“Yes,” said Peter, “I suppose I will have to study. How did you come to know so much—did your father tell you?”
“Why, I get it out of books, of course.” Joanna was highly indignant: “I never go to bed without getting my lessons. In fact, all I do is to get lessons of some kind—school lessons or music. You know I’m to be a great singer.”
“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.
VII
Sylvia and Joanna, walking through Sixty-third Street on an errand for their mother, came upon groups of children playing games. Italians, Jews, colored Americans, white Americans were there disporting themselves with more or less abandon, according to their peculiar temperament.
“Look,” said Joanna suddenly, catching at Sylvia’s hand. “See those children dancing! Wait, I’ve got to see that!”
Out in the middle of the street a band of colored children were dancing and acting a game. With no thought of spectators they joined hands, took a few steps, separated, spun around, smote hands sharply, and then flung them above their heads. One girl stood in the middle, singing too, but with an attentive air. Presently she darted forward, seized a member of the ring:
“Say, little Missy, won’t you marry me?”
Their voices were treble and sweet, though shrill, and rang with a peculiar, piercing quality above the street noises and the sounds of the other children’s games. The little players were absorbed, enraptured with the spirit of the dance and the abandon of the music. Joanna, too, was in a transport. She watched them going through the motions several times. Presently she caught all the words:
“Sissy in the barn, join in the weddin’,
Sissy in the barn, join in the weddin’.”
The child in the center here chose a partner. The others sang:
“Sweetest l’il couple I ever did see.
Barn! Barn!”
They stamped here.
“Arms all ’round me!
Barn!”
The two children in the center embraced each other while the rest sang:
“Say, little Missy, won’t you marry me?”
Then the two in the center pointed fingers at each other, shrilling:
“Stay back, girl, don’t you come near me
All them sassy words you say!”
Then all:
“Oh, Barn! Barn!
Arms all ’round me!
Say, little Missy, won’t you marry me?
Marry me?”
The last line came as a faint echo.
Joanna rushed forward: “I can play it! Girls let me play it, too!”
The children stared at her a moment, then, with the instinct of childhood for a kindred spirit, two of them unclasped hands and took Joanna in. She outdid them all in the fervor and grace of her acting. Two white settlement workers stopped and looked at her.
“Come on, Joanna,” Sylvia called impatiently.
Joanna came running, a string of the children after her. She bade them goodbye. “I must go now, but I’m coming back sometime soon, to learn some more.” She blew them a kiss, “goodbye, oh, goodbye!”
She came up to Sylvia flushed and excited. “We’ll play it home, Sylvia! Wasn’t it lovely and dear? Oh, I could dance like that forever!” She went almost all the entire remaining distance on tiptoe.
Life in Joel Marshall’s house was not always a serious discussion of the Marshall children’s future. Like many of the better class of colored people, the Marshalls did not meet with the grosser forms of color prejudice, because they kept away from the places where it might be shown. This was bad from the standpoint of development of civic pride and interest. But it had its good results along another line. The children took most of their pleasures in their house or in those of their friends and devoted their wits and young originality to indoor pastimes.
The Marshall house was a great center for this kind of thing, and already Friday and Saturday nights were being regularly set apart for the children’s amusement and for the reception and entertainment of the various young people who dropped in.
Joanna taught her dance. Sylvia and Philip and Alexander were willing pupils; Joanna was magnetic when in this kind of mood. By the time Harry Portor and Maggie Ellersley arrived, they were all singing and stamping and twirling. Peter came in late, held up by the butcher. “Had to go on an errand for the grand white folks,” he explained briefly.
“You’ll wear out my carpet tonight for
