There Is Confusion

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.”

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 someone 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.

“No, I didn’t know that. Perhaps you’ll sing in your choir?”

Then Joanna astonished him. “In my choir⁠—I sing there already! No! Everywhere, anywhere, Carnegie Hall and in Boston and London. You see, I’m to be famous.”

“But,” Peter objected, “colored people don’t get any chance at that kind of thing.”

“Colored people,” Joanna quoted from her extensive reading, “can do everything that anybody else can do. They’ve already done it. Some one colored person somewhere in the world does as good a job as anyone else⁠—perhaps a better one. They’ve been kings and queens and poets and teachers and doctors and everything. I’m going to be the one colored person who sings best in these days, and I never, never, never mean to let color interfere with anything I really want to do.”

“I dance, too,” she interrupted herself, “and I’ll probably do that besides. Not ordinary dancing, you know, but queer beautiful things that are different from what we see around here; perhaps I’ll make them up myself. You’ll see! They’ll have on the billboard, ‘Joanna Marshall, the famous artist,’⁠—” She was almost dancing along the sidewalk now, her eyes and cheeks glowing.

Peter looked at her wistfully. His practical experience and the memory of his father inclined him to dubiousness. But her superb assurance carried away all his doubts.

“I don’t suppose you’ll ever think of just ordinary people like me?”

“But you’ll be famous, too⁠—you’ll be a wonderful doctor. Do be. I can’t stand stupid, common people.”

“You’ll always be able to stand me,” said Peter with a fervor which made his statement a vow.

If Peter was unconscious of the utter desirability of association with the young Marshalls, Maggie Ellersley was not. Ever since her childhood when she had overheard a conversation between a cousin and her mother, she had made up her mind to attach herself to some such family and see what came of it.

The cousin and her mother worked together for some wealthy white people. Maggie’s mother was a laundress, a spare hardworking woman to whom life had meant nothing but poverty and confusion. On Thursdays and Fridays of each week she washed and ironed and gossiped with “my cousin Mis’ Sparrow” who was cook at the house on Madison Avenue. Maggie used to come there for dinner and go home with her mother.

“Mis’ Sparrow,” small and spidery, had a perpetual complaint against the world. In particular she experienced envy toward those who were better off than herself. Her jaundiced disposition may be excused, however, when one reflects that hers was a lot which had been hard ever since she could remember. She was poor, she was weak, she was ignorant. Add to that the fact that she was black in a country where color is a crime and you have her “complex.” Some people would say she had really done well in one sense with her life. She had attained by her own unaided efforts to a comfortable, even if menial, position, where she had heat, light and enough to eat. They would ask: Considering her beginnings what more could she want?

“Courage,” said Bertully, helping her into the taxi, “there are some others.”

The next manager, David Kohler, was explicit and to the point. “Couldn’t make any money out of you. America doesn’t want to see a colored dancer in the role of a première danseuse. How’s that accent, Bertully? She wants you to be absurd, grotesque. Of course,” tentatively, “you couldn’t consider being corked up⁠—you’re brown but you’re too light as you are⁠—and doing a breakdown?”

“No,” said Joanna shortly, “I couldn’t. Shall we go, Monsieur?”

By the time they reached the third manager, Joanna for all her natural assurance had become a little timid. Bertully’s name had gained them almost instant admission to the manager, but it was hard in the short wait to listen to the scarcely veiled comments of the office girls and the other applicants.

“Say, what do you suppose she is?”

“Must be a South American.”

“She ain’t, she’s a nigger or I don’t know one.”

“Say, she’s got her nerve comin’ here. Think Snyder’ll give her anything?”

“Will he? Not a chance!”

Her cheeks were so flushed when she went in that she really was beautiful. But Snyder gave her one look, checked himself in the act of raising his hat, swung around to the Frenchman.

“This your great find, Bertully?”

“Mais oui,” the old man began excitedly.

The other calmly lit a big black cigar.

“You needn’t wait, Miss. Like to oblige you, Bertully, but I couldn’t do a thing for you.” He walked across the office, held the door open for them, bent over Bertully’s ear. “You’ll ruin your trade teachin’ niggers, Bertully. Better take my tip.”