TEN months later Tom Mason leaned back against the red plush of the car
seat and jingled some coins in his pocket.
“Tell you what, Bye, we really are cleaning up. I hadn’t expected
anything like this run of engagements. Now suppose you beat it along to
Mrs. Lea’s and find out what special arrangements she wants made for the
musicians to-night and I’ll go on to Mrs. Lawlor and see about
to-morrow.”
Peter stared moodily at the flying landscape. “I wish you’d come
yourself, Mason. I hate to talk to these white people. Their damned
patronizing airs make me sick.”
“What do you care about their patronizin’? All I’m interested in is
gettin’ what I can out of them. When I’ve made my pile, if I can’t spend
it here the way I please, Annie and me can pick up and go to South
America or France. I hear they treat colored people all right there.”
“‘Treat colored people all right,’” Peter mimicked. “What business has
any one ‘treating’ us, anyway? The world’s ours as much as it is theirs.
And I don’t want to leave America. It’s mine, my people helped make it.
These very orchards we’re passing now used to be the famous Bye
orchards. My grandfather and great-grandfather helped to cultivate
them.”
“Is that so? Honest?” Tom showed a sudden respectful interest. “How’d
they come to lose them?”
“Lose them? They never owned them. The black Byes were slaves of the
white Byes.”
“Oh, slaves! Oh, you mean they worked in the fields? Well, I guess
that’s different. Come on, here we are.”
Peter flung himself out of the car after Tom and followed him up a
tree-lined street. The suburban town stretched calm, peaceful and
superior about them. Clearly this was the home of the rich and
well-born. It is true that a few ordinary mortals lived here, but mainly
to do the bidding of the wealthy. A group of young white girls, passing
the two men, glanced at them a little curiously.
“Entertainers for the Lea affair,” one of them said, making no effort to
keep from being overheard.
Peter stopped short. “That’s what I hate,” he said fiercely. “Labeled
because we’re black.”
“Ain’t you got a grouch, though!” Tom spoke almost admiringly. He told
his sister afterwards: “Bye’s got this here—now—temper’ment. Never can
tell how it’s goin’ to take him. Seems different since he started
keeping company with Maggie, don’t you think so?”
Annie admitted she did.
At present Tom patted Peter on the shoulder, and starting him up the
driveway which led to Mrs. Lea’s large low white house, went on himself
to Mrs. Lawlor.
Mrs. Lea received Peter in a small morning-room. She was pretty, a
genuine blonde, with small delicate features and beautiful fluffy hair.
But as Peter did not like fair types, his mind simply registered
“washed-out,” and took no further stock of her looks. What he did notice
was that she was dressed in a lacey, too transparent floating robe, too
low in the neck, and too short in the skirt.
“Something she would wear only before some one for whom she cared very
much, or some one whom she didn’t think worth considering,” he told
himself, lowering.
Mrs. Lea, leading him into the ballroom beyond, barely glanced at him.
“See, the musicians are to sit behind those palms and the piano will be
completely banked with flowers. I’m expecting the decorators every
moment. Your men will have to get here very early so as to get behind
all this without being seen. I want the effect of music instead of
perfume pouring out of the flowers. Do you get the idea—er—what did you
say your name was?”
“Yes, I understand,” said Peter shortly. “My name is Bye.”
“I meant your first name—Bye—why, that’s the name of a family in Bryn
Mawr, who used to own half of the land about here. There’re a Dr.
Meriwether Bye and his grandfather, Dr. Meriwether Bye, living in the
old Bye house now. Where do you come from?”
“I was born in Philadelphia like my father and grandfather and his
father before him.”
She stated the obvious conclusion: “Probably your parents belonged to
the Bryn Mawr Byes.”
“So my father told me,” replied Peter, affecting a composure equal to
her own. “His name was Meriwether Bye.”
She did not like that. She decided she did not like him either—eyeing
his straight, fine figure and meeting his unyielding look. These niggers
with their uppish ways! Besides this one looked, looked—indefinably he
reminded her of young Meriwether Bye. She spoke to him:
“I don’t want you to leave to-night before I get a chance to point you
out to young Dr. Bye. He’ll be so interested.” She looked at Peter
again. Yes, he was intelligent enough to get the full force of what she
wanted to say. “It’s so in keeping with things that the grandson of the
man who was slave to his grandfather should be his entertainer
to-night.”
Peter felt his skin tightening. “I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I’m
a medical student, not an entertainer. I came here for Mr. Mason, who is
very busy. You may be sure I’ll give him your instructions. Good-day,
Mrs. Lea.”
He rushed out of the house, down to the station where, without waiting
for Tom, he boarded the train. Not far from the West Philadelphia depot
he pushed the bell of a certain house, flung open the unlocked door and
rushed up a flight of stairs.
In a small room to his left he found the person he was seeking, a short,
almost black young fellow who lifted a dejected and then an amazed
countenance toward him.
“Am I seeing things? Where’d you blow in from, Pete? Thought you’d
chucked us all, the old school and all the rest of it.”
“I haven’t, I’ve been a fool, a damned fool, but I’m back to my senses.
I’m going back to my classes and I tell you, Ed Morgan, I’ll clean up.
See here, you’ve got to do me a favor.”
“Name it.”
“You know Mason, Tom Mason on Fifteenth Street? I’ve been playing for
him. But I can’t stick it any longer. Tom’s all right, but I can’t stand
his customers. Besides, I’ve got to get back to work. I’m quitting this
minute—see. But Tom’s got a big dance on, near Bryn Mawr to-night at a
Mrs.—Mrs. Lea,” he gulped. “Good pay and all that. You can play as well
as I can, Ed. Easy stuff, you can read it. You got to do it.”
“Do it! Man, lead me to that job. I’m broke, see, stony broke, busted.”
He turned his pockets inside out. “I was just wondering what I could
pawn. And I need instruments—Oh, Lord!”
Peter gave him some money. “Take this, you can pay me any time. Only
rush down to Tom’s and tell him I can’t come. I’m dead—see?—drowned,
fallen in the Schuylkill. And see here, old fellow, afterwards we’ll
have a talk. I want everything, everything, mind you, that you can
remember, every note, every bit of paper that bears on the work of these
last ten months. And I’ll show them—” he seemed to forget Morgan—“with
their damned talk of entertainers.” Down the stairs he ran, still
talking.
“Mad, quite mad,” said little Morgan, staring. “Glad he’s coming back to
work, though. Now, where’d I put that cap?”
Still at white heat, Peter walked the few short blocks to his boarding
house. Once inside his room he shut himself in and paced the floor.
“The grandson—that’s me—of the man who was his grandfather’s slave
should be his—that’s Meriwether Bye, young Dr. Meriwether Bye—should be
his entertainer, his hired entertainer.
“My grandfather didn’t have a chance, but here I am half a century after
and I’m still a slave, an entertainer. My grandfather. Let’s see, which
one of the Byes was that?”
He went to the closet, pushed some books and papers aside and hauled
down the old Bye Bible. The leaves, streaked and brown, stuck together.
With clumsy, unaccustomed fingers he turned them, until at last between
the Old Testament and the Apocrypha he found what he was looking for:
“Record of Births and Deaths.”
The old, stiff, faded writing with the long German _s_, the work of
hands long since still, smote him with a sense of worthlessness. These
people, according to their lights, must have considered themselves
“people of importance,” else why this careful record of dates?
His lean brown finger traced the lines. “Joshua Bye, born about
1780”—heavens, that must have been his great-great-grandfather. No,
maybe he was just a “great,” for the black Byes, he remembered hearing
his father Meriwether say, lived long and married late.
“Isaiah Bye, born 1830—a child of freedom.” How proud they had been of
that! Yes, that was his grandfather, he remembered now. And he had made
a great deal of that freedom. Meriwether had often dwelt with pride on
Isaiah’s learning, his school, his property, his “half-interest,”
Meriwether had said grandiloquently, in a bookshop. Peter could hear his
father talking now.
“A child of freedom”—Peter was that but what had he made of it? He
wondered what Isaiah in turn had written on the occasion of Meriwether’s
birth. His finger ran down the page, and found it, stopped.
There it was—“Meriwether,” the inscription read, “by _his_ fruits shall
ye know—_me_.”
At first Peter thought it was a mistake. Then gradually it dawned on
him—his fine old grandfather, proud of his achievements, seeing his son
as a monument to himself, seeing each Bye son doubtless as a monument to
each Bye father. Poor Isaiah, perhaps happy Isaiah, for having died
before he realized how worthless, how anything but monumental _his_ son
had really been, except as a failure. And now he, Peter, was following
in that son’s footsteps.
He remembered an old daguerreotype of his grandfather that he had seen
at his great-uncle Peter’s. The face, perfectly black, looked out from
its faded red-plush frame with that immobile look of dignity which only
black people can attain. “I have made the most of myself,” the proud old
face seemed to say. “My father was a slave, but I am a teacher, a leader
of men. My son shall be a great healer and my son’s son——”
Peter put the open Bible carefully on the table and took out a
cigarette. But he held it a long time unlighted.
So far as he could remember he had never had any desire to rise, “to be
somebody,” as Isaiah, he rightly guessed, would have phrased it. He saw
himself after his mother’s death, a small placid boy, perfectly willing
to stay out of school. Until he met Joanna. There was his term of
service in the butcher-shop and himself again perfectly willing to be
the butcher’s assistant. Until Joanna’s questioning had made him declare
for surgery. Once in college his whole impulse had been to get away from
it all, not because he hadn’t liked the work; he adored it, was
fascinated by it. But the obstacles, prejudice, his very real dislike
for white people, his poverty, all or any of these had seemed to him
sufficient cause for dropping his studies and becoming a musician. Not
an artist, but an entertainer, a player in what might be termed “a
strolling orchestra,” picking up jobs, receiving tips, going down in the
servants’ dining room for meals. And when Joanna had objected, he
thought she was “funny,” “bossy.”
And as soon as he had broken with her, he had given up striving
altogether. He had been nothing without Joanna. He wondered humbly if
she had seen something in him which he had not recognized in himself.
How different they had been! After all, Joanna, though she had not had
to contend with poverty, had had as hard a fight as he. “She’d have been
on the stage long ago if she’d been white,” he murmured. “And see how
she takes it!”
Well, he would show her and Isaiah, yes, and Mrs. Lea, too, that there
was something to him. But chiefly Joanna. Some day he’d go to her and
say, “Joanna, what I am, you made me.”
His landlady called up to him:
“Telephone for you, Mr. Bye.”
He went downstairs, took down the receiver.
“Hello, this is Mr. Bye, yes, this is Peter. Who’s this speaking,
please?...
“Oh—oh, yes, of course. Why—why, Maggie!”
He had forgotten all about her!
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