by Peter Quinn
Jack Jack was no amateur in bed. He said that his mentor, Jack Diamond, had seen to that, making sure he had the best training in the romantic arts that the young Republic could provide. Unlike most performers, Diamond had preferred to tour the wilder, less settled parts of the country, the fringes of the frontier, where, he had told Jack, the women were given to amorous acrobatics that their counterparts in the East were incapable of, especially in the vicinity of Boston. But Eliza found in Jack a knowledge that she knew wasn’t imparted by whores, an interest in her response, slow caresses stoking her desire.
Black Jack had no interest in lovemaking. He tossed around at night, unable to sleep but unwilling to tell her why. She knew he worried about money. He was well paid, and the accommodations in the hotel were far cheaper than he could afford. He put his money in the bank or hid it somewhere. Never told her how much he had. But he talked about hard times the way sailors talk about bad weather, as if it were a looming certainty, if not today then tomorrow, a storm of wind, rain, and hail that would flatten the improvident and sink the spendthrift. No matter how brightly the sun shone, he lived in despair over what lay ahead until, suddenly, motivated by reasons she could never fathom, the clouds would lift, and instead of going directly from the show to their room, Black Jack would give way to Jack Jack, bosom friend of everyone in the barroom, congenial host, standing round after round, a fountain of stories, songs, drinks; her gentle, attentive lover.
When they left the barroom, it was late. They made love. He rolled off her, both of them expended, and she felt the soft exhalation of his breath on her neck, the rhythm of sleep. It was not her time of the month, and she had not asked him to withdraw before he ejaculated. She lay in the dark, and his semen flowed out of her. Sexless creatures, without faces. Her aunt’s superstition.
“Do you believe in signs?” he said. She was surprised that he was still awake. She turned her head toward his. Their faces almost touched.
“Signs?”
“Omens. Portents.”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On what’s being portended and who’s doing the portending. I believe the prophecies in the Bible and what the prophets said, but I’m not much for the fashion of the séance and the knock-knocking of the spirit world.”
“You don’t think it’s possible to foresee a death?”
“I never thought about it.”
“In Ireland we believed it was, and among the old people there were those believed I had the power.”
“To tell who was going to die?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever?”
“Sometimes I thought I saw a light that surrounded a person’s head, and, sure enough, he was usually dead before too long.”
She knew he was superstitious. All performers were, the Irish ones especially, with their medals, scapulars, holy water, and beads. Most of it was foreign to the stark religion she was raised in at Midian’s Well. Jack had two holy cards tucked into the mirror over the bureau. On one the figure of Jesus pointed at his exposed heart, which was crowned with thorns; on the other was a prayer that Eliza loved to read. She found comfort in its cadences, its promises. Mercy, clemency, love, the fruit of thy womb. She had repeated it so often she had it memorized.
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy;
Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.
To thee do we cry,
Poor banished children of Eve;
to thee do we send up our sighs
mourning and weeping
in this vale of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy towards us;
and after this, our exile,
show unto us
the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
“You don’t believe me?” Jack said.
“People die by the hundreds every day in this city. And you can tell which ones?”
“Not all. Some. A few.”
“Anyone I know?”
“No, it ain’t happened since I left Ireland.”
He was quiet again. He rolled onto his side and draped his arm over her. In a moment he was asleep. Eliza lay still. She loved the night. As a child she had gotten out of bed when her parents were asleep and snuck up the hill behind the house. She could see the sea from there, the lights of ships as they glided across it, and hear the sounds that carried with magical clarity over the water, words, laughter, songs. She looked up at the stars but never found in them a clue to what lay ahead. The only premonition she ever had was the one that kept her from sleep: Sooner or later, Jack would leave her. As much as she appreciated his gentleness with her, as oblivious as he was to race, she had come to understand that his kindness was an attempt to keep her at a distance. And beneath his indifference she sensed his fear of losing what he had, his talent, his money, minstrelsy, as the burden of a family dragged him under as he tried to stay afloat.
*
In December of 1860, when Eliza left her own room and moved in with Jack, Stephen Foster performed a mock wedding in the barroom of the hotel. Jack had just made his debut with Brown-lee’s: Jack Jack in his prime. He made the champagne flow, and spun around the room dancing with different partners. Foster stood on a chair and demanded silence. He fell off once and everyone laughed, but Jack helped him back up, and wobbling a bit as he spoke, Foster said that no matter what the politicians claimed, there was but one real democracy in the world, one true society of equals, and this room encompassed it.
“The dancer, the singer, the balladeer, the minstrel, the thespian, whether comedian or tragedian, those of us who compose music and those of you who play it, we know no qualification but ability! We accept no distinction save talent!”
Foster almost fell off the chair again, but Jack caught him. Foster called Eliza to come forward. She was standing in the back of the room, and when she didn’t move, the others pushed her forward. Foster took her hand and put it in Jack’s.
“Neither Greek nor Jew, nor slave nor free! Can anyone tell me why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony?”
“No!” the crowd yelled.
“Get me a ring,” Foster said.
Someone rushed to the hotel dining room and came back with a large napkin ring, which he handed to Foster. Eliza was embarrassed but excited. She had just started her role in Uncle Tom and was new to the company of entertainers. She felt Jack’s hand tighten around hers until it hurt. He said under his breath, “Foster, stop this.” She glanced at him. Black Jack. Squirt had it right: It was as if there were a storm bottled up inside him.
Foster held up the ring. “This is the symbol of the union we celebrate, a new race to be procreated, talc to whiten the black, the cork to blacken the white, appearances only, the inconsequentiality of the accidental beside the shared essence of what flows through their veins—greasepaint!”
There was more cheering. Foster rocked unsteadily on the chair. Jack pressed his foot against the leg and pushed. Foster went backward, his arms outstretched and spinning in circles. He crashed into a table. Those standing nearby helped him up, and Eliza lent a hand. When she turned around, Jack had disappeared. His money was still on the bar, and the party continued, the increasingly loud camaraderie celebrating the truest democracy of all: the dispensation of free drinks.
Eliza stayed and drank champagne, but with Jack gone the others lost interest in her and she found herself at a table alone. The room was still crowded. A man with thinning gray hair plastered to his scalp came over and poured champagne into her glass.
“Do you mind if I sit?” he asked.
Eliza shook her head. He introduced himself as Bill Wehman.
“You’re Miss La Plante, I presume. People are talking about you, which in our profession is a thing to be desired.”
“Yes, I’m Therese La Plante, but everyone calls me Eliza. Jack started it, now everybody does it.”
“Eliza it is. You’re new to the city?”
“Fairly.”
He held up his glass. “I wish you luck. The rest seems to have been taken care of. I’m told you have talent. I can see you have beauty, and it’s all wrapped in mystery, a combination that is nonpareil.”
“There’s no mystery, Mr. Wehman.”
“Bill,” he said. “Never been called nothing else. Call me Bill.”
“What is so mysterious, Bill?”
“Well, in case you don’t know it, there’s a storm of speculation about you. There’s one story says you’re the illegitimate daughter of Santa Anna, the conqueror of the Alamo and a late resident of this city. There’s another says you’re a Negress, the first ever on the New York stage.”
“Nobody’s business but mine, is it?” Eliza stood up. She had been warned that even as her presence helped draw in audiences, it could lead to suspicion, a disquiet about “the niggers taking over.” Let them have their mystery. She wasn’t going to solve it for them.
He put his hand on her wrist. “Miss La Plante, Eliza, hear me out. Please, this will take but a minute.” She sat.
“At my age, I ain’t got much interest in people’s origins. Never interested me, even when I was young. But there are people mightily interested.”
He poured champagne into his glass and put it next to her ear. “Listen, Eliza. Effervescence. Escaping gases. Someday a philosopher of some sort will undoubtedly write a book explaining the sudden popularity of this bubbling brew, why at this particular moment it should conquer New York, sweeping aside the taste for whiskey and ale.”
The glass was so close to her ear that she could hear its fizz and feel its sparkle. “I have no idea,” she said.
“Nobody knows why, not even our yet-to-be-born philosopher. But he’ll make up a reason, invent some theory about the era we live in and then use champagne to prove it. Philosophers do it all the time. Matter of fact, everybody does it, finds facts to fit his theories. It ain’t just the philosophers.”
He put the glass next to his own ear. “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
Eliza stood up. The man was obviously drunk. She was too tired to humor him. “I have to go,” she said.
“I know I sound like a raving old lunatic, but just a minute more.” She stood where she was. “I’ll get to the point. People got all sorts of theories about Negroes, about whether to free them or not, about how much like the white man they are, about whether they can be civilized, about whether they belong back in Africa. Some are sure that one day we’ll learn to live together, peacefully. Could be. But that’s a theory. Let me tell you a fact. In the summer of ’34, I was appearing at the National Theatre in a play I can’t even remember the name of. Was brutally hot, typical for New York at that time of the year, the city was seething with trouble, and before too long gangs of immigrants were fighting gangs of Americans for control of the streets. Got so bad the city watchmen hid themselves for fear of being killed.
“Well, somehow in the middle of it all, both sides got it in their heads to go after the abolitionists. New York never had many abolitionists, not then, not now, but the mobs decided that hordes of free blacks was about to be imported into the city, so they went wild, pausing long enough in their warfare to attack the homes of the abolitionists and beat up any colored they found on the street and wreck some colored churches.
“We never closed the theatre, even when the whole city seemed run by the mobs and they had barricades up in the streets like Paris during one of them French revolutions.
“One night in the intermission, when the heat was wringing the life out of me, I went out the back of the theatre and stood in the street, still in costume, my hair all white like I was an old man. Odd, when you think about it, that I don’t remember the play but recall how I was made up. Memory’s like that. Anyways, I’m standing there next to this colored boy who used to move the scenery. Quiet boy, polite as can be, and as light as they come, so much so that, sometimes, if he was standing in the shadows, you’d swear he was white. But that night he wasn’t in the shadows. Was right out there in the street, and I was talking to him just like I’m talking to you when this crowd starts coming up the street, maybe two, three hundred people, and before either of us knew what was happening, they were all around us and this colored boy is struggling to get free and people are tearing at each other to get at him.
“No need to go into what they did, because the truth is I don’t like thinking about it. They treated that boy the worst way you can treat a living thing, and then strung him up from this withered, spindly tree that bent with the boy’s weight.
“I tried to stop ’em, but there wasn’t much I could do. Matter of fact, if I hadn’t a been made up as an old man, I think they woulda mashed me up almost as bad as they did that poor boy.”
Wehman poured more champagne; the bubbles foamed to the top of his glass. He held it up in front of his face. “I’ve never cared for this stuff. Whiskey is my drink, and I suppose one day the fashion of champagne will pass and some new concoction will take its place, because that’s the way this town is, fashion following fashion, but I’m not sure that the feelings toward the colored is going to follow that pattern. The colored seem to be in a category all their own. I’ve been here all my life and never seen it change.”
In the church in Midian’s Well, the Reverend Mr. Enders had constantly reminded his congregation not to show any emotion when they came into contact with white people. “It is the Lord who has hardened their hearts,” he said. “You can’t change them. Only the Lord can.” Eliza could see that Wehman was trying to be kind, but it was a white person’s kindness, an inescapable if unintended note of superiority, as if any Negro in any part of America needed to be reminded of the danger he was in. Wehman was sitting with his mouth open, drool at its right corner. He thought she was a total innocent, Mrs. Stowe’s Eliza in the flesh.
“I must be going, Bill,” she said, “but I thank you for your note of caution.”
Wehman stood up and walked with her to the hotel lobby. “For all I know, maybe you are Santa Anna’s daughter, but it’s best to be on your guard. Be careful.”
Jack Mulcahey was the only white man Eliza ever met who talked as if color were of no consequence. He had told her several times the story of how when he was a boy in Donegal a man from his village had come running back from the coast, breathless and frightened. People gathered around and asked him what was wrong. The man said he had just seen the Góban Saor himself, Goban the Wright, his tongue a hammer, his eloquence a bellows, his skin as black as the grates on which he beat the red-hot irons, fir dubh, the dark man the storytellers described. The villagers said that the man must be drunk. But Jack and some other boys slipped away and went down to see for themselves; and sure enough, there he was, Góban Saor, standing in an alehouse, amid a crowd of sailors, in striped pants and blue jacket, his head bare, his hair tightly curled and glistening. The boys watched him through the window while he drank porter. A demigod from the land of the stories.
Jack said, “I don’t think that black man had ever seen such a collection of ragamuffins as he did that day. He gave us each a shilling. Paddy as the object of a nigger’s charity. You don’t get much poorer than that.” But like marriage, race was something Jack usually preferred not to talk about. For Jack it was as if his and Eliza’s life were confined to the New England Hotel, as if this were all the past they had, the only future they should expect.
Eliza never volunteered anything. When Jack asked, she would tell him everything, from her childhood in Midian’s Well until the day she met him, but only when he asked, only when he expressed interest. And she would tell only Jack. She would tell no one else. When Josie Woods had taken her to the theatre and told the manager that Miss Therese La Plante would be a perfect Eliza and would bring an element of exotic to the flagging stage version of Mrs. Stowe’s novel, the stage manager had been skeptical.
&nbs
p; “What is your background?” he asked.
Eliza said nothing. She knew he was looking for some reason to dismiss her, any excuse.
Mrs. Woods broke the silence. “What is your background?” she asked him. “Or mine? And what does background have to do with acting? Are you a parson or a stage manager?”
“I mean, what experience?”
Eliza spoke up for herself. “I studied under Mrs. Euphemia Blanchard at the Fulton Academy.”
The manager agreed to give her a try. When they left his office, Mrs. Woods said to her, “You never mentioned anything to me about studying acting. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
Eliza always considered it her first successful bit of acting, the authority with which she invoked Mrs. Blanchard’s name, a bluff that neither the stage manager nor Mrs. Woods called. It wasn’t a total lie. Mrs. Blanchard not only rescued her from the streets, clothed, and fed her, but taught her about the supreme artifice of the coloreds who lived among the whites, the necessity of dissembling, the acting required of those who would survive.
She had left Midian’s Well on a Sunday, done it suddenly, although she had yearned to leave for as long as she could remember. She had gone to a dock a few miles down the road from Midian’s Well, in the white folk’s town. Her father and the rest of the community were in church, where they would be for most of the day. He would be looking back at the door, growing angrier by the minute, working himself into a rage that would explode once he came home.
A white man in an oyster boat that was pulled alongside the dock called to her. “Girl, here’s a nickel, run up to that shed and fetch me some tobacco.”
She had been in the presence of whites before but had never talked to one. The men of Midian’s Well were the only ones who did, and only when necessary. He reached up and handed her the nickel. She ran to the shack by the dock and asked the white man behind the counter for tobacco. Her heart was racing with excitement.