Juba! (11 page)

For the time being, it didn't matter. The rest of the troupe was putting on blackface in the dressing room, and I was thinking about my lines and the songs I was going to sing. I wanted to sing “Mary Blane,” but Valentine got that one, so I was going to sing “Come Back, Stephen.”

Huff, which was what everybody called Mr. Everton, had got into an argument with Gil over something, and each had screamed at the other. The thing was that all the players knew they could scream at Gil. He seemed like a good fellow, but every so often he would slip into a mood, and he would go quiet.

We were side stage when the curtain opened, and the audience started their applause as they faced the row of chairs onstage. I came out first, turned to the audience, and made as if I were surprised that they were there. Lots of laughter. Then the rest came out, one by one, with each of us pretending to be unaware that we were in a large theater.

Briggs started playing at a fast tempo. His banjo seemed
almost alive in his hands as he plucked the strings and beat a rhythm on the tight leather skin. The man could really play. Pell started up next on the bones, catching the rhythm that Briggs laid down and tossing his body around as he sat in the chair. The way he was moving, his shoulders going up and down, one at a time, that left leg banging out a rhythm on the floor, was enough to make anyone want to move in their seat!

By the time we got through the first medley, with Briggs setting the pace, Huff playing the violin, Pell on bones, Valentine on lute, Ludlow on low banjo, and me on tambourine, we had the audience just where we wanted them. They were clapping and stomping their feet and were just as much part of the show as we were.

The first two parts had seven numbers each, with mostly Ludlow, Gil, and Valentine doing the solos. There was a short break after each of the first two parts for us to run offstage. I saw Gil go into the dressing room after the second part, and he looked a little upset.

“You doing good?” I asked him when he came out.

He smiled and said he was. I smelled whiskey on his breath.

On the break, Sarah was passing out towels for us to wipe the sweat from our foreheads, and she was also touching up the blackface that had begun to run from the heat. I looked over at Valentine, and he had a big, broad smile on his face. He caught me looking at him and pointed a stubby finger at me.

“We got them running through the woods, Juba. Bring 'em home!” he said.

The third part started like the first two, with six songs, including “Come with the Darky Band,” a six-eight number that bounced with Valentine's singing and the rest of us backing him up. And then it was the troupe sitting down again and me on the floor by myself. I didn't expect to be jumpy, but I was as I started across the floor. Briggs must have felt me, because he laid his beat down stronger.

“They're going to be watching your feet, Juba,” Margaret had said.

So I let them watch my feet and hear the rhythm of my feet and try to figure out where I was going next. There were some people in the audience beginning to keep time with me by clapping, and they made me smile, because I knew they couldn't keep up with me.

Briggs picked up the tempo, and for a while, we exchanged beats. We hadn't rehearsed it like that, but we were rolling through the dance together. Gil was accenting the beat on the bones, and he was standing. At rehearsal he had sat. There was a growing tension in the theater that I could feel swell with the music, and then, as if I had been swept up by the music, I just let go and something magical took over my body.

I couldn't hear the crowd, but I could feel them. Some had
begun to stand up, and soon most of them were standing. They had come to see me dance, and they were seeing the best Juba who had ever moved across the floor!

When the program ended and the audience was giving each of us a round of applause, I bowed and could hardly straighten up. I was exhausted.

“Juba! Juba! Juba!” They called my name. “Juba! Juba! Juba!”

“They want an encore,” Mr. Campbell was shouting into my ear. “Can you give them something? Three minutes? Two?”

I was on the stage again. This time I started dancing slowly with my back to the audience—a straight jig with a shuffle step. Then I shifted the beat to my right leg as I turned to face the audience. They were clapping for me, but as I clapped my hands, I changed the beat. Briggs picked me up on the banjo. Something was coming to me, something I had never tried before.

Get it right, Juba. Get it right.

I concentrated on the rhythm, and on Briggs's banjo. I moved the feel of it from my legs to my hips to my waist. And then back down to my right leg, keeping the same rhythm, the same hard beat, as I lifted my left foot away from the floor. I was doing a traditional jig on one leg.

Suddenly there was silence. The audience stopped clapping. Had I missed it?

“Bravo! Bravo!”

A shout from the balcony, and the whole theater exploded in cheers and applause.

I brought my left leg down and held out my hands to the audience as I danced backward into the wings.

“You are a marvel! A marvel!” Gil threw his arms around me and I nearly collapsed into them.

It was the happiest moment of my life.

In the dressing room, we were congratulating each other again. Mr. Campbell showed up with a woman who could have been his daughter and passed out cigars. He told me to take one even if I didn't smoke.

We finally changed into our street clothes and were ready to leave when Sarah came up to me and put her hand on my arm.

“I don't even believe you, Mr. Juba,” she said. “I truly don't!”

“Then you think my performance was good enough for this theater?” I asked.

“This and any other theater in the world, I would think,” Sarah said. “And you were looking fairly handsome out there for a bit, as well.”

“You still in costume?” Huff came by.

“No, I . . .” I started to answer him and realized that he knew I had taken off my dancing clothes. It was just my black face that I hadn't removed.

The reviews of my dancing were great. One or two of the smaller papers used the word
nigger
to describe me, but I shrugged that off. Almost all of the papers connected me to Charles Dickens, or Boz. I read everything I could by him and about him, as I had done in the years following our meeting in Five Points. I particularly liked
A Christmas Carol,
with Tiny
Tim and Scrooge and all the characters who were so easy to remember. Dickens came to our third performance and visited me backstage after the show.

“You surpass everything that I've ever written about you,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. I had thought that if he came to the show, I would apologize for not knowing who he was or how good a writer he was when I first met him, but nothing came out.

“I always see people as potential characters in my books,” Mr. Dickens said. “I like those characters who are distinct, somewhat bigger than life, but grounded in a reality that I can handle. That is not you, Juba. You are so much bigger than life, your dancing is so much bigger than life, that you are almost otherworldly. It is such a pleasure to meet someone who enjoys his art as much as you do, sir. It is a great pleasure indeed.”

We shook hands, and as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. I had the feeling I had been in contact with a great man.

I thought about writing to Stubby. What would I say? London was busy and twisting and wonderful. I thought I could just walk the streets all day and never stop being amazed. Me, Gil, and Valentine went down to a place called Piccadilly Circus. The stores were swell and the people, some young and some old, dressed in suits and walked about as if
they were the most important people in the world. Valentine thought they were funny, but I liked to see people walking like that, looking as if they were special. We also went to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and Gil, who was from Virginia, said the horses were acting just like the people. They were special and they knew it.

The expense money we were given was in shillings, and we were supposed to do some mental arithmetic to figure out how much we were spending in dollars. Valentine said he had a foolproof way of doing it.

“You give it over to an English shopkeeper and hope they're honest,” he said. “Otherwise, I don't have a clue. Huff thinks we're getting a shady deal, being paid in English money.”

“He's got problems,” Gil said. “He thinks we'd make more money being like Christy's Minstrels.”

“Christy's Minstrels don't know the people they're dealing with,” Valentine said. “They might as well be from New York, because they can live around black people all day and not understand them.”

“What I would love is for everyone to understand the music and dancing of colored people,” Gil said. “If you like colored people or you don't like them, there's something special in their music. If you have ears and eyes, you have to know that's true.”

“Mr. Valentine, have you noticed that I am from New York City?” I asked.

“You don't count,” Valentine said. “You were born black. So what you know about being that way doesn't really matter. Not in show business, anyway.”

I looked at Valentine thinking he would be smiling, but he wasn't.

We stopped at a shoemaker on a small street in Bethnal Green. There was a kettle on a stove, and the steam filled the room and made it feel damp. I asked the store owner if he could make me a shoe with a wooden sole that would still look stylish. He looked at me somewhat suspicious and asked if I would remove my shoes and step up on his “fitting stand.” It was a foot high, and he looked at my feet for a while and then went into the back of his shop.

“That's where he keeps his elves,” Valentine said. “They really make the shoes.”

The man came back a few minutes later carrying a pair of women's shoes with a flat heel.

“Just try these on,” he said. “They were meant for display so as not to waste the leather. I can fix them for you, take off some of the lace and what have you.”

I tried them on, and they felt pretty good. I was still on the fitting platform, so I tried a few steps to see how they would sound. On the hard wooden floor of the platform they were great.

“You're going to break the sole if I don't put a small sliver
of leather over it,” he said. “Not a problem there if you want it done.”

Two gentlemen watching me came over, and one pointed at my feet. “Those the feet that the Boz brought over?” he asked.

“The very same,” Gil said.

“Well, I guess you are worth seeing after all!” he said as they left the shop.

Gil said he should have me dancing up and down Regent Street from noon until five to advertise our performances.

When I got back from a full day of running around London, looking at the buildings and the stores and listening to the people on the streets, I was tired and wishing I had someone to talk to like Stubby or even Jack Bishop. Valentine's statement about me being black so it didn't matter what I knew was something to think about.

The truth to it was that I wasn't doing much thinking about anything except me being on the stage. The theater's lights seemed to create a world just for me, and I was floating through it like some crazy baby bird that had just been pushed out of its nest but had learned to fly. To fly, to fly across the stage, to fly across the waves of applause, to fly across the “bravos” and the “hurrahs” of the audience. I kept telling myself to calm down, but I wasn't listening.