I Got to Keep Moving

by Bill Harris

  The mother and son stood as if for their picture to be taken. To their left, over their heads, behind them was a newly posted handbill touting

  ROYALE & RHYMES’ MINSTRELS

  ALL COLORED ALL THE TIME

  Shell shock was a white man’s disease. Coloreds were too happy to be shell-shocked. If they were any ways sad they just sang a blues until their spirits picked up again, or they packed up and picked up and took off up the road.

  30 PERFORMERS & MUSICIANS

  The colored minstrels that the handbill advertised were set up in the field behind the factory near the railroad tracks. They had been there for the last two nights. The redhead had told him she saw them on her way to his room.

  The smell of bacon was making the clerk lightheaded.

  On the poster there were rows of ovals of the black faces of the minstrel performers and musicians.

  Where had he heard that tune? His stomach was gurgling like a running toilet.

  “What happened to your boy?” The clerk heard his voice like a phantom’s speaking from deep within the forest of his mind.

  “Nothing, he’s all right.”

  “Looks like hot barbed wire got run ’crost his face.”

  “Accident,” she said, with a tone that wasn’t apologetic, assertive, secretive, or revealing.

  The clerk’s head was swimming with the aroma of frying bacon, his belly sizzling. The craving in his belly made itself heard.

  ROYALE & RHYMES’ MINSTRELS

  ALL COLORED ALL THE TIME

  “He wants to tell you something,” the woman said.

  The clerk shook his head.

  It was that first feeling—more than a feeling—knowledge, that ignited in him, bright as a shell burst, causing even worse heart-skip and gut wrench; that even though he went over the top with all the rest and did what he had to, like all the rest, he would forever not un-feel how he had felt in that moment when the order was shouted. It was not the feeling of a man. It was an emptiness past fear, a vacancy, and could only be erased—not by music, not by sex or religion—by nothing but drink. That any revelation or exploration of it or suspicion of its having been was—what? The clerk did not know.

  “What’s your boy’s name?”

  “He doesn’t have a name.”

  It must be a nigger joke.

  “How do you call him, when you want him?”

  “I don’t have to call him, Mister. He knows when I want him.”

  Was it a joke? All of it? Had Willard, Willard and his uncle, somehow had something—?

  The clerk could sense her impatience with him. It didn’t make him mad at her. Not like it did with the redhead.

  She was just a steely-nerved colored woman with her scarred, blind child. She wanted to get on to whatever path they had to follow.

  “He’ll name himself when he needs one,” the young colored woman said.

  It made just enough sense not to pursue it, or was just colored-crazy enough not to follow it for fear of the worthlessness of the outcome.

  “What’s it like to be blind?”

  The boy turned his face to his mother.

  “He just sees different,” she said.

  The clerk didn’t argue. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  “You’re lucky you’re blind,” the clerk said. He meant it. Lucky as that son of a bitch Willard, he thought. Said, “You won’t have to go war.”

  “It helped Gabriel that he had his horn to blow,” the boy said.

  What mattered was to dismiss them. Then telephone the sheriff to alert him to their being in the vicinity.

  The colored woman looked over her shoulder to follow his line of sight to the handbill.

  The clerk looked away from the handbill and to his left across the road, at the courthouse the color of the redhead’s hair, where the sun in its stubborn journey eased dark angles before it.

  “It’s 6:30 now,” the clerk said. “You have until 7.”

  “My boy might can help you, before it’s too late,” the woman said, “but you have to listen.”

  The clerk turned and went through the screen door and closed both doors behind him.

  He imagined the young colored woman and the boy slowly walking away, trying to decide what to do.

  15

  All Colored All the Time

  1937

  Mister R.W. Boone was how he always introduced himself to colored or white, adult or child. It was ever just his initials or only his last name. R.W. Boone, like it was a single name.

  Ralph Waldo. R.W.

  They knew what he stood for. He stood for the race. The Race. Mister R.W. Boone was a race man from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. It was colored first and last with him. Anybody knew him knew that. Race man. And a ladies man. That was a close second. Close as his next heartbeat. When he stepped down off the lead car in a new town, he was either escorting a woman down who’d been with him for a week or so, escorting her across the track, a ticket in her hand to send her on her way back to where he’d picked her up, or he was being met by some other woman waiting on him to let her ride along with them for a week or so until he escorted her across the track, a return ticket in her hand.

  Boone’s rules: 10:15! R.W. put his index fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled his loud, shrill note. Time for the morning meeting. Be there or be fined. Too many fines, be fired. That was his first rule as any day opened. Boone was quick to say he didn’t give a fat goddamn what they did or with who or what, long as the consequences didn’t include the law, come out of his pocket, or keep them from answering morning roll, or the call for places at showtime. Whatever it was they’d done, he offered as general information and not boasting, he’d likely done it or seen it done and it hadn’t killed him, so it wasn’t nothing to get the big head over, or be too shamed of, and wasn’t nothing to damn anybody else about for doing it, or an excuse for being late. And he didn’t want it, whatever the hell it might be, to cause him any upset.

  Boone was known, he thought, for being fair, giving everybody all the room he could for them to be themselves. All he wanted was for his operation to run like a business, on time and professional. Not like a family—he’d come from a family (that was all anybody knew on that subject), and he’d seen how a heap of other families operated and they were, to the last of them, lacking in the necessary harmony to turn sufficient profit to pay fifty plus people a living wage. Royale & Rhymes was a business and he was the head of it. Everybody had an assigned job and as long as they did it in the way expected it was all good and greasy. But mess up in a way to bring in the law, or so it came out of his pocket, or kept any one of them from answering one of the two daily calls, and they’d likely be left on the side of the tracks quicker than a cat can lick its ass.

  At the very first it was thought by a few (Clara and Martha) that she was his latest traveling companion. Traveling companion being only one of the behind-his-back names they (mostly Clara) had for R.W.’s women.

  Clara: His one a weekenders, his bed warmers—

  Martha: Bosom buddies, close associates, playmates—

  Pearl Moon this new one called herself. She didn’t fit the pattern. R.W. liked them young and long-legged. Of the two she lacked the long legs. But it wasn’t only the legs— there was the boy, and blind to boot. R.W.’s women never had babies with them. It wasn’t that he wasn’t known far and wide to have sowed his seed far and wide. Johnny Appleseed didn’t have nothing on him, they, Clara and Martha, joked.

  That was attested to by the short stack of envelopes he mailed off monthly each addressed to a different woman up and down the lines and each with a handwritten note and support money. Not even a race man, one who was a Lothario, would take on a woman with a scarred, blind boy. It was against his nature and his rules, as Clara and Martha knew them, but he had taken the two in, the young woman and her son, scarred and blind.

  The night-black southeast Indiana landscape rushed unseen outside the train
coach windows. She wasn’t fooling no-body, Martha low talked to Clara through the smoke of her last Old Gold before bedtime. Had a whole heap of airs trying to cover up pinch of substance; if you asked what Clara thought. The smoke shooting from her nose like from a dragon’s, she fixed her mouth as if that was all she had to say on the subject. Martha hadn’t asked, but knew without asking, what Clara’s answer and attitude would be on the question of the new one and her blind boy. Like, she wouldn’t beg for mercy, Martha said, if Lucifer had dragged her for a solid mile. That was true, Clara thought. Pearl Moon wasn’t an easy woman to like, by women or by men, but she didn’t take no stuff. And that boy, Martha continued, gesturing, her fingers dancing like fairies through daisies, he so blind he can’t see whether he suppose to sit down or stand up to pee. She ought to quit, Martha was told by Clara, who almost doubled over with suppressed laughter, knowing Martha was, if anything, just getting started.

  R.W. was a rooster all right. He sure liked women. And they sure liked him. Picking up their conversation the next morning at breakfast, Martha did believe R.W. would hump a burning stump. R.W. and every other man God delivered through some poor woman; Clara laughed in agreement.

  They’d both slept through their predawn arrival in Eutassee. Slept through the three rail cars containing Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels rolling tent and equipment, instruments, show props, and crew. It had been switched off and deposited in the old Southern Rail yard and coal chute, an industrial branch line, weedy from recent disuse, spur and near the Sullivan Gin Mill and Warehouse, once thriving when cotton was still king. Where at harvest time bail-loaded wagons had snaked clear back to the county limits. The Northern yard, with the proper passenger depot where buyers had arrived in droves, was across town nearer the city center. Royale & Rhymes’ troupe would layover there for the two days while they set the three-pole tent and perform that evening and the next.

  Now, with the bottom busted out of the U.S. economic barrel, and times being tough as mule meat, Eutassee was like almost every town Royale & Rhymes went to, and they played them all: big, middle-sized, and little, colored and white. And to all in distance of a railroad line and were lucky enough to have some change in their coin purse to purchase the pleasure of an evening’s performance from the All Colored All The Time performers.

  And sure as the moon and the sun, somebody in practically ever berg and junction they hit was interested in joining up with them. Be it a farm boy with an itch for some form of excitement that tending a cotton crop could not offer; the budding local beauty being circled by hard-eyed but empty promises to make her satisfied; the swamped by a bad situation and all the signs saying it won’t be no better soon; and any of the hundreds of others lost and looking. So despite his being a through and through race man, if he took in or took on every stray with a reason to get away he’d have a parade strung out behind him as wide and long as the Mississippi. The couple times they remembered he’d done it years ago, the strays’d found just how long and lonesome that road was they had dreamed so much about that they couldn’t get whatever they’d left behind off their minds.

  “Ain’t everybody can live the life we lead,” Clara said. Martha slowly nodded her head—turn tail, or just as likely, chaff, under the unaccustomed rule of a colored man, and, after a few nights out, good riddance, they’d run or wander off.

  Clara and Martha paused, chewing. If R.W. let them all tag on he’d look like Moses leading the children of Egypt. But Royale & Rhymes’ manager prided himself on leading a top-notch professional outfit. When the colored and white paying public entered the Royale & Rhymes tent, they knew they had walked through the flaps of the finest colored entertainment outfit their money could buy. The troupe’s reputation was at stake every night. If all they offered were ragtag amateurs with no more talent and excitement than the locals could produce themselves on their own porches or parlors and never regret the cost of admission, then we deserve to go belly up, R.W. said.

  “He’s something, ain’t he . . . ?”

  The slight forward tilt of his bowler matching the dangle of his cigarette, his white shirt, bow tie, three-piece suit, shined shoes.

  Martha sucked at the salty-sweet bit of bacon rind stuck between her canine and upper right bicuspid. R.W. was looking at his pocket watch. The morning meeting started at 7:15 sharp. Clara’s elbow was crooked on the table, the steaming cup at her lips. Still tongue-worrying the gristle, she slowly wagged her head.

  “Ain’t a white man in America can do what R.W. does better than him.”

  The two trombone players thought R.W. Boone wasn’t so much an alchemist as something they didn’t have a word for. An alchemist had something—cooper, brass some earthly element to tinker with to start in his quest for gold. R.W. Boone was whatever you’d call it that came before alchemy. That somebody who took nothing, if you could call pure need nothing, and turned it into something. If there was a name for that then, they thought, that’s the tag you’d have to pen on R.W. Boone.

  Martha on her second Old Gold and first cup of coffee of the morning, and Clara with her hot chocolate watched R.W. talking to Carpenter and the boy. Now there was a pair.

  Even the ones who considered the boy a nuisance or claimed they couldn’t stand his ways or the sight of him took some time with him. Amused by his determination or impressed with his willingness to try anything, they’d take a minute anyway to direct him or instruct him. Hell, they’d say, he’s trying, and if somebody doesn’t tell him something or give him a guiding hand he’ll kill his young fool self.

  But he had something, him, and his mama, too. Grit or backbone or sand, or whatever it was, it wasn’t every day that, satchels in hand, combinations like them came walking in.

  In the span since the two arrived, Clara and Martha’d had sufficient time to observe and speculate and to piece the whole thing together—to their satisfaction anyway.

  The mother and the boy’d come that first night and seen the show. She sought R.W. out and told him his troupe had talent, that what they lacked was style. Their costumes were raggedy as a billy goat’s ass, she said. Telling him people performed up to the way they looked. Clara and Martha hadn’t actually witnessed the meeting but they could imagine it clear as Miss Ann’s crystal.

  Pearl Moon standing there with Royale & Rhymes’ boss man, looking dead at him like she did, making her bargain with him. Like two men, two white men. Saying she could see the pressure was on him running the show and all. Him saying she hadn’t seen him long enough to know nothing about him but how tall he was and what kind of suit he wore, and how his pocket square draped from his lapel pocket like a silk-tongued beagle’s. Her standing there letting him say it, waiting on him to finish. That was probably one of those moments, Clara and Martha surmised, when she, Pearl, put that pause on him. When she just looked at you in a way that stopped time so what you’d just said bounced back at you like you had shouted it against a stone wall, and you didn’t hear the echo of it the way you’d meant it when you said it, but how it must’ve sounded when you were trying to sass or lie to your mama, or escape by some lame excuse to somebody with dominion over you or the situation.

  Another of her tricks was you’d say something to her and your voice wouldn’t come back at all—just fall down a well with no bottom—and you’d stand there wondering if you’d really said anything at all or only thought you had. And if so why you’d bothered. Still another was what Pearl Moon did with those eyes of hers. She saw sharp enough for the two of them, her and her blind son, and she had a way of looking at you when you thought she was through with you, patting her foot, her bent wrist on her hip, or even if she walked away and you were to look after her, she’d glance back over her shoulder and a chill would run over you like somebody’d opened the back door of Alaska.

  That was how they imagined she had looked at R.W. that first time they met and negotiated. Then, they imagined her saying, You trying to do everything yourself. Some of it you good at, some you ain’t. She could
see he knew business, he didn’t know style is what else she could see. She did. Knew style. That was her business. She knew why the customers came and what they wanted when they got there. What he ought to do, they, Martha and Clara, imagined her, Pearl, saying, was give her a budget, let her take on the management of the updating of the costumes and such, freeing him up for his booking and other company running duties like picking the towns, supervising, making the payroll.

  R.W. must’ve, they surmised, argued with her about how she thought he’d turned Royale & Rhymes from a sad-ass floundering minstrel troupe into a three-car attraction, employing thirty-odd people, and holding its own in tough times against cutthroat competition, if he was as lacking in whatever it was she thought he was lacking in.

  They could imagine him too, looking back at her with her attitude as brassy as a San Francisco whorehouse bar rail, and not only listening to the gist of her business proposition but mulling it over: what if he let her concentrate on making his performers live up to their potential? If after a couple months he didn’t see an improvement in the performance and revenue, then he’d leave her and the boy by the side of the road where they’d come from.

  R.W. took a chance. He announced who Pearl and the boy were and said they would be with them for a while, time period to be determined.

  So Pearl and Son were joining the Royale & Rhymes All Colored All the Time traveling show with a company of thirty-one permanent members: comedians, singers, musicians, dancer; box office, concessions, and maintenance staff. She would be helping out.

  The train slowly picked up speed, its ruff-ruffs were like a medium-sized dog issuing a half-serious warning. Ruff-ruff-ruff.

  At full speed you could feel it rushing forward with slight shimmies, sudden eruptions of rhythm surprising, rolling right or left, that accented but did not interrupt its determined hurtle forward. On steady stretches it toot-tooted like a high-powered automobile. Was the whistle, he wondered as they swayed through a curve, a language, its code rolling out over the land, was it a message to those who worked or went on their way as it called to them?