Juba! Read online

  “I imagined—and I know I’m talking too much—that you must have had some difficult times along the way. I think that’s the mystery of greatness and of people who achieve wonderful things,” Mr. Dickens said. “That somewhere in their lives they have felt the cold winds of despair, but have kept their hearts warm nevertheless.”

  Engraved portrait of Charles Dickens

  “I wish I could remember what you just said, sir,” I said. “I’ll never get the words just right, but I liked the way you said it.”

  “Are you going to dance again?” Mr. Dickens asked. “I would love to see you perform one more time before I leave.”

  “Charles Dickens is one of the most famous writers in the world,” a puffy man next to Mr. Dickens said. “I’m sure you’d like to dance for him.”

  When somebody admires what you do, and tells you to your face, you really do want to do something to earn his good opinion. I said I’d dance again.

  I told Miss Lilly that Mr. Dickens wanted to see me dance again, and she got her husband to clear people off the floor to give me room. The Jewish woman who had been playing piano was going toward the door, and I went and asked her to play one more time.

  “I don’t know. My husband doesn’t like me out too late,” she said.

  “I’ll get someone to walk you home. And there’s an extra fifty cents in it for you,” I said. “Do you know ‘Morrison’s Jig’?”

  “I sure do,” she said.

  “Don’t play it too slow.”

  Middle of the floor. I looked over to where Mr. Dickens was sitting and nodded toward him. He smiled and nodded back. I could see all the eyes around the rest of the room focused on me.

  The piano player hit a chord, then a second that I knew was a lead-in, and then began to play “Morrison’s Jig.”

  The music swept through the room as I began to dance. I had thought about dancing as well as I could, but suddenly there was no reason to think about dancing at all. I let the music take me over and sweep me across the floor. I spun, I moved across the floor on one leg and back on the other, I double-stepped, slid on one leg as I moved backward, switched to a six-beat clog step. I danced faster than I had ever danced, with more precision than I had ever had before, and with more joy in my heart.

  Mr. Dickens had stood and was clapping his hands, and everybody who was still in Almack’s followed his lead.

  I danced until it seemed I couldn’t dance anymore. When the piano player got to the last chorus, I was tired and exhausted, and as happy as I had ever been in my life.

  Mr. Dickens came out onto the floor and put his arms around me. I was sweaty and hot, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Master Juba.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “I do not need any smelly-breath Negro standing nose to nose with me spitting fool talk in my face!” Margaret was yelling at me. “If he is your friend, then he is your friend, but you keep his large black face away from my door. Do you understand me, Mr. Juba?”

  “No,” I said, stepping away from the door.

  Stubby had tried to get me up earlier but had given up when I started fighting to keep the covers over my head. I was still exhausted from the day before and certainly wasn’t up to slowing down Margaret as she brushed by me.

  “This morning Mr. Peter Williams came knocking on my door and offering me a job at Almack’s to run regular shows,” Margaret said. “I told him I didn’t run the show, that you did, but he said he couldn’t deal with you and offered me five dollars a week to—how did he put it—provide entertainment for the people.”

  “He offered you five dollars every week?” I asked.

  “That he did,” Margaret said.

  That didn’t sit too good with me. He hadn’t offered me anything, and I wouldn’t do it for what he was offering Margaret. I started explaining to Margaret how Peter was trying to get everything for nothing. She said I didn’t have to explain anything to her because she hadn’t been born the day before.

  “Or this morning!” she threw in. “Everybody is walking around talking about how great the show was and when the next one is going to be. One old codger with a Southern accent even asked me if I owned you!”

  “Owned me?”

  “Do you know how excited my boys and girls were when they were leaving?” Margaret asked. She was relaxing, and I could see she was really pleased with herself. “They were dancing in the streets as happy and as dumb as starlings on a Sunday morning. That’s the way life was meant to be, Juba. Happy and as dumb as starlings on a Sunday morning.”

  “They were great, Margaret,” I said. “You had them just perfect.”

  “Anyway, there’s a fellow who wants to talk to you, and he said he’d been told you lived somewhere in this house,” Margaret said. “I told him maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. He’s a reporter from a newspaper in Newark, New Jersey.”

  “What does he want to see me for?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Where is he now?”

  The newspaper reporter was waiting for Margaret on the front steps, so I put on my last clean shirt and went down to meet him. Margaret sat next to me on the steps, took off her apron, and put it over her knees.

  “Here he is, mister, the great Juba!” Margaret said.

  “Hello, my name is Bains,” the man said. “I understand that you are quite a dancer!”

  “You want to put that in your paper?” I asked. “That I’m quite a dancer?”

  “Well, no. Actually, I’m doing a story on Charles Dickens. I wanted to talk to you about him,” the reporter said. “The Tribune said you were chatting with him after the main show and that you invented a new dance just for him. Is that true?”

  “I talked to some people after the show,” I said. “One of them said his name was Dickens.”

  “You don’t know who Charles Dickens is?”

  “I know he liked my dancing,” I said.

  “Charles Dickens is an amazing author—can you read?”

  “I can read and write,” I said.

  “Well, you should read Nicholas Nickleby or The Old Curiosity Shop,” the reporter said. “He publishes monthly in the London papers, and people over there adore him. What did he say to you?”

  “He just said he liked my dancing,” I said. I felt a little embarrassed. So much was going on around me, and I wasn’t keeping up with it at all. Mr. Dickens hadn’t come up to me and said he was famous or anything. He had just said he enjoyed what he did, and I’d told him I enjoyed what I did. His exact words had slipped my mind.

  “It’s not often a famous British writer has a conversation with a black man.” The reporter was standing and putting away his notebook.

  “What’s my color got to do with it?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, just looked at me, nodded, and went on his way.

  Good. There was a lot of excitement going on, and I wasn’t sure if I could handle any more than I already had.

  Jack and Stubby came out with trays of oysters and fish, and I helped put them on Jack’s cart.

  “You feeling okay now?” I asked Jack.

  “Fair to middling,” Jack said. “Margaret said everybody in the world wants a piece of Master Juba today. She said people were knocking on her door as soon as the sun came up.”

  “Miss Lilly said a lot of people complimented her on the food, too,” Stubby said. “She asked me if I wanted to cook at Almack’s on weekends.”

  “Always looking out for themselves,” Jack said. “I told Stubby he could probably get a better job if he held out.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked Stubby.

  “Jack said I needed to think about what went right and what went wrong and figure out how I could have handled the whole thing better,” Stubby said. “What went wrong was that nobody knew it was me who did the cooking. Pete’s spreading the word that Miss Lilly did the cooking, and she’s not walking away from that.”r />
  “He sure can’t say he did the dancing.” Jack grinned.

  I went along with Jack and Stubby, selling fish and oysters. It wasn’t something I liked to do, and Jack usually didn’t want me along, but he was so happy for me and Stubby that he didn’t mind. He told everybody he sold fish to that I was the world’s greatest dancer.

  “And to prove it, he’s pushing fish down Ninth Street,” a woman with a big bosom said.

  Jack started to argue with her that one thing didn’t have anything to do with the other, but I wasn’t sure. Something good had happened to me and I needed to figure out how to handle it, just as Jack had said something good had happened to Stubby and he needed to step back and think it through.

  We sold fish all morning, and Stubby ran his mouth a mile a minute all the time. He reminded me of Mr. Charles Dickens, because he was loving cooking and serving food as much as Mr. Dickens loved writing.

  We put the cart up at two o’clock, and Jack said he had to lie down for a while. He didn’t look too good and he was coughing, so me and Stubby put everything away. Stubby wanted to go over to Almack’s, and I didn’t think that was a good idea. If Miss Lilly was saying she did the cooking, it was because Peter Williams put her up to it. Stubby was eager smart, and Jack was old smart, but Peter Williams was mean smart, and I got the notion that maybe mean smart was stronger than what me, Jack, and Stubby had.

  “If I’m going to think everything through, like Jack said”—Stubby’s shoulders were jerking up and down a little from him being nervous—“I think I should do the thinking over where I did the cooking and serving.”

  My friend made me smile, but I went over to Almack’s with him. When we got there, Peter was talking to Fred Flamer and two dandied-up gentlemen. The gentlemen were young, maybe twenty-eight to pushing thirty. One wore a suit that looked a little tight, like he wasn’t comfortable in it. The other one wore a short jacket, pants that didn’t quite match, and a silk scarf around his neck. He was the talker.

  “When we heard about the show and how you and Mr. Flamer danced, we knew immediately that you were the fellows we needed for a show we’re going to be putting on in Washington,” he said after shaking my hand for too long. “We want to start the performance at a theater that is a terrific place in the heart of Washington. We’re willing to pay you seven fifty a week apiece for the first month—we need to recoup some of our investment—and after that we’ll give the two of you one percent of the total profits along with the seven fifty. But we need to get the whole thing going pretty soon, because the Majestic Theater won’t be available for very long.”

  “We’re seeing it as an opportunity we can’t pass up,” the other fellow said.

  “And what they’re telling me is that you’ll be dancing there four nights a week, and you can come here and work at Almack’s for two nights,” Peter said. “That’s a lot of traveling, but it could work out good. We could bill you up here as performers from the famous theater in the nation’s capital.”

  “Is it really famous?” Freddy asked.

  “What we want to do is to make it famous,” the gentleman with the scarf said. “And I think we can do that. What do you say?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Freddy said.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, remembering what Jack and Stubby had been saying about thinking things through.

  The two gentlemen asked me a lot of questions about how many more dancers I would need to create a show as good as the one at Almack’s. I asked them if they had seen the show and they said they hadn’t, but that word of mouth was what made show business successful. That if you had enough people talking about you, the money would follow.

  Fred was nodding and agreeing with everything they said, but I wasn’t sure. What I would have liked to know was what kind of deal they were working out with Peter Williams, and why they were talking about investing money when they hadn’t seen me dance. Also, it seemed wrong that they were offering me and Freddy the same deal. I had seen a lot of people calling themselves dancers or singers who got some attention, but they weren’t that good.

  Still, I felt bad when I didn’t sign up with them on the spot the way Freddy did. Something deep inside me said I was being too scared, that I was going to throw a good chance away.

  At home, lying across the bed, I watched a cockroach crawl up the wall. Where did it think it was going? Halfway up, it stopped for a second, then started again at an angle. I didn’t think it had anywhere special in its mind, if cockroaches have minds, but its legs were moving. I thought maybe that was what I was doing, just moving with no place in mind. I thought about going with Freddy Flamer to that theater job. Washington was an important city. The White House was there, and the president.

  I also thought about Freddy Flamer. He couldn’t dance with me for more than ten seconds, but if he got a job in a real, legitimate theater, he would be outdoing me. It wasn’t as if I was jealous of him; I just knew that sometimes how good you were didn’t matter. Like when we were at the auditions and I saw John Diamond sitting with Mr. Reeves, who wanted to reopen the theater. John Diamond was good, better than most, but he was starting way ahead of everyone else. When he came to me and said he would be part of my show, he was trying keep his name on top, and he knew it. But just being white gave him a head start in life.

  When he was yelling for me and Freddy to “coon it up,” he was making sure we were staying in our places as black performers. That made me mad, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  The chance to be in a theater in Washington was jumping around in my head. All the theaters I knew were the ones around Five Points, one over on Bedford Street, and a few of the ones uptown. If Freddy got that job and did well, I would be hurt.

  Stubby came in all smelly. He had been out back emptying the slop pot and some had spilled on his pants.

  “How did that happen?”

  “This girl came out in the backyard to hang up some clothes, and I didn’t want her to see me with the slop pot,” Stubby said.

  “You know the girl?”

  “No, but I didn’t want her to know I used a slop pot,” he said. “Mostly old people use slop pots, and I’m not that old.”

  When it was cold out, a lot of people used slop pots to do their business in instead of sitting out in the outhouse behind the building. In fact, the outhouse smelled so bad you couldn’t stay in it very long before you felt sick. And if you were shy, the way Stubby was shy, you always used a slop pot.

  “I’m thinking of taking a job in Washington, D.C.,” I said. “Some people are looking for dancers to work in a regular theater down there. Peter Williams said me and Freddy Flamer could work there for a few days every week and then come back to New York to work at his place.”

  “Freddy’s going to work there, too?”

  “They offered me and Freddy a job,” I answered.

  “What kind of act is it?” Stubby asked. “You got to put black paint on your face and paint your lips red?”

  “I thought about that,” I lied. “What I was thinking was that even if I had to ‘black up,’ I’d be working in a real, honest-to-God theater, so it might not be so bad.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you thinking about doing it?”

  “If you had a chance to cook for Delmonico’s, to be their top chef, but you had to black up and shuffle around, would you do it?” I asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Stubby said. “Because you just don’t have to do something good, you have to let people know it’s you that’s doing it. If I was shuffling around acting like a clown, then people wouldn’t give me any credit for doing the cooking. They wouldn’t be saying Stubby Jackson is the top chef, they would just be saying I work there. You see how Pete Williams was talking about how the food came from Almack’s, and how Miss Lilly was a great cook?”

  “I saw that,” I said. “Pete’s like a snake in the grass.”

  “An
d if he gets in the loudest say, then everybody is going to listen to him and not me,” Stubby said. “You don’t see quiet people at the top. You see noisy people up there.”

  Stubby was right. I still told him he smelled bad, though.

  I let Stubby borrow a pair of my pants, and he hung his out the window. Under his regular pants he was wearing cut-down long drawers in the middle of the summer. I asked him how come he was wearing them and he said those were the only undergarments he had.

  “I don’t like to go around with no undergarments,” he said. “When they get old, I cut the legs down, but I don’t want to cut all of them down in case I got to wear them in the winter.”

  Stubby was a little strange, but I loved him to death.

  Jack came by and asked if me and Stubby wanted to go down to the docks and get some crabs.

  “We can make smoked crab legs,” he said.

  I thought Jack would smoke a cross-eyed pigeon if he could catch one.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  What I wanted to do was to figure out my next move. The show was everything I wanted it to be, but it hadn’t taken me anyplace. Peter was making me an offer, but I didn’t trust him. The men who wanted me and Freddy to work at a theater in Washington had made an offer, but I didn’t know what they had in mind, and they didn’t think they had to lay it out to me. Freddy was jumping like a grasshopper that landed on a hot stove, but he was coming from a different place than I was.

  Me and Stubby started pushing the empty cart down the street, and Jack was going on about how good the springs were in Ireland.

  “The fields were so green, and the countryside was just beautiful,” he said. “The fog in the morning washed everything down with dew and moistened the ground. Then the fog would lift, but you could see the dew glistening in the morning sun. It would look like a blanket of diamonds. A beautiful sight. A truly beautiful sight.

  “When times got hard and we were stealing our own potatoes to eat, we had to figure out whether we had a chance to survive,” he went on. “It wasn’t about living good, it was just about surviving. People were starving in a land that should have fed us all. That’s why so many of us took a chance on coming to America. It wasn’t the opportunity to get rich or make it big, it was just a chance to live. Coming to America seemed to be a good thing, and staying behind in Ireland seemed to be a good thing. Some of us were wanting to go, and some of us were content watching the others go. That was a funny feeling right there, watching somebody else taking the chance you wanted to take. But that’s how life is at times.”