Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  The effect on the Japanese was quite what Commodore Perry must have wanted. The musicians numbered twenty-four and wore red jackets with tight white wigs on their heads, their faces pink as fish bellies, sweating under the cool March sun. Even though they were big men they were trying to march across the sand lightly, like they’d no doubt done while practicing on the deck of one or another of the American vessels, and their feet looked small. The music itself dictated their pace, but as they came closer and the sand got deeper, those in front bogged down. Their movement wasn’t slowed, but they had to pick their feet up higher, like horses might, flipping bits of sand into the tightly packed crowd. They marched right into the treaty house, boots twisting sores into the delicate tatami, and the moment they turned, freezing in their positions like dolls, a brass band, which had also been hiding in the little pine forest, burst into a breezy version of “Anacreon in Heaven,” the American national song.

  “Here comes the man himself I’ll bet,” said Einosuke, so captured by the moment that he started rubbing the netsuke carvings that held together the drawstrings of his various pouches.

  The band came the same way the fife and drum corps had, but stopped short of the treaty house, turned and folded into itself, and separated again to form two columns. The anthem finished just as the musicians faced each other, from either side of the newly formed and deathly silent corridor. For two full minutes no one moved or spoke. Even the wind, which had been playing out among the waves all morning, seemed to stop the whitecaps in their cresting while the seconds ticked away. It was like a moment of prayer followed by a drum roll so soft at its beginning that people thought it was only a new wind rising in the pines. But pretty soon the tip of a shaft came out of that sound, the American flag below it, and carrying the shaft in his thin black hands came an actual American Negro.

  The Negro’s appearance had a strong effect on everyone, but Commodore Perry himself came next, and in such close proximity to his color bearer that people no longer knew where to cast their eyes. Though he wore a uniform that was as dark as the one he’d worn on shipboard, this time it was so festooned with medals and shoulder tassels, that though he was an average-sized man, he appeared now to be small. He walked with an exaggerated swagger and held his left hand up in the air, as if at any moment he might start waving to the crowd. Behind the Commodore came a line of other high-ranking men, but by then no one could concentrate on anyone but Perry. It was like he’d practiced his smallness in order to give himself an indisputable sense of ultimate size.

  When the Negro reached the treaty house and turned to hold the colors at an angle under which the Commodore could stride, Lord Abe and the other lords suddenly stood up again. The American officers had fanned out behind Perry with their hands locked behind their backs, while Perry simply waited, his own hands at his sides.

  “Good day, gentlemen!” he said, as exuberant as he’d been in his banquet room. “How well we are received! How beautiful everything is! This structure—how magnificent!—built in honor of what this day will bring, seems as solid as, I pray, the friendship between our two countries will turn out to be.”

  His interpreter commenced putting his words into Dutch but Manjiro translated for Einosuke.

  “You are welcome. Please, join us at the table now, let’s proceed with dispatch,” was Lord Abe’s only reply.

  There had been so much pomp, so much weight, placed on the American arrival that even these plain words could not break the spell. It was broken, however, for the brothers at least, by having to watch Commodore Perry try to sit down. He spent a long time wedging his knees under the table in order to keep from falling over backwards on the floor. While he turned and twisted the Japanese lords looked away, but once he was settled, now wearing an uncomfortable smile, someone began reading the treaty aloud. Each section was read twice, first in Dutch, then simultaneously in English and Japanese. It was a strange process, cumbersome and noisy, difficult for anyone to understand. Many times one side or the other stopped the reading, but it wasn’t so much to clarify a meaning as to simply catch their breath and go on.

  In this way the signing of the Kanagawa Treaty of 1854, signaling Japan’s emergence from two hundred and fifty years of relative isolation, took three hours and nine minutes by the official American pocket watch, which was presented to Lord Abe after the ceremony was done.

  6.

  Tell Him I’m in Mourning!

  “I MIGHT AS WELL have stayed home,” said Masako. “I couldn’t see a thing, unless you count the backs of heavy kimonos!”

  At first she presented her outrage as energetically as always, but now that the boring part of the day was over—all that talking, all those long-winded speeches—she decided that it really might be grand to ride in a circle on the steam train or study the face of a foreigner for a while. When she thought of the train she felt excitement in her spine and imagined the wind in her face, her fingers plugging her ears to keep out the noise. Her mother’s expression told her that if she kept on complaining she might very well miss those things, however, and her father’s told her that something weighed heavily on his mind. So she closed her mouth and found Keiko, falling back to walk at her older sister’s side.

  Only a few weeks earlier a treaty with America had been an impossible thing for Einosuke to contemplate, but when he finally spoke to his family on this bright March morning, his desire was not the continued expression of his dismay, but to take defeat with dignity and find reconciliation with his younger brother. He spoke to all of them in a formal manner, but his gaze fell upon Manjiro.

  “Because the issue of whether or not to sign this treaty has been decided by its signing,” he said, “we will now have some few months, some few weeks at least, before we have to consider the Americans again. Let us try to use that time to put our differences behind us. Wrongly or rightly, if we can go forward with a unified Japan, why can’t we do likewise with a unified family?”

  He raised his hands to indicate that the weather, at least, agreed with him, and then he put them down.

  It was a sweeter gift than the chocolates for the others to hear him speak that way, not only because they knew the truth of his words, but because they knew how supremely difficult it was for Einosuke to say them. Manjiro bowed, Fumiko touched her husband’s wrist with approval and affection, and the girls each took one of Aunt Tsune’s thin and oddly reluctant arms. Tsune herself remained as she had been, detached and contemplative, but she too was moved. She thought the comment contained elements of grace and for the first time in years remembered what she had tried to tell her sister at the time of her wedding—that marrying Einosuke was a lucky thing for Fumiko, like catching a firefly whose light flittered into the present darkness from a past era, but burned a noble flame. Fumiko herself had been ambivalent about the marriage, but had grown to care deeply for Einosuke, even before the birth of their first child.

  Where previously they had felt only irritation at the crowds, now they all looked around in pleasant amazement. Was it only last week that this land they stood upon had been barren, uninhabited but for the wind and the cold and the scrubby pines? Einosuke smiled when he finished speaking, his heart once again at ease. He looked at the tightly packed throngs both surrounded by and surrounding the whisde and chug of the American steam train and thought that though he would not mount the thing himself, he could not forbid his children to ride.

  THE MINSTREL STAGE was strongly built and large, higher and wider than the treaty house, and backed up against the largest stand of pines. When he looked up at the makeshift curtain, which had been stretched by the Japanese carpenters in error, across the back rather than the front of the stage, Manjiro tried to tell the others that they should forget the train for a moment, that here on this stage the strangest and most wonderful entertainment would very soon take place. A sign said that the minstrels were scheduled to perform three shows that night, but thus far all anyone could see were the scarred sides of an upright piano, stre
aked with sand and salty lines of dried seawater. The girls had just started speaking again, resuming their lobby in favor of the train, when one of the minstrels came out from behind the curtain, carrying the piano stool and wearing a tall brown hat. His face and arms were once again covered with black paint, while his teeth and the whites of his eyes startled and silenced the crowd. When he reached the piano he put the stool down and looked out. It had grown slightly dark by then, but the stage was lit by torches on the tops of bamboo poles.

  “Stay awhile folks,” said the minstrel. “Come now, gather ’round. This’ll be better for your eyes and better for your ears too… Better for every part of you than a ride on that ridiculous monstrosity. It ain’t the real thing but we are. And that’s a promise from me, Ace Bledsoe, the star of the show.”

  When he smiled the people nearest him leaned away, most of them afraid. Manjiro could see fear in the eyes of his family members, too, and that made him strangely happy. He wanted to speak English now, to show off. This was the man who had given him the chocolates so shouldn’t he acknowledge him, use his years of study to say hello? He had not had a chance to speak English casually since his tutor left Shimoda.

  “It is true,” he said in English. “This entertainment is fine.”

  “Who’s there?” asked Ace Bledsoe. “Hey! If it’s not the same fellow from before!”

  He dropped his piano stool and jumped off the stage, coming down like a spider with his arms out. People wanted to run, but at the same time were calmed by Manjiro, captivated by hearing him speak the spidery tongue.

  “Howdy do?” said Ace, sticking out his hand. But then he dropped his act, telling Manjiro very quietly, “I’ve been looking for you. I thought you might show me the town.”

  Manjiro’s intention was to present Einosuke, who had just brought peace to the family in an elegant and generous way, but when he turned to do it, Einosuke surprised him by standing back, and his nieces were already glued to their aunt in the rear, so the person closest to the grinning foreigner was quite suddenly his sister-in-law, Fumiko. She held her ground, but when the man came closer and reached out an oily black hand, she was so completely startled that she stared up at him, her own white face and blackened teeth a mirror image of him. Something passed between them, or more accurately from him to her, and a trembling started deep in her heart which she instantly mistook for fear.

  “Pleasure’s mine,” he said, in his regular voice. “Ace Bledsoe’s my name. I hail from the free state of Pennsylvania, not far from New York. We don’t cotton to slavery, never mind what you see here tonight.”

  In part Fumiko could see now how truly opposite they were, the Americans and the Japanese, that it wasn’t Manjiro but her husband and her father-in-law who had been right all along. This man’s white teeth might bite her if she didn’t run, and his sticky black skin, if she let it touch her, might mark her so badly that she would never again get clean. In larger part, however, she was appalled to understand that she was drawn to this man, that there was a look in his eyes, behind his dark makeup, that she recognized. She tried to concentrate on his lips, which continued to smack out impossible sounds, but his eyes drew her strongly and she simply could not look away.

  How ridiculous it was, how outrageous and offensive and horrifying! Only a moment earlier she had been happy, pleased with her husband’s speech and to be walking here with her beautiful girls, yet now that she saw this American’s face her deepest childhood memories came back to her; that of a mud monster from the depths of Lake Biwa, slime and water dripping off of him, plus that of a gallant and genuine koibito, who would one day carry her off and who, she had always told herself, she would instantly recognize.

  It was an impossible, a nearly unbearable moment for Fumiko, and before she could do anything about it, before anyone could intercede, she began to cry. Oh, it was humiliating! She tried to stop immediately, of course, but the more she resisted the more her tears flowed. When the American saw them he cocked his head like someone’s pet dog, so she slammed her eyes shut, lest he discover for himself her tumultuous state.

  Einosuke and Manjiro came to her quickly, though it seemed to Fumiko like an hour had gone by, and when Einosuke touched her she was finally able to break the spell that had so overcome her, by sighing and shaking herself. She opened her eyes again, squinting at the ground, then pulled out a handkerchief. Her tears had already ruined her powdery makeup, streaming down her face like a slug clearing a trail.

  “You must tell him something!” she hissed, suddenly furious with the men in her family. “Find some excuse, Einosuke! Tell him I am in mourning. That’s it! Hurry now! Tell him some relative has died!”

  “But who?” asked her husband. “None of your relatives are even sick just now.”

  Manjiro, however, put her request into English without taking any more time.

  “It is not your countenance that distresses her,” he said, “but the face of a favorite aunt who has recently died.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” said Ace, trying to imagine how he could possibly resemble this Japanese woman’s aunt. “I’ve lost family members of my own, so I know it’s hard.”

  Lucky for everyone, the other musician came out just then and glared from the edge of the stage. It was time for the show to begin, past time actually, and the man who was facing Fumiko, throttling and rifting her heart, was late.

  He took Fumiko’s hand and shook it, then before she could cry again, dropped it and shook everyone else’s, one at a time.

  7.

  He Didn’t Care about the Neighbors Anymore

  WHEN EINOSUKE and Fumiko got home that night they immediately began quarreling in the garden room. They were alone in the downstairs portion of the house—the girls had gone to bed, Aunt Tsune was off with Lord Tokugawa’s entourage, and Manjiro and his father had stayed to see the last performance of the minstrel show—but around them Edo was listening.

  “I realize I should have shown more strength, that I should not have let that creature see my tears,” Fumiko began, “but I was not prepared. No one, least of all you, my husband, told me the foreigners would look the way they did, that they should hold such powerful weapons in the features of their faces!”

  The other half of what she had felt she had already begun to dismiss, to attribute to the move to Odawara, to the fact that her period was coming, even to the trouble she’d been having with her maid, the extraordinary difficulties of her life these last few days.

  Einosuke was tired and wanted to change his clothes and go out to work in his garden, to rake and smooth the pebbles and extract the latest set of soggy leaves. What he did not want to do was talk about the Americans, and so he replied without consideration. “I was at a loss when you cried,” he said. “Luckily Manjiro rescued us.”

  Fumiko understood as well as anyone that it was a wife’s job to soothe the wounded sensibilities of her husband, but this time it had been her sensibilities that had been wounded, she who had broken so horribly into tears, and what she wanted now was to be soothed herself, and to purge forever those untoward thoughts.

  “Do you not remember that it was my idea, not Manjiro’s, to invent the dying relative?” she asked. “That it was I who, even in my shock, tried to rescue the situation?”

  “To claim a recent death might explain your tears,” Einosuke told her, “but it also might make us seem harsh for coming to the treaty-signing ceremony so soon after a death in the family. In America I bet there is a proper time of mourning, just like there is in Japan.”

  Not once in a year did Fumiko’s anger vent itself outwardly. That, no doubt, is why Einosuke still didn’t see it coming.

  “Ah,” she slowly said, “so if it is Manjiro’s idea you will offer credit but if it is mine you will criticize. It seems to me that a recently dead aunt requires the same consideration no matter whose invention she might be.”

  “Do you know where we put the rake with the shortest handle?” Einosuke asked. “I can’t f
ind it anywhere. I hope you didn’t allow O-bata to lend it to that neighbor again. Last time I had to go and ask the man directly before he gave it back.”

  He had stepped down off the porch and was bending to peer under it, looking among his orderly collection of garden tools. He had spoken quietly because the neighbor in question was sometimes outside at odd hours and could be lurking just across the fence right now. Einosuke imagined him sitting down low, purposefully shaking the base of one or another of his horrid little trees.

  The most painful sting often comes from the smallest bee, and Einosuke was hurt just as much as he would have been had Fumiko whacked him with the handle of that missing rake when she said, “You are my husband, but you are a vain and foolish man sometimes.”

  He remained bent for a moment, staring into the darkness under the porch, but when he stood back up the darkness in his eyes was replaced by fire. “All this trouble, all this talk!” he hissed. “Is it too much to ask that such things be left outside, that they not be so readily ushered into a man’s home?”

  “At the moment I’m not concerned about what is inside or outside a man’s home so much as I am about what is inside or outside the man himself,” Fumiko replied. “Speak plainly if you are to hiss at me, don’t rely on form.”