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. Sylvia with a ribbon, or a piece of lace and a ready needle and thread could give the effect of possessing two dresses, whereas she had only the one. Sylvia dressed the dolls, hiring Joanna’s remarkable and usually disregarded assembly of these so that she might make them new clothes. She drove an honest bargain. If Joanna would let her play store with her dolls for a week, one of them could keep the new dress which Sylvia would have made for her; Joanna’s dolls were usually in Sylvia’s care.
Yet when Joanna did sew or knit, her stitches and pieces bore inspection much better than Sylvia’s. By the same token, however, they missed Sylvia’s dash.
In one thing only did Joanna show real abandon, that was in dancing. Sylvia was as light as thistledown on her feet, but Joanna was like the spirit of dancing. She had grace, the very poetry of motion, and she could dance any step however intricate if she saw it once.
“If you want to get Joanna to play,” Maggie Ellersley, Sylvia’s chum and schoolmate would say impatiently, “you must start some singing or dancing game. She wouldn’t play ‘I Spy’ or ‘Pussy wants a corner’ with you for worlds.”
Any sort of folksong or dance, though she did not know them by that name, delighted the child. Usually she held herself aloof, but in summer down on Fifty-ninth Street Joanna was one with the children in the street, singing, dancing, jumping rope in unexpected and fancy ways.
Sylvia’s and Maggie’s and even her brothers’ rougher scoffing affected her not at all, not only because she had the calm self-assurance which is the first step toward success, but also because of old Joel’s strong belief in her.
Joel believed that all things were possible. “Nothing in reason,” he used to tell Joanna, “is impossible. Forty years ago I was almost a pauper in Richmond. Look at me today. I spend more on you in a month, Joanna, than my mother and I ever saw in a five-year stretch. One hundred years ago and nearly all of us were slaves. See what we are now. Ten years ago people would have laughed at the thought of colored people on the stage. Look at the billboards on Broadway.”
It was in the first part of the century when Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, Ada Overton and others were at their zenith. Old Joel believed them the precursors of greater things. Since Joanna’s gifts were those of singing and dancing, he hoped to make her famous the country over. Of course he would have preferred a more serious form of endowment. But such as it was, it was Joanna’s, and must be developed. Joel Marshall believed in using the gifts nearest at hand.
“And don’t think anything about being colored,” he used to say.
“It might be different if you lived in some other part of the country, but here in this section it may not interfere much more than being poor, or having some slight deformity. I have often noticed,” said Joel, who had used his powers of observation to no small advantage, “that having some natural drawback often pushes you forward, that is if you’ve got anything in you to start with. It might even happen,” he added, launched now on his favorite theme, “that your color would add to your success. Depend on it if you’ve got something which these white folks haven’t got, or can do something better than they can, they’ll call on you fast enough and your color will only make you more noticeable.”
Joanna used to listen interestedly. Not that in those early years she always understood fully everything her father said, but his talk created for her a kind of atmosphere which created in turn a feeling of assurance and self-confidence which was really superb.
Another theory of Joel’s which he had worked out for himself, and which in no small degree contributed to Joanna’s education was his early understanding of the natural rights of men inherent in the mere fact of living. He told Joanna that no class of men remained static throughout the ages—he had not used these words, it is true, but he had come pretty near it. Somewhere in those early days of his in odd scraps of reading he had learned that Greece had once been enslaved; that Russia had but recently freed her serfs; that England possessed a submerged class.
“All people, all countries, have their ups and downs, Joanna,” he would tell her gravely, “and just now it’s our turn to be down, but it will soon roll round for our time to be up, or rather we must see to it that we do get up. So everyone of us has something to do for the race. Never forget that, little girl.”
Joanna was a memorable type in these days. A grave child, brown without that peculiar luminosity of appearance which she was to have later on, and which Sylvia already possessed. She had a mop of thick black hair which was actually heavy, so much so that the back of her head bulged. Joanna knew next to nothing at this time of those first aids to colored people in this country in the matter of conforming to average appearance. If she had known them, it is doubtful if she would have used them, for she had the variety of honesty which made her hesitate and even dislike to do or adopt anything artificial, no matter how much it might improve her general appearance. No hair straighteners, nor even curling kids for her.
“Joanna’s ways are so straight, they almost sway back,” Sylvia used to say aptly.
