by Peter Quinn
Feel these bumps: Causality, Desire to Know Why; Comparison, Perception of Resemblance; Sublimity, Love of Grandeur. They stood out on Foster’s head. Because of them he could see what nobody else could see. Sheet music and the two-cent royalty were just a beginning. When he thought about it, his brain raced so fast that he couldn’t keep up. Drink helped slow it down, but too often brought it to a halt. He sought balance. Last night, he had it—enough drink to slow rather than stop him. He told Mulcahey what he saw: a cast-iron box in every house, sound coming out of it at the turn of the tap like Croton water, song after song in succession, an unlimited profusion, beginning and ceasing at will. You pay a charge once a month, the same as for water, and you can turn the spigot on or off, at will.
They were standing at the end of a pier. River noises all around. Whistles, horns, screeching of gulls. Mulcahey dropped pebbles into the black water of the East River. It’s no longer enough just to write music or to sing it, Foster said. You’ve got to know how to sell it, to create as well as to meet demand. Wed Hermes to Polyhymnia. Mulcahey dropped more pebbles. The circles rippled out toward infinity. The future belonged to the salesman. The country is overrun with inventions and inventors. The Patent Office can barely keep up. Machines for sawing, reaping, canning, digging ditches, cleaning streets, binding books, stitching shoes. The ones who grow rich won’t be the inventors, but those with the ability to feel the bumps on the national cranium, decipher the shape of the people’s desires, form those desires into a single vision of happiness, and go out and sell it.
Plug, plug, plug: That’s the future. The lesson of a songwriter’s career. Don’t just wait for the public to decide what music it likes. Listen carefully as it hums. Measure its bumps. Anticipate the songs it wants to sing. The science of anthropometry has shown that despite all its variations, mankind comes in three basic sizes: small, medium, and large. Now all things are possible! Ready-made shirts, pants, jackets, dresses, blouses. Ready-made books, ideas, philosophies, politics, religions, music, culture. The world has become a marketplace. The same challenge for the philosopher as for the politician, the ironmonger, and the songwriter: Sell or die.
Mulcahey kept his eyes on the circles that widened out from the pebbles he dropped into the water. He dropped some more. Plop, plop, plop. He started to sing: Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me; starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.
Foster watched the water. The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone called it a river. They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things. Enough to drop a few pebbles and make the smallest of waves. A ship sounded its foghorn. Over the streamlet vapors are borne, waiting to fade at the bright coming morn. He could see the river for what it was. He could see through the vapors to the other shore. Not a dreamer at all, but a man waiting for history to catch up with him. He knew where the column of water led. He wasn’t mesmerized by tiny circles, nor did he confuse ripplets with waves.
His problem was the same as his maternal granduncle’s, Oliver Evans. Foster had never met him, but he heard the story repeated over and over again by his mother, one of the few that drew out any sign of passion or excitement in her. She was there the day Evans drove his steam engine out of the yard near the Schuylkill River, a clanging, banging, puffing monster, its copper boiler sticking a thick thumb of smoke into the air. Behind this engine Evans pulled a steam dredge mounted on a scow—the “Orukter Amphibole,” he called it. He transported it through the quiet streets, scaring horses and dogs, sending a rush of birds into the air, the noise and smoke causing men and women to fear that the Last Judgment had arrived. A freewheeling steam engine that turned corners and climbed hills and pulled another ton of steam-driven machinery behind it. One more in a long line of Evans’s inventions. A mill that ran itself, free of any human hand. A machine for carding wool that could turn out 1,500 cards a minute. A pump to bring enough water to satisfy the daily requirements of 25,000 people. He could have brought America into the Age of Steam a generation before Stephenson put England on rails. But he was dismissed as a dreamer until the day came when the waters of history caught up with him, lifting the notion of the “Orukter Amphibole” on its crest, carrying it into the future. A horde of salesmen now jumped in, infringing his patents, stealing his ideas, growing rich by selling what he had created and suffered for. Sounds of the rude world heard in the day, lull’d by the moonlight have all passed away!
“Beautiful Dreamer.” Firth, Pond & Co. had paid for it and had the plates engraved for printing, but they’d never used it. Maybe Daly would be interested in buying it from them. Then he would have his song. But would Daly want his twenty dollars back? Foster sensed someone standing behind him.
“Are you waiting for a guest, sir?”
A face bent close to his. A long nose and chin, side-whiskers running to the lips, the hair parted in the middle, greased down close to the skull, smelling of pomade. Foster kept his eyes on the fire. A new layer of ash was forming over the coals.
“I’m digesting my lunch.”
“Sir, these seats are for our guests and their visitors. If you wish to digest your meal, I would think a walk in the fresh air might help.” The nameless clerk-critic stood next to the chair, his shiny black boots reflecting the golden-red coals. Foster sat still. The clerk didn’t move. “Sir,” he said again.
Foster got up. Without looking at the clerk, he walked across the lobby. Men and women hurried past him. They shook their umbrellas and folded them.
You never knew where an idea would come from. In the summer of 1849, the cholera struck Cincinnati. Iron tubs filled with charcoal burned at street corners and crossroads, the thick smoke a presumed antidote to the invisible vapors that carried the disease. The worst of it was among the immigrants and the Negroes. Their bodies piled up in the streets before the authorities could muster the men needed to bury them. Stephen moved out of the city to a small farm owned by a Mrs. Dodge. The landlady was thrilled with her tenant: Cincinnati’s musical poet. Soon she had turned Stephen into a specimen. He couldn’t eat a meal alone. There were always guests, friends of hers she wanted to introduce to the young and famous songwriter.
On a wet, cold day in September, a few days before he was scheduled to return to the city, Mrs. Dodge told him she had an acquaintance coming to tea who had recently lost a child to the cholera. She was in very great need of cheering up. Her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a minister and scholar. He taught at the Lane Theological Seminary. She came from a family of preachers. Her father was Lyman Beecher. Her brothers were preachers back east.
He expected a shy, proper, quiet woman. Mrs. Stowe surprised him. When he came into the room, she was standing by the window with Mrs. Dodge. Mrs. Stowe was a woman so small that her growth seemed to have been arrested in childhood. She walked over to Stephen without waiting for Mrs. Dodge to make the introductions.
He bowed slightly at the waist. She barely reached his chest. He stared down into her small, pale face. “Mr. Foster,” she said, “while I find your music enjoyable, I find the lyrics to be offensive and vicious.” He burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. The incongruity of it, this diminutive woman in black striding over and, without the smallest amenities, launching into her sermon. His laughter didn’t stop her. “You make the Negro an object of ridicule,” she said. “You confirm the white man in his silly notions of a divinely conferred superiority.” She had a piece of paper in her hand. She read from it:
I jumped aboard the telegraph,
And trabbled down de ribber,
De ‘lectric fluid magnified
And killed five hundred nigger.
“You should know better, Mr. Foster. A man of your talents should be filling the country with the uplifting music of brotherhood, not such inanities. The Negro is not someone to be laughed at, Mr. Foster. For his suffering, God will exact a price. The laughter will stop. There will be tears instead.”
Mrs. Dodge interposed herself. She handed them their cups of tea. Foster smiled at Mrs. Stowe. He wasn’t insulted. He liked her direct way, always liked that in people, not having to figure out where somebody stood. The Negro as a figure of tragedy. She was on to something. The sadness of the Negro. The only one he really knew was Olivia. A girl of sadness. Others never saw that part of her, but he had. The way she cried. Such pain. And there was also Uncle Ned, the free Negro who swept out the office. An ancient, stooped man with a great air of tragedy, he died at the beginning of the summer from the cholera. No more hard work for poor old Ned, He’s gone whar de good niggers go.
Sometimes, after work as a clerk in the steamboat office in Cincinnati, Stephen would go down to the docks and watch the gangs of Negroes load and unload the boats. They were men. He had never given it much thought before. Never looked at Negroes with any intent of figuring out who they were, no more than he tried to distinguish the individual horses in the work teams that endlessly hauled wagons to and from the docks. Now he watched them. When the work stopped, they stood together in a group, talking and looking over their shoulders at the white men who oversaw them. Their whole way of speaking and gesticulating changed when they were by themselves. There was a litheness to their step, an energy and gracefulness, that they lost when the whites returned. They threw back their heads and laughed. Loud laughter. Rhythmical, playful, high-pitched. Yet there was something sly and mocking in it, conspiratorial. White people were unnerved by it. They were sure it was at their expense, Sambo and Cudjo making sport of their master, aping his walk or mannerisms, returning his contempt.
“Come over here, boys,” the white man would yell, and the Negroes would come. They could be coaxed into singing or commanded to dance or made into the butt of a joke, but they kept the secret of their laughter to themselves, a subversive glare lingering above the broad, innocent smile.
What did they talk about among themselves? Foster thought about approaching them but knew they would respond to him as they did to all white men. The free Negroes were even more guarded than the slaves. They hurried to end any conversation and get on their way. It had been impossible to talk to Ned about anything but the Bible and, once he was started on that subject, equally impossible to stop him.
Foster was astounded when a few years later Mrs. Stowe became the world’s most famous author. Shrewd as well as outspoken, a true daughter of New England, she pushed aside Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery, with its exposé of popish sexual depravity, as America’s favorite reading. In its place she put her noble Negro, patient, saintly Tom. Foster read the book. Which was further away from the real but impenetrable humanity of these black men and women? His Uncle Ned? Or her Uncle Tom? Still, he admired her. He never spoke to anyone about Negroes, never asserted what observation had confirmed to him: These are men. Mrs. Stowe had. Better yet, she had made a fortune at it. Good luck to her.
When he finished reading her book, he began writing a song based on it. The tragedy of the Negro. A man sold away from his family. He wrote it in the accounting ledger where he wrote the rough drafts of all his songs:
Oh, good night, good night, good night
Poor Uncle Tom
Grieve not for your old Kentucky home
You’re bound for a better land
Old Uncle Tom.
He crossed it out. The new opening came to him whole, in an entire sentence: The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home. He called them darkies instead of niggers. The darkies the white man liked to see, merry, all happy and bright, but Mrs. Stowe’s darkies also. The Negro of tragedy taken away from his family and home.
The head must bow
And the back will have to bend
Wherever the darkie may go …
He heard that it was among the favorite songs that Confederate military bands liked to play. Rebels marching to a Negro lamenting that the time has come when the darkies have to part. Sentiments by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Music makes for strange bedfellows.
Foster stood by the doorway of the hotel, next to a potted palm. Wished he could remember what he had done with Dunne’s umbrella. He glanced quickly in the direction of where he had been sitting. The clerk was standing in the middle of the lobby, staring. Foster walked outside. The clock atop City Hall said 4:00. The rain had changed into a soundless mizzle.
On the other side of Broadway, down to his right, was Barnum’s Museum, its façade already ablaze with gaslight, a riot of banners bearing the images of birds and beasts and mermaids. On the balcony, above the door, five men in white gutta-percha coats with red-plumed hats sat on chairs and tuned their instruments. They prepared their siren song for the early-evening crowd. Pay attention, New York.
Oliver Evans had been a genius of steam and iron, of the mechanical arts. He lived with a lonely vision of the future, with ideas the people couldn’t share,’ at least not in his lifetime. Barnum was a genius of tears and laughter, of the emotions. The shrewdest of the shrewd race of Connecticut Yankee peddlers, he understood the people in their multiple desires. No need to guess. He thought their thoughts as the child in the womb thinks its mother’s thoughts. Barnum waits contentedly in the womb of his public, lets its thoughts and tastes shape him, and then, at the moment of parturition, emerges to give them the very things they knew they wanted but couldn’t articulate. Hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up, here for your viewing pleasure, the one, the only, the object of your desire!
Three times Foster had left his name with the museum manager. Once, a brief note. You may remember me. We met during a trip I made to New York ten years ago. I would like to discuss a business proposition of possible benefit to us both.
No answer beyond “Mr. Barnum has your note.”
The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Two years ago, the traffic and pedestrians would have come to a halt. Now they moved on, iron-covered wheels rattling over cobblestones, draymen shouting, a cacophony of conversations, no melody, no harmony, a thousand different songs being sung at once. A few more days for to tote the weary load. Doo-dah, doo-dah. After two years of war, even Barnum was having a problem getting the people’s attention. But the people still needed to be entertained. The song industry wouldn’t die. It was only a matter of listening, hearing the faint chord of the future, giving the people what they wanted.
Foster walked out into the pavement, into the middle of the two-way river of pedestrians that was pushing north and south. He stood and listened to the shuffle of wet feet. Two years ago, the bombs bursting in air above Fort Sumter, whiz, crash, bang, a strange new music to the nation’s ears. A woman bumped into him. She gave him a startled look and walked on. Tramp, tramp, the troops are marching. The papers advertised a substantial reward for anyone who could produce “an American Marseillaise or a suitable Tyrtaean hymn.” What was the song they were waiting to sing? “Willie, My Brave, Our Willie Dear Is Dying, Willie’s Gone to Heaven.” Not that. The song of the future. He would hear it. If anyone could, he would. From the direction of the North River came the long piercing stab of a steam whistle. Poor Oliver Evans.
Hey mister, you’re blocking the way.
Watch your back.
Doo-dah, doo-dah.
Barnum’s band could barely be heard.
The song was there. Somewhere. He would find it. Just you wait, New York. Just you wait.
III
JACK MULCAHEY CLAIMED TO BE, in his own words, “a born minstrel,” a claim that was true enough since, to begin with, he was born in 1832, the same year as the industry. But it was Tommy Rice who created the industry, which was why they called him “Daddy” Rice, a Yankee Doodle Irishman born in the Seventh Ward on Bancker Street, in the year before the Bancker family had petitioned to have the street renamed in honor of someone who either couldn’t see or didn’t mind the immigrant horde that had turned a dignified, elm-lined lane into a treeless, refuse-strewn, overpopulated confusion. That someone was the former president of the
United States, James Madison, who offered no protest when Bancker was renamed Madison Street.
Rice was born on Madison (nee Bancker) Street, in 1808; the industry came into being in either Louisville or Cincinnati, the location varying according to the level of alcohol in Daddy Rice’s veins when he repeated the story in the bar of the New England Hotel, on Bayard Street, in those last performances of his life, while syphilis raced John Barleycorn for the honor of committing to eternity the man who’d done for the stage what Fulton had done for steam.
First on de heel tap, den on de toe,
Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
Wheel about and turn about and do jis so,
And ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
Daddy Rice had suffered his second stroke in 1860, when Mulcahey first saw him do that immortal chorus, a limping old man, his right eye practically closed, his badly shaven face and neck spotted by tiny nicks and cuts amid gray stubble. But the old man came alive with that chorus, the limp disappearing, the left foot moving forward, heel tap, the right foot backward, den on de toe, a circular motion on one foot until he had his back to you, wheel about, and a leap into the air, perhaps not with the dramatic intensity of twenty years before but into the air nonetheless, jump Jim Crow. Everyone would clap because as people whose livelihood was the stage they knew, no matter how pathetic the old man or how repetitious his nearly nightly rendition of his original act, this was history, a living tableau of a moment that nobody in the room, except Daddy Rice, had been there to see.
