There Is Confusion/Chapter 7

Sylvia and Joanna, walking through Sixty-third Street on an errand for their mother, came upon groups of children playing games. Italians, Jews, colored Americans, white Americans were there disporting themselves with more or less abandon, according to their peculiar temperament.

"Look," said Joanna suddenly, catching at Sylvia's hand. "See those children dancing! Wait, I've got to see that!"

Out in the middle of the street a band of colored children were dancing and acting a game. With no thought of spectators they joined hands, took a few steps, separated, spun around, smote hands sharply, and then flung them above their heads. One girl stood in the middle, singing too, but with an attentive air. Presently she darted forward, seized a member of the ring:

Their voices were treble and sweet, though shrill, and rang with a peculiar, piercing quality above the street noises and the sounds of the other children's games. The little players were absorbed, enraptured with the spirit of the dance and the abandon of the music. Joanna, too, was in a transport. She watched them going through the motions several times. Presently she caught all the words:

The child in the center here chose a partner. The others sang:

They stamped here.

The two children in the center embraced each other while the rest sang:

Then the two in the center pointed fingers at each other, shrilling:

Then all:

The last line came as a faint echo.

Joanna rushed forward: "I can play it! Girls let me play it, too!"

The children stared at her a moment, then, with the instinct of childhood for a kindred spirit, two of them unclasped hands and took Joanna in. She outdid them all in the fervor and grace of her acting. Two white settlement workers stopped and looked at her.

"Come on, Joanna," Sylvia called impatiently.

Joanna came running, a string of the children after her. She bade them good-by. "I must go now, but I'm coming back sometime soon, to learn some more." She blew them a kiss, "good-by, oh, good-by!"

She came up to Sylvia flushed and excited. "We'll play it home, Sylvia! Wasn't it lovely and dear? Oh, I could dance ​like that forever!" She went almost all the entire remaining distance on tip-toe.

Life in Joel Marshall's house was not always a serious discussion of the Marshall children's future. Like many of the better class of colored people, the Marshalls did not meet with the grosser forms of color prejudice, because they kept away from the places where it might be shown. This was bad from the standpoint of development of civic pride and interest. But it had its good results along another line. The children took most of their pleasures in their house or in those of their friends and devoted their wits and young originality to indoor pastimes.

The Marshall house was a great center for this kind of thing, and already Friday and Saturday nights were being regularly set apart for the children's amusement and for the reception and entertainment of the various young people who dropped in.

Joanna taught her dance. Sylvia and Philip and Alexander were willing pupils; Joanna was magnetic when in this kind of mood. By the time Harry Portor and Maggie Ellersley arrived, they were all singing and stamping and twirling. Peter came in late, held up by the butcher. "Had to go on an errand for the grand white folks," he explained briefly.

"You'll wear out my carpet to-night for sure," said Mrs. Marshall, but she loved the dancing as much as any of them, and got up and took a turn. Joanna taught the tune to Peter, who had a good ear, and he ran over to the old-fashioned square piano and rattled it off to a wild thumping accompaniment. When Brian Spencer came in, who even in those days was pretty sure to be where Slyvia was—the fun was at its height. Peter, strumming a haunting, atavistic measure; Joanna, dancing like a faun, instructed Maggie Ellersley.

"Now, Maggie, dance up to one of them. All right, take Philip. You point your finger at him,—no both of you. Yes, you're right, Peter. I forgot that. See, Phil, Peter's learned ​it already. Here I'll do it by myself; all of you stand back."

She went through an elaborate pantomime, stretching out her hands as though clasping a partner on each side. She described an imaginary circle for the ring and ran into the midst of it. An imaginary partner was before her and she drew him in, pointed a slim, brown finger at him, rested both hands on her young hips, pirouetted, sang to him gayly:

"Stand back, boy, don't you come near me!"

"My," laughed Brian Spencer, clapping loudly. "Can't you see it all just as plainly? Really, Jan, you ought to go on the stage as an impersonator, I don't believe you could be beat." He was a tall dark boy with fine proud features that looked chiseled. He and Alexander were home from college for the Easter vacation.

Maggie Ellersley, as it happened, had been at a matinée the week before. "It was vaudeville, Joanna, and there was an actress there who took off different people and then she did some Irish folk dances, but she couldn't hold a candle to you. Too bad we're colored."

"It's not going to make any difference to me," said Joanna determinedly. "Mother and father are willing. If I want to go on the stage I'll get there."

"Joanna has the faith that moves mountains," laughed Peter. "If anybody can make it she can."

Peter was a regular visitor at the Marshall home now. Ever since that day four years before when he had told Joanna of his new-born determination to be a surgeon, he had spent all his spare time near her. Miss Susan Graves did not like this at first, not that she resented Peter's absence from her so much, but he was a Bye and she did not choose to have him associate too much with people whom she did not know. It was no part of her plan for Peter to retrograde into the wreck which Meriwether had become. She made it her business to meet Mrs. Marshall at a church affair

​"I think," said Miss Graves, eyeing Joanna's mother with her clear, square gaze, "that my boy has spoken to me of you."

Mrs. Marshall looked puzzled. She thought this was a Miss Graves.

"Peter Bye," his aunt continued, "he's my nephew. He often speaks of Joanna Marshall."

"Oh, Peter! Yes, we like to have him at the house. The girls find him great fun. So you're his aunt. You must come to see us, too. Get him to bring you."

Miss Graves came and was impressed enough to let Peter continue, though he would have continued without her permission. But Miss Susan, like Belle Bye nearly a century ago, recognized atmosphere when she saw it. She was poor; Peter was penniless. These were the sort of people her nephew ought to know. She liked Joel's success, his pride, his air of being somebody. She estimated rightly the correctness of the old-fashioned walnut furniture, the heavy curtains, the kidney table in the parlor, the massive silver service and good linen. It is true Sylvia changed much of this—except the silver—for cretonnes and wicker chairs and gay rugs. But as Miss Susan went to the house only a few times she did not know of this.

What she especially liked was the spirit of life, of ambition and hopefulness that pulsed in that household. As Miss Graves grew older, she began to see that her younger sister had had some pretty good views after all, that it did not do to stick to settled views,—"this for me, and that quite other thing for you." The great things of life were for the taking, it was true, but the result of deliberate planning. One did not simply stumble into success. She had lived too long with "the best white people" not to find that out.

Joel knew this, too, she realized. His whole life was devoted to the mapping out of his children's future. His own and Joanna's high enthusiasms had borne fruit. Of late the boys, Philip and Alexander, had talked good solid man-talk.

​"Colored people will be going big pretty soon. We'll have to get in it, too, Pa."

Miss Susan decided this was a good place for Peter. Even if she had the money to do so, she could not send him to a school where he would meet with more inspiration in both precept and actual concrete example. Already in the lesser things this association was bearing fruit. Peter was too handsome, too graceful, too charming ever to be considered a boor. But he had lacked finish, that fine courtliness of manner which Miss Susan noted could convert a man of most ordinary appearance into a prince. She had marked it among Jacob Sharples' grandsons. Peter had not possessed a knowledge of that delicacy, of that attention to trifles which, once gained by a man, gives him passport everywhere. Miss Susan had noticed, to her regret, the boy's tendency to let her carry bundles, to look after even the heavier household duties. It had never occurred to him if the weather were cold or stormy, to offer to go errands for her. And his aunt, practical though she was, shrank from calling his attention to these things. She did not want him to think of her as exacting a return for her kindness.

Now the Marshall boys were fine gentlemen. Joel had made them so by teaching, as well as by his attitude toward their mother and sisters. Joanna and Sylvia, particularly Sylvia, helped the boys out with an occasional stitch, an occasional sewing on of a button. When Alexander was getting ready for college, and was working at nights to help with his expenses, Sylvia used to arrange sandwiches and milk for him when he came in late. And Joanna had recopied his chemistry and history notes. These were only kind trivialities, but the boys treated their sisters like queens. Philip was a little like Sylvia, only neither as handsome nor as lithe and quick. Alexander—Alec, Sandy, the girls called him variously—was slower, like Joanna. Both boys were tall and well set-up. ​The girls used to thrill a little—sisters to them though they were—over the very real and thoughtful gallantry of these two young men.

Miss Susan had remarked this quality as soon as she met them. And she was beginning now to see its reflection in Peter. And as he had beauty and great personal charm to go with it, it distinguished him even more than the Marshall boys. She half way suspected a conscious assumption of this on his part.

"But if he keeps it up, it will become part of him," she thought to herself, "and then—girls be careful." She would have been a little fearful for Joanna had she not noticed immediately in the young girl that indomitable desire for distinction. "Joanna will never fall in love with anybody," she said once to a common friend of herself and the Marshalls. "She'll never be able to take her mind off long enough from her high falutin dreams."

Of course Peter had no conception why his aunt liked him to visit the Marshalls. He was only too glad that she didn't disapprove. He was seventeen now and beginning to know himself in some ways pretty well. He liked Sandy and Philip and Sylvia Marshall—liked them very well, and Joanna! It could hardly be said that he loved her at this time. But he knew that what he liked best of all in the world was to be near her, to watch her, and to listen to her plans. She had little shadowy gleams in her dark thick hair, glints of light that ended abruptly in wavy blackness. He would like to touch it. He remembered that he had once pulled her hair. He had done it often! But now, though she was only fifteen, he did not dare. Yet he often touched Sylvia's.

The night that Joanna taught them all the barn dance, Peter maneuvered until he got Harry Portor at the piano, and said:

​"How does that part go, Joanna? Here I am in the center. Then I take you in. Then———"

"Put your arms around her," said Sylvia. "That's it. Now,———

Barn! Barn!"

He went home and fairly babbled to his aunt about it. "Joanna is the most wonderful!"