There Is Confusion/Chapter 4

Isaiah did not marry until he was thirty-one, which was an advanced age for his times. Even then he had married earlier than his father. Old Joshua, who died long before Isaiah's marriage, had been inordinately proud of his one son.

"Jes' wouldn't work fer white folks," Joshua used to say, "that weren't good enough fer him."

Isaiah and Miriam Sayres Bye had one son. "Meriwether," Isaiah wrote in Aaron and Dinah Bye's old gift, and under it in a script as fine and characteristic as that of the original inscription: "By his fruits shall ye know—me." It was a strange but not unnatural bit of pride, the same pride which had made him name this squirming bundle of potentialities, "Meriwether,—Meriwether Bye," a boy with the same name which old white Aaron Bye's son had borne and with as good chances. The Civil War was on the horizon then and Isaiah Bye, with that calm expectation of the unexpected which was his mother's chiefest legacy, was sure that in that grand mêlée all his people would know freedom. So black Meriwether Bye, born like himself in freedom, would know nothing but that estate when he began to have understanding.

Isaiah had accumulated a little, though how that was possible, no one aware of his tiny stipend could guess. It is true he not only taught school, but he had outside pupils, ex-slaves, freedmen, men like himself born in freedom, but unable through economic pressure to enjoy it except in name,—all these crowded his home at night on Vine Street, and sweated mightily over primers and pothooks and the abacus. Twenty-five ​cents an hour he charged them, giving each a meticulous care such as would bring a modern tutor many dollars. He wrote letters, pamphlets, too, for that marvelous organization already well established, the A. M. E. Church. His wife had a sister whose husband kept a second-hand shop and from this source he earned an occasional dollar. When Meriwether was eight, Isaiah owned two houses in Pearl Street, the house in Vine Street, a half interest in his brother-in-law's store and a plot in Mount Olivet Cemetery.

From the very beginning Meriwether knew he was to be a great man—a doctor, his father had said emphatically. And Meriwether repeated it by rote. He was a clever enough child though without his father's solid trait of concentration. But he liked the idea of greatness—that and the profession of medicine came to be synonymous with him as it was already with his father. Otherwise it is likely that both of them would have seen earlier the boy's inaptitude for the calling thus thrust upon him.

Meriwether went to his father's school, to Mr. Jonas Howard's catering establishment, which he loved, to Sunday-School and to his Uncle Peter's second-hand store. In any one of these places he was at home. He might have made a good teacher, caterer, minister or storekeeper. Yet he meandered on, doing absolutely mediocre work, never failing, never shining, and always rather purposely waiting the day which should bring him to the Medical School.

He was waiting for something else, too, though this Isaiah never guessed. He was waiting for some sign of help or recognition from the white Byes. His father had told him of the slaveholder's great debt to old Joshua; he had taken him riding past the Bryn Mawr peach orchards. "By rights part of them ought to belong to us. But I don't mind, no sir-ee! Let 'em have 'em. See where we are to-day without their help. Think of it!"

​Meriwether did think of it and did mind it. He learned that he had been named after the son of his grandfather's patron and somehow it seemed impossible to him that that mere fact should not result in something tangibly advantageous. He lacked the imagination to understand the pride which actuated Isaiah to name his boy as he had. The year before Meriwether was to enter medical school, Isaiah, fortunately, for himself, died.

A few months later Miriam died, too. Meriwether was left sole heir to the three houses and two or three hundred dollars. He was tired of school and not at all displeased with the idea of being his own master. He would like a little vacation, he fancied, and a chance to see the world. Somebody told him of a good way to do this—why not get a job as train porter? The idea pleased him; there was travel, easy money, besides his little property in Philadelphia. And afterwards perhaps there would be the patron for whom he had been named, Dr. Meriwether Bye of Bryn Mawr.

Isaiah's mother, Belle Bye, used to say, "Things you do expect and things you don't expect are sure to come to pass." It took Isaiah many years to see the reasonableness of this apparently unreasoned statement. Certainly one of the things he never expected to come to pass was that his boy Meriwether should, first, give up altogether his project of studying medicine and, second, that bit by bit, through sickness, gambling, and a hitherto unsuspected penchant for sheer laziness, he should run through his Philadelphia property, thus wiping away all that edifice of respectability and good citizenship which Isaiah Bye had so carefully built up.

Colored Philadelphia society is organized as definitely as, and even a little more carefully than, Philadelphia white society. One wasn't "in" in those old days unless one were, first, "an old citizen," and, second, unless one were eminently respectable,—almost it might be said God-fearing. Meriwether ​having been born to this estate suffered all the inconveniences coming to a member of a group at that time small and closely welded. His business was everybody's business. His Uncle Peter had upbraided him for not studying medicine. Jonas Howard, the caterer, knew about his first real estate transfer. The young Howards and his cousins knew about his gambling and rebuked him admiringly. On one of his "runs" Meriwether spent a week in New York. This was in 1889. Not a single colored person knew him or cared about him. He rented a room in Fifty-third Street and made that his headquarters. Later he rented two rooms and married a young seamstress who died in 1891 when her boy was born.

Meriwether did do two things after that. First he wrote to Dr. Meriwether Bye telling him who he was and implying he would not disdain a little aid. It is doubtful if the doctor, who at that time was traveling in Europe with his tiny grandson, ever received the letter. Second, he took to drink. More than anything else he fell into a deep, ineluctable mood of melancholia. Here he was, Meriwether Bye, destined to be a great man, a famous physician. Why, he had been a man of property once, with money in the bank! And now he was just a poor nobody, picking up odd jobs, paying his room rent fearfully from week to week, sometimes pawning Isaiah Bye's chased gold watch.

How he worked it out he himself could not have told. But he saw himself a martyr, "driven by fate" from the high eminence of his father's dreams to his own poor realities. Think how he had struggled, sacrificed—he believed it—the fun and freedom of youth to come to this! "How," said Meriwether Bye harking back to Sunday-School days, "how are the mighty fallen!" And how easily might they have remained mighty.

He named his boy Peter after his Uncle Peter, in whose ​second-hand shop in Philadelphia he had spent delightful hours.

Now see the perversity of human nature. Just as his father Isaiah Bye had talked to his son Meriwether about the reward of effort and faithful toil, just so Meriwether talked to Peter about the futility of labor and ambition. And in particular he talked to him about the ingratitude of the white Byes—of all white people.

"It makes no difference, Peter, what you do, or how hard you work. The rewards of life are only for such or such. You may pour your heart's blood out,"—he had a fine gift of rhetoric—"and still achieve nothing. Think of your great-grandfather. Fate favors those whom she chooses. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed."

Or, "Peter, if life has any favors for you, she'll give them to you without your asking for them. The world owes you a living, let it come to you, don't bother going after it."

How completely his son might be absorbing all this, Meriwether never knew, for Peter, vocal enough with his playmates and others, maintained an owlish silence when his father thus harangued him.

But his aunt knew. She was a tall, stout, yellow woman, with that ineffable look of sadness in her eyes characteristic of a certain type of colored people. She was the sister of Peter's mother, and when Peter's father died, suddenly, inconsequently, she accepted uncomplainingly his son along with her other burdens.

Peter was then twelve; extraordinarily handsome, vivid and alert. Miss Susan Graves riding home from the cemetery reflected that he might be not such a burden after all. Clearly he would soon want to be taking care of himself.

"Peter," she said thoughtfully, "what do you want to do when you grow up?"

"Oh, I don't know," her nephew replied, temporarily remov​ing his gaze from the window-pane where it had been glued for twenty minutes. "I'm not bothered about that, Aunt Susan. You see the world owes me a living."

She noticed in him then the first fruits of his father's shiftlessness. But far more deeply rooted than that was his deep dislike for white people. He did not believe that any of them were kind or just or even human. And although he could not himself have told what he wanted from the white Byes, if indeed he wanted anything, he grew up with the feeling that he and his had been unusually badly treated. His grandfather's connection with white people resulted in pride, his father's in shiftlessness; in Peter it took the form of a constant and increasing bitterness.