IT was Joanna’s love for beauty that made her consciously see Peter Bye.
It is true that almost as soon as she saw him she lost sight of him
again, for the boy did not come up to her requirements which, even at
the early age at which these two met, were quite crystallized. Joanna
liked first of all fixity of purpose. The phrase “When I grow up, I’m
going to be” was constantly on her lips. She got into the habit of
measuring people, “sizing them up” Joel would have said, in accordance
with the amount of steadfastness, perseverance and ambition which they
displayed. She had little time for shiftless or “do-less” persons.
Sylvia used to say, half angrily, “Joanna, when the bad man gets you, he
isn’t going to torture you. He’s just going to shut you up with lazy,
good-for-nothing folks. That will be torture enough for you.”
Peter Bye, in spite of the dark arresting beauty which first drew
Joanna’s glance to him across the other white and pink faces in the
crowded schoolroom, was undoubtedly shiftless. “Not lazy,” Joanna said
to herself, looking at him from under level brows before she dismissed
him forever from her busy mind. “It’s just that he doesn’t care; he just
doesn’t want to be anybody.”
She was too young to understand the power of that great force, heredity.
She had no notion of the part which it played in her own life. Peter was
the legitimate result of a heredity that had become a tradition, of a
tradition that had become warped, that had gone astray and had carried
Peter and Peter Bye’s father along in its general wreckage.
It is impossible to understand the boy’s character without some
knowledge of the lives of those who had gone before him.
As far back as the last decades of the eighteenth century there had been
white Byes and black Byes in Philadelphia. The black Byes were known to
be the chattels of Aaron and Dinah Bye, Quakers, who without reluctance
had set free their slaves, among them black Joshua Bye, the
great-grandfather of Peter. This was done in 1780 according to the laws
of Pennsylvania, which thus allowed the Quakers to salve their
consciences without offending their thrifty instincts.
Aaron Bye, most people said, was unusually good to his slaves. He had
something of the patriarchal instinct and liked to think of himself as
ruler over the destiny of many people, his wife’s, his children’s and
more completely that of his slaves. Certainly he was very kind to
Joshua’s mother, Judy. She was a tall, straight, steely, black woman
with fine inscrutable eyes, a thin-lipped mouth and a large but shapely
nose. She bore about her a quality of brooding, of mystery, embodying
the attraction which she exercised for many men, white and black. But
apparently she knew little of this. Her only weakness, if such it might
be called, was an inexplicable attachment to the white Bye family. She
married, a few years before receiving her freedom, a man named Ceazer, a
proud, surly, handsome individual, who refused to adopt the surname of
his master; he had belonged to white people named Morton. Since even
after freedom Judy would not hear to leaving the Bye family, Aaron Bye
greatly pleased by this loyalty offered the position of coachman to
Ceazer, which the latter, with his customary surliness, accepted. Later
he not only threw up his job, but ran away, vanishing finally into
legend.
His was a strange truculent character; he hated slavery, hated all white
people, hated particularly the Mortons, hated ineffably Aaron Bye. He
wanted nothing at his hands. Once he knocked down another Negro who
referred to him as “Mist’ Bye’s man.” He was no man’s man, he assured
the stricken narrator, least of all the man of that damn Quaker. His
enmity went to ridiculous lengths. Aaron Bye taught Joshua how to write
and gave him a little black testament for a prize. In it he wrote “The
gift of Aaron Bye.” Joshua, delighted, wrote his own name under the
inscription and ran and showed it to his mother. She, it turned out, had
not been watching his making of pothooks without purpose. Underneath her
boy’s name she fashioned in halting crazy characters her single attempt
at writing, her own name, Judy Bye. Nothing would serve Joshua then but
that he must have Ceazer’s name in the book, too. Remembering that his
father could not write, Joshua wrote out himself with a fine flourish
“Ceazer Bye” and showed the name to its owner, entreating him to make
his mark beside it. Ceazer took up the pen in his strong, wiry fingers.
“Which one ob dese did you say were mine?”
Joshua pointed it out, waiting for the cross. Ceazer made a mark, it was
true, but it was a thick broad line drawn through his name with a fury
which almost tore the thin page. _He_ was no Bye!
It was not long after this that he disappeared, a strange, brooding,
intractable figure.
Joshua, although born in slavery, had never known the institution in its
more hideous aspects. He had been a very little boy when his freedom
came to him. And Ceazer, old Judy told him, had fought in the
Revolution! So that Joshua knew more of warfare to set people free than
of slavery for which war was later to be waged. From him his son Isaiah
heard almost nothing of the old régime, though there were many vestiges
of it on all sides. All he knew was that Joshua had kept on working for
Dinah and Aaron Bye after his emancipation, and that they had given him
on the occasion of his marriage to Belle Potter a huge Family Bible,
bound in leather and with an Apocrypha. On the title-page was written in
a fine old script: _To Joshua and Belle Bye from Aaron and Dinah Bye.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”_
For a long time to Isaiah, who used to pore absorbedly as a boy over
this book with its pictures and long old-fashioned S, this inscription
savored of vineyards and orchards. The white Byes, as a matter of fact,
were the possessors of very fine peach-orchards in the neighborhood of
what is now known as Bryn Mawr, and Isaiah, even as a little fellow, had
been taken out there to pick peaches.
His father Joshua had spent his life in making those orchards what they
were; a born agriculturist, he had an uncanny knowledge of planting, of
grafting, of fertilizing. Many a farmer tried to inveigle him from Aaron
Bye. But although Joshua’s wages were small, he had inherited his
mother’s blind, invincible attachment for the Byes. His place was with
Aaron.
It was young white Meriwether Bye, youngest son of Aaron’s and Dinah’s
ten children, who told Isaiah what the inscription meant. Joshua had not
married until he was nearly fifty and his single son, black Isaiah, and
white Meriwether were boys together. Meriwether used to come to the Bye
house at Fourth and Coates Streets, which is now Fairmount Avenue, as
often as Isaiah used to appear at the Bye house at Fourth and Spruce.
Isaiah showed the inscription to Meriwether, “By their fruits ye shall
know them.”
“Yes,” said young Merry tracing the letters with a fat finger, “that’s
our family motto.” Isaiah wanted to know what a motto was.
“Something,” Meriwether told him vaguely, “that your whole family goes
by.” The black boy thought that likely.
“Everybody knows Bye peaches, ain’t that so? ’Cause of that everybody
knows the Byes.”
Meriwether, though impressed by this logic, didn’t think that that was
what was meant. A subsequent conversation with his father confirmed his
opinion.
“It means this, Ziah,” he said one hot July afternoon walking home with
the colored boy from the brickyard where Isaiah worked, “it means it
shows the kind of stuff you are. It means—now—you see a bare tree in the
winter time don’t you, and you don’t know what it is? But you do perhaps
know an apple blossom when you see it, or a peach blossom. In the spring
you see that tree covered, let’s say, with apple blossoms. Well, you
know it’s an apple tree.”
“But what’s that got to do with us?” Isaiah wanted to know. He was
interested, he could not tell why, but his slow-working mind clung to
its first idea. “Your father wrote it in the book he gave my father. My
father hasn’t any fruit trees.”
Isaiah never forgot the answer Meriwether made him in the unconscious
cruelty of youth. “When it comes to people,” said the young Quaker, “it
means pretty much the same thing. Now when I grow up, I’m going to be a
great doctor,” his chest swelled, “but nobody will be surprised. They’ll
all say, ‘Of course, he’s the son of Aaron Bye, the rich peach-merchant.
Good stock there,’” he involuntarily mimicked his pompous father; “and
I’ll be good fruit. That’s the way it always is: good trees, good fruit;
rich, important people, rich important sons.”
“What’ll I be?” asked Isaiah Bye, grotesquely tragic in his tattered
clothes, the sweat rolling off his shiny face, so intent was his
interest.
“Well,” Meriwether countered judicially, “what could you be?” He
pondered a moment, his own position so secure that he was willing to do
his best by this serious case. “Your father and your father’s father
were slaves. ’Course your father’s free now but he’s just a servant.
He’s not what you’d call his own man. So I s’pose that’s what you’ll be,
a good servant. Tell you what, Isaiah, you can be my coachman. I’ll be
good to you. And when you’re grown up,” said Meriwether with more
imagination than he usually displayed, “I’ll point you out to some
famous doctor from France and say, ‘His father was a good servant to my
father, and he’s been a good servant to my father’s son.’ How’ll you
like that?” Meriwether tapped him fondly if somewhat condescendingly on
the arm.
“You’ll never,” said Isaiah Bye, drawing back from the familiar touch,
“you’ll never be able to say that about me.” And he turned and ran down
the hot street, leaving Meriwether Bye gaping on the sidewalk.
After that his father could never persuade him to enter again the Bye
house, or the Bye orchards. Fortunately his mother upheld him here.
“’Tain’t as though he had to work for them old Byes,” she said
straightening up her already straight shoulders. “He makes just as much
and more in the brick-yard and in helpin’ Amos White haul.”
“I know that,” Joshua would reply impatiently, “but old Mist’ Aaron
says—now—he likes to have his own people workin’ roun’ him. And I don’t
like to disappoint him.”
Belle Bye told Isaiah. “I’m not one of his own people, Ma,” he answered
stubbornly, “and after that I’m not ever goin’ back.” Belle was rejoiced
to hear this. She would have been an insurgent in any walk of life.
Joshua was the genuine peasant type—the type, black or white, which
believes in a superior class and yields blindly to its mandates. But
Belle had seen too many changes even in her thirty-five years—she was
far younger than Joshua—not to know that many things are possible if one
just has courage.
Isaiah, on being questioned, told his mother with considerable
reluctance about his conversation with Meriwether. Belle, while
regretting the breach, understood. She had been glad to have her boy the
associate of young white Bye. Without expressing it to herself in so
many words she had realized that association with Meriwether was an
education for Isaiah. Already he was talking more correctly than other
colored boys in his group, his manners were good, and though his work
was of the roughest kind, his vision was broad, he knew there were other
things.
“I don’t believe,” his mother told him wisely, “that you kin go as fur
as you dream. Too many things agin you fur that, boy. But you kin die
much further along the road than when you was born. Never forget that.”
So Isaiah was saved from the initial mistake of aiming too high and of
coming utterly to smash. Yet he accomplished wonders. Who shall say how
he increased his slender store of knowledge? How he learned to read wise
books borrowed and bought as best he might? How he learned geography and
history that made his heart-beats go wild since it told him of the
French Revolution and how a whole nation once practically enslaved arose
to a fuller, richer life?
The inspiration for all this lay in those careless words of young
Meriwether. Although Isaiah met the young fellow many times after that
incident, and apparently with friendliness, he never in his heart
forgave him. Like Ceazer he developed a dislike for white people and
their ways which developed, however, into a sturdy independence and an
unyielding pride. No amount of contumely ever made him ashamed of his
slave ancestry. On the contrary, to measure himself against old Ceazer
and Judy gave him ground for honest pride. “See what they were and how
far I’ve gone,” he used to say, pleasantly boastful.
He resented as few sons of freedmen did the assurance with which the
white Byes took their wealth and position and power. “Hoisted themselves
on the backs of the black Byes.” He resented especially the ingratitude
of Aaron Bye to Joshua. For himself he asked nothing; being content to
fight his own way “through an onfriendly world.”
The white Byes had gone far, but the black Byes having now that greatest
of all gifts, freedom, would go far, too. They would be leaders of other
black men.
The upshot of all this was that Isaiah Bye opened a school for colored
youth down on Vine Street. No name and no figure in colored life in
Philadelphia was ever better beloved and more revered than his.
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