There Is Confusion quotes

“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.

It is true she never learned to iron especially well, but this was about the only thing in which she yielded place to Sylvia.

Sylvia was like a firefly in comparison with Joanna’s steady beaconlike flood of light.

Sylvia dashed about, worked as quickly as she thought and produced immediate and usually rather striking results.

No hair straighteners, nor even curling kids for her.

“Joanna’s ways are so straight, they almost sway back,” Sylvia used to say aptly.

And indeed Joanna wanted one to see her at her very worst. She did not like to take people by surprise.

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.

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?

Isaiah’s mother, Belle Bye, used to say,

“Things you do expect and things you don’t expect are sure to come to pass.”

It took Isaiah many years to see the reasonableness of this apparently unreasoned statement.

“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.

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:

And she was nearly always excited. Something within her frail bosom pulsed in a constant revolt against the spirit of things that kept her in these conditions.

“I will not always live like this, Ma⁠—I’ll get out of it some way.”

And her mother, though always scoffing, believed her with a dreary hopefulness. “If there’s a way to be found out, Maggie’ll find it.”

Miraculously the scheme worked. It gave Maggie her first insight into the workings of life.

If you wanted things, you thought and thought about them, and when an opportunity offered, there you were with your mind made up to jump at it.

Of course they were poor, but at least they were decent. John Howe, staying for that year in New York, realizing more and more how truly he was indebted to Maggie and her mother, took a proprietary interest.

She burst into sharp, strangling sobs, burying her head against his shoulder.

So she left New York, weeping, to return to it one day dry-eyed but with a bitterness that was worse than tears.

But Joanna didn’t believe that.

“Love is a wonderful, rare thing, very beautiful, very sweet, but you can do without it.”

“Not much you can’t. Better not try it, Joanna. You have to found your life on love, then you can do all these other things.”

One night she astonished him. “Peter,” she said suddenly, “sit up. So. I’m tired. I’ve had a hard day. Do you mind if I rest my head on your shoulder?”

Would he mind if she offered him a king’s estate?

He was too ecstatic, too—yes—scared, to speak. He sat as she directed, he stretched his thin tense arm around her fine young body.

She burst into hysterical tears at that.

“I never thought I’d become engaged with a smudge on my face.”

“I know you didn’t. I’ll try to overlook it.” He got down on his knees and kissed her hands. “Darling Joanna, I’ll love you always.”

She would come on the stage, trailing clouds of glory, and lean toward them—a rosy brown vision. In some misty colorful robe of Sylvia’s designing, her thick crinkling hair piled high on her head as the Spanish woman had taught her, she seemed to say:

“I am no better than you. You are no worse than I. Whatever I am, you, in your children, may be. Whatever you are, I in my father have been.”

She was absolutely sincere in her estimation of her art, or of any art. It was only in its relation to the other things of life that she lost her vision and sense of proportion.

“You are one, you know Janna.”

“Both. One makes me adore you, the other says ‘hands off.’ ”

“Not a bad thing, do you think, considering all the men I meet?”

She was really paying him a sincere compliment when she told him that she did not want an accompanist for a husband.

Like many a woman of strong and purposeful character, she hated a weak man.

It followed then that the man who won Joanna must be even stronger, more determined than she.

“So silly of me to mind this,” Joanna scolded herself. But she did mind it. How could it be possible that she, Joanna Marshall, was meeting with rebuffs? Not that she was conceited.

The point was that she had grown up in her own and Joel’s belief⁠—namely, that honest effort led invariably to success.

This was probably the first time in her life that she had been thwarted. She was like a spoiled child, bewildered and indignant at being suddenly brought to book.

… had money enough to have her dancing and music lessons—the very fact that she had had to take separate and special lessons from Bertully meant to her that some special and separate way would be arranged whereby she would become a dancer on the stage.

She did not know how to envisage disappointment.

Strangely enough, the defection of the artiste struck home to her more keenly than the reception which she had had from the stage-managers. She refused Sylvia’s invitation to come back downstairs and spend the evening with her and Brian.

She did not cry or throw herself across the bed. It might have been better for her if she had.

Joanna’s creed was that one kept a stiff upper lip even to oneself.

She had not had many occasions to try out that creed.

In the morning she awoke with a sense of impending disaster.

The phrase is trite but so, alas, is disaster.

At first, as she lay there, her slender brown arms stretched above her tumbled head, she mused to herself about it.

One of the mysteries of the ages will be solved with the answer to the question: Why do men consider women incalculable?

Peter had been hurt by Joanna’s indifference again and again, she had refused a dozen times to marry him, she had scolded him, teased him, slighted him. Yet she had always come back to his eager arms.

“I do think she thinks herself a lot better than anyone else,” Maggie said slowly, remembering Joanna’s letter to her about Philip.

“Well, she is, you know,” he put in unexpectedly. “Oh, Lord, what am I going to do without her!”

Genuinely touched, she sat down on the little box-couch beside him and slid her arm around his shoulder. “After all, you’ve still got me, Peter.”

Her self-control ebbed back to her. Somehow she had never been seriously afraid of Neal. Her scorn had been too great for that.

One does not fear what one scorns.

She said to him evenly, “Henderson, let me go.”

She saw him look at the knife, Peter’s knife, which he was still holding in his hand. A look of determination settled in his eyes.

Even then she was not frightened. People⁠—the people one knows never do that sort of thing.

With a flash-like movement he leaned closer and brought the keen, glittering piece of steel down toward her. When she saw he was in earnest she threw her arm forward close over her breast. But the knife bit down, down into the soft flesh.

Then came the march of two million American soldiers across the town and the surrounding country. Under their careless feet the farms became mud, so that the name

Brest recalls to the minds of thousands nothing if not a picture of the deepest, slimiest, stickiest mud that the world has known.

All about were people, people, too many people, French and Americans. And finally the relations between the two nations, allies though they were, developed from misunderstandings into hot irritations, from irritations into clashes. First white Americans and Frenchmen clashed;

She landed at Brest, from Brest she went to Paris, where she was summoned to Chambéry to help Mrs. Terry, the colored worker, in charge of the leave-center in the Savoyard capital.

Maggie was taken out of herself completely. The voyage, the danger, the foreign language and new customs went to her head like wine.

The need of the men overwhelmed and staggered her. They were pathetically proud of her—and of Mrs. Terry, too—glad to be allowed a sight of her bright face, to exchange a word.

So that was what Joanna had meant so long ago.

Strange how time dissolves mysteries. Strange how, after deciding to take life as one finds it, life comes fawning to one’s hand.

Several days elapsed before another talk could be managed. Then they met in front of the Statue des Eléphants. Philip, examining that marvel with meticulous care, asked her indirectly about Peter.

She looked at him starry-eyed. “You don’t seem so weak, Philip.”

Outside, the cross on Nivrolet, a luminous symbol of faith, pointed steadfastly to heaven.

What could they say?

Does anyone believe that two people who have loved dearly and have been parted can say anything adequate at such moments?

Certainly all the explanations, the pleas for forgiveness that Joanna had meant to utter if they should ever meet again, left her. She only sat and held his hand and called his name again and again. But he was silent.

He told Joanna about Meriwether during those first incredibly beatific days after they had met again. But Joanna was too astounded at the happiness which flooded the very atmosphere about them.

Almost as though she were taking a deep sea bath in bliss.

“I used to think,” she told him, “even if Peter does come back, we never can

Gave me the funniest look. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘you’se the spit of both families!’ Funny, isn’t it, Joanna; those two families, the black and the white Byes, lived so long together that they developed similar characteristics, like husbands and wives, you know.

And they say white and colored people are fathoms apart!

Even I noticed that Meriwether Bye and I were built alike. I’m afraid we weren’t much alike spiritually. Well, here’s where we hop off again. I’m afraid I’ll be longer this time. Mind waiting for me, darling?”

Oh, if you’ve suffered half as much as I have, you’ve suffered horribly. I learned that nothing in the world is worth as much as love. For people like us, people who can and must suffer—

Love is our refuge and strength.

”

drives me, and the critics call me a really great artist, Peter, to consider ordinary vaudeville. Oh, it takes courage to fight against it, Peter, to keep it from choking us, submerging us.

But now that we have love, Peter, we have a pattern to guide us out of the confusion.

When you left me for Maggie, I used to lie awake at night and think of all the sweet things I might have said to you. Oh, if you’ve suffered half as much as I have, you’ve suffered horribly.

He kissed her reverently. “Yes, thank God, we’ve got Love. That is the great compensation.

We’ve tried everything else, dear: you, your career; and I, my self-indulgence. And we’ve found what we wanted was each other.

But you’re right, Joanna, it is frightful to see the havoc that this queer intangible bugaboo of color works among us. Vera and Harley, you and I, aren’t so badly off.