Under Carpenter’s supervision the crew of locals were rigging the bleachers and raising the tent.
Peck, first cornetist, was smoking a ready-roll he’d bummed off Napoleon Hampden. He was standing with Son. They’d rehearsed and were ready for their opening that night in Ford’s Bend. He was watching Jasper Graves, Royale & Rhymes’ advance man, who’d just come in from placing handbills on posts and walls in town and window cards in local businesses, and was talking to R.W. Peck could just barely overhear them.
“You aren’t going to like it,” Jasper said.
R.W. waited, not liking it already. “Another show posted over Royale & Rhymes’ handbills all over town,” Jasper told their boss.
“Who done it?”
“You ain’t going to like it,” the thin, wavy-haired, light-skinned, hazel-eyed man said, stalling the bad news. “It was another minstrel outfit.”
He didn’t think it was a damn opera company, R.W., said, but whoever in the hell it was he wasn’t going to blame Jasper for bringing the news if he told him what the news was sometime before sundown and time for the damned show.
Jasper, only slightly less anxious, said, “They’re a four-car unit down at the other depot.”
Peck could see R.W. rifling through his mind for troupes with four train cars.
“They white. Robben’s White Smart Set Minstrels out of New Orleans.”
“Any sight of them?”
They hadn’t set up at the pavilion in the town square when Jasper’d left. But they were expected to any time soon.
Stepping into the sunlight out of the shadows of the tent, Professor Elmore Sawyer, the band director, sensing something, joined them. What was wrong?
Jasper repeated his report in a rush, adding, “and you know the smoke ain’t hardly cleared from the last lynching they had around here.”
“That was over in Nelson County,” R.W. said.
“Y’all all right?” Peck, joining them, asked, his hand on Son’s shoulder.
“You think lynchers don’t cross country lines?” Jasper asked.
Graves asked if they ought to pack up, citing R.W.’s number one rule about the possibility of trouble and the law. He had a bad feeling.
“We were here first,” R.W. told him.
“But they here now,” Graves countered, “and this is a mostly white town. When they get a scent of blood . . .”
That didn’t make any difference, Sawyer said, as Bump Reynolds joined them.
“What’s up?”
Professor Sawyer explained.
“Them crackers got to learn,” R.W. concluded as he fetched his 21-jewel railroad model Waltham from his vest pocket. An 18-wheel steam locomotive hand carved into its gold top. He thumbnailed it open with a soft pop.
“Time for school,” he said. The watch closed with a click.
Son asked, “We going to town, R.W.?”
“Yeah, Son, we’re going to town.”
At the end of his long list of orders rattled off like Bobby Collier’s snare drum paradiddles, they knew who was going, and those who were staying in camp were to continue with the set up and to be ready for possible trouble.
The band went in led by R.W.
Peck could see the boy, with his hand on R.W.’s arm, could feel the calm and the excitement. There was also Professor Sawyer, and a cadre from the band: two cornets, two trombones, clarinet, tuba, and snare and bass drums. Heading toward town, dressed in their red-coated uniforms with the polished brass buttons, with gold epaulets and braided floral designs across the chest and down the sleeves. Bunched together they crunched along beside the tracks, the cinders and gravel sharp under their feet. They could have gone around skirting the business district and come up behind the square, but R.W. led them across the tracks and walked the three blocks up Logan Street to the corner of Main by the Post Office, where they could hear the faint sounds of “Doing the Uptown Low Down.”
To Peck’s ear the white minstrels were well trained and strictly rehearsed. Their execution was as precise as the wheels and cogs of R.W.’s 21-jeweled Waltham. The white musicians knew the tune but that was about all; Professor Sawyer’s glance and head gesture confirmed his similar thought to Peck. It had as much feeling as a stone at the bottom of a cotton sack. Their tempo dragged like a cotton-loaded wagon creaking behind a sun-besotted swaybacked mule. The best could be said for Robben’s band was that they sounded fit for a society orchestra playing for swells in tuxedos and dolled-up dames in sequined gowns. Well, that might have been how it looked on the sheet music, and okay for that kind of crowd, but this was a town of scuffling, raw-boned Swamp State crackers, rough as the trunk of a palmetto tree, and plagued by the low level of cornmeal in the barrel compared to the numbers of mouths had to be fed.
As R.W., Son, and the musicians moved up the street, Peck heard the six brass, four reeds, and drums from up the street. Sawyer signaled his band into formation and they were at the ready, marching in step, in place, at the corner by the boarded-up People’s State Bank and across the street from the Gulf Gas station. He called number twenty-eight in the book. “Doing the Uptown Low Down.” The same tune the Robben’s White Minstrel’s band was working their way through.
“All right boys; let’s buck ’em,” he said. He counted off. There was a bass drum boom and a glissando from the tuba, then a slow, dampened, rat-tatted dirge-like tempo on the snare. Willie Bump Reynolds’s tuba’s deep boom-thundering aftershocks threatened to undo the nails holding the boards over the failed bank’s windows, as well as any loose teeth, earwax, and idle thoughts within a radius of several blocks; or set clanging the bells atop the wedding-cake-looking steeples in the array of churches about town.
Peck and Napoleon Hampden’s cornets, playing as one, took the lead. It was mournful, but bright. It was steady as the sun’s heavenly arc. They could be heard with clarity down the four or five blocks to the pavilion in the town square where the Robben’s Smart Set musicians, ringed by townspeople, were doing their best.
Son carried the printed placard on a staff.
ROYALE & RHYMES’ MINSTRELS
ALL COLORED ALL THE TIME
ARE HERE!
Nelson’s Pasture
7 pm
Son was guided by Boone’s hand on his other shoulder. Up the center of the street they marched, between the parked cars and buggies and mule-drawn wagons angled parallel on either side. Past shops: pharmacy, barber, women’s ready-to-wear apparel, manned by assistants left behind while the bosses had moseyed to the square to hear the white minstrels play a tune or two, or by benevolent merchants or proprietors who’d released their help for a brief, end-of-the-week reprieve. In the second-level windows, there were heads and shoulders of stay-at-home women who lived above the shops.
A few men, women, and children stepped in behind Royale & Rhyme’s musicians, following them in. The crowd standing or lounging on the lawn around the pavilion or seated on the benches, beneath the statue of the war hero, started to turn toward R.W.’s band as the white musicians in blackface and dressed in red, white, and blue satin outfits, and red pillbox caps with black patent leather bills, strove valiantly to keep playing the tune in their tempo. Their effort, against the vigor of Royale & Rhymes’ lead unison cornets was like a rooster on roller skates. The twin punches of Clara and Martha’s trombones goosed the tempo steadily forward and higher, but still holding it for the back beat.
It all proved too much for the Robben’s bandsmen. Man by man the white minstrel musicians shut down, despite their conductor’s admonitions to the contrary. They laid their instruments on their laps or stood them on their thighs or knees, and they sat still as cornerstones, as the colored musicians reached the end of the circle around the bandstand, still playing, their sound and rhythm washing over the crowd like Noah’s flood, and then circled the pavilion again, following the boy’s and Boone’s lead, the Royale & Rhymes sign bobbing on the staff with the boy’s clogging but sure-footed march step. The Robben’s White Minstrels watched, their expressions hidden by the grease or burnt cork, but their postures lacked starch, and uncertainty hung on them like gray moss. The colored musicians circled them again, as they brought the tune to a climax, and enthusiastic applause.
Scattered, like a half handful of black-eyed peas around the edge of a bowl of rice, were town Negroes and Negroes in town. Domestics. Handymen. Street vendors. Each of them was aware of the others—in case—for the good it might do, and each in their caution—you had to know it to see—concealed their delight, pride, appreciation, and even apprehension. Peck and the rest of R.W.’s musicians saw it, soaked it up like flowers in the sun.
Professor Sawyer called the number of the next selection. Number thirty-three, “Russian Lullaby,” a popular, sentimental tune of the day. They played it in a plaintive tempo. Drew Toomer’s clarinet played the melody over quiet drum rolls from Bobby Collier. The crowd’s light applause over the introduction voiced their recognition and approval. The trombones and cornets and clarinet offered a counter melody based on “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” The crowd stood, hushed. Some swayed slightly, half smiling. Some dabbed at their eyes with sleeve handkerchiefs or knuckles or backs of their hands.
The all colored band began to exit the pavilion area along the sidewalk they had entered on only moments ago. Clear of the main body of the crowd and back into the street, Sawyer clapped his hands, indicating a doubling of the tempo. Peck’s cornet solo was from the melody of Gounod’s third act devil’s aria from Faust. Translating and transcribing as he played, its brassy brightness cutting the air like a scythe:
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The longest night you’ll live! On the band’s exit there were, on both sides of the street, more people in doorways and on the sidewalks than there were on their entrance. Some who had trailed them on their march up Main now followed them back, plus late joiners in tow, smiling, cutting a step, or trying to: the elderly, the idle, maids on errands, mammies pushing their wards in straw strollers, barefoot schoolboys, young toughs, clerks and assistant managers returning to the shops from supper with heads nodding or bobbing with the beat and against it.
There was no one not aware of the Sawyer’s band boys and girls in their bright red coats, sweat streaming down their shiny faces.
Peck eyed the colored people, their joy now as hard to hide as a bull under a blanket, as they grinned, snapped their fingers, and bobbed their heads. Some smiled and looked whites in the eye long enough to acknowledge and be acknowledged. Some, along with various whites, followed them as Boone extended the route out of town a few blocks more, past the Baptist Church at the proper end of the old business section, and by blocks of two-story frame houses and then down that stretch of Cotton Lane.
The tune now was “Keep Your Hands Off My Mojo.” The crowd had dwindled to a few, mostly boys on bicycles and on foot, and a barking dog or two. By the fields of twelve-cent-a-pound cotton, R.W.’s band went, still in formation, by the idle
They stood, out of formation, clustered in the dirt road, the air alive around them. The band was fidgety. They paced like thoroughbreds cooling down after a hard ride, pacing, snorting, pawing the earth, as they caught their breath, regulating their hearts.
Their instruments were at the ends of their arms like unacknowledged faithful dogs or smoking guns. Their breathing: some full-chested, some snorts, some swallowing. Hummhuphnnph of throats cleared. Dry coughs, dry spits. Feet: shuffling in place, scuffs of dust, a step or two forward, back, or to the side. Their bodies humming like new strung telephone wires. But there was a difficult-to-define uncertainty as they milled about. Like schoolboys at a dance: anxious yet eager, fretful yet cocky. Still, necessary for that moment, in close proximity.
Initiating the ritual of group smoking, Peck bummed a cigarette. The snap of the top of a tobacco tin, crinkle of a cigarette package, scrap and tszzzt! of a safety match. Flicking scent of sulfur.
Muum of thanks.
Naw, n’e’mind, I don’t want to be the third, let me get a light from you Drew. Mild indignation at having to ask.
“Damn, Peck, you want me to thump you in the chest too, to help you inhale?”
“In the rush I forget my smokes, all right? I’ll give you one when we get back if it means that much to you.”
“You’ll give one back—that’ll be a first.”
Then the inarticulate quiet of the after excitement of what they’d just done.
They didn’t know what to do.
The smell of rain a rumor from the west.
Bobby Collier, his drum on its side between his feet, drumsticks under his left arm, blew his nose, the knuckle of his index finger closing one nostril then the other. Sniffed. Wiped with his red and white handkerchief.
Peck had to pee. He crunched off through the scrub for privacy. Martha and Clara, their trombones angled against the shoulders like rifles, turned their backs. Napoleon Hampden crunched off to sneak a swig from his flask.
There was a swallow’s quick, sharp, trilled single note wheet-tweets; a wren’s rapid, high-pitched chattering.
Jasmine sugar-sweet in the nose.
Standing in high brown grass Peck noticed Son. He could see the boy whose head was turning quickly back and forth like a hound trying to catch a scent. Peck could see the boy had never been around the musicians when they felt like they were feeling then. Peck felt pretty much the same way. Anxious. Out of sorts. They were as restless as if they had unexplainably forgotten who they were. As if they, only minutes ago, had slipped back, to before Son knew them, to before they joined to work for R.W., to some point where they were only themselves—John Henry, Bump, Napoleon, Bobby, Drew, Clara, Martha—individuals, and not R.W. Boone’s Royale & Rhymes’ All Colored Minstrels All The Time Band, under Professor Sawyer’s direction.
Peck shook it off, zipped up. Crisp, drought-dried stalks snapping as he high-stepped back through the weeds and wildflowers. Son moved toward him, reached, touched, and tugged Peck’s sleeve. He whispered to the cornetist.
“Cakewalkin’ Babies from Home,” Peck called out, smiling. He had been thinking the same damned tune. It was as if it had come to him and the boy in a flashing, prophetic, two-pronged revelation. His bandmates, relieved by the simple logic and rightness of it, formed a near circle, raising their instruments to the ready without an upbeat, and launched forth at the Professor’s snapping head nod of a downbeat. They played the opening choruses, the trombones answering the cornets, the riffs from the reeds signifying like cawing crows.
Martha and Drew began singing, trading lines:
“Here they come, look at ’em, demonstrating,” Martha began.
“. . . going some, ain’t they syncopating?” Drew followed.
“Talk of the town, teasing brown, picking ’em up and laying ’em down . . .”
Son was in the circle, he was, in rhythm, high-stepping in place, in a slow clockwise rotation.
“Dancin’ fools, ain’t we demonstrating?” Martha sang.
“We’re a class of our own,” Drew answered, throwing his arms wide to them.
Martha, wagging her finger, “Now the only way to win is to cheat us.”
“. . . you may try,” Drew sang, shaking his head.
“. . . but you’ll never beat us!” They ended together, laughing.
The horns and drums took over with all their might. The music played not for the sparsely clouded high blue sky, or the shuttered gin off a ways, or the dilapidated three-room shack back by the clump of scarlet oak, the moss over-layering it all like a widow’s veil, or for any stray fice or livestock or fowl. The brass band, with the twelve-year-old blind boy’s stamping feet setting the lick, were playing only for each other.
“Strut your stuff, boy!” R.W. encouraged as Son waved his arms over his head still marching to the beat.
Playing their jubilation at being who they were: R.W. Boone’s Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels band under the baton of Professor Elmore Sawyer, euphoric exaltation at their capacity of expressing it and their being their only competition.
“You’re the cake walkin’ baby from home”!
For the first show that night, the crowd clambered out like there was going to be free money. It was thick as bees in a hive, as ants on sugar. First show because Boone added a second to accommodate the overflow, the sheriff increasing the license fee by half. Coloreds and whites separated by the rope. For the second show, which went past midnight, the rope was moved, the white section being smaller by half than from the first.
Surprisingly, Boone told Peck later, there was no attempted reprisal from a disgruntled faction within the white minstrel camp. Had any attempted reprisal proven the case, everyone in Royale & Rhymes’ Minstrels had some defense, a tent peg, razor, hammer, sickle, rail spike, or pistol at hand.
There were several from the white minstrels in attendance at the second show, incognito as possible.
Peck could see, even in the shadows of the yellow-gray light of the kerosene lanterns, the white musicians’ postures, like pointers at the hunt, eyes darting, taking mental notes.
Nicodemus and Snuff—Pete Ratliff and Billy Faddis—did their skits, under Boone’s orders, without blackface. Pete Ratliff, urged forward by Billy Faddis, protested. Boone told him if he blackened his face his pay envelope would have less green in it.
Described it to the boy with the pictures he might have missed, filling in for him, and others who had not heard, or wanted to hear it again. “We took them fire today, Son,” R.W. said. “And they didn’t have the water to put us out. Posting over my goddamn handbills trying to say we don’t exist.”
“Or,” Peck said, “like we don’t goddamn matter.”
R.W. wouldn’t stand for that even if they were announcing the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The boy was sitting opposite him, Indian style, his ankles crossed on the seat. His elbows were on his knees, his face in his hands, his head thrust forward like an automobile’s hood ornament.
“A word was not spoken and our stride was not broken,” Professor said. He and the others were standing in the aisle, or seated nearby. Listening as the train pulled away with a lurch, entering its slow acceleration toward gaining traveling speed.
Boone hurried through or skipped the parts where the boy, despite his excitement and fighting sleep, nodded rapidly, indicating he knew that part, his whole body rocking with his pleasure of the memory and connection as the train rocked and swayed and the night deepened, Baba—deba—
daba-deba-daba—
dah-dah-daba, sounded the whistle. And there were the first sprinkles of rain against the windows, as the train rocked and swayed toward Smith’s Crossing and the state line.