A Free State

FOR MARY

I was a derision to all my people;
and
their song all the day.

—
LAMENTATIONS
3:14

C
ity haze shot through with morning sun. Buildings razed, buildings rising, dust drifting off the dirt streets drying in the morning air. Clank of carts on cobblestones, barrels unloaded, the men shouting, the mist burning off the river. Along Chestnut, along Walnut, along Market, they make their way, amid hollering and hammering and the smell of horse and mule shit. Open doors to taverns, men in bowler hats, bricks and shingles and the cart at the curb. The street sloping down toward the river and the docks.

Henry Sims regarded the poster as people jostled past on the sidewalk:

$200 REWARD!

RANAWAY FROM THE SUBSCRIBER, AT THE TIDES, FAIRHOPE,
VIRGINIA, ONE NEGRO, JOSEPH, AGED 19, 5 FEET AND 7 INCHES
IN HEIGHT; IS OF A LIGHT COPPER COLOR WITH GREEN EYES,
CLEVER AND PERSONABLE, AN EXCELLENT MIMIC; MAY WELL BE
TRYING TO PASS AS SPANISH OR AS FREEMAN. VERY PROFICIENT
PERFORMER ON THE BANJAR. HAD ON WHEN LAST SEEN, ROUGH
BROWN TROUSERS, WHITE DRESS SHIRT, A BLUE JACKET AND
PAIR OF NEW HUNTING BOOTS BELONGING TO THE UNDERSIGNED.
LIKELY HEADED FOR CINCINNATI, BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA, OR
NEW YORK. A REWARD OF $200 WILL BE GIVEN UPON HIS
DELIVERY TO HIS RIGHTFUL OWNER. JAMES STEPHENS, THE TIDES,
FAIRHOPE, VIRGINIA.

In the upper-right-hand corner, the silhouetted runaway, the shouldered stick with the bundle on the end, the frightened, caricatured black face. Not much of a likeness, he thought. In the distance, the river, steaming and shivering in the light morning breeze.

Three months earlier, Henry, born Joseph, had noticed a version of the same poster, offering $150. He was, apparently, rising in his former master's esteem. Over the weeks, that poster faded and tore and was covered by others. Every vertical surface in Philadelphia was a riot of posters and handbills crowing and cajoling, some fresh and sharp, some buckling and peeling like birch bark, announcing performances by operatic artists, contortionists, orators, Shakespearean companies, comedic sketches, dramas at the Chestnut Street Theater, all competing for space and attention with the reward posters for those who, like himself, had made their way out of what the solemn members of the Vigilance Committee liked to call the House of Bondage.

He turned his attention to a larger poster, adjacent.

HELD OVER!!

AT

BARTON's MINSTREL THEATER

THE ORIGINAL

VIRGINIA HARMONISTS

PURVEYORS OF ETHIOPIAN AIRS

PLANTATION JIGS

AND EVERY VARIETY OF

NEGRO JOLLITY

MESSRS. POWELL AND
DOUGLASS ON THE ENDS

UNRIVALLED HILARITY

MR. MULLIGAN WILL PERFORM HIS
SPECIALTY

“FIRE DOWN BELOW”

NIGHTLY

PERFORMANCES COMMENCE

AT 7 O'CLOCK

PUNCTUALLY

Above the text, an engraved depiction of five figures with black faces, seated in a semicircle, limbs jutting and jabbing, playing banjo, fiddle, tambourine, a set of bones. The troupes,
in which white men blackened their faces with burnt cork and sang and played like Negroes, were beyond number, and popular beyond measure. The Virginia Minstrels, the Sable Harmonists, the Christy Minstrels, Sanford's Minstrels, the Ethiopian Serenaders. Plantation Melodies, African Extempore, Essence of Old Virginny, Zip Coon, Jim Crow, Take Me Back to Dixie's Land . . .

No, Henry thought—take me not back to Dixie's Land. You can have Dixie's Land.

He hefted the sack in his hand, felt the light weight of the banjo with pleasure. Time, he thought, to purvey some Ethiopian airs. On a bright morning such as this he was still astonished at the feeling. To walk where you want to walk, as a free man. To look at the sunlight on the side of a brick building as a free man, to smell bread baking as a free man. To touch a tree, to tie your boot on the sidewalk, to enter a tavern, free. To know yourself to be more capable than most of the white men who, even here, condescend to you, and to be able to show it without fear of a whipping. To climb the stairs, to feel money in your pocket, as a free man. That was worth everything.

He turned and started down Walnut Street, toward the river. Like all musicians, he loved a river.

I
first saw Henry Sims on the corner of Chestnut and Front Streets, performing for the lunchtime idlers. He wore a bright-red flannel shirt buttoned at the neck despite the warm spring day, black suspenders, and a dark-gold, shallow-crowned straw hat which sat well back on his head, giving the impression of a halo.

That afternoon I was on my way to a dry goods shop where the troupe got fabrics at a discount. Powell had worked up a fem routine that we were planning to insert at the beginning of the evening's second half, and I was going to purchase some crinolines that Rose had requested. In addition to my role as Brother Neckbones, I had installed myself as our manager, accountant, property master, and, importantly, costume consultant, in no small part because it gave me ongoing reason to have business with Rose.

I heard the sound of the banjo before I saw its source. The song was recognizable as “Old Dan Tucker,” but the tune
was surrounded by a rowdy chorus of other tunes and half-tunes, banjo voices and lines of notes, all of which seemed to comment upon the main melody in tones of mockery, qualification, and encouragement.

I assumed there were at least two men playing, but as I approached the edge of the small crowd I saw a solitary, light-skinned Negro who was not only playing the banjo but dancing as well. The upper part of his body remained still except for his hands, but from hips to ground his legs had an independent life, shuttling from one position to another, in constant motion except for brief moments when he would hold still, as if daring you to fix his image in your mind. All the while he maintained a calm, enigmatic smile, as if he were merely sitting on a riverbank, watching the boats pass by.

Every one of us in the Virginia Harmonists had made it a point to study as many Colored musicians as we could track down. We were scholars of a sort: we conducted our studies in fields, in barns, on cabin porches, and on the docks. Yet I had never seen anything like what I was witnessing. Others played their instruments, with large or modest skill; perhaps they danced or sang or delivered a fragmentary monologue. But here was a true performer, in absolute command of his audience's attention. His little dance figures mimicked the turns of the melody and rhythm, as well as the substance of the lyrics. When he sang

Combed his hair with a wagon wheel

And died with a toothache in his heel . . .

he executed a maneuver with his ankles that made it appear as if the ground were sliding away under his feet. Arriving at the song's refrain,

Get out the way, Old Dan Tucker . . .

he would spring abruptly to one side with no apparent exertion, to the crowd's audible delight.

It was impossible to turn away. This, I realized immediately, was what we needed. I listened to him sing and play three songs, until he removed the straw hat from his head with a flourish, made a bow, and solicited contributions.

“I'm not the preacher,” he announced, setting his hat down on the cobblestones, “and I'm not the preacher's son—but I'll take up collection 'til the preacher comes . . .” Five or six coins fell under his glance as he twisted a tuning peg, thumbing a string, repeatedly, as its pitch rose and took its proper place in the choir. I remember the sharp sunlight and the rushing clouds on that brilliant, blustery afternoon.

I hung back to let the crowd disperse, meaning to talk to him in private. As I waited, my attention was distracted for a moment by some barrels falling off the back of a cart and making an ungodly racket, which startled everyone. When I turned my attention back to the group, the wizard had disappeared. Not a sign of him, as if he were a djinn returned to a bottle and spirited away. It was the first evidence I had of his genius for escape. I swore that I would return and find out who he was. And that is what changed everything for me.

I had been in Philadelphia for three years.

I had made a place, and a name, for myself in that sprawling city, with its alleys and avenues, its great stone churches and its mean dockside hotels, its Southwark and its Callowhill and its broad public squares. At that time it was hard to know whether the city was under construction or demolition. It was, in fact, both, and at a feverish pace. The same might have been said for the entire nation. Buildings, businesses, whole communities sprang up seemingly overnight, then were torn down to make way for their successors, as if living out some myth of endless progress, of clear title to reshape the world day to day.

At least this was the case in the Northern states. In the South, a different myth was under construction—of some fancied Golden Age, a glorious past built on the bones of the present, some vision of columned buildings and millennial stasis. A stage setting, behind which you could hear the groans of the dark-skinned men and women who labored without pay to keep the illusion inflated. It was an odd spectacle to witness at a distance, especially for those who were raised in the illusion-free setting of a small working farm holding, as I had been, and who supplied the necessary labor themselves.

My grandparents on either side had arrived in America during the first great wave of Irish immigration, sometime soon after the nation had become a nation, and they settled near the Pennsylvania borderlands, not far from what became Gettysburg. My father's line of Scotch-Irish mistrusted the cities, mistrusted in fact any form of imagination beyond what was necessary to establish one's own holding and be left alone. My mother was Catholic Irish, and so nothing if not
imaginative, and life in my father's literal and figurative Presbyterian gristmill must have been a kind of slow extinction. I saw this, although none of my ten siblings—all of whom were older than myself—seemed to, and I was always trying to raise a smile on her face with some little song or saying.

I was beaten regularly. All my brothers were beaten, although my eldest brothers seemed to take it as a badge of pride and a token of affection. I did not. If ever my father saw me idle, or enjoying a joke or a game of my own devising, this was cause for correction. A smell of stale urine and perspiration came off him as he whipped me with a doubled length of rope and an expressionless face. It was the closest physical contact I had with him. I did not wish for more.

Oddly enough, my father did not mind music. He played the fiddle in a flatfooted, unadorned manner, and he had a number of the old ballads by heart, things such as “The Unquiet Grave” and “The Twa' Corbies.” His ordinarily watchful, squinting eyes would close and his brows arch slightly when he would approach one of the higher melody notes. I found these songs rather somber, but I was fascinated by the very fact that they existed—that a person, even one as stolid as my father, could all but change shape by shifting from the spoken language of workaday concern into song, as if stepping through a window onto the moon.

As soon as I was deemed old enough—five years old—I was delegated to drag sacks of this or that over here or there, under the low wood rafters, and to stand by a cart until brother Mac returned, and to milk our cows when sister Margaret had other responsibilities. My father grudgingly allowed me to attend school—at my mother's insistence—
and I had instruction until the age of eleven, at which time I was officially herded toward the waiting yoke. Not even the mill, but rather some dismal farmland he had acquired, half a day's ride away, near Carlisle.

It broke my heart to leave my mother. She was my refuge from an oppressive tedium—the dispenser of consoling words, little rhymes, small tokens always hidden from my father and brothers, such as a piece of pie or candy that she had acquired somehow. I suppose I was her refuge as well. She wept when I left. I did as well, but I did it out of sight.

At the farm, I worked under the supervision of my brothers Duncan and Robert. They took after our father in their habits. The days were intolerably long, and filled with pointless repetitive labor. Work this pump until your right arm drops off. Repeat, with your left, until you are armless. Sleep upon a horsehair pallet half an inch thick, grow two arms back, repeat the next day. Grind this, lift this, carry this, pull this. My brothers, never warm to begin with, were strangers to me now, whose only means of social intercourse seemed to be the shouting of orders, the emission of rude jokes, and the administration of physical punishment, with and without cause. I had no privacy whatsoever, except for Sundays after church, when I would steal a precious hour or two and escape into the one book I had managed to export from home—
Robinson Crusoe
.

I hated the farm, and I thought my life had ended prematurely, but it was there that I first saw the Negro minstrels.

My brothers had met two sisters in the town, a brewer's daughters as I remember, and invited them to a show which was to be held in a tent on a neighboring farm. At that time,
and in that place, entertainment was not easily available, and when some itinerant offering came through, whether it was a lantern show or a lecture or a circus, everyone attended.

Of course my brothers had no inclination to bring me along on their evening of courtship, but I put up a racket, threatening every type of insurrection—I was twelve years old, and I could have brought the farm's gears to a halt in half a dozen ways—and they gave in, installing me in the rear of a cart, amidst the hay and some lengths of wood for a future barn. I had no idea what we were going to see; I just wanted to go somewhere.

The show was to be held on a farm six miles away, and the spring evening was warm as the cart made its way along the post road. Any form of travel was a balm to my soul, and I lay in the back looking up at the softening evening sky and wished I were on my way to some glorious battle or sea voyage. The sky was a great ocean and the clouds were ships. I awoke from a shallow slumber as the wagon rocked to an abrupt halt and we were stopped in a field, among many others.

The seats were already filling in the tent. Duncan and Robert and the girls found four together near the rear, and I was left to locate an orphaned perch for myself. This turned out to be good luck, as I made my way to the front and found a narrow spot on a bench between two corpulent farmers, only one row away from the stage platform. I can recall as if I were there now the shadows on the inside of the tent, the smell of bodies and the earth on which the benches were set.

At length, a man went around and dimmed the lamps at the perimeter of the tent, and then turned up the lamps along
the front of the stage platform so that they cast light there, and the audience grew quieter.

A figure emerged from behind the canvas curtain at the rear of the stage, the footlights casting his looming shadow in triplicate on the canvas behind him. He seemed at least eight feet tall, an effect heightened by his satin trousers, which had vertical stripes that ran from his waist to his cuffs and glistened in the light, and a top hat that had met with some accident and was cocked in mid-rise. His shirt, also of some bright satin stuff, had puffy sleeves that billowed and swung when he gestured. His face was black, black as tar, making his eyes and mouth stand out in an uncannily exaggerated manner so that he resembled either a personable devil or a threatening angel. And he carried a musical instrument I had not seen before. It had strings, and the body was round, resembling a drum head.

This was Joel Walker Sweeney, a figure of legend now but at the time a mysterious apparition portending one knew not what. I believed him to be an actual Negro, and I gazed at him in awe.

Stepping to the front of the stage and grinning like a demon, he shouted, “
Good ebening, good ebening, everybody!
” and began playing his banjo. It was a jumping, twitchy tune—in fact it was no tune at all, but only a series of repeated rhythmic arabesques. As he played, he made some introductory remarks, quite at his leisure and unrelated to what his banjo was doing.

“
I hopes you is fine dis ebening
,” he said, as the banjo spun out its commentary beneath his voice. His dialect was strange and jarring to the ear—English, certainly, yet some rogue variant that forced one to pay attention in order to discern
the sense. “
I has come from Old Virginny, a far piece for sho'. I got on board a locomotive, but dey had only built three mile of track so it didn't take me very far. Den I climbed on a packet boat on de Chesapeake, but don't you know dat boat sank. I swam ashore and found me an old mule to ride, but after a ways that mule took sick and died, and so I walked the rest of de way and here I is. At least I kep' my banjer wit' me and I may as well play a few songs for you good people tonight
.”

How to convey the atmosphere that settled over the tent? The swish his satin sleeves emitted as he switched and swung along the stage, the way his movements were timed and echoed the phrases of his songs and the banjo . . . He played at least six songs solo—I remember “Lucy Long,” “Jump Jim Crow,” and “Jim Along Josey”—before being joined by another fellow who played the bones and danced a marvelous jig dance. The songs beguiled me; they were full of improbable characters, tragic courtships, bullfrogs dressed like soldiers, talking birds. The sound of the banjo—part drum, part lute—set up an irresistible forward momentum, yet it constantly subverted expectation. Where you were led to expect a note, there would be an emphatic absence; where you had been led to expect rest, you would be pushed forward into the next episode. The banjo constantly insisted: “
And, and, and, and, and
. . .” Always more to come, never the possibility foreclosed, except playfully. I went into a kind of trance, as if he had cast a spell upon me . . . the shadows behind him, the proximity of all the other souls, the warmth of the evening . . . I was transported, lifted above the world and its tedium, as if a curtain had been pulled back and I had been told that all glory could be mine.

He played for what seemed both an eternity and the most fleeting of moments. During a spell of especially riotous applause, Sweeney left the stage, and I sensed a shift of some
sort in the audience response. I returned to myself and looked around and realized that the performance was, in fact, concluded. People were getting up from their seats and making their way outside. We were being evicted from the circle of wonder and possibility and herded back into the lockstep of ordinary time.