“Jack, that’s what you’re always saying,” Stubby says. “That thing about ‘that’s how life is at times.’ Life can’t be about anything that happens.”
“Sometimes it can,” Jack said.
We got down to the dock and asked around, and the only crabs we found were soft-shelled crabs. That wasn’t what Jack wanted. He wanted king crabs with their long legs.
“The smoke goes through the joints and even seeps through the shells,” he said, disappointed. “And they’re different enough so that people will buy them.”
Stubby wanted to buy some soft-shelled crabs to cook, and he got enough to make a supper for the three of us.
“Jack, you thinking I’m scared to take a chance on going to Washington?” I asked as we started back to the house.
“I don’t think you’re scared, Juba,” Jack said. “I think your menu’s too long. You can’t decide on what you want because it all looks good.”
It all looked good and it didn’t look good at the same time. I was wary of the offer to go to Washington from men who hadn’t said a thing about my dancing and didn’t seem to care whether I was really good or not. It was a feeling I had in my stomach rather than a set of thoughts I could lay out and speak on. But it was there.
It didn’t stop me from feeling flat-out terrible when Freddy came around to say good-bye to everyone. He was shaking hands and flashing his smile from ear to ear.
Peter Williams said that if Freddy got into the fast life in Washington, he might not even bother coming back to dance in New York again.
Even though I didn’t like it, I danced at Almack’s over the next few months because I needed the little money that Peter was giving me, and it kept me going. People were still coming up to me and telling me how great the show had been, but it didn’t seem to lead to anything. Charley White knew I could dance and sing, so he asked me if I played any banjo, and I told him yes even though I wasn’t really that good at it and I really wanted to be dancing. He asked me to sit in with his minstrels, and I did it for the money.
I got a good billing for two nights at the Chatham Theatre and the same at the Bowery Theatre. But what I had to do was dance in between acts of a regular play. Sometimes the people would be talking and drinking as I danced, which I didn’t like at all. John Diamond was on the same programs with me and it was billed as a dance contest, but Diamond just clowned around. For the two nights at the Chatham I got five dollars, and for the two nights at the Bowery Theatre I got four dollars a night, which was good money.
I went up to Boston with the Georgia Champions, a black minstrel show, and danced at the Concert Hall, but I only got five dollars for three nights’ dancing and two days’ travel.
The weeks with me holding my breath and waiting for something wonderful to happen stretched out to months and then started fading away to a memory as a first and then a second year passed. Nothing wonderful happened except that I noticed that life was going on around me the same way it always had. Freddy never came back from Washington, so I felt he must be getting along. I wondered how I might have done if I had gone with him. Five Points was getting a little grimier, and all the promises of fixing up the waterfront were falling through the cracks.
Stubby was disappointed, too. His hopes of becoming a great chef just didn’t happen. He cooked at a number of restaurants for short times, but the owners would almost always put somebody white over Stubby, even if they didn’t know as much about cooking as he did. After a while, Stubby gave up the idea of owning his own restaurant and became a cook at the Colored Orphan Asylum.
I didn’t give up. But, like Jack Bishop said, I came close.
“Juba, you’re like a bird strutting down the avenue,” he would say. “You’re strutting just fine, but how come you’re not flying?”
Jack knew how black people were treated in New York. We were second-class people every day and third-class performers when we tried to exercise our talents outside the black community. What he did was to needle me so I wouldn’t give up altogether, and in a way, I appreciated it. In a way, I didn’t, though, because sometimes he made me feel that when I accepted a job with a minstrel band or put on blackface, I was betraying my people. To me, putting on blackface was the strangest thing in the world. I was born black, and yet the promoters wanted me to dress up like some kind of strange image of a black person that really wasn’t a true Negro. It was as if a lot of white people had a place in their heads for black people, and you had to fit in that place in a certain manner or they didn’t want you. They wanted black performers to talk bad, say stupid things, and be like pets. Jack said a lot of white people were afraid of real black people.
“If half the country can convince itself it’s okay to make black people slaves,” he said, “then you got to figure we don’t know who you are. So we make you into something we know by putting you in blackface. That’s easy to figure.”
It wasn’t easy for me to figure, but it made sense in a way. Anyway, Jack was still a good person and we were always close. So when I got my next break, almost six years after the Almack’s show, I was glad Jack was with me.
There were some girls playing hopscotch in front of the house. When they saw us coming with the cart, they all stopped playing and shouted down the street. A boy who was walking toward Avenue A turned around and started coming our way. The girls who had been playing hopscotch pointed toward me.
The boy who came up to me was pale, with buck teeth and hair that came down over his ears. His clothing was a shirt tucked into loose pants, shoes that were two big for him, and a hat that he had slapped to one side of his head. He was about twelve or thirteen.
“You the dancing nigger?” he asked me.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“Let’s see you dance!” he said.
“Get away from here,” I said, brushing past him.
“I don’t think you can dance at all!” the brat insisted.
Jack told me to ignore the kid, but I wasn’t as patient with fools as I used to be and really thought about sending a punch toward his jaw.
“Mayor Brady told me to tell you to be down at City Hall in the morning, nine thirty, in room one-oh-three,” the brat said. “He wants you to meet with some people. He said I could get a dime off you.”
“He was wrong,” I said.
“Nigger!”
“Get out of here before I swat you across the face!” Jack said, drawing his hand back.
The kid spit on the ground and took off. He’d be in a gang within a year, if he wasn’t in one already.
“The mayor wants to see you?” Jack looked at me, puzzled. “What for?”
“No idea, unless he’s thinking of putting together some private party,” I said.
“He ever see you perform?”
“Jack, I wouldn’t know the mayor of New York if he was standing right here on the stoop,” I said.
Jack was feeling poorly. He had a hitch in his walk, and I had the feeling he was in more pain than he let on. I helped him to his door, then went upstairs to my room. Stubby had moved uptown near Seneca Village, where a lot of black people were living, so I had the place to myself.
The next morning I found a clean shirt, put it on, and made the ten-minute walk to City Hall.
Mayor William Brady was a big man, bald on top of his head and kind of rough-looking. He wore a big silver ring on his right hand, which looked a little out of place on a man. When the officer who met me at the door announced my name, Brady pointed to a seat without saying a word to me.
There were two other men in the room, an older one who Brady was sitting next to and a younger man I thought I had seen before. Brady was talking to the older man about getting some wagons over to Pearl Street to move a city office.
“Just get it done today,” he said. “You got that?”
The man nodded and followed Brady’s lead in standing up. When the man left, Brady turned to me. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but he had a grin on his face that c
ould have been a smile with a little practice.
“This is Gilbert Pell. He’s a cousin of my wife or some such nonsense, and he tells me he wants to take you to England with the Ethiopian Serenaders so you can pretend to be black,” Brady said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to England, but I think you’ve got the black bit down pretty good.”
Gilbert Pell spoke slowly and had a soft voice. He was younger than I thought the leader of a group like the Serenaders would be. He seemed shy, not like so many show business people who were ready to tell you what was on their minds and what was on yours as well. There were a few chairs out in the hall, and we sat together while the mayor went on about the city business.
“There are a lot of minstrel groups around the country,” Mr. Pell said. “Some do well, and some just manage to lose money slowly. There’s a minstrel tradition in this country. A group of white men with blackened faces and woolly wigs dance and sing in imitation of how they think Negroes do. My group, Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders, are good and a little different. We try to present Negro music the way you people sing and play it. We’re not so much dealing with comedy.”
“You know how we sing and play our music?” I asked.
“My mammy taught me spirituals when I was a child,” Mr. Pell said. “I would sit on her lap and she would sing to me and rock me to sleep every night. Sometimes she would take me to the quarters and I played with the black children, as we all did until we got to be about nine or so. Then we were separated. Whites were taught our lessons, blacks were sent to the fields to work. Eventually, I had to learn to look at my mammy differently—Lois was her name—but I could somehow never leave the music.”
He drifted away for a moment, lost in thought about something very far off, and I didn’t interrupt him. When he came back to the moment, it was with a wave of his hand, as if he were pushing something away from him. I wondered what it was.
“Anyway, we’ve been to Great Britain before. England, Ireland, and Scotland, and we did well. We even performed before the queen of England. She was a little stiff, I thought, but she was interested in seeing what we did.
“We’re going back to England, and I’d like to take you with me,” Mr. Pell said. “I saw you at the Bowery, and you were outstanding, even though you weren’t onstage very long. I can give you top billing with the other players. Your dancing and your singing will make us unique. And I’m really pleased to see how young you are. What do you think?”
“Well, I’m interested,” I said.
He kept on talking about how he thought my dancing and singing would fit into his group and how we would all be equals once we got onstage.
The Serenaders had been around for a while, and I had seen them perform. Some of them were good and some just okay. They didn’t get as much publicity as Christy’s Minstrels, but they did all right. As Mr. Pell talked, my head was spinning. To me, what the minstrels did most was to prance across a stage making fun of black people. Sometimes they would throw in a few good songs, and both the Serenaders and Christy’s Minstrels were better at that than some. The idea of me being part of an act that made fun of my own kind didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth.
“Do all your players wear wigs and black grease on their faces?” I asked.
“I’m thinking . . .” Mr. Pell looked away for a moment, then back at me. “I’m thinking of calling the group I’m taking to London this time by a different name. Maybe leave off Ethiopian and just be Pell’s Serenaders, to make it different from the other groups. If you don’t want to black up or wear a wig, then that’s fine with me. We can make up the rules as we go along. How does that sound to you?”
It sounded good and bad. Getting together with a well-known group could be a big step, and then it could be nothing, like the show we did at Almack’s. I didn’t push Mr. Pell on how I would have to look onstage, because I needed to figure out whether I wanted to take the chance before I questioned it.
Before I left, the mayor, who came out of the office for a while, asked me if I had ever been to London before.
“No, sir,” I answered. “Have you?”
“I’m waiting for the queen to send me a personal invitation,” he said, and let out a big laugh.
Why that was funny got away from me. I looked at Mr. Pell, and he wasn’t laughing, either.
Mr. Pell said he had a week to find somebody, so he needed my answer as soon as possible. He gave me an address where I could contact him. It was Butler’s Theatre.
I thought about it and thought about it. It was like wrestling with a slippery eel. Soon as I wrapped my mind around “yes,” it would slip over to “no.” And as soon as I wrapped my mind around “no,” I would see something pointing to “yes.” One of the things in the back of my mind was how good Fred Flamer was doing, or how good I thought he was doing. He had gone to Washington to that job and had never come back to Five Points.
I ended up with a “yes,” and Mr. Pell said he was glad and that he thought I would be glad as well. He set up a time for me to meet the other performers.
Mr. Briggs was the friendly sort. He reached out and grabbed my hand and shook it as if he had known me for a long time.
Mr. Ludlow was young and narrow shouldered but had a lot of quick jokes he could call up in a minute. Mr. Everton acted like his face wasn’t made for smiling. Mr. Valentine said he thought I would do all right with him.
“England is different from America,” Mr. Valentine said. “They speak two kinds of English over there. The first is the high-class English, and you have to listen really carefully to understand what they’re saying. The second is the low-class English, and it doesn’t matter how hard you listen, you won’t understand them.”
CHAPTER
NINE
The strangest thing about leaving New York was saying good-bye to people. What I learned about good-bye was that you were telling everyone that you were leaving where you were and going someplace else. But if you didn’t know where that someplace was, if it was just a dot on a map, then you didn’t have that much to say.
“So what you going to be doing different in London, England?” Miss Lilly asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I hope they like what I do.”
Miss Lilly patted me on the wrist and told me not to worry, that I would always have a home in Five Points. She wrote down the address Mr. Pell gave me as our English contact and said she would write to me. She had been kind to me whenever she could.
Jack Bishop gave me six dollars to take with me and a small Bible printed in Gaelic. “It’s okay if you can’t read it,” he said. “Just remember that you don’t have to go to church to get the Lord’s help.”
“Think about me when all those English people are clapping for you,” Stubby said. “You think about me and I’ll feel it, too.”
On the American Eagle, Mr. Valentine complained all the time about his cabin and how small and cramped it was for him and Mr. Everton. I was the only one with a cabin by myself. I slept on a cot that was fastened to the deck, and the rest of the cabin was piled high with trunks full of our stage gear. When none of us was seasick, we practiced on deck, and people on the ship came and watched us. Briggs was really good, and so was Pell. They could all move and dance and sound as if they were black, and I felt a little uncomfortable with them. When Gil, which is how Mr. Pell wanted me to address him, asked if I was all right, I told him I was getting a little nervous.
“If everyone is showing black people as being stupid and lazy, then it doesn’t matter too much what I do,” I said.
Gilbert Pell headed the Serenaders and performed the role of Bones in blackface, as was the custom for minstrels.
“It matters if you make it matter,” Gil said. “People should come away from our performances thinking about what they’ve just seen.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “How do we know what they’re thinking?”
“Doesn’t matter what we know. If they come expecting just a bunch of
clowns in blackface and nappy wigs and that’s what they see onstage, then they won’t think anything as they leave,” Gil said. “But if they come expecting dumb Negro acts and they see great dancing and great singing, then they’ll think maybe they were wrong about black people. Or at least a few of them will.
“Do you know why minstrel shows are mostly held in the North?” Gil asked. “Because people in the South have seen and heard real Negroes. They’re not funny, and their music isn’t funny, either.”
That was something to think on.
We arrived in London on a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon. Gil arranged for two carriages, and we loaded our trunks and went to where we would be staying. Cheshire Street looked a lot like Five Points. The streets around it were narrow, and there were a lot of people just standing around. Children stared at us as we came out of the carriages, and a few followed us to 110 Cheshire, which was going to be our home in London.
The next day, the entire group met with our London manager, Mr. Campbell, at a steamy restaurant. We were supposed to meet someone from a British newspaper, the Times of London, and map out our plans. I didn’t know what to order from the menu and was glad when Mr. Campbell ordered something called bangers and mash for all of us.
“The ticket sales have been disappointing, to say the least,” Mr. Campbell said.
“They haven’t seen us yet,” Gil said. “Once the reviews start coming in, the people will follow.”