There Is Confusion/Chapter 36

Joanna and Peter married and Peter came at Joel's insistent request to live in the One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street house. It was marvelous to see how the two old people renewed themselves in the youth of their children. Joel was as proud of Peter as he had been of Joanna. Even Mrs. Marshall's long allegiance to Sylvia wavered a little.

The first child was a boy; "Meriwether," Peter had named him after young Dr. Meriwether Bye. "I'm going to tempt providence," he said to his wife. "I hope he'll not be the sort of Meriwether that my father was. I'll see to it that he isn't. He's going to be all and more than old Isaiah Bye ever dreamed of," and he quoted, to Joanna's mystification: "By his fruits shall ye know me."

The two possessed happiness; but more than happiness they had found peace. They were united by the very pain which each had caused the other. And the knowledge of how greatly each could suffer created in them a sort of whimsical tolerance. There is nothing like humor to speed the wheels of life.

Joanna, having come to understand the nothingness of that inordinate craving for sheer success, surprised herself by the pleasure which came to her out of what she had always considered the ordinary things of life. Realizing how nearly she had lost the essentials in grasping after the trimmings of existence, she experienced a deep, almost holy joy in the routine of the day. To see about her, her husband and parents, little Meriwether usually in Joel's arms, gave her, she confessed almost shamefacedly to Sylvia, "thoughts that lay too deep for ​tears." She rarely regretted leaving the stage and although she sang sometimes in churches and concerts and once even went on a brief tour, she almost never danced except in the ordinary way.

Still, as her mentality was essentially creative, she found herself more and more impelled toward the expression of the intense appreciation of living which welled within her. Luckily her training in music offered her some outlet. With her slight knowledge of composition she composed two little songs and glimpsing future possibilities, she began to study that most fascinating of all the sciences—harmony.

The change in Peter was more fundamental than that in Joanna. She at least had always had these possibilities of domesticity. Her desire for greatness had been a sort of superimposed structure which, having been taken off, left her her true self. It was as though her life had expanded on the plan of Holmes' admonition to the Chambered Nautilus:

Joanna was free.

But Peter had had to undergo a complete metamorphosis. He was a supersensitive colored man living among hosts of indifferent white people. Not only had he to change in every particular his theory of how to maintain such a relationship, but indeed he had to decide what sort of relationship was worth maintaining. At his father's death and during his young manhood he had been absolutely without a notion of the responsibilities which the most average man expects to take upon himself. He looked back with a real shame and chagrin ​to the many favors which he had accepted without question from his Aunt Susan.

Joanna, clever Joanna, helped him here. She was not only naturally independent, but she was, for all her talent, essentially practical with that clearheadedness which artistic people exhibit sometimes in such unexpected fashion. Perhaps it is wrong to imply that Joanna had lost her ambition. She was still ambitious, only the field of her ambition lay without herself. It was Peter now whom she wished to see succeed. If his success depended ever so little on his achievement of a sense of responsibility, then she meant to develop that sense. To this end, she consulted him, she took his advice, she asked him to arrange about the few recitals which she undertook. In a thousand little ways she deferred to him, and showed him that as a matter of course he was the arbiter of her own and her child's destiny, the fons et origo of authority.

So he grew both in the spirit of racial tolerance and in the spirit of responsibility. He wanted to live in America; he wanted to get along with his fellow man, but he no longer proposed to let circumstances shape his career. No one but himself, not even Joanna, should captain his ship. He meant to be a successful surgeon, a responsible husband and father, a self-reliant man.

The memory of Meriwether Bye, never far distant, braced him constantly. The young physician's words and ideas had exercised a singleness of concentration, of influence over Peter such as a friendship of long standing could hardly have hoped to achieve.

For a long time he expected to hear from Meriwether's grandfather. Then as the months and nearly two years rolled by without a sign from Bryn Mawr, Peter decided that the old gentleman wished to spare himself the pain of learning more of the circumstances surrounding his grandson's death.

Sylvia's boy, Roger, captivated by his new soldier-uncle, ​spent most of his time at Peter's house serving in the purely impressionistic capacity of office-boy. He came up to the sitting room one summer morning bearing a bit of cardboard between his fingers.

"Meriwether Bye," he pronounced, handing the card to Peter. "Ain't it funny he should have the same name as the kid? But he's no relation because he's white and as old as the hills."

"Meriwether's grandfather!" Peter said in astonishment. "Come on down with me, Joanna."

Together they descended to find an old, old man sitting in an absolutely immobile silence in Peter's office. He rose, a tall, straight, white figure and looked at the two young people, still in silence.

"I'm Peter Bye," the young man said, coming forward. "Won't you sit down? sit down? Sit here, Joanna."

Together they sat in a strange, strained quiet, Joanna watching Peter in whom she sensed the rising anew of the antagonism of all the years. There they were, she felt, representing the last of the old order and the first of the new, since Peter's generation was the first to escape the effect of the ancient régime, and he personally had not completely escaped it. How many things this ancient, stately personage who sat regarding them with keen though inscrutable eyes could have told them of the circumstances which had combined to make the two of them what they were! For this old man's whole life and fortune had been reared on the institution of slavery.

Out of the puzzling silence he spoke, in the expressionless, brittle tone of extreme old age. "Yes, I know you are a Bye, Isaiah Bye's grandson. And you were with Meriwether at the end. Tell me about it."

Very solemnly, almost pityingly, Peter began the recital of his brief, dream-like acquaintance with Meriwether Bye. "He had quite made up his mind beforehand that he was going ​to die. Perhaps you knew. So, I'm sure he was quite reconciled to it; I don't think you need grieve for him. And at the very end I was with him. It turned out that we had been fighting just a few yards apart. I think I eased him a little; I'm a doctor, too," said Peter simply. He put his hand in front of his eyes as though trying to shut out the vision of the pitiful, needless death. "His last words were to you, did I tell you, sir? He sat up suddenly against me, his hand on my arm and called out—Oh, I can hear his voice now: 'Grandfather, this is the last of the Byes."

They sat again in a deep silence.

"I'm sorry," Peter continued after a long revery, "that he hadn't married, and had no children. It's hard on you, sir, you who are now the last of the Byes."

"Yes," said the old gentleman laconically, "it is. Now, suppose you tell me something about yourself."

But first Peter told him about his father, Meriwether, glossing over the dead man's faults and irresoluteness and dwelling on his ambition. "So you see, I had always had the idea of becoming a doctor before me. But I'm afraid I should never have realized it if it had not been for my wife, here." He smiled gratefully at Joanna, who smiled back at him with a gratitude of another sort. He had uttered no word of complaint nor of the difficulties attendant on being a colored man in America. She was very proud of him. He was so charming, so handsome, growing daily in independence.

"You have a son," said old Meriwether. "I believe you said you had a son, Meriwether? How would you like me to take him and educate him, bring him up away from all he'd have to go through in this country, let him spend his life in Paris and Vienna. Perhaps he would be a doctor, too. When he became a man he could do as he pleased. And probably, probably, I say, I should make him my heir."

Neither Joanna nor Peter had ever thought of wealth. And ​while neither of them envisaged for a second the possibility of parting from little Meriwether, they were momentarily stunned at such prospects, Joanna especially.

"Why," asked Peter, his old demon of dislike and suspicion flaring up in him, "should you at this late date show interest in a black Bye?"

"Because," said Meriwether Bye, getting up and beginning to pace the floor, "because he is my heir. Because he is the last of the Byes. Because when my brave boy called out 'this is the last of the Byes,' he meant you, not himself. He had no way of knowing it, but he did know it. That queer sense in him which warned him he was going to die, probably told him.

"You've heard of your grandfather Isaiah, the boy that grew up with me?" Peter nodded. "Well, his father, black Joshua Bye, was my oldest brother; my father—he was Aaron Bye—was his father. Joshua was really his oldest child. His mother was Judy Bye, old Judy Bye, whom I've seen often sitting in Isaiah's house, her eyes straining, straining into the future—perhaps she saw this, who knows?"

"My father," said Peter in a dangerously level voice, "told me and told me often that much of Aaron Bye's prosperity had been due to the loyalty and hard work of Joshua Bye. But he never told me that Aaron was his father. And you knew this, have known it———"

"Not while Isaiah and I were boys. Not for many, many years afterwards. My father," the word seemed strange on this old man's lips, "always meant, I think, to do something for his—his son in his will. But he put it off and finally just before his death he told my brother Elmer—his oldest son by his real wife you know—told him about it. But Elmer was all out of sympathy with the idea, and, although he did not tell my father so, had no notion of acquainting Joshua either with his real parentage or with the fact that he should have ​been one of Aaron Bye's heirs. Elmer was one of those men with a sharp dislike, amounting to an obsession, almost, for Negroes, for all unfortunate people. I'm free from it personally."

"Yet," said Peter harshly, "your conduct has differed not one whit from his. How long have you known this?"

"Since the close of the Civil War. All my brothers had died but Elmer, and all his sons were killed in the war. When Elmer was himself about to die, he told me. He thought the loss of his sons was a curse upon him because he had failed to obey my father's wishes. He left their carrying out to me. I was a young man still. I saw no reason for opening up old wounds. Besides, I did not know what had become of Isaiah's son. Isaiah and Joshua were both dead. I could not see that my father had acted differently from other slave-holders—it was the custom of the country—and at least he did not do as many a white man had done, sell his son into deeper and more terrible slavery. . . . I can see now that whatever slavery may have done for other men it has thrown the lives of all the Byes into confusion. Think of the farce my father's religion must have become to him . . . and I shall never forget Elmer. Sometimes I think the shadow of it fell across Meriwether's life—I meant to tell him. I know he would have made restitution. Now I shall do it for him."

He ceased speaking and looked at Peter curiously, wistfully. "I suppose you find it hard to forgive us. I'm afraid I had not thought until very recently what this might have meant to you,—to Isaiah."

Peter ignored this. "If you made my son your heir," he questioned, avoiding Joanna's startled look, "would you be willing to publish to the world that you were doing it because little Meriwether was your blood relation—no matter how distant—or would this be the gift of an eccentric philanthropist?"

​The old man's face grew a dull red. "Surely it would not be necessary—think of my father. What good would it do the boy to know that Aaron Bye's blood flowed in his veins?"

"None," said Peter triumphantly. He turned to Joanna. "See, dear, there is the source of all I used to be. My ingratitude, my inability to adopt responsibility, my very irresoluteness come from that strain of white Bye blood. But I understand it now, I can fight against it. I'm free, Joanna, free."

He walked over to Meriwether Bye, and the two tall straight men—so alike, so different, one young, one very old—gazed for a long time at each other.

"I don't want your gifts," said Peter gently, "nor does my son want them—neither your money nor the acknowledgment of your blood. They come too late." He turned to his wife after Meriwether had left the house. "Thank God, Joanna, they have come too late. Perhaps I might have been like that."

Afterwards the memory of the little black testament returned to him. He found it and showed it to Joanna. "I'll bet that old codger Ceazer knew that Joshua wasn't his son and that's why he scratched his own name out of the book. He would have been an ancestor worth having."

Joanna looked at him proudly. "Peter, you are wonderful! Such a man, a great man!"

He sighed a little wistfully. "There spoke the real Joanna. Greatness, even in daily living, will always be your creed, I suppose."

"No," said Joanna, a shameless apostate, "my creed calls for nothing but happiness."