There Is Confusion/Chapter 22

Ten months later Tom Mason leaned back against the red plush of the car seat and jingled some coins in his pocket.

"Tell you what, Bye, we really are cleaning up. I hadn't expected anything like this run of engagements. Now suppose you beat it along to Mrs. Lea's and find out what special arrangements she wants made for the musicians to-night and I'll go on to Mrs. Lawlor and see about to-morrow."

Peter stared moodily at the flying landscape. "I wish you'd come yourself, Mason. I hate to talk to these white people. Their damned patronizing airs make me sick."

"What do you care about their patronizin'? All I'm interested in is gettin' what I can out of them. When I've made my pile, if I can't spend it here the way I please, Annie and me can pick up and go to South America or France. I hear they treat colored people all right there."

"Treat colored people all right,'" Peter mimicked. "What business has any one 'treating' us, anyway? The world's ours as much as it is theirs. And I don't want to leave America. It's mine, my people helped make it. These very orchards we're passing now used to be the famous Bye orchards. My grandfather and great-grandfather helped to cultivate them."

"Is that so? Honest?" Tom showed a sudden respectful interest. "How'd they come to lose them?"

"Lose them? They never owned them. The black Byes were slaves of the white Byes."

​"Oh, slaves! Oh, you mean they worked in the fields? Well, I guess that's different. Come on, here we are."

Peter flung himself out of the car after Tom and followed him up a tree-lined street. The suburban town stretched calm, peaceful and superior about them. Clearly this was the home of the rich and well-born. It is true that a few ordinary mortals lived here, but mainly to do the bidding of the wealthy. A group of young white girls, passing the two men, glanced at them a little curiously.

"Entertainers for the Lea affair," one of them said, making no effort to keep from being overheard.

Peter stopped short. "That's what I hate," he said fiercely. "Labeled because we're black."

"Ain't you got a grouch, though!" Tom spoke almost admiringly. He told his sister afterwards: "Bye's got this here—now—temper'ment. Never can tell how it's goin' to take him. Seems different since he started keeping company with Maggie, don't you think so?"

Annie admitted she did.

At present Tom patted Peter on the shoulder, and starting him up the driveway which led to Mrs. Lea's large low white house, went on himself to Mrs. Lawlor.

Mrs. Lea received Peter in a small morning-room. She was pretty, a genuine blonde, with small delicate features and beautiful fluffy hair. But as Peter did not like fair types, his mind simply registered "washed-out," and took no further stock of her looks. What he did notice was that she was dressed in a lacey, too transparent floating robe, too low in the neck, and too short in the skirt.

"Something she would wear only before some one for whom she cared very much, or some one whom she didn't think worth considering," he told himself, lowering.

Mrs. Lea, leading him into the ballroom beyond, barely glanced at him. "See, the musicians are to sit behind those ​palms and the piano will be completely banked with flowers. I'm expecting the decorators every moment. Your men will have to get here very early so as to get behind all this without being seen. I want the effect of music instead of perfume pouring out of the flowers. Do you get the idea—er—what did you say your name was?"

"Yes, I understand," said Peter shortly. "My name is Bye."

"I meant your first name—Bye—why, that's the name of a family in Bryn Mawr, who used to own half of the land about here. There're a Dr. Meriwether Bye and his grandfather, Dr. Meriwether Bye, living in the old Bye house now. Where do you come from?"

"I was born in Philadelphia like my father and grandfather and his father before him."

She stated the obvious conclusion: "Probably your parents belonged to the Bryn Mawr Byes."

"So my father told me," replied Peter, affecting a composure equal to her own. "His name was Meriwether Bye."

She did not like that. She decided she did not like him either—eyeing his straight, fine figure and meeting his unyielding look. These niggers with their uppish ways! Besides this one looked, looked—indefinably he reminded her of young Meriwether Bye. She spoke to him:

"I don't want you to leave to-night before I get a chance to point you out to young Dr. Bye. He'll be so interested." She looked at Peter again. Yes, he was intelligent enough to get the full force of what she wanted to say. "It's so in keeping with things that the grandson of the man who was slave to his grandfather should be his entertainer to-night."

Peter felt his skin tightening. "I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I'm a medical student, not an entertainer. I came here for Mr. Mason, who is very busy. You may be sure I'll give him your instructions. Good-day, Mrs. Lea."

He rushed out of the house, down to the station where, ​without waiting for Tom, he boarded the train. Not far from the West Philadelphia depot he pushed the bell of a certain house, flung open the unlocked door and rushed up a flight of stairs.

In a small room to his left he found the person he was seeking, a short, almost black young fellow who lifted a dejected and then an amazed countenance toward him.

"Am I seeing things? Where'd you blow in from, Pete? Thought you'd chucked us all, the old school and all the rest of it."

"I haven't, I've been a fool, a damned fool, but I'm back to my senses. I'm going back to my classes and I tell you, Ed Morgan, I'll clean up. See here, you've got to do me a favor."

"Name it."

"You know Mason, Tom Mason on Fifteenth Street? I've been playing for him. But I can't stick it any longer. Tom's all right, but I can't stand his customers. Besides, I've got to get back to work. I'm quitting this minute—see. But Tom's got a big dance on, near Bryn Mawr to-night at a Mrs.—Mrs. Lea," he gulped. "Good pay and all that. You can play as well as I can, Ed. Easy stuff, you can read it. You got to do it."

"Do it! Man, lead me to that job. I'm broke, see, stony broke, busted." He turned his pockets inside out. "I was just wondering what I could pawn. And I need instruments—Oh, Lord!"

Peter gave him some money. "Take this, you can pay me any time. Only rush down to Tom's and tell him I can't come. I'm dead—see?—drowned, fallen in the Schuylkill. And see here, old fellow, afterwards we'll have a talk. I want everything, everything, mind you, that you can remember, every note, every bit of paper that bears on the work of these last ten months. And I'll show them—" he seemed to forget ​Morgan— "with their damned talk of entertainers." Down the stairs he ran, still talking.

"Mad, quite mad," said little Morgan, staring. "Glad he's coming back to work, though. Now, where'd I put that cap?"

Still at white heat, Peter walked the few short blocks to his boarding house. Once inside his room he shut himself in and paced the floor.

"The grandson—that's me—of the man who was his grandfather's slave should be his—that's Meriwether Bye, young Dr. Meriwether Bye—should be his entertainer, his hired entertainer.

"My grandfather didn't have a chance, but here I am half a century after and I'm still a slave, an entertainer. My grandfather. Let's see, which one of the Byes was that?"

He went to the closet, pushed some books and papers aside and hauled down the old Bye Bible. The leaves, streaked and brown, stuck together. With clumsy, unaccustomed fingers he turned them, until at last between the Old Testament and the Apochrypha he found what he was looking for: "Record of Births and Deaths."

The old, stiff, faded writing with the long German s, the work of hands long since still, smote him with a sense of worthlessness. These people, according to their lights, must have considered themselves "people of importance," else why this careful record of dates?

His lean brown finger traced the lines. "Joshua Bye, born about 1780"—heavens, that must have been his great-great-grandfather. No, maybe he was just a "great," for the black Byes, he remembered hearing his father Meriwether say, lived long and married late.

"Isaiah Bye, born 1830—a child of freedom." How proud they had been of that! Yes, that was his grandfather, he remembered now. And he had made a great deal of that freedom. Meriwether had often dwelt with pride on Isaiah's ​learning, his school, his property, his "half-interest," Meriwether had said grandiloquently, in a bookshop. Peter could hear his father talking now.

"A child of freedom"—Peter was that but what had he made of it? He wondered what Isaiah in turn had written on the occasion of Meriwether's birth. His finger ran down the page, and found it, stopped.

There it was—"Meriwether," the inscription read, "by his fruits shall ye know—me."

At first Peter thought it was a mistake. Then gradually it dawned on him—his fine old grandfather, proud of his achievements, seeing his son as a monument to himself, seeing each Bye son doubtless as a monument to each Bye father. Poor Isaiah, perhaps happy Isaiah, for having died before he realized how worthless, how anything but monumental his son had really been, except as a failure. And now he, Peter, was following in that son's footsteps.

He remembered an old daguerreotype of his grandfather that he had seen at his great-uncle Peter's. The face, perfectly black, looked out from its faded red-plush frame with that immobile look of dignity which only black people can attain. "I have made the most of myself," the proud old face seemed to say. "My father was a slave, but I am a teacher, a leader of men. My son shall be a great healer and my son's son———"

Peter put the open Bible carefully on the table and took out a cigarette. But he held it a long time unlighted.

So far as he could remember he had never had any desire to rise, "to be somebody," as Isaiah, he rightly guessed, would have phrased it. He saw himself after his mother's death, a small placid boy, perfectly willing to stay out of school. Until he met Joanna. There was his term of service in the butcher-shop and himself again perfectly willing to be the butcher's assistant. Until Joanna's questioning had made him declare ​for surgery. Once in college his whole impulse had been to get away from it all, not because he hadn't liked the work; he adored it, was fascinated by it. But the obstacles, prejudice, his very real dislike for white people, his poverty, all or any of these had seemed to him sufficient cause for dropping his studies and becoming a musician. Not an artist, but an entertainer, a player in what might be termed "a strolling orchestra," picking up jobs, receiving tips, going down in the servants' dining room for meals. And when Joanna had objected, he thought she was "funny," "bossy."

And as soon as he had broken with her, he had given up striving altogether. He had been nothing without Joanna. He wondered humbly if she had seen something in him which he had not recognized in himself.

How different they had been! After all, Joanna, though she had not had to contend with poverty, had had as hard a fight as he. "She'd have been on the stage long ago if she'd been white," he murmured. "And see how she takes it!"

Well, he would show her and Isaiah, yes, and Mrs. Lea, too, that there was something to him. But chiefly Joanna. Some day he'd go to her and say, "Joanna, what I am, you made me."

His ladylady called up to him:

"Telephone for you, Mr. Bye."

He went downstairs, took down the receiver.

"Hello, this is Mr. Bye, yes, this is Peter. Who's this speaking, please? . . .

"Oh—oh, yes, of course. Why—why, Maggie!"

He had forgotten all about her!