by Peter Quinn
“It’s the ‘Lament for Red Hugh O’Donnell.’ It was taught me by my teacher Moriarty, who learned it from McDonnell, the piper from the Isles. When Moriarty taught it to me he was an old man, nearly eighty, and McDonnell himself was an old man when he taught it to Moriarty, who came here from Kerry to learn the pipes from McDonnell.” Malachi was relaxed now. The story of the music came easily to him: “McDonnell himself was the pupil of Patrick O’Malley, and it’s said that O’Malley’s father saw the O’Donnell himself ride out against the English and that he was there when the earls, O’Donnell among them, set out from Lough Swilly for Spain, and O’Donnell was still strong and young and swearing vengeance, and there was little doubt he would have had it but the English poisoned him, as is their way.”
“This must be the longest song title in history,” the lord said.
“He is giving the history of the song, my lord,” Jack’s father said. “It’s a long story.”
“Most stories here are, my lord,” the agent said. “You become accustomed to that.”
When Malachi finished, the lord dropped a large silver coin into his lap, a thing so heavy, the engraving so fine to his fingers, so intricate and so interesting, that Malachi refused to let it out of his hand, feeling the crown and the profile of a face and the letters that no one could understand except for the English name “George.”
It was two weeks later that Jack performed for his first audience. He led his granduncle, Malachi, by the hand to the Great House he had seen from a distance but never visited. The piper’s hand was wet with perspiration, and Jack could sense his nervousness and it added to his own excitement. “Don’t ye move so fast,” Malachi said to him. “Ye cost me my breath.” Jack walked alongside him, and the small pebbles of the carriageway felt strange under his bare feet, a tingling feeling on the rough, hardened skin of his soles, mysterious, a carpet of fine stones.
At the end of the carriageway, Jack could hear the hubbub of voices ahead, the woo-woo sound of English. There was a group of people on the stone porch, round men in red and blue and green coats, their boots all shined and bright, and women in long dresses, long curls around their faces, red circles on their cheeks. Jack described them to his uncle. “What are they doing?” Malachi said.
“They’re staring at us, Granduncle.”
“O Holy Child Jesus, have mercy on us.”
Malachi slowed down, but Jack was in a hurry to see these people up close and he began to move faster and drag Malachi with him, and as his granduncle tried to restrain him, a tall man in a blue coat saw them and came down the stairs. It was the lord. There was a servant behind him.
“The piper!”
“I led him here as I was told,” Jack said in English.
The lord rubbed Jack’s head. “You’re a good boy.” He gestured to the servant behind him. “Get two chairs ready. Put them here, by the window, not too close to the food.” He walked back up to the porch and clapped his hands. “The treat I promised you is here. The music, purely played, of a former age, the savage, plaintive tunes of the instruments that once called this island’s natives to war.”
The guests gathered around them. “Tell your uncle,” the lord said, “to play the ‘Lament for McDonnell’; tell him to start with that.”
“O’Donnell, you mean, sir.”
The lord looked down at Jack and smiled. “Yes, boy, you’re quite correct. O’Donnell it is.” Jack spoke to his granduncle in Irish, and Malachi played. He finished that and immediately started to play a reel, and Jack got up and began to dance, as he always did when Malachi played his song. He stood on his toes, his knees pumping up and down, his feet moving in the intricate patterns he had learned by heart. Not a touch of stage fright. The crowd began to clap, and some of them laughed with delight. The lord began to tap his foot and beat time with his hand against his thigh. One of the guests, a short, stout man, stood next to the lord. He roared with laughter. “This is rich,” he said, “too rich.”
When Malachi and Jack finished, the lord sent them around to the back of the house and they were given food on plates so white, Jack told his granduncle, that they must never have been eaten off before. They each got a breast of chicken and a great mound of potatoes with a thick gravy over it. And for all the years since, Jack never lost the taste of that debut dinner, the association of the stage with a full stomach and the Great House and the handsome people, the carriageway of white stones, so watch out, you minstrel boys, because here comes one Paddy who, jump Jim Crow, is out to have it all.
Mulcahey stood in front of the dressing-room mirror. He went up on his toes, the muscles in his calves tightening. He walked on the tips of his toes toward the door, arching the upper half of his body backward, strutting across the floor. “Jesus,” Tommy Rice told Mulcahey that night they met in the New England Hotel, “I could dance before I could walk, wasn’t any step I couldn’t get the hang of in no time, because it all came naturally from listening to the sound of my old man’s fiddle, and dancing in the middle of Bancker Street with all those other Irish kids.”
Squirt came back into the room from the direction of the stage. “You is crazy, Jack. The show is about to start and you not even finished dressing.” Mulcahey heard the twang of banjos, a chorus of voices. He sat down, and Squirt wrapped a paper collar around his neck, did it slowly, carefully, while Mulcahey held his chin high in the air.
“How’s the crowd?”
“The house is half full.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it, Squirt.”
Mulcahey slipped the red ribbon around the collar and tied a big bow. He stood, and Squirt held up the silver jacket with the satin lapels and Mulcahey put his arms into it. He picked up his banjo and walked to the door. The smell of stage lights filled the corridor, calcium heated to incandescence, a sharp, acrid, familiar odor. At the end of the corridor the half-moon of shining darkies was in place on the stage.
Mulcahey went ahead. The curtain was going up. He drew a deep breath and sang softly to himself as he went: “The minstrel boy to the war is gone, in the ranks of death you will find him.”
IV
“YOUR MASTER, I suppose, don’t keep no dogs?”
“Heaps of ’em. Thar’s Bruno—he’s a roarer, he is, and why ‘bout every nigger of us keeps a pup of some natur’ or uther.”
“I don’t want no nigger’s dog.”
“Ours is good dogs, Mr. Haley, and I don’t see no use cussin’ on ‘em, no way.”
Eliza stood in the wings and adjusted the shawl on her shoulders so she could toss it over her head quickly. The slave-catcher was getting ready for the chase. A stagehand knelt next to her, holding a big red dog with one hand, stroking it with the other. He had his face next to the dog’s ear and was whispering into it. Eliza took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and pressed it lightly against her forehead to absorb the perspiration. The dog was panting, drops of saliva dropping from its mouth onto the floor. “Here, Bruno,” the black-faced actor yelled. The stagehand took his hand off the dog’s collar and slapped it gently on the rump. The dog ran into the center of the stage.
“We’re off!” the slave-catcher yelled.
The stagehand ran back to a trunk by the wall and took out a doll wrapped in a plaid blanket. He came back and put it into Eliza’s arms. “Don’t throw the little nigger,” he said. She had once, accidentally. Tripped on the wooden blocks painted to look like ice, the doll careening away from her down between the blocks.
She adjusted the blanket around the doll. A round wooden head painted dark brown, big white eyes with black pupils, wide mouth with red lips that stretched into a grin. The white people’s nigger baby. She couldn’t have been more than eight weeks’ pregnant with Mulcahey’s baby when she visited Mrs. Dumas’s on Bond Street, the downtown version of Madame Restell’s, abortionist to the respectable, an establishment that operated in a mansion close to the unfinished cathedral. Mrs. Dumas shared space with a dentist and a newspaper, her offices in th
e basement, wooden shutters permanently closed against the street, like a whorehouse. Hanging over the sidewalk was a wooden sign with a large white tooth painted on it. Printed beneath in tall black letters was the word “EXTRACTIONS.”
Eliza bled badly after it. She drank the medicine Mrs. Dumas gave her. It smelled like camphor. She ripped up a sheet and put the rags between her legs and slept as much as she could. Mulcahey didn’t seem to notice anything wrong until he tried to make love to her. He reeked of alcohol. She had fallen asleep waiting for him to leave the hotel bar and come upstairs. He was kissing her shoulder and rubbing her thigh. She was cradling a baby in her dream, an infant with big brown eyes. It took her a minute to get her bearings. Mulcahey’s hand was underneath her nightgown. She pushed it away. “Jack,” she said, “I’m sick.”
He sat beside her, grinning the way he always did when he had had too much to drink.
“Something you ate?”
“Women’s problems, Jack.”
He lay down and in a few moments was snoring. She went back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin the next night. Although weak and tired, she got through the initial scenes without any problems. Then came the escape across the ice, the doll in her arms. She held it tightly, stroked its head, kept in mind the directions in the script: Eliza strains her child to her bosom with a convulsive grasp, as she goes rapidly forward. The grotesque face stared at her. Brown eyes, not blue; eyes like hers, not Mulcahey’s. “Eliza, move it!” Regan, the chief stagehand, said in a harsh whisper. Stagehands in both wings were pulling on ropes in a kind of tugo’-war, moving the wooden blocks back and forth, making a river of roaring ice. She jumped onto the first block. From behind her, offstage, the slave-catcher yelled, “Thar she is! Don’t let her get away!” She jumped to the second block, then to the third. She was in the middle of the stage. The dramatic leap was next. The stagehands paused in their tugging. “Count to two,” Regan reminded them. The script repeated itself in her head: Eliza pauses and looks behind, and then, nerved with the strength such as God gives only the desperate, with a wild cry and a flying leap, vaults across to the block that is momentarily stationary. She turns in disbelief to view her desperate achievement, and lifts her child up to heaven in a gesture of triumph.
Her foot hit the rim of the block and she fell forward. The doll and blanket went flying, bounced off the far end of the block, and fell into the make-believe river. The audience gasped. She crawled on her hands and knees. Regan gave the order to get the blocks moving again. The river ice churned wildly. She reached down between the blocks. “Oh, God,” Regan said, “the bitch is gonna get her arm broke.” She pulled the doll out before the blocks banged together. The blanket was gone, and one leg was missing. She clutched the doll to her so the audience couldn’t see it.
Not once in the hundred-odd leaps since then had she fallen, but Regan insisted on bringing up her mishap at every performance. She stepped onto the first block and looked down into the doll’s face. The same silly smile. From behind her came the cue: “Thar she is! Don’t let her get away!” She was off and running, one block, two block, three block, pause, look behind, ice stops, jump, a two-footed landing, baby lifted into the air, a burst of applause, exit stage left.
She put the doll down and took off her shawl. Her blouse was wet with perspiration. Nothing to do until the shoot-out with the slave-hunters, then another break until the last scene when Eliza and her husband, George, would be reunited with Madame de Thoux, George’s sister, and Cassy, Eliza’s mother, the whole cast Africa-bound, a convoluted ending but, since everyone had already read the book, one everyone readily grasped. Coming as it did after the respective death scenes of Eva and Uncle Tom, it drew some tears but soft, hopeful ones, not like the sobbing that attended the ends of the little girl and the Christian slave. “Mrs. Stowe should try her hand at comedies,” said Mulcahey. “She has a gift for endings that go past the happy to the hilarious.”
“There’s nothing wrong with happy endings,” Eliza said. “They happen sometimes.”
A crowd of barefoot black-faced actors in ragged clothes walked around Eliza to the stage. A musical interlude. Nothing crude or in the fashion of a minstrel show. The audience was mostly country types, families from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, young soldiers, the fresh-faced kind on their way from upstate New York to their first taste of war. They were here to be uplifted. Eliza went out the stage door into the alley. The rain had stopped. The night air felt cold. She pulled the shawl close around her.
A group of actors were playing crack-loo against the wall of the theatre, pitching half-dollars that bounced against the brick and rang loudly when they hit the pavement. Carrie Drew, Aunt Ophelia in the play, had her hem hitched into her belt. She stood with her legs apart, her knees slightly bent, and pitched a coin in a high arc that barely kissed the wall and fell closer to it than any of the other coins scattered about. She did a little dance and picked up her winnings. A stagehand appeared at the door and shouted, “Girls, you’re on next.” Carrie unhitched her dress and let it down. She was a woman in her thirties made up to look older. On her forehead was a set of India-ink wrinkles, drawn with a camel’s-hair brush, and covered with a dusting of fine chalk. There were gray streaks in her hair. Behind her were the actresses who played Eva and Topsy: Eva, a woman of twenty in a blond wig with pigtails, wearing a long white dress; Topsy, a woman of about the same age, in blackface and a black wig with tufts of hair tied in red rags, and clothed in a faded, torn calico dress. The audience was required to believe that they were prepuberal incarnations of some of America’s most cherished verities. “Representatives of their races,” as Mrs. Stowe described them: “The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor … The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!”
Eva took a deep draw on her cheroot, dropped it, and crushed it with her foot. “Let me see that,” she said to Carrie. Carrie tossed one of the half-dollars high in the air. Eva caught it.
“How do I know this is the one you used?”
“Just gotta trust me.”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“Want an answer?”
They laughed and went up the stairs.
“Well, Eliza,” Carrie said, “I’m glad to see you escaped the slave-catchers. How was the trip across the river?”
“Uneventful.”
“And how is our devoted audience this evening?”
“A full house ready to weep.”
Carrie turned her head and said over her shoulder to Eva and Topsy, “Come, my younglings, we mustn’t disappoint.”
Eliza watched them go in. The two younger actresses were new in their roles. This was only their second week. Carrie had been there almost six months. For these three, as for the other migratory creatures of the stage, Uncle Tom was a convenient refuge that served as a resting spot between more promising engagements, a perpetually running play in which the cast was always changing, all except Señorita La Plante, the actress from somewhere in the South, whom everyone called Eliza.
*
Several nights before, Stephen Foster had shown up to stand in the wings and watch the play. It was not the first time he had done so, but he was drunker than usual, swaying from side to side and forced to hold on to the curtains to keep his balance. He was so loud that Regan came over and threatened to toss him out.
“Eliza,” Foster said, “I must talk to you.”
She took him to a corner where the dust hung like Spanish moss on abandoned props and scenery. He had been in Jim Ryan’s on Cherry Street, the lowest dive on a street lined with them, watching people dance—sailors, whores, thieves, soldiers. Darkie musicians were playing banjos and drums in the corner of the room, and the white trash was moving to it, legs pumping rapidly, arms swinging, people who had jus
t met swaying together, sometimes dancing so close, and in such a frenzied way, their pelvises seemed to grind together. The music kept getting faster, and its pulse, its regular metric beat, was hypnotic.
“It made you want to move,” he said.
“What made you want to move?” Eliza asked.
It was the music he had heard on the Cincinnati docks, Olivia’s music as she moved so naturally, so fluidly, when they stood outside the Negro church and listened to the voices inside. An ancient whore with lips and cheeks farded with red paint had come over, taken his arm, and moved him out onto the dance floor. He tried to go back, but she dragged him to the floor once more. He felt humiliated, but when he looked around, he realized no one in Jim Ryan’s was watching anyone. They were each involved in the excitement of their own movement. The floor was moving up and down with the pounding of the dancers. It felt as if it might snap. The whore started to move furiously, flailing her arms.
“Uncle Tom,” he said. “Uncle Tom with music. New music. A new way to dance.” He moved his feet in a little jig. “Do you understand, Eliza?”
He could tell by her face that she didn’t. He had gotten too drunk. But in the morning he would be able to explain. Uncle Tom’s Cabin with music. Not an opera. But a play interspersed with singing and dancing. Not minstrel music. But real Negro music. And real darkies. Up until now, Eliza had one of the few roles that a colored person could aspire to: Mrs. Stowe’s mulatto girl who could almost pass for white. The American stage had darkies galore, from the tragic Othello, with Edwin Booth in blackface, to the dimwitted Tambo, played by any number of burnt-cork minstrels. It also had Coal Black Rose and Little Yaller Gal, the high-struttin’, dark-as-midnight, big-as-a-barrel mammy and the silky, smooth-moving, coffee-colored siren. But the universal conventions of minstrelsy ordained that darkies need not apply. All roles were reserved for transvested white men, sometime pretenders to another sex as well as to another race.