Jack Bishop was sick, so me and Stubby went down to the docks to buy fish.
“Tell them the fish are for the old Bishop,” Jack said.
It was cold and rainy at four o’clock on Monday morning, and I didn’t want to go fish buying, even if it was for Jack. Stubby was all for it, though, saying that buying good food was a big part of cooking.
“If you buy old, tough meat, there’s not a lot you can do with it,” he was saying. “You got to boil it to death to get it so you can chew it. The same thing with fish. You get old fish and it starts falling apart on you before it’s done. Then it’s not good for anything.”
“You do the talking,” I said. “I’m not a cook and I’m not a fish buyer.”
“These fellows down here are rough,” Stubby said. “They won’t go for dancing.”
“Stubby, you don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe I’ll invent a new dance just for the docks. I’ll call it the octopus and dance like I have seven legs. How many legs does an octopus have?”
“Octopuses have eight arms and no legs,” Stubby said. “So they don’t dance.”
Stubby thought that was the funniest thing in the world, that an octopus didn’t have any legs. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he knew about octopuses.
My mind was still halfway on the auditions. Jack said my hopes had been too high, which was wrong. My hopes hadn’t been too high. They were just where I wanted them to be. I knew I could dance, and anybody who saw me knew it. John Diamond was almost twenty, and he couldn’t dance next to me without looking second best, so he decided he was going to take away my chance. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and thought about punching him in the face. “Now you coon it up!” I imagined myself saying.
And I didn’t want to hear any common sense coming from Miss Lilly or Jack Bishop or anybody else, white or black. They came around telling me they knew how I felt when they didn’t know anything about it. It’s one thing if you don’t have anything going for you and people say they’re sorry you’re sad. You’re sorry, too, but you figure there’s a reason for you to be sad and you settle into it. But when you got something going for you, when you have feet people watch and a body that people want to see moving across a stage, nobody can tell you anything, because they’re nowhere near where you are.
“He’s only done what he knows how to do,” Jack said, telling me how I shouldn’t be mad at Fred Flamer. “You can’t blame a man for that, can you?”
Yes, I could. I could, and it was filling me up inside to a point where I thought either I was going to have to puke it up or it was going to kill me.
We reached the docks, and Stubby went over to one corner where a tall, thin fellow was standing next to a row of baskets.
“Where’s the Bishop?” the man asked.
“Home with a cough,” Stubby said.
“Weak,” the man replied. “Old and weak!”
He had to be as old as Jack, and in the early-morning light he didn’t look any healthier. He and Stubby talked for a while about how calm the sea was and what it meant. The fisherman said it meant there was a storm coming up. After a while they agreed on a price, and Stubby wrestled a basket of oysters onto the cart.
“I’m buying three of them,” he said.
I loaded the next two as Stubby paid the man. As we pulled off, the oyster man called out to us to tell Jack to rub some warm tallow onto his chest.
Then we went to another fellow and bought two baskets of different kinds of fish. Stubby looked pleased, but it just added to my misery.
“We did good,” he said. “Those fish are so fresh, they’re still talking to each other.”
“Stubby, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life selling fish or cooking them,” I said. “You’re a good man, but I don’t see doing what you do.”
Stubby didn’t answer, and I thought I might have hurt him, which I didn’t mean to do.
It was getting lighter by the time we rolled the cart back to Baxter Street. The corner lamp man was walking down the street with his ladder, and I watched him as he leaned the ladder against a pole, climbed up it, and put out the lamp. People had all kinds of jobs, from fishing to lighting lamps at night and putting them out in the morning. There was nothing wrong with any of them, but they just weren’t for me.
We took the oysters upstairs to the roof, and I started building a fire to smoke them. Stubby left with the cart to sell what he could. Jack Bishop’s dog, John Tyler, came through the roof door and over to where I sat waiting for the chips to start burning evenly. He sniffed at me and sat down, and I shoved him away. The dumb dog just turned and looked at me, then came back and sat down next to me again.
I pushed him away again.
Next to come up to the roof was Margaret. She came over, picked up a stick, and poked through the chips, evening them out on the grill.
“Jack told me you were all beat up inside,” she said.
“I don’t care what he told you,” I said.
“You think you’re the only one in the world who ran over a bump in the road?” she asked.
“No, but I’m the only one wearing my skin who’s had a hard time,” I said.
“I grew up with three sisters and two brothers,” Margaret said. She was rubbing the back of John Tyler’s head. “Two of the girls and one of the boys died before they were six. That was what it was like. If you got sick, you prayed to Saint Blaise. If he didn’t help you, then you died. It wasn’t a huge thing for a child to die, but it was hard to get used to.”
“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?” I asked.
“Glory, no!” Margaret looked at me sidewise. “You already have a mouthful of sour lemons—how could you fit any more in there? And let me tell you something about life, my black friend: you’re just about old enough for your piss to get a little smell to it. There are going to be days when the auditions will look like a Sunday picnic to you!”
She was right, but it didn’t help me any. When she went downstairs, John Tyler started to go with her, then turned around and came over to me again. “John Tyler, you are stupid—even for a dog you are stupid!” I said.
By the time the bells in the church on Mott Street rang ten o’clock, I had finished smoking most of the oysters and was ready when Stubby came up to the roof. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him I didn’t need him looking out for me.
“I’m looking out for the oysters,” Stubby said. “How are you doing with the oysters?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a little stupid for thinking that Stubby had meant me personally and not the oysters.
“You don’t need me to tell you who’s looking for you, either?” he asked.
“Who’s looking for me?”
“That should be ‘Who is looking for me, Mr. Jackson?’” Stubby said.
“Jack Bishop?”
“Miss Lilly was in front of the house asking where you live,” Stubby said. “She said her husband wanted to see you.”
“Forget Pete Williams—I don’t have any respect for that man,” I said.
“Jack said Pete probably has another scheme up his sleeve, and Margaret said if the devil gives a party, he plays his own tunes, so you’d best be careful.”
“Why are you talking about somebody wanting to see me to Jack Bishop and Margaret?”
“I was going to talk to you about it first, but I thought you didn’t want anybody looking out for you,” Stubby said.
“Stubby, what do you think I should do?” I asked my friend. “You think he’s just got another trick up his sleeve?”
“Well, if Miss Lilly came looking for you, there’s got to be something bright shining somewhere,” Stubby said. “She’s a hard woman, but she’s not a mean woman.”
I didn’t want to talk it over with anybody else, because I already knew I had to go and see what Peter Williams wanted. I knew I was going to be mad if Pete said something wrong, but I was already mad, and I would be just as mad not knowing as knowing.
“Can you finish smoking the oysters?”
“You know I can,” Stubby said. “And tell Miss Lilly it was me that found you.”
“I don’t know if Pete is up, but Miss Lilly is in her little study,” the cleaning man said when I arrived at Almack’s. “She said you might be sliding by.”
“Well, I’m here,” I said.
“Saw you dancing the other day.” The cleaning man leaned on his mop. “You trying to be one of them black Irishmen or something?”
“Dance is dance,” I said. “Where is Miss Lilly’s study?”
He pointed to a room in the corner, and I made my way to it and knocked on the door. Miss Lilly and Peter Williams sat at a small table. Miss Lilly was usually a pretty imposing woman, but sometimes she could be more imposing than at other times. She was sitting straight up when I entered the room. She was wearing a high-necked beige dress with a little brown and beige jacket.
“How you doing, Juba?”
“Just fine, Miss Lilly,” I said.
“Peter wants to talk to you,” Miss Lilly said, without looking toward where her husband sat.
“You seemed a little bothered the other day,” Pete said. “Did something rub you the wrong way?”
Did something rub me the wrong way?
“Look, Pete, we were both there,” I said. “We don’t have to pretend we’re light-headed or nothing. They were turning the auditions into a minstrel show. You’ve been around enough to know that.”
“That was a business meeting,” Pete said. “If you doing business, then you got to bring people what they want or they’ll take their business someplace else.”
“Jack Bishop said one of the white men there was a slave trader,” I said. “That’s the business you in now?”
“Look, Juba, I don’t have to take no lip from you,” Pete said. “Miss Lilly invited you here because she thought you could talk like you got a brain in your head. I own this place—I don’t have to take nothing from nobody! And if you don’t understand that, or don’t like it, you can just get on up out of here!”
I stood up, ready to go.
“Sit down, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “Peter, if you want to play like you don’t have no sense and bully your way around, then it’s up to you. You said you wanted something, and that’s the only reason I asked Juba to come over here. Now, don’t make me look like a fool, because I don’t have a use for being foolish.”
Pete looked at me and then away. He sighed deeply and crossed one leg over the other.
“There was some things I liked about what went on that day and some things I could forget about,” he said. “What I liked was that there were people in here who were never in here before. They were looking around and seeing that it wasn’t a bad-looking place and seeing that white people—I mean classy white people, not no riffraffers—looked comfortable. I liked that and I know that idea could bring in some money.
“I don’t know what everyone did when they left the place. They could have been slave traders, or they could have been slave owners. I don’t know. A lot of people living in New York City and running around with their noses in the air got plantations down South. But what I know is that if somebody can get them all coming into Almack’s, I can build this business up so it looks respectable, feels respectable, and makes some respectable money. Miss Lilly thinks you’re the man who can pull it off for me.”
“Juba, you know dancing, and you know a lot of people.” Miss Lilly leaned toward me. “What you were doing—your kind of dancing—wasn’t what they were expecting, but I could see how you were drawing the people in. They weren’t clapping along with anybody else. You’ve got class, and they know it and I know it and Peter knows it. Don’t you, Peter?”
“He’s all right.”
“Don’t you, Peter?”
“For a young man, he’s got a lot of class, Miss Lilly,” Pete said. “But what I want is a whole forty-minute show, like they have in the regular theaters. I want some white dancers and some black dancers. I want some singers, some decent food, a forty-minute show, and whatever it takes to let people know this is a top-of-the-line establishment. If I get them in here one time and show them they don’t have anything to be afraid of, maybe I can get them in here two times. And if I can get them in here two times, maybe I can keep them coming.”
“What do you think, Juba?” Miss Lilly asked.
“You want food, too?”
“Whatever it takes,” Miss Lilly said.
“Why didn’t you ask John Diamond to do it?” I asked. “You two seemed to be hitting it off pretty swell.”
“Because deep in my heart, I’m a race man!” Pete said. “I don’t need any white boy running my business! I’m throwing twenty dollars into this adventure, and I need somebody who has my interest in their heart! Are you the man? That’s a very simple question, Juba. Are you the man?”
“I think he is,” Miss Lilly said. “I truly do. And maybe he can get Cissy going.”
“Cissy?”
“You didn’t know she sings?” Miss Lilly asked. “You’ve got to use her in the show.”
She glanced over at her husband, who rolled his eyes away.
“You mean to tell me that Peter Williams, after ruining your audition the other day, had the nerve to ask you to set up a show for him?” Jack Bishop sat up in his bed. “And what did he say when you told him to bugger off?”
“I said I would do it,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say I would do it, but that’s the way it came out.”
“Your tongue and your lips were having a fight or something?” Stubby asked. “If you didn’t mean to say something, how come you said it?”
“Because he’s figured out that there’s things you have to do in life because they’re the right things to do at the moment,” Jack said. “That’s the way life is sometimes, with righteous stink on both ends of the stick.”
“I said it, but I don’t know how I’m going to get it done,” I said. “Pete wants it sometime during the next two weeks, and I don’t know where to start. I’ve never thought about getting a forty-minute program together.”
“You can have breaks like they have in the regular shows,” Stubby said. “Have somebody dance for three minutes, and then have a five-minute break. That’s eight minutes gone already. So you have five dances, which is going to add up to fifteen minutes, and then you have five breaks, which will add up to twenty-five minutes. Fifteen and twenty-five make forty. Nothing to it.”
“Juba, why are other people’s problems so easy to solve?” Jack said. He pulled the blankets around his thin shoulders. “All you needed to do was to call on Stubby and your problems are solved! Of course, you’ll have a show with mostly breaks in it and Pete will want to skin you alive, but Stubby will have an answer for that, too.”
“You don’t owe Peter Williams anything,” Stubby said. “You’re doing him a favor.”
“And he’s putting up twenty dollars cash money to pull this thing off,” I said. “So if I don’t get it right, he’s going to want his money back.”
“Did he actually make a promise to give you the money, or did he just talk about it?” Jack asked.
When Pete had started talking about money, I had felt the same way Jack Bishop did, that it was going to be all talk. But then Pete had taken out a small leather pouch and put it in the middle of the table. He had asked me if I knew what was in the bag, and although I had heard the clink of coins, I had just shrugged my shoulders.
Pete emptied the bag onto the table and dumped out twenty silver dollars. He made sure that the pouch was empty and started putting the coins back in. Then he pushed the pouch over to me.
I’d already figured that Peter Williams was rich, but I didn’t think he was so rich he could just hand out twenty dollars like that. When I looked at him, he was staring at me directly in the eyes. What I figured him to be thinking was that I would be really impressed with the money. I hadn’t fainted, but my knees were beginning to feel weak.
I took the pouch from my pocket and put it in front of Jack Bishop.
“Twenty dollars—I counted it four times,” I said. “He wants a forty-minute show, with black and white performers, and they’ve got to be classy. Plus I have to make a meal for about fifteen tables. Pete says he’ll sit special guests at the tables and treat them royal, and everybody else will just be in regular seats around the room.”
“If you let some of your guests eat off the good plates and the fine linen, then everybody will think they’re being treated like swells,” Jack said. “Are you sure Peter isn’t English? He sounds sneaky enough.”
“You think I can pull it off?” I asked.
“You can if you don’t hang all your clothes on one nail,” Jack said. “Look around and see who you can call on to help you. You know who can dance and who can sing. You know who’s got clean shirts and who don’t, too. All you have to do is get them all lined up, see what’s in it for each of them, and let their interests take over.”
“You can leave the cooking to me,” Stubby volunteered. “If they’re looking for the top drawer, then I’m your man.”
“Give him a shot, Juba,” Jack said. “He’ll make you proud of him.”
What Jack was saying made sense. I did know most of the entertainers in Five Points and some from as far away as Twenty-Third Street. They were all hungry to show off their talents, and most of them would work for nothing if I asked. When I went over what Stubby had said, about only needing five acts, it gave me a way to think about how many people I had to get. Some people could perform twice, so I figured seven should do it. Fourteen performances would be the whole forty minutes with a little over. I would be the main dancer, and I knew I could probably get Simmy Long to dance. I needed one more colored dancer and some white performers. I had an idea of where I was going to get the white performers, but I wasn’t sure about the colored dancer. I didn’t want to even talk to the one I knew best, but I knew I at least needed to feel him out.
“Juba, I needed to get the job at the auditions,” Freddy said. “Look around this place. This is how I’m living. I deserve better than this.”
It had been easy for me to find Freddy. I knew he lived on Cherry Street, and I just asked some kids where the colored man who always carried a cane stayed, and they pointed out his place. A round-faced woman sitting on the stoop told me Freddy lived on the second floor and that he had just moved in a little while ago.
The place smelled horrible. It was dark in the middle of the day, with people sleeping in the corners. The sewer ran right under the building, and you could smell the waste.
“I don’t even have my own place,” Freddy said. “I rent a space here to sleep on the floor. I don’t have no decent place to live, and I can barely get up enough money to eat proper. When John Diamond was calling to me to make my act more like a minstrel show, it hurt me. It truly did, because I know I’m better than that. I am not nobody’s nigger. But look at the way I’m living. You got to see what was pulling on my coattail, Juba.”
There was a noise, and I looked to see a pile of rags on the floor move. A woman, rags tied around her legs, was sleeping against the wall with a coat pulled partway over her. The whole place was dreary, dark, and disgusting.
“You’re not living well, Freddy,” I said. “But to throw yourself away completely didn’t make any sense. If you’re going to let people put you in whatever place they want, you’re never going to have their respect. And when you jumped into that place, grinning and carrying on, you dragged me right in with you.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Juba. I truly am, but we can work together on this. Peter talked to me about putting on a show, and I was all for it. He said you and me could pull it off. We could work together.”
“He said we could work together?”
“Miss Lilly was pulling for you. She didn’t think you wanted to work with me,” Freddy said. “But I think we could do well together. We could put on a good show. What do you say?”
Freddy held out his hand. I didn’t take it.
“When did he talk to you, Freddy?” I asked.
“Right after the auditions,” Freddy answered. “We need to put bygones behind us, Juba. You and I are the best entertainers around here. I know we can do it!”
I was getting mad at Pete again for talking to Freddy before he talked to me.
“We can’t work together, Freddy,” I said. “I’ll bring you in on this if you do what I say. If you don’t want to do what I tell you, then you got to move away from me.”
“I’ll do whatever you say, Juba,” Freddy said. “Just give me a chance.”
I didn’t feel right when I left Freddy. What I knew, or thought I knew, was that if the chance came for him to throw his manhood and his talent away to get over, he would do it. Peter Williams didn’t care about that. Pete didn’t even think of himself as a black man. He thought of himself as a money man. Still, I needed another colored dancer, and Freddy could dance. He could carry himself well, too, when he wanted. But I had to make the show good enough that he would want to be something special.
“Isn’t it funny, Stubby, that you got to convince people not to hurt themselves?” I asked my roommate when I got home.
“Freddy is doing what he thinks he can do,” Stubby said. “That’s not easy sometimes.”
“That’s not good enough for me,” I said. “And I got some words I have picked out for Freddy. I’m just saving them for a special occasion.”
From the dancing at the auditions, I thought maybe John Diamond had got the white dancers on board. They were all kinds of good, and I thought about asking John for their names, but he and I were always butting heads about who was the best between us, and I knew he wouldn’t do me any favors. We had even danced together at times when some promoter wanted to put on a black and white show, but I could tell he didn’t like sharing the stage. Margaret taught mostly young Irish girls, and I wondered if she would help.
In the afternoon Stubby came and asked me if I was going to help him put up the cart and bring the unsold fish upstairs. There wasn’t that much fish left, but only half the smoked oysters were gone.
“When Jack is selling, he just kind of mushes his way through a conversation and gets people nodding and smiling, and then they feel too ashamed not to buy something,” Stubby said. “When I’m selling, I’m begging them to buy, and they start acting like the fish are moldy and the oysters are rotten.”
“So how do you think I should go ask Margaret if she’s going to help me get this thing together?” I asked.
“You’re not even interested in selling these fish, are you?”
“Stubby, dancing and entertaining people is what I love,” I said. “If fish could clap their hands, I’d be dancing for them. So do you think Margaret will help me get a show together?”
“Fish don’t have hands,” Stubby said. “And Margaret’s not going to help you, because she doesn’t like you that much. She told me that.”
She didn’t like me that much, but I had a sneaky feeling she liked dancing enough to think about working with me.
I had been in Margaret’s apartment a couple of times, and she had shown me some interesting things about dancing. She was tough in a way and had a quick tongue on her, but there were things she knew, and it came to me that maybe all the white dancers didn’t have to be that good just to put on a show. In fact, the more I thought about it, the clearer I realized they didn’t have to be good at all. As long as they didn’t fall down on the floor, they could fill up the space between when I was dancing and when Freddy and Simmy were dancing.
The Artis twins were a little weird, but that was part of their act. They were not that good-looking, but they moved together well. Pete told people they were from Africa, but I knew they were from Philadelphia. He had them dress alike in white, gauzy costumes, and sometimes they played castanets as they danced. They were a popular act.
The show was going to be a colored dance performance with some white dancers and singers just around to show it was a mixed group. So when I got to Margaret’s place, after washing up to get the fish smell off my hands and clothes, I was feeling pretty good as I explained to her what I had in mind.
“If you think for one hot minute that I’m going to be out rounding up dancers and helping you put on a show just to show off the talents of three colored boys, you have put your hat on the wrong part of your body, Mr. Juba.”
“I’m not wearing a hat,” I reminded her.
“And you don’t have much of a head to put it on if you were wearing one,” Margaret said. “There are young white people out there who can dance just as well as you can and will put their hearts and souls into it. But they are not as stupid as you seem to think they are, that they’re going to just sweep the floor for the coloreds.”
“I didn’t say they couldn’t dance,” I said.
“Yes, you did, Juba.” Margaret leaned her face toward me. “You were spitting some of the words and swallowing some of them, but you got your teeth together enough to say that they didn’t have to be that good, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So go get yourself some bums off the streets and see what they can do for you!”
“Miss Moran, can you help me?” I thought of Stubby trying to sell fish. “If I can get a show together for Pete Williams, it will mean a lot to me. At the auditions they wouldn’t let me dance. The man who owned the theater was asking me to ‘coon it up’! Do you know what that means?”
“Because you’re wearing a scarf doesn’t mean you’re the only one in the village with a neck, Juba,” Margaret said. “It means they wanted you to forget about your dancing and be something that amused them—the same way you want the young white people to forget about their dancing and be something that amuses you. Jack Bishop told me what happened at the auditions. He felt really bad for you, and when he told me, I felt really bad for you. But now I see that nobody has to feel anything for you, because you have it all covered by yourself.”
“I didn’t think of it that way,” I said.
“You always think with yourself in the middle of your mind and everybody else floating around on the edges.”
“So there’s nothing you can do for me?” My voice seemed small.
“If you’re ready to get down off your throne, Mr. Juba Almighty, I might lend you a hand,” Margaret said.
I had to sit for another ten minutes while Margaret reminded me how stupid I was for thinking she was going to betray the Irish race and then described my dancing as something that wasn’t much more than clog dancing in the first place, and said I had stolen everything I knew from the street corners and festivals around Five Points.
“Okay, Margaret, I see where you are right about me not thinking about the white dancers in the same way that John Diamond and Mr. Reeves hadn’t thought about the black dancers at the auditions,” I said. “I was just so upset about what happened that I was hoping to make up for everything, to make it all right, by turning out a spectacular show.
“You’re right that I have learned a lot from clog dancing, and that I’ve borrowed some of the steps and some of the moves. But where you’re wrong is important, too. I bring a lot of rhythms to the dancing, and a lot of moves that make my dancing special. I’m dancing from my heart and using everything I know, and some of it I don’t even know where it comes from. But I can tell you this. Whenever I see a person move, my eyes kind of record it, and I can feel that movement in my muscles, and in my legs, and in my arms. When I see somebody running, it’s almost like me running.
“Sometimes I watch the little girls jumping rope on Avenue A, across from the school, and if I watch them long enough, I get tired because my body is moving right along with theirs. At the auditions, I saw the white dancers and I watched them and I liked what I saw. I wanted to get out there and take what they were doing and build on it. They were dancing so well that people were watching their feet, the way you say old Irish people always do, but I wanted to dance so good that people would want to see if my feet were still touching the floor. I’m not just trying to make money, or even to entertain people. I love what I do, and I want to do it because I love it. And sometimes all that loving of dancing I have just gets in the way of my thinking straight. I’m always ready to learn something new about dancing, Margaret. Jack Bishop is teaching me a lot about being a good person, and I love to hear Stubby talking about cooking. I’m glad you got my head straight about how I was looking at the Irish dancers. I’m not that big a fellow, but I’m bigger now than when I knocked on your door this afternoon.”
“Well, just don’t let that tongue of yours tie up knots that it can’t get loose.”
“So do you think you can help me pull it all together?”
“We’ll see,” Margaret said. “We’ll see.”