Show Boat (9 page)

Mrs. Hawks glanced then at the arresting face of Julie Dozier, female half of our general business team and one of the finest actresses on the river. Mrs. Hawks looked at Elly Chipley (Lenore La Verne on the bills) the little beauty, and favourite from Duluth to New Orleans. She breathed deep.

“Yes. I am.” And with those three monosyllables Parthenia Ann Hawks renounced the ties of land, of conventionality; forsook the staid orderliness of the little white-painted cottage at Thebes; shut her ears to the scandalized gossip of her sedate neighbours; yielded grimly to the urge of the river and became at last its unwilling mistress.

W
HEN April came, and the dogwood flashed its spectral white in the woods, the show boat started. It was the most leisurely and dreamlike of journeys. In all the hurried harried country that still was intent on repairing the ravages of a Civil War, they alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on another plane. Miles—hundreds—thousands of miles of willow-fringed streams flowing aquamarine in the sunlight, olive-green in the shade. Wild honeysuckle clambering over black tree trunks. Mules. Negroes. Bare unpainted cabins the colour of the sandy soil itself. Sleepy little villages blinking drowsily down upon a river which was some almost forgotten offspring spawned years before by the Mississippi. The nearest railroad perhaps twenty-five miles distant.

They floated down the rivers. They floated down the rivers. Sometimes they were broad majestic streams rolling turbulently to the sea, and draining a continent. Sometimes they were shallow narrow streams little more than creeks, through which the
Cotton Blossom
picked her way as cautiously as a timid girl picking her way among stepping stones. Behind them, pushing them maternally along like a fat puffing
duck with her silly little gosling, was the steamboat
Mollie Able
.

To the people dwelling in the towns, plantations, and hamlets along the many tributaries of the Mississippi and Ohio, the show boat was no longer a novelty. It had been a familiar and welcome sight since 1817 when the first crude barge of that type had drifted down the Cumberland River. But familiarity with these craft had failed to dispel their glamour. To the farmers and villagers of the Midwest; and to the small planters—black and white—of the South, the show boat meant music, romance, gaiety. It visited towns whose leafy crypts had never echoed the shrill hoot of an engine whistle. It penetrated settlements whose backwoods dwellers had never witnessed a theatrical performance in all their lives—simple child-like credulous people to whom the make-believe villainies, heroics, loves, adventures of the drama were so real as sometimes to cause the
Cotton Blossom
troupe actual embarrassment. Often quality folk came to the show boat. The perfume and silks and broadcloth of the Big House took frequent possession of the lower boxes and the front seats.

That first summer was, to Magnolia, a dream of pure delight. Nothing could mar it except that haunting spectre of autumn when she would have to return to Thebes and to the ordinary routine of a little girl in a second-best pinafore that was donned for school in the morning and thriftily replaced by a less important pinafore on her return from school in the late afternoon. But throughout those summer months Magnolia was a
fairy princess. She was Cinderella at the ball. She shut her mind to the horrid certainty that the clock would inevitably strike twelve.

Year by year, as the spell of the river grew stronger and the easy indolence of the life took firmer hold, Mrs. Hawks and the child spent longer and longer periods on the show boat; less and less time in the humdrum security of the cottage ashore. Usually the boat started in April. But sometimes, when the season was mild, it was March. Mrs. Hawks would announce with a good deal of firmness that Magnolia must finish the school term, which ended in June. Later she and the child would join the boat wherever it happened to be showing at the time.

“Couple of months missed won’t hurt her,” Captain Andy would argue, loath as always to be separated from his daughter. “May’s the grandest month on the rivers—and April. Everything coming out fresh. Outdoors all day. Do her good.”

“I may not know much, but this I do know, Andy Hawks: No child of mine is going to grow up an ignoramus just because her father has nothing better to do than go galumphing around the country with a lot of riff-raff.”

But in the end, when the show boat started its leisurely journey, there was Mrs. Hawks hanging fresh dimity curtains; bickering with Queenie; preventing, by her acid presence, the possibility of a too-saccharine existence for the members of the
Cotton Blossom
troupe. In her old capacity as school teacher, Parthy undertook the task of carrying on Magnolia’s education during
these truant spring months. It was an acrimonious and painful business ending, almost invariably, in temper, tears, disobedience, upbraidings. Unconsciously Andy Hawks had done much for the youth of New England when he ended Parthy’s public teaching career.

“Nine times seven, I said.… No, it isn’t! Just because fifty-six was the right answer last time it isn’t right every time. That was seven times eight and I’ll thank you to look at the book and not out of the window. I declare, Maggie Hawks, sometimes I think you’re downright simple.”

Magnolia’s under lip would come out. Her brow was lowering. She somehow always looked her plainest and sallowest during these sessions with her mother. “I don’t care what nine times seven is. Elly doesn’t know, either. I asked her and she said she never had nine of anything, much less nine times seven of anything; and Elly’s the most beautiful person in the world, except Julie sometimes—and me when I smile. And my name isn’t Maggie Hawks, either.”

“I’d like to know what it is if it isn’t. And if you talk to me like that again, young lady, I’ll smack you just as sure as I’m sitting here.”

“It’s Magnolia—Magnolia—uh—something beautiful—I don’t know what. But not Hawks. Magnolia—uh——” a gesture with her right hand meant to convey some idea of the exquisiteness of her real name.

Mrs. Hawks clapped a maternal hand to her daughter’s somewhat bulging brow, decided that she was feverish, needed a physic, and promptly administered one.

As for geography, if Magnolia did not learn it, she lived it. She came to know her country by travelling up and down its waterways. She learned its people by meeting them, of all sorts and conditions. She learned folkways; river lore; Negro songs; bird calls; pilot rules; profanity; the art of stage make-up; all the parts in the
Cotton Blossom
troupe’s repertoire including East Lynne, Lady Audley’s Secret, Tempest and Sunshine, Spanish Gipsy, Madcap Margery, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

There probably was much that was sordid about the life. But to the imaginative and volatile little girl of ten or thereabouts it was a combination playhouse, make-believe theatre, and picnic jaunt. Hers were days of enchantment—or would have been were it not for the practical Parthy who, iron woman that she was, saw to it that the child was properly fed, well clothed, and sufficiently refreshed by sleep. But Parthy’s interests now were too manifold and diverse to permit of her accustomed concentration on Magnolia. She had an entire boatload of people to boss—two boatloads, in fact, for she did not hesitate to investigate and criticize the manners and morals of the crew that manned the towboat
Mollie Able
. A man was never safe from her as he sat smoking his after-dinner pipe and spitting contemplatively into the river. It came about that Magnolia’s life was infinitely more free afloat than it had ever been on land.

Up and down the rivers the story went that the
Cotton Blossom
was the sternest-disciplined, best-managed, and most generously provisioned boat in the business. And it was notorious that a sign back-stage
and in each dressing room read: “No lady of the company allowed on deck in a wrapper.” It also was known that drunkenness on the
Cotton Blossom
was punished by instant dismissal; that Mrs. Captain Andy Hawks was a holy terror; that the platters of fried chicken on Sunday were inexhaustible. All of this was true.

Magnolia’s existence became a weird mixture of lawlessness and order; of humdrum and fantasy. She slipped into the life as though she had been born to it. Parthy alone kept her from being utterly spoiled by the members of the troupe.

Mrs. Hawks’ stern tread never adjusted itself to the leisurely rhythm of the show boat’s tempo. This was obvious even to Magnolia. The very first week of their initial trip she had heard her mother say briskly to Julie, “What time is it?” Mrs. Hawks was marching from one end of the boat to the other, intent on some fell domestic errand of her own. Julie, seated in a low chair on deck, sewing and gazing out upon the yellow turbulence of the Mississippi, had replied in her deep indolent voice, without glancing up, “What does it matter?”

The four words epitomized the divinely care-free existence of the
Cotton Blossom
show-boat troupe.

Sometimes they played a new town every night. Sometimes, in regions that were populous and that boasted a good back-country, they remained a week. In such towns, as the boat returned year after year until it became a recognized institution, there grew up between the show-boat troupe and the townspeople a sort of friendly intimacy. They were warmly greeted on
their arrival; sped regretfully on their departure. They almost never travelled at night. Usually they went to bed with the sound of the water slap-slapping gently against the boat’s flat sides, and proceeded down river at daybreak. This meant that constant warfare raged between the steamboat crew of the
Mollie Able
and the show-boat troupe of the
Cotton Blossom
. The steamer crew, its work done, retired early, for it must be up and about at daybreak. It breakfasted at four-thirty or five. The actors never were abed before midnight or one o’clock and rose for a nine o’clock breakfast. They complained that the steamer crew, with its bells, whistles, hoarse shouts, hammerings, puffings, and general to-do attendant upon casting off and getting under way, robbed them of their morning sleep. The crew grumbled and cursed as it tried to get a night’s rest in spite of the noise of the band, the departing audience, the midnight sociability of the players who, still at high tension after their night’s work, could not yet retire meekly to bed.

“Lot of damn scenery chewers,” growled the crew, turning in sleep.

“Filthy roustabouts,” retorted the troupers, disturbed at dawn. “Yell because they can’t talk like human beings.”

They rarely mingled, except such members of the crew as played in the band; and never exchanged civilities. This state of affairs lent spice to an existence that might otherwise have proved too placid for comfort. The bickering acted as a safety valve.

It all was, perhaps, the worst possible environment
for a skinny, high-strung, and sensitive little girl who was one-quarter French. But Magnolia thrived on it. She had the solid and lumpy Puritanism of Parthy’s presence to counteract the leaven of her volatile father. This saved her from being utterly consumed.

The life was at once indolent and busy. Captain Andy, scurrying hither and thither, into the town, up the river bank, rushing down the aisle at rehearsal to squeak a false direction to the hard-working company, driving off into the country to return in triumph laden with farm produce, was fond of saying, “We’re just like one big happy family.”

Captain Andy knew and liked good food (the Frenchman in him). They ate the best that the countryside afforded—not a great deal of meat in the height of summer when they were, perhaps, playing the hot humid Southern river towns, but plenty of vegetables and fruit—great melons bought from the patch with the sun still hot on their rounded bulging sides, and then chilled to dripping deliciousness before eating; luscious yams; country butter and cream. They all drank the water dipped out of the river on which they happened to be floating. They quaffed great dippersful of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and even the turbid Missouri, and seemed none the worse for it. At the stern was the settling barrel. Here the river water, dipped up in buckets, was left to settle before drinking. At the bottom of this receptacle, after it was three-quarters empty, one might find a rich layer of Mississippi silt intermingled with plummy odds and ends of every description including, sometimes, a sizable catfish.

In everything but actual rehearsing and playing, Magnolia lived the life of the company. The boat was their home. They ate, slept, worked, played on it. The company must be prompt at meal time, at rehearsals, and at the evening performances. There all responsibility ended for them.

Breakfast was at nine; and under Parthy’s stern regime this meant nine. They were a motley lot as they assembled. In that bizarre setting the homely, everyday garb of the men and women took on a grotesque aspect. It was as though they were dressed for a part. As they appeared in the dining room, singly, in couples, or in groups, with a cheerful or a dour greeting, depending on the morning mood of each, an onlooker could think only of the home life of the Vincent Crummleses. Having seen Elly the night before as Miss Lenore La Verne in the golden curls, short skirts, and wide-eyed innocence of Bessie, the backwoodsman’s daughter, who turned out, in the last act, to be none other than the Lady Clarice Trelawney, carelessly mislaid at birth, her appearance at breakfast was likely to have something of the shock of disillusionment. The baby stare of her great blue eyes was due to near-sightedness to correct which she wore silver-rimmed spectacles when not under the public gaze. Her breakfast jacket, though frilly, was not of the freshest, and her kid curlers were not entirely hidden by a silk-and-lace cap. Elly was, despite these grotesqueries, undeniably and triumphantly pretty, and thus arrayed gave the effect of a little girl mischievously tricked out in her grandmother’s wardrobe. Her husband, known as Schultzy in private
and Harold Westbrook on the bills, acted as director of the company. He was what is known in actor’s parlance as a raver, and his method of acting was designated in the show-boat world as spitting scenery. A somewhat furtive young man in very tight pants and high collar always a trifle too large. He was a cuff-shooter, and those cuffs were secured and embellished with great square shiny chunks of quartz-like stuff which he frequently breathed upon heavily and then rubbed with his handkerchief. Schultzy played juvenile leads opposite his wife’s ingénue réles; had a real flair for the theatre.