Actually she struck a medium, made him keep clean, insisted on his regular attendance at school, took him to Sunday-School and Church entertainments and induced him to work on Saturdays and holidays by refusing pocket-money to “a boy as big as you.”

  She could not understand why he chose a job in a butcher’s shop. Doubtless Peter hardly knew himself. “I like to watch the man saw the bones,” he would have said vaguely. “I can do it, too. I can cut up a chicken or a rabbit just as neatly!”

  CHAPTER VI

  It was Joanna who first acquainted Peter with himself. But neither of the children knew this at the time. And although Peter came to realize it later it was many years before he told her so. For, though he went through many changes and though these two came to speak of many things, he kept a certain inarticulateness all his lifetime.

  Joanna and all the older Marshalls went to a school in West Fifty-second Street, one after another like little steps, with Joanna at first quite some distance behind. They were known throughout the school. “Those Marshall children, you know those colored children that always dress so well and as though they had someone to take care of them. Pretty nice looking children, too, if only they weren’t colored. Their father is a caterer, has that place over there on Fifty-ninth Street. Makes a lot of money for a colored man.”

  Peter, unlike Joanna, had gone to school, one might almost say, all over New York, and nowhere for any great length of time. Meriwether had stayed longest at Mrs. Reading’s but as, in later years, he more and more went off on his runs without paying his bills, Mrs. Reading frequently refused to let Peter leave the house until his father’s return.

  “For all I know he may be joinin’ his father on the outside and the two of them go off together. Then where’d I be? For them few rags that Mr. Bye keeps in his room wouldn’t be no good to nobody.”

  This enforced truancy was the least of Peter’s troubles. He did not like school,—too many white people and consequently, as he saw it, too much chance for petty injustice. The result of this was that Peter at twelve, possessed it is true of a large assortment of really useful facts, lacked the fine precision, if the doubtful usefulness, of Joanna’s knowledge at ten. When Miss Susan settled in the Marshalls’ neighborhood and brought Peter to the school in Fifty-second Street he was found to be lacking and yet curiously in advance. “We’ll try him,” said the principal doubtfully, “in the fifth grade. I’ll take him to Miss Shanley’s room.”

  Miss Shanley was Joanna’s teacher. She greeted Peter without enthusiasm, not because he was colored but because he was clearly a problem. Joanna spied him immediately. He was too handsome with his brown-red skin, his black silky hair that curled alluringly, his dark, almost almond-shaped eyes, to escape her notice. But she forgot about him, too, almost immediately, for the first time Miss Shanley called on him he failed rather ignominiously. Joanna did not like stupid people and thereafter to her he simply was not.

  On the contrary, Joanna had caught and retained Peter’s attention. She was the only other colored person in the room and therefore to him the only one worth considering. And though at that time Joanna was still rather plain, she already had an air. Everything about her was of an exquisite perfection. Her hair was brushed till it shone, her skin glowed not only with health but obviously with cleanliness, her shoes were brown and shiny, with perfectly level heels. She wore that first week a very fine soft sage-green middy suit with a wide buff tie. The nails which finished off the rather square-tipped fingers of her small square hands, were even and rounded and shining. Peter had seen little girls with this perfection and assurance on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia and on Fifth Avenue in New York, but they had been white. He had not yet envisaged this sort of thing for his own. Perhaps he inherited his great-grandfather Joshua’s spiritless acceptance of things as they are, and his belief that differences between people were not made, but had to be.

  Joanna clearly stood for something in the class. Peter noted a little enviously the quality of the tone in which Miss Shanley addressed her. To other children she said, “Gertrude, can you tell me about the Articles of Confederation?” Usually she implied a doubt, which Gertrude usually justified. But she was sure of Joanna. The tenseness of her attitude might be seen to relax; her mentality prepared momentarily for a rest. “Joanna will now tell us,—” she would announce. For Joanna, having a purpose and having been drilled by Joel to the effect that final perfection is built on small intermediate perfections, got her lessons completely and in detail every day.

  It was at this time and for many years thereafter characteristic of Peter that he, too, wanted to shine, but did not realize that one shone only as a result of much mental polishing personally applied. Joanna’s assurance, her air of purposefulness, her indifference intrigued him and piqued him. He sidled across to the blackboard nearest her—if they were both sent to the board—cleaned hers off if she gave him a chance, managed to speak a word to her now and then. He even contrived to wait for her one day at the Girls’ entrance. Joanna threw him a glance of recognition, swept by, returned.

  His heart jumped within him.

  “If you see my sister Sylvia,—you know her?—tell her not to wait for me. I have to go early to my music-lesson. She’ll be right out.”

  Sylvia didn’t appear for half an hour and Peter should have been at the butcher’s, but he waited. Sylvia and Maggie Ellersley came out laughing and glowing. Peter gave the message.

  “Thanks,” said Sylvia prettily. Maggie stared after him. She was still the least bit bold in those days.

  “Ain’t he the best looker you ever saw, Sylvia? Such eyes! Who is he, anyway? Not ever Joanna’s beau?”

  “Imagine old Joanna with a beau.” Sylvia laughed. “He’s just a new boy in her class. He is good looking.”

  Some important examinations were to take place shortly and Miss Shanley planned extensive reviews. She was a thorough if somewhat unimaginative teacher and she meant to have no loose threads. So she devoted two days to geography, two more to grammar, another to history, one to the rather puzzling consideration of that mysterious study, physiology. Perhaps by now the class was a bit fed up with cramming, perhaps the children weren’t really interested in physiological processes. Joanna wasn’t, but she always got lessons like these doggedly, thinking “Soon we’ll be past all this,” or “I’m going to forget this old stuff as soon as I grow up.” Poor Miss Shanley was in despair. She could not call on Joanna for everything. Pupil after pupil had failed. Her eye roved over the room and fell on Peter’s black head.

  She sighed. He had not even been a member of the class when she had taught this particular physiological phenomenon. “Can’t anyone besides Joanna Marshall give me the ‘Course of the Food’?”

  Peter raised his hand. “He looks intelligent,” she thought. “Well, Bye you may try it.”

  “I don’t think I can give it to you the way the others say it,”—the children had been reciting by rote, “but I know what happens to the food.”

  She knew he would fail if he didn’t know it her way, but she let him begin.

  This was old ground for Peter. “Look, I can draw it. See, you take the food in your mouth,” he drew a rough sketch of lips, mouth cavity and gullet, “then you must chew it, masticate, I think you said.” He went on varying from his own simplified interpretation of Meriwether Bye’s early instructions, past difficult names like pancreatic juice and thoracic duct, and while he talked he drew, recalling pictures from those old anatomies; expounding, flourishing. Miss Shanley stared at him in amazement. This jewel, this undiscovered diamond!

  “How’d you come to know it, Peter?”

  “I read it, I studied it.” He did not say when. “But it’s so easy to learn things about the body. It’s yourself.”

  She quizzed him then while the other children, Joanna among them, stared open-eyed. But he knew all the simple ground which she had already covered, and much, much beyond.

  “If all the children,” said Miss Shanley, forgetting Peter’s past, “would just get their lessons like Peter Bye and Joanna Marshall.”

  She had coupled their names together! And after school Joanna was waiting for him. He walked up the street with her, pleasantly conscious of her interest, her frank admiration.

  “How wonderful,” she breathed, “that you should know your physiology like that. What are you going to be when you grow up, a doctor?”

  “A surgeon,” said Peter forgetting his old formula and expressing a resolve which her question had engendered in him just that second. He saw himself on the instant, a tall distinguished-looking man, wielding scissors and knife with deft nervous fingers. Joanna would be hovering somewhere—he was not sure how—in the offing. And she would be looking at him with this same admiration.

  “My, won’t you have to study?” Joanna could have told an aspirant almost to the day and measure the amount of time and effort it would take him to become a surgeon, a dentist, a lawyer, an engineer. All these things Joel discussed about his table with the intense seriousness which colored men feel when they speak of their children’s futures. Alexander and Philip were to have their choice of any calling within reason. They were seventeen and fifteen now and the house swarmed with college catalogues. Schools, terms, degrees of prejudice, fields of practice,—Joanna knew them all.

  “Yes,” said Peter, “I suppose I will have to study. How did you come to know so much—did your father tell you?”

  “Why, I get it out of books, of course.” Joanna was highly indignant: “I never go to bed without getting my lessons. In fact, all I do is to get lessons of some kind—school lessons or music. You know I’m to be a great singer.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. Perhaps you’ll sing in your choir?”

  Then Joanna astonished him. “In my choir—I sing there already! No! Everywhere, anywhere, Carnegie Hall and in Boston and London. You see, I’m to be famous.”

  “But,” Peter objected, “colored people don’t get any chance at that kind of thing.”

  “Colored people,” Joanna quoted from her extensive reading, “can do everything that anybody else can do. They’ve already done it. Some one colored person somewhere in the world does as good a job as anyone else,—perhaps a better one. They’ve been kings and queens and poets and teachers and doctors and everything. I’m going to be the one colored person who sings best in these days, and I never, never, never mean to let color interfere with anything I really want to do.”

  “I dance, too,” she interrupted herself, “and I’ll probably do that besides. Not ordinary dancing, you know, but queer beautiful things that are different from what we see around here; perhaps I’ll make them up myself. You’ll see! They’ll have on the bill-board, ‘Joanna Marshall, the famous artist,’—” She was almost dancing along the sidewalk now, her eyes and cheeks glowing.

  Peter looked at her wistfully. His practical experience and the memory of his father inclined him to dubiousness. But her superb assurance carried away all his doubts.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll ever think of just ordinary people like me?”

  “But you’ll be famous, too—you’ll be a wonderful doctor. Do be. I can’t stand stupid, common people.”

  “You’ll always be able to stand me,” said Peter with a fervor which made his statement a vow.

  CHAPTER VII

  Sylvia and Joanna, walking through Sixty-third Street on an errand for their mother, came upon groups of children playing games. Italians, Jews, colored Americans, white Americans were there disporting themselves with more or less abandon, according to their peculiar temperament.

  “Look,” said Joanna suddenly, catching at Sylvia’s hand. “See those children dancing! Wait, I’ve got to see that!”

  Out in the middle of the street a band of colored children were dancing and acting a game. With no thought of spectators they joined hands, took a few steps, separated, spun around, smote hands sharply, and then flung them above their heads. One girl stood in the middle, singing too, but with an attentive air. Presently she darted forward, seized a member of the ring: