Juba! Read online

  It took us until late in the afternoon to finish smoking all the oysters and putting them in the pots that Jack would carry them around in. He had a whole list of swells who would buy smoked oysters and pay good money for them, too.

  When the oysters had been smoked and put in the little pots that Jack had invested in, I helped him load them on the hand cart, made sure all the pots were covered good, and watched him pull off uptown.

  I thought Jack really didn’t have to work. He had bought the house on Baxter Street when Andrew Jackson was president, and things were cheaper downtown and expensive uptown. He made enough money renting out rooms to get by since he had given up drinking. He wasn’t getting rich, but he wasn’t barefoot, as he always said. The tenements in Five Points were mostly beat-up wooden shacks. People said one wooden match would burn down the whole neighborhood in thirty minutes if the wind was right. Jack had some income from renting out two floors.

  Street in Five Points, New York City, circa 1861

  There wasn’t much to the job of helping him. Jack was the kind of man who kept busy all the time. He would be up at first light every morning and down to the docks haggling with the fishermen who were just coming in. What he’d figured out, and he was a figuring man, was that instead of selling fish to everybody, he would just smoke oysters, crabs, and some croakers if they had them for sale, and sell them to the rich people uptown.

  It was funny the three of us being together, Jack at least seventy and me and Stubby still in our teens. The black people over on the square used to call Jack my white daddy, which didn’t bother me at all. I had a steady income and a decent place to live.

  Besides Stubby, the only person I spent a lot of time with was Freddy Flamer. Freddy played fiddle, danced a little, and did a few magic tricks. He got a few jobs playing the fiddle and sometimes made a few coins doing magic tricks uptown around the theaters, but he was getting by mostly by cleaning clothes and tailoring. His mama had taught him how to sew and do some patching up of men’s clothing. Jack said Freddy looked like a gentleman.

  “You got to look like something that deserves money before people will let it loose from their pockets,” Jack said. “Freddy looks like he could be having tea with the Queen of England and she’d be passing him the cakes.”

  I didn’t know about that, but I did like the way Freddy carried himself. There was an elegant style about him, like he knew something about himself that nobody else knew. When we were on the down side, scraping the dregs, so to speak, sometimes we would perform on the corners up near Fourteenth Street. Freddy would start to fiddling and catch people’s attention, and then I’d dance. Maybe if they would throw us coins because we were good or maybe because they didn’t expect a black man to be dancing Irish jigs. Didn’t make any difference to either of us—we would usually get enough money for food.

  My name is William Henry Lane, but when I dance, I call myself Master Juba, and people I know just call me Juba. Juba is a dance that black people do in the South. They say it comes from Africa. I don’t know about that, but most dancers in Five Points give themselves stage names, so I settled on Juba. It has a nice ring to it.

  I live to dance. The first time I saw a good dancer perform, it was old Jim Lowe, who is as old as dirt but moves like he has extra joints in his legs. He saw me watching him and grinned at me and asked me if I could dance. I didn’t know if I could or not, but I said yes.

  “Show me what you got,” Jim said. “Dance for me.”

  I tried dancing the way I had seen Jim dance, but I couldn’t do what he did. When I stopped, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you got something. You really have got something.” I’ve been dancing ever since and loving what I do.

  Freddy called himself a dancer, as I did, even though he didn’t dance all that well. Stubby didn’t dance at all, but he was something special. It was Stubby who said that one day the three of us were going to be rich and famous.

  “I’ll open up a big restaurant,” he said. “Maybe I’ll buy Fraunces Tavern and serve nothing but the best food and the best wine. Then you and Freddy can come by and we’ll sit at a table near the window and eat clams baked in walnut shells.”

  “I don’t eat clams,” Freddy said. “Clams can rotten out your insides. You can ask Jack about that.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I asked Jack anyway.

  “You ever look a clam in the eye?” Jack asked me.

  “No, I have not,” I said.

  “If you look a clam in the eye, or at least where its eye is supposed to be, you can see a map of just what’s in you,” Jack said. “The outside of a clam is the same as the inside of a human being. My grandmother told me that.”

  I didn’t want to say anything bad about Jack’s grandmother, but I didn’t believe that the outside of a clam was like the inside of a human being. You didn’t argue with Jack Bishop, and I thought that was why him, Stubby, Freddy, and me got along. We let Jack tell his stories, and we didn’t argue with him about them and he didn’t argue with us.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Monday. I helped Jack load up his cart and watched as he and Stubby started off. I knew they wouldn’t be back until around four, maybe four thirty, and I wouldn’t have anything much to do until then, so I went over to Peter Williams’s place. Peter was a big black man with a thick neck, slitty eyes, and big lips. He ran Almack’s, a club he had gotten from an Englishman who owed him money. All the black men around Five Points said Almack’s was the best club in New York City for dancing and meeting up with women who were more or less on the wild side. They served decent food on most days and had as many ways for a man to get into trouble as you would want.

  Where Jack Bishop was a straightforward, hardworking man who just got by from day to day, Peter Williams was a schemer, and as cold as the club he ran. The place had three stories. The first story was the Club Room, where people danced and where the food was cooked by Peter’s wife, Miss Lilly, and whoever she got to help her. That was also where they kept the whiskey, tobacco, and anything else they had to sell.

  The room had chairs and tables all around the walls and a big space in the middle of the floor for dancing. On the far end of the room was a little roped-off part, and that was where Peter had people put on their shows.

  The shows Peter put on depended on who was coming in the door. If it was a bunch of sailors from the docks, then it was some skinny girls dancing and showing off as much as they could show without catching their death of pneumonia. The sailors would buy drinks from Quincy, who sat at a table with boxes of whiskey next to him and the open bottles on the table in front of him. Quincy was also the man who kept order in Almack’s. It was known that he did not mind putting a rowdy customer to rest and leaving his bruised and battered body in a gutter somewhere in Five Points.

  When the sailors had enough drink in them so that the light-skinned girls started looking pretty, they could buy a dance. A dance with one of the girls meant some quick kissing, some slow rubbing, and maybe a trip upstairs to the top floor, where other stuff was going on.

  I wasn’t interested in any of the girls, or none of the whiskey, but I was interested in the occasional shows Peter had. Peter was about selling you whatever he could convince you that you needed. When he saw that some uptown people had come into his club and maybe there were a few loose coins floating around, he would arrange to put on a little show with some real good dancers, like John Diamond, or the Artis sisters, or me.

  Map of lower Manhattan showing the Five Points area in Ward 6. New York Herald, 1863.

  John Diamond did all kinds of Irish dancing, jigs, step, and clog, you name it. He could move good, but he also moved with style. He was a tall, thin white boy who gave off the impression that he was an upper-crust gentleman just cruising downtown for a night’s amusement. The first time I saw him, he was sitting at a table, kind of sideways, so he could put one leg way back so you would notice it, and had a blue silk scarf wrapped around his neck so that it cove
red the lower part of his face. That man could just sit still and make people watch him. Once in a while, when somebody from the newspapers came over—the Herald or even the Newark, New Jersey, paper—Peter would get John to sit out in the audience like he was a regular customer, only he would be wearing a cloak and a top hat. Then Peter would have a few dancers go through their numbers, and just when everyone thought they were seeing something good, Peter would signal John to take the floor, and that would knock everybody out. That’s how good John Diamond was, and he knew it. He was nasty, too. I told Jack about how nasty John Diamond was, and Jack said God gave some talent to nasty people just to keep the rest of us on our toes.

  The Artis sisters were good-looking. The big thing about them was that they were fifteen-year-old identical twins and moved together in a fascinating kind of way. I don’t know how they learned to slink around a dance floor like that, but they could really do it. Once in a while they would dance behind John Diamond and he would pretend they were his women or something. Other times they would dance with the regular girls, the ones who would dance with whoever came into Almack’s. It was something to see the coal-black twins dancing around the yellow-complexioned regular girl dancers. There would be seven or nine light-skinned girls—always an odd number—and the two Artis sisters sliding in and around them.

  There were some white girls dancing in Almack’s, too. Some could dance pretty well, and some were only fair. But they had to mix with the crowd, so you didn’t get any top dancers. Also, most of the dancing wasn’t meant to be looked at, it was meant to loosen up the pockets.

  Then there was me.

  I was born in South County, Rhode Island, and was raised by my aunt Hattie. She brought me to New York City when I was five, and we lived on Cherry Street until she died in 1838. Since then I’d been more or less on my own. What I had was what most people called a normal life. The only thing that was different was that when I was seven, I had seen Jim Lowe dancing on the Bowery in front of the theater that used to carry three or four small acts besides whoever it was that was the headline star. He was dancing in front of the theater, and the woman with him was inviting people over to see the signs that told about what was going on in the theater that evening.

  I loved the way people were watching the man, and I loved even more the way the man was moving and enjoying himself. He thought I could be a dancer and showed me a few things, and I loved it. I started dancing along with him on weekends, and he was all right with that. People were clapping and throwing us pennies, and it was the grandest thing that had ever happened to me.

  A lot of the people in Five Points were Irish, and they did the most dancing. It didn’t take but two seconds and a tambourine to get the Irish up on their feet. They’d dance in twos or threes or with a whole pack of dancers, according to the situation. But what made it best for me was that the men danced just as good as the women and they wanted to be dancing!

  I learned every Irish dance I could by watching their feet and remembering the tunes I heard. Then I would go home and practice until I felt like I had it down. They had lots of dance contests in Five Points. Every time one of the political parties had a candidate for anything, they would have a party in the streets—usually Baxter Street or up near the Paradise Square—and pass out free food and have a singing contest and a dancing contest. The Dead Rabbits, a group of street hustlers from the area, worked for the Republicans and the Independents, and they would keep order and run the contests. That’s how I first got noticed. I ran up against John Diamond, who was always broke or near broke and looking for a dollar or four bits, and entering the contests. Most of the contests he entered he won, but one day me and him had a dance-off and I threw out all my best moves. I won the contest and he called me a few choice names and said they just wanted to give the fifty cents first prize to a blackie. I didn’t believe that at all. I knew how good I was.

  Almack’s was nearly empty by the time I got there. Miss Lilly gave me a lemonade and told me how glad she was that the Africans on the Amistad had won their case.

  “What case?” I asked.

  “Juba, baby, you need to bury your head in some books for about two years,” Miss Lilly said. “There’s more to this world than dancing and entertaining people. You’re acting just like this child over there.”

  I didn’t know who the girl was, but she was light-skinned, skinny, and sad-looking as she carried a pail and a mop across the room and started washing the floor down.

  “So what are you doing with yourself these days, Mr. Dancing Man?” Miss Lilly went on.

  “Trying to keep my backbone in back of me and my navel closed up!” I said.

  “Boy, where did you hear that dumb saying?” Miss Lilly asked. “It had to be from that Jack Bishop. That man got more old sayings in him than he got sense or fish. You want some more lemonade?”

  “Wouldn’t mind,” I said.

  “Go get it from behind the bar,” Miss Lilly said.

  I hadn’t gone more than two steps when I heard a cry and looked over to see that the girl who was washing the floor had fallen.

  “Go get your lemonade!” Miss Lilly called to me. Her voice was kind of sharp.

  I got the lemonade and brought it back to the table. The girl was struggling to get up and she was crying hard.

  “We need this floor done before the afternoon crowd comes in,” Miss Lilly called to her. Her voice was still hard.

  I watched the girl dip the mop back in the bucket and start back into washing the floor.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Just another frail thing who’s finding out that life don’t come with no lace handkerchiefs. She’s sweet in her way, but sweet don’t get you very far in Five Points,” Miss Lilly said. “Goes by the name of Cissy Daniels, but her real name is Priscilla. She owes Pete money and he wants it.”

  “That’s not a good place to be,” I said.

  “Then she shouldn’t have gone there,” Miss Lilly said.

  “She don’t like to wash floors, I guess.”

  “She don’t mind washing floors.” Miss Lilly sipped her lemonade out of a mug and made a face.

  “If she don’t mind washing floors, why is she crying?”

  “I didn’t know you did missionary work, Juba.” Miss Lilly managed a smile. “Or did you trip over your feet and fall in love?”

  “Just wondered,” I said.

  “Pete don’t pay her but thirty-five cents a day to clean up around here,” Miss Lilly said. “And since she’s not cleaning all day, she’s not worth any more than that. But she owes him over twenty dollars, and the way she’s paying him a few cents a day, she knows she’s going to be working for him for the next hundred years. He told her he’d pay her sixty cents if she danced when the customers came in, but she didn’t want to do that.”

  “She’s a dancer?”

  “She got two legs and she’s not dead, so I guess she can do something,” Miss Lilly said. “Pete wants her to dance with the customers.”

  “Oh.”

  I knew what that meant. Dancing with the men who came into Almack’s was more about standing up and wrestling with them than anything else. And more than one would want to drag her upstairs to one of the rooms.

  Pete came down the stairs. The man walked heavy, banging his way down the wooden stairs like he was falling from one step to the next. He looked around the room, saw the girl washing, and then came over and sat with me and Miss Lilly.

  “You ain’t giving him none of my good lemonade, are you?” Pete asked Miss Lilly.

  “He’s drinking the same as I am,” Miss Lilly said.

  “Juba is nothing but a boy, but he’s got so much money he walks lopsided just from the weight of it,” Pete said. “Plus, he’s got a big job with the fish king. He makes about ten dollars a week from him. Isn’t that right?”

  “Ten dollars? He pays me fifteen dollars just to keep the fish happy!” I said. “I sing to them at night so they wake up smiling in the mornin
g.”

  “If he’s got that much money, he can help Cissy pay off what she owes you,” Miss Lilly said. “She was laying on the floor crying, and it got Juba’s heart pounding.”

  “You didn’t let her cry on my floor, did you?” Pete asked, shaking his head from side to side. “She’s probably got them salty tears, and you know how salt can mess a good floor up.”

  “You’re a hard man, Mr. Williams,” I said.

  “Me? Hard? No, sir! I’m the easiest man in the world. Didn’t I wink at the judges and let you win that contest against John Diamond?”

  “You didn’t let me win anything,” I said. “I beat down John Diamond fair and square, and those other dancers weren’t even close.”

  “So when you coming to work for me?” Pete asked. “Those contests only come once in a while, and I can guarantee you two dollars a week and fifty percent of all the tips you pick up. And you wouldn’t have to go around smelling fishy all day.”

  That was funny, and I had to laugh. Maybe he could guarantee me two dollars a week, but there was no way I would ever let him take half of the tip money, too.

  We watched as Cissy finished mopping the floor and started to leave. Pete told Miss Lilly to call her, and Miss Lilly snapped her fingers and signaled for her to come over.

  When Cissy reached us, Miss Lilly asked her if she wanted some lemonade.

  “No, ma’am,” Cissy said quietly.

  “Sit down,” Pete said, which she did after pulling a chair over.

  “If you look at this gal up close, you can see she’s not that bad-looking if she could manage to put a smile on her face once in a while,” Pete said. “At the rate she’s going, she’s going to be about thirty or forty before she’s going to finish paying me off, though. If she played her cards right, she could pay me off in eight months, maybe even in six. Then she could go out and get herself an easy job taking care of the white folks’ babies. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”