Show Boat (13 page)

“How does your cook do it!” her friends would say—Ethel Barrymore or Kit Cornell or Frank Crowninshield or Charley Towne or Woollcott. “I’ll bet it isn’t real at all. It’s painted on the platter.”

“It is not! It’s a practical ham, stuffed with all kinds of devilment. The recipe is my mother’s. She got it from an old Southern cook named Queenie.”

“Listen, Kim. You’re among friends. Your dear public is not present. You don’t have to pretend any old Southern aristocracy Virginia belle mammy stuff with
us
.”

“Pretend, you great oaf! I was born on a show
boat on the Mississippi, and proud of it. Everybody knows that.”

Mrs. Hawks, bustling into the show-boat kitchen with her unerring gift for scenting an atmosphere of mellow enjoyment, and dissipating it, would find Magnolia perched on a chair, both elbows on the table, her palms propping her chin as she regarded with round-eyed fascination Queenie’s magic manipulations. Or perhaps Jo, the charming and shiftless, would be singing for her one of the Negro plantation songs, wistful with longing and pain; the folk songs of a wronged race, later to come into a blaze of popularity as spirituals.

For some nautical reason, a broad beam, about six inches high and correspondingly wide, stretched across the kitchen floor from side to side, dividing the room. Through long use Jo and Queenie had become accustomed to stepping over this obstruction, Queenie ponderously, Jo with an effortless swing of his lank legs. On this Magnolia used to sit, her arms hugging her knees, her great eyes in the little sallow pointed face fixed attentively on Jo. The kitchen was very clean and shining and stuffy. Jo’s legs were crossed, one foot in its great low shapeless shoe hooked in the chair rung, his banjo cradled in his lap. The once white parchment face of the instrument was now almost as black as Jo’s, what with much strumming by work-stained fingers.

“Which one, Miss Magnolia?”

“I Got Shoes,” Magnolia would answer, promptly.

Jo would throw back his head, his sombre eyes half shut:

The longing of a footsore, ragged, driven race expressed in the tragically childlike terms of shoes, white robes, wings, and the wise and simple insight into hypocrisy: “Ev’rybody talkin ’bout Heav’n ain’t goin’ there.…”

“Now which one?” His fingers still picking the strings, ready at a word to slip into the opening chords of the next song.

“Go Down, Moses.”

She liked this one—at once the most majestic and supplicating of all the Negro folk songs—because it always made her cry a little. Sometimes Queenie, busy at the stove or the kitchen table, joined in with her high rich camp-meeting voice. Jo’s voice was a reedy tenor, but soft and husky with the indescribable Negro vocal quality. Magnolia soon knew the tune
and the words of every song in Jo’s repertoire. Unconsciously, being an excellent mimic, she sang as Jo and Queenie sang, her head thrown slightly back, her eyes rolling or half closed, one foot beating rhythmic time to the music’s cadence. Her voice was true, though mediocre; but she got into this the hoarsely sweet Negro overtone—purple velvet muffling a flute.

Between Jo and Queenie flourished a fighting affection, deep, true, and lasting. There was some doubt as to the actual legal existence of their marriage, but the union was sound and normal enough. At each season’s close they left the show boat the richer by three hundred dollars, clean new calico for Queenie, and proper jeans for Jo. Shoes on their feet. Hats on their heads. Bundles in their arms. Each spring they returned penniless, in rags, and slightly liquored. They had had a magnificent time. They did not drink again while the
Cotton Blossom
kitchen was their home. But the next winter the programme repeated itself. Captain Andy liked and trusted them. They were as faithful to him as their childlike vagaries would permit.

So, filled with the healthy ecstasy of song, the Negro man and woman and the white child would sit in deep contentment in the show-boat kitchen. The sound of a door slammed. Quick heavy footsteps. Three sets of nerves went taut. Parthy.

“Maggie Hawks, have you practised to-day?”

“Some.”

“How much?”

“Oh, half an hour—more.”

“When?”

“ ’Smorning.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

The sulky lower lip out. The high forehead wrinkled by a frown. Song flown. Peace gone.

“I did so. Jo, didn’t you hear me practising?”

“Ah suah did, Miss Magnolia.”

“You march right out of here, young lady, and practise another half hour. Do you think your father’s made of money, that I can throw fifty-cent pieces away on George for nothing? Now you do your exercises fifteen minutes and the Maiden’s Prayer fifteen.… Idea!”

Magnolia marched. Out of earshot Parthy expressed her opinion of nigger songs. “I declare I don’t know where you get your low ways from! White people aren’t good enough for you, I suppose, that you’ve got to run with blacks in the kitchen. Now you sit yourself down on that stool.”

Magnolia was actually having music lessons. George, the Whistler and piano player, was her teacher, receiving fifty cents an hour for weekly instruction. Driven by her stern parent, she practised an hour daily on the tinny old piano in the orchestra pit, a rebellious, skinny, pathetic little figure strumming painstakingly away in the great emptiness of the show-boat auditorium. She must needs choose her time for practice when a rehearsal of the night’s play was not in progress on the stage or when the band was not struggling with the music of a new song and dance number. Incredibly enough, she actually learned something of the mechanics of music, if not of its technique. She had an excellent rhythm
sense, and this was aided by none other than Jo, whose feeling for time and beat and measure and pitch was flawless. Queenie lumped his song gift in with his general shiftlessness. Born fifty years later he might have known brief fame in some midnight revue or Club Alabam’ on Broadway. Certainly Magnolia unwittingly learned more of real music from black Jo and many another Negro wharf minstrel than she did from hours of the heavy-handed and unlyrical George.

That Mrs. Hawks could introduce into the indolent tenor of show-boat life anything so methodical and humdrum as five-finger exercises done an hour daily was triumphant proof of her indomitable driving force. Life had miscast her in the role of wife and mother. She was born to be a Madam Chairman. Committees, Votes, Movements, Drives, Platforms, Gavels, Reports all showed in her stars. Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as the
Cotton Blossom
afforded. Parthy had never heard the word Feminist, and wouldn’t have recognized it if she had. One spoke at that time not of Women’s Rights but of Women’s Wrongs. On these Parthenia often waxed tartly eloquent. Her housekeeping fervour was the natural result of her lack of a more impersonal safety valve. The
Cotton Blossom
shone like a Methodist Sunday household. Only Julie and Windy, the
Mollie Able
pilot, defied her. She actually indulged in those most domestic of rites, canning and preserving, on board the boat. Donning an all-enveloping gingham apron, she would set frenziedly to work on two bushels of peaches or seckel pears; baskets of tomatoes; pecks
of apples. Pickled pears, peach marmalade, grape jell in jars and pots and glasses filled shelves and cupboards. Queenie found a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that occasionally, owing to some culinary accident or to the unusual motion of the flat-bottomed
Cotton Blossom
in the rough waters of an open bay, one of these jars was found smashed on the floor, its rich purple or amber contents mingling with splinters of glass. No one—not even Parthy—ever dared connect Queenie with these quite explicable mishaps.

Parthy was an expert needlewoman. She often assisted Julie or Elly or Mis’ Means with their costumes. To see her stern implacable face bent over a heap of frivolous stuffs while her industrious fingers swiftly sent the needle flashing through unvarying seams was to receive the shock that comes of beholding the incongruous. The enormity of it penetrated even her blunt sensibilities.

“If anybody’d ever told me that I’d live to see the day when I’d be sewing on costumes for show folks!”

“Run along, Parthy. You like it,” Andy would say.

But she never would admit that. “Like it or lump it, what can I do! Married you for better or worse, didn’t I!” Her tone leaving no doubt as to the path down which that act had led her. Actually she was having a rich, care-free, and varied life such as she had never dreamed of and of which she secretly was enamoured.

Dwellers in this or that river town loitering down at the landing to see what manner of sin and loose living went on in and about this show boat with its painted
women and play-acting men would be startled to hear sounds and sniff smells which were identical with those which might be issuing that very moment from their own smug and godly dwellings ashore. From out the open doors of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre came the unmistakable and humdrum sounds of scales and five-finger exercises done painfully and unwillingly by rebellious childish hands. Ta-ta-ta—
TA
—ta-ta-ta. From below decks there floated up the mouth-watering savour of tomato ketchup, of boiling vinegar and spices, or the perfumed aroma of luscious fruits seething in sugary kettles.

“Smells for all the world like somebody was doing up sweet pickles.” One village matron to another.

“Well, I suppose they got to eat like other folks.”

Ta-ta-ta—
TA
—ta-ta-ta.

It was inevitable, however, that the ease and indolence of the life, as well as the daily contact with odd and unconventional characters must leave some imprint on even so adamantine an exterior as Parthy’s. Little by little her school-teacherly diction dropped from her. Slowly her vowels began to slur, her aren’ts became ain’ts, her crisp new England utterance took on something of the slovenly Southern drawl, her consonants were missing from the end of a word here and there. True, she still bustled and nagged, managed and scolded, drove and reproached. She still had the power to make Andy jump with nervousness. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the influence of this virago was more definitely felt than that of any other one of the
Cotton Blossom
’s company and crew. Of these only
Julie Dozier, and Windy, the pilot (so called because he almost never talked) actually triumphed over Mrs. Hawks. Julie’s was a negative victory. She never voluntarily spoke to Parthy and had the power to aggravate that lady to the point of frenzy by remaining limp, supine, and idle when Parthy thought she should be most active; by raising her right eyebrow quizzically in response to a more than usually energetic tirade; by the habitual disorder of the tiny room which she shared with Steve; by the flagrant carelessness and untidiness of her own gaunt graceful person.

“I declare, Hawks, what you keep that slatternly yellow cat around this boat for beats me.”

“Best actress in the whole caboodle, that’s why.” Something fine in little Captain Andy had seen and recognized the flame that might have glorified Julie had it not instead consumed her. “That girl had the right backing she’d make her mark, and not in any show boat, either. I’ve been to New York. I’ve seen ’em down at Wallack’s and Daly’s and around.”

“A slut, that’s what she is. I had my way she’d leave this boat bag and baggage.”

“Well, this is one time you won’t have your way, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am.” She had not yet killed the spirit in Andy.

“Mark my words, you’ll live to regret it. The way she looks out of those black eyes of hers! Gives me the creeps.”

“What would you have the girl look out of,” retorted Andy, not very brilliantly. “Her ears?”

Julie could not but know of this antagonism toward
her. Some perverse streak in her otherwise rich and gentle make-up caused her to find a sinister pleasure in arousing it.

Windy’s victory was more definitely dramatic, though his defensive method against Parthy’s attacks resembled in sardonic quiet and poise Julie’s own. Windy was accounted one of the most expert pilots on the Mississippi. He knew every coil and sinew and stripe of the yellow serpent. River men used his name as a synonym for magic with the pilot’s wheel. Starless night or misty day; shoal water or deep, it was all one to Windy. Though Andy’s senior by more than fifteen years, the two had been friends for twenty. Captain Andy had enormous respect for his steersmanship; was impressed by his taciturnity (being himself so talkative and vivacious); enjoyed talking with him in the bright quiet security of the pilot house. He was absolute czar of the
Mollie Able
and the
Cotton Blossom
, as befitted his high accomplishments. No one ever dreamed of opposing him except Parthy. He was slovenly of person, careless of habit. These shortcomings Parthy undertook to correct early in her show-boat career. She met with defeat so prompt, so complete, so crushing as to cause her for ever after to leave him unmolested.

Windy had muddy boots. They were, it seemed, congenitally so. He would go ashore in mid-afternoon of a hot August day when farmers for miles around had been praying for rain these weeks past and return in a downpour with half the muck and clay of the countryside clinging to his number eleven black square-toed elastic-side boots. A tall, emaciated drooping old man,
Windy; with long gnarled muscular hands whose enlarged knuckles and leathery palms were the result of almost half a century at the wheel. His pants were always grease-stained; his black string tie and gray shirt spattered with tobacco juice; his brown jersey frayed and ragged. Across his front he wore a fine anchor watch chain, or “log” chain, as it was called. And gleaming behind the long flowing tobacco-splotched gray beard that reached almost to his waist could be glimpsed a milkily pink pearl stud like a star behind a dirty cloud-bank. The jewel had been come by, doubtless, in payment of some waterfront saloon gambling debt. Surely its exquisite curves had once glowed upon fine and perfumed linen.