Juba! (4 page)

“If she don't have seven babies before she's nineteen, she'll be a good entertainer,” Jack whispered to me.

When the girl finished, a few people started clapping, and after Mr. Reeves stood up and gave her a hand, everyone joined in.

“Ten!” Ten was a light-skinned black man with sandy hair. He started doing a reel, with a little too much spinning, and Mr. Reeves stood up and called to the piano player to stop.

“Are you colored, or what?”

“I'm colored,” the dancer said.

Mr. Reeves sat back down, and the piano player started again.

“That piano player know what to play for you?” Stubby asked me.

Panic. “Stubby, go tell him to play ‘Old Rattler'
clog when I dance,” I said. “Wait until this fellow is finished.”

As soon as the dancer was finished and bowing, Stubby went over to the piano player and whispered in his ear. I looked over to where Mr. Reeves was sitting and talking to
John Diamond. Their heads were just about touching, they were so close together.

The door banged open and four fellows came in. They all had bandanas tied around their legs, so we knew they were from one of the local gangs. They found spots against the far wall and leaned against it.

“Probably from the mayor's office.” Jack Bishop chuckled. “Out looking for the dancing voters!”

Fred Flamer was number eleven. When he started out to the middle of the floor, John Diamond stood up.

“Show us your minstrel stuff, Fred!” he shouted. “You're the best!”

John Diamond was running the auditions, and I didn't like that one bit. I had to think he was already hired.

I thought Fred would go for a clog dance, his best move, but instead, the piano player started a step dance. What Fred did surprised me. I sat back in my chair and just watched. Fred wasn't a first-rate dancer, but he was better than the fool I saw on the floor. He came out reeling and staggering around like he was drunk. He looked over toward where Mr. Reeves was sitting and began rolling his eyes. John Diamond started laughing, and so did Mr. Reeves. The more they laughed, the more Fred clowned it up, even falling to his knees and shaking his shoulders as if he were having a fit or something. I felt myself getting madder and madder.

It felt to me like Fred was on the floor longer than any of the others. He lay on his back and started shaking. He smiled with his chin on the floor. He was throwing away his skills. John Diamond roared with laughter, and when Fred had finished and had stood up and taken a deep bow, John began to applaud.

“Twelve!”

Whatever I had in me I was going to put out on the floor. The piano player started in on “Old Rattler,” and I hit the rhythm on the first chorus. The song had been a good choice because it let me show off my clog-dancing skills, marking a steady beat on the floor and keeping the momentum moving throughout my body. I had a pattern that I had worked on to get the audience going, and every time I did a stutter step toward the front, people started clapping with me. I knew I had them going, and I wanted to keep them going even higher.

“Coon it up! We want to see some minstrels!” John Diamond yelled out.

I ignored him and kept dancing, but the clapping began to slow down.

“Coon it up, boy—this is a colored dance!” John Diamond again.

I kept dancing, doubling on my steps, beating my hands together, keeping my elbows high.

“Come on, Juba, do you want a job or not?” Pete Williams's
voice boomed through the small hall.

“Thirteen!” John Diamond called the next dancer even though I hadn't finished my routine.

I was beat down, tired, and hurt. I went back over to where Stubby and Jack Bishop were sitting and plopped down in the chair.

“You done good, Juba,” Jack said. “You done real good.”

Number thirteen was an old man I had seen around the neighborhood. They told me he used to be a dancer. He was smooth, but he was grinning like he had lost his mind; he was “cooning it up,” even though he was white.

The auditions over, I sat with Jack and Stubby and watched as the dancers started getting their things together and leaving. The woman who had brought the little girl I liked came over and patted me on the hand. She didn't say anything, just patted me on the hand.

John Diamond, Mr. Reeves, and the man Jack had said was a slave dealer left together.

“Juba, you want to tell us how you're feeling, or should we just look at your face and figure it out?” Jack asked.

“The way I feel? Like everything that is me, the real me, the inside me, is dead,” I said. “I don't even know if I feel that or if I just know it.”

“So I'm going back to the house and getting some more smoked oysters ready to sell to rich people,” Jack said, easing
himself up from the table. “You can come help if you want, but take your time. The oysters will always be there.”

Jack and Stubby left, and I wanted to go, too, but my legs just didn't seem to have the strength to move on.

“Juba, there are things we can't change in this world.” A soft voice spoke to me. “You're old enough to know that by now.”

I looked up to see Miss Lilly sitting across from me.

“That's what I used to think, Miss Lilly,” I said. “But they just changed all my dreams about dancing and all my hopes to make something of myself. My dancing didn't mean a thing. The only thing they see in a black man is a clown or a slave. How long did it take? Four minutes?”

“You used those minutes well, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “They'll come back again.”

I doubted it.

Jack Bishop was sick, so me and Stubby went down to the docks to buy fish.

“Tell them the fish are for the old Bishop,” Jack said.

It was cold and rainy at four o'clock on Monday morning, and I didn't want to go fish buying, even if it was for Jack. Stubby was all for it, though, saying that buying good food was a big part of cooking.

“If you buy old, tough meat, there's not a lot you can do with it,” he was saying. “You got to boil it to death to get it so you can chew it. The same thing with fish. You get old fish and it starts falling apart on you before it's done. Then it's
not good for anything.”

“You do the talking,” I said. “I'm not a cook and I'm not a fish buyer.”

“These fellows down here are rough,” Stubby said. “They won't go for dancing.”

“Stubby, you don't know that,” I said. “Maybe I'll invent a new dance just for the docks. I'll call it the octopus and dance like I have seven legs. How many legs does an octopus have?”

“Octopuses have eight arms and no legs,” Stubby said. “So they don't dance.”

Stubby thought that was the funniest thing in the world, that an octopus didn't have any legs. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he knew about octopuses.

My mind was still halfway on the auditions. Jack said my hopes had been too high, which was wrong. My hopes hadn't been too high. They were just where I wanted them to be. I knew I could dance, and anybody who saw me knew it. John Diamond was almost twenty, and he couldn't dance next to me without looking second best, so he decided he was going to take away my chance. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and thought about punching him in the face. “Now
you
coon it up!” I imagined myself saying.

And I didn't want to hear any common sense coming from Miss Lilly or Jack Bishop or anybody else, white or black. They came around telling me they knew how I felt when they
didn't know anything about it. It's one thing if you don't have anything going for you and people say they're sorry you're sad. You're sorry, too, but you figure there's a reason for you to be sad and you settle into it. But when you got something going for you, when you have feet people watch and a body that people want to see moving across a stage, nobody can tell you anything, because they're nowhere near where you are.

“He's only done what he knows how to do,” Jack said, telling me how I shouldn't be mad at Fred Flamer. “You can't blame a man for that, can you?”

Yes, I could. I could, and it was filling me up inside to a point where I thought either I was going to have to puke it up or it was going to kill me.

We reached the docks, and Stubby went over to one corner where a tall, thin fellow was standing next to a row of baskets.

“Where's the Bishop?” the man asked.

“Home with a cough,” Stubby said.

“Weak,” the man replied. “Old and weak!”

He had to be as old as Jack, and in the early-morning light he didn't look any healthier. He and Stubby talked for a while about how calm the sea was and what it meant. The fisherman said it meant there was a storm coming up. After a while they agreed on a price, and Stubby wrestled a basket of oysters onto the cart.

“I'm buying three of them,” he said.

I loaded the next two as Stubby paid the man. As we pulled off, the oyster man called out to us to tell Jack to rub some warm tallow onto his chest.

Then we went to another fellow and bought two baskets of different kinds of fish. Stubby looked pleased, but it just added to my misery.

“We did good,” he said. “Those fish are so fresh, they're still talking to each other.”

“Stubby, I don't want to spend the rest of my life selling fish or cooking them,” I said. “You're a good man, but I don't see doing what you do.”

Stubby didn't answer, and I thought I might have hurt him, which I didn't mean to do.

It was getting lighter by the time we rolled the cart back to Baxter Street. The corner lamp man was walking down the street with his ladder, and I watched him as he leaned the ladder against a pole, climbed up it, and put out the lamp. People had all kinds of jobs, from fishing to lighting lamps at night and putting them out in the morning. There was nothing wrong with any of them, but they just weren't for me.

We took the oysters upstairs to the roof, and I started building a fire to smoke them. Stubby left with the cart to sell what he could. Jack Bishop's dog, John Tyler, came through the roof door and over to where I sat waiting for the chips to start burning evenly. He sniffed at me and sat down, and I shoved
him away. The dumb dog just turned and looked at me, then came back and sat down next to me again.

I pushed him away again.

Next to come up to the roof was Margaret. She came over, picked up a stick, and poked through the chips, evening them out on the grill.

“Jack told me you were all beat up inside,” she said.

“I don't care what he told you,” I said.

“You think you're the only one in the world who ran over a bump in the road?” she asked.

“No, but I'm the only one wearing my skin who's had a hard time,” I said.

“I grew up with three sisters and two brothers,” Margaret said. She was rubbing the back of John Tyler's head. “Two of the girls and one of the boys died before they were six. That was what it was like. If you got sick, you prayed to Saint Blaise. If he didn't help you, then you died. It wasn't a huge thing for a child to die, but it was hard to get used to.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?” I asked.

“Glory, no!” Margaret looked at me sidewise. “You already have a mouthful of sour lemons—how could you fit any more in there? And let me tell you something about life, my black friend: you're just about old enough for your piss to get a little smell to it. There are going to be days when the auditions will look like a Sunday picnic to you!”

She was right, but it didn't help me any. When she went downstairs, John Tyler started to go with her, then turned around and came over to me again. “John Tyler, you are stupid—even for a dog you are stupid!” I said.

By the time the bells in the church on Mott Street rang ten o'clock, I had finished smoking most of the oysters and was ready when Stubby came up to the roof. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him I didn't need him looking out for me.

“I'm looking out for the oysters,” Stubby said. “How are you doing with the oysters?”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little stupid for thinking that Stubby had meant me personally and not the oysters.

“You don't need me to tell you who's looking for you, either?” he asked.

“Who's looking for me?”

“That should be ‘Who is looking for me, Mr. Jackson?'” Stubby said.

“Jack Bishop?”

“Miss Lilly was in front of the house asking where you live,” Stubby said. “She said her husband wanted to see you.”

“Forget Pete Williams—I don't have any respect for that man,” I said.

“Jack said Pete probably has another scheme up his sleeve, and Margaret said if the devil gives a party, he plays his own tunes, so you'd best be careful.”

“Why are you talking about somebody wanting to see me to Jack Bishop and Margaret?”

“I was going to talk to you about it first, but I thought you didn't want anybody looking out for you,” Stubby said.

“Stubby, what do you think I should do?” I asked my friend. “You think he's just got another trick up his sleeve?”

“Well, if Miss Lilly came looking for you, there's got to be something bright shining somewhere,” Stubby said. “She's a hard woman, but she's not a mean woman.”

I didn't want to talk it over with anybody else, because I already knew I had to go and see what Peter Williams wanted. I knew I was going to be mad if Pete said something wrong, but I was already mad, and I would be just as mad not knowing as knowing.

“Can you finish smoking the oysters?”

“You know I can,” Stubby said. “And tell Miss Lilly it was me that found you.”

“I don't know if Pete is up, but Miss Lilly is in her little study,” the cleaning man said when I arrived at Almack's. “She said you might be sliding by.”

“Well, I'm here,” I said.

“Saw you dancing the other day.” The cleaning man leaned on his mop. “You trying to be one of them black Irishmen or something?”

“Dance is dance,” I said. “Where is Miss Lilly's study?”

He pointed to a room in the corner, and I made my way to it and knocked on the door. Miss Lilly and Peter Williams sat at a small table. Miss Lilly was usually a pretty imposing woman, but sometimes she could be more imposing than at other times. She was sitting straight up when I entered the room. She was wearing a high-necked beige dress with a little brown and beige jacket.

“How you doing, Juba?”

“Just fine, Miss Lilly,” I said.

“Peter wants to talk to you,” Miss Lilly said, without looking toward where her husband sat.

“You seemed a little bothered the other day,” Pete said. “Did something rub you the wrong way?”

Did something rub me the wrong way?

“Look, Pete, we were both there,” I said. “We don't have to pretend we're light-headed or nothing. They were turning the auditions into a minstrel show. You've been around enough to know that.”

“That was a business meeting,” Pete said. “If you doing business, then you got to bring people what they want or they'll take their business someplace else.”

“Jack Bishop said one of the white men there was a slave trader,” I said. “That's the business you in now?”

“Look, Juba, I don't have to take no lip from you,” Pete said.
“Miss Lilly invited you here because she thought you could talk like you got a brain in your head. I own this place—I don't have to take nothing from nobody! And if you don't understand that, or don't like it, you can just get on up out of here!”

I stood up, ready to go.

“Sit down, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “Peter, if you want to play like you don't have no sense and bully your way around, then it's up to you. You said you wanted something, and that's the only reason I asked Juba to come over here. Now, don't make
me
look like a fool, because I don't have a use for being foolish.”

Pete looked at me and then away. He sighed deeply and crossed one leg over the other.

“There was some things I liked about what went on that day and some things I could forget about,” he said. “What I liked was that there were people in here who were never in here before. They were looking around and seeing that it wasn't a bad-looking place and seeing that white people—I mean classy white people, not no riffraffers—looked comfortable. I liked that and I know that idea could bring in some money.

“I don't know what everyone did when they left the place. They could have been slave traders, or they could have been slave owners. I don't know. A lot of people living in New York City and running around with their noses in the air got plantations down South. But what I know is that if somebody
can get them all coming into Almack's, I can build this business up so it looks respectable, feels respectable, and makes some respectable money. Miss Lilly thinks you're the man who can pull it off for me.”

“Juba, you know dancing, and you know a lot of people.” Miss Lilly leaned toward me. “What you were doing—your kind of dancing—wasn't what they were expecting, but I could see how you were drawing the people in. They weren't clapping along with anybody else. You've got class, and they know it and I know it and Peter knows it.
Don't
you, Peter?”

“He's all right.”

“
Don't
you, Peter?”

“For a young man, he's got a lot of class, Miss Lilly,” Pete said. “But what I want is a whole forty-minute show, like they have in the regular theaters. I want some white dancers and some black dancers. I want some singers, some decent food, a forty-minute show, and whatever it takes to let people know this is a top-of-the-line establishment. If I get them in here one time and show them they don't have anything to be afraid of, maybe I can get them in here two times. And if I can get them in here two times, maybe I can keep them coming.”

“What do you think, Juba?” Miss Lilly asked.

“You want food, too?”

“Whatever it takes,” Miss Lilly said.

“Why didn't you ask John Diamond to do it?” I asked. “You
two seemed to be hitting it off pretty swell.”

“Because deep in my heart, I'm a race man!” Pete said. “I don't need any white boy running my business! I'm throwing twenty dollars into this adventure, and I need somebody who has my interest in their heart! Are you the man? That's a very simple question, Juba. Are you the man?”

“I think he is,” Miss Lilly said. “I truly do. And maybe he can get Cissy going.”

“Cissy?”

“You didn't know she sings?” Miss Lilly asked. “You've got to use her in the show.”

She glanced over at her husband, who rolled his eyes away.

“You mean to tell me that Peter Williams, after ruining your audition the other day, had the nerve to ask you to set up a show for him?” Jack Bishop sat up in his bed. “And what did he say when you told him to bugger off?”

“I said I would do it,” I said. “I didn't mean to say I would do it, but that's the way it came out.”

“Your tongue and your lips were having a fight or something?” Stubby asked. “If you didn't mean to say something, how come you said it?”

“Because he's figured out that there's things you have to do in life because they're the right things to do at the moment,” Jack said. “That's the way life is sometimes, with
righteous stink on both ends of the stick.”