Juba! Read online

  “We’ve been canceled at Lyceum and I’m looking for a new place to perform” was the quick reply. “I’m even thinking of a theater outside of London.”

  That didn’t sound good. Valentine asked what had happened, and Mr. Campbell said people just didn’t have that much money to spend on entertainment.

  “London is a great city for entertainment,” he said. “People from all over the British Isles come here on holiday and are very supportive of all kinds of shows. But every theater is struggling, and when they struggle, they go to revivals and trot out all the old shows. You can’t blame them, but it makes booking hard.”

  “It was my understanding that we were scheduled to perform at the Lyceum for a month,” Gil said.

  “The small print said it depended on us selling a certain number of tickets before the first performance,” Mr. Campbell said. “And we aren’t even close to filling the number of seats the owner wants. He’s booked in The Beggar’s Opera.”

  The food came, and it turned out to be sausages and potatoes. The waitress brought out tea for everybody and asked me something I didn’t understand.

  “She wants to know if you’re an African,” Mr. Campbell said.

  “I’m an American,” I said.

  The answer surprised her, and she stepped back. “You’re a slave?”

  “No,” I said.

  She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me and went on about her business. I asked Mr. Campbell if they had many black people in London, and he said no. It had been hard trying to see out of the carriage on the way to Cheshire Street, so I didn’t know what kinds of people there were in London.

  A quiet came over the group as we ate the sausages, which weren’t that bad, and the potatoes, which were kind of strange-tasting. Cancellations were pretty common in show business. We were always scrambling around looking for places to perform and hoping that somehow we would be paid at the end of the week. But Gil acted as if he was really down, and I wondered if I was going to be on a boat headed back to New York in the morning.

  Mr. Campbell was telling us about a theater in Birmingham, which was about a day’s journey north of London, when the man from the Times joined us. The waitress who had asked me if I was a slave came over, took his order, and gave me another funny look. Mr. Campbell introduced Gil and told the reporter about the cancellation and how he was sure we would soon book another theater. The reporter asked for our names, and Gil produced a paper from his pocket with all of our names on it.

  “You’re Juba!” The man from the Times pointed a stubby finger at me. “The one Charles Dickens wrote about?”

  “I’m Juba,” I said, not sure where he was going.

  “Well, you’re the anointed one, and all of London will be anxious to see you, sir.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Half of London has heard about Boz’s Juba, and they’ll want to see him for themselves,” the reporter explained to us. “No doubt about him being the main attraction, is there?”

  That made me feel really good.

  Gil and Mr. Campbell decided to sit tight and wait to see what happened when the story of me being in London made the papers. They didn’t have to wait long. We had an offer to fill a two-week gap at Sadler’s Wells starting on the weekend. Mr. Campbell was congratulating the group because the new deal was better than the one that had been canceled.

  “And hundreds more people will see and hear us, and the critics will be there, too,” Mr. Campbell said.

  The reporter from the Times didn’t refer to my real name, William Henry Lane, at all. To him I was Boz’s Juba, and I didn’t have a problem with that. Gil went out and bought the paper and we all sat around while Ludlow read it to us.

  Advertisement for performances at Royal Vauxhall Gardens, including the performances by G. W. Pell and Master Juba

  Pell’s Serenaders have arrived in London and with them they have brought the celebrated African that our own Charles Dickens has anointed as the world’s best dancer. We are referring of course to Boz’s Juba, the young man that our Author referred to in his well-received book, American Notes. I have seen the subject dancer and note that he is keen of eye and full of nervous energy, not at all like the slow blackies that sweep the sidewalks at Cecil Court and other places in London. I, for one, am eager to see him educate us with his flying feet. If he is half as good as Boz describes him, he will be a wonder to behold!

  The whole troupe was excited and eager to start. I was the most excited. I thought back on meeting Charles Dickens, and although I liked him, I hadn’t made that much of our conversation. I tried to remember what he looked like and could only think of a kind of softness about him.

  The idea of people in England wanting to see me dance, even knowing my name, made me feel lighter than air. If they had been told by Charles Dickens that I was something special, then I wanted to be something so special they would never forget me.

  The Sadler’s Wells Theatre was like something I couldn’t even imagine. It was huge, with a stage that was as deep as it was wide. The back of the stage, from the high curtain wall to the back brick wall, was flat. The front twenty feet of the stage declined toward the audience.

  There were fifty-four seats across in the first row, and there were twenty-two rows on the first floor. I don’t know how many seats the balcony had. There were boxes on both sides, and if you stood exactly center stage, you got the feeling that the whole world could see you. After our first rehearsal, which went very well, I stood center stage and tried to imagine every seat filled with people leaning forward to see Pell’s Serenaders. As I stood there, all my fears went away. I could almost hear the music, and I wanted to dance on the spot. I did a few steps across the rough floor.

  “How do you like it?” Gil asked.

  “It’s a little soft,” I said. “The audience could miss the rhythm.”

  “You’ve got wooden soles, haven’t you?”

  “I might look for a new pair,” I said.

  I was hoping my nervousness wasn’t showing. Coming to England, I had hoped for the best, a chance to show my skills and to get paid for doing it. The stories in the newspapers had taken me by surprise. I wanted to buy all the newspapers and take them to our rooms with me.

  The theater had dressing rooms for the performers, too. No theater I had ever been in had official dressing rooms, but Sadler’s Wells did. In the rooms were long tables with mirrors, and lamps that you could move from side to side or up and down on a sliding bar.

  “Do you put on your own face paint?” The voice startled me.

  I turned and saw a round-faced girl, who looked to be about eighteen or so, standing in the doorway.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “I do sewing for your wardrobe,” the girl said. “If you need anything repaired or adjusted, I can do it. I’m really quite good.”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said. “And your name is . . . ?”

  “Sarah Felton,” she answered. “My father is a tailor. That’s where I learned the trade. You’re black, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” I had to smile. “I am very black.”

  “It must be pretty hard to live in a country where they make slaves of your people,” the girl said. “I think it would twist my bonnet something terrible! I can’t imagine people walking down the street looking at me as if I were something that could be bought and sold. The very idea of it!”

  “It makes me mad, too,” I said. “And it hurts me as well.”

  “I can believe that, sir,” she said. “I can truly believe that. Well, if you need anything repaired, or need to know where anything is around the theater, I’m your girl.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “And do you dance as well as they say, Master Juba?”

  “I hope so.”

  It was our first night, and my stomach was jumping around as if I were going to ask it to dance instead of my feet. Looking through the curtain, I saw the theater filling up with peo
ple, and I didn’t feel as bad about Gil arguing with Mr. Campbell earlier. Mr. Campbell said he had to give the theater a better deal than we thought we were going to get. Gil said we’d just about break even after we paid all our expenses.

  For the time being, it didn’t matter. The rest of the troupe was putting on blackface in the dressing room, and I was thinking about my lines and the songs I was going to sing. I wanted to sing “Mary Blane,” but Valentine got that one, so I was going to sing “Come Back, Stephen.”

  Huff, which was what everybody called Mr. Everton, had got into an argument with Gil over something, and each had screamed at the other. The thing was that all the players knew they could scream at Gil. He seemed like a good fellow, but every so often he would slip into a mood, and he would go quiet.

  We were side stage when the curtain opened, and the audience started their applause as they faced the row of chairs onstage. I came out first, turned to the audience, and made as if I were surprised that they were there. Lots of laughter. Then the rest came out, one by one, with each of us pretending to be unaware that we were in a large theater.

  Briggs started playing at a fast tempo. His banjo seemed almost alive in his hands as he plucked the strings and beat a rhythm on the tight leather skin. The man could really play. Pell started up next on the bones, catching the rhythm that Briggs laid down and tossing his body around as he sat in the chair. The way he was moving, his shoulders going up and down, one at a time, that left leg banging out a rhythm on the floor, was enough to make anyone want to move in their seat!

  By the time we got through the first medley, with Briggs setting the pace, Huff playing the violin, Pell on bones, Valentine on lute, Ludlow on low banjo, and me on tambourine, we had the audience just where we wanted them. They were clapping and stomping their feet and were just as much part of the show as we were.

  Serenaders sheet music

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The first two parts had seven numbers each, with mostly Ludlow, Gil, and Valentine doing the solos. There was a short break after each of the first two parts for us to run offstage. I saw Gil go into the dressing room after the second part, and he looked a little upset.

  “You doing good?” I asked him when he came out.

  He smiled and said he was. I smelled whiskey on his breath.

  On the break, Sarah was passing out towels for us to wipe the sweat from our foreheads, and she was also touching up the blackface that had begun to run from the heat. I looked over at Valentine, and he had a big, broad smile on his face. He caught me looking at him and pointed a stubby finger at me.

  “We got them running through the woods, Juba. Bring ’em home!” he said.

  The third part started like the first two, with six songs, including “Come with the Darky Band,” a six-eight number that bounced with Valentine’s singing and the rest of us backing him up. And then it was the troupe sitting down again and me on the floor by myself. I didn’t expect to be jumpy, but I was as I started across the floor. Briggs must have felt me, because he laid his beat down stronger.

  “They’re going to be watching your feet, Juba,” Margaret had said.

  So I let them watch my feet and hear the rhythm of my feet and try to figure out where I was going next. There were some people in the audience beginning to keep time with me by clapping, and they made me smile, because I knew they couldn’t keep up with me.

  Briggs picked up the tempo, and for a while, we exchanged beats. We hadn’t rehearsed it like that, but we were rolling through the dance together. Gil was accenting the beat on the bones, and he was standing. At rehearsal he had sat. There was a growing tension in the theater that I could feel swell with the music, and then, as if I had been swept up by the music, I just let go and something magical took over my body.

  I couldn’t hear the crowd, but I could feel them. Some had begun to stand up, and soon most of them were standing. They had come to see me dance, and they were seeing the best Juba who had ever moved across the floor!

  When the program ended and the audience was giving each of us a round of applause, I bowed and could hardly straighten up. I was exhausted.

  “Juba! Juba! Juba!” They called my name. “Juba! Juba! Juba!”

  “They want an encore,” Mr. Campbell was shouting into my ear. “Can you give them something? Three minutes? Two?”

  I was on the stage again. This time I started dancing slowly with my back to the audience—a straight jig with a shuffle step. Then I shifted the beat to my right leg as I turned to face the audience. They were clapping for me, but as I clapped my hands, I changed the beat. Briggs picked me up on the banjo. Something was coming to me, something I had never tried before.

  Get it right, Juba. Get it right.

  I concentrated on the rhythm, and on Briggs’s banjo. I moved the feel of it from my legs to my hips to my waist. And then back down to my right leg, keeping the same rhythm, the same hard beat, as I lifted my left foot away from the floor. I was doing a traditional jig on one leg.

  Suddenly there was silence. The audience stopped clapping. Had I missed it?

  “Bravo! Bravo!”

  A shout from the balcony, and the whole theater exploded in cheers and applause.

  I brought my left leg down and held out my hands to the audience as I danced backward into the wings.

  “You are a marvel! A marvel!” Gil threw his arms around me and I nearly collapsed into them.

  It was the happiest moment of my life.

  In the dressing room, we were congratulating each other again. Mr. Campbell showed up with a woman who could have been his daughter and passed out cigars. He told me to take one even if I didn’t smoke.

  We finally changed into our street clothes and were ready to leave when Sarah came up to me and put her hand on my arm.

  “I don’t even believe you, Mr. Juba,” she said. “I truly don’t!”

  “Then you think my performance was good enough for this theater?” I asked.

  “This and any other theater in the world, I would think,” Sarah said. “And you were looking fairly handsome out there for a bit, as well.”

  “You still in costume?” Huff came by.

  “No, I . . .” I started to answer him and realized that he knew I had taken off my dancing clothes. It was just my black face that I hadn’t removed.

  Engraving showing Juba dancing from the Illustrated London News

  The reviews of my dancing were great. One or two of the smaller papers used the word nigger to describe me, but I shrugged that off. Almost all of the papers connected me to Charles Dickens, or Boz. I read everything I could by him and about him, as I had done in the years following our meeting in Five Points. I particularly liked A Christmas Carol, with Tiny Tim and Scrooge and all the characters who were so easy to remember. Dickens came to our third performance and visited me backstage after the show.

  “You surpass everything that I’ve ever written about you,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. I had thought that if he came to the show, I would apologize for not knowing who he was or how good a writer he was when I first met him, but nothing came out.

  “I always see people as potential characters in my books,” Mr. Dickens said. “I like those characters who are distinct, somewhat bigger than life, but grounded in a reality that I can handle. That is not you, Juba. You are so much bigger than life, your dancing is so much bigger than life, that you are almost otherworldly. It is such a pleasure to meet someone who enjoys his art as much as you do, sir. It is a great pleasure indeed.”

  We shook hands, and as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. I had the feeling I had been in contact with a great man.

  Reviews of Juba’s performance

  The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser 10/18/1848

  The Era 11/12/1848

  I thought about writing to Stubby. What would I say? London was busy and twisting and wonderful. I thought I could just walk the streets all day and
never stop being amazed. Me, Gil, and Valentine went down to a place called Piccadilly Circus. The stores were swell and the people, some young and some old, dressed in suits and walked about as if they were the most important people in the world. Valentine thought they were funny, but I liked to see people walking like that, looking as if they were special. We also went to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and Gil, who was from Virginia, said the horses were acting just like the people. They were special and they knew it.

  The expense money we were given was in shillings, and we were supposed to do some mental arithmetic to figure out how much we were spending in dollars. Valentine said he had a foolproof way of doing it.

  “You give it over to an English shopkeeper and hope they’re honest,” he said. “Otherwise, I don’t have a clue. Huff thinks we’re getting a shady deal, being paid in English money.”

  “He’s got problems,” Gil said. “He thinks we’d make more money being like Christy’s Minstrels.”

  “Christy’s Minstrels don’t know the people they’re dealing with,” Valentine said. “They might as well be from New York, because they can live around black people all day and not understand them.”

  “What I would love is for everyone to understand the music and dancing of colored people,” Gil said. “If you like colored people or you don’t like them, there’s something special in their music. If you have ears and eyes, you have to know that’s true.”

  “Mr. Valentine, have you noticed that I am from New York City?” I asked.

  “You don’t count,” Valentine said. “You were born black. So what you know about being that way doesn’t really matter. Not in show business, anyway.”

  I looked at Valentine thinking he would be smiling, but he wasn’t.

  We stopped at a shoemaker on a small street in Bethnal Green. There was a kettle on a stove, and the steam filled the room and made it feel damp. I asked the store owner if he could make me a shoe with a wooden sole that would still look stylish. He looked at me somewhat suspicious and asked if I would remove my shoes and step up on his “fitting stand.” It was a foot high, and he looked at my feet for a while and then went into the back of his shop.