by Bill Harris
“Strut your stuff, boy!” R.W. encouraged as Son waved his arms over his head still marching to the beat.
Playing their jubilation at being who they were: R.W. Boone’s Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels band under the baton of Professor Elmore Sawyer, euphoric exaltation at their capacity of expressing it and their being their only competition.
“You’re the cake walkin’ baby from home”!
For the first show that night, the crowd clambered out like there was going to be free money. It was thick as bees in a hive, as ants on sugar. First show because Boone added a second to accommodate the overflow, the sheriff increasing the license fee by half. Coloreds and whites separated by the rope. For the second show, which went past midnight, the rope was moved, the white section being smaller by half than from the first.
Surprisingly, Boone told Peck later, there was no attempted reprisal from a disgruntled faction within the white minstrel camp. Had any attempted reprisal proven the case, everyone in Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels had some defense, a tent peg, razor, hammer, sickle, rail spike, or pistol at hand.
There were several from the white minstrels in attendance at the second show, incognito as possible.
Peck could see, even in the shadows of the yellow-gray light of the kerosene lanterns, the white musicians’ postures, like pointers at the hunt, eyes darting, taking mental notes.
Nicodemus and Snuff—Pete Ratliff and Billy Faddis—did their skits, under Boone’s orders, without blackface. Pete Ratliff, urged forward by Billy Faddis, protested. Boone told him if he blackened his face his pay envelope would have less green in it.
Described it to the boy with the pictures he might have missed, filling in for him, and others who had not heard, or wanted to hear it again. “We took them fire today, Son,” R.W. said. “And they didn’t have the water to put us out. Posting over my goddamn handbills trying to say we don’t exist.”
“Or,” Peck said, “like we don’t goddamn matter.”
R.W. wouldn’t stand for that even if they were announcing the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The boy was sitting opposite him, Indian style, his ankles crossed on the seat. His elbows were on his knees, his face in his hands, his head thrust forward like an automobile’s hood ornament.
“A word was not spoken and our stride was not broken,” Professor said. He and the others were standing in the aisle, or seated nearby. Listening as the train pulled away with a lurch, entering its slow acceleration toward gaining traveling speed.
Boone hurried through or skipped the parts where the boy, despite his excitement and fighting sleep, nodded rapidly, indicating he knew that part, his whole body rocking with his pleasure of the memory and connection as the train rocked and swayed and the night deepened, Baba—deba—
daba-deba-daba—
dah-dah-daba, sounded the whistle. And there were the first sprinkles of rain against the windows, as the train rocked and swayed toward Smith’s Crossing and the state line.
17
The Redhead
Ernestsville, Virginia, 1934
The early shift guy got there at 6:51.
By 7:02 the clerk, the bottle in a brown paper bag in his hand, walked step by rote step to his room.
There, he drank.
When the redhead came he would not, in the rise and blur of days, break the silence with a mention of the colored woman and her blind, scarred sapling of a son. And the two of them would drift from him like the sight of his chilled, huffed breath on that trek in France, marching through mud—concentrating on each step, each step, sloughing, sloshing, the hup, two, three along, abandoned kilometer after kilometer through the void of cold and dull throb of weapon and kit weight, hunger, lack of sleep, dragging, step by rote step, or like smoke . . . when whatever belief he’d ever had evaporated.
God did not know what He was doing. There was no reason for things. No order to His blessing or punishments scattered in dibs and dabs or in floods or flames. Take what comes. And wait. In the pig muck trenches in Rheims-Soissons, or behind that counter, or in a room . . .
And one evening, when from a room down the hall the smell of burnt biscuits floats under the door of his room, the clerk will, in the silence, choke the redhead until her tongue, red as her hair, lolls like raw liver . . .
Clara thought R.W. would get around to telling them one day. Out of the blue at morning meeting, or when the train was pulling out, while they would think they were on one subject, it might be a month, six months, a year, but in his own time he would say something about Pearl—whatever her name really was, and Son, whatever his name was or was going to be, and their leaving. Clara thought they’d been fired. Martha thought they had quit. Until they knew better they had to wonder and hypothesize.
Everybody had their own firsthand version they heard from somebody else secondhand. According to Bump, Pearl, showing the other side of herself, had got in it toe to toe with R.W. about how much or little they were being compensated for their contribution.
Pearl’d said, Bump said, she thought as little as R.W. paid people the only reason they stayed with him was because they didn’t think they could do better.
Clara humphed.
Whereas, Bump continued, Pearl’d said she thought if she couldn’t do better then she’d just jump over in somebody’s river and drown.
Let her, Clara humphed again.
Rather, Bump said Pearl’d said, than be underpaid and underappreciated she’d just as soon go back to doing what they were doing before them joined up. And to prove it they were leaving his cheap behind.
The way Pete Ratliff told it, Pearl had to pull a pistol on R.W. to get him to pay her what she thought was fair. R.W. said, Pete Ratliff said, he would do it this one time but the budget couldn’t stand it on a weekly basis. So be it, Pete said Pearl said, but this one time at least Son was going to get his fair compensation. R.W. didn’t see that insults were called for, Pete said, they were just talking he said. No. They were talking about money, Pearl, according to Pete Ratliff said, which was negotiating she said. She thought she held the upper hand because the draw from much of what they were discussing was because of Son’s being in the show and singing his little blues. She said in so many words Son was the golden egg and she was the goose that had laid and hatched it. She knew, she continued, repeating his phrase, we all just trying to make a living, but she had to look out for herself and her son. He understood that. If she felt like they weren’t getting out fair what they were bringing in then something had to change. He didn’t think she was bluffing and he told her he appreciated all they had done—she cut him off saying the only appreciation she gave a damn about was the green kind she could put in her pocket. Right then he said he couldn’t see his way clear to do any better by them than he was already doing. She knew when a bluff was a bluff. He had set his stakes in the ground, marking his boundaries. She told him then that was the way it was. They shook hands like two white men. That was Pete Ratliff’s version of it.
“She was going to miss us a sight more than we do her,” Clara said. “We a world on this train.”
She and that boy going to do all right, Martha predicted to herself.
“Our own universe,” Clara continued, warming up. “They won’t never be in another organization like this again. Not colored from root to top branch to limb tip. Proving night after night Jim Crow is a lie.”
For her part Clara was glad Pearl and Son were gone and said so to R.W. and any and everybody else she wanted to say it to and could corner long enough to say it. Martha on the other hand didn’t say it but she was sorry to see them go. Not so much Pearl, though she liked the way she’d stood up to everybody, including R.W.
Martha had spent little time with Pearl. Alone only twice she could remember. A costume fitting, having strands of fake pearls the size of peas tacked onto the red velvet dress Pearl had made. Martha listening as Pearl, a staggered row of straight pins in her mouth, not so much talked as kind of hummed, words but unco
nscious ones. It was in response to something Martha had asked, trying to sound casual, but probing for information on the mysterious seamstress and all else she was. Not understanding every word, straining so as to be able to give an exact or at least a reasonable word-for-word account to satisfy the grilling she would get from Clara when next they met.
Pearl: “I met the Chinaman. He took me in. He had his reasons, but I had mine too. I learned—about me, what I could and would do. Learned how to do. How to run something. How to do with people get them to do what was needed. That was good. Good to know that. It got me though. Made me see what it took.”
With Clara afterwards, Martha couldn’t interpret what had been good to know. What that was.
“She didn’t say, Clara! Didn’t say who the Chinaman was, didn’t say what people, or what she got them to do.”
Martha listened, as Clara complained that she knew less now than before Martha’d told her what’d gone on.
“I didn’t want to say nothing,” Clara said, afraid Pearl’d realize she was being overheard and stop.
“Oh, she Pearl now, is she?”
“That’s her name, Clara.”
“It’s the name she go by.”
Martha laughed.
Clara would’ve found a way to get some answers, she said. Them little scraps Martha’d brought back was useless as hen shit against a hurricane. Martha’d smiled and didn’t argue. Martha hadn’t told Clara the last thing Pearl had said that day, said directly to her, mouth free of the pins pushed back into the purple ball of a cushion on an elastic band around her wrist. Pearl holding up a looking glass big around as a straw hat, for Martha to approve the repair.
“Son says he likes you,” said direct and as information, not in passing. “Says he likes you because you’re nice.”
And anyway, it was Son Martha thought most about; especially him with the dreamy look on his face as he listened to the crystal radio him and carpenter had assembled. And the way him and carpenter worked together. It’s a sorry hen don’t think her chick’ll grow to a peacock and prove to be a rainbow for the world. But Son had something special about him a non-mother could see as well.
Agreeing with Clara about how tough it was going to be for a woman on her own with a blind child, Martha in her silence rooted for their wellbeing.
“They call me one-armed,” Carpenter said as he was saying goodbye to Son, “they wrong as usual. I got two arms. It’s a hand that’s missing. And since we been together you’ve been that other hand for me, and a good one. And if they’d thought big enough to ask us we could’ve found a way to build the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China. They just didn’t have sense enough to ask us.
“Everybody is what they called handicapped, boy. Yours and mine’s just more obvious, but that don’t mean nothing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It has been a pleasure working with you,” Carpenter said.
“You too, sir.”
“I’m going to hear about you some day.”
“I’ll make it something good.”
“Deal.”
“Deal. Thank you for teaching me.”
18
Two of Your Old Friends
May 2, 1938
Dear Peck,
Baby, you will never guess who showed up out of nowhere and is rooming here at 560 now. Two of your old friends that you wrote about. Pearl Moon & her boy! They’ve been here two days. I see what you meant about them . . .
V
Honest to Jesus, it wasn’t that Vienna wanted to know everybody in ‘lo’ Dunbar’s business. It wasn’t even that she was that interested, except maybe to have some gossip to speed up the time in the shop, and to write to Peck about. Most everybody heard what she heard, and maybe more, including ‘lo’ Dunbar’s barbers, bartenders, pool hall men, funeral parlor folks, bootblacks, hustlers, and who knows who all else, knew most of what there was to know about most everybody anyway. Same way the domestics, chauffeurs, yard boys, workers out at the plant, janitors who crossed Dunbar Avenue day to day into the white folks’ section, even out to the Henderson District, got to know their business, too.
Not much happened in Chilton’s ‘lo’ Dunbar Street colored section that somebody didn’t see, and that self-same somebody didn’t tell somebody else. And so on, until sooner or later what was told or what was heard, or what was said to have been seen, got around to Vienna in as close proximity as she was in the beauty shop, where talk, usually about other people’s business, was the lifeblood of daily communication.
Vienna. Vienna Minnifee. Future Mrs. Peck Morgan. First chair beautician in
The Colored House of Beauty, Potluck’s beauty salon.
Marcel Waving, Hair Dying, Facial and Scalp Treatments,
Shampooing, Manicuring, Eyebrow Shaping,
Always courteous treatment.
Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
Except by appointment.
Now Pearl and Son’s arrival in Chilton, that was one occurrence that others had to hear from Vienna, because she was there when they arrived. Standing that evening after work on the corner of Everett and Chilton, where she crossed to head home to 560, the rooming house where she lived. Owned by Chap, run by his wife Potluck. A Wednesday it was, which meant it had been a light day for doing heads. Hardly worth being open. A day consisting mostly of a little light cleaning up, getting ready for the rest of the week. It was the day when stories and hearsay were sorted and sifted through most thoroughly to be set for the coming late week and weekend rush.
So any telling of Pearl and Son’s road weary arrival in Chilton, to be accurate, had to start with Vienna’s version of it.
Standing there were she, who they’d come to know as Pearl Moon, with a satchel in one hand, a note in the other, and Son, holding on to her sleeve with his free hand, his satchel in the other. Both of them, after what looked like some hard traveling, were as dusty and scuffed as two bundles dropped off some shinny man’s wagon.
Everybody in motion but the two of them. Women doing their last evening shopping before stores closed, men and women just rushing home after work, or men moving to the bar or the pool hall—moving around the two like streams of water around two rocks. Many of them giving the woman and boy a quick studying appraisal as they moved past, but none stopped, except Vienna, asking can I help you, point you somewhere?
Pearl nodding with that just-about-impossible-to-read half-smile people would come to know and puzzle over, thanking Vienna for her kindness, looking at her with the direct look they would also come to know and note for its intensity, taking Vienna all in, assessing and calibrating like Schlaffer the pawnbroker looking through his loupe at a trinket professed to be an heirloom with a pedigreed provenance, the final appraisal filed away to be referenced in all future evaluations and advisements.
Pearl held out the creased piece of paper. Did Vienna know this address?
Pulling her attention from the boy, Vienna looked at the paper. Not only did she know it, she said, it was where she was going. 560 Chilton. The boy nodded as if he knew it all along.
The three of them headed off, with Vienna a step or two in the lead, almost bumping into a light pole, listening and looking from Pearl to the boy as they were walking to 560. The boy clutching the woman’s sleeve, his head in a slow bob and swing, rolling right or left like he was catching scents, or listening to a slow motion tennis match as he took in the sounds: voices, traffic, and footsteps.
Pearl was carrying on two conversations, one with Vienna, mostly asking questions about points of interest. At the same time, in a slightly lower voice with the boy, she was appraising everything in the sweep of her vision that might be an obstruction or of danger to her child.
It put Vienna in mind of the juggler in the amateur contest at King’s Theater once, tossing balls and plates and a top hat, all at the same time. Pearl was way more amazing than that as she and her son moved together like two halves of something, some being, that was more than the sum o
f their two parts. Him like the tail on a kite as she wove, stopped, started through the shoppers and pedestrians on Chilton Street.
Vienna walked them along that block of two-or three-storied professional buildings with their awnings unfurled, which housed the offices of two colored doctors, the lawyer; the three-story hotel with the druggist, barbershop, and beauty parlor on the first floor; the pool hall, pawn shop, ice cream parlor, meat market, fruit stand, King’s Colored movie theater, the café, the Baptist and Methodist churches (pointing to Reverend Leonard’s Spain Street Zion A.M.E., where she sang in the choir); the grocery store, women’s clothing and dry goods store, undertaker, insurance, and millinery; and the stoplights at the corners of Downing and Percival.
Vienna looked at the street from how the woman, a newcomer, must see it: the business district of ‘lo’ Dunbar. A street to be proud of. Almost 100% colored-owned and operated from one end to the other. Well kept. Clean windows. Fresh goods. Decent enough prices so that coloreds were satisfied or proud to do their shopping there. The merchants wheeling in their carts, sweeping down their sidewalks, cranking their awnings up, taking their aprons off. People speaking to Vienna, eyeing the couple with her, asking with scrunched-up eyebrows who the two new arrivers were, the woman with mouth going a mile a minute, the boy sniffing like a bloodhound. Vienna just smiling and nodding, as if she was too engrossed in what Pearl was saying to catch the meaning of their expressions, and them, thinking to themselves, Okay, don’t tell us, we’ll know anything worth knowing soon enough anyway.
The note with the address was from Mister R.W. Boone, the mother said.