THERE IS CONFUSION
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THERE IS CONFUSION
BY
JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble; pain on pain,—
TENNYSON.
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK
1924
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Copyright, 1924, by
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
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Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, March, 1924
Second Printing, May, 1924
Third Printing, August, 1924
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TO MY SISTER
HELEN FAUSET LANNING
WHOSE PERSISTENT FAITH HAS MADE ME
ASHAMED TO FALTER
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THERE IS CONFUSION
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
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THERE IS CONFUSION
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CHAPTER I
JOANNA’S first consciousness of the close understanding which existed
between herself and her father dated back to a time when she was very
young. Her mother, her brothers and her sister had gone to church, and
Joanna, suffering from some slight childish complaint, had been left
home. She had climbed upon her father’s knee demanding a story.
“What sort of story?” Joel Marshall asked, willing and anxious to please
her, for she was his favorite child.
“Story ’bout somebody great, Daddy. Great like I’m going to be when I
get to be a big girl.”
He stared at her amazed and adoring. She was like a little, living echo
out of his own forgotten past. Joel Marshall, born a slave and the son
of a slave in Richmond, Virginia, had felt as a little boy that same
impulse to greatness.
“As a little tyke,” his mother used to tell her friends, “he was always
pesterin’ me: ‘Mammy, I’ll be a great man some day, won’t I? Mammy,
you’re gonna help me to be great?’
“But that was a long time ago, just a year or so after the war,” said
Mammy, rocking complacently in her comfortable chair. “How wuz I to know
he’d be a great caterer, feedin’ bank presidents and everything? Once
you know they had him fix a banquet fur President Grant. Sent all the
way to Richmond fur ’im. That’s howcome he settled yere in New York;
yassuh, my son is sure a great man.”
But alas for poor Joel! His idea of greatness and his Mammy’s were
totally at variance. The kind of greatness he had envisaged had been
that which gets one before the public eye, which makes one a leader of
causes, a “man among men.” He loved such phrases! At night the little
boy in the tiny half-story room in that tiny house in Virginia picked
out the stories of Napoleon, Lincoln and Garrison, all white men, it is
true; but Lincoln had been poor and Napoleon unknown and yet they had
risen to the highest possible state. At least he could rise to
comparative fame. And when he was older and came to know of Frederick
Douglass and Toussaint L’Ouverture, he knew if he could but burst his
bonds he, too, could write his name in glory.
This was no selfish wish. If he wanted to be great he also wanted to do
honestly and faithfully the things that bring greatness. He was to that
end dependable and thorough in all that he did, but even as a boy he
used to feel a sick despair,—he had so much against him. His color, his
poverty, meant nothing to his ardent heart; those were nature’s
limitations, placed deliberately about one, he could see dimly, to try
one’s strength on. But that he should have a father broken and sickened
by slavery who lingered on and on! That after that father’s death the
little house should burn down!
He was fifteen when that happened and he and his mother both went to
work in the service of Harvey Carter, a wealthy Virginian, whose wife
entertained on a large scale. It was here that Joel learned from an
expert chef how to cook. His wages were small even for those days, but
still he contrived to save, for he had set his heart on attending a
theological seminary. Some day he would be a minister, a man with a
great name and a healing tongue. These were the dreams he dreamed as he
basted Mrs. Carter’s chickens or methodically mixed salad dressing.
His mother knew his ideas and loved them with such a fine, albeit
somewhat uncomprehending passion and belief, that in grateful return he
made her the one other consideration of his life, weaving unconsciously
about himself a web of such loyalty and regard for her that he could not
have broken through it if he would. Her very sympathy defeated his
purpose. So that when she, too, fell ill on a day with what seemed for
years an incurable affection, Joel shut his teeth and put his frustrated
plans behind him.
He drew his small savings from the bank and rented a tiny two and a half
room shack in the front room of which he opened a restaurant,—really a
little lunchstand. He was patronized at first only,—and that
sparingly—by his own people. But gradually the fame of his wonderful
sandwiches, his inimitable pastries, his pancakes, brought him first
more black customers, then white ones, then outside orders. In five
years’ time Joel’s catering became known state wide. He conquered
poverty and came to know the meaning of comfort. The Grant incident
created a reputation for him in New York and he was shrewd enough to
take advantage of it and move there.
Ten years too late old Mrs. Marshall was pronounced cured by the
doctors. She never understood what her defection had cost her son. His
material success, his position in the church, in the community at large
and in the colored business world,—all these things meant “power.” To
her, her son was already great. Joel did not undertake to explain to her
that his lack of education would be a bar forever between him and the
kind of greatness for which his heart had yearned.
It was after he moved to New York and after the death of his mother that
Joel married. His wife had been a school teacher, and her precision of
language and exactitude in small matters made Joel think again of the
education and subsequent greatness which were to have been his. His wife
was kind and sweet, but fundamentally unambitious, and for a time the
pleasure of having a home and in contrasting these days of ease with the
hardships of youth made Joel somewhat resigned to his fate.
“Besides, it’s too late now,” he used to tell himself. “What could I
be?” So he contented himself with putting by his money, and attending
church, where he was a steward and really the unacknowledged head.
His first child brought back the old keen longing. It was a boy and
Joel, bending over the small, warm, brown bundle, felt a gleam of hope.
He would name it Joel and would instil, or more likely, stimulate the
ambition which he felt must be already in that tiny brain. But his wife
wouldn’t hear of the name Joel.
“It’s hard enough for him to be colored,” she said jealously guarding
her young, “and to call him a stiff old-fashioned name like that would
finish his bad luck. I am going to name him Alexander.”
Alec, as he was usually called, did not resemble his father in the
least. He was the average baby and the average boy, interested in
marbles, in playing hookey, in parachutes, but with no determination to
be a dark Napoleon or a Frederick Douglass. Two other children, Philip
and Sylvia, resembled him, and Joel Marshall, now a man of forty, gave
up his old ideas completely and decided to be a good business man,
husband and father; not a bad decision if he had but known it.
Then Joanna came; Joanna with a fluff of thick, black hair, and solemn,
earnest eyes and an infinite capacity for spending long moments in
thought. “She’s like you, Joel,” Mrs. Marshall said. And because the
novelty of choosing names for babies had somewhat worn off, she made no
objection to the name Joanna, which Joel hesitatingly proposed for her.
“She certainly should have been named for you,” the mother told him a
month later; “see how she follows you with her eyes. She’d rather watch
you than eat.”
And indeed from the very beginning Joanna showed her preference for her
father. The two seemed to have a secret understanding. After the first
child, Mrs. Marshall had fretted somewhat over the time and strength
expended in caring for the other little Marshalls, but she never had any
occasion to worry about Joanna. Joel had his office in his residence,
and after Joanna was dressed and fed, all she wanted was to lie in her
carriage and later to ride about on the kiddie-car of that day in her
father’s office, where she watched him with her solemn eyes.
Joel never forgot the first time she asked him for a story. He was in
the habit of regaling his youngsters with tales of his early life, of
himself, of boys who had grown up with him, of ball-games and boyish
pranks. The three older children had a fine catholicity of taste. “Tell
us a story,” was all they asked, its subject made no difference to them.
But on that certain Sunday before Joanna was five years old she perched
herself on her father’s knee and commanded astoundingly:
“Tell me a story, Daddy, ’bout somebody great.”
Joel didn’t know what she meant at first, so far removed was he from the
thought of his old dream. And yet the question did seem something like
an echo, faint but recognizable of a longing that had once loomed large
in his life.
“Great,” he repeated. “How do you mean great, Baby? Tall, great big man,
like Daddy, hey?” He stood six feet and was broad with it.
Joanna shook a dissenting head. “No, not great that way. I want to hear
about a man who did things nobody else could do,—maybe he put out a
fire,” she ended doubtfully, “but I mean something greater than that.”
Joel had her taught to read after that. She was a little frail for
school, and did not start until later than the other children, though
she was far the most studious. So she had three or four years of solid
reading, and always her choice of subject was of some one who had
overcome obstacles and so stood out beyond his fellows.
At first she thought nothing of color, and it was not until she had gone
to school and learned something of discrimination that she began to
ponder.
“Didn’t colored people ever do anything, Daddy?” But Joel was prepared
for that. He told her himself of Douglass and Vesey and Turner. There
were great women, too, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner
Truth, women who had been slaves, he explained to her, but had won their
way to fame and freedom through their own efforts.
Joanna had a fine sense of relativity. Young as she was, she could
understand that the bravery and courage exercised by these slave women
was a much finer and different thing from that exercised for instance by
Florence Nightingale. “They were like Joan of Arc,” she thought to
herself, “Joan, wonderful Joan with the name almost like mine.” Only an
innate, almost too meticulous sense of honesty had kept her from
changing her own name to the shorter form.
She used to lie in her bed at night, straight and still with her eyes
fixed on the stretch of sky visible even from a house in Fifty-ninth
Street and dream dreams. “I’ll be great, too,” she told herself. “I’m
not sure how. I can’t be like those wonderful women, Harriet and
Sojourner, but at least I won’t be ordinary.”
She spoke to her father like a little piping echo from the past, “Daddy,
you’ll help me to be a great woman, somebody you’ll be proud of?”
Her words made him so happy; they renewed his life. She was so
completely like himself, and he could help her. “Thank God,” he used to
murmur over his books that daily showed an increase in his earnings.
He took Joanna everywhere with him. One Easter Sunday a great colored
singer, a beautiful woman, sang an Easter anthem in his church, lifting
up a golden voice among the tall white lilies. Afterwards she went home
with Mr. and Mrs. Marshall and stayed to dinner. Joanna never moved her
eyes from her during the ride home.
After dinner she stood in front of the singer in the comfortable
living-room. “I can sing like you,” she said gravely, “and I can
remember the tune of most of that hymn you sang this morning. Listen.”
And with no further introduction she sang most of the anthem. She was
only ten then, yet her voice was already free of the shrillness of
childhood and beginning to assume that liquid golden quality which so
distinguished it later.
Madame Caldwell gasped. She had won her own laurels through bitter
experience in various studios, meeting insult, indifference and
unkindness with an unyielding front, which brought her finally
consideration, a grudging interest, sometimes a genuine appreciation.
She was well on her way to recognition now. Colored people acclaimed her
all over the country and she had some local reputation in her home town
where black and white alike were very proud of her.
“But no daughter of mine,” she used to say bitterly, “if she has the
voice of an angel shall go through what I have suffered.”
Yet when she heard Joanna sing that Easter Sunday, she seized Joel
Marshall’s arm. “Get her a teacher, Mr. Marshall. She has a voice in ten
thousand. Poor child, how you will have to work!”
But Joanna wasn’t listening, her eyes sought her father’s. Both of them
knew at once that the road to glory was stretching out before her.
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