“I don’t believe,” his mother told him wisely, “that you kin go as fur as you dream. Too many things agin you fur that, boy. But you kin die much further along the road than when you was born. Never forget that.”
So Isaiah was saved from the initial mistake of aiming too high and of coming utterly to smash. Yet he accomplished wonders. Who shall say how he increased his slender store of knowledge? How he learned to read wise books borrowed and bought as best he might? How he learned geography and history that made his heartbeats go wild since it told him of the French Revolution and how a whole nation once practically enslaved arose to a fuller, richer life?
The inspiration for all this lay in those careless words of young Meriwether. Although Isaiah met the young fellow many times after that incident, and apparently with friendliness, he never in his heart forgave him. Like Ceazer he developed a dislike for white people and their ways which developed, however, into a sturdy independence and an unyielding pride. No amount of contumely ever made him ashamed of his slave ancestry. On the contrary, to measure himself against old Ceazer and Judy gave him ground for honest pride. “See what they were and how far I’ve gone,” he used to say, pleasantly boastful.
He resented as few sons of freedmen did the assurance with which the white Byes took their wealth and position and power. “Hoisted themselves on the backs of the black Byes.” He resented especially the ingratitude of Aaron Bye to Joshua. For himself he asked nothing; being content to fight his own way “through an onfriendly world.”
The white Byes had gone far, but the black Byes having now that greatest of all gifts, freedom, would go far, too. They would be leaders of other black men.
The upshot of all this was that Isaiah Bye opened a school for colored youth down on Vine Street. No name and no figure in colored life in Philadelphia was ever better beloved and more revered than his.
IV
Isaiah did not marry until he was thirty-one, which was an advanced age for his times. Even then he had married earlier than his father. Old Joshua, who died long before Isaiah’s marriage, had been inordinately proud of his one son.
“Jes’ wouldn’t work fer white folks,” Joshua used to say, “that weren’t good enough fer him.”
Isaiah and Miriam Sayres Bye had one son. “Meriwether,” Isaiah wrote in Aaron and Dinah Bye’s old gift, and under it in a script as fine and characteristic as that of the original inscription: “By his fruits shall ye know—me.” It was a strange but not unnatural bit of pride, the same pride which had made him name this squirming bundle of potentialities, “Meriwether—Meriwether Bye,” a boy with the same name which old white Aaron Bye’s son had borne and with as good chances. The Civil War was on the horizon then and Isaiah Bye, with that calm expectation of the unexpected which was his mother’s chiefest legacy, was sure that in that grand melee all his people would know freedom. So black Meriwether Bye, born like himself in freedom, would know nothing but that estate when he began to have understanding.
Isaiah had accumulated a little, though how that was possible, no one aware of his tiny stipend could guess. It is true he not only taught school, but he had outside pupils, ex-slaves, freedmen, men like himself born in freedom, but unable through economic pressure to enjoy it except in name—all these crowded his home at night on Vine Street, and sweated mightily over primers and pothooks and the abacus. Twenty-five cents an hour he charged them, giving each a meticulous care such as would bring a modern tutor many dollars. He wrote letters, pamphlets, too, for that marvelous organization already well established, the A.M.E. Church. His wife had a sister whose husband kept a secondhand shop and from this source he earned an occasional dollar. When Meriwether was eight, Isaiah owned two houses in Pearl Street, the house in Vine Street, a half interest in his brother-in-law’s store and a plot in Mount Olivet Cemetery.
From the very beginning Meriwether knew he was to be a great man—a doctor, his father had said emphatically. And Meriwether repeated it by rote. He was a clever enough child though without his father’s solid trait of concentration. But he liked the idea of greatness—that and the profession of medicine came to be synonymous with him as it was already with his father. Otherwise it is likely that both of them would have seen earlier the boy’s inaptitude for the calling thus thrust upon him.
Meriwether went to his father’s school, to Mr. Jonas Howard’s catering establishment, which he loved, to Sunday-School and to his Uncle Peter’s secondhand store. In any one of these places he was at home. He might have made a good teacher, caterer, minister or storekeeper. Yet he meandered on, doing absolutely mediocre work, never failing, never shining, and always rather purposely waiting the day which should bring him to the Medical School.
He was waiting for something else, too, though this Isaiah never guessed. He was waiting for some sign of help or recognition from the white Byes. His father had told him of the slaveholder’s great debt to old Joshua; he had taken him riding past the Bryn Mawr peach orchards. “By rights part of them ought to belong to us. But
