Joanna had a fine sense of relativity. Young as she was, she could understand that the bravery and courage exercised by these slave women was a much finer and different thing from that exercised for instance by Florence Nightingale. “They were like Joan of Arc,” she thought to herself, “Joan, wonderful Joan with the name almost like mine.” Only an innate, almost too meticulous sense of honesty had kept her from changing her own name to the shorter form.
She used to lie in her bed at night, straight and still with her eyes fixed on the stretch of sky visible even from a house in Fifty-ninth Street and dream dreams. “I’ll be great, too,” she told herself. “I’m not sure how. I can’t be like those wonderful women, Harriet and Sojourner, but at least I won’t be ordinary.”
She spoke to her father like a little piping echo from the past, “Daddy, you’ll help me to be a great woman, somebody you’ll be proud of?”
Her words made him so happy; they renewed his life. She was so completely like himself, and he could help her. “Thank God,” he used to murmur over his books that daily showed an increase in his earnings.
He took Joanna everywhere with him. One Easter Sunday a great colored singer, a beautiful woman, sang an Easter anthem in his church, lifting up a golden voice among the tall white lilies. Afterwards she went home with Mr. and Mrs. Marshall and stayed to dinner. Joanna never moved her eyes from her during the ride home.
After dinner she stood in front of the singer in the comfortable living-room. “I can sing like you,” she said gravely, “and I can remember the tune of most of that hymn you sang this morning. Listen.”
And with no further introduction she sang most of the anthem. She was only ten then, yet her voice was already free of the shrillness of childhood and beginning to assume that liquid golden quality which so distinguished it later.
Madame Caldwell gasped. She had won her own laurels through bitter experience in various studios, meeting insult, indifference and unkindness with an unyielding front, which brought her finally consideration, a grudging interest, sometimes a genuine appreciation.
She was well on her way to recognition now. Colored people acclaimed her all over the country and she had some local reputation in her hometown where black and white alike were very proud of her.
“But no daughter of mine,” she used to say bitterly, “if she has the voice of an angel shall go through what I have suffered.”
Yet when she heard Joanna sing that Easter Sunday, she seized Joel Marshall’s arm. “Get her a teacher, Mr. Marshall. She has a voice in ten thousand. Poor child, how you will have to work!”
But Joanna wasn’t listening, her eyes sought her father’s. Both of them knew at once that the road to glory was stretching out before her.
II
Joanna was like her father not only so far as ambition was concerned but also in her willingness to work. She had a fine serious mind, a little slow-moving at first, but working with a splendid precision that helped her through many a hard place. Her quality of being able to stick to a problem until she was satisfied served in the long run as well as her sister Sylvia’s greater quickness and versatility. Eventually, too, Joanna’s laboriousness and native exactness produced in her the result of an oft-sharpened knife. The method which she applied to one study, she remembered to apply to another, and if this failed then she was able to make combinations.
Usually she had to have things explained to her from the very beginning, either by a teacher or through directions in a book. But to offset this slowness she had a good sense of logic, a strong power of concentration, and a remarkably retentive and visualizing memory.
Sylvia and she, destined to be such perfect friends in their maturity, were not very sympathetic in their childhood. The older girl was thoughtless, quick to jump at conclusions, natively witty and strongly disinclined toward seriousness. “Joanna makes me sick,” was her constant cry, “always thinking of her lessons and how important she’s going to be when she’s grown-up. So tiresome, too, wanting to talk about what she’s going to do all the time, with no interest in your affairs.”
Which was not quite true, for Joanna was mightily interested in people who had a “purpose” in life. Otherwise not at all. This was where she differed most from her father. With Joel success and distinction had been his dream, his dearest wish. But always he had realized that there were other things which might interfere. With Joanna success and distinction were an obsession. It never occurred to her that life was anything but what a man chose to make it, provided, of course, he did choose to make it something. Her brothers’ and Sylvia’s haphazard methods were always incomprehensible to her, and this gave her the least touch of the “holier than thou” manner.
Her mother insisted on each child’s learning to do housework. Even the boys were not exempt from this, indeed they rather liked it. Sylvia made no complaint though she occasionally bribed Alec or Philip to do her stint for her. Joanna never complained, either, yet she made up her mind early that as a woman she would never do this kind of work. Not that she despised it, she simply considered it labor lost for a person who like herself might be spending her time in more beautiful and more graceful activities. Yet in spite of her dislike, she always lingered longest over her work, and the room or the silver which she had cleaned always
