by Tom Piazza
“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.
I wrestled with the question of how to tell Mulligan, and I wrestled more, and finally I decided not to tell him at all. I decided that I would introduce Henry to the troupe as a Mexican. His skin was light enough for this to be plausible. I had heard Henry do his pidgin Spanish voice, which I thought was good enough to fool anyone who didn’t speak the language. I doubted that Mulligan, or anyone else in the troupe, knew Spanish. I would say that I had heard him playing on the street—that much was true enough—and had managed to convey to him my interest through sign language and a few Spanish phrases I had picked up in the circus.
It was an outlandish story, admittedly. But there was no question about our increasingly desperate situation as a troupe; Henry, in whatever guise, would inject new and necessary energy into our presentation and, I would gamble, attract fresh customers. I had no doubt that he would know what to do on a stage. I envisioned him in the old-style Sweeney type of costume—a phantasm of the earlier type of minstrel—a brilliant rustic among the mock sophisticates. If we could settle on the best way of introducing him, and then turn him loose, I was sure that he would be a sensation. And if we maintained the fiction that he was Mexican, then we could, if worse came to worst, claim ignorance that he was a Negro. We could remand him to the fates, if it came to that.
Armed with my provisional plan, I took Mulligan aside during the next afternoon’s specialty audition—dog tricks, this time. A half-dozen terriers, arrayed in a line, trained to bark out the rhythm of a handful of songs—“Old Folks at Home,” “Oh, Susannah,” and some others, disfigured more or less beyond recognition.
“Why do we need him?” was Mulligan’s first, and understandable, response when I presented the idea to him.
“We need something,” I said. “We need to set ourselves apart again. We are sinking. How many yodelers and bird trainers can we present?” I looked up at the stage, where Birch was cleaning up after a mess one of the dogs had bestowed upon our boards. “Or dog acts.”
“And why won’t he do a formal audition?”
“He is very shy, and embarrassed about his bad English. And anyway, he has auditioned for me, in effect. I’ll vouch for him.”
“And he will black up?”
“To be sure,” I said, keeping my face as blank as possible.
“And one song only?”
“Correct.”
Mulligan, watching my reactions, frowned and said, “Why the mystery, James?”
“I can’t tell you more. I have reasons.”
I watched him weigh the costs and benefits of pressing the point. “How would we introduce him?”
“I would think in the second half . . .”
“Of course.”
“. . . he could wander onstage while we were doing patter between tunes. Or I could be introducing Burke’s monologue. He could walk on, looking lost and mystified.”
Mulligan nodded. “And one of us will say, ‘Why Brudder Neckbones, who’s dat nigger poking around in our yard?’”
“Exactly,” I said.
“‘Maybe he’s dat chicken thief dey told us about, come from de next plantation!’”
“Yes,” I said. “General consternation, protests, mayhem.”
“That’s good,” Mulligan said. He emitted a short bark of a laugh, envisioning it. I was pleased to see him warming to the scenario so quickly. Then his face clouded over.
“What’s wrong?” I said. But I knew. “John, this fellow is no Mulligan. The rest of the line can say, ‘Bullfrog, is you gonna take dat sittin’ down? Show him!’ And then you wash away the memory of him. Yes?”
“And afterward, something on the order of, ‘Nobody beats Bullfrog!’ I must prevail.”
“Little question of that,” I said.
“We’ll need to rehearse this,” he said.
This was impossible to do without Henry’s identity being revealed. “I would prefer not to,” I said.
Mulligan watched me, silently. At length he said, in a calm voice, “James. What are you about, here? Is he a criminal? What is the idea?”
“He is no criminal,” I said, remembering that I had no idea if this were true. “Please trust me. We can give the boys the scenario in general terms; we can improvise dialogue on the spot. There are reasons for keeping it a surprise.” I looked hard at him. “Everyone will benefit. If it does not work out, we have the opera singer on tap, don’t we? What was her name?”
“Gloria.”
“Fatima?” he said, as if I had just awakened him. “Fatima . . . Oh God, of course. I still . . .” He shook his head.
“Let’s keep our spirit of adventure alive, shall we?”
He nodded, looked as if he were about to speak. At that moment, Birch interrupted us and the discussion was tabled, but I took it as a tacit assent.
I was elated. But, like a splinter just beneath the surface, something nagged at me. I was now keeping a secret from my closest associate and, in truth, the only person I could remotely call a friend. I was discovering a vein of recklessness in myself that quite surprised me, as if an entirely different person were inside, using me as a disguise. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. But it was disquieting, as if a lost relative had shown up with a dubious proposition. We were up against it, was what I told myself.
On the appointed day, Henry showed up at my apartments, his straw hat replaced by a woolen slouch cap pulled low over his eyebrows, which he kept on after he was inside, until I reminded him to remove it.
“Welcome,” I said.
“Good,” he said, looking around the room somewhat nervously. “Thank you.”
“Would you like some lemonade?” I said. Mrs. Callahan had prepared some and kept it in a shared icebox.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head, and I left the room to get us a couple of glasses. When I returned with the glasses of lemonade, he was standing in the same place where I’d left him, still holding his banjo in its bag. I told him to set the banjo down and have a seat on the divan.
Gradually he relaxed enough to maintain his side of a modest volley of conversation. He asked if I owned the house where we were, and I told him that I only rented it. He wanted to know if I had lived there for a long time, and I told him it had been about three years.
