Meriwether did think of it and did mind it. He learned that he had been named after the son of his grandfather’s patron and somehow it seemed impossible to him that that mere fact should not result in something tangibly advantageous. He lacked the imagination to understand the pride which actuated Isaiah to name his boy as he had. The year before Meriwether was to enter medical school, Isaiah, fortunately, for himself, died.
A few months later Miriam died, too. Meriwether was left sole heir to the three houses and two or three hundred dollars. He was tired of school and not at all displeased with the idea of being his own master. He would like a little vacation, he fancied, and a chance to see the world. Somebody told him of a good way to do this—why not get a job as train porter? The idea pleased him; there was travel, easy money, besides his little property in Philadelphia. And afterwards perhaps there would be the patron for whom he had been named, Dr. Meriwether Bye of Bryn Mawr.
Isaiah’s mother, Belle Bye, used to say, “Things you do expect and things you don’t expect are sure to come to pass.” It took Isaiah many years to see the reasonableness of this apparently unreasoned statement. Certainly one of the things he never expected to come to pass was that his boy Meriwether should, first, give up altogether his project of studying medicine and, second, that bit by bit, through sickness, gambling, and a hitherto unsuspected penchant for sheer laziness, he should run through his Philadelphia property, thus wiping away all that edifice of respectability and good citizenship which Isaiah Bye had so carefully built up.
Colored Philadelphia society is organized as definitely as, and even a little more carefully than, Philadelphia white society. One wasn’t “in” in those old days unless one were, first, “an old citizen,” and, second, unless one were eminently respectable—almost it might be said God-fearing. Meriwether having been born to this estate suffered all the inconveniences coming to a member of a group at that time small and closely welded. His business was everybody’s business. His Uncle Peter had upbraided him for not studying medicine. Jonas Howard, the caterer, knew about his first real estate transfer. The young Howards and his cousins knew about his gambling and rebuked him admiringly. On one of his “runs” Meriwether spent a week in New York. This was in 1889. Not a single colored person knew him or cared about him. He rented a room in Fifty-third Street and made that his headquarters. Later he rented two rooms and married a young seamstress who died in 1891 when her boy was born.
Meriwether did do two things after that. First he wrote to Dr. Meriwether Bye telling him who he was and implying he would not disdain a little aid. It is doubtful if the doctor, who at that time was traveling in Europe with his tiny grandson, ever received the letter. Second, he took to drink. More than anything else he fell into a deep, ineluctable mood of melancholia. Here he was, Meriwether Bye, destined to be a great man, a famous physician. Why, he had been a man of property once, with money in the bank! And now he was just a poor nobody, picking up odd jobs, paying his room rent fearfully from week to week, sometimes pawning Isaiah Bye’s chased gold watch.
How he worked it out he himself could not have told. But he saw himself a martyr, “driven by fate” from the high eminence of his father’s dreams to his own poor realities. Think how he had struggled, sacrificed—he believed it—the fun and freedom of youth to come to this! “How,” said Meriwether Bye harking back to Sunday-School days, “how are the mighty fallen!” And how easily might they have remained mighty.
He named his boy Peter after his Uncle Peter, in whose secondhand shop in Philadelphia he had spent delightful hours.
Now see the perversity of human nature. Just as his father Isaiah Bye had talked to his son Meriwether about the reward of effort and faithful toil, just so Meriwether talked to Peter about the futility of labor and ambition. And in particular he talked to him about the ingratitude of the white Byes—of all white people.
“It makes no difference, Peter, what you do, or how hard you work. The rewards of life are only for such or such. You may pour your heart’s blood out,”—he had a fine gift of rhetoric—“and still achieve nothing. Think of your great-grandfather. Fate favors those whom she chooses. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.”
Or, “Peter, if life has any favors for you, she’ll give them to you without your asking for them. The world owes you a living, let it come to you, don’t bother going after it.”
How completely his son might be absorbing all this, Meriwether never knew, for Peter, vocal enough with his playmates and others, maintained an owlish silence when his father thus harangued him.
But his aunt knew. She was a tall, stout, yellow woman, with that ineffable look of sadness in her eyes characteristic of a certain type of colored people. She was the sister of Peter’s mother, and when Peter’s father died, suddenly, inconsequently, she accepted uncomplainingly his son along with her other burdens.
Peter was then twelve; extraordinarily handsome, vivid and alert. Miss Susan Graves riding home from the cemetery reflected that he might be not such a burden after all. Clearly he would soon want to be taking care of himself.
“Peter,” she said thoughtfully, “what do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” her nephew replied, temporarily removing his gaze from the windowpane where it had been glued for twenty minutes. “I’m not bothered about that, Aunt Susan. You see the world owes me a living.”
She
