Dancers on the Shore

by William Melvin Kelley

  My old man got him a job with the same construction company he worked for and the foreman, he’d send them both up on the girders and give them enough work for eight men and they’d get it done, and then they’d come home and Uncle Wallace’d watch television until one and then go to sleep. He never seen it before and it knocked him out.

  He hadn’t seen anything of New York but our house and the building he and my old man was practically putting up singlehanded. That’s why one Friday night, my old man said: “Carlyle, why don’t you take old Wallace downtown and show him the city?”

  I really didn’t want to go; I mean, that’s nowhere getting stuck with a man could be your father, but I went.

  First I took him to Harlem near where we used to live and we said hello to some of my old friends who was standing in front of a bar, watching the girls swishing by in dresses where you could see everything, either because the dresses was so tight over what they should-a been covering, or because there wasn’t no dress covering the other parts. I guess Uncle Wallace liked that pretty much because everybody was colored and where we live in the Bronx, everybody is Italian. So in Harlem, he must-a felt at home.

  Then we went to Times Square. I don’t think he liked that too much, too big and noisy for him, him being right out of a cotton field. I was about to take him home, but then I said: “Hey, Uncle Wallace, you ever seen a queer?”

  He looked down at me. “What’s that, Carlyle?”

  I was about to laugh because I figured maybe he ain’t seen a queer, but I would-a thought everybody knew what they was. But then I decided just to explain—I knew how strong he was, but hadn’t been knowing him long enough to know how fast he got mad. So I just told him what a queer was.

  He looked down at me blank and sort of stupid. “No stuff?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Uncle Wallace.” I took him by the arm. “Come on, I’ll show you some queers.”

  That’s why we went to Greenwich Village.

  It was comical to see him looking at his first queer, who was as queer as a giraffe sitting on a bird’s nest. Uncle Wallace just gaped like he seen a farmer hitch a chipmunk to a plow, then turned to me. “Well, I’ll be lynched, Carlyle!”

  After that we walked around past the handbag and sandal shops and the coffee houses and dug the queers and some girls in sort of black underwear, and then all of a sudden, he wasn’t with me no more. I turned all the way around, a little scared because if he would-a got his-self lost, I’d never see him again. He was halfway back up the block, his head way above everybody else’s like he was standing on a box, and a look on his face like he been knocked up side his head with a cast-iron Cadillac. I ran back up to him, but by the time I got to where he been standing, he was most down some steps leading into a cellar coffee shop called The Lantern. I called to him but he must-a not heard me over the singing that was coming from inside. He was already at the door and a cross-eyed little blond girl was telling him to put a dollar in the basket she was tending. So I followed him down, paid my dollar, and caught up to him. “Hey, Uncle Wallace, what’s the matter?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, grabbing it tight so I could hear the bones shift around. “Hush, boy.” And then he turned to this little lit-up stage and there was this scrawny yellow Negro sitting on a stool playing the guitar and singing some folk song. He was wearing a green shirt open to his belly button, and a pair of tight back pants. What a queer!

  The song he was singing was all about how life is tough—he looked like the toughest day he ever spent was when his boyfriend didn’t serve him breakfast in bed—and how when you’re picking cotton, the sun seems to be as big as the whole sky. The last line was about how he’d pick all the cotton in the world and not plant no more and wouldn’t have to work again and how he’d finally win out over the sun. When he finished, everybody snapped their fingers, which is what they do in the Village instead of clap.

  Then he said: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, this next piece is another from the collection of Francis Mazer, a song he found during his 1948 trip through the South. A blues called Wasn’t That a Man.” He struck a chord and started to sing: something about a Negro who swum a flooded, raging river with his two sons and his wife tied on his back. He sang it very fast so all the words ran together.

  Uncle Wallace listened through one chorus, his eyes narrowing all the time until they about disappeared, and then he was moving, like a black battleship, and I grabbed his coat so he wouldn’t make a fool of his-self in front of all them white folks, but then I just let him go. It was his business if he wanted to act like a nigger, and I couldn’t stop him anyway. So I just stood there watching him walk in the dark between the little tables and looming out in the spotlight, burying the yellow Negro in his shadow.

  Uncle Wallace reached out and put his hand around the neck of the guitar and the notes choked off. His hand must-a gone around the neck about three times.

  The yellow Negro looked up at him, sort of shook. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Brother, you better start begging somebody’s pardon for what you doing to that song. You sings it all wrong.”

  Then a bald man in a shirt with the points of the collar all twisted and bent come up and patted Uncle Wallace on the back, hard. “Come on, buddy. Let’s move out.”

  Uncle Wallace about-faced and looked way down at him. “Brother, next time you come up behind me and touch me, you’ll find yourself peeping at me out of that guitar.”

  The bald man took a step back. Uncle Wallace looked at the yellow Negro again. “Now, look-a-here, colored brother, you can’t sing my songs that way. You sing them like I made them up or don’t sing them at all. And if you do sing them your way, then you may just never sing again, ever.” He was still holding the neck of the guitar.

  “Your songs? You didn’t write these songs,” the yellow Negro said. “They grew up out of the Rural Southern Negro Culture.”

  “Go on, nigger! They grew up out-a me. That song you was just singing now, about the man and the river, I wrote that song about my very own Daddy.”

  A couple people in the audience started to sit up and listen. But that little yellow flit of a Negro didn’t believe it. “I tell you, these songs were collected in 1948 by Francis Mazer, and there’s no telling how long they’ve been sung. I heard the original tapes myself.”

  Uncle Wallace’s eyes went blank for a second. Then he said: “What this Francis Mazer look like? He a little old gray-haired man with a game leg?”

  That stopped the yellow Negro for a while. “Yessss.” He held onto the world like he didn’t want to let it out.

  “Sure enough, I remember him. He was a mighty sweet old gentleman, told me all he wanted to do was put my songs on a little strip of plastic. I asked him if he meant to write all my songs on that small space. He said I got him wrong, that the machine he had with him would make a record of them. And I said for him to go on. I was playing a dance and the folks was happy and I sang from Friday night until the next afternoon, and that little gentleman stood by just putting them spools in his machine and smiling. And when I got done he give me thirty dollars, U.S. currency, and I went out and bought me some new strings and a plow too.” Uncle Wallace stopped and shook his head. “Mighty sweet old gentleman. And you say his name was Mazer?”

  “This has gone far enough!” The yellow Negro was real ticked off now, sort of cross like a chick. “Arthur, get him out of here.” He was talking to the bald man.

  Uncle Wallace looked at the bald man too, sort of menacing. Then he looked at the yellow Negro. “I don’t want you singing my songs at all.” Then he just walked away, out of the lights and it was like the sun come up on the yellow Negro all at once.

  But the bald man wouldn’t let it stop there and said: “Hey, you, mister, wait!” He was talking to Uncle Wallace, who didn’t stop because (he told me later) he never in his life got called Mis
ter by no white man, so he thought the bald man was talking to someone else.

  The bald man run after him and was about to put his hand on his shoulder, but remembered what Uncle Wallace said before and hot-footed it around in front of him and started to talk, backing up. “I’m Arthur Friedlander. I own this place. If you’re what you say you are, then I’d like you to sing some songs.”

  That stopped Uncle Wallace, who told me once he’d sing for anybody, even a president of a White Citizen’s Council if he got asked. So he came to a halt like a coal truck at a sudden red light and looked down on Mister Friedlander and said: “You want me to sing?”

  And Mister Friedlander said: “If you can. Sure, go on.”

  “But I ain’t brung my guitars.”

  “He’ll let you use his. Go on.” He reached out sort of timid, like at a real mean dog, and took Uncle Wallace’s arm and started to lead him back to the lights.

  The yellow Negro, he didn’t really want to give up his guitar, but I guess he figured Mister Friedlander would fire him if he didn’t, so he left it resting against the stool and stormed off the stage.

  Uncle Wallace and Mister Friedlander went up there and Uncle Wallace picked up the guitar and ran his fingers over the strings. It looked like he was holding a ukulele.

  Mister Friedlander looked at the audience and said: “The Lantern takes pleasure in presenting a new folk singer.” He realized he didn’t know Uncle Wallace’s name and turned around.

  “Bedlow,” Uncle Wallace said, sort-a shy.

  “Bedlow,” said Mister Friedlander to the audience.

  A couple people giggled and a couple others snapped their fingers, but they was joking. Uncle Wallace whacked the guitar again, and all of a sudden music come out of it. I was surprised because way down deep I thought sure Uncle Wallace was just a fool. He didn’t play right off, though, just hit it a couple times and started to talk:

  “That song the other fellow was playing, I wrote that when my Daddy died, for his funeral. That was 1947. It’s all about how when I was a boy we had a flood down home and where we was living got filled up with water. There was only one safe, high spot in that country—an island in mid-river. But none of us could swim but my Daddy, so he tied me and my brother on his back and my Mama, she hung on and he swum the whole parcel of us over. So everybody remembered that and when he was taken I made a song about it to sing over his trench…” He hit another chord, but still didn’t sing yet, just stopped.

  “Say,” he said, “anybody got another guitar?”

  Some folks started mumbling about him being a fake and stalling and a couple of them laughed. I was thinking maybe they was right.

  A white boy with a beard come up with a guitar case and opened it and reached over a guitar to Uncle Wallace and so now he had two guitars. I thought he didn’t like the yellow Negro’s guitar, but he started to get them in the same tune—hitting one and then the other. And when he judged they was all right, he put one on his left knee, with his left hand around the neck like anybody would hold a guitar, and then put the other one on his right knee and grabbed the neck of that one with his right hand. His arms was way out and he looked like he was about to fly away. Then he clamped his fingers down on the strings of them both so hard and so fast they both sounded, not just a little noise, but a loud chord like an organ in church, or two men playing guitars. Then he started to stamp his feet and clamp his fingers and you could hear the blues get going and then he was singing…

  Well, not really, because the most you could say about his voice was that it was on key, and it was sure loud! It wasn’t deep and hollow, or high and sweet. It didn’t even sound like singing. In fact, I don’t think anybody ever heard him sing or really listened to him. It wasn’t a voice you heard or listened to; it was a voice you swallowed, because it always seemed to upset your stomach. I heard him sing lots of times and it was always the same: not hearing anything, but feeling kind of sick like you been drinking a gallon of wine, and the wine was fighting you inside, grabbing at your belly and twisting it around so you wanted to yell out, but didn’t because you was scared the wine might take offense and tear you to pieces. And when he stopped and the grabbing stopped, you’d feel all weak and terrible like maybe you would feel if you gotten a date with a girl you thought might give you some tail and you been thinking about it all day in school and then you went out with her and when you took her home, her folks was out, and so she took you inside and you did get some tail and now that it was all over, you wished she’d run inside and not given you anything because then it wouldn’t be all over now and you’d still have it to look forward to. But pretty soon he’d start singing again and everything would be like it was before, feeling sick, and wishing you was still sick when you didn’t feel sick no more.

  So that’s the way it was that Friday in the Village; that’s the way it always was. And the people was always the same. When he got through grabbing at them, no one snapped their fingers; no one ordered anything. The cooks come out the kitchen and the waitresses sat down with the customers. People come down the steps and paid their money and managed to get into a seat before he reached out and caught them, and when the seats was all gone—because nobody left—people kept coming until they was standing and sitting in the aisles, packed right to the doors, and even on the stage with him, nobody moving or making a sound, just getting sick in the stomach and hating it and loving it all at the same time.

  So Uncle Wallace sang right until Saturday morning at four. And then we went home and I slept all day.

  * * *

  —

  THAT WAS HOW we found out what Uncle Wallace was, or did. But for a while after he sang that Friday, he didn’t sing no more. It was like before: Uncle Wallace going to work, him and my old man building their building, coming home and Uncle Wallace gassing himself on TV until one, then going to sleep.

  But then the phone call came from Mister Friedlander and I answered it. He sounded real tired and said: “Hello? Is this the Bedlow residence? Do you have someone living with you or know of someone named Bedlow who sings folk songs?”

  And when I answered the questions Yes, there was a silence and then I could hear sobbing on the other end of the line and through all the sobbing, him saying, “Thank God; thank God,” for about five minutes.

  So at first I was about to hang up because I heard of guys calling up and cursing at women and all that mess, but then he said: “Who am I talking to?” I told him. “You were with that man who sang in my place four weeks ago? The Lantern? I’m Arthur Friedlander.” So I said Hello, because I remembered him. He asked me what Uncle Wallace was to me and I told him.

  “Carlyle,” he said, “I’ve been trying to find your uncle for three weeks. I called Bedfords and Bradfords for the first two. It’s like this, kid, every night a hundred people come into the place and ask for him and I have to say he isn’t here and they get so mad they go away. He’s ruining me! Where’s your uncle now?”

  I told him Uncle Wallace was at work.

  “Listen, kid, there’s a five in it for you if you can get him down here tonight by seven-thirty. And tell him I’ll pay him thirty—no, make that fifty a week.”

  I said I could only try like I figured it might be hard to get Uncle Wallace to sing. Mister Friedlander give me his number and told me to call him back when I had an answer and hung up.

  When Uncle Wallace come home, I said: “That man you sang for a month ago?—he wants you to come again…for money.” I didn’t have to add the money part because I could tell by his face, he was ready to go.

  So I called back Mister Friedlander and told him we was coming. I said that to get Uncle Wallace to sing, which he hadn’t wanted to do, I had to say Mister Friedlander was paying him seventy-five dollars a week.

  Mister Friedlander didn’t even seem surprised. He just said, “But you got him to come?”

  �
�Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Good boy! I’m giving you ten dollars instead of five.” Which is what I figured he’d do if I told him I had trouble.

  When we turned the corner into The Lantern’s block there was a riot going on, with a hundred people, maybe even a thousand there, not all Village people neither. A whole bunch of them was in suits, and fur coats and jewels. Man, if I been a pickpocket I could-a retired on what I could-a got there that night. And there was cops in their green cars with flashing lights going off and on, and on horses. Folks was pushing each other into the gutter and throwing punches. I looked up at Uncle Wallace and said: “Hey, we better split. We ain’t got nothing to do with this, and you know how cops pick on colored folks.”

  “But I promised the man I’d sing, Carlyle,” he said. But I could tell it wasn’t that: he just wanted to sing, promise or no promise.

  So we tried to sneak around behind all the rioting to get into The Lantern. And we most made it, but someone said: “Is that him?”

  And someone answered: “Got to be.”

  I poked Uncle Wallace and said: “Now we really better get out-a here. These white folks think you done something.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but we better get out-a here, now.” And I grabbed his arm and started to pull him away, out-a there. I could tell he didn’t want to go; he wanted to sing, but I figured I had to keep him out-a jail if I could.

  Then someone started to yell at us to stop and I turned around to see how big they was and if there was more than we could handle, because either Uncle Wallace could flatten them or we could outrun them. But it was Mister Friedlander, chugging up the stairs, yelling.

  We stopped.

  He got to us and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “They think Uncle Wallace did something. He didn’t do nothing. We just got here. We don’t know nothing about this riot.”

  “Come inside. I’ll explain,” Mister Friedlander said. So we went down the stairs, and inside and he locked the door.