Juba! (5 page)

“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.”