by John Barth
We cheered.
“Well, sir, folks, I’m glad so many of ye got out tonight, ’cause we got such a fine new show this year I was anxious for all my friends and even my enemies in Cambridge to see it.” He squinted over the footlights. “Guess my friends’ll be in later,” he mumbled loudly, and grinned at once lest we miss the jest—but we were alert, and laughed especially loud.
“Yes, sir, a brand-new line-up this year, folks, from a cracker jack start to a whiz-bang finish! But before we haul back the curtain and get on with the fun, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint ye just a wee bit.”
We murmured sympathy for ourselves.
“Now I know ye was pinin’ to see Miss Clara Mulloy, the Mary Pickford of the Chesapeake, do her stuff in The Parachute Girl. So was I, I got to admit, ’cause no matter how many times in a row I watch Miss Clara jump down in that there par’chute, them legs o’ hers is so durn pretty I can’t see my fill!”
We laughed more raucously, Capt. Osborn jabbing me in the ribs and exploding with mirthful phlegm.
“But I’m sorry to say Miss Clara Mulloy has caught a germ from someplace—must have been Crisfield, couldn’t of been Cambridge—and I swear if she ain’t got the laryngitis so bad she can’t say a durn word!”
We voiced our disappointment, some of us resentfully.
“I know, I know,” Capt Adam sympathized. “I feel like walkin’ out myself. Hey, Miss Clara,” he shouted into the wings, “come on out here and show the people yer—ah—yer laryngitis!” He winked at us, we roared, and then Miss Clara Mulloy—brown-haired, brown-eyed, trimly corseted—curtsied onto the stage, the sequins flashing on her black gown, a red flannel scarf tied incongruously around her white neck. She curtsied again to our ovation, pointed to her throat, and moved her lips in silent explanation, while Capt. Adam looked on adoringly.
“What do ye say?” he cried to us. “Shall we call the whole thing off? I’m willin’!”
“NO!” we shouted, almost as one man—two or three rowdies cried “Yes!” but we glared them down.
“Do I hear yes?” the Captain asked.
“NO!” we roared again, our stares defying contradiction from the one or two hoodlums who are forever spoiling honest folks’ fun. “No!” we pleaded, hoping Capt. Adam wouldn’t judge us citizens of Cambridge by our most unfortunate element.
“Yes,” one of the incorrigibles snickered.
“That man should be thrown out!” I heard the Colonel declare in exasperation.
“Well, I say let’s be fair and square,” Capt. Adam said. “Any man, woman, or child that wants to leave can get up right now and go, and John Strudge’ll give ye yer full admission money back at the box office, despite ye already heard the overture!”
We laughed at this last and applauded his generosity. The house lights came up for a moment, but no one dared move.
“All right, then, let’s get on with the show!”
The house lights were extinguished, Miss Clara Mulloy rewarded our applause with a blown kiss (her eyes dewy), Prof. Eisen struck up a lively tune, and we relaxed again.
“Now, then,” the Captain announced. “Instead o’ The Parachute Girl, I’m proud to present the great T. Wallace Whittaker, one o’ the finest singers and actors that ever trod the boards. Ye all know T. Wallace Whittaker as the great Southern tenor—got a voice like a honeycomb in a sweet-gum stump, I swear! But what ye probably don’t know is that T. Wallace Whittaker is one o’ the best Shakespearian actors in the U.S.A.! Ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honor to present T. Wallace Whittaker, the eminent tragedian, in Scenes from the Bard!”
Uncertain applause. The band played heavy chords in a minor key, the curtain opened, and we looked into a Victorian parlor (first set for The Parachute Girl), in the center of which bowed T. Wallace Whittaker. He was a broad-beamed, Sunday-schooly young man, and he wore a tight black Hamlet-looking outfit. From the tone of his very first words—a lofty “I shall begin by reciting the famous speech of the duke Jacques, from Act Two of As You Like It”— he lost the sympathy of us men, although some wives nodded knowingly.
T. Wallace walked to the footlights, struck a declamatory pose, and closed his eyes for a moment. He did not clear his throat, but some of us cleared ours.
“All the world’s a stage,” he declared, “and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…”
Already Capt. Osborn had the fidgets, and began ticking his cane against his high-top shoe. The rest of us sat uncomfortably as T. Wallace ran through the seven ages of man.
“… Last scene of all… mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing!”
Polite applause, especially from the ladies. I thought I heard Jeannine ask shrilly for more popcorn, but it could have been some other child. One of the rowdies made a sneering remark that I couldn’t catch, but that set his neighbors chuckling, no longer so hostile to him as before, and rewarded him with a flash of T. Wallace Whittaker’s eyes.
“Mark Antony’s funeral oration, from Act Three of Julius Caesar,” he announced. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…”
“Ye can have mine, boy,” the hoodlum said loudly. “I’ve took enough!” He stalked out of the theater, and the rest of us were shamefully amused. Even some wives stifled smiles, but T. Wallace Whittaker went on, blushing, to inflame an imaginary mob against Brutus and company. The oration was long, for T. Wallace went through the whole routine of Caesar’s will. By the time he insinuated his desire to move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny, his audience was on the verge of doing likewise; we were tapping our feet, sneezing, and whispering among ourselves. When he cried at the end, “Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!” someone whistled and flung a handful of pennies onto the stage.
T. Wallace ignored the insult; rather, he acknowledged it with a defiant glare but refused to be bowed.
“What I shall recite now,” he said grimly, “is the most magnificent thing in the whole English language. I shan’t expect a noisy rabble to appreciate its beauty, but perhaps a respectful silence will be granted, if not to me, at least to Shakespeare!”
“Where’s the minstrels?” someone shouted. “Bring on the minstrels!” More pennies sailed over the footlights.
“The soliloquy from Hamlet,” T. Wallace Whittaker whispered.
“Go home!”
“Take ’im away!”
“Come on, minstrels!”
“To be, or not to be: that is the question…”
“Ya-a-a-ah!”
The audience was out of hand now. Several young men stood on their chairs to take better aim with their pennies, which no longer merely fell at T. Wallace’s feet, but struck his face, chest, and gesticulating arms until he was forced to turn half around. But he would not be vanquished.
“To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub…”
One pimply-faced lad, standing in a front-row seat, began aping T. Wallace’s gestures, to our delight, until Col. Morton struck at him with his gold-headed cane.
“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong…” T. Wallace Whittaker was determined that we should have our culture. I greatly admired him.
“… the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay…”
“Yahoo! Boo! Hsssss!”
It was open warfare now; T. Wallace could no longer be heard, but nevertheless he continued undaunted. Capt. Adam appeared from the wings, disturbed lest we begin taking the vessel apart, but we greeted his conciliatory wavings with more boos. He went to T. Wallace, doubtless to ask him to call it a day, but T. Wallace declaimed in his face. Capt. Adam grew panicky, then angry, and tried to drag him off; T. Wallace shoved him away, still gesticulating with the other hand. Capt. Adam shook his finger at the young man, shouted, “Yer fired!” and signaled to Prof. Eisen to strike up the band. The $7
,500 Challenge Maritime Band waltzed into “Over the Waves.” T. Wallace Whittaker stepped through the closing curtains, and shaking both fists at us through a copper shower (to which I, too, contributed, standing up and flinging all my change at him), in blind defiance he screamed: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought!” Finished at last, he scooped a handful of pennies from the stage, flung them back at us, and disappeared behind the curtain.
A few more late-thrown pennies sailed after him, hit the curtain, and clicked onto the stage. We were all laughing and comparing notes, a little sheepish, but exhilarated for all that—none more so than I, for it is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him. For my part, as I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book, I’m seldom reluctant to assist in my small way in the persecution of people who defy the crowd with their principles, especially when I’m in favor of the principles. After all, the test of one’s principles is his willingness to suffer for them, and the test of this willingness—the only test—is actual suffering. What was I doing, then, but assisting T. Wallace Whittaker in the realization of his principles? For now, surely, having been hooted from the stage and fired from his job in the cause of Shakespeare, he would either abandon his principles, in which case they weren’t integrated very strongly into his personality, or else cling to them more strongly than ever, in which case he had us to thank for giving him the means to strength.
Capt. Adam appeared next from the wings, smiling thinly, and raised his hands. We were willing enough now to be silent, having made our point.
“Oh, well, who likes Shakespeare anyhow?” He shrugged cravenly, kicking a few pennies around the footlights. “If ye think yer gittin’ any o’ these pennies back, though, yer crazy!”
We laughed, relieved as wayward children who learn that they won’t be punished after all.
“Now, then, see if ye can’t be a little nicer to the next folks,” Capt. Adam grinned. “At least pitch quarters at ’em. Ladies and gents: those knights of the burnt-cork, the U.S.A.‘s greatest sable humorists, the chaste and inimitable Ethiopian Tidewater Minstrels!”
We applauded complacently, for this was what we’d come to see. Prof. Eisen ripped into “I’m Alabam-my Bound” at express-train tempo, and the curtains parted. The set for The Parachute Girl had been replaced by a solid blue backdrop, against which stood out the bright uniforms of a small semicircle of minstrels. There were six in all: three on each side of Capt. Adam, who took his place as interlocutor. All wore fuzzy black wigs, orange clawhammer coats, bright checkered vests and trousers, tall paper collars, and enormous shoes, and sang in raucous unison the words of the song. The two minstrels on either side of the interlocutor assisted with banjos and guitars, while Tambo and Bones, the end men, played the instruments from which their names are derived. With a great rattling and crashing the tune shuddered to its end.
“Gentle-men-n-n-n…” cried Capt Adam, raising his arms to heaven, “BE… SEATED!”
Tambo and Bones, to be sure, missed their chairs and fell sprawling on the floor, accompanied by thumps from the bass drum. Knees were slapped, ribs elbowed. Capt. Osborn, beside me, strangled rapturously. Col. Morton’s cane banged approval. In his new role as Mr. Interlocutor, Capt. Adam was transformed into an entirely different person—grammatical, florid, effusive—so that one doubted the authenticity of his original character. When the end men, great eyeballs rolling, had regained their seats, the classical repartee ensued, the interlocutor being tripped up in his pomposity again and again—to our delight, for our sympathies were all with impish Tambo, irrepressible Bones.
“Good evening, Mr. Tambo; you look a little down in the mouth tonight.”
“Mist’ Interlocutor, ah ain’t down in de mouf; ah’s down in de pocketbook. New hat fo’ de wife, new shoes fo’ de baby. Now dat no-good boy ob mine is done pesterin’ me to buy him a ’cyclopedia. Say he needs ’em fo’ de school.”
“An encyclopedia! Ah, there’s a wise lad, Tambo! No schoolboy should be without a good encyclopedia. I trust you’ll purchase one for the lad?”
“No, sah!”
“No?”
“No, sah! Ah say to dat boy, ah say, ‘ ’Cyclopedia nuffin! Y’all gwine walk like de other chillun!’ ”
We were led by the nose through rudimentary jokes, clubbed with long-anticipated punch lines, titillated—despite the minstrels’ alleged chastity—by an occasional double-entendre as ponderous as it was mild. Negroes were shiftless and ignorant, foreigners suspect; the WPA was a refuge for loafers; mothers-in-law were shrewish; women poor drivers; drunkenness was an amusing but unquestioned vice; churchgoing a soporific but unquestioned virtue. Tambo and Bones deserved their poverty, but their rascality won our hearts, and we nodded to one another as their native wit led the overeducated interlocutor into one trap after another. Tambo and Bones vindicated our ordinariness; made us secure in the face of mere book learning; their every triumph over Mr. Interlocutor was a pat on our backs. Indeed, a double pat: for were not Tambo and Bones but irresponsible Negroes?
We were sung to of heart, hearth, and home by Sweet Sally Starbuck, the singing soubrette, she of the moist eyes, cornsilk hair, and flushed cheeks. What did she sing us? “I Had a Dream, Dear.” “After the Ball Is Over.” “A Mother’s Prayer for Her Son.” “Harvest Moon.”
“Y’all so smaht, Mist’ Interlocutor, ansah me dis, sah: whut got twenty-nine legs, six arms, twelve ears, three tails, twenty feet, and a passle ob faucets, and say cockadoodledoo?”
“Great heavens, Tambo! What does have twenty-nine legs, six arms, twelve ears, three tails, twenty feet, and a passle of faucets, and says cockadoodledoo?”
“Three farmers, three milkin’ stools, three Jersey cows, and a loudmouf roostah! Ha!”
We were preached to by J. Strudge, calliopist, ticket collector, and banjo player extraordinary, the Magnificent Ethiopian Delineator, the Black Demosthenes:
“Ladies, gemmen, houn’ dawgs, bullfrawgs, an’ polecats: de tex’ fer today come from de forty-leben chaptah, umpteen verse-borry fo’, carry three, give or take a couple, chunk in one fer good measure—ob de Book ob Zephaniah, whar de two Jedges, name ob First an’ Secon’ Samuel, done take de Ax ob de Romans an’ cut de ’Pistles off de ’Postles fer playin’ de Numbahs! Hyar how she go, bredren: Blessed am dent dat ’specks nuffin’, ’caze dey ain’t gwine git nuffin!”
We were serenaded by banjo and fiddle, bones and tambourine.
“Mr. Bones, I spoke to your wife today, and she tells me your mammy’s been living—with you all—for three years now.”
“Mah mammy! Ah been thinkin’ all dis time dat was her mammy!”
“No! How can you be so consistently stupid, Mr. Bones?”
“Well, Mist’ Interlocutor, dat ain’t easy fo’ a dahkie like me dafs neber been to one ob dem fancy colleges!”
We were supposed to hear pastoral lays of the corn and cotton fields from the vibrant throat of T. Wallace Whittaker, famous Southern tenor, but we did not, much to the disappointment of the ladies. We heard instead Sweet Sally Starbuck once more, and she sang to us this time “Just a Song at Twilight,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.”
And Mr. Tambo! And Mr. Bones! Did they pat us the Juba? They did. Did they cut us the Pidgin’s Wing? They did. Did they scratch us the Long Dog Scratch? They did.
“Mistah Tambo, Mistah Tambo! Ah fails to unnerstan’
How a wuthless, shifless dahkie such as you, sah,
Kin conglomerate de money fo’ a Caddylac sedan,
Jest to keep yo’ yaller gal fren’ sweet and true, sah…”
There were banjo exhibitions, comic dances, novelty songs, more jokes.
“And now, ladies and gents,” Capt. Adam announced, “for the last feature on our program: the world-renowned imitator Burley Joe Wells, all the way from New Orleans, Louisiana!”
The dead-pa
n banjoist seated next to Tambo stepped forward, a great black hulk, and held his arms out from his sides. Tambo and Bones stumbled up, and after some pantomimed horseplay, commenced working the arms up and down like pump handles. Burley Joe rolled his eyes and puffed out his cheeks, as though a pressure were building inside him, and when at last he opened his mouth, the blast of a steam calliope rocked the hall with “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” the Floating Opera’s musical signature. A full chorus he tootled, and came whistling to the end accompanied by Prof. Eisen and our applause.
“Looziana sawmill, down in de bayou,” Burley Joe grunted next. He took up a stance at one side of the stage, his back against the exit, and after some preliminary coughing, produced a hum like that of an idling buzz saw. Tambo and Bones disappeared into the opposite wing and reappeared a moment later carrying a yellow-pine plank, eight feet long and a foot wide. They tripped, they stumbled, they pulled and tugged, and finally they fed the plank in under Burley Joe’s left arm. The saw whined and screamed, and the board disappeared into the wings, followed by the end men. The saw hummed on. Tambo and Bones reappeared ten seconds later with two pine planks, each six inches wide. The process was repeated again and again, the saw chunging against knots and squealing in pine resin, until at last the end men appeared with enormous satisfied smiles on their faces, each holding a single tiny toothpick in his hand; little Bones strode up to big Burley Joe and wrenched his nose as though turning a switch, and the saw’s buzz slowly died away.
“Steamboat race,” growled Burley Joe, who wasted none of his art on introductions. “De Natchez soun’ like dis [A high-pitched chugging, pumping, swishing sound. A shrill whistle], an’ de Robert E. Lee soun’ like dis [A low, throaty throb. A resonant bass whistle]. Hyar dey goes, now.”
