Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  Festivities were afoot, and having ignored the whole affair during the previous spring, I was determined this year to make up for lost time. There had been some debate in the local papers over whether the Carnival should be held at all, given the terrible aftermath of the flood. To stage a celebration in the face of so much misfortune would constitute an indecency, said some. But the more common feeling was that a carnival might be just the pick-me-up the city needed. The citizens of Memphis had grown weary of being a population under siege by the river. They moved leadenly among the clutter of flood refugees, like people surrounded by ghosts they refuse to believe in. What they needed, these citizens, was a little relief, and not the kind, as one editorial quipped, that the government distributes along with sanitary napkins and fruit.

  Anyway, the Cotton Carnival was one of Memphis’s most time-honored traditions, and hadn’t the city taken pride all along in its policy of business as usual? The stores had stayed open and the banks had continued to foreclose. The alphabet agencies never slept. While their tracks were hoisted on trestles over the washed-out thoroughfares—except on Beale, which was judged unnegotiable—the trolleys ran relatively on time. And it was safe to assume that the graveyards, give or take a few postponed funerals, remained in use. Bodies were not gathering dust in back rooms, and everyone else’s grandmothers were laid to rest with appropriate honors. Not that I worried much about Grandma Zippe these days, or any other members of my family, living or dead.

  Like the twins, who were on call for any odd commission twenty-four hours a day, I was learning to do without sleep. As a matter of form, I would put in my appearance at the pawnshop every weekday afternoon, then walk away from it in the early evening. I seldom bothered now with going back to North Main Street for supper; instead, I preferred to scrounge some fried catfish and vinegar pie along with the twins after they got off work at Mambo’s. Since my mother thought I was with my father and vice versa—if my father thought about me at all—my freedom was practically complete.

  Naturally I still had to return to the apartment at some point each night. If my mama was alone, I would ask her politely—though not too politely, lest she get suspicious—how her day had gone. I would nod with what patience I could muster as she recounted “your grandfather’s” latest enormity. I made a diligent show of doing my homework, maybe listened to “The Firestone Hour” with Mama, provided she wasn’t on the phone to her brother-in-law. I listened to “The Green Hornet” with Grandpa Isador if he happened to be around and sitting still. At about nine I yawned ostentatiously and remarked what a long day it had been, hoping that anyone hearing me would take the hint. Shutting myself up in my alcove, I waited for the apartment to grow quiet, then I unfolded the bed, plumped the bedclothes, and slipped out the window.

  Only once did I feel that my family’s influence might have extended farther than I liked to give them credit for. That was when I saw my father’s puller in the faded front parlor of the Baby Doll Hotel. I was about to climb the stairs behind Lucifer and Michael when I caught sight of him through the bamboo curtain. He was wearing the mohair sport coat that hung to his knees, making his nautical salute to Aunt Honey and a couple of her girls. Frozen in my tracks, I listened to him croak, “Y’all pardon my hand say gimme do my mouf say much oblige.” It was about the longest speech I’d ever heard him make.

  Backing up in a panic, I ducked under the staircase and wondered how I’d been found out. My delinquency discovered, Papa had sent Oboy, citizen of both sides of the water, to bring me back. Well, he wouldn’t take me without a struggle. I’d kick his knees, I’d rub out his wrinkles like the writing on the golem’s forehead, and he’d sleep for a thousand years. The bamboo jangled and I peeped out to see him scuttling toward the front door, lugging a stuffed leather satchel. When the door shut, I crept from my hiding place and went to a parlor window to look out. I saw him under a lamp on Gayoso Street, handing the satchel to a cigar-puffing fat man in the back of a Studebaker touring car.

  “That they landlord, I swan.” It was Aunt Honey grumbling at my shoulder. “Man so evil-greedy he ain’t have a shaddah.”

  If I hadn’t been so shaken, I might have argued that not only did he have a shadow, but it was longer than you would have guessed. This is not to say that I wasted much time in contemplating the reach of my uncle’s dominion, or the way that it compromised Aunt Honey’s much vaunted proprietorship. On the contrary, by the time the twins had come back downstairs—their pockets full of whatever the night might require—and we hit the street, I’d put the entire episode out of my mind.

  Once or twice Lucifer had mentioned the arrival of the royal river barge, “which it a come down like a floatin fizgig, like the glory boat.” But beyond looking forward to the barge, he seemed to have no particular interest in the other Carnival events. This disappointed me, since I didn’t regard the merrymaking on Beale Street as an authentic part of the Cotton Carnival. Then Lucifer was obliged to set me straight about the “real” Carnival, which was, as he explained, a sort of by-invitation-only affair. It consisted mostly of “yo private funkshum,” a phrase that on his tongue sounded obscene. These functions were held behind the closed doors of mansions and hotel ballrooms. They were sponsored by your “hinkty” elite: “Kinda folk will play golf on a horse so cain’t nobody caddy. Eat fish turd look like buckshot, be alia time talkin”—and here he held his nose—“faw faw faw.”

  So I had no choice but to agree with him: who needed the snobs. There was, anyway, plenty of action (when was there not?) right here in the neighborhood. The Cotton Maker’s Jubilee, which was the colored answer to the restricted Carnival, was now in full swing. The shvartzers had set up their own impromptu fairgrounds in the wagon yard behind the Daisy Theater. They had booths selling ribs and fried pies made by the ladies of rival churches, and try-your-luck concessions run by a shadier element whose proceeds went to fly-by-night charities. They had their own royalty, who put in an appearance in their own unofficial parade, a complement to the authorized parade down Main Street in which traditionally unshod Negroes in stylized antebellum rags were harnessed for the purpose of pulling the flower-decked floats. It was not a sight, as Lucifer spelled it out, that inspired the colored people to abandon themselves to good times.

  So we were there among the crowd in front of Mambo’s on that early evening in May, bobbing for a glimpse—over fedoras and children on shoulders—of a procession two miles long. In the vanguard were the high-stepping school bands, playing blue notes in a dazzle of sequins and polished brass. Precision marching, they headed for the bayou runoff as if they expected the waters to part, then splashed in up to their hips without breaking stride. The drum major augered the air with his baton, kicking his chin with his knees, and the crowd went delirious. Some broke ranks to join the parade themselves, becoming second-line marchers with mops and brooms that they twirled artistically. They fell in beside the columns of fraternal and benevolent societies—the Knights of Pythias and the Lost Tribe of Canaan, resplendent in their lionskin tunics and admiral’s hats, some carrying crosiers. Not to be outdone by the flashy brass bands, they also waded into the water to uproarious applause.

  Next came a lumbering caravan of crepe-paper floats, shoved along by gangs of self-congratulating boys in rubber boots. These floats turned out to be as good as their name. Mounted with historical tableaux depicting darkies of distinction, draped with banners advertising local boilermakers and chiropodists, they were fitted out also with amphibious modifications—oil drums and netted bundles of cork. When they were launched across the lagoon, the spectators were beside themselves again.

  Because I was frankly bewildered by some of the scenes that the floats portrayed—the gingham-clad granny holding a branch hung with tinsel stars, the codger with the cardboard test tube frothing cotton wool—Lucifer had offered to fill the gaps in my education: “Tha’s the Moses lady have lead the slave to yo promise land Chicago Soufside, an tha’s the man what have invent the peanut.”
Then, “lastest but not leastest,” appeared the reigning mayor of Beale Street, standing among a bevy of young ladies in the back of a shining black La Salle.

  His election, according to the wise guy, was annually uncontested. This was due to his inherent stateliness, and the gold-braided livery that belonged to him by virtue of his head-waiter’s job at the Hotel Peabody. The girls alongside him were mostly content to throw chocolate kisses and Monopoly money, but a couple of them (none other than the Baby Doll’s own Sugar Monkey and Oraldine, who’d insinuated themselves to the scandal and delight of the crowd) seemed bent on ruffling the man of the hour’s composure. Looking somewhat martyred by their fawning attentions, the mayor, however, managed to retain his poise. He flung fake money and repeated the benediction “Every man a kang!” until the car had entered the lagoon and promptly stalled.

  Meanwhile the parade proper had been convoyed over the water, where it broke apart and dispersed into the side streets of the pawnshop district. The crowd around us had also thinned, as families remembered their whereabouts and began to return the tenderloin to its regular denizens. It was here that I surprised myself by making a proposal. This wasn’t like me, but in the wake of the hoopla I was left feeling restless and ready for more. I was thinking there were places other than Beale Street to be.

  “Why don’t we go to the midway?” I suggested, then right away wanted to take it back. What I’d meant was the regulation Carnival midway, erected in Confederate Park by the river—featuring, as the billboards blazoned, miles of sideshows and games, and rides such as the Slide of Death. But the shvartzers, as I’d suddenly recalled, were only allowed to attend on specified “colored nights,” and I didn’t think this was one of them.

  I waited for Lucifer to bristle a bit and remind me of this fact, thus letting me off the hook, but since when had I known him to shy away from the prohibited? Instead, he’d put on his thoughtful face, pretending to consult with his brother. Then he turned back to me with his yard-wide grin. “Copacetic, Mistah Harry,” he said. “Do y’all lead us the way.”

  I’d never before led the way. It had always been Lucifer’s show, naturally, since we’d always been more or less on his stamping grounds. By the same token, when invading the territory of the white man (before sundown, I might add), it was just as natural that I should be the one to chart the course. So why was it I felt like my bluff had been called?

  Once we were on our way, though, I started to get into the swing of things. I kept several paces ahead of them so that no one would realize we were together, and began to enjoy a sense of cloak-and-dagger. I was a double agent, smuggling books one way and Negroes the other, up and down the treacherous pipeline of Beale. I was the Moses man. By the time we’d angled our way through the downtown streets, arriving at the park, now surrounded by bill-plastered hoardings, I felt I was completely in charge, confident of certain skills I’d developed thanks to the crafty company I kept.

  Such as breaking and entering. Witness how I steered the twins away from the crowds that were streaming toward the gate. I told them to follow me as we circled the fence to the eroded river side of the park. Employing the sixth sense I’d recently acquired, I located a loose slat in the hoardings; I pulled the board from its nail until there was room for us to slip through.

  In the dusty compound behind the sideshow tents—the loudspeakers broadcasting yowzahs and step-right-ups—we kept our noses low and began to snoop around. I was of course aware of a certain pointlessness in this. If I’d wanted, I could have walked abroad at perfect liberty according to the birthright of my race. I could have ridden the bumper cars, to say nothing of the Slide of Death, and thrown baseballs at a target that, if hit, would dump a mugging shvartzer into a tub of water. But these days I was happier skulking about the underside of things.

  Dropping to all fours, I stuck my head under the taut canvas skirt of the nearest tent, heartened that the twins still followed my lead. Then I had to look back at Lucifer to ask silently if he saw what I saw. Was I mistaken or wasn’t the interior of this tent out of joint with the world in which our uplifted rumps remained? I yanked my head out to make sure that we were still under the same pink twilight of moments ago, then took a breath and ducked beneath the flap again. It was there as before, what might have been the “One Man’s Family” living room, complete with carpet and standing lamp, sofa and armchair, an end table with a bakelite radio and a hanging bird cage—in short, a comfy domestic oasis amid a waste of sawdust. But seated around it, instead of Mom and Dad, were an assortment of jokes played by nature, not necessarily in good taste.

  There was a man like a zeppelin in a sleeveless undershirt that could have swaddled Aunt Honey, with enough material left over to sail a boat. Wedged somehow into the armchair, he spilled over like tons of dough allowed to rise unattended. Here and there you might have identified a telling detail: a tonsured fringe of hair, a lit cigarette, a ring on an upraised pinkie above a teacup; but these were only clues to the character who was lost under that deluge of flesh. Sitting across from him on an arm of the sofa was something that even the wise guy referred to in reverent whispers—something he called a morphodite. This one had on an appliquéd dressing gown, fallen open to reveal a leg much smoother and shapelier than the hairy one over which it was crossed. It had a pair of what could have been boobies or impressive pectorals beneath its gown, and a face divided into two distinct halves. One side was conventionally pretty, the other handsome in a courtly sort of way. On the handsome side it sported one half of a salt-and-pepper beard, into which it was vainly braiding colored ribbons.

  There were others: a limbless boy with sausage lips and a broken nose, wearing a knitted vest and lying like a belly-up turtle on an embroidered pouf. There was a sharp-chinned creature in a silk shawl with the face of a maiden aunt, though her sticklike anatomy had more in common with a praying mantis. She was spoon-feeding a ropy gruel to the turtle boy with one hand, tuning the radio with the other, chattering all the while: “It’s almost time for ‘Mary Noble’ which is one program I never miss you know her husband left the hospital with amnesia and yesterday he sits down at the Horn and Hardart with his poor blind mother now you take another bite for your own poor mama in heaven…”

  There were a couple of teenage kids on the sofa with interchangeable, dark-eyed vinegar pusses. They had on matching pairs of lederhosen which revealed the fact that, between them, they had only three legs. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders in what might have passed for geniality, but their words betrayed a heated argument. The quarrel, which seemed to involve mutual accusations as to the other’s complete lack of rhythm, looked like it was about to turn physical.

  You couldn’t blame me for feeling proud of myself. My first time out as trailblazer, and look at the spectacle I’d led us to. But when I looked toward the twins for some confirmation of this, they were already gone. I slid out from under the tent and there was Lucifer with an arm around his brother, walking him through what appeared to be a rehearsal for a three-legged race.

  “Lessee can us nigger twin make like the Si-maneez,” he was saying. Sometimes these shvartzers had a rude way of reminding you how short their attention spans were.

  “What’s the matter,” I snapped at both of them, trying hard to keep my voice down, “my freaks aren’t entertaining enough for you?”

  Lucifer left off the monkeyshines, though he kept his arm around the dummy’s shoulder. “Powerful sorry, Mistah Harry,” he told me with mock sincerity, “we ain’t knowed they was yourn an tha’s a fack.”

  I didn’t think he needed to be so cheeky over a mere turn of phrase, even if he had a point. He didn’t have to make such a palsie production of conferring with his idiot brother, asking him, “Michael, my man, where the fanny show at?”

  Michael aimed his ineffable gaze at a nearby tent full of raucous shouting. It was lit from within, a large and shapeless shadow rippling on the canvas. Lucifer nodded and the two of them hit the dirt and
slithered under the tent flap. My term as ringleader had expired for the night.

  Resentful, I crawled under the flap behind them and chinned myself, as they had, on the back of a plywood stage. What I saw made me forget to keep moping. Beside a portable phonograph playing a slow drag of crackling trombones, a chunky woman with chrome-yellow hair that looked scorched at the roots, wearing nothing but a pair of high heels, reclined in the puddle of a cast-off lamé robe. She was resting on her elbows, her thick back toward the rear of the tent, the seahorse tattoo at her shoulder riding a spume of powder-blue moles. Toward a rowdy audience of unshaven yokels in red kerchiefs and washed-out overalls she had spread her lumpish thighs. She’d lifted her hips as if to make a table of her loins, a lazy Susan perhaps, as her undulant rotations implied.

  The men in the audience were of the type that Lucifer might have labeled “peckerwood,” as opposed to buckra, cracker, ofay, and pure white trash—distinctions generally too fine for me to grasp. But something about this crowd’s off-color catcalls and the way they beat each other with their hats seemed to identify them positively as peckerwood. Then a cry went up from the back of the house, a regular wild-animal howl, which brought all the other noise in the tent to a head. A boy was being lifted above the heads of the assembly—a lanky, flax-haired kid not much older than I, his face tallow white from what at first I took to be pain. He’d been injured or had a fit, and the men were trying to get him clear of the fray. But when I saw that he looked perfectly undamaged, with no hint of lunatic foam about his wide-open mouth, I concluded that it wasn’t pain but fear that made him so pale.

  They passed him horizontally from hand to hand toward the stage, then slid him, careless of splinters, along a brief runway. Like a bubble-eyed log at a blade, they aimed him toward the junction of the woman’s splayed limbs. There was clapping and stomping in unison, a ruckus building toward a pitch that made you worry for the precariousness of the river bluff. There were “Great Godamighty!”s and a couple of “Thank you Jesus!’es as the woman grabbed the gaping kid by the hair. She snatched up the spangled robe from beneath her and spread it daintily, as if for a picnic, over the head of the boy in her lap.