To Joshua and Belle Bye from Aaron and Dinah Bye. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
For a long time to Isaiah, who used to pore absorbedly as a boy over this book with its pictures and long old-fashioned S, this inscription savored of vineyards and orchards. The white Byes, as a matter of fact, were the possessors of very fine peach-orchards in the neighborhood of what is now known as Bryn Mawr, and Isaiah, even as a little fellow, had been taken out there to pick peaches.
His father Joshua had spent his life in making those orchards what they were; a born agriculturist, he had an uncanny knowledge of planting, of grafting, of fertilizing. Many a farmer tried to inveigle him from Aaron Bye. But although Joshua’s wages were small, he had inherited his mother’s blind, invincible attachment for the Byes. His place was with Aaron.
It was young white Meriwether Bye, youngest son-of Aaron’s and Dinah’s ten children, who told Isaiah what the inscription meant. Joshua had not married until he was nearly fifty and his single son, black Isaiah, and white Meriwether were boys together. Meriwether used to come to the Bye house at Fourth and Coates Streets, which is now Fairmount Avenue, as often as Isaiah used to appear at the Bye house at Fourth and Spruce.
Isaiah showed the inscription to Meriwether, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
“Yes,” said young Merry tracing the letters with a fat finger, “that’s our family motto.” Isaiah wanted to know what a motto was.
“Something,” Meriwether told him vaguely, “that your whole family goes by.” The black boy thought that likely.
“Everybody knows Bye peaches, ain’t that so? Cause of that everybody knows the Byes.”
Meriwether, though impressed by this logic, didn’t think that that was what was meant. A subsequent conversation with his father confirmed his opinion.
“It means this, Ziah,” he said one hot July afternoon walking home with the colored boy from the brickyard where Isaiah worked, “it means it shows the kind of stuff you are. It means—now—you see a bare tree in the wintertime don’t you, and you don’t know what it is? But you do perhaps know an apple blossom when you see it, or a peach blossom. In the spring you see that tree covered, let’s say, with apple blossoms. Well, you know it’s an apple tree.”
“But what’s that got to do with us?” Isaiah wanted to know. He was interested, he could not tell why, but his slow-working mind clung to its first idea. “Your father wrote it in the book he gave my father. My father hasn’t any fruit trees.”
Isaiah never forgot the answer Meriwether made him in the unconscious cruelty of youth. “When it comes to people,” said the young Quaker, “it means pretty much the same thing. Now when I grow up, I’m going to be a great doctor,” his chest swelled, “but nobody will be surprised. They’ll all say, ‘Of course, he’s the son of Aaron Bye, the rich peach-merchant. Good stock there,’ ” he involuntarily mimicked his pompous father; “and I’ll be good fruit. That’s the way it always is: good trees, good fruit; rich, important people, rich important sons.”
“What’ll I be?” asked Isaiah Bye, grotesquely tragic in his tattered clothes, the sweat rolling off his shiny face, so intent was his interest.
“Well,” Meriwether countered judicially, “what could you be?” He pondered a moment, his own position so secure that he was willing to do his best by this serious case. “Your father and your father’s father were slaves. ’Course your father’s free now but he’s just a servant. He’s not what you’d call his own man. So I s’pose that’s what you’ll be, a good servant. Tell you what, Isaiah, you can be my coachman. I’ll be good to you. And when you’re grown up,” said Meriwether with more imagination than he usually displayed, “I’ll point you out to some famous doctor from France and say, ‘His father was a good servant to my father, and he’s been a good servant to my father’s son.’ How’ll you like that?” Meriwether tapped him fondly if somewhat condescendingly on the arm.
“You’ll never,” said Isaiah Bye, drawing back from the familiar touch, “you’ll never be able to say that about me.” And he turned and ran down the hot street, leaving Meriwether Bye gaping on the sidewalk.
After that his father could never persuade him to enter again the Bye house, or the Bye orchards. Fortunately his mother upheld him here. “ ’Tain’t as though he had to work for them old Byes,” she said straightening up her already straight shoulders. “He makes just as much and more in the brickyard and in helpin’ Amos White haul.”
“I know that,” Joshua would reply impatiently, “but old Mist’ Aaron says—now—he likes to have his own people workin’ roun’ him. And I don’t like to disappoint him.”
Belle Bye told Isaiah. “I’m not one of his own people, Ma,” he answered stubbornly, “and after that I’m not ever goin’ back.” Belle was rejoiced to hear this. She would have been an insurgent in any walk of life. Joshua was the genuine peasant type—the type, black or white, which believes in a superior class and yields blindly to its mandates. But Belle had seen too many changes even in her thirty-five years—she was far younger than Joshua—not to know that many things are possible if one just has courage.
Isaiah, on being questioned, told his mother with considerable reluctance
