American Follies

by Norman Lock

  6 - ,

  Q W I U O P

  Z

  A X & N ? ;

  Brister took my hand. His felt like bark. Outside, the sky was dark, but I saw in his face and in Elizabeth’s as she held the candle to her watch that it was not to row us across the river that he’d disturbed our rest. He put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Listen!” I did and, in the distance, heard the baying of hounds that had been loosed on us. “Get your things! Hurry now!”

  He went into the shed and returned with an empty feed sack containing bread, pears, and a jar of milk. He gave me a clean cloth. “If the baby starts to fuss, soak some milk with this rag and let him suckle it.”

  He blew out the candles and led us quietly to the riverbank, where a skiff was tied to the branch of a cottonwood. “Hurry!” he said again. We got into the boat and made for the channel where the current flowed swiftly toward the Gulf. The only sounds were the softly groaning tholes, disgruntled bullfrogs stirred up by Brister’s oars, and the light slap of water against the prow. The crying of the dogs grew faint.

  “An idea came to me in the night,” he said. “The Rufus J. Lackland tied up at Wyanock Landing yesterday, five miles downriver. She’ll be on her way again sometime this evening. If you manage to get aboard, you can get to New Orleans and then catch a train to New York.”

  We took heart.

  “I pray no harm will come to you, Mr. Warwick, for helping us,” said Susan earnestly.

  Elizabeth muttered words I didn’t catch. Margaret grabbed his hand and kissed it. He pulled it away and went on rowing. Had there been light enough to see his face, doubtless I’d have seen his embarrassment—his black skin notwithstanding.

  “Before we get to the landing, I mean to row ashore and get you two blacked up.” He pointed to Elizabeth and Susan.

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.

  I couldn’t tell if she was dismayed, horrified, or thrilled.

  “Klansmen are everywhere in these parts. At Wyanock, they could be on the lookout for you all. If I black up Mrs. Stanton and Miss Susan, you can pass for colored servants of Miss Finch and her little sister.” He turned to Elizabeth. “If you carry the boy, folks will think he’s yours.” What further confirmation of my son’s negritude could I ask for? Little Martin was black—but he was not a bastard.

  “I bore seven children, and I don’t think it’s fair to be burdened with an eighth at my time of life!” she complained.

  “I will play mother,” said Susan with the air of a martyr who plainly enjoys the role.

  Brister bit the water with his oars, and the boat jumped toward New Orleans (as if four hundred miles of river weren’t in the way). A mile or so above the landing, he slewed the boat to shore. He led us into a stand of pines and made a fire. With a piece of char, he blackened Susan’s and Elizabeth’s faces, necks, and wrists. “Lucky for you two, your hair lost its color.” Susan’s was gray, Elizabeth’s white. He gave them each a bright rag to tie around their heads. Squinting at the result, he said, “Sisters, you look fine!” He reached into his sack and took out a shiny red dress. “Mrs. Stanton, put this on—and don’t pother! It belonged to my wife, who was taken in December. She was a big woman, like you.”

  Elizabeth held the dress at arm’s length, as if expecting an uprising of moths. “Is this really necessary?”

  “My Ida got married in that dress. She always said she wanted to be buried in it. I didn’t see her sister—a slack-jawed, lopsided Louisiana cane cutter—switch it for a calico shift. Poor Ida was already in the ground when I caught Beulah wearing it. I made her take it off in the yard to shame her.” Sensing Elizabeth’s reluctance, he said, “Ida didn’t die of something catching.”

  “Oh, give it to me!” Elizabeth took the dress and walked a short way into the woods in search of privacy. I could tell she was annoyed. To be at the mercy of a man’s cunning, a negro man’s at that, or to be eyed up and down like a heifer at a cattle show—I couldn’t say which of the two she considered more humiliating.

  “How do I look?” asked Elizabeth, coming out from behind a tree.

  “Like the Whore of Babylon in blackface,” crowed Susan.

  “So long as no one can recognize me.”

  Brister gave each of the suffragists a pair of Ida’s Sunday gloves to hide her white hands.

  We started walking toward the skiff.

  “Hold on, ladies!” said Brister. “This is as far as I dare. The landing’s a mile off. Just stay on the towpath, and it will take you right to it. Get aboard the steamer soon as you can and keep out of sight till she gets under way.”

  We said our good-byes. Margaret wept—circus people are sentimental. Susan shook the old man’s bony hand. Beguiled by Ida’s dress, Elizabeth kissed the old man’s grizzled cheek. Brister cleared his throat, climbed into his skiff, hoisted the patched and mended sail, and started back to French Fort.

  “I feel like a croquet ball that is made to roll across the lawn by the tap of a mallet.”

  “Lizzie, you do talk nonsense sometimes!” said Susan with enough bite to core an apple.

  “I’m most myself in my black silk dress; in blackface and red sateen, who knows what I shall become?”

  “And who were you in your famous bloomers?”

  “I’ve outgrown them as one does the mistaken ideals of her youth.”

  “Or for being overly fond of custard pies.”

  “Plump women are more admired than sticks like you!”

  “Admired by whom?” Susan had treed her as a hound dog does a raccoon. To answer with the word men would have betrayed woman’s sovereignty; other women could have made her seem reliant on the good opinion of her sex. To reply myself to Susan’s question would have revealed her vanity.

  Like a coon up a tree, Elizabeth hid behind her black mask. “By the time we get home to Mrs. Crockett’s, I will be some other woman.” She sighed.

  “Well, I hope she doesn’t snore!”

  A steam whistle hooted in derision.

  The towpath turned sharply toward the river, and the Rufus J. Lackland stood before us. During the war, she’d been a Confederate “cotton-clad.” With battering rams of railroad iron and her bow packed with cotton bales to absorb the shock, she’d sunk Union gunboats on the Lower Mississippi.

  Notice of her departure was tacked onto a board:

  Leaves on SUNDAY, 13th inst., at 6 P.M. MEMPHIS & NEW ORLEANS PACKET BOAT

  The first-class passenger packet RUFUS J. LACKLAND, S. PHILLIPS, master, is now receiving freight & will leave as above. For freight or passage, apply on board. This boat connects at Napoléon with regular packets for the Arkansas and White rivers & stops at Greenville, Vicksburg & Natchez. Bills of lading signed at office of the agents up to 4 o’clock the day of departure.

  Margaret and I walked up the steamer’s gangway. Elizabeth and Susan, who carried little Martin, followed at a respectful distance. Brister had warned us, “Don’t talk like educated folks, misses, or you will give yourselves away. And, Miss Susan, I noticed you often have a sour face on you. If a white person sees it, you will be thrashed. Miss Ellen, you have got to act haughty to make people believe in this mummery.” He’d addressed himself to Margaret last: “Child, try not to fuss and call attention to yourself.” I do believe he never realized that Margaret was a grown woman.

  At the ticket window, I nearly lost my nerve.

  “Don’t you have any baggage?” asked the purser.

  “No, sir.” Instantly, I regretted having shown him deference. I was masquerading as a fine lady, though a northern one.

  “Not even a ‘carpetbag’?” he asked, smirking.

  “I do not.” I tried to look down my nose at him, but my eyes crossed.

  “Why’s that?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Our trunks were stolen,” I blurted.

  “Plenty of thieving niggers hereabouts.”

  Fortunately, the purser had not even glanced at “my negroes,” who w
ere unworthy of his notice. I doubted if their disguises or Margaret’s subterfuge could have withstood his scrutiny. But then again, most of us see according to our expectations. He lectured a knot of sympathetic listeners who had gathered behind us on the innate depravity of the negro. Having emptied his duct of bile, he turned to me and said in a perfunctory voice, “That’ll be four-fifty.” Opening my purse, I was dismayed to find that my federal money had changed into Confederate notes. Their worthlessness notwithstanding, he stuffed them into his cash box.

  We went below, locked ourselves in our cabin, and prepared to wait for six o’clock.

  “It was all I could do to hold my tongue and not rip his out of his rotten mouth!” said Susan, furious at the treatment we’d received from “a puffed-up specimen of meanness, worse than the worst plug ugly.”

  “He never so much as looked at me!” said Elizabeth in like temper.

  “General Thumb would never have stood for it!” said Margaret, her green eyes moist with remembrance. “He would have stuck him with his sword stick.”

  While the women continued to air their resentment, I fell into that loveliest of phrases—a “brown study.”

  Questions of right and wrong are better left to parsons and judges, who are paid to answer them; however, I feel obliged to mention one question that clamored for an answer as I lay on my bunk with the baby in my arms. (Strange, that he was so well behaved! You might have thought him a cloth poppet.)

  Should I keep the child, or find a decent black family to raise him?

  I shook off my torpor and listened to the black-faced suffragists talk of trivial matters. Even noble minds will sometimes stoop to folly under nervous strain. I glimpsed my face in the mirror on the cabin wall and was heartened to see Ellen Finch looking back at me.

  “It’s nearly time for the boat to be getting under way,” said Elizabeth, having glanced at her watch. “By ‘time,’ I mean what ordinary people experience going about their lives and not the fitful, skittish time we’ve been keeping ever since we left Grand Central.”

  Life, for me, had been governed by a very different clock since my nightmare on the train from Sing Sing, the strange events at Dobbs Ferry, and the encounter with Alma Bridwell White in Zarephath. For me, time was neither straightforward nor dependable.

  “I’m feeling peckish,” said Susan. “What about you, Margaret?”

  “I could eat a horse!”

  The shrill voice of the Rufus J. Lackland’s steam whistle announced her departure. The cabin floor shook as the stern paddles chewed water that had first begun to flow from Lake Itasca ages before a regretful God scuttled His creation, all save an ark of refugees, who would prove to be no better than their ancestors. The instant before the paddles took purchase and the steamer lurched forward, possibility held sway over all the universe. The Mississippi River could have reversed its course, ceased to flow, or dried up in its bed. The boat could have taken wing and flown to the antipodes or to Missouri, where people are said to be skeptical. Martin II could have turned white, and I become a Chinese or a Cherokee. But nothing out of the ordinary occurred except that the packet, as ponderous as a hippopotamus, turned inelegantly in the channel and headed for its first stop, Napoléon, Arkansas, at eighteen knots. Soon the river’s reaches would turn copper and tarnish into dusk. Late on the following night, we’d arrive in cosmopolitan New Orleans, where we would have less reason to be afraid.

  We went up on the main deck, where supper was being served, and ate our fill of ham and oysters, rice and green beans, followed by ice cream and peach cobbler. I sipped a mint julep because it was expected of me, while Margaret drank lemonade and our two reluctant servants water. The male passengers nipped Kentucky bourbon, save for a traveler in Bibles, who took gin “because of its purity.” Had Gallagher been there, his red face would have inched ever closer to his plate until it rested on the remains of his supper, with only an imbiber’s snore to signify the presence of life or the absence of death, however one chooses to view the matter. As the boat steamed south, the sun was falling over Arkansas. Soon Tennessee would be overthrown by darkness. The Father of Waters would shine like quicksilver before it was quenched.

  After supper, we yielded to the drowsiness that can steal over passengers on a riverboat, especially at night, when the day’s rude noise has faded and the stern wheel’s threshing and the water’s lapping on the hull produce an unearthly calm. Passengers become subdued, as if in the presence of something that could be called “holy” but is usually mistaken for the workings of digestion. Drunk with love on such a night, Solomon sang to his beloved, whose belly was “like an heap of wheat set about with lilies,” and Marc Antony, the Roman, became enamored of his Egypt as she floated down the Cydnus River, “her barge like a burnished throne.”

  On such a night, Lincoln rode through the streets of Washington to Ford’s Theatre, happy that, at long last, peace was in the April air. On such a night at war’s end, the grossly overloaded Steamship Sultana sank off Memphis, and 1,200 Union soldiers liberated from Andersonville Prison drowned. They’d been packed into a boat meant to carry eighty-five passengers and crew. What Confederate captain Henry Wirz, the only officer, north or south, to be hanged for war crimes, had failed to accomplish, abetted by starvation, dysentery, and typhus, the Mississippi’s icy runoff, the prisoners’ enfeeblement, and the greed of Union officers Hatch and Mason did. (They were promised five dollars, COD, for every soldier delivered from captivity.) Time is often fragrant with desire, but more often, it is pregnant with disaster and stinks of death.

  The lamps were lighted in the Lackland’s dining room. A blacked-up quartet sang “Old Aunt Jemima.” Believing the song ridiculed negroes, the white passengers joined in gleefully, unaware that Billy Kersand, a black minstrel, had written the lyrics to make fun of the crackers, who’d have gone to any lengths to keep their negroes in perpetual servitude. “God damn ‘Ape’ Lincoln and his blue bellies!”

  My old missus promise me,

  Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

  When she died she’d set me free,

  Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

  She lived so long her head got bald,

  Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

  She swore she would not die at all,

  Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

  Next, the Lackland’s lord of the revels introduced a troupe of “Ethiopian delineators,” who portrayed three negroes in fancy dress, arguing over a watermelon during a performance of La Dame blanche.

  When he pointed his baton at Elizabeth and Susan, they gasped in unison, fearing they’d been found out in spite of having enhanced Brister’s charcoal daubing with greasepaint purloined from the Ethiopians’ dressing room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” began the showman as urbanely as a cotillion caller. “It has come to my attention that two sophisticates of the art of minstrelsy are here with us tonight. I refer to those comedic sisters in blackface who have performed humorous sketches of colored life for audiences throughout the South—Lizzie and Sue! Maybe they can be persuaded to regale us with one of their famous delineations.”

  Uplifted by a tide of applause, Elizabeth and Susan were swept up and deposited onto the stage. By some mischievous wiggle of fate (as might be read by Madame Singleton), two white suffragists masquerading as black maids had turned into a pair of white minstrels in blackface.

  “Ladies, be seated,” said the master of minstrelsy in a sequined voice as he assumed the role of a straight-faced Interlocutor flanked by Tambo and Mr. Bones. Helpless to do otherwise, Elizabeth and Susan sat in the “end men’s” chairs. “We will commence with the overture!” he announced as he tapped his baton on a jug of white lightning.

  A fiddler, a trombonist, and a banjo player went to work on a ludicrous air until, at a sign from Mr. Interlocutor, it squeaked and wheezed to a stop.

  “Esteemed passengers of the Rufus J. Lackland, it’s time for some monkeyshines!”

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: How are
you this fine evening, Sister Bones? (No reply) Why, what’s wrong, Sister? You look down in the mouth.

  SISTER BONES (Susan): I sorry.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: What about?

  SISTER BONES: I sorry I was born a slave in America.

  Elizabeth, in the role of Sister Tambo, rattled a tambourine against her knee.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Why, didn’t you hear the news?

  SISTER BONES: What news might dat be?

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Mr. Lincoln emancipated the slaves!

  SISTER TAMBO: He sure did! The massa hisself read the Emasculation Proclamation over da heads of da colored men. Then dey all lined up in da yard and got demselves emasculated.

  SISTER BONES: I don’ know nothin’ ’bout dat. Our massa read us the Maceration Proclamation, and den we all got ourselves macerated.

  SISTER TAMBO: I never heard ’bout no Maceration Proclamation befo’.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR (Ignoring Sister Tambo): So you were macerated.

  SISTER BONES: Right down to da bones!

  Susan clacked a bone castanet.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: What did he do with all those macerated bones?

  SISTER BONES: He carved little Nativity figures outta dem to set under his Christmas tree.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Your master must be a Christian gentleman.

  SISTER BONES: He whips da Devil outta us for our souls’ sake.

  SISTER TAMBO: What your massa do wid all da leftover dark meat?

  SISTER BONES: He boiled it up with some greens and ate it.

  SISTER TAMBO: Dass a awful way to treat colored folk!

  SISTER BONES: Pshaw! He saved us da most nourishin’ part.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: And what might the most nourishing part of a darky be, Sister Bones?

  SISTER BONES: OUR HATRED!

  Elizabeth rattled the tambourine and laughed hysterically while Susan clacked.

  No one in the dining room could decide whether he’d been mocked or treated to a sophisticated “coon show” such as people saw in the big cities. Although nobody clapped, neither did anyone hiss, and the supper plates weren’t shied in remonstrance at the two smart aleck ladies in blackface.