I took a very deep breath, stood up, and began to dance. It was a happy dance, with me leaning back and kicking my legs high into the air. I spun and did a series of slow glissades while tapping all the time.
Sarah stood and applauded. I wanted to do a thousand more things for her, to dance along the walls and across the ceiling—and I almost felt as if I could. Then I stopped. The troupe wasn’t booked into anything, we were all running out of money, and my joy turned instantly to sadness. Sarah came to me and put her arms around me. She knew what I was feeling. Sarah always knew.
As bad as things were that Tuesday morning, they were worse by noon. The weather was bright but still a bit foggy, and as I started out, I wore a scarf that Sarah had found for me. She told me not to walk the entire distance, but I did. I needed to think, to come to some kind of decision about the troupe, and about me and Sarah.
A funny thing. In London, down in the Strand, there were street singers and dancers who dressed in blackface, performed on the corners or in the squares, and then passed the hat around. They called themselves minstrels or serenaders or even niggers. We had had a huge impact on London, but it wasn’t doing us very much good.
Campbell was just locking up his place on Cecil Court when I arrived.
“Juba, just the man I wanted to see!” he said. “Do you have time to come to my office?”
I nodded while I searched his face, looking for a clue as to what he was going to tell me. His office was small and messy. There were papers piled on the desk, on a cabinet, and even on the chair behind the desk. I wondered where he sat.
He took the papers off the chair, sat down, and started going through them.
“I’m afraid that Gilbert Pell came in yesterday afternoon, and it wasn’t a pretty sight,” he said. “He was coughing rather badly, and he reeked of drink.”
“He can pull himself together if he has to,” I said.
“That I doubt,” Mr. Campbell said. “The boy has demons. He said the troupe was free to do whatever you please. You can use his name if you so desire, or any other name. That’s not a very good idea, because his is the better-known name connected with your group. Everybody is calling themselves the Serenaders or the Ethiopians, or something similar. Gilbert Pell’s brother Richard is mucking about trying to book shows for his own group.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Not good,” Mr. Campbell said. “He’s older, less energetic, and quite a lot less talented than Gil. At any rate, Gilbert Pell has taken himself off to Bristol for what he says is a holiday. I think he’s going into hiding.”
“From whom?”
“From himself,” Mr. Campbell said. “But he’s left you two letters. One, I know, contains a ticket for you back to America and the money he owes you. I believe it amounts to a little over ten pounds. The other is a letter he received for you from America.”
Mr. Campbell handed me the letters. They seemed heavy in my hand, because I knew they might make me act in some way I would regret.
“And you have no other bookings for the troupe?” I asked.
“If you decide to stay in London, there is always the possibility of someone looking for a dancer of your caliber and, quite frankly, with your fame,” Mr. Campbell said. “It won’t be as much as you earned with Pell, of course. But do leave me an address and check with me frequently and I will see what I can do for you.”
“Do you know what the others are doing?”
“Mr. Valentine has left for America, and I think Mr. Briggs is preparing to go,” Mr. Campbell said.
I felt crushed. A light rain made the darkening skies even darker as I started home. What we had all known about the tour, that it was over, was now staring me in the face. My life seemed to have so many ups and downs that the ups didn’t matter that much anymore. When I got home, Sarah had made a chicken in crust, like a pie, with peas and carrots. I told her what Campbell had said, and she tried to be brave.
“Only one ticket to America?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“And the other letter?”
I hadn’t opened the other letter and got it from my jacket pocket. It was addressed to me, William Henry Lane, and was from New York. I opened it and saw a neat handwriting. It was from Miss Lilly, Pete’s wife.
Dear Juba,
I hope this letter finds you in good health. Peter says that you are probably filthy rich by now and may have an English accent. For me that would be funny because I cannot imagine you with an English accent.
We have heard about your success in London and hear that you are well. Things are going good here in New York. Almack’s is busy. Peter is thinking about starting his own theater and is talking to some people from the mayor’s office to get a license. If you decide to come back to New York, you will always find a good job here.
There is also some bad news. You remember Fred Flamer, who went to Washington to get a job. Peter said that Fred had gone to Washington and you had gone to London and that showed what Negroes could do if they set their minds to it. But word has come that Fred was sold into slavery. He tried to run away and got to a newspaper to tell them of his predicament but then was caught and had the backs of his heels cut so he could not run away again.
Peter said that if you do return, he would appreciate a letter from you so he could put an advertisement in the paper that Boz’s Juba was going to make an appearance. Good-bye for now, and please stay in touch.
Yours truly, Lilly Williams
I read Miss Lilly’s letter three times, and still it was so shocking that I didn’t want to believe it.
“Who is she?” Sarah asked.
“She’s the wife of the man who owns a dance club,” I said. “He’s a bit of a scoundrel, but she’s pretty nice.”
“The man she’s talking about was a slave?”
“He wasn’t a slave when he was in New York,” I said. “But sometimes men will come to a free state, or just find a free black man, and sell him into slavery.”
“But if the man—if he told them he wasn’t . . .”
“If people can have slaves in the first place, then why does it matter where they came from?” I said. “If they stole them from Africa or from New York, the thing is that there’s a lot of money in slavery. A full-grown man can be sold for hundreds of dollars. And if someone is caught selling free people, or trying to sell a free person, it won’t make a difference in a Southern court.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
“Sarah, my life is falling apart,” I said.
“You can’t go back to America, Juba,” Sarah said. She sat next to me at the table and put her head close to mine. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s not just the danger. I’ve learned to live with that,” I said. “You have to watch yourself, but you can live with it. Freddy—the man Miss Lilly is writing about—was chasing a dream. I’ve danced with him. We actually made up a dance story—Little Red Riding Hood—and we danced it together. But it seems that my whole life is coming apart.”
“It’s not your fault that Gilbert Pell has left,” Sarah said. “I think he always drank too much and ran around too much. It seemed that he could never sit still.”
“Maybe it was because his life had reached the same point as mine has,” I said.
“Juba, you have me,” Sarah said. “And we have each other.”
“But all my life I’ve dreamed of being a dancer. Not just a dancer, but a great dancer,” I said. “I wanted to do something with dancing that nobody else has ever done. But every time I think I’ve made it, every time I feel I’m just about ready to take off, to fly away from the crowd, I end up with nothing. When Freddy and I danced together—it was over seven years ago—the program was great and people were talking about how much the dancers had done. There were Irish kids dancing, and black dancers, and some I didn’t know what their backgrounds were, but they gave it everything they had. And after all the applause had stopped and people took their smiles and handshakes to their daily
lives, I was nobody again.
“Freddy let his guard down because he needed to have a dream to hang on to. I came to England as Boz’s Juba. I loved meeting Mr. Dickens and talking to him. He made me feel like an artist, and what he said about me, and about my dancing, was more than I expected from such a great man, but it was exactly what I needed. He made me feel like I mattered, Sarah. He made me feel as if I really mattered.”
“Oh, you do, Juba.” Sarah put her arm around my waist. “You really do.”
I felt sorry for myself, and sorry for Sarah that she had to put up with me. We talked more about Gil and about Mr. Campbell, and even a little about Charles Dickens. Sarah said there were probably times when he felt bad about who he was or how his life was going. I didn’t think so. He had seen his “worst of times” and had moved on. He was where I wanted to be.
Sarah’s father had worked for a tailor in Dudley, some seventy-five miles north of London. Sarah said that the tailor, a Mr. Preece, had said he would always give her a job if she wanted it.
“My father had a room with him, and I think we could take that room now that my father is retired,” she said. “Would you like that?”
“I think he’d be surprised to see you coming to Dudley with a black fellow,” I said.
“We don’t get many surprises in Dudley—it might be good for him.”
I didn’t really know what to do. I thought of Stubby back in New York, and how his dream of becoming a top chef hadn’t worked out. Freddy Flamer stayed on my mind as I wondered how things would have been for him if we had hit it off better. I could have helped his dancing and maybe . . . maybe things would have worked out differently. As it was, I didn’t imagine there was much for me back in Five Points. Working for Peter Williams would lead nowhere. No matter how well I danced, it wouldn’t help. I was still black, still someone who could be sold in parts of the country I called home.
Dudley, in a way, would be a new beginning for me, and although I was terrified that we were making a mistake, Sarah’s enthusiasm and faith in me gave me courage. We arranged to be married in a small chapel in Marylebone, with a Reverend Cotter looking over his glasses at me and asking Sarah twice if she was sure about the wedding. She said she was. We had rounded up Mr. Campbell and a lady friend of his to witness the ceremony. I explained to him that I had assumed the name of Henry Juba to start my new life with Sarah, and that satisfied him.
Reverend Cotter ended the ceremony with “May you both be blessed with the strength of heaven, the light of the sun and the radiance of the moon, the splendor of fire, the speed of lightning, the swiftness of wind, the depth of the sea, the stability of earth, and the firmness of rock.”
As we left the chapel, Sarah held tight to my arm, smiling. I could see her eyes glistening with tears that matched my own. It was a new start for both of us, and I determined to make her life with me really fine. I had more faith in our love than anything I had found in my life.
It took us three days to conclude our business in London. Mr. Campbell went with me to turn in the ticket and managed to scream and turn red when the ticket seller tried to tell me there was a charge and they could only give me half of the money. I finally got it all, and Sarah and I took the train from London to Birmingham and then a coach to Dudley that very night.
Mr. Preece did have a vacant room and didn’t much care about who took it as long as we could pay for the first week’s lodging. The room was large enough for the two of us, and we had free use of the kitchen. Sarah was used to Dudley, a very small town with its center less than a mile square. The people spoke differently than they did in London, but I could understand most of them.
“What is it that you do, lad?” an old gentleman in Mr. Preece’s tailor shop asked me. His wife, almost a head taller than he, clung to his arm and gave me the sharpest look she could muster.
“I’m a dancer,” I said.
“A dancing master?” he replied. “You teach dancing? That’s not very likely, is it?”
I remembered Jack Bishop telling me that many towns in Ireland had dancing masters who taught the young people. I told him that I did indeed teach dancing, and he cleared his throat several times and sniffed. “Do you have anyone around who can hold a fiddle?” I asked.
He said he could certainly find someone over the next hour if I intended to stay in town. It was nearly two hours later when the man returned with his wife in tow, a man carrying a fiddle, two more women, a clergyman, and a man in uniform. They stood in front of the shop looking for me to provide a bit of entertainment.
“Play,” I said to the fiddler.
“Play what?”
“Do you know any jigs?”
He frowned, but he put his fiddle to his chin and began to play. I gave him four measures to warm up, and I began to dance.
It was the women who began to clap their hands in rhythm first, and then the man in uniform. The fiddler, a stocky sort with thick, curly hair, leaned into his playing. He was better than I thought he would be.
Within the week I put up a sign in the window of our rented room that read Dancing Master and had my first two pupils. They only had a few pence to spare, and it wasn’t worth my time to try to lighten the feet of the two girls who came on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it gave me an air of being respectable. It meant more to Sarah than it did to me.
Sarah, dear, dear Sarah. I hadn’t imagined that she would ever mean so much to me. But she was my crutch; she had put her sturdy soul under my arm for the past two years, holding me up in my darkest moments with her cheerfulness. For the first time in the landscape of my memory, something came before dancing. It was Sarah.
When the small crowd in Dudley saw me dance for the first time, they were amazed. A shrewish woman, her face deeply lined with reminders of her age, came over to me after I had ended the dance and poked me. I still remember her amazement that I was real.
“You must be a devil!” she said, craning her neck toward me. “Real people with souls don’t move like that!”
For weeks, people would stop me on the street and ask me to dance. “Just a bit,” they would say, or “for a moment.” A small theater group, dedicated to putting on dramas, asked me if I would dance between the acts.
The people of Dudley were amazed at my dancing, but there was no theater that wanted to book me. As word got out, a few theaters contacted me and offered short engagements. Sarah said it was a start, but I knew better.
“They’re offering me up as a novelty,” I said. “Something to take the mind away for a few minutes. Nothing more. Charles Dickens said to me that what we did, what he did with his words and me with my dancing, had to transform people. For a long time I didn’t know what he meant. But when I think about it, what dancing is and what it needs to be doing, I can see it. I want people to look at me as they first did in Dudley and wonder if I am a man or a devil. I want them to think that a man’s body can’t move the way mine does, and if mine can move, if I can go across a floor the way I have so many times, then they must think again about everything that is possible. They must be some new person, if only for the minutes they are watching me.”
The village people in Dudley were surprised to see me dancing, to see a black man who could perform magic with his body, but they could not support me. Was that always the case with artists? If I ever saw Mr. Dickens again, and if that great man had time, I would ask him: Did you have moments of despair as you wrote A Christmas Carol? When you are alone in the night, the echoes of your readers’ praise still ringing in your ears, are you worried that they don’t really love you? Do your readers ever think of you as they do of me, that you are a creature who does not need to eat, to be safe with money in the bank and a never-ending supply of wood for your fire? Do they think you are otherworldly, some kind of gifted devil instead of a human being?
The folks in Dudley grew to like me, to nod when they saw me on the street or tip their hats, but without a theater, I was lost. I even thought of starting my own venture, some sm
all place, like Almack’s back in Five Points. Sarah and I rented a hall on Sedgley Road for a weekend, but the seats, like the ones in London, were nearly empty.
London was the only place we knew where I would find steady work, and I made the trip there at the beginning of each week, coming home to Dudley when I could, bringing whatever earnings I had managed to scrape up. I found a job as a waiter’s assistant at Mivart’s Hotel. It was hard work, on my feet for twelve hours a day, but it brought in some money, and I was able to contribute at least something to our household. Sometimes I would be in London for weeks at a time, living close to the bone and longing for Sarah. In the quiet times, in the cheap lodgings I found, I would try not to ask myself if I had failed. I knew that I had touched some lives with my talents, and had given some people the idea that they could do something different with their own lives, and with their own bodies. I told myself that I had put dancing—no, not dancing, but the ambitions of dancing, the hope for the applause and the headlines—behind me. But then, one raw day, while cleaning up tables at Mivart’s, I ran into Mr. Campbell again.
“Juba!” Mr. Campbell’s voice caught me by surprise. “Sit down, my boy.”
Of course I couldn’t sit at his table in a fine restaurant, but he consented to come to the kitchen to see me. We talked. I told him of my circumstances, and he talked of what had happened when I had first arrived in London. He made it seem grander than I had imagined. He told me that Gilbert Pell had fallen on hard times and was no longer performing.
“He’ll come back when he’s ready,” Mr. Campbell said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing as good as any other bird strutting along the sidewalk,” I said. “It’s a hard business.”
“That it is. That it is. You know, there’s a fellow in Liverpool who is trying to enlarge his theater,” Mr. Campbell said. “For the last year or so, he’s been doing a few weeks of Shakespeare and putting on some performances of John Gay. It’s the Gay piece, The Beggar’s Opera, that pays his bills. He wants to have a spectacular month-long performance with minstrels, acrobats, and singers for the autumn season. Shall I write to him about you? It would pay reasonably well and might do us both some good. I had a nice business with the Pell brothers and with Christy. Anything American goes over reasonably well, you know.”