“You really feel it? I didn’t suppose any white man felt like that. Well, you needn’t mind about me or about any of the black Byes,” he surprised himself by saying. “After all, it isn’t as though we were related. It’s just the fortunes of—well, not of war—but of life.”
“No,” Meriwether returned, “we’re not related. Thank God there’s none of that unutterable mix-up. I don’t think I could have forgiven those Quaker Byes that. But sometimes it seems to me that just because those black Byes and thousands of others like them had no claim, that they had every claim.”
After that day they met daily; Meriwether expounding, explaining, unconsciously teaching; Peter listening and absorbing. “I’m surprised,” the young white man said, giving Peter a calculating look, “that you were content with being an entertainer.”
Peter flushed and explained. It was only a temporary phase in his life. He had been broken-up, crazy. Haltingly he spoke of Joanna and finally of Maggie.
Meriwether thought it a bad business. “Stupid of you not to see that the first girl had your interest at heart. Why, man, by your own account she had brought you out of the butcher-shop to the University. Well, life permits these things.” Bit by bit he told Peter of his own love-life. He had loved Mrs. Lea for years even before her marriage when they were boy and girl together, but her hard, uncomprehending attitude toward “lesser peoples” chilled him, really frightened him. He knew he could not live with a woman like that.
To Peter’s surprise Meriwether was a fatalist. He had strong premonitions and allowed himself to be guided by them. “From the outset,” he told Peter, gravely, “I knew that you meant something to me. That was why I used to watch you so closely. I used to wonder and speculate about you. Something in you made me think of myself. It was as though you, all unrelated even racially, represented something which might have been a part of myself, as though you,” he said dreamily, “were living actively what I was thinking of passively. I have often tried to picture my life as a colored man. I think if there had been any of that selfish admixture of blood between the white and black Byes and I had heard of it, I’d have gone the United States over but what I’d have found my relatives, and have claimed them, too, before all the world.”
One of Meriwether’s strange fantasies was that he would never return from the war. “I knew it when I came away from America. And listen, Bye, when I die,” Peter marveled at the sureness of that “when,” “I want you after you get back home to go to my grandfather and tell him who you are and how you met me. You are to give him this.” He took a little case from his pocket in which were the pictures of a man and woman—old-fashioned pictures.
“Your father,” Peter exclaimed involuntarily, “you can see he’s a Bye—”
“And my mother,” Meriwether finished. He drew a locket suspended on a thin gold chain from around his neck. “And take this to Mrs. Lea. She loves me,” he said very simply. “Here, you might just as well take them now.” Peter accepted them reluctantly.
He wished he had a picture of Joanna. Death seemed suddenly very near, very possible. He did not care if he died, but he would like Joanna to know that he thought of her. But he had nothing to leave for her. Yes, there was the Testament. He took it from his inside breast-pocket and showed it to Meriwether. Indeed he looked at it closely for the first time himself. The two heads so like yet so different bent over the old faded script. On the top of the page in a beautiful clear hand was written Aaron Bye, then underneath in crazy drunken letters, Judy Bye.
“I can’t guess who she was,” said Peter.
A little below a familiar name appeared, Joshua Bye, and above it, evidently written, in the same hand, Ceazer Bye. But through this entry a firm black line was drawn, drawn with a pen that dug down into the thin paper. After Joshua’s name came the names Isaiah and then Meriwether.
“My father,” Peter explained, feeling somehow very near to him. “I guess I’d better put my name in, too.” He wrote it in his small compact hand. “I wonder who those two were, Judy and Ceazer,” he mused, smiling a little at the quaint spelling. “I don’t seem ever to have heard of them; I thought we started with Joshua.” But Meriwether professed dimly to remember some mention of Judy.
“I’m sure I’ve heard my grandfather mention her name years ago and Ceazer’s, too; he was her husband, seems to me. I suppose Aaron Bye gave them the Testament.”
The little incident threw them into a deeper intimacy. Meriwether professed himself to be as interested in and as bewildered at the workings of the color question as Peter himself, though naturally he lacked his new friend’s bitterness.
“It is amazing into what confusion slavery threw American life,” he said, launched on one of their interminable discussions. “Here America was founded for the sake of liberty and the establishment of an asylum for all who were oppressed. And no land has more actively engaged in the suppression of liberty, or in keeping down those who were already oppressed. So that a white boy raised on all sorts
