There Is Confusion/Chapter 28

The District Line Theater was jammed every night now. People came from all over New York and all its suburbs to see the new dancer—Joanna Marshall. Her success and fame were instant. The newspapers featured her, the "colyumists" wrote her up, her face appeared with other members of the cast, but never alone, on the billboards outside the little ramshackle theater. Special writers came to see her, took snapshots of herself and of Sylvia which they never published, and speculated on the amount of white blood which she had in her veins.

Mr. Hale had taken her on in May. The piece ran all summer with Joanna as the great attraction, although not the acknowledged star. Miss Ashby, the girl who danced as an Indian and as an American, was that. From the first she had resented the colored girl's success and had held jealously to all her rights and privileges. But the public, surprisingly loyal to this new and original plaything, never varied in the expression of its enjoyment of Joanna. Now that her changed contract was again about to expire, Miss Ashby announced her inability to remain with the play.

"I've really been violating my principles in staying this long," she told Mr. Hale with meaning.

Even Miss Sharples was overcome at this news. Joanna could be cast without any difficulty as an Indian, a wig and grease paint would accomplish that. But Joanna could hardly pose as a white American. She was too dark.

Sylvia had a suggestion here. "America" was supposed to ​come on last as a regal, symbolic figure, but Miss Ashby had paid more attention to the dancing than to the symbolism.

"Why not," asked Sylvia, "have a mask made for Joanna? She could then be made as typically American as anyone could wish and no one need know the difference."

That was the basis on which Mr. Hale worked. On the first night on which the new "America" was introduced, an inveterate theater-goer in the first row of the orchestra insisted on encoring her. Joanna returned, bowed and bowed, was encored.

Somehow the habitué guessed the truth. "Pull off your mask, America," he shouted. The house took it up. "Let's see your face, America!"

Mr. Hale, Miss Sharples, Francis, Miss Rosen and Miss Phelps held a hurried consultation behind the scenes. "There's nothing to be done," Hale said, "quick, off with your mask, Miss Marshall." And breathless, somewhat with the air of a man bracing himself, he led Joanna again on the stage.

There was a moment's silence, a moment's tenseness. Then Joanna smiled and spoke. "I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War and my brother is 'over there' now."

Perhaps it would not have succeeded anywhere else but in New York, and perhaps not even there but in Greenwich Village, but the tightly packed audience took up the applause again and Joanna was a star.

The very next week Mr. Hale moved the production to Broadway.

Joanna found herself becoming a sensation. Through Miss Sharples, who was besieged with requests to meet her protégée, she came in contact with groups of writers, dramatists, "thinkers," that vast, friendly, changing kaleidoscope of New York dwellers who take their mental life seriously. Occa​sionally, too, she was invited to grace an "occasion," an afternoon at the house of a rich society woman. Once at one of these affairs she met Vera Manning, who grinned at her impishly and announced to the room that she and Miss Marshall were old friends. They had been schoolmates.

"When I was a child," said Vera impudently, "my mother sent me to public school for almost a year. She said she wanted me to be a real democrat."

She threw Joanna a droll look. When the afternoon was over, Vera asked her to go on to tea with her.

Joanna was perfect: "That's very kind of you, Miss Manning, and I don't know but what I will. There are several things I'd like to interest you in. When I think of the illimitable power for good which you white people possess———"

Once outside the door the two girls went off into gusts of inextinguishable laughter.

Joanna did not like these affairs and soon she adopted the habit of refusing such invitations. She preferred Miss Sharples' artist friends—because among them she sensed attempts, more or less tentative perhaps, toward reality. True, paradoxically enough it was a reality based on art, rather than on living. But the girl was beginning to feel the need of something with which to fill her life. Whether her disastrous love affair, or the frequent discouragements with which she met, had changed or reshaped her vision she did not know. But life, she began to realize, was not a matter of sufficient raiment, food, or even success. There must be something more filling, more insistent, more permeating—the sort of thing that left no room for boredom or introspection.

For in spite of her vogue, her unbelievably decided successes, Joanna frequently tasted the depths of ennui. She saw life as a ghastly skeleton and herself feverishly trying to cover up its bare bones with the garish trappings of her art, her lessons, her practice, her press-clippings.

​Miss Sharples put her up for membership in a club whose members were mostly people that "did" something. And Joanna fell in the habit of taking her lunch and frequently her dinner, too, at this club, just to lose herself in the atmosphere which she found there.

Undoubtedly the contact did her good. Joanna, while lacking Peter's singularly active dislike for white people, was not on the other hand a "good mixer." Following the natural reaction at this time of her racial group, she had tended to seek all her ideals among colored people and where these were lacking to create them for herself. As a result of this attitude, injurious in the long run to both whites and-blacks, she was hardening into a singularly narrow, even though self-reliant egocentric. She had never met in her family with much opposition to her chosen career, but then neither with the exception of Joel's and that of her teachers had she met with much coöperation.

Now to her astonishment she found herself in a setting where people, without being considered "different," "high-brow," "affected,"—and not greatly caring if they were—talked, breathed, lived for and submerged themselves and others, too, in their calling. She met girls not as old as she, who had already "arrived" in their chosen profession; incredibly young editors, artists—exponents of new and inexplicable schools of drawing,—women with causes,—birth-control, single tax, psychiatry,—teachers of dancing, radical high school teachers.

There were men to be met, too, really eminent men, but Joanna was not much interested. Following the American idea, she had been too carefully trained to care for the company of white men. Between them and herself the barrier was too impassable. Besides, it was women who had the real difficulties to overcome, disabilities of sex and of tradition.

For a while she was puzzled, a little ashamed when she ​realized that so many of these women had outstripped her so early; some of them were poor, some had responsibilities. There were not many of these last. It was a long time before the solution occurred to her and when it did the result was her first real rebellion against the stupidity of prejudice.

These women had not been compelled to endure her long, heartrending struggle against color. Those who had had means had been able to plunge immediately into the sea of preparation; they had had their choice of teachers; as soon as they were equipped they had been able to approach the guardians of literary and artistic portals. Joanna thought of her many futile efforts with Bertully and sighed at the pity of it all. Sometimes she felt like a battle-scarred veteran among all these successful, happy, chattering people, who, no matter how seriously, how deeply they took their success, yet never regarded it with the same degree of wonder, almost of awe with which she regarded hers.

She realized for the first time how completely colored Americans were mere on-lookers at the possibilities of life. She spent a few happy months with these people; they made pleasant and stimulating company for her; she herself suspected that she had made good "copy" for some of them. They were for the most part unconscious of race, not at all inclined to patronize, and generous with praise and suggestion. One woman, it is true, told Joanna that she had always liked colored people.

"My father would insist on having colored servants. He preferred them."

Joanna had made an impish reply. "My father employs both white and colored servants. But he prefers the colored ones. However, it doesn't make any difference to me."

Still that had been a rare encounter. Life on the whole smiled on her. Yet she was not happy. But is anybody so? she wondered. She had forgotten to sorrow for her break with ​Peter, her life was too full for that, even for a new love. Vera Manning's brother Tom, brought into her entourage by the flood of publicity and popularity that engulfed her, asked her to marry him. She liked him; found him charming and sympathetic, but he was too white and she did not want a marriage which would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes. What she did want, she decided, was to be needed, to be useful, to be devoting her time, her concentration and her remarkable singlemindedness to some worthy visible end. After all, she had worked hard and striven tremendously—to be what? A dancer.

"Is this really what you wanted me to be?" she asked her father abruptly. They were driving home from the theater, their nightly custom. "Is this your idea of real greatness?"

And Joel, his voice half glad, half sorry, told her that he, too, had hoped for something different.