A Free State

by Tom Piazza

  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.

  In a kind of panic, forgetting about my brothers, and their consorts, and the entire material world for that matter, I struggled out from between the two profuse farmers, who were still whistling and bouncing in their places, made my way to the tent’s edge, and slipped through one of the seams and out under the dark sky. My thought was to run to the rear and find this genius and say . . . I knew not what. But at the least I needed to know that this was not some dream I had conjured, that what I had seen existed in fact.

  I ran alongside the tent as the applause abated, ducking the rope stays, and it was not long before I saw a flap which I took, correctly, to be the rear entrance to the stage. I carefully pulled it to one side, and there inside I saw the magic figure, sans top hat now, and another—the one who had done the jig dance. The great man was laughing over something, and he held a rag in his hand, and as I watched he passed it over his face and a large patch of his cheek changed color. He appeared to be wiping the very color off his face. After several swipes I realized that this was in fact a white man who had for some reason blackened himself for the performance. I was astonished. As he wiped, he spoke to the other.

  “You came out of that turnaround very handily,” he said. “I thought we were going to have to begin again, but you saved the day.”

  “Yes, well,” the other said, wiping off his own face, “next time give me some signal that you’re going to switch the rhythm. I nearly broke my neck trying to follow that.”

  “Don’t give me orders, you sodomite,” the tall man said, grinning genially and wiping off the last of the blacking. “I am captain of this ship.”

  “You are a freak and nothing more, a half-human fit for a circus freak tent”—the genius laughed at this—“half man and half jackass . . .”

  “Only half jackass!” the genius said. “You have the full pedigree. Did you see the tart in the blue frock, by the way?”

  “It’s why I’m making haste.”

  I was shocked to hear them speak in this manner. I listened until, ambushed by the dust in the air, I sneezed violently. On the instant they both saw me, and the tall one focused on me, and our eyes met. I was no longer looking at an Ethiopian apparition, but at a white man, still in outlandish garb, and I thought he regarded me tenderly for a moment. The other watched both of us. I thought the tall one was about to speak to me; perhaps he would invite me in, take me away with them to wherever people did the things they did. He was half-smiling at me, steadily, as he reached over to a table, picked up something and, with a hard flick of his wrist, threw it at me. I ducked out of the way under the tent flap just in time to hear the object strike the canvas with a thud.

  As if the devil himself were on my tail, I ran as quickly as I could around the tent toward where the last of the audience was leaving. My brother Duncan swatted me on the side of the head for giving them a scare that I had gotten lost, and they threw me in the back of the cart for the long, dark ride home.

  From that point forward I was all but useless at the farm. I was convinced that some mistake had been made in the world’s scheme, as if bills of lading had been mixed up and an order meant for one place had been set down in another. There was a world of color and song and movement, and it was elsewhere. I despised the routine, despised being at the mercy of my brothers’ moods and orders. Count these and stack them and then count them again. All I could think of was escape.

  Then one day, perhaps six months later, perhaps a year, a circus came through, set up very nearby, and stayed for a week. One could hear the riotous goings-on from half a mile away. They had contortionists and strong men and women aerialists and beribboned horses and a tired zebra. There was a small brass band ensemble and, very importantly, a performer on the banjo, Corbett by name, who blacked his face and sang while he played. There were also a number of sweepers and riggers and gatekeepers and such, and when the entire encampment departed on the eighth day, I was among their number.

  I was berthed, with a few clothes I had tied up in a tablecloth, on a small, filthy blanket in the back of a wagon. As we pulled away and the farm slowly faded from my view I experienced a slight, fleeting pang of doubt, which disappeared when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see another young circus hand offering me some peanuts from a bag. I never looked back again.

  The work was not all that different from my duties at the farm, at least at first, but there was the immense advantage of a regular change in scenery. And stimulating company, with interesting stories to tell. Everyone did a number of jobs in the circus, even the performers, and we rarely had a moment of unoccupied time. Yet there was a feeling of freedom.

  We proceeded through Pittsburgh, through Ohio, up to Cleveland, followed the lake’s edge to Erie, then to Buffalo. We saw Rochester and Syracuse and Albany, by way of small towns like Auburn and Seneca Falls. Rivers, taverns, brown grass tramped down. Fires and the night and the morning’s ashes. We set up our tents and wagons in fields near Pittsfield and Burlington and Portsmouth, and down again through Wilmington and across to Harrisburg. If any member of my family came to any of our performances in that area of Pennsylvania I would not know. By that time I had changed my name from MacDougall to Douglass, partly in order to save them embarrassment and also partly to betoken my new identity—I hesitate to say my “rebirth.”

  But in a sense that is what it was. One stepped through a portal into an alternate world when one took up with the circus, or any traveling band. The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado.

  “Do you remember the set-to in the saloon in Pittsburgh? Where Halsey nearly got his eye put out by the drayman?”

  “That was in Cincinnati. I know because I spent two nights with the redhead Jane.”

  “You may think she was a redhead but I saw her black roots!”

  “I say it was Pittsburgh!”

  “Nothing compares with the brawl in Ithaca.”

  “This we can agree upon.”

  . . . and so forth.

  My three and a half years with Kimball’s Circus were my Harvard University. I learned geography, history, economics, and no small measure of practical philosophy. I learned the ways of varied men and women, took informal seminars in music, physics, and animal husbandry. I acquired books in towns and read as much as time allowed. I was able to keep only a very few, as my berth in the caravan was tight indeed. I learned to coexist with others while asking nothing of them except that they perform their duties and allow me to perform mine.

  And I learned the banjo from Corbett, or Brother Sam as he called himself when behind the burnt cork mask. He was in no way the equal of Sweeney in either virtuosity or personality, but he was someone to study. He taught me the secrets of the masquerade, the songs, the best proportion of grease to burnt cork. I also learned to manipulate the bones satisfactorily. He was the banjo player, and there could not happily be two in a troupe—and anyway there was only one banjo—so I learned the clackety-clacks, as one of my fellow riggers called them.

  One of the great benefits of
traveling was the opportunity to hear this or that local musician at his instrument, especially the Colored players. Set up in a boggy field north of Camden or west of Easton, and the sound of a fiddle playing an unusual variation on some familiar jig or reel would carry across half a mile from a porch or a stillhouse. If time allowed, one would visit with the fiddler, or the banjo player, exchange a tune or three, add to one’s store of technique and repertoire. I was always struck by how welcoming the Negroes were, how willing to share their knowledge with us. They had no reason to be so. They certainly received no share of the profit we gained from their generosity.

  Corbett was a genial, expansive soul, an adequate performer, and a fine raconteur up to the midpoint of whatever bottle he was emptying. But he was a hopeless drunkard, and somewhere around Hagerstown he was jettisoned, with regrets, in favor of one John Mulligan, about whom I must now speak.

  Mulligan was ten years older than myself and had clearly served his own apprenticeship among the Colored players. He was an absolutely remarkable banjo player. Corbett had a limited repertoire, which he delivered competently, and with which he was content. But Mulligan was a fire-eater; his appetite for new songs, technical refinement, practice, was huge, as was his appetite for food. He was not nearly so girthy then as he later allowed himself to become. Mulligan was a large man in all senses, and deadly serious about playing the banjo. He had his eyes set on a musical ideal.

  My first encounter with him was not promising. Although I was well seasoned after three years with Kimball’s, I was not yet eighteen years of age, and when I suggested, shortly after his arrival, that the two of us rehearse a few songs together he merely grunted.

  “Why don’t you get me some water, boy,” he said. “I am putting my banjer in tune.” He was sitting on a stool in one of the tents, like a giant toad on a small mushroom.

  “Why don’t you get your own water,” I said. “The exercise will do you some good.”

  This got his attention, and he stopped tuning and regarded me, for a moment, with a fierce expression, which almost immediately gave way to laughter—at my cheekiness, I suppose. I must have been a very unthreatening sight, myself, skinny as I was then, and standing with my bones at the ready.

  “Let’s see what you can do, then,” he said, and without preamble launched headlong into “Buckley’s Hornpipe.” I was on top of it in no time and followed the tune’s tricky switchbacks and crooked repetitions with ease. On the third time through I executed a few dance steps as well, while playing, and I saw Mulligan note them with surprise and approval.

  When we had finished he avoided my eyes, but I saw him making some private adjustments in his assessment of me. Yet his first words were, “Now get me that water.”

  My response was a familiar obscenity, and I left him to find his own water. He never made the request again. And we were thenceforth on a much friendlier footing.

  I was in earnest about performing, by that time. The homelier aspects of the circus life—the animals, the mud, the lifting and pulling—had begun to lose their charm for me, and it was music that offered a path outward and upward. Negro minstrelsy had become a national sensation. The practice of “blacking up” had spread from Sweeney and a handful of others to feed a hunger that had gone unrecognized until then. In it, we—everyone, it seemed—encountered a freedom that could be found there and there only. As if day-to-day life were a dull slog under gray skies, and the minstrels launched one into the empyrean blue. Even the sad songs—here was the mystery—were enlivening. We had heard jigs, we had heard ballads, we knew polkas and reels. But these Negro songs combined pathos and grandeur in the same taste; gaiety and tragedy wore not separate masks but the same mask. The arrangements compelled your feet to move, lifted you. Nothing like it had been heard in the history of the world.

  Bands of four and five men—white men, of course—sprang up like wildflowers, holding forth from proper stages in real theaters in cities, and were attracting large audiences and large financial reward. The first of these bands that I saw was the Virginia Minstrels, so-called, with Emmett, Whitlock, Brower, and Pelham, in New York City. I went to see their performance at the old Bowery Theater, and I will never forget it. This was not just a man, however skilled, singing a few tunes, but a coherent musical group, with assigned parts, worked-out routines, harmonies. They exploded onto the stage; their movements, wild yet precise and timed to one another, expanded upon the music they made—tambourine, fiddle, bones, banjo. All were expert singers and dancers as well as masters of their instruments. Their performance galvanized me, as it plainly did everyone within hearing, and I resolved to form a troupe of my own.

  Mulligan, it turned out, had been at the same performance, as well as several others by the same ensemble, at which he carefully studied the technique of the great Whitlock. When he and I met we were both carrying the same idea firmly—to establish a troupe—and after our initial skirmish we set to practicing with a singleness of purpose that was energizing to say the least. Our performances—Mulligan on the banjo and myself on the bones—began to be a primary attraction for Kimball, and it caused no small jealousy among the other acts, and at length we made up our minds to leave the circus at the end of a run in Camden and hop across the river to plant our flag in Philadelphia.

  Mulligan had begun to defer to me in matters of business and organization. He was a great musician, but that is all he was. All his prodigious energies went into the subtleties of performance on the banjo. He was hopeless with money, and it was on this score, in fact, that I finally cemented an understanding with him.

  Each week, Mulligan would no sooner draw his salary than it would evaporate like the morning dew in the harsh sunlight of a card game. He was forever borrowing money and sliding further into debt.

  “John,” I said to him one day after listening to his chronic financial lament, “have you ever thought to save your money?” Saving money was a skill I had somehow inherited from my Scots forebears.

  “James,” he said, “I cannot make ends meet as things stand now. How would I find two pennies extra, let alone enough to call ‘savings’?”

  “Let me do this,” I said. “Have Kimball pay both our salaries to me, and then I will pay you myself. And after one month we will see if that works to your satisfaction. I will save your money for you.”

  He watched my face as if I had posed a very difficult mathematics problem and he was considering whether to attempt an answer. Finally, he said, “You would pay me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you may abandon the arrangement at any time you wish, and retrieve your escrows from me.”

  “Escrows?”

  “Savings.” He regarded me with a puzzled, vaguely suspicious expression, and I said, “John, you know where I am twenty-four hours a day. I could hardly slip out on you even if I wanted to.”

  Still somewhat puzzled, he agreed to the arrangement. He was making, at that time, twelve dollars per week; I was drawing ten. Kimball, after making sure that Mulligan was in agreement, began paying the full twenty-two dollars to me on every Friday, and I would pay Mulligan ten directly. He bristled initially, but agreed to see if he could live within the constraint. After the second week it began to seem normal to him. After the third I believe he forgot the arrangement entirely. At the end of the sixth week, when I paid him his Friday salary, I presented him with an additional twelve dollars.

  Dumbfounded, he asked, “What is this for? Where did you get this?”

  “These are your savings,” I said. “You may collect them now, or I can continue to hold them for you and add to them each week.”

  His gaze bounced several times between the banknotes and my own face. He shook his head once, then again, then said, simply, “Thank you. Let’s continue.”

  From then on I was treasurer of a corporation of two. And when at length we were ready to leave Kimball and make a start in Philadelphia, Mulligan ceded the helm to me in all logistical matters. Our reputation preceded us, and by putti
ng out word that we were forming a troupe we quickly attracted interest from local players. This is how we found Powell, Eagan, and Richards, who was later replaced by Burke.

  We put to good use what we had learned from Emmett and Whitlock, from Sweeney, and from the Colored amateurs we had studied and emulated. When we hit the stage there was no going back, for anyone. The curtain would rise upon us, seated in front of our painted plantation backdrop, and with a whack on the tambourine and my call of “Good ebening, brudders and sistuhs!” the hall was transfigured. We did not yet understand the nature of the illusion, nor that all the gaiety existed exactly because of the tragedy and injustice that even then bore down upon our nation. We would learn. But we did not know it then. When this elbow jabbed at the tambourine’s thump, and Eagan’s feet tapped out a tattoo as he played an Irish jig with an Ethiopian accent while Mulligan’s banjo kept up a constant commentary, now mocking, now assenting, and my bones rolled chittering challenges at the others . . . well, the audience was transported, and we were as well. Even when Burke would arise to deliver a recitation concerning the demise of Old Master, or of a favored hunting dog, the presence of the black mask insulated us, and our listeners, from a full encounter with tragedy. It was our escape from our own yoke. It brought us alive.