Just because I’d had to go to such lengths to keep up my part as librarian didn’t mean I still wasn’t having fun. Since my father seemed to have forgotten all about grooming me for his successor, my association with the pawnshop was no more than nominal. Nowadays I considered myself an apprentice confidence artist or an aspiring “sweet man,” which is a kind of outlaw shadchen who makes matches at hourly rates. I had begun to take a studious interest in Lucifer’s so-called errands, though it was often difficult to distinguish between the official ones and the ones he’d trumped up for a lark. Business and pleasure were such near relations, by his lights, that you could almost have called them twins. In any case, these errands involved such a variety of destinations that we were never at a loss for excitement or for excuses to make expeditions beyond the immediate vicinity of the Baby Doll Hotel.
On the strength of a whispered complaint from one of the ladies, for instance, we might be sent after graveyard dirt, popularly known as goofer dust. This, along with certain bodily discharges and the bones of black cats—not to mention the gris-gris made from the devil’s dandruff and imported from New Orleans—was an essential ingredient in recipes for casting spells. To get it we would make a moonlit trek to the potter’s field behind the bayou, where Lucifer maintained that the twins’ mama was buried. This was a pretty safe bet, since the weathered wooden markers bore only numbers instead of names. (Not that it would have mattered, since Aunt Honey—the only available source of information concerning their birth—never managed to recollect the same surname for the brothers twice. As for their mother’s given name, it was sometimes Junipurr, occasionally Beulah Love or Nectarine. Their father was always John.) Also, I noticed that Lucifer seldom led us to the same grave site, that it varied according to his disposition like odds in a policy game. Nevertheless, he took every least occasion to steer us through the lot, never failing to place some dandelions or a sprig of chicory on a grave.
Another place where it was said you could find the really vintage dirt was across the river at the old slave burial ground on President’s Island. One night in a “borried” johnboat, with both brothers paddling furiously while I bailed with a coffee tin, we actually attempted the rough passage. Before the current turned us back, we saw how the cemetery had been desecrated by the flood. How the high water had performed a kind of postmortem emancipation, robbing the graves of their rotting cypress caskets, setting them free in a bobbing skeleton fleet.
Sometimes we might be sent to the root doctor after the cure for a lady’s ailment, such as the bedevilment or the piss-out-of-a-dozen-holes disease. We might be sent after the remedy for having swallowed (as they say) a watermelon seed. Frequently we were endowed for these journeys with some article sacred to the lady in question: an unlaundered intimate garment or the flap of a boyfriend’s union suit, materials that would be useful in the manufacture of an effective medicine mojo. Then we would set out through the quarter east of Mambo’s, past Wellington, into what Lucifer called the rat cellar of Beale Street. That’s where you saw the dogtrot shacks in their barren garden plots, the fallen chimneys and tilted pump handles like buried saber hilts. You saw neolithic chassis stranded on cinder blocks, eroded vertical landscapes of crazy quilts, children peeping out from under barrel lids. You saw children wearing croker sacks like cocoons they couldn’t shed.
The root doctor, Washington Legba A-men by name, lived alone in a rattling antebellum mansion at the farthest reach of Beale. The house, along with several others still standing, had been abandoned, according to Lucifer, during the plague of the yellowjack: “Which it ain’t actual oughta be call yallah, cause what I’m hear, you will tend to ejackalate black.” As the wise guy had it, these ancestral residences, after the flight of their wealthy owners, had been taken over by colored who were naturally immune to your buckra infirmities. For a time, in fact, the shvartzers had actually run the city. They’d taken over the ghost hotels and worked miracles in the madhouses and hospitals. They’d worn opera hats and suede gloves, occupied box seats at the dogfights and the Piscoble church. In the evenings they’d roasted pheasants over the pyres that burned the cracker victims of the plague. Then the epidemic had ended and the quality folk returned to find the Negroes whistling somewhat smugly in their rags.
But some of the richest never came back to reclaim their estates. Their once palatial houses fell into disrepair, and those at the far end of Beale Street in particular became the frequent subject for tales of weird goings-on.
Dr. A-men could usually be found tending his herb patch or manipulating the colored glass bottles on his bottle tree. These he arranged the better to catch, as I understood, the energy of the spheres. (It was an activity that bore a certain resemblance to one of my grandfather’s pastimes, rearranging the branches on mystical diagrams of the Tree of Life.) At other times Dr. A-men might be out under the stars, digging in the earthworks surrounding his tumbledown house. Using a coiled coat hanger with a rag tip dipped in magnetic sand, a device he called a treasure witch, he’d divined that the original occupants had buried a fortune somewhere on the grounds. So far, however, his bewildering complex of ditches had turned up nothing but more bottles and animal bones. These latter he’d put to good use, grotesquely reconstructing them, turning the interior of his trash-appointed mansion into a museum of monsters.
Whenever the doctor saw us coming, he perfunctorily tipped his beaver hat, revealing a head like a scorched kettle. There were cracks in the kettle that became eyes and a mouth when he spoke, then reverted back to cracks when he was silent. After he’d heard our request, he would ask us to kindly excuse him while he repaired to his “elabbatoy.” We would follow him anyway as far as a vine-tangled porch, then look through a window into a room that had seen better days, where ladies had probably entertained suitors, and fathers informed errant sons they were being disowned. There we’d see Dr. A-men poking around among his bones and the jugs that sprouted tubes like curling copper smoke.
We would be back waiting in the yard when he returned with some inky decoction or a root shaped like a pair of frog’s legs. Making great claims for the medicinal properties of the article to hand, he might declare: “This one give me by the bad news Right Reverend Razzpeeyutin, who done had it off his longtime ladyfrien Joan a Arc, who done got it direckly from the man a the hour, that am to say his ramblin majesty High John de Conqueroo.”
Once, at the behest of Ringworm the gambler, who tipped us papershell nuts with dimes inside, we carried a message to a hoochie-kooch dancer in Professor Miller’s All-Mahogany Revue. From a catwalk in the wings of the Palace Theater, we watched their glittering precision; we counted aloud the propeller revolutions of the tassels on their tushies, and applauded the way they dispatched with uniform high kicks the customers who tried to climb on stage. We stuck around for the amateur segment and heard one of a series of comics called Kokomo claim that his wife was so fat he had to hug her on the installment plan, so ugly that when she went to the zoo the monkeys paid to see her. But the audience shouted his punch lines before he could get them out, and the tummler, known as the Lord High Executioner, wearing a leopard-skin toga and waving a revolver, chased him off the stage. Then came a sister act announced as everybody’s favorite pair of canaries, Mercy and Circe the Café au Ladies, who proceeded to argue over the order of their songs. They were followed by a hypnotist who caused an apparently prim volunteer from the audience to hike her skirt and grind her hips to a rolling drum. There was an infant billed as a tap-dancing prodigy, who turned into an evangelist once he’d mounted the boards, and had to be carried off by the seat of his pants. There was a magician so unpopular that his mere appearance provoked a hail of rotten vegetables.
Several times we’d been sent out to hunt some missing novice who’d run away in a cold-footed funk from the Baby Doll. On those occasions Lucifer had judged that the likeliest place to look for the girls was at the picture show. Duck-walking past the box office of the Orpheum Theater on Main Street, we would steal up into the “nigger heaven” gallery. In the lofty darkness just under a ceiling hung with gilded fruit, we’d plop down in half a dozen laps before finding vacant seats. That’s how, during a period of late-night detective work, we saw the tail end of The Invisible Man, Captain Blood, and Snow White. We’d seen a midnight double bill in its entirety (Gunga Din and Lives of a Bengal Lancer), and a vaudeville troupe that featured Eddie Cantor, before Lucifer had admitted that we might be barking up the wrong tree.
We saw Bessie Smith, to whom Lucifer allowed a degree of famousness beyond his ordinary use of the word. He said she had a voice whose pitch could break your glasses or cut diamonds; it could set your rinktum free. She was coming out of the Club Panama, wearing a peacock plume headdress and a gown made of mirrors. Surrounded by gaping admirers, who were reflected in the gown, she looked like she was decked out for the evening in the myriad faces of Beale.
Carrying unpaid hotel tabs into the rooms behind the Chop Suey House, we saw men lolling like tent caterpillars in a network of crisscrossed hammocks. We got silly breathing smoke that smelled of burnt rubber and sour cream. At the forge on Vance Street we saw the blacksmith playing his bottleneck guitar for a white man, who kept mopping his brow and boasting, “I told them I’d go as far as Hades for the genuine goods.” Then he would tap the microphone to make sure that the song—about the failure of a key to fit a certain keyhole—would not be lost. We saw a local undertaker sitting defiantly astride a man lying face-down on the sidewalk, his shirt slashed to red spaghetti.
“Ol Hylo,” the undertaker had offered to explain to one and all, “he been kilt now three, fo time, but it look like this one here done took. I ain’t be cheat outta his funeral airy again.”
One night we came across a moonlight baptism in progress. It was being performed, said Lucifer, by the congregation of the First Beale Street Church of the Everloving Shepherd Who Dwells on High. Having traditionally used the snake-ridden Gayoso Bayou for such functions, they had shifted their site to the new lagoon, which was considered, as a relatively fresh act of God, to have greater qualities of sanctification.
Backed up by somberly clad parishioners, the procession of prospective saints—or “haints,” as the wise guy liked to say—gathered at the water’s eastern edge. They were clapping their hands and singing a hymn: “What it say in the ten chapter ten / Is you die you bound to live again.” One by one the candidates for the sacrament of immersion would wade out into the muck, their white gowns parachuting about their hips. After their dunking at the hands of owl-faced deacons, dressed im-practically in slickers, the newly baptized were given to inspired acrobatics in the street. They writhed and tumbled in full view of the fleshpots of Babylon, outflanking Satan with cunning maneuvers. Giving voice to spine-tingling hallelujahs, they called for a witness, which I supposed was where we came in.
“Do Jesus!” they shouted. “I’m testify to the blood and the recollection!” Then the angels seemed to have gotten hold of their tongues, making them sound like tuneful daveners, like a Torah portion might sound if read by warbling birds. It was an observation that prompted my suggesting to Lucifer, “Could be that there’s a little Yid in ’em.” Upon which the wise guy, who as always had to have the last word, replied, “What you reckon, Mistah Harry, think they was one or two in the woodpile?”
Another time we saw a fight in a juke joint that was still going on when we went back the next night, though the men were bloodied to featurelessness, moving in a sluggish slow motion, and nobody was paying attention anymore. Then, sent by one of the Baby Doll’s high-rolling regulars for ribs to cater a private affair, we went round to Johnny Mills’s. In that ramshackle, screen-door institution, smoke feathering out every knothole, I—who’d been more or less kosher from birth—had my first taste of barbecued pork. I chewed meat the consistency of charred embers marinated in axle grease, topped with a pebbly yellow matter indistinguishable from my loosened fillings. Though I put aside the sandwich unfinished, noting how the absorbent white bread held the impression of my fingerprints, I told the twins it was the best I’d ever had. Later on I spat up discreetly in a rubbish pail.
Whenever she saw me hanging around the hotel, Aunt Honey would always ask me whether I was lost. Considering the tumultuous cackling that generally followed this question, I suppose she thought she was being funny. But as much as she seemed to be enjoying herself, moving furniture with her earthshaking hilarity, I can’t say I was able to enter into the joke. Aunt Honey excepted, however, the ladies of the Baby Doll had pretty much grown accustomed to having me around. Careless in their attire at the best of times, they seldom took the trouble to cover themselves up for my sake. Quite often I received the heart-swelling mazel, if the heart can sometimes slip below the belt, of a glimpse of magenta nipple peeping out of a flimsy halter. Or, conditions permitting, the fubsy halfmoon of a mole-flecked derrière, revealed for the instant it took to scratch a spider bite. Or a long exposure of coffee flank like a shapely greased beanstalk that only the most nimble could shinny up to paradise.
If ever the women caught me looking, they would gently rebuke me: “I ain’t hear’d you say thank y’all, Mistah Harry.” Then they would laugh over the way my ears became inflamed and I tried to cross my legs while standing up. Some of the things I liked most to watch them doing were sighing contentedly at what they saw in a hand-held mirror, tapping their slender fingers on a saucily cocked hip, raking their hair until it stood up like a nest of serpents, dropping an ice cube into the hollow at the base of their neck. Then I liked to watch the slow snail’s progress of the ice and the trail of moisture it left as it slid into the dark valley between their bazooms.
In time I came to know them all by name. There was Dido (“cause I likes to cut me one, ef you takes my meanin”), who enjoyed a drop or two of belladonna in her lemonade. And Casauba, who embraced her customers like poured molasses, but kept her face unavailable for kissing behind the veil of her cardinal cloche. There was the back-sassing Sally Sweetmeat, always with a ready remark, with the silvery laughter of a glockenspiel. Her boast was that she’d served time in prison for matricide: “See, we have done quoil bout which side the mattress I spose to be.” And the lazy Sugar Monkey, whose splay-legged bones had turned to rubber under the conflagration of her auburn hair. Concerning her great rolling bosom, the popular theory was that it was subject to tides. Snowpea, the freckle-faced, biscuit-skinned albino, liked to show off her various keepsakes: the whistle made from the ring finger of a dead lover, the ashtray made from the patella of one still alive. She told me, “It were the loup garou what scare me white. Now what done scare you, home boy?” There was the practical-minded Oraldine, who pinned a rose behind her ear during business hours, keeping tally through a system of plucked petals like a botanical abacus. And the devout Sister Pacify, who was a charter member of Brother Scissors’ Do Right Church. There it had been revealed that, in the descending chronology of her former lives, she’d been a bride of John Henry, the Shulamite from the Bible, and an Ethiopian priestess turned into a bird and exiled to an island that had sunk off the Florida coast.
The ladies, in turn, had their string of pet names for me: Humpy Moses, Breath’n Britches, Young Massa Calamine, “cause you pank like the lotion and we gon have to spread you where we’s itch.” Sometimes they could be relentless in their teasing, always fingering my hair into kiss curls and playing at telling my fortune. Tracing the lines on my palm or the configuration of virgin whiskers on my chin, they would solemnly prophesy the number of hearts I was fated to break. Then, though I didn’t understand why this should pass for humor, they would howl themselves into tears. At other times, however, they might suddenly seem not to be playing at all, such as the night that I’d eaten a surfeit of sardines with the twins, and Snowpea tickled me till I let go a resounding fortz. Sniffing the noxious air around me, the ladies had reached the consensus that here was the harbinger of an authentic ill wind. I thought they were kidding, of course, until Sister Pacify sanctimoniously proclaimed, “Fartomancy ain’t never lie.”
Frequently the ladies would follow me back to my alcove, or visions of them anyway, which spilled from my mind to crowd around my bed. They stepped up their campaign of teasing me, not giggling anymore but growling low in their throats, their bodies swaying with a feline urgency. That’s when they’d swear me to secrecy, then proceed to teach me tricks of love forgotten since the time of the Pharaohs. They taught me tricks named after long-extinct animals and ancient machines, tricks that the Lord Himself was ignorant of—because if He learned of such shameful goings-on under His sun, His out-of-countenance blush would incinerate the world. On such nights I lost the few hours of sleep that were still left to me.
During my trips back to the Parkway to borrow more books, I started to relax a little in the company of my cousin. It was a situation that seemed to be mutual. A certain chumminess, if you will, had begun to evolve between us—so sue me. This is not to say that she entirely dropped her theatrical posturing, or that she didn’t occasionally revert to her poor-in-spirit routine. But on the whole she greeted me with what I took to be a healthy enthusiasm. What’s more, she even looked to be putting on a little weight. Her gaunt cheeks had acquired what might almost be described as a tawny hue, this from the tan she’d gotten while pacing in her garden. The sun had also tinged her blue-black hair with threads of scarlet, which set off to some advantage the slightly bloodshot cast to her eyes. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Naomi had acquired a kind of gypsy air.
It was clear that my visits were doing her good. This was not a role that anyone could have accused me of seeking, but I confess to having been a little curious about the extent to which Naomi might yet be transformed.
Sometimes I hung around even after she’d loaned me the books, which she’d taken to bringing down to the garden before I could ask. The maid would serve us iced tea with a sprig of mint and sticky macaroons. I munched and sipped while Naomi paced the herringbone bricks, relating the pleasures awaiting me in what she thought I was about to read. I listened attentively, thinking that this might come in handy should she want to quiz me later on. But she never bothered. She was much too busy getting the stories off her chest to inquire how I might have enjoyed them. She was too delighted by the evidently liberating act of giving her library away to worry about whether or not it was put to good use. Not once did she pry or ask for the return of her unsalvageable volumes, nor did she pull a long face when I carried them away, now that she knew she could trust me to come back for more.
Often I felt that, even if the books weren’t for me, I still owed my cousin something in exchange. Once I even went so far as to reciprocate after a fashion, telling her snatches of what I’d seen with the twins. I told her about hickory-striped gamblers and double-brained witch doctors, frail sisters with rabbit fever who flounced their dresses to stir the breeze. But, catching myself, I pretended that these were references to characters in books I’d read on my own. I would have been happy to loan them to Naomi, but they didn’t belong to me.
In the meantime, having theoretically fed Michael a whole curriculum’s worth of reading, I was ready to call it quits. I was wasting my energy, not to mention Naomi’s books, on an am horetz, a nincompoop. Of course Lucifer continued to make ridiculous claims for his little brother’s progress. (It was ‘Til brothah” because, according to the wise guy’s apocryphal version of their nativity, only he had been delivered from his mama in time. “Michael, he gots to be prize out after she have already pass on, which it is how he ain’t been all the way born.”) But while I didn’t say it outright, I made up my mind that I’d contributed enough to the dummy’s fruitless education. Besides, it was Cotton Carnival time, and with so much going on, who would notice if I turned up empty-handed?
Festivities were afoot, and having ignored the whole affair during the previous spring, I was determined this year to make up for lost time. There had been some debate in the local papers over whether the Carnival should be held at all, given the terrible aftermath of the flood. To stage a celebration in the face of so much misfortune would constitute an indecency, said some. But the more common feeling was that a carnival might be just the pick-me-up the city needed. The citizens of Memphis had grown weary of being a population under siege by the river. They moved leadenly among the clutter of flood refugees, like people surrounded by ghosts they refuse to believe in. What they needed, these citizens, was a little relief, and not the kind, as one editorial quipped, that the government distributes along with sanitary napkins and fruit.
Anyway, the Cotton Carnival was one of Memphis’s most time-honored traditions, and hadn’t the city taken pride all along in its policy of business as usual? The stores had stayed open and the banks had continued to foreclose. The alphabet agencies never slept. While their tracks were hoisted on trestles over the washed-out thoroughfares—except on Beale, which was judged unnegotiable—the trolleys ran relatively on time. And it was safe to assume that the graveyards, give or take a few postponed funerals, remained in use. Bodies were not gathering dust in back rooms, and everyone else’s grandmothers were laid to rest with appropriate honors. Not that I worried much about Grandma Zippe these days, or any other members of my family, living or dead.
Like the twins, who were on call for any odd commission twenty-four hours a day, I was learning to do without sleep. As a matter of form, I would put in my appearance at the pawnshop every weekday afternoon, then walk away from it in the early evening. I seldom bothered now with going back to North Main Street for supper; instead, I preferred to scrounge some fried catfish and vinegar pie along with the twins after they got off work at Mambo’s. Since my mother thought I was with my father and vice versa—if my father thought about me at all—my freedom was practically complete.
Naturally I still had to return to the apartment at some point each night. If my mama was alone, I would ask her politely—though not too politely, lest she get suspicious—how her day had gone. I would nod with what patience I could muster as she recounted “your grandfather’s” latest enormity. I made a diligent show of doing my homework, maybe listened to “The Firestone Hour” with Mama, provided she wasn’t on the phone to her brother-in-law. I listened to “The Green Hornet” with Grandpa Isador if he happened to be around and sitting still. At about nine I yawned ostentatiously and remarked what a long day it had been, hoping that anyone hearing me would take the hint. Shutting myself up in my alcove, I waited for the apartment to grow quiet, then I unfolded the bed, plumped the bedclothes, and slipped out the window.
Only once did I feel that my family’s influence might have extended farther than I liked to give them credit for. That was when I saw my father’s puller in the faded front parlor of the Baby Doll Hotel. I was about to climb the stairs behind Lucifer and Michael when I caught sight of him through the bamboo curtain. He was wearing the mohair sport coat that hung to his knees, making his nautical salute to Aunt Honey and a couple of her girls. Frozen in my tracks, I listened to him croak, “Y’all pardon my hand say gimme do my mouf say much oblige.” It was about the longest speech I’d ever heard him make.
Backing up in a panic, I ducked under the staircase and wondered how I’d been found out. My delinquency discovered, Papa had sent Oboy, citizen of both sides of the water, to bring me back. Well, he wouldn’t take me without a struggle. I’d kick his knees, I’d rub out his wrinkles like the writing on the golem’s forehead, and he’d sleep for a thousand years. The bamboo jangled and I peeped out to see him scuttling toward the front door, lugging a stuffed leather satchel. When the door shut, I crept from my hiding place and went to a parlor window to look out. I saw him under a lamp on Gayoso Street, handing the satchel to a cigar-puffing fat man in the back of a Studebaker touring car.
“That they landlord, I swan.” It was Aunt Honey grumbling at my shoulder. “Man so evil-greedy he ain’t have a shaddah.”
If I hadn’t been so shaken, I might have argued that not only did he have a shadow, but it was longer than you would have guessed. This is not to say that I wasted much time in contemplating the reach of my uncle’s dominion, or the way that it compromised Aunt Honey’s much vaunted proprietorship. On the contrary, by the time the twins had come back downstairs—their pockets full of whatever the night might require—and we hit the street, I’d put the entire episode out of my mind.
Once or twice Lucifer had mentioned the arrival of the royal river barge, “which it a come down like a floatin fizgig, like the glory boat.” But beyond looking forward to the barge, he seemed to have no particular interest in the other Carnival events. This disappointed me, since I didn’t regard the merrymaking on Beale Street as an authentic part of the Cotton Carnival. Then Lucifer was obliged to set me straight about the “real” Carnival, which was, as he explained, a sort of by-invitation-only affair. It consisted mostly of “yo private funkshum,” a phrase that on his tongue sounded obscene. These functions were held behind the closed doors of mansions and hotel ballrooms. They were sponsored by your “hinkty” elite: “Kinda folk will play golf on a horse so cain’t nobody caddy. Eat fish turd look like buckshot, be alia time talkin”—and here he held his nose—“faw faw faw.”
So I had no choice but to agree with him: who needed the snobs. There was, anyway, plenty of action (when was there not?) right here in the neighborhood. The Cotton Maker’s Jubilee, which was the colored answer to the restricted Carnival, was now in full swing. The shvartzers had set up their own impromptu fairgrounds in the wagon yard behind the Daisy Theater. They had booths selling ribs and fried pies made by the ladies of rival churches, and try-your-luck concessions run by a shadier element whose proceeds went to fly-by-night charities. They had their own royalty, who put in an appearance in their own unofficial parade, a complement to the authorized parade down Main Street in which traditionally unshod Negroes in stylized antebellum rags were harnessed for the purpose of pulling the flower-decked floats. It was not a sight, as Lucifer spelled it out, that inspired the colored people to abandon themselves to good times.
So we were there among the crowd in front of Mambo’s on that early evening in May, bobbing for a glimpse—over fedoras and children on shoulders—of a procession two miles long. In the vanguard were the high-stepping school bands, playing blue notes in a dazzle of sequins and polished brass. Precision marching, they headed for the bayou runoff as if they expected the waters to part, then splashed in up to their hips without breaking stride. The drum major augered the air with his baton, kicking his chin with his knees, and the crowd went delirious. Some broke ranks to join the parade themselves, becoming second-line marchers with mops and brooms that they twirled artistically. They fell in beside the columns of fraternal and benevolent societies—the Knights of Pythias and the Lost Tribe of Canaan, resplendent in their lionskin tunics and admiral’s hats, some carrying crosiers. Not to be outdone by the flashy brass bands, they also waded into the water to uproarious applause.
Next came a lumbering caravan of crepe-paper floats, shoved along by gangs of self-congratulating boys in rubber boots. These floats turned out to be as good as their name. Mounted with historical tableaux depicting darkies of distinction, draped with banners advertising local boilermakers and chiropodists, they were fitted out also with amphibious modifications—oil drums and netted bundles of cork. When they were launched across the lagoon, the spectators were beside themselves again.
Because I was frankly bewildered by some of the scenes that the floats portrayed—the gingham-clad granny holding a branch hung with tinsel stars, the codger with the cardboard test tube frothing cotton wool—Lucifer had offered to fill the gaps in my education: “Tha’s the Moses lady have lead the slave to yo promise land Chicago Soufside, an tha’s the man what have invent the peanut.” Then, “lastest but not leastest,” appeared the reigning mayor of Beale Street, standing among a bevy of young ladies in the back of a shining black La Salle.
His election, according to the wise guy, was annually uncontested. This was due to his inherent stateliness, and the gold-braided livery that belonged to him by virtue of his head-waiter’s job at the Hotel Peabody. The girls alongside him were mostly content to throw chocolate kisses and Monopoly money, but a couple of them (none other than the Baby Doll’s own Sugar Monkey and Oraldine, who’d insinuated themselves to the scandal and delight of the crowd) seemed bent on ruffling the man of the hour’s composure. Looking somewhat martyred by their fawning attentions, the mayor, however, managed to retain his poise. He flung fake money and repeated the benediction “Every man a kang!” until the car had entered the lagoon and promptly stalled.
Meanwhile the parade proper had been convoyed over the water, where it broke apart and dispersed into the side streets of the pawnshop district. The crowd around us had also thinned, as families remembered their whereabouts and began to return the tenderloin to its regular denizens. It was here that I surprised myself by making a proposal. This wasn’t like me, but in the wake of the hoopla I was left feeling restless and ready for more. I was thinking there were places other than Beale Street to be.
“Why don’t we go to the midway?” I suggested, then right away wanted to take it back. What I’d meant was the regulation Carnival midway, erected in Confederate Park by the river—featuring, as the billboards blazoned, miles of sideshows and games, and rides such as the Slide of Death. But the shvartzers, as I’d suddenly recalled, were only allowed to attend on specified “colored nights,” and I didn’t think this was one of them.
I waited for Lucifer to bristle a bit and remind me of this fact, thus letting me off the hook, but since when had I known him to shy away from the prohibited? Instead, he’d put on his thoughtful face, pretending to consult with his brother. Then he turned back to me with his yard-wide grin. “Copacetic, Mistah Harry,” he said. “Do y’all lead us the way.”
I’d never before led the way. It had always been Lucifer’s show, naturally, since we’d always been more or less on his stamping grounds. By the same token, when invading the territory of the white man (before sundown, I might add), it was just as natural that I should be the one to chart the course. So why was it I felt like my bluff had been called?
Once we were on our way, though, I started to get into the swing of things. I kept several paces ahead of them so that no one would realize we were together, and began to enjoy a sense of cloak-and-dagger. I was a double agent, smuggling books one way and Negroes the other, up and down the treacherous pipeline of Beale. I was the Moses man. By the time we’d angled our way through the downtown streets, arriving at the park, now surrounded by bill-plastered hoardings, I felt I was completely in charge, confident of certain skills I’d developed thanks to the crafty company I kept.
Such as breaking and entering. Witness how I steered the twins away from the crowds that were streaming toward the gate. I told them to follow me as we circled the fence to the eroded river side of the park. Employing the sixth sense I’d recently acquired, I located a loose slat in the hoardings; I pulled the board from its nail until there was room for us to slip through.
In the dusty compound behind the sideshow tents—the loudspeakers broadcasting yowzahs and step-right-ups—we kept our noses low and began to snoop around. I was of course aware of a certain pointlessness in this. If I’d wanted, I could have walked abroad at perfect liberty according to the birthright of my race. I could have ridden the bumper cars, to say nothing of the Slide of Death, and thrown baseballs at a target that, if hit, would dump a mugging shvartzer into a tub of water. But these days I was happier skulking about the underside of things.
Dropping to all fours, I stuck my head under the taut canvas skirt of the nearest tent, heartened that the twins still followed my lead. Then I had to look back at Lucifer to ask silently if he saw what I saw. Was I mistaken or wasn’t the interior of this tent out of joint with the world in which our uplifted rumps remained? I yanked my head out to make sure that we were still under the same pink twilight of moments ago, then took a breath and ducked beneath the flap again. It was there as before, what might have been the “One Man’s Family” living room, complete with carpet and standing lamp, sofa and armchair, an end table with a bakelite radio and a hanging bird cage—in short, a comfy domestic oasis amid a waste of sawdust. But seated around it, instead of Mom and Dad, were an assortment of jokes played by nature, not necessarily in good taste.
There was a man like a zeppelin in a sleeveless undershirt that could have swaddled Aunt Honey, with enough material left over to sail a boat. Wedged somehow into the armchair, he spilled over like tons of dough allowed to rise unattended. Here and there you might have identified a telling detail: a tonsured fringe of hair, a lit cigarette, a ring on an upraised pinkie above a teacup; but these were only clues to the character who was lost under that deluge of flesh. Sitting across from him on an arm of the sofa was something that even the wise guy referred to in reverent whispers—something he called a morphodite. This one had on an appliquéd dressing gown, fallen open to reveal a leg much smoother and shapelier than the hairy one over which it was crossed. It had a pair of what could have been boobies or impressive pectorals beneath its gown, and a face divided into two distinct halves. One side was conventionally pretty, the other handsome in a courtly sort of way. On the handsome side it sported one half of a salt-and-pepper beard, into which it was vainly braiding colored ribbons.
There were others: a limbless boy with sausage lips and a broken nose, wearing a knitted vest and lying like a belly-up turtle on an embroidered pouf. There was a sharp-chinned creature in a silk shawl with the face of a maiden aunt, though her sticklike anatomy had more in common with a praying mantis. She was spoon-feeding a ropy gruel to the turtle boy with one hand, tuning the radio with the other, chattering all the while: “It’s almost time for ‘Mary Noble’ which is one program I never miss you know her husband left the hospital with amnesia and yesterday he sits down at the Horn and Hardart with his poor blind mother now you take another bite for your own poor mama in heaven…”
There were a couple of teenage kids on the sofa with interchangeable, dark-eyed vinegar pusses. They had on matching pairs of lederhosen which revealed the fact that, between them, they had only three legs. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders in what might have passed for geniality, but their words betrayed a heated argument. The quarrel, which seemed to involve mutual accusations as to the other’s complete lack of rhythm, looked like it was about to turn physical.
You couldn’t blame me for feeling proud of myself. My first time out as trailblazer, and look at the spectacle I’d led us to. But when I looked toward the twins for some confirmation of this, they were already gone. I slid out from under the tent and there was Lucifer with an arm around his brother, walking him through what appeared to be a rehearsal for a three-legged race.
“Lessee can us nigger twin make like the Si-maneez,” he was saying. Sometimes these shvartzers had a rude way of reminding you how short their attention spans were.
“What’s the matter,” I snapped at both of them, trying hard to keep my voice down, “my freaks aren’t entertaining enough for you?”
Lucifer left off the monkeyshines, though he kept his arm around the dummy’s shoulder. “Powerful sorry, Mistah Harry,” he told me with mock sincerity, “we ain’t knowed they was yourn an tha’s a fack.”
I didn’t think he needed to be so cheeky over a mere turn of phrase, even if he had a point. He didn’t have to make such a palsie production of conferring with his idiot brother, asking him, “Michael, my man, where the fanny show at?”
Michael aimed his ineffable gaze at a nearby tent full of raucous shouting. It was lit from within, a large and shapeless shadow rippling on the canvas. Lucifer nodded and the two of them hit the dirt and slithered under the tent flap. My term as ringleader had expired for the night.
Resentful, I crawled under the flap behind them and chinned myself, as they had, on the back of a plywood stage. What I saw made me forget to keep moping. Beside a portable phonograph playing a slow drag of crackling trombones, a chunky woman with chrome-yellow hair that looked scorched at the roots, wearing nothing but a pair of high heels, reclined in the puddle of a cast-off lamé robe. She was resting on her elbows, her thick back toward the rear of the tent, the seahorse tattoo at her shoulder riding a spume of powder-blue moles. Toward a rowdy audience of unshaven yokels in red kerchiefs and washed-out overalls she had spread her lumpish thighs. She’d lifted her hips as if to make a table of her loins, a lazy Susan perhaps, as her undulant rotations implied.
The men in the audience were of the type that Lucifer might have labeled “peckerwood,” as opposed to buckra, cracker, ofay, and pure white trash—distinctions generally too fine for me to grasp. But something about this crowd’s off-color catcalls and the way they beat each other with their hats seemed to identify them positively as peckerwood. Then a cry went up from the back of the house, a regular wild-animal howl, which brought all the other noise in the tent to a head. A boy was being lifted above the heads of the assembly—a lanky, flax-haired kid not much older than I, his face tallow white from what at first I took to be pain. He’d been injured or had a fit, and the men were trying to get him clear of the fray. But when I saw that he looked perfectly undamaged, with no hint of lunatic foam about his wide-open mouth, I concluded that it wasn’t pain but fear that made him so pale.
They passed him horizontally from hand to hand toward the stage, then slid him, careless of splinters, along a brief runway. Like a bubble-eyed log at a blade, they aimed him toward the junction of the woman’s splayed limbs. There was clapping and stomping in unison, a ruckus building toward a pitch that made you worry for the precariousness of the river bluff. There were “Great Godamighty!”s and a couple of “Thank you Jesus!’es as the woman grabbed the gaping kid by the hair. She snatched up the spangled robe from beneath her and spread it daintily, as if for a picnic, over the head of the boy in her lap.
A few of the men threw their hats but most of them fell silent, a silence more complete for the tumult of moments before. It put me in mind of that part of the moonlight baptism where a person is dunked under water and everyone else holds their breath.
“Oolala!” squealed the naked lady, her accent most decidedly un-French. “The kid never known it was such good eatin’ at the Y.”
This was when I got the nod from Lucifer. He had spotted a straw-skimmered sideshow sharper who, having apparently spotted us first, was advancing from around the corner of the stage. We dropped to the ground running but were forced to turn back for Michael, who’d remained glued to the scene. By the time we’d dislodged his grip on the stage, the carnival man was upon us, backing us into the canvas, which we needed no invitation to scram underneath.
Out in the compound, however, it was my turn to pause and look back toward the tent. Shoving his brother ahead, Lucifer stopped long enough to tug my sleeve and give a word to the wise. “Bes absquatulate, Mistah Harry, else they circle-size you all over again.”
This helped me to remember that I’d been seen in the company of Negroes tom-peeping on a buck-naked white lady. If for such crimes the shvartzers had their eyes gouged out and made into buttons to sew shut their mouths, then what of me? What of the youth of Hebrew extraction who’d helped them to see what they should never have seen?
Then I was hightailing it through the lot behind the twins, keeping pace with my pounding heart, its din driving the stray thoughts from between my ears. Lucifer found the loose hoarding and the three of us scrambled through as one frantic multilimbed klutz. Fleeing the park, we stuck to the dry side of Front Street, putting half a dozen blocks between ourselves and the amusements before we dared to draw up in an alley to catch our breath.
Mine, though, stayed elusive. We were safe enough here in this cul-de-sac behind the classing houses, so what was the trouble? The question seemed also to be on the wise guy’s mind as he passed me his medicine bottle. He was giving me the once-over, with special attention to the area below my waist, which I attempted to cover too late with my shirttail. Then he puckered his face to make the diagnosis, this doctor from Chelm. “Mistah Harry,” said Lucifer, “we has to fine you some poon fo yo britches split an ol Hambone done join the party.”
He made it sound like my inexperience was everybody’s burden to bear. It was enough to make you want to take issue with all of his own windbag claims—the boasts that, if intended to make me eat my heart out, had been pretty successful. All that stuff about how he’d been initiated by this one or that one at some impossibly precocious age. How he’d done it under dogtrots or in the branches of persimmons, in the dressing room at Schwab’s Emporium while the clerk outside the curtain asked how was the fit. He’d done it in the deep leather back seat of Colonel George Lee’s double-parked DeSoto in the time it took the colonel to run into the Pantaze Drugstore for cigars. He’d done it, to hear him kiss and tell it, with all kinds—from the ones who’d been around the block to the daughter of the pastor of the Jesus Wept Tabernacle. He’d done it with the big ones, which felt like you were squeezing a cloud, and the skinny ones who clung like marsupials when you tried to leave; the ones who bit plugs out of you and the ones who spoke languages they swore they’d never heard; the seasoned ladies who gave you instructions that, if followed to the letter, caused their skin to ripple like it was made of rolling pins; the young things who hollered like they’d been gutted of their slippery souls.
To all these conquests the wise guy laid claim to, I would have liked to pronounce a hearty Bronx cheer. Not that it would have mattered to Lucifer, always his own most gullible audience. For him, the mere saying was believing.
“Why pick on me?” I demanded in any case, about to point out that his brother was having the same difficulty with his breathing as I was.
But Lucifer was busy again. He was examining an imaginary wristwatch, checking its precision against a fading smudge of sunset over the river. “I makes it bout a hair past my chegro bite,” he said. “Time fo the barge be comin in.”
Because of the unretreating floodwaters, there’d been some controversy over whether it was safe to sail the royal barge this year. The problem, as the papers saw it, was not actually sailing so much as docking the barge while the levee was still submerged. But as in the case of the Carnival itself, tradition won out over cautious opinion and a temporary landing stage was constructed at the foot of Beale.
When we arrived at the scene, the crowd was already at high tide; a solid mass of spectators was backed up almost to Main Street. There were people riding one another’s shoulders, in some cases double piggyback. They were standing on rooftops, hanging out of windows and fire escapes, clinging to the bannered lampposts. The sight of such a mighty crush of spectators dampened what hopes I’d had of getting an unobstructed view of the river. But Lucifer, as usual, didn’t know enough to be discouraged.
Darting eel-like, tapping on shoulders and pinching when necessary, he sidled through the multitude so neatly that you’d have thought he was following a predetermined route. Behind him his brother fitted himself snugly into the spaces that Lucifer left in his wake, leaving me to suffer the scorn of the onlookers as they tried to close ranks again. In this way we negotiated an acre of perspiring humanity, coming to a full stop only when we’d reached the rope that divided the crowd from the floating dock.
I guess you could say that this was my official debut in white society among colored boys. None of the smattering of Negroes I’d seen on the fringes of the crowd seemed to have penetrated it to this depth. So if this wasn’t tempting fate, I didn’t know what was. But as Lucifer had made it quite clear that I wasn’t in charge anymore, I was happy to let him worry about things—that is, if he even knew how to worry. Of course, given the boisterous density of the spectators, nobody seemed especially concerned about the company I’d come in. Besides, it was dark out now, and the swordplay of spotlights along the levee was trained on the river and the sky.
From where we stood on the cobbles, just below the trestle and not ten feet from the water, we could already see the barge passing beneath the Harahan Bridge. From this distance it looked like a multilayered seagoing wedding cake, riding the platter of its own reflection. It was a storybook vessel, or so it appeared, making a preliminary stop before it continued upstream toward its real destination, which was probably the moon. Immediately I understood why Lucifer had suspended his disapproval of the Carnival for this single event.
There was a band on board, which you could now make out in their toy soldier outfits, posed up and down a staircase of footlighted cotton bales. They were playing what sounded at first like a variation on the general drone of the crowd, this until the barge came closer. Then melodies began to detach themselves from the surrounding murmurousness. They played “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee” and “Mr. Crump Don’t ‘Low,” a local favorite that listed the activities that the political boss had proscribed for the welfare of all. As the barge drew near the landing, the band went into a spirited rendition of “Dixie,” and there was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. In fact, some of the yokels—hatchet-faced river refugees by the look of them—placed their hands over their hearts.
Meanwhile the sky above Arkansas had begun to crackle and thunder with salvos of fireworks, causing some to cover their heads. Explosions rained over us: fantastic blossoms that grew in an instant to the size of the firmament, then dripped bright nectar as they swiftly faded away. There were nets of silver and green incandescence, spilling cargoes of luminous fruit, jeweled spiders spinning gas-blue filaments by which they dropped from the upstaged stars. People pointed as if they were about to attach a name to the lastest array, but “ooh” and “ahh” were all that anyone, including Lucifer, could think to say.
Under cover of all this, a couple of Carnival pages began to unfurl a tongue of red carpet, rolling it across the gangplank and up the cobbles toward a suite of waiting limousines. There was a flourish of lights and pompous music and a voice over the public address bidding unctuous welcome. Then, from their thrones atop the highest tier of the pyramid of cotton bales, the sovereigns of the Carnival rose. Followed by the slow train of their glittering retinue, they began their triumphal disembarkation from the barge.
Surging forward for a better view, the crowd shoved us up against the braided rope. Thus were we within spitting distance of the passing royalty. For all of his finery—the crimson cape trimmed in spotted ermine, the gold frogs and epaulets on a snow-white tunic, the medallion like a gilded pie crust—I thought the king looked a little uncomfortable under his heavy crown. With gravy eyes, the clef sign of an oily forelock setting off his dissipated features, he looked like the victim of a practical joke. Like he’d passed out after too many toddies, only to wake up on a showboat in monarchical robes. Still, he seemed committed to making the best of it, swatting the air with a scepter that he wielded like a tennis racket. This was in contrast to his pretty consort, who waved her own scepter as blithely as a magic wand.
She was a doozy all right. You name it, she had it: the vapory coif arranged in a heart-shaped setting around her serenely smiling face; the buttermilk skin highlighted by the port-wine nevus on her shoulder, like a fleur-de-lis. She had the plump boozalums crushing a corsage that had tried to come between them, plunging dolphinlike into the deep bodice of her emerald gown. All of which I appreciated, even if she wasn’t my type.
Her rose-petal lips were too simpering for my taste, her eyes, which the lights showed a transparent china blue, too dreamy and far apart. They lacked the candid come-hither quality that I liked in the ladies of the Baby Doll; give me their saucy temptations any day. This one was for yawning behind her dance card, or waving her hankie at a departing troop train. At best she might tear a strip from her petticoat to bind your mortal wound as you expired with her name on your lips. But she was altogether too much the universal shiksa for me.
Still, you had to hand it to her. She carried herself with a pleasingly self-possessed grace, what you might almost call majesty. To say nothing of how her sparkling diadem looked like a tiny castle in the cloud of her corn-silk hair.
But if I wasn’t impressed enough, others certainly were. All around us the spectators kept up a jubilant ovation, some of them (albeit the more primitive and confused) actually falling to their knees. Here and there some frail onlooker, overcome by an excess of pageantry, might crumple into a swoon; they might be revived by furious fanning and spirits of ammonia, only to crumple again. Who would have thought that his shik-kered highness and a milk-fed tootsie could have created such a holy stir? Even Michael, as I noticed, wasn’t above being moved by it all. With a spasmodic though somehow prayerful rhythm, completely out of sync with the processional march of the band, he’d begun to sway from side to side. At one point he uncovered the burnished knob of his head and began to gnaw at his hat brim, taking a healthy bite out of the straw and chewing earnestly. On top of all this, if my ears didn’t deceive me, he seemed to have started to moan.
It was an irritating sound whose source I couldn’t locate at first, until it began to rise above the general commotion. Even then it took a minute to convince me that this unjoyful noise did in fact belong to the dummy. It was the first peep that, to my knowledge, had ever come out of him, a thick, gurgling whine from somewhere deep in his diaphragm, like a noise bubbling up out of an antediluvian well. By the time it had my complete attention, as well as Lucifer’s (with whom I exchanged a puzzled look), by the time it had the attention of every bystander within earshot, the noise had graduated to a sharp but still throaty keen. It was a wrenching ejaculation, which had contorted the dummy’s face into the shape of a horn.
Then suddenly Michael’s newfound voice had lost its rust. It was a voice that had swapped its gills for wings, bursting forth in an exultation of virgin words.
“Lawd ha mercy!” he cried, sailing what was left of his hat into the pyrotechnical sky. “I wusht I be blind! I wusht I be struck blind di-reckly! She’m the las thing I see, everything else be disrumumbumf…”
The rest was muffled in the hand that Lucifer had clapped over his brother’s mouth. Like a thief caught in the act by an alarm, the wise guy frantically whipped his head from left to right. He looked as if he wanted anything, a sack or a handy hole, to stuff the dummy into, a blunt instrument to clunk over his skull. He crooked an arm around Michael’s straining neck for the purpose of strangling him, or so it looked, though I suppose the hold could have passed for a lifesaver’s embrace.
At no time during our acquaintance had I ever seen the cocky kid so farshvitzed with panic, and the truth was that I could have done without seeing it now. As Lucifer manhandled the bug-eyed ex-mute through the crowd, dragging him toward higher ground,. I was satisfied to trot along faithfully after. I was content to keep a discreet distance behind them, wondering if miracles would never cease.