Mister R.W. Boone was how he always introduced himself to colored or white, adult or child. It was ever just his initials or only his last name. R.W. Boone, like it was a single name.
Ralph Waldo. R.W.
They knew what he stood for. He stood for the race. The Race. Mister R.W. Boone was a race man from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. It was colored first and last with him. Anybody knew him knew that. Race man. And a ladies man. That was a close second. Close as his next heartbeat. When he stepped down off the lead car in a new town, he was either escorting a woman down who’d been with him for a week or so, escorting her across the track, a ticket in her hand to send her on her way back to where he’d picked her up, or he was being met by some other woman waiting on him to let her ride along with them for a week or so until he escorted her across the track, a return ticket in her hand.
Boone’s rules: 10:15! R.W. put his index fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled his loud, shrill note. Time for the morning meeting. Be there or be fined. Too many fines, be fired. That was his first rule as any day opened. Boone was quick to say he didn’t give a fat goddamn what they did or with who or what, long as the consequences didn’t include the law, come out of his pocket, or keep them from answering morning roll, or the call for places at showtime. Whatever it was they’d done, he offered as general information and not boasting, he’d likely done it or seen it done and it hadn’t killed him, so it wasn’t nothing to get the big head over, or be too shamed of, and wasn’t nothing to damn anybody else about for doing it, or an excuse for being late. And he didn’t want it, whatever the hell it might be, to cause him any upset.
Boone was known, he thought, for being fair, giving everybody all the room he could for them to be themselves. All he wanted was for his operation to run like a business, on time and professional. Not like a family—he’d come from a family (that was all anybody knew on that subject), and he’d seen how a heap of other families operated and they were, to the last of them, lacking in the necessary harmony to turn sufficient profit to pay fifty plus people a living wage. Royale & Rhymes was a business and he was the head of it. Everybody had an assigned job and as long as they did it in the way expected it was all good and greasy. But mess up in a way to bring in the law, or so it came out of his pocket, or kept any one of them from answering one of the two daily calls, and they’d likely be left on the side of the tracks quicker than a cat can lick its ass.
At the very first it was thought by a few (Clara and Martha) that she was his latest traveling companion. Traveling companion being only one of the behind-his-back names they (mostly Clara) had for R.W.’s women.
Clara: His one a weekenders, his bed warmers—
Martha: Bosom buddies, close associates, playmates—
Pearl Moon this new one called herself. She didn’t fit the pattern. R.W. liked them young and long-legged. Of the two she lacked the long legs. But it wasn’t only the legs— there was the boy, and blind to boot. R.W.’s women never had babies with them. It wasn’t that he wasn’t known far and wide to have sowed his seed far and wide. Johnny Appleseed didn’t have nothing on him, they, Clara and Martha, joked.
That was attested to by the short stack of envelopes he mailed off monthly each addressed to a different woman up and down the lines and each with a handwritten note and support money. Not even a race man, one who was a Lothario, would take on a woman with a scarred, blind boy. It was against his nature and his rules, as Clara and Martha knew them, but he had taken the two in, the young woman and her son, scarred and blind.
The night-black southeast Indiana landscape rushed unseen outside the train coach windows. She wasn’t fooling no-body, Martha low talked to Clara through the smoke of her last Old Gold before bedtime. Had a whole heap of airs trying to cover up pinch of substance; if you asked what Clara thought. The smoke shooting from her nose like from a dragon’s, she fixed her mouth as if that was all she had to say on the subject. Martha hadn’t asked, but knew without asking, what Clara’s answer and attitude would be on the question of the new one and her blind boy. Like, she wouldn’t beg for mercy, Martha said, if Lucifer had dragged her for a solid mile. That was true, Clara thought. Pearl Moon wasn’t an easy woman to like, by women or by men, but she didn’t take no stuff. And that boy, Martha continued, gesturing, her fingers dancing like fairies through daisies, he so blind he can’t see whether he suppose to sit down or stand up to pee. She ought to quit, Martha was told by Clara, who almost doubled over with suppressed laughter, knowing Martha was, if anything, just getting started.
R.W. was a rooster all right. He sure liked women. And they sure liked him. Picking up their conversation the next morning at breakfast, Martha did believe R.W. would hump a burning stump. R.W. and every other man God delivered through some poor woman; Clara laughed in agreement.
They’d both slept through their predawn arrival in Eutassee. Slept through the three rail cars containing Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels rolling tent and equipment, instruments, show props, and crew. It had been switched off and deposited in the old Southern Rail yard and coal chute, an industrial branch line, weedy from recent disuse, spur and near the Sullivan Gin Mill and Warehouse, once thriving when cotton was still king. Where at harvest time bail-loaded wagons had snaked clear back to the county limits. The Northern yard, with the proper passenger depot where buyers had arrived in droves, was across town nearer the city center. Royale & Rhymes’ troupe would layover there for the two days while they set the three-pole tent and perform that evening and the next.
Now, with the bottom busted out of the U.S. economic barrel, and times being tough as mule meat, Eutassee was like almost every town Royale & Rhymes went to, and they played them all: big, middle-sized, and little, colored and white. And to all in distance of a railroad line and were lucky enough to have some change in their coin purse to purchase the pleasure of an evening’s performance from the All Colored All The Time performers.
And sure as the moon and the sun, somebody in practically ever berg and junction they hit was interested in joining up with them. Be it a farm boy with an itch for some form of excitement that tending a cotton crop could not offer; the budding local beauty being circled by hard-eyed but empty promises to make her satisfied; the swamped by a bad situation and all the signs saying it won’t be no better soon; and any of the hundreds of others lost and looking. So despite his being a through and through race man, if he took in or took on every stray with a reason to get away he’d have a parade strung out behind him as wide and long as the Mississippi. The couple times they remembered he’d done it years ago, the strays’d found just how long and lonesome that road was they had dreamed so much about that they couldn’t get whatever they’d left behind off their minds.
“Ain’t everybody can live the life we lead,” Clara said. Martha slowly nodded her head—turn tail, or just as likely, chaff, under the unaccustomed rule of a colored man, and, after a few nights out, good riddance, they’d run or wander off.
Clara and Martha paused, chewing. If R.W. let them all tag on he’d look like Moses leading the children of Egypt. But Royale & Rhymes’ manager prided himself on leading a top-notch professional outfit. When the colored and white paying public entered the Royale & Rhymes tent, they knew they had walked through the flaps of the finest colored entertainment outfit their money could buy. The troupe’s reputation was at stake every night. If all they offered were ragtag amateurs with no more talent and excitement than the locals could produce themselves on their own porches or parlors and never regret the cost of admission, then we deserve to go belly up, R.W. said.
“He’s something, ain’t he . . . ?”
The slight forward tilt of his bowler matching the dangle of his cigarette, his white shirt, bow tie, three-piece suit, shined shoes.
Martha sucked at the salty-sweet bit of bacon rind stuck between her canine and upper right bicuspid. R.W. was looking at his pocket watch. The morning meeting started at 7:15 sharp. Clara’s elbow was crooked on the table, the steaming cup at her lips. Still tongue-worrying the gristle, she slowly wagged her head.
“Ain’t a white man in America can do what R.W. does better than him.”
The two trombone players thought R.W. Boone wasn’t so much an alchemist as something they didn’t have a word for. An alchemist had something—cooper, brass some earthly element to tinker with to start in his quest for gold. R.W. Boone was whatever you’d call it that came before alchemy. That somebody who took nothing, if you could call pure need nothing, and turned it into something. If there was a name for that then, they thought, that’s the tag you’d have to pen on R.W. Boone.
Martha on her second Old Gold and first cup of coffee of the morning, and Clara with her hot chocolate watched R.W. talking to Carpenter and the boy. Now there was a pair.
Even the ones who considered the boy a nuisance or claimed they couldn’t stand his ways or the sight of him took some time with him. Amused by his determination or impressed with his willingness to try anything, they’d take a minute anyway to direct him or instruct him. Hell, they’d say, he’s trying, and if somebody doesn’t tell him something or give him a guiding hand he’ll kill his young fool self.
But he had something, him, and his mama, too. Grit or backbone or sand, or whatever it was, it wasn’t every day that, satchels in hand, combinations like them came walking in.
In the span since the two arrived, Clara and Martha’d had sufficient time to observe and speculate and to piece the whole thing together—to their satisfaction anyway.
The mother and the boy’d come that first night and seen the show. She sought R.W. out and told him his troupe had talent, that what they lacked was style. Their costumes were raggedy as a billy goat’s ass, she said. Telling him people performed up to the way they looked. Clara and Martha hadn’t actually witnessed the meeting but they could imagine it clear as Miss Ann’s crystal.
Pearl Moon standing there with Royale & Rhymes’ boss man, looking dead at him like she did, making her bargain with him. Like two men, two white men. Saying she could see the pressure was on him running the show and all. Him saying she hadn’t seen him long enough to know nothing about him but how tall he was and what kind of suit he wore, and how his pocket square draped from his lapel pocket like a silk-tongued beagle’s. Her standing there letting him say it, waiting on him to finish. That was probably one of those moments, Clara and Martha surmised, when she, Pearl, put that pause on him. When she just looked at you in a way that stopped time so what you’d just said bounced back at you like you had shouted it against a stone wall, and you didn’t hear the echo of it the way you’d meant it when you said it, but how it must’ve sounded when you were trying to sass or lie to your mama, or escape by some lame excuse to somebody with dominion over you or the situation.
Another of her tricks was you’d say something to her and your voice wouldn’t come back at all—just fall down a well with no bottom—and you’d stand there wondering if you’d really said anything at all or only thought you had. And if so why you’d bothered. Still another was what Pearl Moon did with those eyes of hers. She saw sharp enough for the two of them, her and her blind son, and she had a way of looking at you when you thought she was through with you, patting her foot, her bent wrist on her hip, or even if she walked away and you were to look after her, she’d glance back over her shoulder and a chill would run over you like somebody’d opened the back door of Alaska.
That was how they imagined she had looked at R.W. that first time they met and negotiated. Then, they imagined her saying, You trying to do everything yourself. Some of it you good at, some you ain’t. She could see he knew business, he didn’t know style is what else she could see. She did. Knew style. That was her business. She knew why the customers came and what they wanted when they got there. What he ought to do, they, Martha and Clara, imagined her, Pearl, saying, was give her a budget, let her take on the management of the updating of the costumes and such, freeing him up for his booking and other company running duties like picking the towns, supervising, making the payroll.
R.W. must’ve, they surmised, argued with her about how she thought he’d turned Royale & Rhymes from a sad-ass floundering minstrel troupe into a three-car attraction, employing thirty-odd people, and holding its own in tough times against cutthroat competition, if he was as lacking in whatever it was she thought he was lacking in.
They could imagine him too, looking back at her with her attitude as brassy as a San Francisco whorehouse bar rail, and not only listening to the gist of her business proposition but mulling it over: what if he let her concentrate on making his performers live up to their potential? If after a couple months he didn’t see an improvement in the performance and revenue, then he’d leave her and the boy by the side of the road where they’d come from.
R.W. took a chance. He announced who Pearl and the boy were and said they would be with them for a while, time period to be determined.
So Pearl and Son were joining the Royale & Rhymes All Colored All the Time traveling show with a company of thirty-one permanent members: comedians, singers, musicians, dancer; box office, concessions, and maintenance staff. She would be helping out.
The train slowly picked up speed, its ruff-ruffs were like a medium-sized dog issuing a half-serious warning. Ruff-ruff-ruff.
At full speed you could feel it rushing forward with slight shimmies, sudden eruptions of rhythm surprising, rolling right or left, that accented but did not interrupt its determined hurtle forward. On steady stretches it toot-tooted like a high-powered automobile. Was the whistle, he wondered as they swayed through a curve, a language, its code rolling out over the land, was it a message to those who worked or went on their way as it called to them?
Pearl and Son sat together, son now asleep against his sleeping mother’s side as if it was the first good sleep they had had since Moses came down from the mountain.
When they awoke Pearl nodded and spoke when nodded and spoken to. Even Clara waited. They had been on the road a spell was as much of a story as either one of them would tell. They could have been from Mars for all anyone in the Royale & Rhymes Company knew.
Once in Dawkins, Georgia when the crew and the hired locals constructed the tent, joining the canvas sections, raising the poles, hammering the stakes, hoisting and tying off, Pearl and the boy went into town with R.W. and came back with a trunk-load of materials and notions. She went to work making and reconstructing band costumes.
Sewing, Pearl said, was the skill she had picked up from her grandmother who’d been a seamstress for some white ladies. That was as much information as she volunteered.
Pearl worked hard, nobody couldn’t say she didn’t; the sewing machine clacking when they got up and when they went to bed. She even took in laundry from a few of the company to pick up some extra money. They weren’t sure if it was the constancy of the work that made her manner sometimes chaffing and fire-spitting, or what, but there was a rough patch with them getting used to her ways.
But openly admitting it or not, Pearl’s improvements were a shot of tonic. The beads and rhinestones and sequins and feathers and gold braid and shiny buttons she bought and sewed on their costumes did make the show flashier. And look like their energy perked up and their timing got sharper. And at every stop the yokels’ jaws dropped. Martha and Clara knew the audiences couldn’t’ve been any more knocked out if they’d’ve bammed them between the eyes with an axe handle when they stepped inside the tent. Pearl Moon had those costumes so shiny they almost didn’t need the kerosene lamps. There were standing ovations just for the female performers strutting costumed out onto the stage. Like the All Coloreds were a bonfire, a pyre burning hard times and Jim Crow signs. And, not that the performers saw an increase in their pay envelope, but revenues were up and there were equipment improvements.
The word had gotten out on Royale & Rhymes’ new look. It was worth the price of admission was the word that spread ahead of them by railroad men and solo entertainers and preachers, the way colored news took to and moved through the air like dandelions seeds and Caribbean moss.
R.W. had, for some time, even before he realized it, wanted to find some way to shed some of the weight on him regarding the running of the show. He had listened to Pearl and was cautiously hopeful she might be of some help, even if not in the way she proposed. But what it was that he had seen, what had set his showmanship instincts flaring up like an allergy, and the deciding factor for taking them on that the trombonists Clara and Martha hadn’t reckoned, was the boy. R.W. talked and listened to the mother and he watched the boy. The boy was a curiosity. A mama’s boy and unschooled, but he was razor smart. Out of the ordinary, like his mama, and like her, with flair. Too soon to say if it was special—as she declared, to whoever she met and whatever she meant, whether he was gold dust, or just an oddity—but the potential was there. Properly presented people would pay to see him.
Without declaring his intentions R.W. gave him little chores around the minstrels to gauge their reaction to him and him to them. The boy was willing. Within his limits able. And R.W., who knew women and talent, saw he had music in him.
Carpenter told a different story to everyone who asked about the loss of his hand, not arm as everybody incorrectly said—always pretending (especially with women) to be reluctant to tell it. One time it was the war overseas, the next a factory accident in Alabama, then a run-in with a white mob in Mississippi.
Separate or together that Carpenter and the boy got anything done was thought by many to be amazing, the quality of the work they did do through planning, and detail, and patience was a near miracle.
“You just have to figure out another way to do it,” Carpenter said.
Oh, it could be funny to watch, but at the same time, it was some kind of satisfying to see them working together.
From the first Pearl Moon told R.W. to tell them all, as she would do over time by word and example, “Don’t baby him (too much). Treat him equal. Let him get his scrapes and bruises. He’s special, but he ain’t no pet. Don’t baby him. He needs to be strong. Let him stumble let him fall. Get him used to what’s ahead. I won’t be around forever. He’s got to know that, and be prepared.”
Opinions ranged from he better not get in my way, to give him a chance, to he’s one of us now. They saw how hard he tried. He worked hard. Worked as hard as his mama, who outworked an army of ants.
R.W. gave strict instructions: Son was not to get involved while the gangs of canvas men and constructionists erected the tent.
So he shambled about. He thumped and stumbled and slipped. Blundered, reeled, toppled, sprawled. He groped and staggered and got turned around. He tripped over, lumbered, or fell into; or lurched, bumped, teetered, scrapped, or tottered; tripped against people, poles, walls, into ditches, boxes, trees, rocks, ruts. Pratfalls that Nicodemus and Snuff, the black-faced comedy duo, would have been proud of and did in fact study for pointers in the naturalism of the boy’s comic flops or plummets. He’d give a week’s pay to see him on a bicycle, Snuff whispered one morning as the meeting was breaking up.
Undaunted after a fall Son scrambled up, licked his palm to wipe his knees, licked again if it was blood-sticky, then swatted and slapped off the dust and dirt and went on. On the train and inside the tent was easily memorized and navigated because it was always the same. The constant challenge was their continual moving, a new town usually every five or six days, strange terrains, unfamiliar topographies, foreign footing on each new lay of land.
Early on there was some mocking behind his back and to his face—careful not to let his mama or R.W. or especially the carpenter catch them. But it wasn’t too long before, through the combination of her insistence and the boy’s being able to do what was asked of him, they got used to him and the scars. Among them it was an unspoken policy that other people’s business was just that. Nobody wanted to be questioned themselves, so they tended to respect that in others; tended to, but with their intentions longer in taking effect in some cases than others.
Carpenter was the first to take the boy under his wing.
Martha hunched Clara as she gestured with her head and laughed. The boy and Carpenter, the only one-armed carpenter any of them had ever seen, were repairing a rickety section of bleacher seats. All around the camp as troupe members moved about they snuck looks or just stopped all together to watch the two of them, the one armed carpenter and a blind boy as they went about replacing plank sections. Carpenter was precise in his construction, in spite of the fact that he never drew a plan or work with a blue print. He’d just see it in his head, complete, down to the last miter angle and nail, and then build it to fit that vision. So his instructions to the boy were exact.
Bring me a handful of them nails in that box on the ground behind you there. And you can knock over that saw horse about four feet to your left on the way if you want to, but I wouldn’t.
Or, Hold this 2x4 for me right here where I got it. Now take this nail right here and hold it right there, like that. Hold it true, get your noggin’ out of the way so you don’t bust my hammer.
Where without the boy he used his stump to hold the board with the nail held between his big and second toe of his right foot.
Oh, it could be funny to watch, but at the same time, it some kind of satisfying to see them working together.
An oatmeal box Carpenter had gotten from cook. Antenna wire. Coil of copper wire. Ground wire. Carpenter explained what each piece was as the boy fingered them. Crystal detector. Earphones. Telling the boy about how the air was full of radio waves sent out by radio stations located all over.
“Like there are thoughts everywhere in the air,” the boy said—or in his head, he wasn’t sure which. “And I just pick them up, huh?”
Carpenter tapped the boy’s forehead. “Yeah, I guess you got a noggin like a crystal detector.”
They laughed.
“Now, the antenna”—the boy found it on the tabletop. “That’s right. That’s what picks up the signal sent out from the station, and it flows between it and the ground wire—that’s right. You tune it to the station with the detector. Yeah, that’s the detector.” His hands were guided through the assembly process: wrapping the copper wire around the oatmeal box. Wires connecting from the oatmeal box to the ground wire and the earphones and detector. Wires connecting the box and detector and antenna. And when it was done and the antenna was strung out and in place, Son put on the earphones.
“You do the adjustments,” Carpenter said. Fiddling, his face scrunched in concentrating.
“Something scratchy.”
“Static.”
“Oh, static.”
Adjusting.
“Anything?”
Son was shaking his head.
“Keep trying.”
And after a few minutes he jumped with delighted surprise. “A tingle,” he said. He turned his head slightly. A smile butterflied across his lips.
“What?”
“I hear it.”
“What?”
“Music.” His hand trembled at the knob. “Somebody is talking—”
“—and—?”
“—More—Music!”
“Just so you’ll know,” is what R.W. said to the boy that first evening before Professor Smith’s downbeat, and the Royale & Rhymes All Colored Minstrels, led by Eggs Isbell, as Mr. Interlocutor shimmy-wiggled on the stage, and before the first act finale of Son’s debut.
“You know by now,” R.W. said, “I don’t assume anybody knows anything I haven’t said to him or to her, so if I’m telling you something you already know, stop me. I know you and your mama’ve traveled some, and seen a thing or two, but, so there’ll be no mistaking who these people are who pay to sit in my tent, and how you’re to think of them, I’ll tell you. They are the hardest-lucked, poorest, most backward-ass people anywhere. Nobody gives a damn about them other than what can be wrung from them. And when they’re sapped dry as cow chips, they’ll drop where they stand and the landlord won’t miss them, and they know it. They’re trapped.”
The minstrels Pete Ratliff and Billy Faddis as their characters, Nicodemus and Snuff begin their routine with the drunk, Nicodemus, who stumbles into the mortuary by mistake and tries to wake up the corpse laid out next to the napping mortician.
“Their lives,” R.W. continued, “won’t get a bit better and neither will their children’s or likely their grandchildren. They are never even going to get in sight of pulling even, let alone getting ahead, and there is nothing they can do about it.”
The nature of the establishment into which Nicodemus has blundered is slowly dawning on him. The audience roars.
“If it wasn’t for some jook off at the end of some dark road, a church on Sunday morning, and us once a season—”
The ghastly enormity of Nicodemus’s mistake is compounded when Snuff, as the mortician, awakened by the commotion of Nicodemus trying to find a portal, any portal of exit, sits up and speaks.
R.W. looked at the boy, his head cocked slightly.
Son’s face cork-blackened beneath the white bonnet and blond, curlicued Shirley Temple wig. He’d been painted with big red liver lips and two large white buttons for eyes. His mother had sewn his costume: a calico dress and white pantaloons. With black patent leather Buster Browns.
Shirley Temple acts were big in the movies and vaudeville houses. There were Little Eva and Mary Pickford and adolescent white girl imitators everywhere. With Son, R.W. saw his chance to put a spin on that kind of attraction.
“They know all that without question,” R.W. continued. “And still they keep on. Why? Because they’re stupid? Because they’re no better than beasts? No. Because there is nothing else they can do—until Jim Crow catches a cold and croaks, or one of us catches him off by himself and chokes the living evil out of him. Until that happens we are the only things outside their world they have to look forward to that doesn’t, in the long run, cause them more pain. That includes the next planting season, Christmas, falling in love, childbirth, and death. But we roll in, and for two hours under this canvas we put on a show that has to last them maybe for the rest of their lives. That ain’t to be taken lightly.”
“No sir,” Son said without pause.
“They file in through that flap like they’re entering St. Peter’s gates. And we have to respect that because they’re paying for our supper. You hear me?”
“You hear?” his mother asked, laying her hand on his shoulder.
“Respect,” the boy said.
He heard.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Eggs announced, boys and girls, for the first time on any stage anywhere—”
On cue and the release of his mother’s hand from his shoulder, twirling his parasol, just as they had rehearsed it and rehearsed it, he skipped straight down the hard-packed earth aisle between the folding chairs and onto the step-high platform of the stage in the center of the tent. It was Bessie Smith’s tune. He had heard it since he could remember. Those first few piano notes pounded out like a couple of hammers striking in the last coffin nails, before easy rolling into a slow, barrelhouse blues. It seemed like a Negro couldn’t have a Victrola Talking Machine without a Bessie Smith tune spinning on it. Even when it was electronically reproduced, her big voice was hot and bright as the sun, and chilling as the sky around a winter moon. When Bessie sang she was declaring her presence as their spokeswoman. Helping get all her listeners told on the true matters of the world.
There ain’t nothing I can do, or nothing I can say
That folks don’t criticize me,
The opening of T’Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do. First put out by her ten or fifteen years before. Son didn’t even know he was singing it the first time R.W. called it to his attention. It was a near perfect imitation of the Columbia records singing star.
But I’m goin’ to do just as I want to anyway
And don’t care if they all despise me.
Son had not even known he knew all of the words until R.W. asked him to sing it through. And the second time when Professor Smith was called over to listen, and then when Bobby Collier on drums, Bump Reynolds on bass, and Professor Smith playing piano, and then Peck Morgan made music behind him. And he rehearsed it again with them for the next couple days.
For the longest time R.W. had wanted a child act as a part of Royale & Rhymes’ roster. He was missing a good bet by not having one of the most popular type acts in vaudeville. On stage far back as R.W. could remember, portrayals of Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; to Mary Pickford, the girl with the curls as Snow White in the moving pictures; to Shirley Temple, singing and dancing and being cute on screens all over the country every night—all brought in the big dollars. They often did adolescent white girls’ versions of colored dances and music and people loved it an ate it up like ice cream.
From the first he had considered the possibility of creating a spot for Son on stage. The boy was personable, self-assured, and had a raw, unexplored talent. Hearing him absentmindedly singing the blues caused the idea to click, like a cue ball’s perfect point of contact with the object ball that propelled it into the called pocket. A parody of the parody of a prim little white girl doing colored material.
Before his mama released him she asked him if he thought he could sing with people listening; would he be nervous? He asked if it was important if he wasn’t. It was. He said he wouldn’t be.
Not on that first night, or any after, was there anyone among the audience who did not know the lyrics. At first they responded as much with the joy of hearing the song as with amusement at a child singing it. The tune was, true to Bessie Smith’s attitude, a full-throated statement to any and all—family, lovers, friends, white folks, preachers, and any damn body else walking and drawing breath—that what they did was something they owned, something they strutted, something private and personal as their heartbeat, and something, maybe the one thing, they had couldn’t nobody else touch.
It was only after a line or two, once they’d recognized the tune, that they could feel the spirit. From her throne as the Empress of the Blues, Bessie was speaking unto them through the mimicking voice of a blackened-faced child in a kerosene-lighted tent in a field yonder from the train tracks.
If I should take a notion
To jump into the ocean
Just like Mistress Smith, in her royalty, drawing out then holding selected words, like a mule straining in its harness against a hidden root.
T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, do, do do . . .
Royale & Rhymes’ audiences didn’t come to sit back and be pulled along on a buggy ride like white folks behind old Dobbin trotting to church on Sunday. They came to grab a handful of mane, sling their legs over the back of the wild buck of Royale & Rhymes’ Colored Minstrels, and hooping and hollering hang on while they spurred it forth.
Sing the shimmy down on Monday
Ain’t no-body’s business if I do, if I do
They shouted praise when pleased and catcalled when they weren’t.
The boy’s singing—what’d Mr. Interlocutor call him?—Little Mizz Eva Topsy—because it was coming from a child—or maybe, due to the feeling behind the words, maybe it was really a midget posing as a child—no, it was a child—a boy?—a girl?—belting it out:
If my friend ain’t got no money
Bessie’s song. Their manifesto.
And I say “take all mine, honey”
Felt deep and wide as a 4 a.m. prayer, coming out of the big red watermelon mouth of a child:
T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, do, do do . . .
Then that spoke to the width and depth of Bessie’s message.
If I give him my last nickel
And it leaves me in a pickle
If a child could be made to feel it, then Lord have mercy!
T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, if I do.
It lifted them. It filled them up. It emptied them out. Throats lumped. Tears rose, glistening. Laughter exploded like dynamite blasting at the taproot of an oak blocking their path to betterment.
One day I’m goin’ crazy
Get me a shotgun and shoot my baby . . .
Shoot ’em, they holler.
Shoot ’em one time for me!
No-body’s business, amen-ing in the face of the look-the-other-way Lord, the hot-cold barbed wire clutches of the law, and every coldhearted white somebody from there back to Timbuktu.
I said it ain’t nobody’s business . . .
Lord, have mercy, they sang ahead of him.
Lord, have mercy, it ain’t nobody’s business,
Hey! what I do
It ain’t nobody’s business what I do
Nobody’s!
Their pocketbooks opened like a Kansas plains cloud black as the ebonies on a standup front parlor piano. Pennies, a few nickels, and a dime or two rained onto the stage like they didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to grieve. He understands.
Listen at him! They hollered, he understands, Bless ’im, and He ain’t nothing but a child.
The show went on from there, but not before he had to sing Madam Bessie Smith’s blues again. And twice a night from then on.