by Peter Quinn
If Daddy Rice was just setting sail on the mighty sea of whiskey, the location was definitely, positively, don’t let anyone tell you different, Louisville. He remembered everything about it. The stable next to the redbrick hall on the dusty street directly opposite the Andrew Jackson Hotel. If the journey was more advanced, the sails filled with wind, the waves sweeping over the forecastle, it was Cincinnati, and Rice didn’t care what you’d heard to the contrary. But if he wavered on where it happened, Rice never changed a detail of how. The version Jack Mulcahey heard for the first time in 1860 was, essentially, the version Rice always told.
Daddy Rice started in the theatre as a carpenter’s apprentice at the Park Theatre on Park Row, and one night had to fill in for an actor who was drunk. It was a two-line bit as a British soldier. He never went back to carpentry. He did scores of small parts and then, in the fall of 1831, joined a company on circuit as actor and property man. The troupe played every small town it ran into, some not even on the map. A potpourri of stuff. A scene from Shakespeare. Some song and dance. Or maybe a play like Robin-son’s The Rifle, in which Daddy Rice, as a Kentucky cornfield Negro, first found himself in blackface.
They were at it six dusty, rainy, hot, cold, snowy, sunny months in churches, halls, saloons, and the only success Rice had was in a filler he did between acts, Paddy with the shillelagh and the shovel, the standard dumb Mick of the transatlantic, pan-Anglo stage who wouldn’t know the difference between one end of a fork and the other unless he sat on it. It kept people in their seats, and Rice had no difficulty doing it because all he was doing was imitating his old man, an immigrant whose difficulties in America his son turned into parody, made the brogue thicker, the mind weaker, the ambitions fewer, the stoop steeper, the emotions sillier, the clothes raggier, until the audience recognized the universal Paddy. It went over fine, but Rice grew quickly tired of it. Then he walked in on the darkie idea. An industry was born!
The darkie was brushing and rubbing down a horse in the stable yard next to the theatre in Louisville (or Cincinnati), and Rice, on his way to a performance, noticed him right away because of his twisted shoulder. It was the same thing Rice’s old man had, the shoulder turned in toward the chin and drawn up toward the ear, as if he had been born a hunchback and the hump had slipped inside his body and was trying to come out the other side. A queer resemblance. Rice was amazed two people could have an affliction so strange yet so similar, and he followed the charcoal replica of his old man into the stable, watched him shuffle across the stone floor, heel tap, den on de toe, singing his little song, and if those weren’t exactly the words, well, jump Jim Crow, they were as close as Rice could come to understanding them.
He did the act the next night after practicing all day in his hotel room. Didn’t tell a soul. Slapped on the charcoal paste just before he went on, Jim Crow instead of Paddy dancing across the stage, the audience at first surprised and quiet, maybe a little threatened by the novelty of this singing, dancing darkie, until they saw the shuffle and the jump, heard the funny little rhyme, adjusted to the sight of a white man’s nigger pantomime, and brought the house down, ovation after ovation, shouts and yells, minstrelsy and the darkie song industry all born that evening in Cincinnati (or Louisville). Daddy Rice never played another part in his life until very near the end, when he couldn’t dance anymore (except for the few seconds he would reenact the historic moment in the bar of the New England Hotel) and was signed up for the role of Uncle Tom in the eponymous play’s Bowery production, in December of 1860.
He lost the role the second night. Mas’r George leaned over his pillow during the climactic death scene and said, “Oh, dear Uncle Tom! do wake—do speak once more! Look up! Here’s Mas’r George—your own Mas’r George. Don’t you know me?” Uncle Tom slept on, snoring.
Mas’r George whispered through clenched teeth, “Rice, you son of a bitch, wake up.” He poked and prodded. He slapped his face, but Daddy Rice, having enjoyed a pre-performance celebration and reassured by the familiar feel of the burnt cork on his skin, slept on. The audience hooted, whistled, and laughed. Rice was fired. The next night, when Mulcahey made his debut with Brownlee’s Minstrel Parade, he came back to the New England Hotel specifically to see the old man dance: Daddy Rice, the former stage Irishman, Jim Crow, and Uncle Tom. An American legend.
Rice died soon after that, a month or so after Stephen Foster, another legend down on his luck, moved into the hotel. Foster arranged the funeral. He talked to Mulcahey and George Holland and Frank Lynch and Dan “Dixie” Emmett, the city’s leading minstrels, and they all contributed to meet the expenses, everyone except that notorious plagiarist and tightwad, Edwin Christy. It was the biggest theatrical funeral since Jack Diamond’s in 1857. Another Paddy raised to prominence by the stage, Diamond had been America’s greatest dancer of Ethiopian breakdowns, signed to a contract by P. T. Barnum himself, the first performer to command a salary of over one hundred dollars a week, until the drink did him in; his funeral had been paid for, like Rice’s, by popular subscription.
“These men deserve monuments,” Stephen Foster said to Mulcahey as they came down the church steps after Rice’s funeral. “They’ve made an industry and given work to thousands.”
Mulcahey moved into the New England Hotel once he was signed to an extended contract with Brownlee’s. It was an actor’s hotel. Names from the past and, some occupants hoped, from the future, living in a part of the island that ran from the Bowery to Broadway, from Chambers to Canal, where the country that surrounded it could find all its conscious and subconscious desires and fears conveniently located in one place: drink, whores, racial amalgamation, catamites, opium, sexual titillation, foreigners, unbridled debauchery, the wages, rewards, and consequences of every conceivable sin. Here the rules the young democracy had imposed on itself were, within limits, suspended, and Mulcahey found himself living in a room next to a mulatto woman, an actress, with a beautiful cocoa-colored face, whom the proprietor described as “the Cuban thespian” Señorita Therese La Plante. Therese couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. It was said that she was really from Louisiana, a highborn octoroon whose father, a white cotton merchant, had shipped her off to a convent in Baltimore for her education. Therese played Eliza in the same production of Uncle Tom that Daddy Rice had lasted one night in; “Eliza,” the broadside said, “as Mrs. Stowe described her: ‘Rich, full, dark-eyed, with long lashes, ripples of silky black hair. The brown of her complexion gives way on the cheek to a perceptible blush, which deepens as the gaze of the strange man is fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.’”
“Eliza” is what Mulcahey always called Therese and what she had come to call herself. He had planned only a short stay in the New England Hotel. Once his star was in the ascendancy he would move to the St. Nicholas on Broadway. But he stayed because of her. Eliza of the oval eyes and high cheekbones, Therese, Indian blood mixed with black and French, her brown pupils deep and lovely, her curly hair in deep waves around her face, black framing brown, the way it fell onto her shoulders, down to the top of her breasts, ah, Eliza, no minstrel boy ever wanted anything more, Eliza, drop your shift, the candlelight lineaments of your body without the hint of blush as the minstrel from next door, the man who bought you drinks and waited to meet you, serendipitously, in the hall, now invited, thank you, Eliza, to your bed, gazes intently on all your naked brownness.
Mulcahey walked up Broadway to the theatre past Meecham’s Minstrels, the Coliseum Minstrels, and Mechanics’ Hall, where Dan Emmett first played his song “Dixie,” past the posters plastered on Canal and along the Bowery, “BOB BUTLER’S THEATRE (MALE ONLY)” in red letters across the top, and beneath it a woman in pink tights, ripe, her bosom in delicious bloom, her thighs fully blossomed, her posterior curved like a full-grown melon, her petal-like feet covered by a white banner with black letters: SOLD OUT.
The finger of Nebuchadnezzar was moving on those walls, filling out those shapes. Hello, girls. Good-bye, Mulcahey. Men
e, mene, tekel, upharsin, a bevy of white boys dressed as darkies.
The war was killing minstrelsy. Emancipation. Long lists of dead and wounded. Now the draft. The specter, north and south, of the black face, real and corporeal, owing nothing to burnt cork. White folks, I’ll sing for you no more. And something else was killing it, too. Mulcahey couldn’t put a name on it, but he could feel it and hear it and see it. The press of the traffic on Broadway. The crowds in the stores and restaurants. The nonstop banging from the factories, the gaslight on all night, men assembling revolvers and reapers and thresher and shoes and shirts, faster, faster, faster. Make it quick. Next. We ain’t got much time. No time for shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, or slow-as-molasses soliloquies. The country had found its different drummer all right. And a one, two, three, heel, kick, heel, kick, get those legs up, girls, let’s move it, look a-way, look a-way, a-way, make room for the next act.
Mulcahey came up the back steps of the theatre on Crosby Street. Up the block, at the corner of Spring, he could see a mob of soldiers waiting outside the Adelphi. Living Tableaus! Moments of History! Cleopatra in Her Bath! He hurried inside. Squirt had everything set out for him. Mulcahey rubbed Squirt’s head for luck, the same way he always did, the head of America’s lurking nightmare, an amalgamationist kid, shanty-Irish mother, no-count Negro father, part of the nigger-Paddy colony on Roosevelt Street that deprived the directors of the Association for Improving the Poor of their sleep. Mulcahey took off his jacket and shirt in a rush, wet a cloth in the tin basin Squirt had set out for him, washed his face and neck and quickly dried them.
He sat down at the mirror. The chaos around him was building, people putting on their jackets and pulling on their wigs, white men blackening their skin. Brownlee’s Minstrel Parade. A Rainbow of Shining Darkies. New York’s Finest Ethiopian Review. Last night, Stephen Foster had asked him to walk down to the Catherine Street ferry. Foster talked the stuff that drunks are made of, uninvented inventions, unachieved success, unrequited everything, the lost opportunities that only the magic of alcohol could temporarily restore. But he also talked sense.
“Jack,” Foster said, “this darkie thing isn’t going to last much longer. It’s like the whaling industry. First it booms. The age of Daddy Rice. The public can’t seem to get enough. Then it disappears. Twenty years ago, every clerk and widow in the country was trying to buy a share in a whaling ship, and you know where those ships are now? They’re sunk in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, the whole damn bunch of them filled with stones and sunk as part of the blockade. The style is changing, and it’s not enough to change with it. That’ll be too late. You have to change ahead of it.”
“What should I do, Foster, grow a pair of teats?”
“Ladies are a part of it, Jack. But only a part. Success demands more than that. Take songwriting. It’s not enough to write words or lyrics anymore. The future is in wholesale. Producing song after song, getting those songs to the people in bulk. Selling, Jack. You have to know how to sell. Plug, plug, plug, that’s the future. Pay the stores to carry your sheets and put them in their windows. Print your music on candy wrappers or on the backs of daguerreotypes. The old days are dead. You can’t just produce, you’ve got to know how to sell.”
Squirt pulled the curtains closed around Mulcahey’s cubicle. Mulcahey looked at himself in the mirror. Hello, Jack. Veins of red in those flashing blue eyes. Got to start keeping a cork in the bottle until the performance is over. Mulcahey always did his own makeup. It was bad luck to let somebody else do it for you, but he let Squirt lay out everything he needed, he depended on him for that. The kid never failed. The burnt cork was there and a small dish of water and a piece of cheesecloth. Jack made up the paste, rubbing the cork around the dish until the residue of water and ash became thicker and thicker.
In the mirror, Squirt’s brown face came into view. “Jack, you keep getting here later, pretty soon they gonna go on without you.”
“No way, kid, I’m the show.”
“You the show until you don’t show and somebody else gonna be the show.” Squirt pulled back the curtain and went out.
Mulcahey pushed back his hair and dipped the cloth into the paste. He drew a black line across his forehead. “So long, white man,” he said. He drew a great black circle around his face, picked up a small brush, dipped it, and leaned toward the mirror, circled his mouth beginning an inch above his lips, holding his right wrist with his left hand, whispering to himself, “Steady there, white man, steady.” He rested his elbows on the table and worked on his eyes, leaving a small white area around them, getting as close as he could to the mirror and dabbing away with his brush.
He leaned back. “Squirt,” he yelled, “Come here.” Squirt appeared in the mirror once again.
“How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
Mulcahey picked up the cloth again and in broad strokes filled in the rest of his face, down his neck, behind his ears. He put on a wig of black curls. The curtain opened again, as if on cue, and Squirt came up behind Mulcahey with a hand mirror. He held it up as Mulcahey pulled and tugged on the wig, picked up the cheesecloth and went over a few spots on his neck and ears. Squirt moved the mirror to give Mulcahey the view he needed.
Mulcahey rolled his head back and forth, from left to right, and the curls danced. He picked up a second brush, dipped it into a small, flat metal tin, brushed on the pink greasepaint, filling in the space around his lips, and gently rubbed them with a swab of cotton. He smiled at himself, and his teeth looked white and large in the black oval of his face and the pink ellipse of his mouth.
“You’re all set,” Squirt said as he ran out.
Mulcahey put on his white gloves, held them at each side of his face, with the palms toward the mirror, the fingers spread out like fans. Mulcahey, “The Ethiopian Impersonator.” His name at the top of the bill. The blackened white man stared back at him, frowning, smiling, the gloved hands waving. “Why, you ol’ darkie,” Mulcahey said to himself in the mirror, “what would da ol’ folks at home think of you now?”
It was twenty years since Mulcahey’s first performance, the first, that is, he could remember. He couldn’t have been more than ten. He stood with the others on the great stone pier. The lord’s yacht was late. The lord had stopped in view of Cruit Island, off the Donegal coast, to watch a flotilla of small leather boats filled with people on the way to the Leacht Mór, the Big Stone blessed by Saint Columcille himself. The yacht stayed for an hour as the people came ashore to touch the stone and pray for a cure, a procession of idiots, the old, cripples, the dying. The lord’s agent for his Irish estates was on the deck with his employer. “They do it once a year, my lord, on the feast of Saint John the Baptist. It’s a kind of crusade.”
“Crusade? I think you mean a pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage, yes, that’s it, that’s what they call it.”
“Is it efficacious?”
“Pardon, my lord?”
“Is anyone ever cured?”
“Some have claimed to be.”
“Good God, I suppose one would have to travel to the Ganges to see anything as bizarre.”
The tenants were drawn up in rows on the pier. Jack stood next to his father in the first rank. In front of them, seated on a milking stool, was Jack’s granduncle, Malachi, who had wept bitterly when the agent came to their cabins with news of the lord’s first visit to his estates. “He’ll evict us all, that’s what he’s come for, so he’ll have the land for his cows.”
Like most of the other tenants, Malachi had no English. But Jack’s father was proficient at it and translated for them. “They want you to play for his lordship, Malachi, that’s all. They want him to hear our music and feel welcomed. They don’t want your cabin.”
Malachi was unconvinced. “Why would a great lord the likes that lives in London want music from an old blind man? No, he wants the land. Mother of God, he wants the land.”
The white yacht sailed into the harbor, its rigging abla
ze with flags. The lord stepped out of the boat that had rowed him ashore and slowly mounted the steps of the pier. Two other boats followed with his luggage. The agent rushed ahead and tapped Malachi on the shoulder. “Play, man. Play.” Malachi’s sightless eyes stayed fixed ahead. His pipes rested on his lap. Jack’s father stepped forward. “Malachi,” he said in Irish, “they want a tune.” But Malachi sat rigidly, not moving.
The lord was in front of them. “What seems to be the problem?”
“No problem,” the agent said. “It’s simply most of these people, my lord, don’t understand the language.”
The lord gestured at the pipes on Malachi’s lap and the bag that was strapped under his arm. “These are different from the Scottish pipes?”
“Yes, my lord, they are called ‘uileann’ pipes and played manually, the piper using these bellows strapped to his arm, instead of blowing with his mouth, as is done in Scotland.”
“This seems more primitive.”
“Many things here are, my lord.”
The agent turned to Jack’s father. “Speak to him in his tongue. Tell him it would greatly please his master if he could hear a song on these pipes.”
“Malachi,” Jack’s father said, “the man here says there’ll be whiskey and tobacco for all the tenants if his lordship can only hear the music that even the people of London speak about so highly, the music of Malachi the piper.”
Malachi began to play. The lord stood and listened. “What is he playing?” he asked.
The agent said to Jack’s father, “Ask him the name of the song.”
“Malachi,” Jack’s father said, “the lord wants to know the name of the tune.”