Juba! Page 11

  “That’s where he keeps his elves,” Valentine said. “They really make the shoes.”

  The man came back a few minutes later carrying a pair of women’s shoes with a flat heel.

  “Just try these on,” he said. “They were meant for display so as not to waste the leather. I can fix them for you, take off some of the lace and what have you.”

  I tried them on, and they felt pretty good. I was still on the fitting platform, so I tried a few steps to see how they would sound. On the hard wooden floor of the platform they were great.

  “You’re going to break the sole if I don’t put a small sliver of leather over it,” he said. “Not a problem there if you want it done.”

  Two gentlemen watching me came over, and one pointed at my feet. “Those the feet that the Boz brought over?” he asked.

  “The very same,” Gil said.

  “Well, I guess you are worth seeing after all!” he said as they left the shop.

  Gil said he should have me dancing up and down Regent Street from noon until five to advertise our performances.

  Piccadilly Circus looking up Regent Street, circa 1860

  When I got back from a full day of running around London, looking at the buildings and the stores and listening to the people on the streets, I was tired and wishing I had someone to talk to like Stubby or even Jack Bishop. Valentine’s statement about me being black so it didn’t matter what I knew was something to think about.

  The truth to it was that I wasn’t doing much thinking about anything except me being on the stage. The theater’s lights seemed to create a world just for me, and I was floating through it like some crazy baby bird that had just been pushed out of its nest but had learned to fly. To fly, to fly across the stage, to fly across the waves of applause, to fly across the “bravos” and the “hurrahs” of the audience. I kept telling myself to calm down, but I wasn’t listening.

  We had done ten performances in and around London when Gil and Huff got into it again. Mr. Campbell, our London manager, and Sarah were there, too. Huff was saying we should start changing our act so that we could bring it home.

  “You can’t bring Juba to Atlanta,” he said. “Not the way he dances. You need to put a wig on him and puff his lips up a little so he looks . . . like what they want to see in Atlanta . . . or we won’t get any bookings down there.”

  “Maybe we can teach them how to see something different,” Gil said. “And maybe that’s why we’re called Pell’s Serenaders, because I have a vision. And maybe, just maybe, you ought to open your eyes and see something different, too.”

  Huff walked across the room and put his nose an inch from Gil’s. “What I see with my own two eyes is that I’m not going to make no kind of steady living working for a nigger. And that’s what I’m doing over here, working behind Boz’s Juba or whatever it is he’s calling himself. In America you make a living working with white men, and for white men. And I aim to go back to America, back to Mableton, Georgia, and make a living. And if I want any coloreds around me, I’ll buy a few!”

  Something inside me jumped, and I was on my feet in a second. Huff was a good-sized man, but I had fought men his size before. He saw me coming and turned and tried to tackle me around the waist. I hit him two shots in the head before his momentum knocked me backward into a wooden closet.

  The fight was short, with Huff finding out I could do more than dance as I hit him on the side of his head and jaw. He staggered backward and put his hands up as Valentine and Mr. Campbell came between us.

  “You can go back to Georgia today, Everton,” Gil said, using Huff’s real name. “I’ll be glad to see you go. You’re wrong, and there’s no way under God’s sky that you don’t know it!”

  “Juba, you’re a good dancer, and I don’t have any reason to offend you.” Huff was bleeding from the nose, and his eyes were bloodshot. “But I’m not wrong. You can say what you want, Gil, and you can scratch around for a better answer, but your head and your eyes tell you that I’m right. Not you, me! In America, he ain’t Boz’s Juba, he’s just colored, and what that means is going to depend on where he finds his black ass!”

  Huff walked out of the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. The room got real still, and one by one, we started to leave. Gil came over and patted me on the wrist. He started to say something, then just shrugged and left.

  “You feeling bad?” Sarah asked me.

  “No.”

  “Liar,” she said quietly.

  “He doesn’t mean that much to me,” I said.

  “Do you know where Edgware Road is?”

  “No, where?”

  “Where I live,” Sarah said. “Come along, I’ll show it to you.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Sarah lived in a two-room flat on Church Street, off Edgware Road. It was a nice area with lots of small shops and restaurants that sold food I had never seen before.

  “Many of the people here are French,” she said. “They mind their own business.”

  She made tea and served some cakes that weren’t at all sweet. She talked about what Huff had been saying, and added that Valentine was worried about how much money the group was making.

  “Is Gil paying you?” I asked.

  “Yes, he pays my salary, but the theater gives him an allowance for wardrobe upkeep,” Sarah answered. “I don’t know how good he is with money, though. Mr. Campbell just about manages everything, I think.”

  Mr. Campbell was a lot stronger than Gilbert Pell. Gil was about my age, maybe a year or two older, but he seemed tired. He was really talented once he got into the performance, but as soon as it was over he would go into a funk, and more than once I thought he was drinking before we went on.

  Over the next two weeks, two things happened. The first was that when our production was over, Mr. Campbell booked us into a theater in Kilburn, an Irish neighborhood. We went over big there, and the Irish really loved my dancing. At one performance they were even dancing along with me in the side aisles. That was sweet, and I enjoyed it. I slowed the pace down and did jigs they all would know. But Gil got into a shouting match with Mr. Campbell about money, and he was told that two other companies were now performing minstrel shows in London.

  “You tell me,” Gil said. “Are they as good as us? Are they nearly as good as us?”

  “No, they’re not,” Mr. Campbell said. “But they don’t have to be. When a good act breaks the ice, then everybody jumps into the water. And if somebody sees three minstrel shows playing at the same time, they’re going to pick one of them. If the one they pick isn’t that good, then they won’t go see the others.”

  “We’ve got Juba and we’ve got the connection with Charles Dickens,” Gil said. “Nobody else has that.”

  “You could have a connection with Moses himself and it would only make a slight difference.” Mr. Campbell was turning red. “How many people do you think read Dickens? Everybody says they read Dickens when his stories come out every month, but how many actually read him and how many are going to take his advice to see Juba? I’m not saying you’re not the best in London, because you are. I am saying you’re not the only game in town.”

  “I find you very annoying, sir,” Gil said.

  “Look, do you know how much business you’ve created for the black circus, that Pablo Fanque deal? People say there’s a black show and it’s great, then there’s a black minstrel show and that’s great, but how do you separate them? You tell me that, Pell. How do you separate them?”

  Mr. Campbell was walking on the same ground that Huff had walked on. Gil said he was doing his best, but what his best produced was a real mix of places for us to perform, from regular theaters to public houses with little places to perform on the second floor, and once even in a tent at a fair. They would all have been good, except for the money. Another thing that happened was that in some of the places, Mr. Campbell wanted us to perform more like the Christy’s Minstrels.

  “It was the onl
y way I could sell you,” he said.

  Poster

  And what that meant was that we had to make ourselves look like what they thought black people looked like in America. I remembered John Diamond yelling at me at Almack’s to “coon it up.”

  “I know that hurts,” Sarah said. “But maybe it’ll only last for a while. If you can get one really long-term contract, then you can just dance the way you want to.”

  The other thing that was happening was that I was falling in love with Sarah Felton. At first I told myself it wasn’t happening, that she was just somebody I could lean on once in a while, who understood what I was going through. But then I found myself thinking about her all the time, and going around London with her on the days the troupe wasn’t working.

  Sarah was nineteen, kind of pretty, with a round face and dark hair that she wore long so that it lay on her back or sometimes in front of her shoulder. But what drew me to her most was that she always knew what was bothering me. There would be a hitch—somebody missed a cue during the performance, perhaps—and I would have to change my act while I was onstage. Nobody would say anything about it, but Sarah would know, and her mouth would tighten up and her eyes would flash when she talked about it. Sometimes I would say that it didn’t really bother me that much, but she knew it did. She always knew.

  “What’s it like in America?” she asked me once when we were in Hyde Park. “I imagine cowboys and Indians and covered wagons. That’s what we see in the Illustrated News. But I imagine New York must be more like London. Is that true?”

  “New York doesn’t have as much history as London,” I said. “In London you talk about things that happened hundreds of years ago. Windsor Castle is older than America. Many of the streets and parks are older than America, too. The biggest difference is that you don’t have slavery over here. Just knowing that you can go somewhere in America and see people being used as slaves is scary.”

  “Not if you’re free,” Sarah said.

  “Even if you’re free,” I said. “Because you know that the people who are slaves are slaves because they look like you.”

  “And there’s nothing funny about that, is there?”

  Sarah’s tone surprised me. It gave me the same feeling that I’d had sometimes when I had seen a dancer do a move or make a step that I didn’t expect but that was somehow so right for the moment, so accurate, that I would remember it forever and want to put it in my act. When she said there was nothing funny about people being slaves because they looked like me, she was describing everything I wanted to show when I danced. I danced the way the Irish danced, and I danced the way the black people danced, but they were all dances of people I loved. I needed to make my dancing show that—that I loved the people and I appreciated them.

  “Juba, you’ve grown quiet on me,” Sarah said.

  “I think you’re getting to be very special to me, Sarah,” I said. “Does that bother you?”

  “Not particularly,” she answered. There was just a hint of a smile on her face. “I’m thinking you could do worse than me if you put your mind to it.”

  It was clear that how Gil went, the troupe went. And more and more, he was falling into a pattern of getting depressed, then drinking too much, then screaming at everybody. I didn’t think it was me who should pull him aside, but I did.

  “You aren’t doing yourself much good,” I told him. “We both know that, don’t we?”

  Gil smiled. “I’m not doing myself a whole lot of good, Mr. Juba,” he said. “But then again, I don’t know if there’s a whole lot of good out there for me to do, either for myself or for anybody else. I’m not even sure if I’m going home after this tour runs out.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the question I asked myself,” Gil said. “Why would I not go home, on the one hand, and why would I go home, on the other hand? I don’t have anybody waiting for me back in the States. You have a sweetheart back in New York?”

  “No,” I confessed.

  “You thinking of taking Sarah back with you?”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking of it,” I said.

  “Don’t act surprised,” Gil said. “The two of you are closer than peas in a pod. I guess you might be all right in New York, a black dancer and a white woman. It wouldn’t do you good to come down to Virginia, though.”

  I hadn’t known that my connection with Sarah was that open. When Gil laid it out like that, I guessed it had to be.

  My talk with him didn’t do any good. He was still inside himself most of the time, and getting frustrated with our bookings. I asked Valentine if he thought we were doing really bad.

  “This is the way we always go,” he said. “We make a living most of the time, but nobody’s getting rich. On the other hand, we’re doing what we want to do. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  When January came, along with the cold weather, we had even fewer bookings. I never did well in the cold weather in England. The dampness seemed to settle in my chest and stay all winter. The new plays and shows had opened in London, and they got all the reviews. No one was mentioning Pell’s Serenaders or Boz’s Juba.

  We did a few performances in Sheffield, one in Brighton, two in Liverpool, and three days in Birmingham. When we had been booked in London again, Campbell asked us to put our earnings into publicity.

  Women also formed minstrel groups.

  “If we can get the ball rolling, we might be able to gain enough momentum for the reviewers to start taking notice,” he said.

  Nobody believed it would happen. We worked the entire week, putting everything we had into the shows, even trying some new material, but the seats were mostly empty. Mr. Charles Dickens came one evening and asked to see me. I was thrilled that he had come, of course, and shook his hand enthusiastically.

  “I thought you had gone back to America,” he said. “The press haven’t been too kind to you, have they?”

  “I guess they have to do what they have to do,” I said. I didn’t want to seem as if I was complaining.

  “How are things going for you?”

  “When things are going good, when I’m onstage and feeling the music, then those are the best of times,” I said. “When we’re sitting around hoping to get a booking, then those are the worst of times.”

  “Yes, of course, but isn’t that what all true art is about?” Mr. Dickens said. “Taking the everyday flotsam and jetsam of life, the worst of times. And making it into something so special that they become the best of times. That’s what the artist does—we make change possible by showing people different ways of looking at things. I think that’s true whether one uses paints or dancing or words. Do you agree?”

  I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I nodded as wisely as I could. He nodded, too, so at least he understood my nod.

  Mr. Campbell lived on Cecil Court, and we were told to check in with him at least three times a week. It wasn’t a good feeling, because I didn’t think he was seriously looking to find us anything. The walk from Church Street to Cecil Court took almost an hour, but my funds were running low and I didn’t want to spend the money for the public coach. Sarah was being as sweet as she could be and encouraging me to practice as much as possible. I did practice some, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had got down a routine in which I could shuffle across the floor without crossing my ankles and still keep a steady rhythm. It was a good step and Sarah liked it, but practice didn’t mean as much when there didn’t seem to be anything to practice for.

  “I think Campbell will come up with something wonderful,” Sarah said. “You’ll all be together again and burning up the stage!”

  “Look, you’re taking in sewing and last week you cleaned flats in Hanover Square,” I said. “I don’t want you to kill yourself while you’re waiting for the Serenaders to get back together.”

  “Juba, is it killing you to do what is necessary for someone you love?”

  I turned toward Sarah, who was sitting by the window. She was looking down at the se
wing in her lap, her face silhouetted by the afternoon light. Outside, the horses from the palace guard were passing, their feet clip-clopping on the hard road surface. We hadn’t talked much about love before. We had mentioned, in passing, some future plan that gave us a picture of the two of us together some weeks, or months, or even years down the road. But we had shied away from being direct, even though we were sharing her small flat. When it came to mind, when I would be walking down the street and feel myself picking up the pace to get home to her, I would attribute it to the convenience of having a woman, or to having a cup of tea when I arrived.

  But in my heart I knew I loved Sarah. I knew I wanted to be with her almost as much as I wanted to dance. Dancing was the way I wanted to live; Sarah was the one I wanted to be with.

  “You know, Sarah, there are problems with us being together,” I said.

  “Oh, good, I enjoy solving problems,” she answered, her voice light and clear. “Are they interesting problems?”

  “To begin with, I’m not British,” I said.

  “You can tell people you’re from Barbados and therefore are a British subject,” Sarah said.

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” I asked. “How about the idea that I’m black and you’re very white?”

  “It matters to me as much as it matters that you dance and I don’t,” she said. “It’s something I’m willing to live with. Are you?”

  The question was simply put.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Yes, I am.”

  “Shouldn’t you do something dramatic at this point in the conversation?” she asked.