by Edna Ferber
“Person’s too sick to play, they’re sick enough to have a doctor’s what I say. Playing Xenia to-morrow. Good a stand’s we got. Prolly won’t be able to open there, neither, if you’re sick’s all that.”
“I’ll be able to play to-morrow!” cried Julie, in a high strained voice. “I’ll be able to play to-morrow. To-morrow I’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?” demanded Doc.
Steve turned on him in sudden desperation. “She’ll be all right, I tell you. She’ll be all right as soon as she gets out of this town.”
“That’s a funny thing,” exclaimed Parthy. She swept through the little crowd at the door, seeming to mow them down with the energy of her progress. “That’s a funny thing.”
“What?” demanded Steve, his tone belligerent. “What’s funny?”
Captain Andy raised a placating palm. “Now, Parthy, now, Parthy. Sh-sh!”
“Don’t shush me, Hawks. I know what I’m talking about. It came over me just this minute. Julie took sick at this very town of Lemoyne time we came down river last year. Soon as you and Doc decided we wouldn’t open here because the license was too high she got well all of a sudden, just like that!” She snapped a thumb and forefinger.
Silence, thick, uncomfortable, heavy with foreboding, settled down upon the little group in the doorway.
“Nothing so funny about that,” said Captain Andy, stoutly; and threw a sharp glance at the face on the pillow. “This hot sticky climate down here after the cold up north is liable to get anybody to feeling queer. None too chipper myself, far’s that goes. Affects some people that way.” He scratched frenziedly at the mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that.
“Well, I may not know much——” began Parthy.
Down the aisle skimmed Magnolia, shouting as she came, her child’s voice high and sharp with excitement. “Mom! Mom! Look. What do you think! Julie’s picture’s been stolen again right out of the front of the lobby. Julie, they’ve taken your picture again. Somebody took one and Schultzy put another in and now it’s been stolen too.”
She was delighted with her news; radiant with it. Her face fell a little at the sight of the figure on the bed, the serious group about the doorway that received her news with much gravity. She flew to the bed then, all contrition. “Oh, Julie darling, I’m so sorry you’re sick.” Julie turned her face away from the child, toward the wall.
Captain Andy, simulating fury, capered a threatening step toward the doorway crowd now increased by the deprecating figure of Mr. Means and Ralph’s tall shambling bulk. “Will you folks clear out of here or will I have to use force! A body’d think a girl didn’t have the right to feel sick. Doc, you get down and ’tend to that ticket window, or Parthy. If we can’t show to-night we got to leave ’em know. Ralph, you write out a sign and get it pasted up at the post office.… Sure you won’t be feeling better by night time, are you, Julie?” He looked doubtfully down at the girl on the bed.
With a sudden lithe movement Julie flung herself into Steve’s arms, clung to him, weeping. “No!” she cried, her voice high, hysterical. “No! No! No! Leave me alone, can’t you! Leave me alone!”
“Sure,” Andy motioned, then, fiercely to the company. “Sure we’ll leave you alone, Julie.”
But Tragedy, having stalked her victim surely, relentlessly, all the morning, now was about to close in upon her. She had sent emissary after emissary down the show-boat aisle, and each had helped to deepen the look of terror in Julie’s eyes. Now sounded the slow shambling heavy tread of Windy the pilot, bearded, sombre, ominous as the figure of fate itself. The little group turned toward him automatically, almost absurdly, like a badly directed mob scene in one of their own improbable plays.
He clumped up the little flight of steps that led from the lower left-hand box to the stage. Clump, clump, clump. Irresistibly Parthy’s eyes peered sharply in pursuit of the muddy tracks that followed each step. She snorted indignantly. Across the stage, his beard waggling up and down as his jaws worked slowly, rhythmically on a wedge of Honest Scrap. As he approached Julie’s doorway he took off his cap and rubbed his pate with his palm, sure sign of great mental perturbation in this monumental old leviathan. The yellow skin of his knobby bald dome-like head shone gold in the rays of the late morning sun that came in through the high windows at the side of the stage.
He stood a moment, chewing, and peering mildly into the dimness of the bedroom, Sphinx-like, it seemed that he never would speak. He stood, champing. The Cotton Blossom troupe waited. They had not played melodrama for years without being able to sense it when they saw it. He spoke. “Seems that skunk Pete’s up to something.” They waited. The long tobacco-stained beard moved up and down, up and down. “Skinned out half an hour back streaking toward town like possessed. He yanked that picture of Julie out of the hall there. Seen him. I see good deal goes on around here.”
Steve sprang to his feet with a great ripping river oath. “I’ll kill him this time, the——”
“Seen you take that first picture out, Steve.” The deep red that had darkened Steve’s face and swelled the veins on his great neck receded now, leaving his china-blue eyes staring out of a white and stricken face.
“I never did! I never did!”
Julie sat up, clutching her wrapper at the throat. She laughed shrilly. “What would he want to steal my picture for! His own wife’s picture. Likely!”
“So nobody in this town’d see it, Julie,” said Windy, mildly. “Listen. Fifty years piloting on the rivers, you got to have pretty good eyesight. Mine’s as good to-day as it was time I was twenty. I just stepped down from the texas to warn you I see Pete coming along the levee with Ike Keener. Ike’s the sheriff. He’ll be in here now any minute.”
“Let him,” Andy said, stoutly. “Our license is paid. Sheriff’s as welcome around this boat as anybody. Let him.”
But no one heard him; no one heeded him. A strange and terrible thing was happening. Julie had sprung from her bed. In her white nightgown and her wrapper, her long black hair all tumbled and wild about her face, a stricken and hunted thing, she clung to Steve, and he to her. There came a pounding at the door that led into the show-boat auditorium from the fore deck. Steve’s eyes seemed suddenly to sink far back in his head. His cheek-bones showed gaunt and sharp as Julie’s own. His jaw was set so that a livid ridge stood out on either side like bars of white-hot steel. He loosened Julie’s hold almost roughly. From his pocket he whipped a great clasp-knife and opened its flashing blade. Julie did not scream, but the other women did, shriek on shriek. Captain Andy sprang for him, a mouse attacking a mastodon. Steve shook him off with a fling of his powerful shoulders.
“I’m not going to hurt her, you fool. Leave me be. I know what I’m doing.” The pounding came again, louder and more insistent. “Somebody go down and let him in—but keep him there a minute.”
No one stirred. The pounding ceased. The doors opened. The boots of Ike Keener, the sheriff, clattered down the aisle of the Cotton Blossom.
“Stop those women screeching,” Steve shouted. Then, to Julie, “It won’t hurt much, darling.” With incredible swiftness he seized Julie’s hand in his left one and ran the keen glittering blade of his knife firmly across the tip of her forefinger. A scarlet line followed it. He bent his blond head, pressed his lips to the wound, sucked it greedily. With a little moan Julie fell back on the bed. Steve snapped the blade into its socket, thrust the knife into his pocket. The boots of Sheriff Ike Keener were clattering across the stage now. The white faces clustered in the doorway—the stricken, bewildered, horrified faces—turned from the two within the room to the one approaching it. They made way for this one silently. Even Parthy was dumb. Magnolia clung to her, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, sensing tragedy though she had never before encountered it.
The lapel of his coat flung back, Ike Keener confronted the little cowed group on the stage. A star shone on his left breast. The scene was like a rehearsal of a Cotton Blossom thriller.
“Who’s captain of this here boat?”
Andy, his fingers clutching his whiskers, stepped forward. “I am. What’s wanted with him? Hawks is my name—Captain Andy Hawks, twenty years on the rivers.”
He looked the sheriff of melodrama, did Ike Keener—boots, black moustaches, wide-brimmed black hat, flowing tie, high boots, and all. Steve himself, made up for the part, couldn’t have done it better. “Well, Cap, kind of unpleasant, but I understand there’s a miscegenation case on board.”
“What?” whispered Magnolia. “What’s that? What does he mean, Mom?”
“Hush!” hissed Parthy, and jerked the child’s arm.
“How’s that?” asked Andy, but he knew.
“Miscegenation. Case of a Negro woman married to a white man. Criminal offense in this state, as you well know.”
“No such thing,” shouted Andy. “No such thing on board this boat.”
Sheriff Ike Keener produced a piece of paper. “Name of the white man is Steve Baker. Name of the negress”— he squinted again at the slip of paper—“name of the negress is Julie Dozier.” He looked around at the group. “Which one’s them?”
“Oh, my God!” screamed Elly. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“Shut up,” said Schultzy, roughly.
Steve stepped to the window and threw up the shade, letting the morning light into the crowded disorderly little cubicle. On the bed lay Julie, her eyes enormous in her sallow pinched face.
“I’m Steve Baker. This is my wife.”
Sheriff Ike Keener tucked the paper in his pocket. “You two better dress and come along with me.”
Julie stood up. She looked an old woman. The marmoset whimpered and whined in his fur nest. She put out a hand, automatically, and plucked it from the muff and held it in the warm hollow of her breast. Her great black eyes stared at the sheriff like the wide-open unseeing eyes of a sleep walker.
Steve Baker grinned—rather, his lips drew back from his teeth in a horrid semblance of mirth. He threw a jovial arm about Julie’s shrinking shoulder. For once she had no need to coach him in his part. He looked Ike Keener in the eye. “You wouldn’t call a man a white man that’s got Negro blood in him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t; not in Mississippi. One drop of nigger blood makes you a nigger in these parts.”
“Well, I got more than a drop of—nigger blood in me, and that’s a fact. You can’t make miscegenation out of that.”
“You ready to swear to that in a court of law?”
“I’ll swear to it any place. I’ll swear it now.” Steve took a step forward, one hand outstretched. “I’ll do more than that. Look at all these folks here. There ain’t one of them but can swear I got Negro blood in me this minute. That’s how white I am.”
Sheriff Ike Keener swept the crowd with his eye. Perhaps what he saw in their faces failed to convince him. “Well, I seen fairer men than you was niggers. Still, you better tell that——”
Mild, benevolent, patriarchal, the figure of old Windy stepped out from among the rest. “Guess you’ve known me, Ike, better part of twenty-five years. I was keelboatin’ time you was runnin’ around, a barefoot on the landin’. Now I’m tellin’ you—me, Windy McKlain—that that white man there’s got nigger blood in him. I’ll take my oath to that.”
Having thus delivered himself of what was, perhaps, the second longest speech in his career, he clumped off again, across the stage, down the stairs, up the aisle, looking, even in that bizarre environment, like something out of Genesis.
Sheriff Ike Keener was frankly puzzled. “If it was anybody else but Windy—but I got this straight from—from somebody ought to know.”
“From who?” shouted Andy, all indignation. “From a sooty-faced scab of a bull-drumming engineer named Pete. And why? Because he’s been stuck on Julie here I don’t know how long, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is,” Steve put in, quickly. “He was after my wife. Anybody in the company ’ll bear me out. He wouldn’t leave her alone, though she hated the sight of him, and Cap here give him a talking—didn’t you, Cap? So finally, when he wouldn’t quit, then there was nothing for it but lick him, and I licked him good, and soused him in the river to get his dirty face clean. He crawls out swearing he’ll get me for it. Now you know.”
Keener now addressed himself to Julie for the first time. “He says—this Pete—that you was born here in Lemoyne, and that your pop was white and your mammy black. That right?”
Julie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she said. “That’s—right.”
A sudden commotion in the group that had been so still. Elly’s voice, shrill with hysteria. “I will! I’ll tell right out. The wench! The lying black——”
Suddenly stifled, as though a hand had been clapped none too gently across her mouth. Incoherent blubberings; a scuffle. Schultzy had picked Elly up like a sack of meal, one hand still firmly held over her mouth; had carried her into her room and slammed the door.
“What’s she say?” inquired Keener.
Again Andy stepped into the breach. “That’s our ingénue lead. She’s kind of high strung. You see, she’s been friends with this—with Julie Dozier, here—without knowing about her—about her blood, and like that. Kind of give her a shock, I guess. Natural.”
It was plain that Sheriff Ike Keener was on the point of departure, puzzled though convinced. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, scratched his head, replaced the hat at an angle that spelled bewilderment. His eye, as he turned away, fell on the majestic figure of Parthenia Ann Hawks, and on Magnolia cowering, wide-eyed, in the folds of her mother’s ample skirts.
“You look like a respectable woman, ma’am.”
Imposing enough at all times, Parthy now grew visibly taller. Cold sparks flew from her eyes. “I am.”
“That your little girl?”
Andy did the honours. “My wife, Sheriff. My little girl, Magnolia. What do you say to the Sheriff, Magnolia?”
Thus urged, Magnolia spoke that which had been seething within her. “You’re bad!” she shouted, her face twisted with the effort to control her tears. “You’re a bad mean man, that’s what! You called Julie names and made her look all funny. You’re a——”
The maternal hand stifled her.
“If I was you, ma’am, I wouldn’t bring up no child on a boat like this. No, nor stay on it, neither. Fine place to rear a child!”
Whereupon, surprisingly enough, Parthy turned defensive. “My child’s as well brought up as your own, and probably better, and so I tell you. And I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself, Mr. Sheriff.”
“Parthy! Parthy!” from the alarmed Andy.
But Sheriff Ike Keener was a man of parts. “Well, women folks are all alike. I’ll be going. I kind of smell a nigger in the woodpile here in more ways than one. But I’ll take your word for it.” He looked Captain Andy sternly in the eye. “Only let me tell you this, Captain Hawks. You better not try to give your show in this town to-night. We got some public-spirited folks here in Lemoyne and this fix you’re in has kind of leaked around. You go to work and try to give your show with this mixed blood you got here and first thing you know you’ll be riding out of town on something don’t sit so easy as a boat.”
His broad-brimmed hat at an angle of authority, his coat tails flirting as he strode, he marched up the aisle then and out.
The little huddling group seemed visibly to collapse. It was as though an unseen hand had removed a sustaining iron support from the spine of each. Magnolia would have flown to Julie, but Parthy jerked her back. Whispering then; glance of disdain.
“Well, Julie, m’girl,” began Andy Hawks, kindly. Julie turned to him.
“We’re going,” she said, quietly.
The door of Elly’s room burst open. Elly, a rumpled, distraught, unlovely figure, appeared in Julie’s doorway, Schultzy trying in vain to placate her.
“You get o
ut of here!” She turned in a frenzy to Andy. “She gets out of here with that white trash she calls her husband or I go, and so I warn you. She’s black! She’s black! God, I was a fool not to see it all the time. Look at her, the nasty yellow——” A stream of abuse, vile, obscene, born of the dregs of river talk heard through the years, now welled to Elly’s lips, distorting them horribly.
“Come away from here,” Parthy said, through set lips, to Magnolia. And bore the child, protesting, up the aisle and into the security of her own room forward.
“I want to stay with Julie! I want to stay with Julie!” wailed Magnolia, overwrought, as the inexorable hand dragged her up the stairs.
In her tiny disordered room Julie was binding up her wild hair with a swift twist. She barely glanced at Elly. “Shut that woman up,” she said, quietly. “Tell her I’m going.” She began to open boxes and drawers.
Steve approached Andy, low-voiced. “Cap, take us down as far as Xenia, will you, for God’s sake! Don’t make us get off here.”
“Down as far as Xenia you go,” shouted Captain Andy at the top of his voice, “and anybody in this company don’t like it they’re free to git, bag and baggage, now. We’ll pull out of here now. Xenia by afternoon at four, latest. And you two want to stay the night on board you’re welcome. I’m master of this boat, by God!”
They left, these two, when the Cotton Blossom docked at Xenia in the late afternoon. Andy shook hands with them, gravely; and Windy clumped down from the pilot house to perform the same solemn ceremony. You sensed unseen peering eyes at every door and window of the Cotton Blossom and the Mollie Able.
“How you fixed for money?” Andy demanded, bluntly.
“We’re fixed all right,” Julie replied, quietly. Of the two of them she was the more composed. “We’ve been saving. You took too good care of us on the Cotton Blossom. No call to spend our money.” The glance from her dark shadow-encircled eyes was one of utter gratefulness. She took up the lighter pieces of luggage. Steve was weighed down with the others—bulging boxes and carpet bags and bundles—their clothing and their show-boat wardrobe and their pitifully few trinkets and personal belongings. A pin cushion, very lumpy, that Magnolia had made for her at Christmas a year ago. Photographs of the Cotton Blossom. A book of pressed wild flowers. Old newspaper clippings.