Juba! Read online

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You ever see a dancer who just wasn’t that good, but they were handsome and carried it off?” Margaret asked.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Look, Juba, start a slow reel,” Margaret said. “Come on, you can do a slow reel, can’t you?”

  She was getting on my nerves, but I started the slow reel. Then she got up and stood next to me, waited for a moment until she had the feel of what I was doing, and began to dance. I hadn’t expected it, and I felt a little embarrassed. She could dance, and she knew it. She was showing me something I didn’t know about Irish dancing: that even though the dancers didn’t touch in many of the dances, there was something going on between them. All right, I liked it.

  I looked at Margaret and she was smiling. When I stopped, she put her hands on her hips and gave a nod.

  “Now put everything I said in your head and stew on it for a while, and see if you come up with something useful,” she said. “I’m doing some washing for people on Fifth Avenue tomorrow, so I’ll see you the next day. Just knock on my door.”

  “You think I’m looking good?” I asked her as she opened the door to let me out.

  “You could look better,” she said.

  Margaret didn’t make me feel very good. I didn’t think she knew as much as she thought she did. She seemed jealous of me, and I didn’t figure to be knocking on her door anymore. What I would do was work out my routine for the auditions in my head, because I knew that whatever my brain could think up, my legs and feet would carry out.

  We had two windows, and one had cracked in the winter. Me and Stubby had nailed a piece of wood over it to keep the cold out. That was fine in the winter, but in the summer it made the room dark in the daytime. I went to the good window, the one over Stubby’s bed, and looked down into the street. People were already bringing out boxes to sit on to catch whatever cool breeze might be wandering down the street. Across from me a woman was sitting in the window, and next to her a cat was sitting on a pillow.

  When I saw Stubby and Jack Bishop coming down the street, I could tell they had had a good day. Stubby was pushing the cart like it was nothing and talking a mile a minute, the way he always did, and Jack was nodding and smiling. I went down and helped Stubby bring in what was left of the pots while Jack chained up the cart.

  “You people must have made a fortune today,” I said.

  “A doctor near Madison Square bought enough oysters to start an oyster war,” Stubby said.

  “What’s an oyster war?”

  “I don’t know.” Stubby was grinning. “But he bought a lot of smoked oysters.”

  Stubby had also bought some sandwiches from a shop on Delancey Street, and there was one for me, which was good, because I didn’t like fish every day.

  “Stubby, what do you think of my dancing?” I asked later, before we’d gone to bed.

  “You’re the best I’ve ever seen,” Stubby said. “I haven’t even heard of anybody as good as you except for John Diamond, and I don’t think he’s got you beat. You can always tell what he’s going to do. With you, it’s different. Sometimes I think your body doesn’t even know what it’s going to do until it’s doing it. You know what I mean?”

  “Like I was possessed by the devil?”

  “No, Juba, and you shouldn’t even say something like that,” Stubby said, a serious look on his face. “Did I ever tell you about a pastry chef I heard of who got possessed by the devil, and every cake he made after that fell flat? His family took him to a doctor in Delaware. . . .”

  I must have fallen asleep as Stubby was talking, because I don’t remember much else he said about the fellow making cakes. But I did think more about what he was saying about my body not knowing what it was going to do next. Maybe Margaret had something after all.

  I practiced two more times with Margaret Moran during the week, once with the old man playing the fiddle and once without him. She was saying that although I was a good dancer, people didn’t feel as if they were part of my performance. There was no way I was going to cut myself down to anything simple, but it was something to think about. Did I want people to feel as if they were part of what I was doing?

  On the morning of the auditions at Almack’s, Stubby said he’d go with me. We told Jack Bishop where we were going; he shrugged and said he’d tag along.

  We arrived at nine o’clock, and I was given a number. Other dancers were already there, and one or two people I knew who were fairly decent singers. There were also a lot of fat-legged Irish girls, who I imagined danced together as a group.

  “You should be on in an hour or so,” a dark-looking man, probably Italian, said. “Just don’t forget, the auditions are over at twelve sharp.”

  I felt confident, as if all I had to do was to show up and people would take notice. No matter how many times I repeated Margaret’s warning about getting overconfident, I was itching to get on with it.

  I was surprised to see how many people were already there. There were a lot of older people, too, no doubt the parents and friends of the singers and dancers. The place had a good feeling to it, and when I looked over at where Pete Williams was sitting, I could see he was pleased.

  Miss Lilly saw me, came and took me by the hand, and walked me over to where Pete sat with two white men and John Diamond.

  “Juba, this is Mr. Reeves, who is having the auditions,” Lilly said. “Mr. Reeves, Juba is one of our best dancers. You’ll like him a lot.”

  I reached out my hand to Mr. Reeves, but he didn’t reach out his hand to me. That was okay. He didn’t know me yet, or what I could do on the floor.

  I went and sat with Jack Bishop and Stubby and told them that the man next to Pete was Reeves.

  “And the other man is a lawyer named Louis Browner,” Jack said. “He’s involved in the slave trade somehow.”

  “He don’t look like it,” Stubby said.

  That was a funny thing to say and not a funny thing to say. On the one hand, how was someone involved in the slave trade supposed to look? On the other hand, it just pointed out that anyone could be a slave trader.

  “Let’s watch this act coming up,” Jack Bishop said.

  Two young white fellows and two girls came out onto the floor. The fellows wore blouselike white shirts and black pants, and the girls wore white blouses and black and green skirts. They looked good.

  Just before they started, I glanced over at where Mr. Reeves and Pete were sitting. I didn’t like the idea of John Diamond sitting there. Had they already hired him?

  The piano player started in on a lively tune, and the four dancers on the floor began their routine. It was nothing special except for the fact that the expressions on their faces looked as if they were having a great time. Their rhythm was right on cue, but it was simple and their steps were even simpler. They danced for a good three minutes and then went into a nice ending bow. Again, nothing special.

  “Number eight!” John Diamond called out.

  I looked at my number even though I knew it was twelve, my lucky number.

  Number eight was tall and slim. He came out in a step dance but quickly went down into a full split, then a scissors lift to a standing position, back to the step moves, then down on his hands. I thought he was going to push himself up, but he only pushed halfway up, then swung his leg around, got his arms out of the way, and brought his legs full circle. Nice, but the guy wasn’t a dancer, he was an acrobat.

  For the next minute or so the fellow showed how strong he was and how agile, but when I glanced over at Mr. Reeves, I saw he was already looking away.

  “Nine!” John Diamond again.

  Nine was a sweet-looking girl, maybe eleven or twelve, with red fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows. She went to the middle of the floor and didn’t move, even after the piano player started playing. An older woman, maybe her mother, went out on the floor, nervously patted the girl on the shoulder, and whispered something in her ear. The piano player starte
d up again and the girl still didn’t move, but I could see she was breathing hard. The mother started out on the floor again, but then the girl began to dance. She was into a regular jig pattern, then changed it to a clog pattern, then switched it back and forth as gracefully as you pleased. It wasn’t sensational, but it was good.

  “If she don’t have seven babies before she’s nineteen, she’ll be a good entertainer,” Jack whispered to me.

  When the girl finished, a few people started clapping, and after Mr. Reeves stood up and gave her a hand, everyone joined in.

  “Ten!” Ten was a light-skinned black man with sandy hair. He started doing a reel, with a little too much spinning, and Mr. Reeves stood up and called to the piano player to stop.

  “Are you colored, or what?”

  “I’m colored,” the dancer said.

  Mr. Reeves sat back down, and the piano player started again.

  “That piano player know what to play for you?” Stubby asked me.

  Panic. “Stubby, go tell him to play ‘Old Rattler’ clog when I dance,” I said. “Wait until this fellow is finished.”

  As soon as the dancer was finished and bowing, Stubby went over to the piano player and whispered in his ear. I looked over to where Mr. Reeves was sitting and talking to John Diamond. Their heads were just about touching, they were so close together.

  The door banged open and four fellows came in. They all had bandanas tied around their legs, so we knew they were from one of the local gangs. They found spots against the far wall and leaned against it.

  “Probably from the mayor’s office.” Jack Bishop chuckled. “Out looking for the dancing voters!”

  Fred Flamer was number eleven. When he started out to the middle of the floor, John Diamond stood up.

  “Show us your minstrel stuff, Fred!” he shouted. “You’re the best!”

  John Diamond was running the auditions, and I didn’t like that one bit. I had to think he was already hired.

  I thought Fred would go for a clog dance, his best move, but instead, the piano player started a step dance. What Fred did surprised me. I sat back in my chair and just watched. Fred wasn’t a first-rate dancer, but he was better than the fool I saw on the floor. He came out reeling and staggering around like he was drunk. He looked over toward where Mr. Reeves was sitting and began rolling his eyes. John Diamond started laughing, and so did Mr. Reeves. The more they laughed, the more Fred clowned it up, even falling to his knees and shaking his shoulders as if he were having a fit or something. I felt myself getting madder and madder.

  It felt to me like Fred was on the floor longer than any of the others. He lay on his back and started shaking. He smiled with his chin on the floor. He was throwing away his skills. John Diamond roared with laughter, and when Fred had finished and had stood up and taken a deep bow, John began to applaud.

  “Twelve!”

  Whatever I had in me I was going to put out on the floor. The piano player started in on “Old Rattler,” and I hit the rhythm on the first chorus. The song had been a good choice because it let me show off my clog-dancing skills, marking a steady beat on the floor and keeping the momentum moving throughout my body. I had a pattern that I had worked on to get the audience going, and every time I did a stutter step toward the front, people started clapping with me. I knew I had them going, and I wanted to keep them going even higher.

  “Coon it up! We want to see some minstrels!” John Diamond yelled out.

  I ignored him and kept dancing, but the clapping began to slow down.

  “Coon it up, boy—this is a colored dance!” John Diamond again.

  I kept dancing, doubling on my steps, beating my hands together, keeping my elbows high.

  “Come on, Juba, do you want a job or not?” Pete Williams’s voice boomed through the small hall.

  “Thirteen!” John Diamond called the next dancer even though I hadn’t finished my routine.

  I was beat down, tired, and hurt. I went back over to where Stubby and Jack Bishop were sitting and plopped down in the chair.

  “You done good, Juba,” Jack said. “You done real good.”

  Number thirteen was an old man I had seen around the neighborhood. They told me he used to be a dancer. He was smooth, but he was grinning like he had lost his mind; he was “cooning it up,” even though he was white.

  The auditions over, I sat with Jack and Stubby and watched as the dancers started getting their things together and leaving. The woman who had brought the little girl I liked came over and patted me on the hand. She didn’t say anything, just patted me on the hand.

  John Diamond, Mr. Reeves, and the man Jack had said was a slave dealer left together.

  “Juba, you want to tell us how you’re feeling, or should we just look at your face and figure it out?” Jack asked.

  “The way I feel? Like everything that is me, the real me, the inside me, is dead,” I said. “I don’t even know if I feel that or if I just know it.”

  “So I’m going back to the house and getting some more smoked oysters ready to sell to rich people,” Jack said, easing himself up from the table. “You can come help if you want, but take your time. The oysters will always be there.”

  Jack and Stubby left, and I wanted to go, too, but my legs just didn’t seem to have the strength to move on.

  “Juba, there are things we can’t change in this world.” A soft voice spoke to me. “You’re old enough to know that by now.”

  I looked up to see Miss Lilly sitting across from me.

  “That’s what I used to think, Miss Lilly,” I said. “But they just changed all my dreams about dancing and all my hopes to make something of myself. My dancing didn’t mean a thing. The only thing they see in a black man is a clown or a slave. How long did it take? Four minutes?”

  “You used those minutes well, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “They’ll come back again.”

  I doubted it.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Jack Bishop was sick, so me and Stubby went down to the docks to buy fish.

  “Tell them the fish are for the old Bishop,” Jack said.

  It was cold and rainy at four o’clock on Monday morning, and I didn’t want to go fish buying, even if it was for Jack. Stubby was all for it, though, saying that buying good food was a big part of cooking.

  “If you buy old, tough meat, there’s not a lot you can do with it,” he was saying. “You got to boil it to death to get it so you can chew it. The same thing with fish. You get old fish and it starts falling apart on you before it’s done. Then it’s not good for anything.”

  “You do the talking,” I said. “I’m not a cook and I’m not a fish buyer.”

  “These fellows down here are rough,” Stubby said. “They won’t go for dancing.”

  “Stubby, you don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe I’ll invent a new dance just for the docks. I’ll call it the octopus and dance like I have seven legs. How many legs does an octopus have?”

  “Octopuses have eight arms and no legs,” Stubby said. “So they don’t dance.”

  Stubby thought that was the funniest thing in the world, that an octopus didn’t have any legs. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he knew about octopuses.

  My mind was still halfway on the auditions. Jack said my hopes had been too high, which was wrong. My hopes hadn’t been too high. They were just where I wanted them to be. I knew I could dance, and anybody who saw me knew it. John Diamond was almost twenty, and he couldn’t dance next to me without looking second best, so he decided he was going to take away my chance. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and thought about punching him in the face. “Now you coon it up!” I imagined myself saying.

  And I didn’t want to hear any common sense coming from Miss Lilly or Jack Bishop or anybody else, white or black. They came around telling me they knew how I felt when they didn’t know anything about it. It’s one thing if you don’t have anything going for you and people say they’re sorry you’re sad. Y
ou’re sorry, too, but you figure there’s a reason for you to be sad and you settle into it. But when you got something going for you, when you have feet people watch and a body that people want to see moving across a stage, nobody can tell you anything, because they’re nowhere near where you are.

  “He’s only done what he knows how to do,” Jack said, telling me how I shouldn’t be mad at Fred Flamer. “You can’t blame a man for that, can you?”

  Yes, I could. I could, and it was filling me up inside to a point where I thought either I was going to have to puke it up or it was going to kill me.

  We reached the docks, and Stubby went over to one corner where a tall, thin fellow was standing next to a row of baskets.

  “Where’s the Bishop?” the man asked.

  “Home with a cough,” Stubby said.

  “Weak,” the man replied. “Old and weak!”

  He had to be as old as Jack, and in the early-morning light he didn’t look any healthier. He and Stubby talked for a while about how calm the sea was and what it meant. The fisherman said it meant there was a storm coming up. After a while they agreed on a price, and Stubby wrestled a basket of oysters onto the cart.

  “I’m buying three of them,” he said.

  I loaded the next two as Stubby paid the man. As we pulled off, the oyster man called out to us to tell Jack to rub some warm tallow onto his chest.

  Then we went to another fellow and bought two baskets of different kinds of fish. Stubby looked pleased, but it just added to my misery.

  “We did good,” he said. “Those fish are so fresh, they’re still talking to each other.”

  “Stubby, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life selling fish or cooking them,” I said. “You’re a good man, but I don’t see doing what you do.”