He caught her hand. “Just because you jockeyed me out of that kiss that time, clever Joanna, doesn’t mean that I’m going to do without it forever.”
In her heart she loved him. “Oh, Peter, be like this always,” she prayed.
XVII
They enjoyed the opera and sang snatches of it coming home as they walked to the subway. Once in the express train, however, Joanna lapsed into sadness.
“I don’t think my voice is as big as that prima donna’s, but those dancing girls! I should have been right up there with them! Oh, Peter, I believe I’m the least bit discouraged.”
She told him of her trips with Bertully. “I didn’t mind those girls calling me ‘nigger.’ That was sheer ill-breeding. Remember what we used to say when we were children when they called us names?” She recited it: “ ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ What I minded was that they couldn’t dream of my being accepted. Thought I had a nerve even to ask it.”
She mounted the steps. “Come in, Peter.”
After dinner they sat in the back parlor and Joanna went on with her story, Peter listening closely.
“I’m glad you’re telling me about this, Joanna,” he said seriously. “Now you’ll understand my case better. You know how I feel about white people and their everlasting unfairness. As though the world and all that in it is belonged to them! I tell you, Jan, I’m sick of the whole business—college, my everlasting grind, my poverty, this confounded prejudice. If I want to get a chance to study a certain case and it’s in a white hospital you’d think I’d committed a crime. As though diseases picked out different races! I’m a good surgeon, I’ll swear I am, but I’ve got so I don’t care whether I get my degree or not. You can’t imagine all the petty unfairness about me. Only the other day the barber refused to shave me in the college barbershop. Your own cousin, John Talbert, is a Zeta Gamma man if ever there was one—that’s the equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa in his school, you know. Do you think he got it? No, they blackballed him out.”
Joanna sat silent, stunned by this avalanche. And to think she had precipitated it!
“Arabelle Morton’s sister, Selma,” Peter went on morosely, “took her Master’s degree last year. The candidates sat in alphabetical order. Selma sat in her seat wondering whom the chair on the left of her belonged to—it was vacant. At the last moment a girl came in, a Miss Nelson, who had been in one or two of her classes. Selma knew she was a Southerner. ‘Oh, I just can’t sit there,’ Selma heard her say, not too much under her breath. And some friend of hers went to the Professor in charge of the exercises and he let her change her place, though it threw the whole line out of order.”
He paused, still brooding.
“Another colored girl—can’t think of her name—paid for a seat in one of the Seminary rooms. The white girl next to her, apparently a very pleasant person, had her books all over her own desk space and this one, too. They were the best seats in the room. The colored girl asked her to move them. She just looked at her. Then this Miss—Miss Taylor, that was her name, took it from one authority to another, finally to the professor in charge of the Library. He assigned her another seat. Said the girl had been there four years, and that anyway, she—the white girl—resented the colored girl’s manner toward her. The damned petty injustice!”
“But, Peter,” Joanna argued, “you wouldn’t let that interfere with your whole career, change your whole life?”
“Why shouldn’t I? There’re plenty of pleasanter ways to earn a living. Why should I take any more of their selfish dog-in-the-manger foolishness? I can make all the money I want with Tom Mason. If you aren’t satisfied for me to be an accompanist, I could go into partnership with him and we could form and place orchestras. It’s a perfectly feasible plan, Joanna. Why shouldn’t I pick the job that comes handiest, since the world owes me a living?”
He frowned, meditating. “Isn’t it funny, I felt just then as though I’d been through all this before. It’s just as though I’d heard myself say that very thing some other time. Well, what do you say, Joanna?”
“That I don’t want a coward and a shirker for a husband. As though that weren’t the thing those white people—those mean ones—wanted! Not all white people are that way. Both of us know it, Peter. And it’s up to us, to you and me, Peter Bye, to show them we can stick to our last as well as anybody else. If they can take the time to be petty, we can take the time to walk past it. Oh, we must fight it when we can, but we mustn’t let it hold us back. Buck up, Peter, be a man. You’ve got to be one if you’re going to marry me.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “May I light a cigarette?” But she noticed he did it with trembling fingers. “Just as you say, Joanna.”
She rose and faced him, this new Peter—this old Peter if she did but know it, with the early shiftlessness, the irresoluteness of his father, Meriwether Bye, the ancient grudge of his grandfather, Isaiah Bye, rearing up, bearing full and perfect fruit in his heart. Both rage and despair possessed her, as she saw the beautiful fabric of their future felled wantonly to the ground. For the sake of a few narrow pedants!
“Peter, Peter, we’ve got to make our own lives. We can’t let these people ruin us.” She felt her knees trembling under her. “We’re both tired and beside ourselves. Come and see me tomorrow, will you?”
What should she say to him
