A Free State (5 page)

I suppose I conceived that this was all a kind of tribute to him, and his race, yet he was watching me with a face that might have defined irony. I stopped speaking.

“Have I said something wrong?”

With a look half amused and half derisive, he said, “Your eloquence is admirable.”

“Will you come to the theater some time and have a look? You can enter with me, and I can install you in the audience, and afterward perhaps we can work something up. You may have an idea and I may have one . . .”

“Do you propose to pay me?” he said.

“I will pay you out of my own pocket if need be.” I watched him register this. “Will you come, then?”

He stood, hefted his banjo in its sack, and said, “I'll have to see if I'm free.”

“Wait,” I said. “Will you tell me your real name?”

“Henry Sims.” He said this in his Spanish voice, so that his surname sounded like “seems.”

“Where may I find you? Can we discuss this further . . .”

“You found me twice,” he said. Then he walked away, leaving me puzzled, and with the distinct feeling that I might never see him again.

I made my way back to Barton's, where we were to hold an audition for a group of Alpine yodelers. I was disinclined to sit still for this performance, yet it was my responsibility, along with Mulligan, to conduct these auditions. Mulligan and I sat next to one another in the fifth row of the dark cavern of the hall as the troupe trouped onstage in their ludicrous outfits. The women as well as the men wore leggings apparently intended to make them resemble sheep, but which only made them appear ridiculously hirsute. Mulligan found this impossibly humorous, which was not common for him, and he began making remarks to me, sotto voce, as the troupe ran through their audition songs.

“They really ought to shave their legs,” he said.

“Quiet,” I said, sliding deeper into gloom.

“Really, it is a troupe of epicene centaurs,” he said.

“Will you stop.”

“I wonder if they are equally hairy on their arms. We ought to present them completely undressed.”

I let this pass.

“Perhaps we could breed them and shear them for profit.”

Onstage, the group was doing some kind of truncated Morris dance and slipping into an antiphonal falsetto that was beginning to strike me as absurd. Mulligan continued chipping away with his deprecatory epigrams, and the troupe dipped and stomped and yodeled, and I was overcome finally
with an attack of giggles which I tried in every way to stifle, unsuccessfully. Hearing my cackling, the troupe stopped in mid-yodel, and Mulligan, who was himself laughing, hollered to them, “You're hired! Mr. Douglass will talk to you about specifics when you are in your street clothes.” As they filed offstage, accompanied by my helpless laughter, Mulligan said to me, “We can insert them in the middle of the second half. They will be perfect.”

When I had myself under control, I walked backstage in a lightened mood.

For whatever reason, that night's performance was stellar. We were, needless to say, never less than professional. Still, for the past months we had rarely been more than professional. Yet as any performer will tell you, once in a while something gets loose and, like birds gathered in a tree creating a racket, everyone is subject to the same mysterious visitation of energy. It was certainly so on this night. Our first half was robust if not epochal. After intermission, the Parakeet Impersonator (a German) whom we had added as that week's specialty was received respectfully, but then we took the stage and “Across the Sea” extended itself under our feet and fingers and we all seemed to levitate six inches off the boards, and I remember looking across at Mulligan and feeling the hair rise on my arms. During the final number, “Clare de Kitchen,” Mulligan rose to his feet and squared off against Powell, and they jumped back and forth across the stage as if they were attached on strings to one another. Finally I rose to my feet as well and circled them, and Eagan—Eagan!—sank from his chair to his knees, playing variations I'd never heard before. Although the house was only half-full, I thought the
audience would tear the theater down, and we had to play three encores.

And yet, when the performance was finished for the evening, all went home in different directions, and one was left alone, alone. Descending abruptly from the peak of performance, one returned to one's rooms, or to a tavern, to hear the chimes at midnight, or at three in the morning. It had been an extraordinary day, yet it was ending in a way that had become painfully familiar. Along the quiet street, through the gate which Mrs. Callahan locked at eight o'clock each night, down the quiet hallway, and into my parlor, where I shut my apartment door behind myself and lit the lamps. I was still a young man, I told myself. I sat on my divan and read for a while. And after a while I set the book down and went to bed. It was far better than carrying sacks of grain across a muddy field, as I had remarked many times. Yet it occurred to me to wonder, as I turned down the lamp on my nightstand, where Henry Sims was, and how he made his peace with the night.

I
t was springtime in Philadelphia, and my gloomy mood did not last. I got up early the next morning and walked through the bright, still-damp city, through the sidewalk tree shade along Sixth Street on my way to the theater. I thought I might show up early, take care of a few business matters. Three creditors were becoming insistent, and we had sufficient funds to satisfy only two of them. Birch and a crew were supposed to be building a small replica of a cabin, on rollers, as an enhancement to our Uncle Tom segment, and I needed to see how that was coming along, as well.

The theater was alive with hammering and shouts, all of which emanated from Birch and two assistants. I made my way to the stage and regarded what they had done, which was perfectly serviceable.

“We'll put a porch on it tomorrow,” Birch said, wiping his face with a rag.

“Why does it need a porch?” I said.

“For Burke? Didn't you want him sitting out front?”

“I suppose,” I said. “But won't that make it more difficult to maneuver on and off the stage?”

“We'll make it so that it's detachable.”

I nodded, looked inside. “Put a chair or two in there, and maybe something on the walls,” I said.

After they'd finished and Birch had left for the morning, I took lunch at Kolb's, directly across from the theater. I liked the heavy, stained-wood paneling in the place, the lingering smell of beer and sauerkraut. I had my own napkin, and my own stein, and the house cat, Abel, knew he could count on a scrap or two from my plate. I lingered a while over one of my notebooks to finish scratching out a few notes toward a routine I was developing. Afterward, on the sidewalk, I stopped to let my eyes adjust to the day's brightness. I looked across Arch Street at the façade of our theater—the stone steps, the two-story columns, the frieze above, with its lyre and laurel. A mockingbird had perched atop the bust of Shakespeare and sang in full voice. I've always loved those birds—the inexhaustible variation in their songs, the way they find the highest perch, the beautiful arrogance, the absolute freedom. I stood listening for a full minute, then I stepped off the curb, and as I did so I heard someone say my name. I turned, and there, in a doorway, stood Henry Sims. His banjo, in its bag, leaned against the door frame.

I was so surprised to see him that it took me a moment to locate words. “You're here,” I said, finally and brilliantly.

“Can I see the theater?” he said. He wore spectacles now, and a brown plaid shirt and a pair of very fine hunting boots,
which were utterly unfit both for the city and for the warm weather.

“Well,” I said, “of course.” We continued to stand regarding one another for a moment or two, and then he picked up the banjo in its bag and we started across the street. He was younger than I'd first taken him to be. We were, I realized, not far from the same age; perhaps he was two years my junior. As we crossed, his gaze scanned the street up and down.

“I'm glad you came,” I said. “Have you been out performing?”

“No,” he said. “I don't do it every day.”

“Here,” I said, “this way.”

We entered the shaded alley that ran alongside the theater and continued down the cement walkway. I tried to arrange my thoughts as quickly as I could; this was the opportunity I had wanted, but it had arrived before I quite knew how I wished to handle it. We got to the stage door, which had been propped open. It was chilly inside, and we paused to let our eyes adjust to the relative darkness. There were always a few oil lamps set on a table by the door, and I located one and lit it, and we started walking through the curtained gloom of the backstage area.

“Watch for the ropes,” I said. Our backstage was full of traps for the unwary or the uninitiated—coils of rope, stacked wood placed anywhere for convenience, wardrobe racks, parts of moving sets retracted into the wings and beyond. Henry stuck close to my right elbow as we made our way.

“Here we are,” I said, opening the door into the dressing room, which was also still dark. I crossed to the dressing table and lit both lamps, and the room came into being.

“You can set the banjo down over there,” I told him.

He looked around the room, and as he did, I followed his gaze to the large mirror which hung lengthwise on the wall facing the dressing table, with a diagonal crack and pictures affixed to it, a cloth flower pinned on one edge. The necessary materials arrayed on the table: jars, wigs, pencils. Leaning in the corner of the room was Jenny, our mascot, a carved and painted wooden figure of a woman—some lost boat's figurehead—gazing at the ceiling. Powell had done time as a seaman, and he brought her in for good luck. We were going to hang her over the dressing room door but we hadn't got around to it. Someone had placed a straw hat on her head. A steamer trunk in the other corner, a low divan, and a large closet, the doors open, hooks on the doors hung with braces, vests, shoes arrayed along the bottom. Scattered around, and piled behind the divan, were props abandoned by visiting acts—three Indian clubs left by a pair of Chinese jugglers, a birdcage with a shoe in it, several coils of rope to be used with a trapeze assembly, a string of paper-cutout silhouettes.

“It's quite a circus, isn't it?” I said.

“When I got to Philadelphia I thought the theaters only had Shakespeare plays. Maybe operas.”

I was surprised to hear Shakespeare's name from a Negro's mouth. I wondered where he had picked that up. “How long have you been here?” I asked.

“A while,” he said.

He examined some of the jars and bottles, and he picked up one of the salvers of burnt cork mixture. He rubbed a bit of the sooty mess between his fingers and thumb, took some and smeared it across the back of his left hand. He stared at it.

“It's mixed with a bit of grease so that it won't sweat off easily,” I said.

“I had an idea about how you could present me.”

“Did you?” I said, slightly taken aback. As I faced him, I realized that the frames of his spectacles were empty of glass. He saw me notice this, and a slight smile shifted his features. I started to say something, and then I decided to hold off. This, I thought, is a fellow who likes to raise questions. “Let me show you the stage, and then we can talk about it.”

A sharp, narrow vein of light divided the heavy maroon draperies, which stretched far up into the darkness overhead. I pulled the curtain to one side and we stepped out onto the wooden boards of the stage, lit only by two lamps mounted on the side walls. Birch had left them on when he had retired for the day. I pointed to a row of metal shells with gas spigots inside, set along the stage's edge. “Later, all those will be lit, and you see the reflectors that illuminate us.” Beyond the edge, the hall, still dark, yawned like the mouth of Jonah's whale.

Looming over the stage from behind was our elaborately painted backdrop depicting a plantation scene—an elegant mansion house surrounded by magnolia trees, among which gowned women and waistcoated gentlemen watched with benign amusement as a few typical Darkies danced a jig. We had three different backdrops that we used to great effect during the performance, but this was a masterpiece. Henry stood for some moments, regarding the scene with interest. As he did so, an utterly unexpected embarrassment began to rise in me. I wasn't sure why; the figures were, after all, strictly a comic convention, and a universally employed one, at that. Still, I steered his attention elsewhere.

“We set up here,” I said. “Our chairs in a crescent like this. We step forward in turn, here, for solo pieces—songs, dances, banjo specialties, what have you . . .” I stopped, then said, “You're all right, are you?”

“Yes,” he said. He walked to the edge of the stage, looked out into the shadowed cavern, up, around. He turned back to the plantation backdrop again, took in the entire stage. He walked to stage left, then back across to stage right. His manner was that of a landlord, surveying a new property holding. His footfalls echoed in the empty house. As if registering this last fact, he executed a quick dance step on the boards at the front of the stage, and the pattern rippled through the hall like wavelets on a pond.

We returned to the dressing room; Henry sat on the divan next to his banjo in its sack, and I sat at the makeup table. I found myself fidgeting with a grease pencil, and I set it back down.

“Well,” I said, “is it what you expected?”

“It's big,” he said. “How many people come to the shows?”

“The hall seats eight hundred.”

“Tickets are fifteen cents?”

“Yes they are,” I said, surprised that he had checked independently. “Let me tell you my idea of how to present you,” I went on. “Then you can tell me yours.”

I had come up with the notion of stationing him behind a large sheet, with lights in back of him projecting his shadow forward, so that the audience would see a dancing, outsized silhouette. This had a certain novelty value, and it answered
one obvious challenge, although it left a number of others unaddressed. Still, I thought it was rather ingenious.

When I had outlined the idea, he gestured dismissively and said, “Why don't I put on the greasepaint with the rest of you?”

“The greasepaint,” I said. This stopped me for a moment. He was already a Negro, if a fairly light-skinned one. Why would he need to apply the cork?

“You can't present me as I am,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I cannot.”

“Right,” he said. “Well, the audience would think I was one of you.”

“One of us,” I said. “You mean a white man.”

“Yes,” he said. “Pretending to be what I am.”

Now I saw what he meant. A kind of double masquerade. It was an audacious proposition, even an elegant solution. Yet, as I mulled it, I felt uneasy. There was something very intimate about the transformation we underwent in the Virginia Harmonists. Whatever our individual differences, the assuming of the burnt-cork mask amounted to membership in a kind of brotherhood, or even a mystery cult, minus only the Masonic trappings. I felt oddly exposed by the idea of a Negro joining us in the ritual.

“My mother,” Henry continued, “told me, ‘If you want to hide something, leave it where everyone can see it.'”

Then he stood up and walked to the dressing table, touched the burnt-cork with one finger and, looking in the glass, painted a mustache on his upper lip with two quick swipes. Stepping back and regarding himself in the mirror, he laughed at his own reflection.

It was well into the afternoon, and I did not want to take more chance than I already had of his being discovered at the theater. I told him I would consider his idea, and if I could find a way of executing it soundly, we might give it a try. I told him I would need to discuss it with my partner. I gave him the address of, and directions to, my apartment, and we arranged to meet there in two days, after I'd had a chance to bring up the idea with Mulligan.

Before he left, he asked me about payment. I had anticipated this, in fact, and had given it a bit of thought. I was certain he could not have been making more than two dollars per day, playing on the street, based on what I had seen. The members of the Virginia Harmonists were paid quite well. Powell and Burke each drew sixty dollars per week, Eagan sixty-five, at his heated insistence. Mulligan, as cofounder and lead soloist, drew seventy-five, and as manager, and everything else, I took eighty. We earned substantially more when we traveled, although there were overhead expenses involved. Based on what I estimated that Henry earned, I offered to pay him four dollars for a night's appearance with us. This money would come out of my own draw, as I did not want to ask the others to subsidize the experiment, at least not initially.

When I named the figure, he looked affronted, repeated the words “Four dollars?” and fixed me with a disappointed frown.

“Well,” I said, aware that it was a slightly low figure, “how much did you expect me to offer?”

“I won't appear for less than ten dollars.” He gazed at me through his glassless spectacles.

“Ten dollars!” I said. This was outrageous, although I had to admire his cheek. That was nearly what Mulligan made for a night. “In no way will I pay you that kind of money. I will pay you five dollars and fifty cents, and no more than that, for one show only. If that show goes well—as I expect it to, mind you—and we feature you regularly, we can set a figure with which we are both pleased.”

He looked down at his banjo in its bag, nodded as he picked it up, and said, “That will be fine.” He stood up and shook my hand with a formality that was almost comic. I had the sense that he felt he had done well for himself. He said he would look forward to our meeting in two days, and then he left.

After he'd gone, my mind was awash with questions, all amounting to one question: Now what? How, really, could we present him onstage, given his race, without inviting trouble? If we did proceed, how to ensure that his secret would not somehow be found out? And how, indeed, could I introduce the idea to the others, and especially to Mulligan? Importing the fellow into the act, in whatever form, would upset a balance we had achieved through long practice and, eventually, habit.

There was the question of how to convince Mulligan to take a chance on a Negro performer. I knew that he was as discomfited by the parade of silly side acts as I was. Yet it would be difficult enough to sell him on the idea of adding another banjo player without handing him this very reasonable objection with which to kill the idea in its cradle. I thought that if I could secure a hearing for Henry, at least, then we could settle the details afterward. His presence and virtuosity would make the case for him.

There was another question, as well, that lurked underneath these. My years in the circus had trained me not to press an individual about his background—one's talent and willingness to work were one's passport. But this was not the circus. I was the proprietor, and I had the welfare of the troupe and its members' livelihoods to answer for. I knew nothing at all about the fellow, except that he was a masterful musician and performer. And I was not sure that I wanted to know more. There was certainly the possibility that he was a criminal, or a runaway. Yet it was unlikely that a criminal or runaway would present himself for daily public scrutiny on the streets, much less on the stage of a theater. There was something about him that did not conform to any template I had encountered. But by the time these thoughts had formed themselves, I had already determined to stow them. We needed something new, and this would be something new. It involved a risk I felt we needed to run.