A Free State

by Tom Piazza

  PART

  III

  8

  Word of the new attraction at Barton’s spread immediately. We were not able to add Henry to the official program until the following week because of a contract with a brother-and-sister singing team from Kreutbaden, ten-year-old twins with whose management—that is, their parents—we had signed a very Prussian contract. Our audiences made their impatience felt, and we had special posters printed up and notices placed, proclaiming the return of Demosthenes Jones on the next weekend.

  There were logistical questions to work out. The problem of how to get Henry in and out of the theater with his banjo without drawing attention I partially solved by acquiring a second banjo for him that we would keep at Barton’s. He would not leave his own banjo there; he liked playing it at night, he said, and practicing. We agreed, early on, that he would stop playing on the streets, as well. The possibility that someone might note a similarity between his street-corner prowess and the new sensation at Barton’s was too much to risk.

  Backstage, however, the masquerade began to unravel quickly. Mulligan, for his part, seemed to calm down a bit after Henry’s second appearance. In fact, afterward I saw him place his hand on Henry’s shoulder and say a few warm words. Henry forgot himself, smiled, and said “Thank you” in English. Eagan’s misgivings, however, gave him, and me, no rest. A question here (“Why doesn’t the fellow black up with us?”), a remark there (“Standoffish, isn’t he?”), and it became clear that the others would need to be included in the masquerade. The risks in this were obvious, but it was unavoidable. So I called a meeting the week after Henry’s second appearance, an extra hour before our usual arrival time. Henry would be a weekend attraction, exclusively, and this was a Tuesday.

  At that meeting I told the basics of what I knew about Henry, and how I had encountered him. There was less surprise than I had anticipated, and more concern than I wanted. Burke asked about legal ramifications to our presenting a Negro, should the word somehow get out. I replied that we would be in a dubious situation if Henry’s identity were generally known.

  “Would we be shut down?” Powell asked.

  “I am not certain,” I replied, disingenuously. “But there is no question that we are running a risk, and I want to make sure that we are all agreed to continue as long as it seems sensible.”

  “If things are so dubious as they stand,” Eagan said, “why are we taking this risk? Why don’t we get rid of him now, before the audience comes to expect it without fail?”

  “He’s a great performer,” Powell said.

  “Isn’t Mulligan more than enough of a banjo player?” Eagan said.

  “That is not the question, Eagan,” I said. “We have been in a hole. We’ve been drowning in yodelers and glass harmonica players, and our audiences have been dwindling. I assume you’ve noticed. And I assume you noticed the audience’s reaction to Henry, and that you want the troupe to survive . . .”

  I was about to add that our receipts had risen by approximately 30 percent in the past week alone, and every sign indicated that the trend would continue. But before I managed to get this out, to my great surprise, Mulligan jumped in, addressing Eagan.

  “Michael,” he said, “I will say this—the audiences love him. Even if there were something swampy about the law, the authorities cannot be unaware of his popularity. Barton certainly isn’t. We have paid off city officials before, if I am not mistaken.” I would not have expected Mulligan, of all of them, to rise in Henry’s defense.

  “Yes, well, do we know anything about him?” Eagan said, reddening. “He might be a criminal. He might be contraband . . .”

  Both Powell and Mulligan jumped in with the obvious rejoinder that a fugitive from justice would hardly be likely to take refuge on a theater stage.

  It came to a vote, and Mulligan led off with his strong support; Powell and Burke predictably followed him, and Eagan finally, and grudgingly, gave in, but not before leaving a muttered protest in his wake. “Mark my words: You are borrowing trouble.”

  Afterward I took Mulligan aside. “John,” I said, “you surprised me in there.”

  “I like the fellow,” he said. “And he is a real artist. I know you think I am fairly puffed-up on my own account, but someone who achieves his level of skill—one supports him. There is no competition there.”

  “Well . . .” I began.

  “And Eagan is insufferable.”

  “He is, isn’t he,” I said.

  Mulligan was pulling at his mustache. “But let’s work up some type of number where we might both be featured. I would enjoy that.”

  Surprise, again. “I think that would be grand.”

  Absently, he repeated, “I’d like that very much.”

  Henry, for his part, was not slow to bring up the matter of the promised increase in his fee. After a considerable bit of wrestling we agreed that he would receive eight dollars for his next week’s appearance. But he insisted that if he were to continue appearing he would have to receive ten dollars for each appearance.

  “That is nearly what Mulligan makes,” I said, before I thought better of it. “I won’t hear of it.”

  “Mulligan does seven performances per week.”

  “Six,” I replied. “And he is the cofounder. And anyway what of it?”

  “We agreed that I need to stop playing on the street. Someone might realize I’m the same person.” We had, indeed, already settled this point. “I can’t survive on eight dollars a week.”

  “How much do you make on the street?” I said.

  “Twenty dollars,” he said, perfectly straight-faced.

  I laughed, returned his stare, and said, “You ought to make your living playing cards. You have a strong enough stomach for a bluff!” To his credit, he laughed at this, and I went on: “If we add you for a second weekend night, and I think we will, I will pay you seven dollars and fifty cents per evening, for the two evenings.”

  He looked excited by this for a moment, before he remembered himself and summoned a doubtful look.

  “You will be making fifteen dollars each week for two nights’ work,” I said, “instead of playing out on the street in all weather, with no guarantee of any income whatsoever.”

  He hemmed and he hawed, and I thought he must have Scots blood in him somewhere, but finally he agreed.

  Thus did Henry Sims become a member, or an associate, of the Virginia Harmonists. To our songs and jokes, our foolery and whimsy, Henry added an edge of something else, a wildness—a vein of madness, even, or so it appeared to some—wedded to a brilliantly honed musical ability that seemed to ride the very edge of control. He was addicted to improvisation, and every night he threw something different into the mix, and it kept us off balance in a way that brought the performances to life.

  If for months before his advent, we had struggled to remain a solid and reliable offering among many similar offerings, we were now once again the sensation of the town.

  I cannot say that Henry and I became friends, exactly, but our rehearsals at my apartments became increasingly cordial—so much so that I allowed myself to wonder, now and again, where he had in fact come from, and who he was. I did not know, aside from a chance remark here and there, much of anything about my colleagues’ innermost thoughts, or feelings—whether Mulligan felt lonely, or Burke speculated about the nature of the afterlife, or Powell kept letters from his first love. We agreed implicitly to keep our interactions confined to one plane only.

  But in the weeks previous, Henry and I had shared such a sense of conspiratorial satisfaction that my ignorance about his background had begun to stand out in an odd relief. Although he was guarded in many ways, enigmatic, yet there was in him something that he kept alive, as if he had found some freedom for himself not only onstage but in life itself, and that spark brought out something in me, as well, part of which was an unaccustomed curiosity.

  “Where did you learn to play music?” I asked. “Were your parents musicians?”


  It was a fine afternoon, at my apartments, three weeks after his first appearance at the theater. I was already thinking of ways to broaden his participation in the program, and we had run through various scenarios. While rehearsing, we had played with a peculiar intensity and wordless communication; our understanding seemed perfect, even transcendent.

  Why I chose that moment to ask him such a question, I am not sure. But I did.

  He did not answer immediately, but finally he said, “No. Were yours?”

  “My father played the violin,” I said, “and those are my best memories of him.”

  “What’s wrong with your other memories?”

  I told him a bit about the mill, and then the farm, my brothers, the sheer boredom of it all. My father, and my mother, the disappointment inside her. He listened with an intense and, I believe, unfeigned interest.

  “Is that why you don’t play the violin?” he asked.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Do you never see your mother?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Where are your parents? You were not raised in Philadelphia.”

  “No,” he said.

  I waited for him to say more. He shifted restlessly on the divan, and then he started speaking. He told me he’d been raised “up north,” near Boston. His family had a small farm, but his father died when Henry was quite young. His aunt lived with him and his mother, and they fared as well as they could, but they fell on hard times. Then a new man entered his mother’s life and became his stepfather. Henry said he was used badly by this man, and was sent away to a boarding school. But it was a hard place, and when Henry returned home his stepfather, and his stepfather’s sister, who sounded like quite a harridan, were so mean to him, and had driven such a wedge between himself and his beloved mother, that he resolved to run away, which he did.

  I listened to it all with some astonishment. It was the stuff of novels, really. I had not been aware that boarding schools were available for Negroes.

  “But where did you learn the banjo?” I asked. “How did you acquire your repertoire?”

  “I lived with my uncle,” he said. “He played with a circus, played all kinds of music. He showed me the banjo. He knew all the songs. I traveled with the circus.”

  “The circus!” I said. “I was on the road with Kimball’s for years before I came here. What troupe were you with?”

  He had a minor coughing fit, which alarmed me, but he recovered enough to say, “Nettles’.”

  I had not heard of them, but there were so many troupes that I did not wonder at it, and I had been out of that world for several years. I was going to ask him more about the troupe, but he preempted me by asking about the farm where I’d grown up. I told him a few more things, and I mentioned that I had changed my name, and that my family wouldn’t have known how to find me if they’d wanted to. “I was born James MacDougall,” I said. “I changed my name to Douglass when I joined the circus.”

  He raised himself on one elbow to look at me, and began laughing. I found this somewhat annoying, and I asked him why he found this funny. “Haven’t you ever wanted to become someone other than you are?”

  “I thought about it,” he said, getting himself under control. “I was given a different name anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man my mother married,” he said.

  “You took his name?”

  “Only for a while,” he said.

  I was not sure what he meant by that, but I didn’t follow it up. Only later, as the weeks went by and we became more familiar, did I begin to allow myself to question the truth of his account.

  I was spending more time at the theater during the days. With our popularity again in the ascendant, there was always correspondence, bills, production details, conferences with Birch on this or that bit of property deployment or stage construction. About half the time Rose would be there, working, and usually I would stop in and sit for a while with her, converse about this or that. I liked being in her workshop, where there was so much evident attention to detail, her process laid out like the insides of a clock. We would talk about nothing in particular during these visits—weather, or any scrap of news from the papers, events, what have you.

  Every now and then I would insert a question to see if Rose would rise to the bait and offer some detail about her own life. One day, I asked where she had learned to sew so brilliantly and with such imagination. She was sewing at that moment, and she smiled and did not look up from her work.

  “When I was a girl,” she said, “I was kidnapped by a tribe of Zouaves and forced to sew saddlebags for their horses.”

  “Oh, now,” I said. “There haven’t been Zouaves in these parts for at least thirty years.”

  She laughed merrily, but she did not amend her story. Another time I asked her if she had always worn her hair short, and she told me she had had hair down to her ankles when she was a girl, but she had had to sell it to an upholsterer’s in order to make ends meet. “They made some lovely pillows with it,” she said.

  I wondered if she joked that way with Eagan. I knew better, at least, than to ask her such a question.

  One day I had spent the entire morning answering mail queries, after which I had gone out for lunch, leaving Rose there by herself. A lovely day, and not too hot. I walked all the way down to Front Street and had a meal at the Black Horse, for a change, then made my way back to Barton’s. Inside, I heard voices coming from Rose’s workroom, so I walked down to have a look.

  To my surprise, I found Henry sitting on her couch. It was not an evening when Henry would be performing, and it was disorienting to see him there. My surprise must have registered on my face, because Rose laughed and said, “James, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

  “Not really,” I said. “Is tea being served? What is the occasion?”

  “I just stopped in to say hello,” Henry said.

  “Really!” I said.

  “I have more free time now that I don’t play on the street.” He grinned, as if he had said something witty.

  “I hope you made sure not to be seen coming in.”

  “I did,” he said. “I’m good at that.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said.

  “I just now finished the outfits for ‘Lucy Long,’” Rose said. This was a routine Powell and Burke had gotten up for the first half.

  “Splendid,” I said.

  “Come in and sit with us,” Rose said.

  “I should not,” I said. “I have receipts to tally up.” Then, to Henry, “Be careful leaving.”

  Back in the dressing room, I was assailed by the most contradictory thoughts and feelings. As foolish as it seems, I was jealous. I had never been exactly jealous of Rose’s arrangement with Eagan. Dismayed, yes, but not jealous, as I was quite sure she did not love him. There was no reason to think anything left-handed was going on with Henry, of course, and yet his presence there felt like an intrusion into the order of things. And, beyond that, there was a recklessness in it. With all the effort we expended to insulate Henry from suspicion, this seemed to show bad judgment at the least. I stewed over it as my receipts sat moldering on the dressing table.

  Perhaps five minutes later, Henry appeared at the door. “You left so fast,” he said. “Why didn’t you come in?”

  “Listen,” I said, motioning for him to step in and close the door behind him, “be careful spending time with Rose. Eagan is a jealous type, and we don’t want him getting the wrong idea.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No!” I said. “Of course not. Just remember that we could be fined or closed down if word got out to the public that you’re not one of us.”

  He narrowed his eyes as if he were trying to discern some underlying meaning to what I had said, and I saw that I had hurt his feelings.

  “I’m just saying to keep alert, is all,” I said. “For ev
eryone’s sake.”

  “I stay alert,” he said. “I’m always alert.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  We exchanged a few more awkward phrases, and then he left.

  I had no basis for any odd feelings whatsoever, and I did my best to ignore them as they swarmed. But I soon had something much larger to worry about.

  On Thursday afternoon I was at the theater, sifting through paperwork, when I heard a knocking from the general direction of the stage door. I ignored it at first, but as it persisted, I got up to see who it was. The box office was open, out front, so I had no idea who this might be.

  When I got there I saw a figure standing at the door who sent a chill through me. Tall, dressed rather crudely, thin, with a cotton eye turned out perhaps thirty degrees to the side. He wore a hideous brimmed hat made of some sort of oily-looking leather.

  I asked how I might help him.

  He said, “I’d like to speak to the proprietor, if I might.”

  “Did you inquire at the box office? The theater isn’t open yet.”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling slightly. “They told me to come around back here.”

  “What does this concern?”

  “Are you the proprietor?”

  “I am the manager of the Virginia Harmonists,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” he said. He had an unpleasant smile, a kind of sneer that curled his upper lip. “Can I come in?”

  I had absolutely no reason, nor desire, to invite this man inside, and I said, “I am in the middle of working at the moment. Please state your business.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve been hired to find and return contraband, ran off from Virginia. He’s a musician and I’m checking with theaters to see if they might know anything.”

  “Negroes aren’t allowed onstage in Philadelphia.”

  “Yeah,” he said, chuckling as if I had said something amusing. “I know that. But I figured maybe he’d want to be around theaters. So nobody has turned up looking for work?”

  “No,” I said.

  The man squinted at me, with that curled-lip smile. “You sure about that?”