III
It was Joanna’s love for beauty that made her consciously see Peter Bye. It is true that almost as soon as she saw him she lost sight of him again, for the boy did not come up to her requirements which, even at the early age at which these two met, were quite crystallized. Joanna liked first of all fixity of purpose. The phrase “When I grow up, I’m going to be” was constantly on her lips. 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. “Not lazy,” Joanna said to herself, looking at him from under level brows before she dismissed him forever from her busy mind. “It’s just that he doesn’t care; he just doesn’t want to be anybody.”
She was too young to understand the power of that great force, heredity. She had no notion of the part which it played in her own life. Peter was the legitimate result of a heredity that had become a tradition, of a tradition that had become warped, that had gone astray and had carried Peter and Peter Bye’s father along in its general wreckage.
It is impossible to understand the boy’s character without some knowledge of the lives of those who had gone before him.
As far back as the last decades of the eighteenth century there had been white Byes and black Byes in Philadelphia. The black Byes were known to be the chattels of Aaron and Dinah Bye, Quakers, who without reluctance had set free their slaves, among them black Joshua Bye, the great-grandfather of Peter. This was done in 1780 according to the laws of Pennsylvania, which thus allowed the Quakers to salve their consciences without offending their thrifty instincts.
Aaron Bye, most people said, was unusually good to his slaves. He had something of the patriarchal instinct and liked to think of himself as ruler over the destiny of many people, his wife’s, his children’s and more completely that of his slaves. Certainly he was very kind to Joshua’s mother, Judy. She was a tall, straight, steely, black woman with fine inscrutable eyes, a thin-lipped mouth and a large but shapely nose. She bore about her a quality of brooding, of mystery, embodying the attraction which she exercised for many men, white and black. But apparently she knew little of this. Her only weakness, if such it might be called, was an inexplicable attachment to the white Bye family. She married, a few years before receiving her freedom, a man named Ceazer, a proud, surly, handsome individual, who refused to adopt the surname of his master; he had belonged to white people named Morton. Since even after freedom Judy would not hear to leaving the Bye family, Aaron Bye greatly pleased by this loyalty offered the position of coachman to Ceazer, which the latter, with his customary surliness, accepted. Later he not only threw up his job, but ran away, vanishing finally into legend.
His was a strange truculent character; he hated slavery, hated all white people, hated particularly the Mortons, hated ineffably Aaron Bye. He wanted nothing at his hands. Once he knocked down another Negro who referred to him as “Mist’ Bye’s man.” He was no man’s man, he assured the stricken narrator, least of all the man of that damn Quaker. His enmity went to ridiculous lengths. Aaron Bye taught Joshua how to write and gave him a little black testament for a prize. In it he wrote “The gift of Aaron Bye.” Joshua, delighted, wrote his own name under the inscription and ran and showed it to his mother. She, it turned out, had not been watching his making of pothooks without purpose. Underneath her boy’s name she fashioned in halting crazy characters her single attempt at writing, her own name, Judy Bye. Nothing would serve Joshua then but that he must have Ceazer’s name in the book, too. Remembering that his father could not write, Joshua wrote out himself with a fine flourish “Ceazer Bye” and showed the name to its owner, entreating him to make his mark beside it. Ceazer took up the pen in his strong, wiry fingers.
“Which one ob dese did you say were mine?”
Joshua pointed it out, waiting for the cross. Ceazer made a mark, it was true, but it was a thick broad line drawn through his name with a fury which almost tore the thin page. He was no Bye!
It was not long after this that he disappeared, a strange, brooding, intractable figure.
Joshua, although born in slavery, had never known the institution in its more hideous aspects. He had been a very little boy when his freedom came to him. And Ceazer, old Judy told him, had fought in the Revolution! So that Joshua knew more of warfare
