Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

“There's water in between them,” Ace pointed out, “and all manner of fish just under the surface, easy to catch. I do believe a man could scoop them up with his hands if he was quick enough. If you want to get a dinghy we could row out and give it a try right now.”

Ned leaned way over the ship's railing and looked down, his face clouding up. “We'd get throttled twice for a trick like that,” he said. “First by the fleet's high muckamucks and then by the Japanese. Neither one of âem want us goin' where they can't keep an eye on us, Ace. How many times have we been told?”

He leaned out farther still, staring down at the black and silent sea. “I do wonder if they're strange tastin' though, them fish I can't quite see. It's another world under the ocean, Ace. Another world in Japan, too. Another world pretty much everywhere we ain't been.”

Ace put his hands on Ned's shoulders, drawing him back until both his feet were firmly planted on the ship's planks once again. Both men stood at the port railing of the
Pohatan
, the flagship of the East India fleet, commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry. Seaward and across a short expanse of bay they could see the low-burning lanterns of the
Susquehanna and the Lexington
, two of the “little cities” Ned had been talking about. There were dots of liquid light from other American vessels, too, farther down the inlet, bobbing yellow like rays of fallen stars tangled up on buoys.

“Yessir, like houses across a dark prairie,” Ned said, “like little homes away from home. It gives me the urge to get back where I belong, Ace. I hope we ain't here too long. There's surely another blue-eyed woman, waitin' somewhere to meet me.”

He would not have been able to say it this way, but what Ned was after with the images he was making was an apt enough metaphor for Ace to want to pound into a lyric later on. Ned thought Ace had the rarest of gifts when it came to music, while Ace thought of music as a path to something else, to a calling that he couldn't quite hear yet. And when he only nodded, lost in those thoughts, Ned yawned and went below, for the wind was high by then and it was cold.

ONCE HE WAS FINALLY ALONE
Ace held his right fist up, blocking out the lights from the
Susquehanna
and the
Lexington
, then extended the top two fingers of that fist, to block out the wan half moon, as well. He had, indeed, thought to write a song about this armada of American sailors, strung out across a vast and lonely world, some of them true naval men, some adventurers or solitary wanderers like himself. But the images Ned had made were obstacles to his imagination, not a help to it, so he soon gave up. He crossed to the ship's landward side, where the quality of light was duller, where dark Japan offered up images of its own. Now he could see parts of a village and more lights moving in the forested hills, as if men on horseback were carrying lanterns. Now again, in the dimmest possible way, quite as if a finger had scratched it on the velvet curtain of the night, he believed he could also see the paper doors of a farmhouse, mournful and low, a whole family of farmers sleeping behind them. Or perhaps awake and staring back at him, curiosity about the coming world pouring from their narrow eyes.

At eleven o'clock, sounded out in high-pitched eighth notes on the ship's triangle, Ace went astern to read in a book of essays that he prized above anything else and had brought on deck with him. But he found instead a group of sailors, sitting and listening to one of their number sing “Buford Holden,” a ballad Ace had written for this current minstrel show they were about to perform for the Japanese. The sailor had a decent voice, and knew the lyrics well enough, but in other ways he got the song all wrong. “Buford Holden” was a freed slave who, while heading north on a railroad train, imagined the glory of the cities he would see, and how grandly he would be welcomed when he arrived in the free states. When Ace sang the song it was ironic, abolitionist to its core, but the sailor seemed to miss the point entirely, lauding instead the natural beauty of the American landscape.

So though Ace was intent on reading, he started singing along behind the sailor, to try and correct the misconception of the song.

Oh, what I'll find there I don't know,
Wide boulevards? Big houses, all in a row?
Or maybe I'll find myself on Commerce Street,
Where the bosses will shake my hand.
“Glad to have you, Buford,” they'll sayâ¦

As he sang Ace could see Buford Holden's face reflected in the window of that northbound train.

“Philadelphia!”
sang the sailor, quickly abdicating the main part to Ace. He became, instead, the conductor, passing through the third-class car, a man who by then had called out the names of so many cities that Buford had grown confused, forgetting even those he had previously memorized. Ace provided the litany of towns.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Philadelphia, New York?
I used to know them all by heart so why not now?
Baltimore, Ohio? Boston, Maine? New Bedford,
That one I know!
New Bedford's in Connecticut!
Wide boulevards? Big houses, all in a row!

“Buford Holden” was a long song, a melodrama, really, that followed Buford into the heart of the same northern ambivalence that Ace had always felt. But there were several possible stopping places in the song and tonight, with his book still beckoning, Ace chose this one. The plaintive quality of his tenor voice left its own imprint on both the sailor and the night.

Ace went to the rail again, to calm himself before reading, but in the quiet that followed something caught his attention from shore. It wasn't singing, yet it had the depth and clarity of a good human voice.

“London, England! Paris, France!”
it said. And after a while.
“Dutch, Amsterdam!”

Far from growing calmer, Ace's heart swelled. So he sent his own voice back across the water in a kind of offering.
“Oh what I'll find there I don't know. Wide boulevards! Big houses, all in a row!”

The sailor came in behind him, a half a second late and harmonizing with his eyes closed.

PART ONE

EDO

1
.
Dutch Learning

“A GOVERNMENT ORCHESTRAâ¦
They've brought a bronze orchestra with a group of government musicians on board.”

“They don't call it an orchestra,” said Manjiro, patiently. “An orchestra must have stringed instruments that one plucks as one does a
shamisen
or
koto
. Also, what you see glowing in the sun isn't bronze, Einosuke, but brass. Think how heavy bronze would be. And no one, not even the Americans, could get it to shine that way.”

“Brass. Bronze. What possible difference could it make? It wouldn't surprise me if these braggarts made their instruments out of solid gold. But I swear, Manjiro, I don't know how you remember such trivialities. What do you think we should do now, send out a barge full of
shaku-hachi
players to sail around them and educate their ears?”

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