There Is Confusion/Chapter 2

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.