“I don’t want you to leave tonight before I get a chance to point you out to young Dr. Bye. He’ll be so interested.” She looked at Peter again. Yes, he was intelligent enough to get the full force of what she wanted to say. “It’s so in keeping with things that the grandson of the man who was slave to his grandfather should be his entertainer tonight.”
Peter felt his skin tightening. “I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I’m a medical student, not an entertainer. I came here for Mr. Mason, who is very busy. You may be sure I’ll give him your instructions. Good day, Mrs. Lea.”
He rushed out of the house, down to the station where, without waiting for Tom, he boarded the train. Not far from the West Philadelphia depot he pushed the bell of a certain house, flung open the unlocked door and rushed up a flight of stairs.
In a small room to his left he found the person he was seeking, a short, almost black young fellow who lifted a dejected and then an amazed countenance toward him.
“Am I seeing things? Where’d you blow in from, Pete? Thought you’d chucked us all, the old school and all the rest of it.”
“I haven’t, I’ve been a fool, a damned fool, but I’m back to my senses. I’m going back to my classes and I tell you, Ed Morgan, I’ll clean up. See here, you’ve got to do me a favor.”
“Name it.”
“You know Mason, Tom Mason on Fifteenth Street? I’ve been playing for him. But I can’t stick it any longer. Tom’s all right, but I can’t stand his customers. Besides, I’ve got to get back to work. I’m quitting this minute—see. But Tom’s got a big dance on, near Bryn Mawr tonight at a Mrs.—Mrs. Lea,” he gulped. “Good pay and all that. You can play as well as I can, Ed. Easy stuff, you can read it. You got to do it.”
“Do it! Man, lead me to that job. I’m broke, see, stony broke, busted.” He turned his pockets inside out. “I was just wondering what I could pawn. And I need instruments—Oh, Lord!”
Peter gave him some money. “Take this, you can pay me any time. Only rush down to Tom’s and tell him I can’t come. I’m dead—see?—drowned, fallen in the Schuylkill. And see here, old fellow, afterwards we’ll have a talk. I want everything, everything, mind you, that you can remember, every note, every bit of paper that bears on the work of these last ten months. And I’ll show them—” he seemed to forget Morgan—“with their damned talk of entertainers.” Down the stairs he ran, still talking.
“Mad, quite mad,” said little Morgan, staring. “Glad he’s coming back to work, though. Now, where’d I put that cap?”
Still at white heat, Peter walked the few short blocks to his boarding house. Once inside his room he shut himself in and paced the floor.
“The grandson—that’s me—of the man who was his grandfather’s slave should be his—that’s Meriwether Bye, young Dr. Meriwether Bye—should be his entertainer, his hired entertainer.
“My grandfather didn’t have a chance, but here I am half a century after and I’m still a slave, an entertainer. My grandfather. Let’s see, which one of the Byes was that?”
He went to the closet, pushed some books and papers aside and hauled down the old Bye Bible. The leaves, streaked and brown, stuck together. With clumsy, unaccustomed fingers he turned them, until at last between the Old Testament and the Apochrypha he found what he was looking for: “Record of Births and Deaths.”
The old, stiff, faded writing with the long German s, the work of hands long since still, smote him with a sense of worthlessness. These people, according to their lights, must have considered themselves “people of importance,” else why this careful record of dates?
His lean brown finger traced the lines. “Joshua Bye, born about 1780”—heavens, that must have been his great-great-grandfather. No, maybe he was just a “great,” for the black Byes, he remembered hearing his father Meriwether say, lived long and married late.
“Isaiah Bye, born 1830—a child of freedom.” How proud they had been of that! Yes, that was his grandfather, he remembered now. And he had made a great deal of that freedom. Meriwether had often dwelt with pride on Isaiah’s learning, his school, his property, his “half-interest,” Meriwether had said grandiloquently, in a bookshop. Peter could hear his father talking now.
“A child of freedom”—Peter was that but what had he made of it? He wondered what Isaiah in turn had written on the occasion of Meriwether’s birth. His finger ran down the page, and found it, stopped.
There it was—“Meriwether,” the inscription read, “by his fruits shall ye know—me.”
At first Peter thought it was a mistake. Then gradually it dawned on him—his fine old grandfather, proud of his achievements, seeing his son as a monument to himself, seeing each Bye son doubtless as a monument to each Bye father. Poor Isaiah, perhaps happy Isaiah, for having died before he realized how worthless, how anything but monumental his son had really been, except as a failure. And now he, Peter, was following in that son’s footsteps.
He remembered an old daguerreotype of his grandfather that he had seen at his great-uncle Peter’s. The face, perfectly black, looked out from its faded red-plush frame with that immobile look of dignity which only black people can attain. “I have made the most of myself,” the proud old face seemed to say. “My father was a slave, but I am a teacher, a leader of men. My son shall be a great healer and my son’s son—”
Peter put the open Bible carefully on the table and took out a cigarette. But he held it a long time unlighted.
So far as he could remember he had never had any desire to rise, “to be somebody,” as Isaiah, he rightly guessed, would have phrased it.
