There Is Confusion/Chapter 27

The day's excitement made Joanna sleep soundly, and in the morning she awoke strongly refreshed and rested. No gesture that she could make to Fate would ever restore Peter. She had been willing to make the greatest sacrifice of all—to surrender her pride—and even as she was about to do this, absolute evidence was given that her sacrifice was useless. The whole affair was over, finished, dead; henceforth Peter was to be in her life what other men were to other girls when they spoke of them as "old beaux." That was the way for her to speak of Peter now. She practiced it with stiff lips: "Peter Bye, oh, yes, he used to be an old beau of mine."

Her romance would hereafter lie behind her. From this day on she would dedicate herself to one interest, which should be the fixed purpose of her life; now that she thought of it she would give up the idea of dancing, too. Her former lover and her former ambition alike were unattainable; they had merely been means of enriching her experience. Now she would get down to the business of living; no more sighs, no more backward glances. And the first thing she would do would be to offer her services as a director of music to a colored school in the South. Many a principal before whose school she had sung would extend her a cordial welcome. Even though the school year was almost near its close she might get a chance to map out arrangements for the work of the following year. Her preference would be one of the less-known, poorly endowed schools where there would be lots of work.

​She lay there and watched the April sun mounting slowly, slowly up the walls of her room. From outside rose the myriad sounds of Harlem; a huckster calling unintelligibly, some school children on their way to P. S. 89, shrilling their Iliad of school affairs; from far away came the echo of a spiritual whistled meditatively, almost reverently. Over herself crept a sense of peace, of finality, the sort of let-downness that comes to one voluntarily relaxing from difficult strain. She had not known such a feeling since when as girls she and Sylvia had been sent on a vacation trip into the country. The life was lonely for the two citified youngsters and they sought solace in taking long walks,—"voyages of discovery" Joanna called them. Once after a tramp of two or three hours they had come about four o'clock to a little lumpy field in whose center stood a cluster of trees. Breathless and weary Joanna had scrambled over the wooden bars and had lain down on the short stiff stubble in the refreshing shade. All about stretched only sky, earth, and in the distance rows of trees rimming their pasture. There was nothing, no one in the world but herself and Sylvia. She felt her senses lulled by the quiet security into a deep sense of peace.

Now this came back to her and other thoughts, too: their return from the country to New York—her mother and Peter were at the station. But she would not think of that. She must get up, write letters, explain to her father and mother, make arrangements.

Essie, a fixture in the service of the Marshalls, brought her a breakfast of rolls and chocolate. Joanna devoured it.

"You don't look bright, Essie."

"No'm. Got lots to worry about. Them white folks where my girl Myrtle goes to school act so mean all the time, always discouragin' her. 'What's the good of you comin' to high school'? they ses. 'What're you gonna do when you finish?'"

​How quickly once she would have rejoined with one of her sweeping platitudes which to her were not platitudes because they represented a fresh and virile belief: "Don't let her become discouraged, Essie; just have her keep on. Success always comes if you work hard enough for it." But to-day, remembering her plans for the stage and her courtship with Peter—both rendered frustrate through this hopeless obstacle of color—she could only murmur: "Yes, yes, I know. White people are hard to get along with. Better times coming, I hope, Essie."

After a bath she slipped into a flame-colored dressing gown and sat down to her letters. Sylvia coming up noiselessly put her head in the door.

"Not dressed yet, Joanna? She'll be here soon. It's 10:30."

Joanna lifted a startled face. "Who'll be here?"

"Miss Sharples, Miss Vera Sharples. I sent Roger up to tell you."

"Yes, he did, but you know how he forgets names. He said 'Miss Vera' and I thought he meant Vera Manning. Wonder what Miss Sharples wants to see me about?"

"One of her pet charities probably. Get a move on. Here, wear your green dress." Joanna, whose thoughts had flown to Peter via Miss Susan Graves via Miss Sharples, took the green dress absent-mindedly, then dropped it with a shudder. Maggie had worn such a dress yesterday, a soft dull green, horribly, fantastically adorned with bright and sticky red.

"No, not that."

"You are nervous, Joanna. What do you feel like wearing?"

Together they chose a crêpe silk dress of straight and simple lines. The bodice as flaming as the dressing gown was long, like a Russian blouse. Its end terminated by hemstitching into a black shallow-plaited skirt. A narrow rope-like cord confined the waist.

​"Stunning," Sylvia said, spinning her around. She had designed the dress. "If Brian just wouldn't treat me right we'd run away to Paris, Jan, and set up a dressmaking establishment. You should be my manikin."

A restatement of Roger's imperfect message revealed the fact that Miss Sharples would call at eleven. Sylvia let her in and ran back to tell her sister who was outlining her plans to her father and mother in the dining room.

"There's your 'grand white folks' Janna. My Heavens, where do you suppose she finds her clothes? She hasn't a bit of color in her face and there she's wearing a stone gray suit and a gray hat with a brown, a brown scarf around it. Her hair is as straight as a poker and she wears it bobbed." Sylvia shuddered.

"Oh well, she's a good sort," Joanna remonstrated, smiling, "and she doesn't say 'you people.'"

Strange how realization falls short of anticipation. Joanna was about to scale the path which led to her highest ambition, but she had no sense of premonition. Instead, she looked at Vera Sharples sitting insignificantly and drably in an armchair, her graying bobbed hair straggling a bit over her mannish tweed coat, her feet encased in solid tan boots. Only her eyes, looking straightforwardly and appraisingly from under the unbecoming hat, kept her from being dubbed a "freak."

Joanna, who had not seen her for some years, thought amusedly as she came with swift rhythmic steps down the long room: "It would be fun to turn Sylvia loose on her and make her dress worthy of her eyes."

The two were standing looking at each other now, Miss Vera still appraisingly. Then the older woman held out her hand. Joanna had neglected to do this, having, like most colored people of her class, carefully schooled herself in the matter of repression where white people were concerned. How​ever, she took the extended hand and gave it a hearty pressure.

"Yes," said Miss Sharples as though checking up the colored girl's points by a pattern which she carried in her head, "yes, you are the one. I was sure I hadn't confused you with anyone else. I haven't seen you for several years, you know, not since that Christmas when you danced for the Day Nursery with Helena Arnold. Do you remember?"

Joanna, slightly nonplussed, nodded yes. As though she could forget that Christmas when she had become engaged to Peter!

Miss Sharples, still pursuing some train of thought known only to herself, meandered on. "I said, 'I know there must be somebody who could do it,' and then I thought of but I didn't know your name. So I called up Helena and she told me. Do you still dance as divinely as you did that night, my dear?"

"Better," Joanna told her confidently, "although it doesn't get me anywhere. Would you mind telling me what all this is about?"

Her visitor settled herself comfortably in a chair, crossed one leg over the other, and took out a cigarette. "Mind if I smoke?" Joanna watched her wide-eyed, picturing her father's surprise if he should happen to look in on them.

"It's a long story. You may or may not know that I am one of the directors of the District Line Theater. Lately we've been putting on a production called 'The Dance of the Nations'—dances of the nations it really should be called. Well, we have one woman to represent France, another England, etc.; we aren't featuring Germany or any of her allies. When it came to America we had to have two or three dances represented, one for the white element, one for the black and one for the red. Of course that made the woman representing America practically a star. Well, she's all right as a white American, ​or as a red one, but when it comes to the colored American, she simply lays down on her job." Miss Sharples' eloquence drowned her sense of grammar.

"You know," she went on vigorously, "art to my eye is art, and there's no sense in letting a foolish prejudice interfere with it. This girl won't darken her face and hasn't a notion, so far as dancing like colored people is concerned, beyond the cake-walk. Well, I told my Board I didn't believe that was either adequate or accurate. I'd seen Helena Arnold dance, you know, and I'd seen you, and I figured that your way was the right way," she concluded sensibly, "because you were colored. Miss Ashby's contract expires this week and I persuaded the Board to let me try to find someone else. What do you think about it?" She paused, still regarding Joanna shrewdly.

"You mean," said Joel Marshall's daughter, "that you are offering me a chance to dance at the District Line Theater?" She thought: "I know this isn't real."

"Well, yes, if you suit. It would be an experiment. To be frank, my dear, some of the directors are doubtful about the success of a colored girl on the stage, but if you dance as well as you did five or six years ago, I should say there would be no difficulty. Suppose you come with me now, there's a rehearsal at the theater this afternoon. Are you free?"

Was she free? She dashed off to get her wraps and stumbled into Sylvia on the second floor. "Isn't she long-winded? What'd she come to see you about?"

Joanna took her by both shoulders and shook her. "About my dancing at the District Line Theater in the 'Dance of the Nations.' Oh, Sylvia, if I'm dreaming, don't let me wake up."

Down in Greenwich Village on the south side of Washington Square, Joanna found Miss Susan's "Board." They were occupying, scattered around, a large dilapidated room of mag​nificent proportions and they were talking of art, of dancing with an enthusiasm and accuracy, an amazing precision such as Joanna had never heard equaled.

"Valvinov is good, more than good, excellent in her conception of the dance and the way she carries it out, but her ankles are too clumsy, it makes me sick to look at her legs." A short, stocky young man seated at the piano delivered this dictum. He was very pale, with thick black hair which he wore plastered back from a low square forehead. His hair was long, Joanna noticed, and ran in unbroken strands from his forehead to the top of his coat collar. He spoke absolutely unaccented English, and his clothes were sharply American, but he was unlike any American the girl had even seen before.

Miss Sharples introduced her briskly. "This is Miss Marshall," she said to the room in general, "the dancer I was telling you of." Joanna inclined her head slightly, but the men all rose and bowed gravely, and the two other women in the room—a Miss Rosen and a Miss Phelps as they turned out to be—bowed also noncommittally but without hostility.

Evidently the place had frequently been used for rehearsals, for there was a narrow platform running across the far end of the room. Here Miss Sharples stationed Joanna. "Just to give them an idea of what you can do, my dear. There isn't much space, but I don't think that will bother you."

"No," said Joanna confidently, "the thing is the music." She glanced at the pale young man who had spoken about the Russian dancer's thick ankles. "Can you play by ear?"

"I think I could manage it," he told her seriously. They were all serious, as unconscious of self and as tremendously interested as though they were assisting at an affair of national moment. Joanna felt the atmosphere enveloping, quickening her. She stepped down from the platform.

"Well, now listen. I'm supposed to have a ring of children ​around me. I sing and they answer. At first I'll have to sing both parts, but afterwards you can play their answers. See, this is the way it goes." She sat down at the piano, and ran through the melody of "Barn! Barn!" singing it in her beautiful, full voice.

"That's it, that's got the lilt," a tall, dark man said to Miss Rosen.

Joanna yielded the piano to the pale young man—Francis—everyone called him. He ran over her sketch, filling in with deep, rich chords, while she flew back to the little platform.

"Now then, you've got it. Ready!

Her voice rang out, her slender flaming body turned and twinkled, her lovely graceful limbs flashed and darted and pirouetted. She was everywhere at once, acting the part of leader, of individual children, of the whole, singing, stamping circle.

The Board applauded. "Oh, but that's great, that's genius," cried Miss Phelps.

"If I could only have some real children," Joanna suggested, "colored children. Are there any around here?"

"About five thousand down there in Minetta Lane," Francis told her gravely. "Want me to get you some?"

"Oh, if you only would." He and Miss Rosen disappeared and were back in fifteen minutes with ten colored children, of every type and shade, black and brown and yellow, some with stiff pigtails and others with bobbed curling locks. Most of them knew the game already, all of them took to Joanna and threw themselves with radiant, eager good nature into the spirit of what she was trying to display.

The tall dark man, Mr. Hale, came over to her. "You're ​all right, Miss Marshall, if you're willing, we'll try you. America's got some foolish prejudices, but we'll try her with a sensation, and you'll be all of that. I'll leave you with Miss Sharples and Miss Rosen, our secretary, to make final arrangements, while Francis and I go out to see what we can do about taking on these kids. I suppose you'll need them."