There Is Confusion/Chapter 5

It may seem a cold-blooded thing to say, but the dying of Meriwether Bye was about the best thing he could have done for his son, Peter. Certainly that was what Miss Susan Graves thought as she viewed rather grimly the small and motley collection of belongings which Peter transferred to her home in his little express wagon from his father's former landlady, Mrs. Reading. The collection consisted of a well-worn extra suit of clothes, another pair of shoes, some underwear in sad need of patching, some books chiefly on physiology and anatomy, the Bye Family Bible, a little old black testament, and a box of letters. There was also a big railroad map which Peter lugged along under his arm and from which he stubbornly refused to be parted. Meriwether, in his brighter moods, used to refer to his "runs" as "business-trips" and would point out to Peter just where he would go on such and such a date. The boy learned a lot of geography in this way, and was talking to his playmates about Duluth and Jacksonville, Sacramento and Denver, before most of them knew that they personally were living in the country's metropolis.

The books on medicine and anatomy had been well thumbed by Peter, too. Meriwether had received them from old Isaiah, his father, and had carried them around on his runs to impress his co-workers in the Pullman service.

Later he got into the habit of reading from them to Peter who always listened in the grave silence which he usually reserved for his father's effusions. For some reason the little boy's brain retained the various and amazing things which his ​father read to him from the dry old books. Long before he knew his multiplication tables he knew the names of the principal bones of the body and the course of the food. In fact these books were his first readers, for Meriwether, more interested in this dry stuff, now that it was too late to profit him anything, taught his boy how to pronounce the difficult names, so that the latter could read to him. Perhaps the poor fellow, dissolute and weak failure though he was, thought that some of the old "greatness" might still accrue to him by this fiction of studying at medicine.

The Bible was the one thing that Peter knew least about. He looked into it once or twice and hitting on Isaiah Bye's tragically proud inscription: "By his fruits ye shall know—me," spelled it out laboriously,—he always had trouble in reading script,—and asked his father with some natural perplexity what it meant. But Meriwether snatched the book away from him with such a black look and took such pains to put it out of his reach, that Peter for a long time thought the Bible, or at any rate that inscription, must be something decidedly off color. He waited until his father had gone on his next "business-trip" before investigating again, but finding the book nowhere as exciting as his beloved Anatomy, he gave up the puzzle and attributed his father's defection to the inscrutable whims and vagaries of the genus called parents. He valued that old Bible the least of all his possessions. That was the bitterest day of his life when he found out what it ought to mean to him.

Miss Susan, though not an "old Philadelphian" herself, knew something of colored Philadelphia's pride in the possession of family and tradition. She would have been glad of course if Meriwether Bye had left Peter some money. But of the two she would very much rather have had the Bible with its absolute assurance of the former standing and respectability of the black Byes. She had a family tradition of her own, for she ​was a member of the Graves family of Gravestown, New Jersey, a clan well known to colored people not only in that vicinity, but also throughout Pennsylvania.

The story is that two white sisters in the middle of the eighteenth century fell in love with two of their father's black slaves. The Negroes may have been African Princes for all any one knows to the contrary. Since nothing they could do or say would win their father's consent to such a union, the girls ran away with their lovers, and married them, with or without benefit of clergy it is impossible to relate. Nature and God alike, instead of being disconcerted at this utter contravention of the laws of man, presented each couple with numerous children. When these reached mating age, finding themselves out of favor with both black and white of their community, the cousins solved the problem by marrying each other. The children of each generation did the same, whether driven to it by like necessity or not, history does not say. But by the time the next brood appeared a precedent had been established, and Graves married Graves not only as a matter of course, but as a matter of pride. They were able to do this, being automatically rendered free by the fact that a white woman had married a black man.

Miss Susan Graves had not married for the simple and sufficient reason that in her day there were not enough male Graves to go around. She would as soon have thought of marrying outside her family as a Spanish grandee would have thought of marrying an English cockney. In those days the position of old maid had its decided disadvantages—few people if any gave her the benefit of the doubt that she might have remained single from choice. Yet Miss Susan Graves, in spite of three other offers, soared on family pride above all this and made her career that of housekeeper for the family of a wealthy merchant on Girard Avenue, in Philadelphia. (You ​must marry a Graves, but obviously you obtained work where you could find it.)

There was a younger sister, Alice Graves, not as direct in purpose as Susan, yet in some respects curiously strong. She had always considered the Graves' tradition silly: it was so unexciting marrying someone whom you had known and seen all your life. What was marriage for if not for a change?

When the oldest son of Merchant Sharples of Girard Avenue married and went to New York, Susan Graves went along as housekeeper. And thither Alice Graves followed shortly to do sewing for that intricate but orderly household. Meriwether Bye, who had known both ladies in Philadelphia—for Miss Susan Bye was a frequent visitor both at his father's and his Uncle Peter's house—came to see them in his rare fits of loneliness, and between runs courted Alice Graves in Central Park. Of course it would have been better if Alice could have married a Graves, but Susan resigned herself easily to the matter—for Bye belonged to old stock and must, she thought, make good eventually. But she developed a strong dislike for him before his death, and took Peter not only for his mother's sake but also to dispel if possible his father's doubtless harmful influence.

Peter was a surprise to his aunt. She found him kind but thoughtless, industrious on occasions but unspeakably shiftless, not too proud, not very grateful and with no sense of responsibility. His father of course spoke there. Yet the boy was indubitably charming, never complained, and usually did as he was told. Miss Susan found herself between two minds—she had an impulse to work her fingers to the bone and thus spare Alice's beautiful son the tussle with poverty which he must know, and again a desire to speak and act forcibly and drive him into an acknowledgment of what her loyalty to her sister was leading her to do for a homeless, friendless lad. Actually she struck a medium, made him keep clean, insisted ​on his regular attendance at school, took him to Sunday-School and Church entertainments and induced him to work on Saturdays and holidays by refusing pocket-money to "a boy as big as you."

She could not understand why he chose a job in a butcher's shop. Doubtless Peter hardly knew himself. "I like to watch the man saw the bones," he would have said vaguely. "I can do it, too. I can cut up a chicken or a rabbit just as neatly!"