Perhaps it would not have succeeded anywhere else but in New York, and perhaps not even there but in Greenwich Village, but the tightly packed audience took up the applause again and Joanna was a star.
The very next week Mr. Hale moved the production to Broadway.
Joanna found herself becoming a sensation. Through Miss Sharples, who was besieged with requests to meet her protégée, she came in contact with groups of writers, dramatists, “thinkers,” that vast, friendly, changing kaleidoscope of New York dwellers who take their mental life seriously. Occasionally, too, she was invited to grace an “occasion,” an afternoon at the house of a rich society woman. Once at one of these affairs she met Vera Manning, who grinned at her impishly and announced to the room that she and Miss Marshall were old friends. They had been schoolmates.
“When I was a child,” said Vera impudently, “my mother sent me to public school for almost a year. She said she wanted me to be a real democrat.”
She threw Joanna a droll look. When the afternoon was over, Vera asked her to go on to tea with her.
Joanna was perfect: “That’s very kind of you, Miss Manning, and I don’t know but what I will. There are several things I’d like to interest you in. When I think of the illimitable power for good which you white people possess—”
Once outside the door the two girls went off into gusts of inextinguishable laughter.
Joanna did not like these affairs and soon she adopted the habit of refusing such invitations. She preferred Miss Sharples’ artist friends—because among them she sensed attempts, more or less tentative perhaps, toward reality. True, paradoxically enough it was a reality based on art, rather than on living. But the girl was beginning to feel the need of something with which to fill her life. Whether her disastrous love affair, or the frequent discouragements with which she met, had changed or reshaped her vision she did not know. But life, she began to realize, was not a matter of sufficient raiment, food, or even success. There must be something more filling, more insistent, more permeating—the sort of thing that left no room for boredom or introspection.
For in spite of her vogue, her unbelievably decided successes, Joanna frequently tasted the depths of ennui. She saw life as a ghastly skeleton and herself feverishly trying to cover up its bare bones with the garish trappings of her art, her lessons, her practice, her press-clippings.
Miss Sharples put her up for membership in a club whose members were mostly people that “did” something. And Joanna fell in the habit of taking her lunch and frequently her dinner, too, at this club, just to lose herself in the atmosphere which she found there.
Undoubtedly the contact did her good. Joanna, while lacking Peter’s singularly active dislike for white people, was not on the other hand a “good mixer.” Following the natural reaction at this time of her racial group, she had tended to seek all her ideals among colored people and where these were lacking to create them for herself. As a result of this attitude, injurious in the long run to both whites and-blacks, she was hardening into a singularly narrow, even though self-reliant egocentric. She had never met in her family with much opposition to her chosen career, but then neither with the exception of Joel’s and that of her teachers had she met with much cooperation.
Now to her astonishment she found herself in a setting where people, without being considered “different,” “highbrow,” “affected,”—and not greatly caring if they were—talked, breathed, lived for and submerged themselves and others, too, in their calling. She met girls not as old as she, who had already “arrived” in their chosen profession; incredibly young editors, artists—exponents of new and inexplicable schools of drawing—women with causes—birth-control, single tax, psychiatry—teachers of dancing, radical high school teachers.
There were men to be met, too, really eminent men, but Joanna was not much interested. Following the American idea, she had been too carefully trained to care for the company of white men. Between them and herself the barrier was too impassable. Besides, it was women who had the real difficulties to overcome, disabilities of sex and of tradition.
For a while she was puzzled, a little ashamed when she realized that so many of these women had outstripped her so early; some of them were poor, some had responsibilities. There were not many of these last. It was a long time before the solution occurred to her and when it did the result was her first real rebellion against the stupidity of prejudice.
These women had not been compelled to endure her long, heartrending struggle against color. Those who had had means had been able to plunge immediately into the sea of preparation; they had had their choice of teachers; as soon as they were equipped they had been able to approach the guardians of literary and artistic portals. Joanna thought of her many futile efforts with Bertully and sighed at the pity of it all. Sometimes she felt like a battle-scarred veteran among all these successful, happy, chattering people, who, no matter how seriously, how deeply they took their success, yet never regarded it with the same degree of wonder, almost of awe with which she regarded hers.
She realized for the first time how completely colored Americans were mere onlookers at the possibilities of life. She spent a few happy months with these people; they made pleasant and stimulating company for her; she herself suspected that she had made good “copy” for some of them. They were for the most part unconscious of race, not at all inclined to patronize, and generous with praise and suggestion. One woman, it is true, told Joanna that she had always liked colored people.
“My father would insist on having colored servants. He preferred them.”
Joanna had made an impish reply. “My father employs both white
