Dancing in the Dark (24 page)

The young man holds a small notepad flat in the palm of one outstretched hand, and in the other hand a pen hovers as he looks intently in the direction of a visibly harrowed Bert Williams. Before the young man is a cup and saucer and a teapot, and there is also a small plate upon which sits a piece of cake and a fork, but the man is clearly not interested in either food or drink for he has made the short crosstown pilgrimage for one purpose only, and that is to interview the most famous colored performer in the world for the
New York Post
, and whoever else he might sell the exclusive to. For a whole year he has been writing to Mr. Williams and requesting an interview, and finally he has made a breakthrough for he is now sitting before his hero, whose large physique and courtly manners are precisely what he was expecting. Nineteen eighteen was a good year to begin requesting this interview, largely because the word on Broadway was that Mr. Bert Williams would never again perform, and that his oneyear hiatus from the Follies was merely a way of delaying the inevitable announcement of his retirement. Bert did not answer the young man’s initial requests, even though he always admired the polite unhurried manner in which the solicitations were framed, but eventually he relented and the colored youngster is
now sitting before him, his thick lips strangely misshapen as though he has recently been struck in the mouth, and his borrowed suit hanging loose for it is far too big for his young bones. He can see that the colored youngster is nervous and so he tries to set him at ease with a smile, but it is obvious that nothing short of beginning the actual interview is going to make the young man feel comfortable. The first questions are factual enough, inquiring as to where he was born, and when he came to America, and if he is now an American citizen. Bert confirms that indeed he is now an American citizen. The young man continues and follows the contours of Bert’s career up until he joins the Follies, correctly identifying dates, places, productions, and generally winning his subject over with his impressive range of knowledge. But then the young man, perhaps sensing Bert’s fatigue, suddenly decides to change gear and open up the interview. He asks Mr. Williams if he feels like a Negro American. This question renders Bert ill at ease and he is unsure how to respond, but the polite young man does not push him on this issue. He turns instead to the nature of the relationship that Mr. Williams enjoyed with Mr. George Walker, and he asks him if it would be true to suggest that his most important work was done in the company of George Walker. Bert pauses before answering, which gives the young man an opening to fire off another question. Of all the things that he has done since Mr. Walker’s passing, what, if anything, has given him the greatest pleasure? For a moment Bert is silent as he tries to work out if somewhere, buried beneath this young man’s general bonhomie, good humor and ill will aren’t lurking side by side. Does the young man believe that he has done no good work since breaking with George nearly ten years ago? In fact, he feels sure that he should not be pressed in this manner to judge his own contribution for surely this is the job of the fellow with the pad and pen. But he decides not to admonish the young reporter and
instead he suggests that in the ten years since the demise of Williams and Walker there has been much to be grateful for. Aside from his many stage performances, and the three short films that he starred in, he has perhaps proved himself to be one of America’s most successful recording artists. The young man listens and writes assiduously, occasionally nodding as his pen scratches back and forth across the page, but it is too late, for the man’s implication is clear; he believes that without George Walker, Mr. Williams has underachieved. A thoroughly disappointed Bert has read and heard it all before. The young reporter looks up and wonders if Mr. Williams is aware that a play called
The Emperor Jones
, written by Mr. Eugene O’Neill, will soon be produced starring the colored actor Charles Gilpin. Bert keeps the smile anchored to his face, but it is the phrase “colored actor” that bothers him, with its unpleasant implication of failure on his part, for he is most certainly not regarded as a colored actor. He is a colored performer. “Actor” is a term that suggests a certain dignity, and it implies a necessary distance between the performer and the character to be interpreted. This one word, “actor,” if properly applied to him, might have spared his soul much misery, but he understands that nobody, including this reporter, considers him to be an actor. The young man looks across at him and once again asks the same question, and this time Bert smiles and nods his head. Yes, he is aware of
The Emperor Jones
, and he remembers Charles Gilpin well, for some years earlier the young “actor” had appeared as a chorus singer in
Abyssinia
, whooping it up with the best of them and doing a little dignified buck dancing. Williams and Walker provided Mr. Gilpin with his professional break, for both he and George felt it important to recognize and encourage talent. Clearly some of this is news to the excited young man, but it upsets Bert that Charles Gilpin should now be spoken of in the present and future tense, while the whole tone of the young man’s
conversation with him speaks to the past tense. Until, that is, the journalist reaches the final question and asks his subject if he can imagine himself forming another company and going out on the road, or did the Follies of 1919 really signal the end of Bert Williams’s stage career? He looks closely at the young man and he chooses to simply stir this question into his cup of tea and ignore it. Bert takes a sip of his tea and then discreetly places the cup back into the circle of the saucer before climbing to his feet. The young man also stands, understanding that the interview is now over, but he worries for despite the thin smile on Mr. Williams’s face he is concerned that he may have caused some offense to the great Negro performer. Mother enters the room, as though on cue, and the two men shake hands, and then Mother escorts the young man out of the room. Bert sits carefully, his knees twin-pointed hillocks on which he rests his flat palms, and he listens for the door to close. Alone now in his library, the evidence of a meeting before him in the shape of the man’s still full cup of tea and his untouched slice of cake, his reputation as a Negro performer under scrutiny, he wonders again about his future.

Clyde D moves slowly. He pours another drink and then pauses as though he wishes to say something, but whatever it is that he wishes to say has momentarily slipped out of his mind. However, he knows better than to hover around Mr. Williams’s table, so he turns and moves back to the bar, where he will remain until Mr. Williams’s glass once again needs tending. These days the noise from the avenue is loud and it leaks into the place and disturbs the peace of the afternoon. In Metheney’s day a man could barely hear a raised voice in the street, but today the competing noises of vendors, automobiles, and streetcars all bully their unapologetic way into Clyde D’s bar. It’s a new, busier world, but old Mr.
Williams is protected in this bar from both prying eyes and conversation.

He looks again at his newspaper, careful to note anything that is reported from England. He never did return there, but he still tells himself that, despite the tedium of the journey aboard the SS
Aurania
, one day he will make it back to Buckingham Palace where the king and queen welcomed the colored players so graciously for their royal command performance to celebrate the ninth birthday of the young Prince of Wales, Edward. He remembers it was not a warm day, and he worried as to how his company would manage everything in the garden of this English palace that was guarded by soldiers who held their helmets under one arm like severed heads. First a stage had to be built, and then all the costumes and props transferred from Shaftsbury Avenue, which was a mile or so across the center of London, and then all the paraphernalia had to be laid out and made ready for the performance. George was eager to make sure that they were dressed properly, his own gemstones as big as marbles, but the actual details of the performance he left to his partner, and so for most of the morning and afternoon Bert found himself rushing from one place to the next confirming that all members of the company were aware of the significance of this day. Williams and Walker would be setting both colored elegance and colored beauty, and a little of their own “African royalty,” before this English king, and by embracing Africa they were breaking the American stranglehold on their lives and engaging with something historically and culturally unique. According to George, they were internationalizing the stereotype, and by doing so hoping to escape its harness, but George was realistic enough to admit that a royal audience might not understand this. Inevitably, when the hour for the performance finally arrived, a fatigued Bert could barely summon the
strength to get into his costume, let alone cakewalk back and forth across the makeshift stage. In the end, it transpired that it was the cakewalking that proved most popular, especially with the young Prince Edward, and at the conclusion of the afternoon the prince insisted that an exhausted Bert and George, his favorite coons, give him a private demonstration of the correct cakewalking technique, laying particular emphasis on the sliding and gliding for the boy could already intuit that his young legs were too short to properly high-step. But this was a long time ago, and now George and Aida are gone, and here in this Harlem bar any thoughts of his weary body cakewalking on a makeshift stage in the garden of an English palace seem unimaginable. Perhaps the polite young man who visited him with a notepad and an eager pen already understood what he has not yet admitted to himself. That his days as a performer are at an end, for he suspects that unless he is on the glamorous playbills of Ziegfeld’s Follies, few people will relish the opportunity of witnessing old Bert Williams performing
low
comedy in blackface, with shuffling feet, and his raggedy clothes falling from his backside. After all, who wishes to recognize
this
Negro today?

Bert falls into the habit of leaving Clyde D’s Bar late at night and wandering the streets of his city on bruised and swollen feet until the sun comes up. He observes the colored citizens of New York going about their night business, and he studies them, he looks at their posture, listens to how they speak to one another in short excitable bursts, and he observes their often flamboyant hand gestures. These days there are many who don’t recognize him, including those who have arrived fresh off the trains from the south and who might be familiar with his name, but who certainly don’t know his face. The sight of this tall, heavyset, lightskinned man ambling around the streets of Harlem shod in
carpet slippers only arouses feelings of pity in the hearts of those who look on. Why is this slow-moving man not home and tucked up safely in a warm bed? What can he be looking for out here on these early-morning streets? As he passes by strangers he smiles at them, for he is a booster for New York and he loves the way the city rises toward the sky, he loves the Brooklyn Bridge, the coalpowered elevated trains, the noise, the dirt, the rivers alive with their multitude of craft; this is his city, and these are his people, and as he walks he imagines that in its perversely detached way New York City understands him, but eventually sleep invades his tired limbs and he finds himself at the top of the short flight of steep steps that lead right up to his door, and he pauses for a moment and then slowly turns around and looks out on a lamplit Seventh Avenue knowing that tonight he has once again beheld the three stages of dawn. First, he witnessed the accidental leakage of light that hardly altered the darkness. Second, he saw the blackness turn a dark, royal blue. And finally, as he entered his block, he could see green leaf against brown trunk, and he stands now and observes the door handle distinct from the door, and the individual colors of Mother’s drapes in the windows, and then the streetlamps blink off and the avenue is now once again illuminated by the reliable light of the day, and soon he will be able to ease the slippers from his swollen feet.

When he wakes up he realizes that the sun is shining directly into his face. He levers himself upright on the sofa in the library and he notices that Mother has already placed the daily newspaper in his lap. These days this early-morning exchange represents the true extent of their intimacy, and he feels powerless to improve upon it. He has dreamt that he was back on the road leading a new company that comprised just himself, George, and Aida, and every city they played in they broke box office records. Strangely,
he remembers that the audience in the stalls contained only colored folks, while the white people sat upstairs in the balcony and looked on somewhat cautiously. Of course, the most important thing of all was the fact that there was no makeup upon his face. George danced a graceful jig and looked over and smiled at him, and then he woke up and discovered that the sun was shining directly into his face and that his wife had carefully placed the daily newspaper in his lap.

He looks from one face to another eager to ask them why they are staring down at him in this fearful manner. In fact, why are they standing over him? Their mouths are moving but he can hear nothing except the sound of the sea rushing around in his head, rising and falling, the waves lapping gently from one side of his nappy wig to the other. Every face is white. He remembers. His company is all white and they are on the road, at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, with his new production,
Under the Bamboo Tree
. It is 1922 and Bert has made a comeback. Bert Williams is producer, star, and leader of a new company, but without George this is futile. The box office is weak, and he is sick and incapable of dressing himself, and the door to his mind is ajar, so much so that he seems to have little control over who or what wanders in, but he understands that he must continue for without him there will be no show, yet there is an aspect of horror on the faces of those who look down at him for clearly they see something that has shocked them. He had thought seriously about formally announcing his retirement, but he finally admitted to himself that his short journey from his library to Clyde D’s and back again was disrupting his soul, and so after two years his wife was happy when against all expectation he tore up the numerous drafts of his “retirement” press release, and he announced that he would be forming a new company and touring the country with a
traditional
type of show. However, it quickly became clear, both to his company and to paying audiences, that Bert Williams had underestimated the pressures of leading a company, and he began to struggle through performances, and sweat cried from his armpits the moment he left the quiet of his dressing room, and his joints jerked to little purpose when he attempted to dance for his whole rig was rusted over, and at the conclusion of each evening he could no longer bow deeply, or smile broadly, or bathe in the luxury of applause. Soon his wife was begging him to return home to New York and admit that his body and mind could no longer take this beating, but he decided to persevere, and now, above him, the circle of white faces begins to spin like a child’s top and he closes his eyes and the world fades to black. He remembers completing the matinee and so this must be the evening performance. And then he feels the staccato motion of the automobile as it picks its careful way through the dark streets of Detroit. The wind is high and it rocks them first one way and then the next, but he can hear nothing except the sea in his ears. He is cold, and his whole body begins to shiver now as he remembers that it was here in Detroit, twenty-six years ago, in 1896, that he first adopted cork and became somebody else. He laughs for he has yet to take off the same cork. Perhaps this is what they were staring at? The evidence of what he has become. A face that was put in place in the last century but that, in this new century, no longer makes much sense to either white or colored. Just who is this corkfaced colored man who claims to be their leader, yet who seems incapable of paying their wages? At the hospital the doctor feels his patient’s brow with the back of his hand, and then he takes a towel and wipes the offending makeup from himself. He plucks a watch from his vest and reaches down and lightly touches his patient’s wrist with two fingers. He shakes his head and takes a deep intake of breath. No, he says, turning to the company manager. No, this
man cannot set foot on a stage again. He gestures to the company manager to move some few paces away, but he does not realize that his patient can hear nothing beyond the rise and fall of the sea that brought him to this country as an eleven-year-old boy on a saltwater voyage that has been both the making and the unmaking of him. Unless you can replace him, begins the doctor, then you must close your show for this man must immediately return to New York City. I take it you know how to contact his kin? And you should instruct the Michigan Railroad Company to send a wheelchair and blankets. The company manager nods and asks the doctor how he might settle the bill. The doctor casts a cursory glance in the direction of his patient and then he shakes his head.