He looked for a long time at a mummified Chippewa Indian standing inside the largest glass cabinet he had ever seen. Most of his fellow onlookers agreed that the Indian, except for the glass eyes, was real, but Ben had his doubts. Next to the mummy, also standing, was an Indian horse club, which looked authentic to Ben—it was like a cricket bat wound with red leather string, the leather forming a thong that held a spherical stone the size of a cricket ball tight against the tip of the blade end. He returned to the lecture hall for a show that featured “Sioux Indians”—alive but unquestionably fake—performing tomahawk combat and paddling a birchbark and cedar-strip canoe back and forth in a long, narrow tank of water onstage. Swinging from “vines” (ropes dyed chartreuse) above and among the Indians was a howling ochre-skinned Wild Man of the Prairies, an acrobatic actor known as Signor Hervio Naño, who had tiny legs and wore a fur and leather costume. Ben had understood that the prairies mostly lacked trees, and thus vines.
On his second visit to the museum, he returned to the lecture hall to watch a brief interview with “Kaspar Hauser,” the celebrated Prussian “wild boy” who was supposed to have been murdered fifteen years earlier. Now a wild man, this Kaspar was in fact Signor Naño, minus the orange paint but clad in the identical fur and leather and wearing a hat.
On his third afternoon at Barnum’s, Ben happened to see the beau (or husband) of the tall, blond, beguiling girl from the Astor House dining room. He spied on him as the fellow examined a diorama of a New York blaze that had, according to the label, burned 241 buildings in 1845. And then a bit later in the basement shooting gallery, he was firing a percussion-cap pistol when Ben arrived. Ben paid fifteen cents to try his hand at what the attendant had described as “an exclusive prototype of Mr. Sharps’s amazing new breech-loading rifle” that used paper cartridges and enabled “a trained shooter to fire ten balls in a minute.” The scar-faced young stranger glanced over, fired once more from his little pistol, and quickly left the gallery.
FATTY FREEBORN NEVER considered himself lucky. He had always had to fight and grabble and scrooge for any measly advantage. The night that two strokes of luck presented themselves inside of a minute in Greene Street, he was quick to exploit the first but slower to recognize the other.
It was his turn to work the ovens alone all night at the Enggas Bakery. Around midnight, waiting for the last of the morning bread to bake, he had fashioned a game for himself, hurling a knife at every rat he saw running through the kitchen, then drinking a swig of rye each time he retrieved the knife. (In fact, the parade of rats consisted of only two, running back and forth along different paths, every time escaping Fatty’s throws.) By three in the morning his bottle was finished; when he awoke at half past four, lying on a mattress of six dozen warm white loaves, he couldn’t even remember having taken the bread out of the ovens. He shoveled the squashed and dirty-crusted breads into a bin, locked up the bakery, and stumbled out to head home.
Ten yards ahead in Greene Street was a woman in a dress with big flounces around the neck and hem, walking with her back to him. Her bonnet was askew. Given the hour, Fatty figured she was a whore. When she stopped to take off the bonnet and retie it, he thought her hair looked very short. And then he realized who it was—Bottle Alley Sally, the punk nance rigged up with the fake cunt. By the time Sally heard Fatty lumbering up from behind, it was futile to run, especially in his ladies’ heels.
The whiskey bottle didn’t break when it slammed against the side of the boy’s head, and didn’t break as Fatty whaled it against his lower back after he fell, moaning, to the sidewalk. Fatty was deciding whether to lift up the dress and rip open the drawers to see if his pal Charlie had been telling the truth about the raw pork when two other young men, Negroes, sprang from behind the swill tub where they had been hiding across the street, next door to the bakery.
Fatty, surprised and confused, started to run, then turned and threw the bottle in the Negroes’ direction. It shattered against the swill tub, but by then the two men were already scrambling into the cellar of No. 94. A hand holding a lantern closed the door quickly behind them. The light in the cellar was extinguished. Burglars at the rich widow lady’s house, Fatty thought. He had no desire to get mixed up in such a mess, so he turned away from the nance, who was spitting blood between sobs, and went on his way.
23
May 9, 1848
New York City
BEN HAD ALREADY seen more plays in two weeks than he had attended during the last six months in England, including one he had meant to see in London, This House to Be Sold: (The Property of the Late William Shakespeare) Inquire Within, featuring Shakespeare and his most famous characters singing and dancing together. Theaters became his fixed destinations at the end of each long day of wandering. He enjoyed the crowds—and such crowds: four thousand people the night before last at the Broadway. He had always paid for a box in London, but here he was happy being jostled by hoi polloi in the shilling seats. He liked the warm, oily “peeeeeanuts” sold by the strolling vendors; he had never tasted one before. And he also found that his new life, so thoroughly uncluttered (not to say empty and feckless) and filled with solitude (not to say loneliness), predisposed him to believe much more easily in the stories and characters depicted onstage.
Theater in America seemed devoted to blurring the distinctions between the players and the ticket holders. At the first play he attended, How to Settle Accounts with Your Laundress, he was shocked when members of the audience started whistling and yelling and stamping their feet during the performance, and when they tossed nuts and a lit firecracker onto the stage, and when they shouted not only praise and ridicule at the actors and actresses but advice to the characters.
The playwrights and performers did their parts as well. During A Glance at New York, a stew of comedy and drama about raucous young workingmen that Ben had seen last week, the hero started to leave the stage to join a fictitious brawl when the actor playing his friend stopped him, pointed out at the audience, and said, “Mose…remember them?” Whereupon Mose turned and delivered an aside: “Look here, ladies and gentlemen, don’t be down on me because I’m going to leave you…I’ll scare up this crowd again tomorrow night, and then you can take another glance at New York!” And that was the end of the play. At the Drury Lane in London, the managers had started charging £20 to watchmakers and tailors to paint advertisements on the scenery flats, but Ben had never seen any play conclude with a winking advertisement for itself.
He had been eager to sample all of the indigenous extravaganzas. In London, two or three minstrel shows appeared during an entire season. Here he discovered that he could, if he had wished, attend a different one every night for weeks. He saw Cool White and the Congo Melodists. He saw an Othello in which the star, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, embraced a white-powdered white man in a wig and a dress playing Desdemona and used a raccoon skin for a handkerchief. Ben was delighted by Rice’s new ending for the play—instead of committing suicide, this Othello impregnates Desdemona and they live happily ever after, their baby’s face painted half white and half black.
But as he watched a matinee performance by Christy’s Original Band of Virginia Minstrels, he found himself bored listening to still more banjo-playing, bone-rattling, and tambourine-shaking, watching another breakdown dancer waving his limbs like a marionette, listening to yet another strenuously satirical “Negro lecture” (this afternoon on “The Joys of Communism”) and another too-antic rendition of “O, Susanna”…
I jumped aboard the telegraph
And trabbled down de ribber,
De lectrick fluid magnified,
And kill’d five hundred Nigga.
He was even bored by his own continuing attempts to decipher the lyrics. (Did the Negro singer somehow murder five hundred fellow Negroes? Or did they drown in the Mississippi? Or did the electricity in the telegraph wire kill them? And were the journey and the deaths literal or metaphorical?) Bored in America! Not two weeks ago he would
have considered such a thing impossible.
As he stepped out of Mechanics’ Hall at the second interval in Christy’s Minstrels’ show, he encountered the bearded journalist he had met aboard the America, now struggling to enter with a large wooden box and a complicated folding tripod. Ben was very pleased to see him. Perhaps in this country where he knew nobody, a sympathetic acquaintance did count as a full-fledged friend.
“Sir! Well, hallo!”
As Ben held the door open, Skaggs passed through and continued speaking.
“I received your kind note proposing we meet, and let me apologize for the lack of reply—my secretary has not attended to the social correspondence for days…weeks…probably years by now.”
“Christy’s show is nearly over, I’m afraid,” Ben said.
“Oh, I’ve not come for the ridiculousness onstage—I’m here to practice my own foolish art.”
“You—you—as well as a newspaper reporter you are a minstrel performer?”
Skaggs chuckled. He explained to Ben that he worked as a reporter only occasionally these days, and that photography was now his true profession. He had wheedled an appointment to take pictures of Mr. Christy and his troupe, in the little alley-yard behind the theater.
“May I help carry your things? I hadn’t any idea so much equipment was required,” Ben said.
“I am sure you have far more pressing business this afternoon, but I should be delighted to have you join me.”
In the dressing room, Skaggs introduced Ben to Christy as his “well-known colleague Mr. Knowles of Mayfair,” and announced his intention to make not one but two portraits of the minstrels—one right away, in which Christy and the other players would remain blacked up—and another after they washed off the blacking, for which they would pose identically, in costume, as white men. “Mr. Knowles tells me that in London,” he explained, concocting a lie, “the Ethiopian Serenaders have just sat for a famous portrait in Oxford Street entirely au naturel.”
And so for one afternoon in May in a hidden well of sunlight between Grand and Broome streets, Ben Knowles served as a daguerreian’s assistant. Afterward he agreed to accompany Skaggs down to his studio.
“Thirty-two,” Skaggs suddenly said, shaking his head, as they climbed into a cab.
“What’s that?”
“Christy. He told me he is only thirty-two years old.”
“I miss your point, sir. I am younger than that myself.”
“But you, my boy, are not earning a hundred dollars a day for two hours of clowning. You are not famous and beloved by the world—not, like Daddy Rice, preparing to retire at age forty with a fortune of forty-five thousand dollars. Even Christy says they are now about to change the name of Mechanics’ Hall to Christy’s American Opera House.” He sighed. “Ours is an unjust world.”
They passed a sign on the front of the theater promising, in letters two feet high, GENUINE NEGRO FUN!
“I have wondered why,” Ben asked, “there are not more Negroes singing the tunes and dancing the jigs in the shows in this nation of Negroes.”
“‘This nation of Negroes’! I might have to borrow that phrase.”
“Honestly,” Ben said, “it has surprised me that I have seen not one colored performer in the theaters here. Even in London, they nearly always include at least one true American Negro, such as Juba, or Thomas Dilward…”
“Mr. Lane”—Juba’s actual name—“is a virtuoso, better at dancing than any drunken white kickshoe in blackface. He simply cannot be denied. And Dilward has the added virtue of his dwarfism. Only if a colored man is superior to his white counterparts, by virtue of sheer talent or freakishness, is he permitted to join this new minstrels’ guild.
“As you surely know, Knowles, we Americans loathe and fear the Negro—”
“Do you, sir?”
“Not I, but Americans in the main. They despise him—but they also envy him his supposed innocence and gaiety. Slavery may be a crime against God and the American idea—indeed, it certainly is—but does the slave fret about paying his rent or paying for her children’s school or the pew at church or which fine shawl to buy? The slave is in fact free, free of every bourgeois worry. And so we pay Christy a thousand dollars a week to enact the fantasy that he is a Negro. His is the double freedom, the impossible freedom, which Americans want for themselves—the freedom of a Negro to sing and shout and dance and laugh and fornicate, but the freedom of a rich man like Christy to upbraid his bankers and live in a mansion and wear laundered clothes every day and eat roast beef every night. We democrats want to live as aristocrats.”
“You have considered this question before, I take it.”
Skaggs smiled. “I have, sir.” He liked Knowles. “A piece I wrote in a magazine last year provoked a mammoth rumpus. I proposed that a special tax be imposed on the minstrel shows to subsidize the costs of operating the Colored Sailors’ Home, the Colored Orphan Asylum, and a House of Refuge for Colored Juvenile Delinquents. And I suggested that this craze among whites for impersonating Negroes is part of a secret abolitionist plot to blur the differences between the races.”
Ben gave him a doubtful look.
“The second notion was satirical,” Skaggs explained, “although neither the local abolitionists nor the Negro-haters appreciated my comic intentions. And, indeed, I have come to think I may have been more correct than I realized. Left, sir,” he said to the driver, pointing across Broadway.
“So you are no devotee? Of minstrelsy?”
“I confess I am not, no.” He looked at Ben. “As a young mechanic I know puts it,” he said, quoting Duff, “‘nigger-singing in the theaters is too mean and disrespectful to the real niggers.’”
In London, minstrel shows had seemed to Ben charming, prankish, good-natured celebrations of black Americans and America itself.
“Perhaps you are not aware, sir,” Skaggs continued, “that Delaware, a ten-hour coach ride from where we sit, is a proud slave state. Right here across the river in New Jersey they abolished slavery only months ago. In liberal Connecticut they permit it still, as they do in New Hampshire, the province from which I escaped as a boy.” Even today, whenever his father launched one of his diatribes against New York City’s immorality, Skaggs would reply by asking his father how the last remaining slave in New Hampshire was faring these days.
“And therefore shenanigans such as Mr. Christy’s,” Ben said, “offend you. I understand.”
“‘Offend’ me? A word I seldom use. Indeed, have never used, as best I recall. But even given my rickety moral compass, these lampoons of black men performed in a nation where black men are still bought and sold…fail to amuse me much.”
“Do you know slave-owning men?”
Skaggs shook his head. “I drank with one once at Niagara Falls, where a colony of plantationists summers. A Mr. Martin, from Alabama—Athens, Alabama, I shall never forget, because Mr. Martin took pains to remind me that the glories of ancient Athens depended upon slavery.”
Even now, Skaggs explained, slaves who fled north to New York were often apprehended and returned like stray livestock to their owners in the South.
Ben felt guilty and foolish. His father’s and Philip’s critiques of the United States had only redoubled Ben’s adoration. He was pleased to have an American friend to enlighten him about America’s flaws and impurities…which, he realized, he had hardly considered before. He recalled what Ashby had often said in defense of himself or others after some wanton behavior: To be pure is to be uncomplicated, and to be uncomplicated is to be a cretin or a trout or some inanimate thing. Ben’s love for America had been like a boy’s infatuation with an actress or a princess from afar.
“Thank you, Mr. Skaggs.”
“My good God! Timothy Skaggs providing ethical guidance. This must remain our secret.”
24
May 10, 1848
New York City
BEN HAD ALREADY seen one New York Hamlet—a production starring the young son of the
English émigré actor Junius Brutus Booth—but he had read for years about the odd American theatrical fashion for “infant wonders,” and so now he prepared to watch his second Hamlet in as many weeks. And was already regretting the choice. The woman next to him reeked so strongly of otto of rose that he considered changing seats. And as soon as the curtain lifted—with comic speed, as always in America—he found the show embarrassing for everyone concerned. The oldest boy on the stage was eleven. The lines were recited as Shakespeare wrote them, and the actors performed earnestly, but most of the audience chuckled and hooted as if the play were a comedy, laughing at the boys’ terror when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared. Local custom did not oblige audience members to remain in their seats for a full act, and Ben was tempted to walk out. He hesitated too long after the first scene ended, however, and settled himself for the second to begin.
How odd, he thought, that only Claudius and Gertrude and the ghost of Hamlet’s father were played by adults, and he wondered about the rationale, speculating that the implicit carnal liaisons would offend American sensibilities if those parts were performed by children—
The woman! From the Astor House two weeks ago! She is Queen Gertrude!
Was it truly? With her heavy makeup and gray-powdered hair, in the glare of limelight, he wasn’t certain…but then she took her place downstage and turned to face the audience. It was she, the tall, electrifying girl from the Astor House, the young woman he had mused about every busy day and lonely night since. An actress! It made sense. He reached into his pocket for his playbill with such haste that he elbowed the sweet-stinking woman on his left.
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