A Free State

by Tom Piazza

  He had plainly been raised well. He had, in fact, an air of affronted nobility, which both attracted me and aroused a certain resistance. He was at no great pains to please. As we made small talk he emitted amusing sayings. Unsure whether he had heard some remark I had made, I repeated myself, and he said, “I heard you twice the first time.” At one juncture I asked if he had ever seen Sweeney perform—I was trying to find out where he had acquired his prodigious repertoire—and he responded, “We went to different schools together.” I never did determine where he had picked up his repertoire.

  When it was time to start playing music, we sat facing one another on two straight chairs. As we got ourselves arranged, he became completely focused on the task. I brought out both my pairs of bones, one pair for each hand, and waited for his banjo to meet his strict requirements. I had the sense that the building could have been destroyed by an earthquake while he tuned, and it would not have made any difference to him.

  Hearing him play on the street was thrilling, but actually playing with him was an experience of another order entirely. He knew all the songs that were standard fare for the minstrels, and dozens—perhaps many dozens—more. From the beginning of any song he would add tiny elements, grace notes, instant echoes of some errant accent I played upon the bones. He had a manifest horror of repeating himself, and any given song would change aspect constantly as it went along, while yet remaining recognizable. He brought out an adventurous spirit in me, and I would try to match him arabesque for arabesque, turn for turn. He played with his eyes closed much of the time, except when our ideas for variation would meet in an especially felicitous manner, and then he would look at me and nod. I think it is safe to say that I had never felt such a combination of concentration and freedom.

  When we had finished an invigorating run-through of “Mary Blaine,” I said, “Well, that could not be improved upon.” He frowned and played a small figure, something he must have thought he had played imperfectly, for he repeated it with slight variations of inflection, accent, intonation, at least twenty-five times before he called a provisional truce with the troublesome phrase. He might, I thought, have been more of a perfectionist than Mulligan.

  We played for well over two hours without a rest; the sunlight had stolen across my parlor floor without my noticing. We took an intermission, then, and sat drinking the last of the lemonade.

  “Well,” I said, “I spoke with my partner, and I think we will go ahead with things.”

  He slapped his knee in triumph.

  “But there are some wrinkles.”

  “What wrinkles?”

  “I determined that it might not be best to tell him, or the others, straight off that you are a Negro.”

  He nodded, waited for me to go on. Then he asked, “How did you plan to hide that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I felt as if I were about to leap from a tall perch into a very small pool of water. Nothing for it but to jump. “I told him that you’re a Mexican.”

  He looked at me as if I were joking.

  “I have heard you speak Spanish, on the street . . .”

  “But . . .” he began, then he stopped, squinted at me. “I wasn’t speaking real Spanish.”

  “I know that. Listen,” I said, “this is merely to get your foot in the door. I don’t want to start by encountering some resistance that we could easily avoid.”

  We went back and forth about it and slowly teased out the rest of the plan. In addition to presenting him to the others as a Mexican—named “Juan García”—we determined that as an extra element of disguise he would meet them already blacked up. We encountered only one major impasse in the original plan: he did not like the idea of stepping onstage for one song and then leaving, as Mulligan and I had discussed. I told him that one song was the limit of what Mulligan would agree to. After some argument, he suggested that he be onstage from the beginning of the second half, seated until “noticed” and called upon to prove his prowess. As a refinement, we established that he would be mute the entire time. In tribute to his nonverbal eloquence we would call him Demosthenes Jones.

  Was this entire idea brazen, and perhaps unhinged? Yes. Yes it was. But suddenly the predictable continuum of the everyday was replaced by a set of effervescent possibilities, and that, I suppose, was what I had been addicted to my entire life. The process was intoxicating, as music was. It was all just plausible enough to seem workable and practical. And what, I asked myself, was the worst that could happen?

  Letting Rose in on Henry’s identity was unavoidable; he needed to be fitted for his outfit, so there was no way around it. Or perhaps it was in fact avoidable, yet I needed to share the secret of my plan with someone, and the idea of a complicity with Rose was too attractive to deny. Of course it was a risk, yet I had a strong intuitive notion that it would be all right, and that she could be trusted with the secret. By this time, Rose and I had become . . . not friends, exactly, but we had a certain comfort with each other that comes from understanding that neither person’s boundaries would be tested further. Still, I thought to check with her first on the question.

  “Rose,” I said, “we are going to need an outfit for a guest performer, but his identity needs to be kept secret. Even from the fellows.”

  “All right, James,” she said, stitching carefully.

  “Listen, Rose,” I said. “I need to be certain that you will keep the secret.”

  She looked up at me for a moment as if to see whether I were joking. “Do you imagine I can’t keep a secret?”

  “Well . . .” I began.

  “I would win medals at it, if they awarded them,” she said. Then she added, “You would be my only serious competition.”

  “Then I’ll ask you this: Do you have antipathies toward Chinamen, Negroes, Mexicans, or other foreigners?”

  Now she looked hard at me. “I take people as I find them, James.” Her look of reproach made me confident that I could import Henry without causing uneasiness in her.

  Two days later, in the late morning, Henry met me at the theater so that Rose could take his measurements and get to work making a costume. She was wearing a simple frock, and she had on a washwoman’s bandanna, tied around her head. But this touch had the paradoxical effect of making her seem even more elegant than usual.

  “I bought some embossed satin for the costume,” she said. “The receipt’s on your desk. I’m going to make a turban with the leftovers. Maybe you’ll let me play an Arab princess.”

  “I’ll conduct the audition privately,” I said, flirting back with her.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “why don’t we get Henry fitted?”

  Henry was standing back in the shadows; I turned and threw him a quizzical look. He stepped forward, and I said, “This is Henry. But we are going to do a little routine for the boys, so think of him, for now, as Juan.”

  He stood there, wordless, with his hands in his trouser pockets. Rose was frowning. I worried that I might have misjudged Rose’s willingness to accept a Negro, but the worry passed when she spoke.

  “Aren’t you hot in that flannel?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s chilly in here.”

  “Is it?” she said.

  There ensued an awkward silence, which I broke by suggesting that we get Henry measured, and we proceeded to Rose’s workroom.

  Once there, Henry submitted to the usual measurements. Rose showed me the bolt of glossy light-green satin, embossed with shiny stripes, which I agreed would be perfect.

  “Well,” she said, “what kind of routine are you preparing?”

  I explained about the Spanish masquerade, and she laughed.

  “Do you speak Spanish?” she asked Henry.

  “Not really,” he said. “Just a type of joke Spanish.”

  “He sounds absolutely like a Mexican,” I said.

  “Let me hear!”

  Henry let out a sentence, something on the or
der of “Dos manicómios de jueves éstaban ricos con la segura . . .” with a kind of insouciant authority that would have been quite convincing to anyone who did not know Spanish.

  “What did he say?” Rose asked, turning to me as if Henry would not understand the question.

  “He said, ‘The sky turns red when the turnips are in the basement.’”

  Henry laughed at this, and so did Rose.

  “Close enough?” I said.

  “Close enough,” he said.

  We discussed a few more details of the costume, and Rose was all business. At the end of our discussion she wished us good luck with our routine and said the costume would be ready in a few days, as soon as she got the Uncle Tom suit altered for Powell. This was fine, as we were just shy of two weeks away from Henry’s debut.

  Henry and I quit the theater. I had errands to run, and we walked a ways together along Arch Street. Henry asked me for Rose’s name, and I told him.

  “Didn’t I introduce you?” I asked.

  He told me I hadn’t, and he added that he had never seen a woman with hair that short before.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s unlike anyone else.”

  “Is she your sweetheart?”

  He wore a slight smile as he asked this. I did not know whether to laugh out loud or to cuff him. It was not the kind of question one asked. And it touched a sore spot in me, of course.

  “No,” I said, rather curtly. “She is kept by one of the troupe. Eagan.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kept’?”

  “I mean,” I said, “maintained. Paid for, housed, clothed, and whatever else you might imagine, in exchange for his pleasure.”

  This came out more harshly than I had intended, although it was certainly the truth. I glanced at Henry and saw an expression of gloom settle over his features, a brooding look, almost angry. I thought that he must be quite an innocent to have had no experience or awareness of such an arrangement. Our paths diverged at the next corner, and Henry mumbled his goodbye and walked off under a cloud, carrying his banjo.

  I let the others know that we would be adding an extra attraction for one number in the second part, on Saturday two weekends hence. There was curiosity and more or less happy acceptance from Powell and Burke; as they never heard the other acts in advance, they were satisfied to accept my brief précis of the situation. Mulligan, of course, had already been apprised, and he kept his own counsel, although I sensed from his facial expression that his misgivings had had time to breed and perhaps ferment in the days since our conversation. Eagan on the other hand, would not let it alone.

  “I had the idea that this troupe was a collaborative venture,” he said.

  “What makes you doubt it, Michael?” I said.

  “Some of us are now privy to a mystery, for which the troupe as a whole is footing the bill. And a Mexican, in the bargain. Who is this fellow, anyway? I suppose the troupes of Austrians were not enough. At least they are white men.”

  “I am paying for this out of my personal receipts, Eagan,” I said. “So you needn’t worry about the impact on our finances. And in what way does his color weigh on the discussion, Brother Scamp?”

  This question stopped him momentarily, although he recovered himself enough to mutter, “I don’t care for intrigue.”

  It was only with the greatest effort that I was able to restrain myself from mentioning his own arrangement with Rose in this connection, but I did restrain myself, and the matter of Juan García was allowed to rest, for the moment, without further discussion.

  And I waited for the day to arrive, full of anticipation. So much depended upon the success of our scheme. I knew nothing about Henry, really, nor did he appear to care who I was or where I had come from. The point of our intersection, the plan we had improvised, the music we made, was what mattered. How lucky we were, I thought, to have the theater. What would any of us do if we did not have these roles to play? If you could truly see into the face in the mirror . . . well, who among us would willingly do that? And if we knew who stood next to us at the market, or who passed us on the street, who sat beside us in the theater, if every grave could speak, as in the old ballads, we might not be able to bear living. We never do truly know what others think. And may it please God they never learn what is in our own black hearts.

  PART

  II

  5

  In the still of the day the horse carried him slowly along the graded path under the elms, past the quarters toward the mansion house. Dragonflies hovered and zagged in the shimmering heat. The few slaves he passed averted their gaze. The rifle in the hide sheath; the turned, whitish eye. Nobody could have mistaken him for good luck.

  He had been summoned and had come in his own good time. Stephens he knew by reputation, as he knew most of the planters in the area. A drunk with pretensions, a notorious libertine with a big library of books, so he’d heard. And a succession of slave mistresses whom he kept like wives until he tired of them and turned them out, either for sale or to the fields. Nothing very unusual about that, except for the artifice of keeping them dressed well and living in the house. Tull had heard that Stephens had taught two of them to read. Or had someone teach them. The real wife, the white one, had died some years back.

  The man’s house boy had been gone five months. Stephens placed newspaper advertisements, had handbills printed and posted both locally in Virginia and in Northern cities, increased his reward offer, all to no avail. And had finally sent a message to him, enlisting his aid. It was, he would have been the first to admit, a last resort. Not only because of the expense—a daily allowance in addition to travel funds and incidentals, along with the reward money itself—but because of who and what he was. No respectable person would have much to do with Tull Burton. Especially not a lace-curtain bitch like this James Stephens.

  Stories about Burton were his calling cards. Three years earlier, a strong and unbroken slave named Silas had run off from Fontainebleau Plantation, twenty miles to the south, and was rumored to be hiding in a swampy tract of woods another ten miles out. The plantation overseer would not go after him, and the master, a fop in green velvet, had sent for Burton. With two accomplices and two dogs, Tull had tracked the runaway into the deep woods and found him in a tree, from which he refused to descend.

  Tull had been through it before, and he always felt anger at the runaways’ refusal to acknowledge the nature of the situation, at the waste of time and energy, the forestalling of the inevitable. It was an overcast day, chilly and disagreeable to begin with.

  “Come on down, Silas,” Tull said. “You’re going home one way or another.”

  “I don’t have to talk to you,” the runaway said.

  “You’re going to suffer more than you need to,” Tull said. “Get down now.”

  “Shit on your mother, drunk.”

  Tull nodded. To one of his men he said, “Start a fire over there,” indicating a spot ten yards away. The man handed his dog’s leash to the other assistant and went to gather some sticks.

  “I don’t drink, Silas,” Tull said, pulling his rifle out of the sheath that hung alongside his saddle.

  “I don’t have to talk to no white man,” the runaway hollered, his voice on the edge of hysteria. “I’m going to Cleveland, or either Mexico . . .”

  To his second man, Tull said, “Tie the dogs to the wagon and get ready to grab him.” The other had gotten the fire started.

  “I’m not working no more, and I’m not getting whipped, and your mama likes when I stick it in . . .”

  Aiming for the runaway’s shoulder, Tull fired one shot, which hit the mark and caused the slave to lose his purchase on one of the limbs to which he clung. Hanging on with his other arm, he struggled to get a leg up over the limb. Tull aimed again and fired, and this time after a brief and futile twist of his torso the slave fell to the ground, making a gurgling sound, an animal sound, angry, pig-eyed . . .

  The two men lunged and grabbed him.

  “Ohhh,
” he hollered. “White man died on the cross for me . . .”

  Tull approached, bent down, and forced a dirty saddle rag into his mouth.

  “See, nigger? You were right. You don’t have to say a thing.” Grunts, struggling. “Pull down those rags.” The breeches, secured by a length of worn and greasy rope. The man who had built the fire got them undone and yanked them down, exposing the runaway’s rubbery, flopping genitals. “You sure stink, nigger,” Tull said. “You ought to take a bath.” Tull pulled out his hunting knife and, saying only “Hold him,” grabbed and stretched the penis and cut it off at the root. The runaway emitted a choked scream from behind the wadded rag in his mouth; his eyes rolled back in his head.

  Tull tossed the wad of flesh onto the ground by the dogs then walked to the fire and held the tip of the knife blade in the flame for fifteen seconds, turning it on either side. He walked back and, saying “Hold him steady,” cauterized the nub as the unfortunate man in his care writhed and twisted.

  “Now see, nigger? I let you keep your balls. You like to talk so much, why don’t you say thank you? My Mama is sure gonna miss that thing.” Drawing back his boot, Tull kicked the writhing man as hard as he could in the side, driving it into the slave’s lower ribs, and they all heard the snapping sound.

  “Now put him on his stomach and get him tied,” Tull said. “Throw him in the wagon when you got him right. I didn’t finish my lunch.”

  The group arrived back at Fontainebleau late in the afternoon. As they approached the mansion house, Tull told one of the field hands watching the procession to run and get Master real quick. They pulled over by the stable area. Five minutes later, Master Arthur came sauntering down the path to where they were. He was well turned out—immaculate white breeches, a green velvet waistcoat, and a lace scarf at the neck, setting off his puffy pink face. Tull watched him with disgust.

  “Yes,” Master Arthur said. “I see you have brought me something.” The slightly brusque heartiness masking a degree of impatience, or perhaps nervousness.