There Is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Author:Jessie Redmon Fauset [Fauset, Jessie Redmon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

They enjoyed the opera and sang snatches of it coming home as they walked to the subway. Once in the express train, however, Joanna lapsed into sadness.

“I don’t think my voice is as big as that prima donna’s, but those dancing girls! I should have been right up there with them! Oh, Peter, I believe I’m the least bit discouraged.”

She told him of her trips with Bertully. “I didn’t mind those girls calling me ‘nigger.’ That was sheer ill-breeding. Remember what we used to say when we were children when they called us names?” She recited it: “ ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ What I minded was that they couldn’t dream of my being accepted. Thought I had a nerve even to ask it.”

She mounted the steps. “Come in, Peter.”

After dinner they sat in the back parlor and Joanna went on with her story, Peter listening closely.

“I’m glad you’re telling me about this, Joanna,” he said seriously. “Now you’ll understand my case better. You know how I feel about white people and their everlasting unfairness. As though the world and all that in it is belonged to them! I tell you, Jan, I’m sick of the whole business,—college, my everlasting grind, my poverty, this confounded prejudice. If I want to get a chance to study a certain case and it’s in a white hospital you’d think I’d committed a crime. As though diseases picked out different races! I’m a good surgeon, I’ll swear I am, but I’ve got so I don’t care whether I get my degree or not. You can’t imagine all the petty unfairness about me. Only the other day the barber refused to shave me in the college barber-shop. Your own cousin, John Talbert, is a Zeta Gamma man if ever there was one—that’s the equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa in his school, you know. Do you think he got it? No, they black-balled him out.”

Joanna sat silent, stunned by this avalanche. And to think she had precipitated it!

“Arabelle Morton’s sister, Selma,” Peter went on morosely, “took her Master’s degree last year. The candidates sat in alphabetical order. Selma sat in her seat wondering whom the chair on the left of her belonged to—it was vacant. At the last moment a girl came in, a Miss Nelson, who had been in one or two of her classes. Selma knew she was a Southerner. ‘Oh, I just can’t sit there,’ Selma heard her say, not too much under her breath. And some friend of hers went to the professor in charge of the exercises and he let her change her place, though it threw the whole line out of order.”

He paused, still brooding.

“Another colored girl—can’t think of her name—paid for a seat in one of the Seminary rooms. The white girl next to her, apparently a very pleasant person, had her books all over her own desk space and this one, too. They were the best seats in the room.

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