Juba! Read online

  Stubby didn’t answer, and I thought I might have hurt him, which I didn’t mean to do.

  It was getting lighter by the time we rolled the cart back to Baxter Street. The corner lamp man was walking down the street with his ladder, and I watched him as he leaned the ladder against a pole, climbed up it, and put out the lamp. People had all kinds of jobs, from fishing to lighting lamps at night and putting them out in the morning. There was nothing wrong with any of them, but they just weren’t for me.

  We took the oysters upstairs to the roof, and I started building a fire to smoke them. Stubby left with the cart to sell what he could. Jack Bishop’s dog, John Tyler, came through the roof door and over to where I sat waiting for the chips to start burning evenly. He sniffed at me and sat down, and I shoved him away. The dumb dog just turned and looked at me, then came back and sat down next to me again.

  I pushed him away again.

  Next to come up to the roof was Margaret. She came over, picked up a stick, and poked through the chips, evening them out on the grill.

  “Jack told me you were all beat up inside,” she said.

  “I don’t care what he told you,” I said.

  “You think you’re the only one in the world who ran over a bump in the road?” she asked.

  “No, but I’m the only one wearing my skin who’s had a hard time,” I said.

  “I grew up with three sisters and two brothers,” Margaret said. She was rubbing the back of John Tyler’s head. “Two of the girls and one of the boys died before they were six. That was what it was like. If you got sick, you prayed to Saint Blaise. If he didn’t help you, then you died. It wasn’t a huge thing for a child to die, but it was hard to get used to.”

  “Am I supposed to feel bad about that?” I asked.

  “Glory, no!” Margaret looked at me sidewise. “You already have a mouthful of sour lemons—how could you fit any more in there? And let me tell you something about life, my black friend: you’re just about old enough for your piss to get a little smell to it. There are going to be days when the auditions will look like a Sunday picnic to you!”

  She was right, but it didn’t help me any. When she went downstairs, John Tyler started to go with her, then turned around and came over to me again. “John Tyler, you are stupid—even for a dog you are stupid!” I said.

  By the time the bells in the church on Mott Street rang ten o’clock, I had finished smoking most of the oysters and was ready when Stubby came up to the roof. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him I didn’t need him looking out for me.

  “I’m looking out for the oysters,” Stubby said. “How are you doing with the oysters?”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little stupid for thinking that Stubby had meant me personally and not the oysters.

  “You don’t need me to tell you who’s looking for you, either?” he asked.

  “Who’s looking for me?”

  “That should be ‘Who is looking for me, Mr. Jackson?’” Stubby said.

  “Jack Bishop?”

  “Miss Lilly was in front of the house asking where you live,” Stubby said. “She said her husband wanted to see you.”

  “Forget Pete Williams—I don’t have any respect for that man,” I said.

  “Jack said Pete probably has another scheme up his sleeve, and Margaret said if the devil gives a party, he plays his own tunes, so you’d best be careful.”

  “Why are you talking about somebody wanting to see me to Jack Bishop and Margaret?”

  “I was going to talk to you about it first, but I thought you didn’t want anybody looking out for you,” Stubby said.

  “Stubby, what do you think I should do?” I asked my friend. “You think he’s just got another trick up his sleeve?”

  “Well, if Miss Lilly came looking for you, there’s got to be something bright shining somewhere,” Stubby said. “She’s a hard woman, but she’s not a mean woman.”

  I didn’t want to talk it over with anybody else, because I already knew I had to go and see what Peter Williams wanted. I knew I was going to be mad if Pete said something wrong, but I was already mad, and I would be just as mad not knowing as knowing.

  “Can you finish smoking the oysters?”

  “You know I can,” Stubby said. “And tell Miss Lilly it was me that found you.”

  “I don’t know if Pete is up, but Miss Lilly is in her little study,” the cleaning man said when I arrived at Almack’s. “She said you might be sliding by.”

  “Well, I’m here,” I said.

  “Saw you dancing the other day.” The cleaning man leaned on his mop. “You trying to be one of them black Irishmen or something?”

  “Dance is dance,” I said. “Where is Miss Lilly’s study?”

  He pointed to a room in the corner, and I made my way to it and knocked on the door. Miss Lilly and Peter Williams sat at a small table. Miss Lilly was usually a pretty imposing woman, but sometimes she could be more imposing than at other times. She was sitting straight up when I entered the room. She was wearing a high-necked beige dress with a little brown and beige jacket.

  “How you doing, Juba?”

  “Just fine, Miss Lilly,” I said.

  “Peter wants to talk to you,” Miss Lilly said, without looking toward where her husband sat.

  “You seemed a little bothered the other day,” Pete said. “Did something rub you the wrong way?”

  Did something rub me the wrong way?

  “Look, Pete, we were both there,” I said. “We don’t have to pretend we’re light-headed or nothing. They were turning the auditions into a minstrel show. You’ve been around enough to know that.”

  “That was a business meeting,” Pete said. “If you doing business, then you got to bring people what they want or they’ll take their business someplace else.”

  “Jack Bishop said one of the white men there was a slave trader,” I said. “That’s the business you in now?”

  “Look, Juba, I don’t have to take no lip from you,” Pete said. “Miss Lilly invited you here because she thought you could talk like you got a brain in your head. I own this place—I don’t have to take nothing from nobody! And if you don’t understand that, or don’t like it, you can just get on up out of here!”

  I stood up, ready to go.

  “Sit down, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “Peter, if you want to play like you don’t have no sense and bully your way around, then it’s up to you. You said you wanted something, and that’s the only reason I asked Juba to come over here. Now, don’t make me look like a fool, because I don’t have a use for being foolish.”

  Pete looked at me and then away. He sighed deeply and crossed one leg over the other.

  “There was some things I liked about what went on that day and some things I could forget about,” he said. “What I liked was that there were people in here who were never in here before. They were looking around and seeing that it wasn’t a bad-looking place and seeing that white people—I mean classy white people, not no riffraffers—looked comfortable. I liked that and I know that idea could bring in some money.

  “I don’t know what everyone did when they left the place. They could have been slave traders, or they could have been slave owners. I don’t know. A lot of people living in New York City and running around with their noses in the air got plantations down South. But what I know is that if somebody can get them all coming into Almack’s, I can build this business up so it looks respectable, feels respectable, and makes some respectable money. Miss Lilly thinks you’re the man who can pull it off for me.”

  “Juba, you know dancing, and you know a lot of people.” Miss Lilly leaned toward me. “What you were doing—your kind of dancing—wasn’t what they were expecting, but I could see how you were drawing the people in. They weren’t clapping along with anybody else. You’ve got class, and they know it and I know it and Peter knows it. Don’t you, Peter?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Don’t you, Peter?”

>   “For a young man, he’s got a lot of class, Miss Lilly,” Pete said. “But what I want is a whole forty-minute show, like they have in the regular theaters. I want some white dancers and some black dancers. I want some singers, some decent food, a forty-minute show, and whatever it takes to let people know this is a top-of-the-line establishment. If I get them in here one time and show them they don’t have anything to be afraid of, maybe I can get them in here two times. And if I can get them in here two times, maybe I can keep them coming.”

  “What do you think, Juba?” Miss Lilly asked.

  “You want food, too?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Miss Lilly said.

  “Why didn’t you ask John Diamond to do it?” I asked. “You two seemed to be hitting it off pretty swell.”

  “Because deep in my heart, I’m a race man!” Pete said. “I don’t need any white boy running my business! I’m throwing twenty dollars into this adventure, and I need somebody who has my interest in their heart! Are you the man? That’s a very simple question, Juba. Are you the man?”

  “I think he is,” Miss Lilly said. “I truly do. And maybe he can get Cissy going.”

  “Cissy?”

  “You didn’t know she sings?” Miss Lilly asked. “You’ve got to use her in the show.”

  She glanced over at her husband, who rolled his eyes away.

  “You mean to tell me that Peter Williams, after ruining your audition the other day, had the nerve to ask you to set up a show for him?” Jack Bishop sat up in his bed. “And what did he say when you told him to bugger off?”

  “I said I would do it,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say I would do it, but that’s the way it came out.”

  “Your tongue and your lips were having a fight or something?” Stubby asked. “If you didn’t mean to say something, how come you said it?”

  “Because he’s figured out that there’s things you have to do in life because they’re the right things to do at the moment,” Jack said. “That’s the way life is sometimes, with righteous stink on both ends of the stick.”

  “I said it, but I don’t know how I’m going to get it done,” I said. “Pete wants it sometime during the next two weeks, and I don’t know where to start. I’ve never thought about getting a forty-minute program together.”

  “You can have breaks like they have in the regular shows,” Stubby said. “Have somebody dance for three minutes, and then have a five-minute break. That’s eight minutes gone already. So you have five dances, which is going to add up to fifteen minutes, and then you have five breaks, which will add up to twenty-five minutes. Fifteen and twenty-five make forty. Nothing to it.”

  “Juba, why are other people’s problems so easy to solve?” Jack said. He pulled the blankets around his thin shoulders. “All you needed to do was to call on Stubby and your problems are solved! Of course, you’ll have a show with mostly breaks in it and Pete will want to skin you alive, but Stubby will have an answer for that, too.”

  “You don’t owe Peter Williams anything,” Stubby said. “You’re doing him a favor.”

  “And he’s putting up twenty dollars cash money to pull this thing off,” I said. “So if I don’t get it right, he’s going to want his money back.”

  “Did he actually make a promise to give you the money, or did he just talk about it?” Jack asked.

  When Pete had started talking about money, I had felt the same way Jack Bishop did, that it was going to be all talk. But then Pete had taken out a small leather pouch and put it in the middle of the table. He had asked me if I knew what was in the bag, and although I had heard the clink of coins, I had just shrugged my shoulders.

  Pete emptied the bag onto the table and dumped out twenty silver dollars. He made sure that the pouch was empty and started putting the coins back in. Then he pushed the pouch over to me.

  I’d already figured that Peter Williams was rich, but I didn’t think he was so rich he could just hand out twenty dollars like that. When I looked at him, he was staring at me directly in the eyes. What I figured him to be thinking was that I would be really impressed with the money. I hadn’t fainted, but my knees were beginning to feel weak.

  I took the pouch from my pocket and put it in front of Jack Bishop.

  “Twenty dollars—I counted it four times,” I said. “He wants a forty-minute show, with black and white performers, and they’ve got to be classy. Plus I have to make a meal for about fifteen tables. Pete says he’ll sit special guests at the tables and treat them royal, and everybody else will just be in regular seats around the room.”

  “If you let some of your guests eat off the good plates and the fine linen, then everybody will think they’re being treated like swells,” Jack said. “Are you sure Peter isn’t English? He sounds sneaky enough.”

  “You think I can pull it off?” I asked.

  “You can if you don’t hang all your clothes on one nail,” Jack said. “Look around and see who you can call on to help you. You know who can dance and who can sing. You know who’s got clean shirts and who don’t, too. All you have to do is get them all lined up, see what’s in it for each of them, and let their interests take over.”

  “You can leave the cooking to me,” Stubby volunteered. “If they’re looking for the top drawer, then I’m your man.”

  “Give him a shot, Juba,” Jack said. “He’ll make you proud of him.”

  What Jack was saying made sense. I did know most of the entertainers in Five Points and some from as far away as Twenty-Third Street. They were all hungry to show off their talents, and most of them would work for nothing if I asked. When I went over what Stubby had said, about only needing five acts, it gave me a way to think about how many people I had to get. Some people could perform twice, so I figured seven should do it. Fourteen performances would be the whole forty minutes with a little over. I would be the main dancer, and I knew I could probably get Simmy Long to dance. I needed one more colored dancer and some white performers. I had an idea of where I was going to get the white performers, but I wasn’t sure about the colored dancer. I didn’t want to even talk to the one I knew best, but I knew I at least needed to feel him out.

  “Juba, I needed to get the job at the auditions,” Freddy said. “Look around this place. This is how I’m living. I deserve better than this.”

  It had been easy for me to find Freddy. I knew he lived on Cherry Street, and I just asked some kids where the colored man who always carried a cane stayed, and they pointed out his place. A round-faced woman sitting on the stoop told me Freddy lived on the second floor and that he had just moved in a little while ago.

  The place smelled horrible. It was dark in the middle of the day, with people sleeping in the corners. The sewer ran right under the building, and you could smell the waste.

  “I don’t even have my own place,” Freddy said. “I rent a space here to sleep on the floor. I don’t have no decent place to live, and I can barely get up enough money to eat proper. When John Diamond was calling to me to make my act more like a minstrel show, it hurt me. It truly did, because I know I’m better than that. I am not nobody’s nigger. But look at the way I’m living. You got to see what was pulling on my coattail, Juba.”

  There was a noise, and I looked to see a pile of rags on the floor move. A woman, rags tied around her legs, was sleeping against the wall with a coat pulled partway over her. The whole place was dreary, dark, and disgusting.

  “You’re not living well, Freddy,” I said. “But to throw yourself away completely didn’t make any sense. If you’re going to let people put you in whatever place they want, you’re never going to have their respect. And when you jumped into that place, grinning and carrying on, you dragged me right in with you.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, Juba. I truly am, but we can work together on this. Peter talked to me about putting on a show, and I was all for it. He said you and me could pull it off. We could work together.”

  “He said we could work together?”

 
“Miss Lilly was pulling for you. She didn’t think you wanted to work with me,” Freddy said. “But I think we could do well together. We could put on a good show. What do you say?”

  Freddy held out his hand. I didn’t take it.

  “When did he talk to you, Freddy?” I asked.

  “Right after the auditions,” Freddy answered. “We need to put bygones behind us, Juba. You and I are the best entertainers around here. I know we can do it!”

  I was getting mad at Pete again for talking to Freddy before he talked to me.

  “We can’t work together, Freddy,” I said. “I’ll bring you in on this if you do what I say. If you don’t want to do what I tell you, then you got to move away from me.”

  “I’ll do whatever you say, Juba,” Freddy said. “Just give me a chance.”

  I didn’t feel right when I left Freddy. What I knew, or thought I knew, was that if the chance came for him to throw his manhood and his talent away to get over, he would do it. Peter Williams didn’t care about that. Pete didn’t even think of himself as a black man. He thought of himself as a money man. Still, I needed another colored dancer, and Freddy could dance. He could carry himself well, too, when he wanted. But I had to make the show good enough that he would want to be something special.

  “Isn’t it funny, Stubby, that you got to convince people not to hurt themselves?” I asked my roommate when I got home.

  “Freddy is doing what he thinks he can do,” Stubby said. “That’s not easy sometimes.”

  “That’s not good enough for me,” I said. “And I got some words I have picked out for Freddy. I’m just saving them for a special occasion.”

  From the dancing at the auditions, I thought maybe John Diamond had got the white dancers on board. They were all kinds of good, and I thought about asking John for their names, but he and I were always butting heads about who was the best between us, and I knew he wouldn’t do me any favors. We had even danced together at times when some promoter wanted to put on a black and white show, but I could tell he didn’t like sharing the stage. Margaret taught mostly young Irish girls, and I wondered if she would help.