Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  There is no pride so strong, so inflexible, so complacent as the pride of the colored “old Philadelphian.” Aaron Cary taught his small grandson that bondsmen who had been enslaved, as Africans had been enslaved, need feel no shame. The burden of that was on their enslavers. But when men rose in less than half a century to positions of independence and of signal success, their children had an ancestry of which they might well be proud.

  His own interests were along business lines. He liked to be able to speak of his son, “Doctor” Christopher Cary, but he would have preferred to be able to point to him as a successful business man or even as a smart “Philadelphia lawyer.” Aaron Cary liked men who possessed and knew how to exercise native ability.

  He told Oliver about Philadelphia families of color who had made the most of this ability. He took him to the churches, St. Thomas’s; Crucifixion; Central Presbyterian; “Cherry St.” Baptist which was really on Christian Street; Union Methodist way up in the fastnesses of North Philadelphia. . . . After service he stood with the little boy on the sidewalk and pointed out to him the descendants of the Augustines, the Trowers, the Dutreuilles, the Baptistes, the Allmans, the Stephenses, families which had made a specialty of catering and undertaking. . . .

  He showed him sites of old forgotten undertakings, Mr. Jacob White’s School where the children of Philadelphia’s best colored families had gone and in which a few of them had taught. It was the forerunner of the “separate school” in Philadelphia which, while not based on the truest spirit of either brotherhood or the much-vaunted Quaker fairness, had yet its points.

  There was too an “Institute for Colored Youth” which he himself had attended—a marvelous school if his description were true. . . . He always referred to it with loving familiarity as the “I.C.Y.” And Oliver for years after connected it inextricably in his mind with the picture of sleety pavements and slipping pedestrians madly clutching the air.

  As a climax old Aaron saved for the boy the story of his own success; how he had obtained to his father’s business; how he had saved time and secured patronage by the expedient of inditing letters written in his distinctive old-fashioned writing to the whole list of his customers, asking them at stated intervals, if they did not want him to come and look over their furniture. . . . To his knowledge of upholstering, he had added that of cabinet-making. . . .

  He had the fine feeling of the Negro for family and catered to the very best . . . exclusively. It was known that he had declared himself unable to serve certain groups of nouveaux riches .As a result it gave, through the course of the years, a certain cachet to have it known that one’s upholstering was handled by Cary and Son.

  He had no son in the business since his only boy, Christopher, had studied medicine; his assistant was the son of one of his older brothers, a man only ten years younger than himself. This latter had introduced painting into the firm’s activities. Beyond this Old Cary refused to go. He thought it best to concentrate in these fields and to give superlative service on every job.

  As a result he had for years served the same group of families: the Drews, the Charlemagne Cadwaladers, the Fultons, the Folsoms, the Chestnut Hill Nashes, the Browns on North Broad Street. . . . He had withdrawn from the active business now, but his name still remained on the little worn sign in front of the small dark shop on Locust Street.

  Sometimes with the little boy he would walk around there and inspect a piece of work which had been ordered by Mrs. Francis Drew or Mrs. Charlemagne Cadwalader, ladies as old as he. And from families which had settled in Philadelphia, no earlier than his . . . though with less coercion. . . . These two elderly scions met with a touch of distinction and other day politeness which brought them together by a closer margin than their difference in station could possibly interpose between them.

  Oliver was tremendously impressed by all this. He grew to have some of his grandfather’s feeling for the cultivation of the inborn talent which was one reason why his father’s efforts to interest him in the professions either of medicine or law left him cold.

  He would be a musician, he told his grandfather, gravely exchanging confidences for the old man’s reminiscences, as they roamed through the latter’s happy hunting ground, down South Street, teeming with unwashed Negroes and Jews, through Ninth Street, less picturesque and primitive, down and across to Seventh and Race where they would sit in Franklin Square. . . .

  He would write, not the kind of music one usually heard, not simply a medley of sweet sounds, he explained in his childish terms, but music that told something, that drew pictures, that would make you see all this. He pointed to the forms milling about the vicinity in which they happened to be.

  If his grandfather was disappointed because Oliver showed no disposition to succeed to him, he never manifested it. . . . He was consistent. He meant what he said when he remarked that a man should develop his native talent. . . . It took money, he knew, to study music. And Oliver should have that. He had meant to leave his tidy fortune, which his patrons the Folsoms had so carefully invested for him, to his son Christopher. But he would never, he told his wife, his faded eyes hardening, leave his money to his son for that fool wife of his, Olivia, to enjoy. In which Rebecca Cary heartily seconded him.

  The old man was no scholar. It is doubtful after his graduation from the “I.C.Y.” if he had ever read any book entirely through except Booker Washington’s “Up From Slavery.” . . . But he did read the newspapers and without having formally studied history, he had the historian’s comparative sense.

  And some of this he imparted to his grandson, explaining to the boy that slavery had not been a special curse visited upon a special people. . . . It had been a cause to produce an effect, a necessity to permit a certain group of people an opportunity to glimpse and adopt another kind of civilization. All this he had gleaned for himself through a practical interpretation of newspapers and of the Bible, which he considered a guide to all situations and problems.

  One other thing too he taught the boy—that greatness knew no race, no color; that real worth was the same the world over; that it was immediately recognizable and that it was a mark of genuine manhood to know no false shame.

  At Grandmother Blake’s home in Boston he was subjected to a more democratic, a more catholic, influence. The members of that family were intense individualists. Dr. Blake was born so and unconsciously had forced the same rôle upon his wife Janet. . . . The twins had inherited his tendencies. In that household there was little talk of race . . . most people, most events were discussed from a cosmic sense. One heard in the same breath of Roland Hayes and John McCormack. Oliver learned of Crispus Attucks, as he learned of Paul Revere, of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, of Burghardt DuBois and More-field Storey.

  Janet and David rather prided themselves on keeping au courant with modern literature. . . . They read impartially the works of Sara Teasdale, William Rose Benét, Countee Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Elinor Wylie. . . . And in this household Mrs. Blake was just as apt to be entertaining at dinner, white, as colored, guests.

  In the more purely social functions which the two young people managed, those invited were mainly colored since the Blakes, like the older Carys, were really in matters of moment, strong “race-people.” Janet, junior, particularly was in the habit of declaring bluntly that when it came to marriage, no white colored men need apply.

  “I’m going to marry a man that looks exactly like you, Oliver-ducky. Not quite so good-looking, he’d be too hard to manage; but you’re the type, all right, all right.”

  It was hard to go from the warmth and pride, the brightness and breadth of these two households to the frigid sterility of the house on Thirty-eighth Street in Philadelphia. It is possible that if Olivia, even while nursing her projects, had bestowed upon her youngest-born the most ordinary of maternal attention he would have elected to stay in these surroundings where he was undoubtedly so dear. . . .

  But as it was, her coldness, her indiff
erence intrigued and stimulated him. Baffled by the chilly riddle of her attitude he had to come back to his real home from time to time to find out what it was all about.

  CHAPTER II

  STILL most of the time he was happy . . . completely so if he were with his father, or Christopher or Teresa. It was only in the presence of his mother that he became suddenly discomfited, like an awkward boy who does not know what to do with ungainly hands or feet. . . . But there was nothing ungainly about Oliver. He was beautifully constructed, he knew it himself, for ever since his babyhood he had heard sung constantly the saga of his grace, his fine looks and his accomplishments. He had no conceit about these matters, accepting them quite casually as one accepts blue eyes or brown. Indeed he might never have thought of them with any degree of consciousness, if his mother’s behavior had not induced in him such a degree of introspection. His appearance, he thought, could not offend her. There must be some hidden, some inner defect, which age would reveal to him.

  It could not be said that he was truly living at home until he was about ten, in the year that Teresa first went off to Christie’s. . . . By that time he had gathered from the establishments of his two grandfathers a hundred, subtle re-enforcements. His delicately sensuous nature lived for beauty and there were so many places in which beauty might be found, so many ways in which it might be fulfilled.

  Because he was of a family well-educated and of comfortable means, because also of his Grandfather Cary’s promises for the future, he was able, as few people of any race or class are, to savor daily, consciously, with a whimsical deliberateness, the pleasure of being alive.

  Long before he knew any Latin he spied a motto, framed on the wall of his father’s office. It read:

  “Mens sana in corpore sano—”

  He asked his father what it said and big Christopher translated. “A sound mind in a sound body. . . . It means,” he began.

  But Oliver interrupted him. “I know what it means, Father.” He had always known.

  The prospect of his life enthralled him. But he was content to live each day. Probably the only condition in the future which made him want to leap over the host of intervening days was the thought of the home which Teresa had planned to make for him and Henry. . . . Otherwise there were charming people, there were pleasantly stimulating lessons, there was the wholesomeness of outdoor sports. There were specially set apart the weary paternalness of his father; the jolly chumminess of his brother Christopher, who unlike many brothers never seemed to realize the difference in their years; and there was the sweet, tender steadfastness of Teresa.

  She represented to him all that his nature so craved from his mother and more besides . . . the fulfilment of faith. If Teresa were to fail him, he could not, he knew, endure life even with all its peculiar zest and lure. . . . But of course to speak of Teresa’s failing him would be the equivalent of speaking of the falling of the heavens.

  At night, and in the early morning too, he liked to lie thinking on these and many things, quite deliberately shutting his mother out from his thoughts. . . . In the deep quiet places of his mind he could not think about his mother. . . . It hurt him too much. . . . But presently at these moments of secret meditation, he found himself unable too, to think of anything tangible at all. So engrossed was he with the touch of fresh, smooth linen on his young cheek; the alluring warmth of the spot where his tousled hair nested; the virgin coolness of that part of the pillow which he had not yet touched.

  Through the open window strange provocative sounds would stray in; at night a party of revellers speeding through the quiet street . . . he tried to picture where they had been, whither they were going to cause them to be so unrestrained. . . . In the mornings the sounds were different; very new and fresh and vaguely hopeful as if everybody were going to have a chance to begin again.

  What he enjoyed most at these moments, the phenomenon which made him least unwilling to go to bed and most willing to waken, were the lights. At the close of the day they were so different from what they were at its beginning.

  The arc-light on the corner cut out a large square space on his ceiling. . . . Against the velvet darkness of the shadowy room it remained there steadfast and immovable. But very early in the morning the daylight came in, whimsically, fitfully, moving uncertainly and timidly on wall and picture and ceiling . . . on his bedspread. . . . Now when he was quite a lad he recalled how it had escaped his grasping fingers when he was a little boy. Of all the wonders of nature he liked light best. . . . When life should leave him, it would be light that he would hate most to lose. . . . He hoped it would rest long and lovingly across his face when he lay dead.

  In his waking hours he liked best music and people . . . all sorts of music and all sorts of people. Even people who were unkind or ugly, fascinated him when they wounded his delicate spirit. . . . And he liked to watch quite rough working folks, the people one saw down on Front Street along the river; colored men working on the perpetually uprooted streets in the terrible dog-days of late June and July. Such people labored with a sureness and willingness, a healthy acknowledgment of the necessity and blessedness of toil.

  All this he would translate some day into music . . . the song, the rhythm, the grunt of the colored men whom he had seen working one day on Woodland Avenue near the University where he had been waiting for Christopher.

  And there was something else too that he must get into melody . . . the calmness, the peace, the utter satisfaction that he had glimpsed on early summer mornings on the faces of laborers trudging serenely to work in the cool of the day before the sun had made a fiery furnace of the city. . . . He used to sit on the steps of the house on Eleventh Street and watch them walking off, off into the light, into new and unknown distances as though questing the ultimate adventure. . . .

  They seemed so happy. . . . Translating this look into music would, he knew, be for him the ultimate adventure. It would take years of study, long, feverish hours of en deavor before he could make horn and harp and piano, oboe, clarinet and viol tell to the ear the vision which his eyes had seen.

  CHAPTER III

  BUT of course there were those chilly spaces, those blank moments when his mother’s indifference, her almost obvious dislike, cast their shadows about him. There were moments, especially when he first came home to live, when half harboring in his mind the memory of the constant attention and tenderness of his two sets of grandparents he would rush home from school to seek his mother. She would perhaps be in her room. Sally would tell him and he would go thundering up the stairs.

  “Say, Mother, I got a hundred in Algebra again today.”

  “Oliver, you are getting too big a boy to come rushing into my room without knocking on the door. . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, Mother. I’ll try not to do it again. . . . But now I’m here, may I stay awhile?”

  “I suppose so. . . . What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  Well, what was it he wanted to see her about!

  “I thought you might like to hear how I had done in school today. I was the only one that understood how to transpose the equation without help. The teacher said she was proud of me. She said it twice. She said: ‘If every boy would work as intelligently as Oliver Cary . . .’”

  He turned his golden appealing face up to her; his face which itself could not show pride until her own had ratified his teacher’s pronouncement,

  “That’s very nice, Oliver.”

  After that, impossible to go on with other recitals of praise and glory.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go downstairs, Mother.”

  “Very well, and when you do go, close the door, so I won’t be interrupted again.” . “Aren’t you going to eat lunch now, Mother, with me?”

  Abstractedly she would look up from the papers to which her glance had so quickly strayed. “Lunch? I’ve already had mine. I told Sally to put some aside for you.”

  Choking back the tears he would go down. He knew it would be impossible for him t
o eat. But Sally’s cunning hand was usually able to offset this impossibility.

  There was the day when he saw her, when he saw his own mother standing on the corner of Fortieth and Aspen Streets. He was coming out of school and he spied her wine-colored coat. Almost without volition his legs went tearing up the street. “Mother,” he shouted, “Mother!” With the other ladies (he did not know whether they were white or colored since there were none fairer than she), she turned and faced him, let her eyes, like theirs, rest on his face with a strange and awful lack of recognition. Then she turned away again. He stood still. . . .

  Afterwards he went home, rushed up to the long mirror in the bathroom door, surveyed himself intently. Yes, he was clean and neat. His heart palpitating, he met her as she came in the hall.

  “Mother, why didn’t you speak to me? I called and called. . . .”

  “That’s precisely the reason I didn’t speak to you,” she began coldly.

  “What reason?”

  “Because you called and called. . . . You don’t suppose I want my friends, my friends, those ladies, to think I was the—the mother of a wild Indian, do you?”

  She reduced him as always to a state of abject submission. He knew he had committed no wrong, that her explanation was inadequate, trivial. But he was only a little boy and the sense of filial duty was strong upon him.

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  Cruelly she followed up her advantage. “And anyway what could you have had so important to tell me that it couldn’t wait. Those ladies and I were talking on matters of the utmost consequence. . . . Why should they have been interrupted by a little boy?”