THE District Line Theater was jammed every night now. People came from
all over New York and all its suburbs to see the new dancer—Joanna
Marshall. Her success and fame were instant. The newspapers featured
her, the “colyumists” wrote her up, her face appeared with other members
of the cast, but never alone, on the billboards outside the little
ramshackle theater. Special writers came to see her, took snapshots of
herself and of Sylvia which they never published, and speculated on the
amount of white blood which she had in her veins.
Mr. Hale had taken her on in May. The piece ran all summer with Joanna
as the great attraction, although not the acknowledged star. Miss Ashby,
the girl who danced as an Indian and as an American, was that. From the
first she had resented the colored girl’s success and had held jealously
to all her rights and privileges. But the public, surprisingly loyal to
this new and original plaything, never varied in the expression of its
enjoyment of Joanna. Now that her changed contract was again about to
expire, Miss Ashby announced her inability to remain with the play.
“I’ve really been violating my principles in staying this long,” she
told Mr. Hale with meaning.
Even Miss Sharples was overcome at this news. Joanna could be cast
without any difficulty as an Indian, a wig and grease paint would
accomplish that. But Joanna could hardly pose as a white American. She
was too dark.
Sylvia had a suggestion here. “America” was supposed to come on last as
a regal, symbolic figure, but Miss Ashby had paid more attention to the
dancing than to the symbolism.
“Why not,” asked Sylvia, “have a mask made for Joanna? She could then be
made as typically American as anyone could wish and no one need know the
difference.”
That was the basis on which Mr. Hale worked. On the first night on which
the new “America” was introduced, an inveterate theater-goer in the
first row of the orchestra insisted on encoring her. Joanna returned,
bowed and bowed, was encored.
Somehow the habitué guessed the truth. “Pull off your mask, America,” he
shouted. The house took it up. “Let’s see your face, America!”
Mr. Hale, Miss Sharples, Francis, Miss Rosen and Miss Phelps held a
hurried consultation behind the scenes. “There’s nothing to be done,”
Hale said, “quick, off with your mask, Miss Marshall.” And breathless,
somewhat with the air of a man bracing himself, he led Joanna again on
the stage.
There was a moment’s silence, a moment’s tenseness. Then Joanna smiled
and spoke. “I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the
audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the
Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War and my brother is ‘over
there’ now.”
Perhaps it would not have succeeded anywhere else but in New York, and
perhaps not even there but in Greenwich Village, but the tightly packed
audience took up the applause again and Joanna was a star.
The very next week Mr. Hale moved the production to Broadway.
Joanna found herself becoming a sensation. Through Miss Sharples, who
was besieged with requests to meet her protégée, she came in contact
with groups of writers, dramatists, “thinkers,” that vast, friendly,
changing kaleidoscope of New York dwellers who take their mental life
seriously. Occasionally, too, she was invited to grace an “occasion,” an
afternoon at the house of a rich society woman. Once at one of these
affairs she met Vera Manning, who grinned at her impishly and announced
to the room that she and Miss Marshall were old friends. They had been
schoolmates.
“When I was a child,” said Vera impudently, “my mother sent me to public
school for almost a year. She said she wanted me to be a real democrat.”
She threw Joanna a droll look. When the afternoon was over, Vera asked
her to go on to tea with her.
Joanna was perfect: “That’s very kind of you, Miss Manning, and I don’t
know but what I will. There are several things I’d like to interest you
in. When I think of the illimitable power for good which you white
people possess——”
Once outside the door the two girls went off into gusts of
inextinguishable laughter.
Joanna did not like these affairs and soon she adopted the habit of
refusing such invitations. She preferred Miss Sharples’ artist
friends—because among them she sensed attempts, more or less tentative
perhaps, toward reality. True, paradoxically enough it was a reality
based on art, rather than on living. But the girl was beginning to feel
the need of something with which to fill her life. Whether her
disastrous love affair, or the frequent discouragements with which she
met, had changed or reshaped her vision she did not know. But life, she
began to realize, was not a matter of sufficient raiment, food, or even
success. There must be something more filling, more insistent, more
permeating—the sort of thing that left no room for boredom or
introspection.
For in spite of her vogue, her unbelievably decided successes, Joanna
frequently tasted the depths of ennui. She saw life as a ghastly
skeleton and herself feverishly trying to cover up its bare bones with
the garish trappings of her art, her lessons, her practice, her
press-clippings.
Miss Sharples put her up for membership in a club whose members were
mostly people that “did” something. And Joanna fell in the habit of
taking her lunch and frequently her dinner, too, at this club, just to
lose herself in the atmosphere which she found there.
Undoubtedly the contact did her good. Joanna, while lacking Peter’s
singularly active dislike for white people, was not on the other hand a
“good mixer.” Following the natural reaction at this time of her racial
group, she had tended to seek all her ideals among colored people and
where these were lacking to create them for herself. As a result of this
attitude, injurious in the long run to both whites and blacks, she was
hardening into a singularly narrow, even though self-reliant egocentric.
She had never met in her family with much opposition to her chosen
career, but then neither with the exception of Joel’s and that of her
teachers had she met with much coöperation.
Now to her astonishment she found herself in a setting where people,
without being considered “different,” “high-brow,” “affected,”—and not
greatly caring if they were—talked, breathed, lived for and submerged
themselves and others, too, in their calling. She met girls not as old
as she, who had already “arrived” in their chosen profession;
incredibly young editors, artists—exponents of new and inexplicable
schools of drawing,—women with causes,—birth-control, single tax,
psychiatry,—teachers of dancing, radical high school teachers.
There were men to be met, too, really eminent men, but Joanna was not
much interested. Following the American idea, she had been too carefully
trained to care for the company of white men. Between them and herself
the barrier was too impassable. Besides, it was women who had the real
difficulties to overcome, disabilities of sex and of tradition.
For a while she was puzzled, a little ashamed when she realized that so
many of these women had outstripped her so early; some of them were
poor, some had responsibilities. There were not many of these last. It
was a long time before the solution occurred to her and when it did the
result was her first real rebellion against the stupidity of prejudice.
These women had not been compelled to endure her long, heartrending
struggle against color. Those who had had means had been able to plunge
immediately into the sea of preparation; they had had their choice of
teachers; as soon as they were equipped they had been able to approach
the guardians of literary and artistic portals. Joanna thought of her
many futile efforts with Bertully and sighed at the pity of it all.
Sometimes she felt like a battle-scarred veteran among all these
successful, happy, chattering people, who, no matter how seriously, how
deeply they took their success, yet never regarded it with the same
degree of wonder, almost of awe with which she regarded hers.
She realized for the first time how completely colored Americans were
mere on-lookers at the possibilities of life. She spent a few happy
months with these people; they made pleasant and stimulating company for
her; she herself suspected that she had made good “copy” for some of
them. They were for the most part unconscious of race, not at all
inclined to patronize, and generous with praise and suggestion. One
woman, it is true, told Joanna that she had always liked colored people.
“My father would insist on having colored servants. He preferred them.”
Joanna had made an impish reply. “My father employs both white and
colored servants. But he prefers the colored ones. However, it doesn’t
make any difference to me.”
Still that had been a rare encounter. Life on the whole smiled on her.
Yet she was not happy. But is anybody so? she wondered. She had
forgotten to sorrow for her break with Peter, her life was too full for
that, even for a new love. Vera Manning’s brother Tom, brought into her
entourage by the flood of publicity and popularity that engulfed her,
asked her to marry him. She liked him; found him charming and
sympathetic, but he was too white and she did not want a marriage which
would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes.
What she did want, she decided, was to be needed, to be useful, to be
devoting her time, her concentration and her remarkable singlemindedness
to some worthy visible end. After all, she had worked hard and striven
tremendously—to be what? A dancer.
“Is this really what you wanted me to be?” she asked her father
abruptly. They were driving home from the theater, their nightly custom.
“Is this your idea of real greatness?”
And Joel, his voice half glad, half sorry, told her that he, too, had
hoped for something different.
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