Circus Parade (12 page)

Another shillaber, with an Italian who looked like like a peddler, had some difficulty in getting close to the board. The operator said quietly—“Etlay ethay ogaday uckerslay up otay ethay cardbay.” (“Let the dago sucker up to the board.”) The way cleared for him at once.

I coaxed the young Negro to take a chance with me. At last he could stand the contagion of the play no longer. “Heah, white boy, you beats it if you all kin,” he said, slipping me a ten dollar bill.

I touched Jeremiah with my foot, and pushed closer to the board, the Negro close to me.

“I'll bet ten, Mister, if you'll let me pick up the shell,” I said innocently.

“Certainly, my boy, certainly, most assuredly. It merely saves me the labor of raising a simple shell. A straight and fair game, gentlemen, and you can raise any shell you wish. Merely a game of wits—guess work. He who guesses the best always wins in this and other games of life.”

The Italian played ahead of me, also the suntanned yokel and others. Their bets ranged from one to ten dollars. Money went back and forth, the operator and his shillabers working fast. The shillabers asked questions, the operator talked swiftly and moved his hands nervously, thus keeping up the tension of the play.

He suddenly beamed at me. “If you still wish to pick your own shell up, my lad, that privilege is yours. You look like a brave gambler to me. You love the game as I do. So it's as you will, my boy, as you will. I believe in giving the young a chance. I was young once myself away back yonder,” he chortled, placing a ten dollar bill between the first and second finger.

I laid the Negro's money on the board. The operator placed it between his fingers.

“The left shell,” I said and raised it, handing him the pea I had carved in the alley. “Here it is, Mister. I win.”

The operator looked startled. The scar on his face turned redder. His own pea was lodged in his long finger nail. Before he recovered I took the money from between his fingers and dodged low and was gone. Jeremiah was well ahead of me.

Looking back I saw the shillaber with the derby hat make a grab for my colored friend. I was soon lost in the crowd.

I hurried off the lot, the two ten-dollar bills in my hand. Realizing after some distance that no one was pursuing me, I thought of the tough spot in which I had left the lad who had loaned me the ten dollars.

“Oh well,” I said to myself, “they can't do anything with him—maybe beat him up a little, that's all.”

Then the thought came that they might do anything with a Negro in Atlanta.

So thinking I reached the Salvation Army Hotel on Peachtree Street.

Sitting in a pine chair was my colored friend.

“What all took you so long?” he asked, as I handed him a ten dollar bill.

His eyes went as big as eggs.

“Ge-mun-ently—this all I git?” he asked.

“Sure Boy, look at all the fun you had. You're lucky to get your ten back. I took all the chances. Suppose I hadn't showed up at all.”

“Gee, that's right,” he said as I left with Jeremiah.

Jock smiled happily when I told him of the incident that night.

 

W
ITHIN three weeks Cameron's World's Greatest Combined Shows were so badly crippled on account of many desertions that the tents were raised in each town with great difficulty.

It is the custom with the wanderers of circus life to leave without notice, and often without money. Routes of other circuses are studied carefully in theatrical papers, so that many “jump the show” and join one in the same vicinity. They will often travel many hundreds of miles until they come to another circus appearing in the same city.

Barnum and Bailey's show was pitched for two days in Forth Worth, Texas, when we arrived. Four clowns, three musicians and one freak deserted in a body.

Whiteface was made a professional clown by accident.

Somewhere his ancestors must have made forgotten kings to laugh. He had been a stake-driver a short time before. There was a vast difference in swinging an eight-pound sledge and being a kinker. For the kinkers are the performers, the aristocrats of the circus world.

He was a natural clown. People laughed at everything he did. Where he came from no one knew. His features were aquiline. There were traces of Ethiopian, Caucasian and Indian in him. But in the South he was just another Negro.

There was an eagle-like expression about his mouth and nose. In his eyes was the meek look of a dove. His teeth were as even as little old-fashioned tombstones in a row. He gave one the impression of power gone to seed, of a ruined cannon rusting in the sun, or a condor with broken wings.

He was one of those people in the subterranean valley who somehow managed to grow and give something to a world that had no thought of him. Under the make-up of a clown his sombre expression left him. He pushed his magnificent yellow body around the ring in a tawdry fool's-parade. He did not walk, he shambled. Over his yellow face was the white paint of the clown. He was, in the language of the circus, a whiteface.

His start had not been conspicuous. Four clowns had deserted. Something had happened to another performer. Whiteface had been helping tear down some aerial rigging, and to save a delay he had been asked to do a dance. All the kinkers or performers smiled as he consented. The audience would laugh at his attempt at dancing, and the aim was to somehow make the audience laugh.

Then something happened. The huge Negro, with the flat coarse shoes lined with brass in front, ambled on the platform like a man with no bones in his legs. He resembled an immense dummy held up with wire and allowed to sag in the middle. He looked about him helplessly. And then suddenly listened, as though for a firing-squad. Then held out his long left arm as if wanting to say a last word with the gunners. It was a stroke of uncouth genius. The terrific effect of it stunned even the ringmaster. There was that tremendous silence one feels only before an execution. Then the great heavy feet began to move.

They patted the wooden stage with the noise of a giant's hands being clapped together. The boneless body moved as if dancing to the roar of the elements. Then suddenly it stopped. He held out his hand for a second as before and ambled from the stage with the same tempo he had used in closing the dance. The applause went around the tent in mighty waves. He was forced back on the platform again.

There was a heavy silence. The heavy feet shook for a second and a heavier wave of appreciation rolled around the tent. Then the immense hand went out like a yellow talon outspread. It had the effect of a firing-squad again. In another second he had ambled from the platform.

Immediately he was prevailed upon to become a clown. He took the job with the same unconcern that he had taken that of stake-driving. He assembled his regalia and rehearsed by himself. He would inflict none of his three colors on the pure white strain of his brother clowns. But in justice to them, they were nearly all artists at heart and drew no color line.

Sufficient to himself as a stake-driver, he remained the same as a clown.

On the third night there wandered on the hippodrome track one of the weirdest of grotesqueries. The pathos and the laughter, the tragedy and the misery of life were stamped on its eagle face. And out of its eyes shone laughing pity.

People with the circus thought it was Jimmy Arkley putting on a new number. Jimmy was the boss clown and liked to do the unexpected. But Jimmy Arkley was standing on the sidelines himself. In his eyes were blended jealousy and admiration. For, bowing to right and left, was a master buffoon all unknowing.

He was using an old artifice to make his audience laugh, that of dignity being made ludicrous and still wrapping the remnants of dignity about itself. He was dressed as a king, with wide fatuous mouth and little shoe-button eyes. His crown was formed from a battered dish-pan and his sceptre was a brass curtain pole. A royal robe, trimmed with raw cotton, dragged on the ground behind him. The robe was so long that his scurvy pet alley-cat used it as a vehicle upon which to ride. Time after time the king would fall out of character long enough to chase the cat from the robe. But as soon as he continued his royal promenade the cat would get on the robe again. In his confusion the king would stumble over an imaginary obstacle.

After regaining his balance he was all dignity again. It was tragic to have so many unforeseen things happen just at the time he was showing himself to his subjects. But the more he suffered the more his subjects laughed.

When he had made his sad round of the hippodrome track and the curtains of the back entrance hid him from view, he took the scurvy alley-cat in his arms and said:

“Well, Bookah, we done made 'um all laugh.”

And Booker T. Washington licked the fatuous mouth of his master.

The audience was still chuckling over the king's exit. The manager hurried to find out who the new kinker was. The discovery that the king was none other than John Quincy Adams, the roustabout stake-driver, was a surprise. The manager told him to go ahead with the act, and gave him a raise of five dollars a week. This brought his salary up to fifteen dollars. He hugged the scurvy cat and said, “Heah, Bookah, take youh tongue outta my eye.”

Jimmy Arkley of course was called in as the boss clown. He explained in detail to John Quincy Adams all the tricks which the dark gentleman with the scurvy cat knew by intuition.

As a stake-driver the name of John Quincy Adams meant nothing. As a clown it meant even less. There are no names like John Quincy Adams in the circus Almanac de Gotha. But as I've said before, somewhere his ancestors must have made forgotten kings to laugh. Whether it was during the period of the American Revolution I know not. As laughter is an hysteria that defies analysis, being synonymous with religious fervor or patriotic outbursts, people laughed at John Quincy Adams without knowing why. Jimmy Arkley always sent him on when the audience was cold. It made no difference to John Quincy Adams. He always got the same laughter.

Even though Jimmy Arkley kept him in his place, life opened like a melon sliced for John Quincy Adams. He had found expression.

He was made to assist in the smaller clown numbers. He took the brunt of physical jokes perpetrated in the arena. He was always the clown upon whom the bucket of water was thrown. It was John Quincy Adams who was dragged by the trick runaway horse. It was his great yellow body that stopped the majority of the slapsticks.

He never complained.

Jimmy Arkley did not like him. But the sad-eyed clown liked all the world and could not see dislike in others. The huge bulk of John Quincy Adams was supersensitive to pain. Who would expect a Negro stake-driver to have acute sensibilities? Every time he winced under the blows of his brother buffoons the audience laughed the more. It was indeed remarkable the expression of pain he could focus on his white-painted face.

His individuality survived it all. It was so marked that Jimmy Arkley was forced by the manager to allow him the center of the stage. He was even consulted about new numbers. At such times the great intuitive clown reverted to the stake-driver and became humble in the presence of whiter and lesser men.

But he never entered the pad-room, never dressed in the long tent with the other clowns. He still ate in the roustabout's section of the cook-house. His increase in salary was of benefit only to me and the scurvy cat. The latter was now heavy and dreamed for the most part nearly all of its nine lives away on John Quincy Adams' bunk. We three lived together in a small tent. It was away from the other tents. Whenever we moved to a new town John Quincy Adams would raise the tent alone.

He could neither read nor write. Once when I told him of a tragic paper-backed novel I was reading, he said:

“What all good dat do you, boy? You's alive ain't you? You doan have to read 'bout nothin'.”

He spent his time playing solitaire, or manipulating new tricks with dice.

He could sing well. His voice was full of the tragedy of three races. He was fond of the Southern folk songs, though he never quite got the words of them correctly. A sense of drama, or an inarticulate feeling for beauty made him accentuate some lines and sing them over and over. When doing so he would put out his immense hand as he had when he first danced. I learned that it was a habit with him when deeply moved. He would chant with a rolling vibration, the wonderful quality of it choking me with emotion and even making the cat stop licking its scurvied scars and look up as the words poured out, the chanter's body slouching low.

H–i–s fingers were l–o–n–g l–i–k–e c–ane in—the br–ake—

And he—had—no—eyes—foh—to see———

And then, as softly as dawn in the desert:

A few—more days—for—to tote de weary l–oa–d
,

No mat–teh … t'w–ill nevah—be light———

A few moah—yeah—s till I—totteh daown de— road.…

D–en my old Kaintucky—home—goodnight———

His face at the end of such a verse was a mask of concentrated agony. The heavy lips would quiver.

I have often thought of him since, and of the scurvy cat we both loved. Three rovers of desolation, we had been joined together by the misery of inarticulate understanding. The cat was quite a personality. There were many places on his body upon which the fur would not grow. He spent hours shining these spots, like a battered old soldier eternally dressing his wounds.

Even when the clown took the cat in his arms and sang:

the cat looked bored.

Success did not affect John Quincy Adams. Somewhere in his roving life there had been planted in his soul the futility of human vanity. So humble and self-effacing was he among the kinkers, that most of them forgot the master of pantomime in the person of the ex-stake-driver.

As the weather grew colder we trekked toward that strip of Florida which projects into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a happy wandering along the Gulf. There was a lazy indifference to life that we of the gypsy clan loved. The brilliant sunshine was reflected everywhere. Even the shadows were diffused with light. The air was balmy.

We played three days in some of the towns. That allowed us to wander about a great deal. For the longer a circus plays in a town the easier it becomes for kinkers and flunkies. The work becomes a mere matter of detail, like in a penitentiary or any other institution.

So I often took long walks with John Quincy Adams and the cat. Once in a while the clown was touched with the wand of reminiscence. Booker T. Washington, however, was always the same sad fellow. Bright sunshine and green lapping waves could not get his mind away from the patches that made his hide look moth-eaten. Often, as John Quincy and I looked out at the far green water upon which white ships sailed, Booker T. Washington would turn away as if scornful of our illusion of beauty. He was an epic of boredom.

Only one thing marred the happiness of our world. It was the year of a presidential election, and owing to the uncertainty of how the pendulum of politics would swing, the powers that be retrenched financially. Times became hard.

As a consequence there was more friction between the colored and white races in the section through which we journeyed.

Many fights occurred.

But John Quincy Adams was not at all concerned by the animosities of differently colored men. It was not in his yellow hulk to inflict pain. He cringed, however, at each tale of physical violence he heard. Always there came into his face the look of concentrated agony. And once, when a Negro had been laid out with a rock, he said to me,

“What foh men 'buse each other?”

“I don't know, Quince,” I replied. “There were probably some Irish in the gang.”

He laughed, his grave-yard of teeth showing.

“Yeah, Red Boy, theah was some niggahs too, I'll bet.”

“No, I don't think so, Quince,” I said banteringly. “The Niggers and the Irish like each other. You know they both had to make a long fight for freedom.”

John Quincy Adams was slouching low in the tent. He looked across at Booker T. Washington, who had just finished licking the patch above his paw.

“Did you heah that, Bookeh T.? Did you all heah what the Red Boy says? He done read dat in one o' dem books, Bookeh T. He doan know what we know.” His voice trailed off.… “Niggah an' de Irish like each other.” Then he turned toward Booker T. Washington and me. “You done heah that song, ain't you, Red Boy, the niggah sing?

I'm a goin' to put on my shoes and put on my coat
,

An' am goin' to walk all oveh God's Heaben———

“Well, that ain't nevah so—now or no otheh time.” He laughed loudly.

“Heah's what happened. A big black niggah goes prancin' into heaven an' all the streets was lined wit' gold and silber lampposts an' big green an' black pahrots a carryin' 'Merican flags in dere claws kep' shoutin' out, ‘Heah's de way, brotheh black man,' an' dey leads 'em right up to de peahly gates, an' right at de cohneh was a big chaih made outta oysteh shells, an' de oystehs was a sittin' up in deah shells a singin':