A Free State

by Tom Piazza

  Thus, the Virginia Harmonists. None of us, to be sure, had ever lived in Virginia. Yet we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our “Boatman Dance” and “Clare de Kitchen,” assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see. But I am getting ahead of my story.

  3

  For six months, we performed at the Walnut Street Theater for a percentage of the entry receipts. “Theater” was something of a euphemism—it was really a wooden barn, which eventually burned to the ground, taking half a city block with it. Then Barton opened his theater on Arch Street; our reputation was becoming firm, and he hired us for a week’s run, which became a two-weeks’ run, and then we became a fixture.

  Philadelphia was my Promised Land. The traveling life provided a sense of the new as long as you kept moving, as if you walked on water. Stop for a moment and you sank. But the city, at least at first, kept one afloat on a fizzing bath of stimulation and possibility. There was a great university, situated next to the lowest kind of taverns. Leafy, shaded sidewalks ran alongside fine wrought-iron fences, then gave way on the very next block to a series of dilapidated shacks sagging under a withering sun. If one walked two blocks one might as well have been in a different city. Dust and ceaseless noise behind makeshift plank fences, covered with handbills and posters, behind which buildings rose and fell. Citizens only two years removed from changing wagon wheels in the mud promenaded now in fine carriages. On the sidewalks one bumped into, or steered around, clerks, ministers, lampmakers, thieves, professors, and prostitutes. One rubbed shoulders with more people in an hour than one might have met in a year in the country, yet the streets afforded a sense of privacy, almost of invisibility. People arrived constantly from points unknown and created entirely new identities for themselves, masks that hid their history.

  Even our theater wore a mask. It announced itself to the street from behind grand Doric columns that rose two stories and supported a frieze with bas-reliefs of scenes from antiquity, and terra-cotta busts of Shakespeare and Marlowe, yet upon entry one attended animal shows, witnessed acrobatics and buffoonery of every type. And, finally and triumphantly, the performances of the Virginia Harmonists.

  Mulligan and I selected the other members with an eye toward a balance of personalities that would provide variety and contrast. Powell was a simple fellow with a happy character; he had attended the university for one term and found himself unsuited for the academic life. I was perennially amused by his transformation into a tambourine-thumping whirligig onstage. Burke was our tragedian, master of monologues and tragic arias and hilarious anecdotes delivered with a doleful countenance. He set type for the Clipper in the small hours, after our show had finished for the night, and he was forever buttonholing me for advances on his weekly pay. I never learned how he spent the extra money. Eagan, our fiddler, was handsome, thin, aloof, and mean. Of the members, he was the one with whom I felt the least affinity. Mulligan had pressed to include him on the basis of his instrumental finesse, which was unarguable.

  Each had answered one of the advertisements we had placed, or had heard by word of mouth. Mulligan and I conferred on their respective musical and personal assets and deficits, and we agreed upon our final choices, but I handled all the details of salary, hiring, and conducting rehearsals to shape ourselves into a show troupe. All except Powell were older than myself, yet none seemed to bristle at my leadership, except for Eagan, who had an unerring nose for the exception to almost any judgment I would make. But generally, and certainly during our first two years, the troupe was harmonious in all ways.

  On a typical evening, we would arrive at the theater around six o’clock to start preparing for our seven-o’clock show. I would arrive first, light the dressing room lamps, make sure costumes were in order. One by one, the men would straggle in. As if we were all waking up slowly, there would be muttered greetings, a general air of preoccupation, perhaps a small detonation of jovial abuse now and again, as we began the evening’s transformation.

  “Long night, Burke?”

  “I fell asleep at the letter box and awoke with the letter ‘E’ embossed in multiple upon my cheek.”

  “Kolb’s has added a bean pot at no charge starting at four in the afternoon.” This was a favorite tavern, just across from the theater.

  “Something to soak up the brew.”

  “Mulligan, is that a beard you’re raising or has your jaw grown mold?”

  Tuning his banjo, Mulligan impassively replied, “The greasepaint will cover it.”

  Eagan always entered looking the most dapper of us all and set purposefully to prepare himself for the evening, perhaps asking something on the order of, “Douglass, are we keeping ‘Boatman’ at the top of the second half? Have you determined?”

  Slowly our street clothes were supplanted by our costumes. We had made the transition from the harlequinade of the earlier performers to full evening dress, but each with some exaggerated comic element—an outsized collar, mismatched cummerbund trailing behind, trousers cut three inches short to reveal red stockings. As we donned the stage garb we slowly joined our stage selves, discussing some bit of stage business that needed tightening or slight variation, mentioning the previous night’s performance, sharing this or that story.

  But the application of the burnt cork effected the true transformation, as if a lid were being lifted from a sarcophagus and some slumbering spirit were raised from the underworld. Each of us seemed to contain some other being who was allowed to emerge only once the face had been blackened. We would regard one another as if encountering our true souls, kept under wraps during daylight hours.

  “Good evening, Brudder Neckbones,” Mr. Powell would say, applying finishing touches in the glass.

  “My finest elucimidations to you on this fine ebening, Brudder Pork Chops,” I would reply. “And Brother Scamp,” I might say to Eagan, “has you made de acquaintance of Bullfrog Johnson?” At this, Mulligan, fully Bullfrogged, would imitate a croak on his fourth string, his face still impassive, and Eagan would produce a small, mocking glissando on his violin in response.

  Slowly but inexorably, whatever cares we had brought into the room were replaced by a shared joke, a sense of having been freed. We had found the land of Eternal Youth. For a description of our performances from the other side of the proscenium, I can offer this brief sketch, from the Clipper:

  Several troupes in our City offer Plantation scenes and Darky songs, but the Virginia Harmonists are unquestionably the finest delineators of Ethiopian melodies and Terpischorean twists of a sable hue. They take the stage as the Greeks took Troy, with the audience their captives and conspirators. Mr. Douglass, as Brother Neckbones, is a most able and genial master of the revels, as well as a commanding manipulator of the bones. For ‘Bullfrog Johnson’ (John Mulligan), no praise will suffice; the equal if not the better of any banjo artist . . . His feature on ‘Fire Down Below,’ in which he nearly turns himself inside out, is astonishing. Mr. Eagan, on violin, provided the ‘Old Virginia Reel,’ during which time Mr. Powell on the tambourine composed a symphony of effects, as well as executing a fine ‘backstep.’ And Mr. Burke, as Brother Rastus, was most effective in his long monologue ‘Massa’s Last Farewell,’ which left not a dry eye in the theater . . .

  For nearly two years we were the acme of entertainment in Philadelphia. We even spent a month touring England, being toasted everywhere we went, and returned to find ourselves billed as “International Sensations.” Our return was celebrated in the Philadelphia papers, and at least three other new troupes were doing all they could to eclipse our success. I took rooms in a good neighborhood, with a fireplace mantel of which I was very proud. I purchased two small framed watercolors for my parlor, and a set of fine silver candlesticks for my mantel
, which set me back half a week’s pay. I had finally climbed under the tent flap and into the magical illusion I had witnessed eight years earlier, when Sweeney took the stage in that nighttime field. I was a full-time changeling, a minstrel.

  I was still a young man, barely twenty-one, yet I was able to assume an air of authority that was, perhaps, a kind of protective coloration. Privately, I had not finished being a boy. Some part of me remained one, even as I issued orders to my seniors. Famous behind a mask onstage, I walked the streets unrecognized by daylight, as if I were living in exile. It made me restless.

  The world was restless, too. Two years into our tenure, competition from other troupes was beginning to siphon off the public’s fickle curiosities. There were by then between ten and fifteen minstrel troupes in Philadelphia alone, not counting traveling troupes that came to town, and slowly they began adding other kinds of attractions to their bills in order to set themselves apart. First Laughlin, on Market Street, added an operatic specialty. Then there were the Swiss bell ringers at Sanford’s, and an illusionist from Austria. Troupes were adding animals, female impersonators, elaborate costumes . . . The entire enterprise was beginning to change character, subsuming the mysterious energy of the pure Colored band into a broader entertainment. The Negro melodies and routines were still the heart of things, but set into a program that surrounded them, rather than comprising the entire world. As manager I had to take these developments into account, yet my heart was not in them.

  Where once our house was packed every night, with almost no effort, now it required a stream of novelties to keep us between two-thirds and three-quarters filled on the weekends. I don’t know that any other troupe was doing appreciably better, but the competition was spurring everyone to greater lengths. The first element I added beyond our core ensemble performance was a pastoral scene in which Powell and Burke portrayed Little Eva and Uncle Tom, in a tableau which I adapted from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dramatized performances of passages from this book were almost a necessity at that time, and I worked up a scene in which pathos was ascendant. It ended with Burke on one knee singing “Ave Maria.” Really, the effect was uncanny.

  The new set pieces and routines demanded sufficient attention that we hired a costumer half-time, named Rose, to help us keep up with the various changes. I suppose this is the place to introduce her, but I hardly know how to begin.

  She appeared at Barton’s around the time I speak of and offered her services as a seamstress. She was tall, even in the flat shoes she wore, and her brown hair was cut short, so that it nearly resembled a boy’s. Her eyes were large and brown. Her stated experience seemed in order with our needs, although I would have hired her if her experience had consisted of sweeping out coal dust in a bordello. I installed her in a large storage room that I cleared out immediately, and she was at work within a week.

  I conferred with her on every detail of costuming. Every day she herself looked different, and yet every day her appearance bore the unmistakable impress of who she was. No one else dressed like her, walked like her. One day she wore men’s trousers and a man’s shirt, and she never looked lovelier. She called me “Mister James,” with a little glint in her eye, for the first week, until I insisted upon her dropping the “mister.” Her voice had a teasing lilt to it, but never cruel, and her natural state was an unhurried grace, as if she were the exiled queen of some unknown country.

  At the sewing table she was as serious as a surgeon, and a wizard at finding ways to use unanticipated materials. I might stop in to find that she had managed to incorporate thin strips of foil into a set of pantaloons (for a Shakespearean parody) so as to catch glints of light; another time she created a pharaoh’s headdress out of a frame of baling wire, covered with dyed muslin. She seemed utterly self-contained when she practiced her craft. I have always been susceptible to this quality in people, as I lack it myself. Part of me is always standing outside, weighing the costs.

  We flirted good-naturedly—she flirted good-naturedly with everyone. On the days when her hours at the worktable overlapped with the troupe’s rehearsals, she joined easily in the give-and-take with the fellows. Dan Powell might say, “Here is our beautiful flower! Remove your weeds so that we can enjoy your beauty!”

  “You’d cut your fingers on my thorns, Dan,” she might reply, with a smile.

  Fitting Burke into an evening gown for some forgotten mock-opera sequence, she might smile to herself at a few words of praise from his middle-aged lips, respond, “I’m very flattered,” without looking up, and thereby draw her boundaries in the gentlest manner. Only Eagan refrained from joining in the general teasing, and this should have told me what I needed to know.

  One afternoon, a month or so after she arrived, I asked if she might join me for a walk and lunch at McKenna’s place on Third Street. It was one of the few public houses that allowed women to come and go, catering, as it did, to travelers from the packet boats. She put some things in order at her worktable, and we walked the few blocks to the tavern. I was a bit on edge, as if I were about to submit to an important audition. I had to remind myself that I was the leader of a famous troupe, and not a schoolboy. I had had girls before—the circus made that inevitable—but I was unhorsed by Rose.

  We took seats at a table by the window. The offerings were listed on a chalkboard on a wall. We read them.

  I was tongue-tied at first, but I discoursed on upcoming routines and costumes, fearing all the while that her attention was only polite. In fact it was heroic, as I am sure I was boring her as much as I was boring myself. Somewhat desperately, I offered my anecdote about meeting Mulligan in the circus, his attempt to conscript me as his water boy, and finally she laughed. One wanted to earn those laughs from her. The mood between us warmed a bit. Finally it occurred to me to ask her about herself, and her own history.

  It was clear, instantly, that this was a mistake. A pained look, and a retreat—momentary, but final.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Please, if that was intrusive . . .”

  She regarded me with the queerest expression, searching my eyes as if to discover any ill intent. I had steered us onto a submerged reef, and I was at a loss for a correction.

  At length she said, “You know, James, that I am spoken for.”

  “No,” I said. “I did not know. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable . . .”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t.” She looked down at the table, where she worried a crumb with a lovely finger. “The world has not used me kindly.”

  If she had more to tell me, she kept it to herself. Behind her beautiful façade, apparently, lay some landscape of pain she chose to keep private. She trusted me sufficiently to let me know that it existed, yet I also understood that our relations would remain on a professional footing thenceforth. I wondered who the fortunate fellow was who had spoken for her, and how he had earned his position.

  The answer arrived one afternoon, perhaps a month later. Dan Powell made some innocuous remark about Rose before a performance, and Eagan shot back, “That’ll be enough of that.” He had, we learned through his remarks here and there, installed her in her own apartment, which he referred to as a “bird’s nest.” A gilded cage was more like it, especially as he had a wife elsewhere. Whom we never saw.

  In any case, I had more than enough to preoccupy me then. The fact was that our troupe’s financial situation had become increasingly precarious, and things had approached the point at which our very existence could be in jeopardy if we did not find some way of attracting larger numbers. I kept this from the others to the extent that I could. But no matter how many birdcall impersonators, or jugglers, or Shakespearean parodies, we added, our receipts continued to fall steadily. I walked the streets, my head full of attendance figures and strategies for promotion, possibilities for new sketches, a thousand details, all the while feeling that I was missing something that lacked a name. We needed something to set us apart, again—to reclaim the public’s full attention. I
dreamed of Sweeney, of the elusive magic. I kept thinking that we needed something closer to the root of what had started us in the first place, the mystery in the tent, the dark outside, the shadows, the sense of something Other that was invisible by the light of normal daytime. And it was at that time that I first saw Henry Sims on the street corner.

  He disappeared, that afternoon, as described, but he lodged in my mind. In those few minutes he summoned up for me the same sense of joy mixed with pathos, of humor, and of possibility, that I had felt seeing Sweeney in the tent. Yet here was no impersonation, no masquerade—he was the thing itself. I did not know his name then, nor anything about him. But it struck me that if there were some way of presenting him in the show, he might add exactly the element that was being diluted. The possibility of a kind of fruitful competition between him and Mulligan, orchestrated for maximum effect, offered itself. My imagining collected around him—a solo performer, as Sweeney had been, yet far more skilled.

  There was one drawback, of course. He was a Negro.

  Negroes did not appear onstage at that time, unless perhaps at some abolitionist meeting. To have a Negro appearing with a white troupe was unheard of—for that matter, against the law. Presenting him could easily get us closed down. One would have to think of some subterfuge, if one were even to attempt it in the first place. There was also the question of my partner, who was nothing if not proud of his own abilities on the banjo. In any case, before any of that, I would need to find him again.

  I finally saw him some weeks later, playing outside the Black Horse Tavern. A crowd spilled out from under the awning that overhung the sidewalk, and two boys had climbed into the branches of an oak tree in the little park across the street in order to have a view. I was determined not to let my attention be distracted, even if a building were to collapse behind me. This time I would talk to him.