Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  Another place where it was said you could find the really vintage dirt was across the river at the old slave burial ground on President’s Island. One night in a “borried” johnboat, with both brothers paddling furiously while I bailed with a coffee tin, we actually attempted the rough passage. Before the current turned us back, we saw how the cemetery had been desecrated by the flood. How the high water had performed a kind of postmortem emancipation, robbing the graves of their rotting cypress caskets, setting them free in a bobbing skeleton fleet.

  Sometimes we might be sent to the root doctor after the cure for a lady’s ailment, such as the bedevilment or the piss-out-of-a-dozen-holes disease. We might be sent after the remedy for having swallowed (as they say) a watermelon seed. Frequently we were endowed for these journeys with some article sacred to the lady in question: an unlaundered intimate garment or the flap of a boyfriend’s union suit, materials that would be useful in the manufacture of an effective medicine mojo. Then we would set out through the quarter east of Mambo’s, past Wellington, into what Lucifer called the rat cellar of Beale Street. That’s where you saw the dogtrot shacks in their barren garden plots, the fallen chimneys and tilted pump handles like buried saber hilts. You saw neolithic chassis stranded on cinder blocks, eroded vertical landscapes of crazy quilts, children peeping out from under barrel lids. You saw children wearing croker sacks like cocoons they couldn’t shed.

  The root doctor, Washington Legba A-men by name, lived alone in a rattling antebellum mansion at the farthest reach of Beale. The house, along with several others still standing, had been abandoned, according to Lucifer, during the plague of the yellowjack: “Which it ain’t actual oughta be call yallah, cause what I’m hear, you will tend to ejackalate black.” As the wise guy had it, these ancestral residences, after the flight of their wealthy owners, had been taken over by colored who were naturally immune to your buckra infirmities. For a time, in fact, the shvartzers had actually run the city. They’d taken over the ghost hotels and worked miracles in the madhouses and hospitals. They’d worn opera hats and suede gloves, occupied box seats at the dogfights and the Piscoble church. In the evenings they’d roasted pheasants over the pyres that burned the cracker victims of the plague. Then the epidemic had ended and the quality folk returned to find the Negroes whistling somewhat smugly in their rags.

  But some of the richest never came back to reclaim their estates. Their once palatial houses fell into disrepair, and those at the far end of Beale Street in particular became the frequent subject for tales of weird goings-on.

  Dr. A-men could usually be found tending his herb patch or manipulating the colored glass bottles on his bottle tree. These he arranged the better to catch, as I understood, the energy of the spheres. (It was an activity that bore a certain resemblance to one of my grandfather’s pastimes, rearranging the branches on mystical diagrams of the Tree of Life.) At other times Dr. A-men might be out under the stars, digging in the earthworks surrounding his tumbledown house. Using a coiled coat hanger with a rag tip dipped in magnetic sand, a device he called a treasure witch, he’d divined that the original occupants had buried a fortune somewhere on the grounds. So far, however, his bewildering complex of ditches had turned up nothing but more bottles and animal bones. These latter he’d put to good use, grotesquely reconstructing them, turning the interior of his trash-appointed mansion into a museum of monsters.

  Whenever the doctor saw us coming, he perfunctorily tipped his beaver hat, revealing a head like a scorched kettle. There were cracks in the kettle that became eyes and a mouth when he spoke, then reverted back to cracks when he was silent. After he’d heard our request, he would ask us to kindly excuse him while he repaired to his “elabbatoy.” We would follow him anyway as far as a vine-tangled porch, then look through a window into a room that had seen better days, where ladies had probably entertained suitors, and fathers informed errant sons they were being disowned. There we’d see Dr. A-men poking around among his bones and the jugs that sprouted tubes like curling copper smoke.

  We would be back waiting in the yard when he returned with some inky decoction or a root shaped like a pair of frog’s legs. Making great claims for the medicinal properties of the article to hand, he might declare: “This one give me by the bad news Right Reverend Razzpeeyutin, who done had it off his longtime ladyfrien Joan a Arc, who done got it direckly from the man a the hour, that am to say his ramblin majesty High John de Conqueroo.”

  Once, at the behest of Ringworm the gambler, who tipped us papershell nuts with dimes inside, we carried a message to a hoochie-kooch dancer in Professor Miller’s All-Mahogany Revue. From a catwalk in the wings of the Palace Theater, we watched their glittering precision; we counted aloud the propeller revolutions of the tassels on their tushies, and applauded the way they dispatched with uniform high kicks the customers who tried to climb on stage. We stuck around for the amateur segment and heard one of a series of comics called Kokomo claim that his wife was so fat he had to hug her on the installment plan, so ugly that when she went to the zoo the monkeys paid to see her. But the audience shouted his punch lines before he could get them out, and the tummler, known as the Lord High Executioner, wearing a leopard-skin toga and waving a revolver, chased him off the stage. Then came a sister act announced as everybody’s favorite pair of canaries, Mercy and Circe the Café au Ladies, who proceeded to argue over the order of their songs. They were followed by a hypnotist who caused an apparently prim volunteer from the audience to hike her skirt and grind her hips to a rolling drum. There was an infant billed as a tap-dancing prodigy, who turned into an evangelist once he’d mounted the boards, and had to be carried off by the seat of his pants. There was a magician so unpopular that his mere appearance provoked a hail of rotten vegetables.

  Several times we’d been sent out to hunt some missing novice who’d run away in a cold-footed funk from the Baby Doll. On those occasions Lucifer had judged that the likeliest place to look for the girls was at the picture show. Duck-walking past the box office of the Orpheum Theater on Main Street, we would steal up into the “nigger heaven” gallery. In the lofty darkness just under a ceiling hung with gilded fruit, we’d plop down in half a dozen laps before finding vacant seats. That’s how, during a period of late-night detective work, we saw the tail end of The Invisible Man, Captain Blood, and Snow White. We’d seen a midnight double bill in its entirety (Gunga Din and Lives of a Bengal Lancer), and a vaudeville troupe that featured Eddie Cantor, before Lucifer had admitted that we might be barking up the wrong tree.

  We saw Bessie Smith, to whom Lucifer allowed a degree of famousness beyond his ordinary use of the word. He said she had a voice whose pitch could break your glasses or cut diamonds; it could set your rinktum free. She was coming out of the Club Panama, wearing a peacock plume headdress and a gown made of mirrors. Surrounded by gaping admirers, who were reflected in the gown, she looked like she was decked out for the evening in the myriad faces of Beale.

  Carrying unpaid hotel tabs into the rooms behind the Chop Suey House, we saw men lolling like tent caterpillars in a network of crisscrossed hammocks. We got silly breathing smoke that smelled of burnt rubber and sour cream. At the forge on Vance Street we saw the blacksmith playing his bottleneck guitar for a white man, who kept mopping his brow and boasting, “I told them I’d go as far as Hades for the genuine goods.” Then he would tap the microphone to make sure that the song—about the failure of a key to fit a certain keyhole—would not be lost. We saw a local undertaker sitting defiantly astride a man lying facedown on the sidewalk, his shirt slashed to red spaghetti.

  “Ol Hylo,” the undertaker had offered to explain to one and all, “he been kilt now three, fo time, but it look like this one here done took. I ain’t be cheat outta his funeral airy again.”

  One night we came across a moonlight baptism in progress. It was being performed, said Lucifer, by the congregation of the First Beale Street Church of the Everloving Shepherd Who Dwells on High. Having traditionally
used the snake-ridden Gayoso Bayou for such functions, they had shifted their site to the new lagoon, which was considered, as a relatively fresh act of God, to have greater qualities of sanctification.

  Backed up by somberly clad parishioners, the procession of prospective saints—or “haints,” as the wise guy liked to say—gathered at the water’s eastern edge. They were clapping their hands and singing a hymn: “What it say in the ten chapter ten / Is you die you bound to live again.” One by one the candidates for the sacrament of immersion would wade out into the muck, their white gowns parachuting about their hips. After their dunking at the hands of owl-faced deacons, dressed impractically in slickers, the newly baptized were given to inspired acrobatics in the street. They writhed and tumbled in full view of the fleshpots of Babylon, outflanking Satan with cunning maneuvers. Giving voice to spine-tingling hallelujahs, they called for a witness, which I supposed was where we came in.

  “Do Jesus!” they shouted. “I’m testify to the blood and the recollection!” Then the angels seemed to have gotten hold of their tongues, making them sound like tuneful daveners, like a Torah portion might sound if read by warbling birds. It was an observation that prompted my suggesting to Lucifer, “Could be that there’s a little Yid in ’em.” Upon which the wise guy, who as always had to have the last word, replied, “What you reckon, Mistah Harry, think they was one or two in the woodpile?”

  Another time we saw a fight in a juke joint that was still going on when we went back the next night, though the men were bloodied to featurelessness, moving in a sluggish slow motion, and nobody was paying attention anymore. Then, sent by one of the Baby Doll’s high-rolling regulars for ribs to cater a private affair, we went round to Johnny Mills’s. In that ramshackle, screen-door institution, smoke feathering out every knothole, I—who’d been more or less kosher from birth—had my first taste of barbecued pork. I chewed meat the consistency of charred embers marinated in axle grease, topped with a pebbly yellow matter indistinguishable from my loosened fillings. Though I put aside the sandwich unfinished, noting how the absorbent white bread held the impression of my fingerprints, I told the twins it was the best I’d ever had. Later on I spat up discreetly in a rubbish pail.

  Whenever she saw me hanging around the hotel, Aunt Honey would always ask me whether I was lost. Considering the tumultuous cackling that generally followed this question, I suppose she thought she was being funny. But as much as she seemed to be enjoying herself, moving furniture with her earthshaking hilarity, I can’t say I was able to enter into the joke. Aunt Honey excepted, however, the ladies of the Baby Doll had pretty much grown accustomed to having me around. Careless in their attire at the best of times, they seldom took the trouble to cover themselves up for my sake. Quite often I received the heart-swelling mazel, if the heart can sometimes slip below the belt, of a glimpse of magenta nipple peeping out of a flimsy halter. Or, conditions permitting, the fubsy halfmoon of a mole-flecked derrière, revealed for the instant it took to scratch a spider bite. Or a long exposure of coffee flank like a shapely greased beanstalk that only the most nimble could shinny up to paradise.

  If ever the women caught me looking, they would gently rebuke me: “I ain’t hear’d you say thank y’all, Mistah Harry.” Then they would laugh over the way my ears became inflamed and I tried to cross my legs while standing up. Some of the things I liked most to watch them doing were sighing contentedly at what they saw in a hand-held mirror, tapping their slender fingers on a saucily cocked hip, raking their hair until it stood up like a nest of serpents, dropping an ice cube into the hollow at the base of their neck. Then I liked to watch the slow snail’s progress of the ice and the trail of moisture it left as it slid into the dark valley between their bazooms.

  In time I came to know them all by name. There was Dido (“cause I likes to cut me one, ef you takes my meanin”), who enjoyed a drop or two of belladonna in her lemonade. And Casauba, who embraced her customers like poured molasses, but kept her face unavailable for kissing behind the veil of her cardinal cloche. There was the back-sassing Sally Sweetmeat, always with a ready remark, with the silvery laughter of a glockenspiel. Her boast was that she’d served time in prison for matricide: “See, we have done quoil bout which side the mattress I spose to be.” And the lazy Sugar Monkey, whose splay-legged bones had turned to rubber under the conflagration of her auburn hair. Concerning her great rolling bosom, the popular theory was that it was subject to tides. Snowpea, the freckle-faced, biscuit-skinned albino, liked to show off her various keepsakes: the whistle made from the ring finger of a dead lover, the ashtray made from the patella of one still alive. She told me, “It were the loup garou what scare me white. Now what done scare you, home boy?” There was the practical-minded Oraldine, who pinned a rose behind her ear during business hours, keeping tally through a system of plucked petals like a botanical abacus. And the devout Sister Pacify, who was a charter member of Brother Scissors’ Do Right Church. There it had been revealed that, in the descending chronology of her former lives, she’d been a bride of John Henry, the Shulamite from the Bible, and an Ethiopian priestess turned into a bird and exiled to an island that had sunk off the Florida coast.

  The ladies, in turn, had their string of pet names for me: Humpy Moses, Breath’n Britches, Young Massa Calamine, “cause you pank like the lotion and we gon have to spread you where we’s itch.” Sometimes they could be relentless in their teasing, always fingering my hair into kiss curls and playing at telling my fortune. Tracing the lines on my palm or the configuration of virgin whiskers on my chin, they would solemnly prophesy the number of hearts I was fated to break. Then, though I didn’t understand why this should pass for humor, they would howl themselves into tears. At other times, however, they might suddenly seem not to be playing at all, such as the night that I’d eaten a surfeit of sardines with the twins, and Snowpea tickled me till I let go a resounding fortz. Sniffing the noxious air around me, the ladies had reached the consensus that here was the harbinger of an authentic ill wind. I thought they were kidding, of course, until Sister Pacify sanctimoniously proclaimed, “Fartomancy ain’t never lie.”

  Frequently the ladies would follow me back to my alcove, or visions of them anyway, which spilled from my mind to crowd around my bed. They stepped up their campaign of teasing me, not giggling anymore but growling low in their throats, their bodies swaying with a feline urgency. That’s when they’d swear me to secrecy, then proceed to teach me tricks of love forgotten since the time of the Pharaohs. They taught me tricks named after long-extinct animals and ancient machines, tricks that the Lord Himself was ignorant of—because if He learned of such shameful goings-on under His sun, His out-of-countenance blush would incinerate the world. On such nights I lost the few hours of sleep that were still left to me.

  During my trips back to the Parkway to borrow more books, I started to relax a little in the company of my cousin. It was a situation that seemed to be mutual. A certain chumminess, if you will, had begun to evolve between us—so sue me. This is not to say that she entirely dropped her theatrical posturing, or that she didn’t occasionally revert to her poor-in-spirit routine. But on the whole she greeted me with what I took to be a healthy enthusiasm. What’s more, she even looked to be putting on a little weight. Her gaunt cheeks had acquired what might almost be described as a tawny hue, this from the tan she’d gotten while pacing in her garden. The sun had also tinged her blue-black hair with threads of scarlet, which set off to some advantage the slightly bloodshot cast to her eyes. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Naomi had acquired a kind of gypsy air.

  It was clear that my visits were doing her good. This was not a role that anyone could have accused me of seeking, but I confess to having been a little curious about the extent to which Naomi might yet be transformed.

  Sometimes I hung around even after she’d loaned me the books, which she’d taken to bringing down to the garden before I could ask. The maid would serve us iced tea with a sprig of mint
and sticky macaroons. I munched and sipped while Naomi paced the herringbone bricks, relating the pleasures awaiting me in what she thought I was about to read. I listened attentively, thinking that this might come in handy should she want to quiz me later on. But she never bothered. She was much too busy getting the stories off her chest to inquire how I might have enjoyed them. She was too delighted by the evidently liberating act of giving her library away to worry about whether or not it was put to good use. Not once did she pry or ask for the return of her unsalvageable volumes, nor did she pull a long face when I carried them away, now that she knew she could trust me to come back for more.

  Often I felt that, even if the books weren’t for me, I still owed my cousin something in exchange. Once I even went so far as to reciprocate after a fashion, telling her snatches of what I’d seen with the twins. I told her about hickory-striped gamblers and double-brained witch doctors, frail sisters with rabbit fever who flounced their dresses to stir the breeze. But, catching myself, I pretended that these were references to characters in books I’d read on my own. I would have been happy to loan them to Naomi, but they didn’t belong to me.

  In the meantime, having theoretically fed Michael a whole curriculum’s worth of reading, I was ready to call it quits. I was wasting my energy, not to mention Naomi’s books, on an am horetz, a nincompoop. Of course Lucifer continued to make ridiculous claims for his little brother’s progress. (It was ‘Til brothah” because, according to the wise guy’s apocryphal version of their nativity, only he had been delivered from his mama in time. “Michael, he gots to be prize out after she have already pass on, which it is how he ain’t been all the way born.”) But while I didn’t say it outright, I made up my mind that I’d contributed enough to the dummy’s fruitless education. Besides, it was Cotton Carnival time, and with so much going on, who would notice if I turned up empty-handed?