Juba! Read online

  In the afternoon Stubby came and asked me if I was going to help him put up the cart and bring the unsold fish upstairs. There wasn’t that much fish left, but only half the smoked oysters were gone.

  “When Jack is selling, he just kind of mushes his way through a conversation and gets people nodding and smiling, and then they feel too ashamed not to buy something,” Stubby said. “When I’m selling, I’m begging them to buy, and they start acting like the fish are moldy and the oysters are rotten.”

  “So how do you think I should go ask Margaret if she’s going to help me get this thing together?” I asked.

  “You’re not even interested in selling these fish, are you?”

  “Stubby, dancing and entertaining people is what I love,” I said. “If fish could clap their hands, I’d be dancing for them. So do you think Margaret will help me get a show together?”

  “Fish don’t have hands,” Stubby said. “And Margaret’s not going to help you, because she doesn’t like you that much. She told me that.”

  She didn’t like me that much, but I had a sneaky feeling she liked dancing enough to think about working with me.

  I had been in Margaret’s apartment a couple of times, and she had shown me some interesting things about dancing. She was tough in a way and had a quick tongue on her, but there were things she knew, and it came to me that maybe all the white dancers didn’t have to be that good just to put on a show. In fact, the more I thought about it, the clearer I realized they didn’t have to be good at all. As long as they didn’t fall down on the floor, they could fill up the space between when I was dancing and when Freddy and Simmy were dancing.

  The Artis twins were a little weird, but that was part of their act. They were not that good-looking, but they moved together well. Pete told people they were from Africa, but I knew they were from Philadelphia. He had them dress alike in white, gauzy costumes, and sometimes they played castanets as they danced. They were a popular act.

  The show was going to be a colored dance performance with some white dancers and singers just around to show it was a mixed group. So when I got to Margaret’s place, after washing up to get the fish smell off my hands and clothes, I was feeling pretty good as I explained to her what I had in mind.

  “If you think for one hot minute that I’m going to be out rounding up dancers and helping you put on a show just to show off the talents of three colored boys, you have put your hat on the wrong part of your body, Mr. Juba.”

  “I’m not wearing a hat,” I reminded her.

  “And you don’t have much of a head to put it on if you were wearing one,” Margaret said. “There are young white people out there who can dance just as well as you can and will put their hearts and souls into it. But they are not as stupid as you seem to think they are, that they’re going to just sweep the floor for the coloreds.”

  “I didn’t say they couldn’t dance,” I said.

  “Yes, you did, Juba.” Margaret leaned her face toward me. “You were spitting some of the words and swallowing some of them, but you got your teeth together enough to say that they didn’t have to be that good, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So go get yourself some bums off the streets and see what they can do for you!”

  “Miss Moran, can you help me?” I thought of Stubby trying to sell fish. “If I can get a show together for Pete Williams, it will mean a lot to me. At the auditions they wouldn’t let me dance. The man who owned the theater was asking me to ‘coon it up’! Do you know what that means?”

  “Because you’re wearing a scarf doesn’t mean you’re the only one in the village with a neck, Juba,” Margaret said. “It means they wanted you to forget about your dancing and be something that amused them—the same way you want the young white people to forget about their dancing and be something that amuses you. Jack Bishop told me what happened at the auditions. He felt really bad for you, and when he told me, I felt really bad for you. But now I see that nobody has to feel anything for you, because you have it all covered by yourself.”

  “I didn’t think of it that way,” I said.

  “You always think with yourself in the middle of your mind and everybody else floating around on the edges.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do for me?” My voice seemed small.

  “If you’re ready to get down off your throne, Mr. Juba Almighty, I might lend you a hand,” Margaret said.

  I had to sit for another ten minutes while Margaret reminded me how stupid I was for thinking she was going to betray the Irish race and then described my dancing as something that wasn’t much more than clog dancing in the first place, and said I had stolen everything I knew from the street corners and festivals around Five Points.

  “Okay, Margaret, I see where you are right about me not thinking about the white dancers in the same way that John Diamond and Mr. Reeves hadn’t thought about the black dancers at the auditions,” I said. “I was just so upset about what happened that I was hoping to make up for everything, to make it all right, by turning out a spectacular show.

  “You’re right that I have learned a lot from clog dancing, and that I’ve borrowed some of the steps and some of the moves. But where you’re wrong is important, too. I bring a lot of rhythms to the dancing, and a lot of moves that make my dancing special. I’m dancing from my heart and using everything I know, and some of it I don’t even know where it comes from. But I can tell you this. Whenever I see a person move, my eyes kind of record it, and I can feel that movement in my muscles, and in my legs, and in my arms. When I see somebody running, it’s almost like me running.

  “Sometimes I watch the little girls jumping rope on Avenue A, across from the school, and if I watch them long enough, I get tired because my body is moving right along with theirs. At the auditions, I saw the white dancers and I watched them and I liked what I saw. I wanted to get out there and take what they were doing and build on it. They were dancing so well that people were watching their feet, the way you say old Irish people always do, but I wanted to dance so good that people would want to see if my feet were still touching the floor. I’m not just trying to make money, or even to entertain people. I love what I do, and I want to do it because I love it. And sometimes all that loving of dancing I have just gets in the way of my thinking straight. I’m always ready to learn something new about dancing, Margaret. Jack Bishop is teaching me a lot about being a good person, and I love to hear Stubby talking about cooking. I’m glad you got my head straight about how I was looking at the Irish dancers. I’m not that big a fellow, but I’m bigger now than when I knocked on your door this afternoon.”

  “Well, just don’t let that tongue of yours tie up knots that it can’t get loose.”

  “So do you think you can help me pull it all together?”

  “We’ll see,” Margaret said. “We’ll see.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  I was lying in bed trying to make myself go to sleep, and Stubby was snoring away across from me, sounding like he was doing it on purpose. First he would give a couple of snorts, then a big noisy snort, and then a little wheezy sound would come out of him. Usually, him snoring didn’t bother me, but now everything was working on my nerves. What Margaret had said didn’t get under my skin that much, although I did think she got the flame under her kettle a little too high. What did bother me was how many people I was relying on to bring this show together.

  Peter Williams said he wanted a forty-minute program, and that wasn’t much to think about when he was saying it, but the doing was something else. The only white dancers I knew up close were John Diamond and his friends. I didn’t want any part of John Diamond, because I knew he would sabotage anything I did. As long as he thought of himself as the number one dancer in Five Points, I was going to be a thorn in his side. But when he didn’t have his race on his side, as he did at the auditions, we were equals. And when it came to dancing, he was good, but I was still the best, and he knew it. />
  Food was going to cost money, and I wanted to pay the dancers, too. Artists need to make money for their art so they can see it’s worthwhile, even if they love what they’re doing. I thought a dollar for each would be right, but when Jack and I worked it out, using seven performers, it was getting shaky.

  “So you’re talking nearly half your money already,” Jack said. “And you haven’t actually hired a dancer or singer yet. Remember, you need some money in reserve for emergencies, too. Or costumes. Or musicians.”

  “You having doubts?” I asked Jack. “You thinking I can’t pull it off?”

  “No, just concerns,” Jack said. “Show business is a lot like stealing hams from a smokehouse. You stick your hand through a hole in the wall and grab a ham, and everybody thinks you’re wonderful. If you stick your hand through the hole and the owner is waiting inside with a meat cleaver and chops it off, then you’re a chump. You have to decide if the risk is worth it.”

  It was worth it to me. I hadn’t had to deal with that many people before, but I was already thinking that if I did put on the show and it made people happy, that was something I could do someplace else.

  I asked Fred Flamer to come to our room and talk it over, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I asked Margaret, too, and she said no, that she didn’t go into men’s rooms.

  The meeting didn’t go well. Stubby was saying yes to everything I said, and to everything I asked, and he wasn’t even thinking about how much it was going to cost.

  Fred Flamer was even worse. He kept sitting on the edge of Stubby’s bed, nodding his head up and down and smiling, and I knew he was desperate for a chance to perform. I thought about asking him to “coon it up” for us, just to see if he would do it. That was wrong and I knew it, but to see anybody be so desperate was strange to me. Fred was a step away from giving up dancing, and he knew it.

  “I’ll take fifteen of the forty minutes,” I said. “Freddy, you can take seven, and we’ll give the white dancers and singers eighteen minutes. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Freddy said. “You know I can fiddle, too.”

  “We’ve got to work it out with Margaret, because she’s going to help us line up some good Irish performers,” I said. “We’re going to have some rehearsals, and everybody has to show up. This is a chance to do ourselves some good.”

  “You think Almack’s is thinking about keeping us on for good?” Freddy asked.

  Peter Williams hadn’t said anything about permanent jobs, and I knew he wasn’t going to be throwing around that kind of money every week. He had a greedy little mind, a taste for money, and an eye for where the money was hidden.

  “I just think he wants to see what can be done,” I answered Freddy. “I’ve performed for him before, but most of what I was getting was jingle thrown out on the floor, and Pete wants part of that.”

  When Freddy left, me and Stubby took the cart out to sell fish. Stubby was full of talk about getting real menus printed up, and I told him I didn’t want to spend money getting anything printed for just one day. He looked disappointed.

  We didn’t sell much. Stubby talked to a black cook and asked her if he could borrow some serving plates for a party he was giving. She said he could if he was nice enough to her, and Stubby said he would be as nice as she wanted him to be. I don’t think he understood that she was wanting some kissing and hugging. She was twice as big as Stubby, and just about twice as old, so he was going to have to cook up something special for those plates.

  Back home, I was so tired. It seemed like every day I was getting more and more tired, and I knew it was because I had too many things to think about. Jack was disappointed that we didn’t sell more fish, and he said so.

  “You just got your mind on this one night, and you’re letting the rest of your life slip away from you!”

  That was right. I wasn’t as hard up as Freddy, but I was feeling the same cold breeze he was feeling. A good chance only came along once in a while, and you had to jump on it when it came your way. If we didn’t put on a good show for Pete Williams, everybody would know about it and it would be hard to get any kind of job dancing or singing.

  I fell asleep on the bed and was surprised when I heard a banging on the door. I thought Stubby had left his key someplace. It wasn’t Stubby, but Miss Lilly and Priscilla, the girl she called Cissy.

  “I told Cissy you didn’t bite, so there was no reason for her to be shy about telling you she was ready to sing for you,” Miss Lilly said. “Go on, girl, sing.”

  Now, the thing is that nobody who did any acting or singing could do it just like that. You had to get yourself in the mood, or warm up, or put your lucky charm in your pocket, or whatever it took for you to be somebody else. That was what show business was about. For a few minutes or a few hours, you were somebody else, somebody with a strange kind of magic.

  The girl had her head down and didn’t move.

  “You sing for Juba and then you come back over to Almack’s,” Miss Lilly said. “You got a peck of work to do, girl.”

  I watched as Miss Lilly started down the stairs, stopped, sent a mean look toward Priscilla, and continued on down.

  “You want some tea?” I asked.

  Priscilla shrugged, and I moved aside so she could come in. She stood in the doorway for a minute and looked inside, then stepped in.

  I went to the cupboard and took down the tin we kept the tea in. Empty. “You want some water?”

  She shrugged again.

  “You like working at Almack’s?” I asked.

  “I owe him a lot of money,” she answered. Her voice was soft and a little breathy. “The way I’m working now and paying him a little every week, I’ll never get finished.”

  “That’s about how half the people in the world work,” I said. “I know people who owe their bosses so much money, they got to borrow their pay every week.”

  “He wants me to dance with his customers,” Priscilla said.

  Dancing with the customers at Almack’s, when the sailors fell in from the ships or when the workers from the warehouses drifted in with their smells and heavy feet, was a rough and tumble business. Men who most women would not have looked at twice began to think they were something special as they ran their hands over the women or tried to kiss them. All the time, Pete and his staff would be peddling booze and pushing the girls out on the floor if they sat down for more than a minute. It was a scene you didn’t want to see.

  “You can sing?” I asked.

  “Some,” she said.

  It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but I sat on our one chair and put my palms up. “Let’s hear you,” I said.

  Her voice was weak, and she came near the key some of the time, but most of the tune got away from her. And she looked so sad.

  I could see why Pete kept her around the club. She was still young, and she was light-skinned, which was what he was looking for, and most of all, she didn’t have any spunk in her. He could push her around and get her to do what he wanted, and that was all that mattered to him. He’d make his money and go to sleep happy. His dealing with a slave trader made sense.

  Lilly was another story. She was bringing Priscilla to me to see if I could do something with her. Why any woman would want to be with a man like Peter was a mystery, but I guessed that some women just stuck with who they found themselves with. Lilly had a good heart, and a little bit of influence with Peter, enough to push him in the direction of improving Almack’s but not enough to protect the women in the place.

  Priscilla finished singing the song, and I told her I would talk with her later.

  “I didn’t do too good, did I?” she asked me.

  “I’ll find a place for you in the show,” I said.

  “You’re trying to wear four hats and you’ve only got one head!” Jack said when I told him about Priscilla. “Be careful you don’t find yourself out in the rain getting wet.”

  “Jack, what does that mean?” I asked.
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  “You’re trying to pull off a show, you’re trying to raise this man’s club to something it ain’t, you’re trying to show off your talents, you’re trying to save this girl, you’re trying to get blacks and whites together on the same program, you’re trying to help Stubby set up his catering business, and you’re trying to elevate the colored race,” Jack said. “What more are you going to do, train some monkeys to knit sweaters?”

  “That’s more than four things,” Stubby said. “First you said he was trying to pull off a show, that’s one thing—”

  “Stubby, I can count,” Jack said. “I’m just trying to say he’s doing too many things.”

  “What kind of business did you say I was in?” Stubby again.

  “Catering,” Jack said. “That’s when you cook for parties or private people and bring the food to them.”

  Stubby was very interested in the catering business and was getting Jack to explain it to him. Jack kept looking over at me, but he was being patient with Stubby and explaining how the event could help him, too.

  I felt a headache coming on because I knew Jack was right. The pressure was getting to me, and I was reaching in too many directions. Some decisions had to be made, and most of all, the decision about what I was going to be doing in the show. Everybody had their own interests, and I couldn’t let them run around me and not let my light shine. I decided to make a list of people who were going to be in the show, and what they wanted. The first thing I needed to do was to see if Margaret was really going to get some Irish dancers or if I would have to go find them.

  Margaret had her hair up with strands tied around paper. She looked like pictures of clowns I had seen in books.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked me. “You’ve never seen a woman with her hair up before?”

  “Looks fine to me,” I said.

  “You’re a little scared of women, aren’t you?” Margaret said. “You don’t like to be around us, right?”