Part 22
And so they did--“gemman moshuns,” “lady moshuns,” “preacher moshuns,” and other less polite--absurd little skinny-shanked, mop-headed creatures, with their soft, bright animal eyes and ingratiating ways; the bandar-log indeed. But why should his fellow bandar-log object so consistently to Sam’l’s monkey motions? For the grown-up Negroes were as unkind to him as his schoolmates had been. Was it, I suggested, that they thought him a “white-folks’ nigger”?
On the contrary. Sam’l had great ambitions for his “race,” as he loved to call them; yearned to lead it on to victory (against what enemy was not stated--presumably the Germans); treated his persecutors--for they amounted almost to that--with a magnanimity that was not without pathos.
“It’s jus’ ign’ance,” he would apologize for them kindly. “They ack so mean an’ ornery an’ outrageous ’cause they got such woolly heads; that’s all!”
Sam’l’s own hair happened by some odd freak to be quite straight and thick and silky, like coarse floss.
“If he didn’t show off so much, I’d be downright sorry for him,” said Aunt Lady. “The boy’s lonesome for his kind; but--just listen to that!” (as a burst of song reached us from the pantry). “He can’t even sing like other people!”
The pantry door having been thoughtfully propped open, we got full benefit in the parlour of a fine falsetto aria done after Caruso’s best manner, the impassioned tremolo, the husky little break at the climax, all complete.
“Do you mean to say,” murmured my husband respectfully, “that the Infant Samuel is serenading us in Italian?”
“Practically,” said the doctor. “As near as he can make it. He’s been that way ever since I made the mistake of bringing Lady home a phonograph from the city. She lends it to Sam’l to take to his room on holidays, and our housework is accomplished to the strains of _I Pagliacci_ and _Lucia_.”
“Never mind, it won’t last long,” his wife soothed him. “Sam’l’s going off to be a hero soon.”
It appeared that, although the draft had twice rejected him, once because of insufficient age and once because of defective vision, Sam’l had managed to overcome all difficulties and was shortly to report at training camp.
I exclaimed with surprise, not able somehow to visualize the temperamental child of Mahaly as a warrior, and such a determined warrior. It did seem in his case peculiarly heroic, he was so inept and helpless-looking; so what the Negroes call “shackly” in the knees.
“Humph!” remarked Aunt Lady to my praise of this patriotism. “Showing off, as usual. ‘I ack soldier moshuns, so I do.’ If Sam’l ever hears a cannon he’ll start for home like a gun-shy setter. A mere ocean won’t be able to stop him.”
* * * * *
It was a prophecy that came to pass, as many of Aunt Lady’s prophecies do. But in the meanwhile Sam’l got as far as France; supplied by me, because of auld lang syne, with the sort of comfort kit that would have pleased Mahaly. It included a Bible, perfumed soap, a box of chocolate, some very fancy notepaper, and a fountain pen; also a letter of sound advice, as I rather dreaded the effect of foreign travel upon so adaptable a temperament.
His reply is one of my cherished possessions. He had been allotted to a labour battalion, diggers, road makers, and the like, of whom he wrote modestly:
We are the Chosen People who must go before, like a Voice in the Wilderness, to puppare the way. Hallelujah, praise the Lord. What we’ll do to them en’emies, respeckted Madam, is a plenty. These yere foreign nations is wusser than what you write about them. The way they ack, respeckted Madam, is somethin’ scand’lous. Specially the French. White wimmen makin’ over a sanctified cullud boy like who but he! But don’ you fret, respeckted Madam, for fear I mought fergit my raisin’. Pussonally I wouldn’t so demeen myself as to ’sociate with no white wimmen what would demeen theirselves by ’sociatin’ with cullud.
It was reassuring to feel that a representative from our old town was keeping so stern an eye upon the morals and manners of our volatile ally.
We learned not long afterward that Sam’l had been invalided safely home, suffering from something like shell-shock. As Aunt Lady put it in her letter, he must have heard a gunshot somewhere.
We forgot about Sam’l for a while after that, until one very early morning I heard our furnace being shaken down with a sort of rhythmic emphasis, and asked the maid who brought in my coffee what all the racket was about.
She tossed her head. “Hit’s de new houseman,” she reported, “and he ’lows don’t nobody but him know how to shake a furnace nohow.” She giggled angrily.
Intuition told me what had occurred, even before a voice came floating up the furnace pipes:
“Hark, fum de tomb come do’fum soun’ (Jay-bird jump an’ jar de groun’).”
Nobody but Mahaly’s child could have given this song its old, peculiar eeriness. Sam’l had abandoned the coloratura type of vocalization and returned to an earlier manner.
“Yes, M’dame, hit’s me,” he called up cheerily (since his sojourn in France he no longer pronounced me “Moddom”). “Miss Lady done sent me along to work for you-all a while,” and he presently handed me his credentials.
Since his return from the war, Aunt Lady wrote, the other Negroes had treated him so unsympathetically that she thought best for him to convalesce elsewhere, in the care of people like ourselves who could understand his sensitive nature. While Sam’l, she went on to say, was not and could never be a decent house servant, he was certainly better than the city sort, who, she understood, were likely as not to sit down beside you in the street car.
He did not drink or gamble, he was not light-fingered (though of course he sometimes borrowed things, like anybody), and he was willing and anxious to do whatever was expected of him, whether he knew how or not. His shell-shock merely took the form of a sort of nervousness in the feet, resembling St. Vitus’s dance.
We did not, as it happened, either need or want a houseman,
## particularly one afflicted with St. Vitus’s dance; but Aunt Lady,
having never in her life failed a friend, is naturally not a person whom her friends can fail. Sam’l and I engaged each other.
It proved a relation which, while pleasant, was of short duration. Sam’l was neglecting his operatic interests at the time in favour of interpretative dancing, and his habit of constant practise in kitchen and basement not only bade fair to disrupt our domestic arrangements, but even to endanger the foundations of the house. At all hours of the day and some of the night there was to be felt a certain measured vibration in the atmosphere, accompanied by a slight warning rattle of chandeliers and crockery.
We might have ignored this growing menace in the interests of friendship, but that one day my husband happened to observe our houseman going off for a holiday sporting golf tweeds and stockings whose vivid pattern was unmistakable. Sam’l, as Aunt Lady had forewarned us, was merely borrowing these articles, and had every intention of returning them to my husband’s closet at the first favourable opportunity; but husbands have their little crotchets. I parted with Sam’l, to our mutual regret.
He bore no hard feelings, confessing that he was really on his gradual way northward to join some influential acquaintances he had made during his military career. We were, it appeared, merely a stepping stone, albeit an honoured and a valued stepping stone, upon his upward progress.
That should by all rights have been the end of Sam’l so far as we were concerned, for when Negroes go North they are usually lost to us. But some years later a visitor was announced, who had sent up no card.
“Leastways he _tried_ to gimme a card,” bridled the housemaid, giggling, “but I never took’n it off him.”
The drawing room was empty. I asked where she had put the caller.
“In the kitchen, whar he belongs at!” was the emphatic response.
The prodigal had returned, but a metamorphosed, almost an unrecognizable prodigal. He had grown a neat little shoebrush moustache (in itself quite a feat for a coloured man); he wore an extremely well-tailored cutaway, mouse-coloured trousers and gloves to match, immaculate white spats, and a gardenia in his buttonhole. His manner was even more of a metamorphosis; it had become as simple as his appearance was elaborate; crisp, clear, decisive, very much the manner, in fact, of my husband closing up a business deal. Sam’l invariably profited by his contacts.
“I shall not take up mo’ than a moment of yore vallyble time, Madam” (pronounced in plain American now), “but I have come to tender you and His Honour some free tickets for the performance to-morrow night. I also mailed free tickets,” he added, “to Doctor and Miss Lady Curtis, and I took’n the libbuty to suggest that they better come and stay with you-all for the event.”
“Quite right, Sam’l; I’m glad you did,” I murmured, rather dazed, “but what is the event?”
In silence he handed me a card--the one my housemaid had rejected--printed in Old English lettering, “Professor Samuel K. Curtis, Esq.” Mahaly’s child had evidently paid his “white folks” the compliment of incorporating their names with his own.
“How nice!” I murmured. “But what are you professor of, Sam’l?”
“The art of Terpsichore, Madam. I thought perhaps you’d reckernize the name. But it’s natural you wouldn’t,” he added, “being as how I’m better known to the public as ‘Slippyfoot.’ Also,” he added simply, “as ‘the Charleston King.’”
I began to understand. One knew by hearsay--our personal ambitions in that line having ceased with the fox trot--of the new dancing step which was taking America and even Europe by storm; and I remembered reading that our own city was to be the privileged scene of a coloured Charleston contest, with competitors from all quarters of the country.
“So you’ve come to compete in the Charleston contest?” I asked.
“Hardly to compete,” he replied gently, looking rather disappointed in me. “Rather to expound, Madam. To show ’em,” he elucidated further, “how the Charleston should be did; its origins, methods, and significations, like I showed ’em,” he added very, very modestly, “in London and in Paris.”
I rose to the occasion sufficiently to invite the Charleston King to remain for supper; an invitation he accepted on condition that he be allowed to wait on us at table, which he did, white spats, gardenia, and all. Greatness had not gone to his head; he still remembered his “raisin’.” Incidentally, he dropped and broke my favourite salad bowl.
None of us had happened to see the Charleston danced before, or so we thought, until the contest begun. Then we recognized it: the same old clap-and-patter, wriggling and prancing, familiar to any Southern childhood, with some elaborations: a constant St. Vitus-like movement of the feet, odd sidewise skating-motions, a slow dipping of the body up and down and up again, with flapping arms, as of some clip-winged bird trying to fly.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Aunt Lady, beside me. “You don’t tell me _ladies_ and _gentlemen_ are carrying on like this in the ballroom? And what’s the crowd making such a to-do about, anyhow? They can see this sort of thing any day if they look out the back window!”
Yet the large auditorium was packed as for a prize fight; white people on the main floor, standing up, mounting their chairs in order to see better; coloured people packing the gallery, in delegations, with appropriate banners; and all shouting together, catcalling, yelling for Slippyfoot Sam.
What a descent from his christened name! I was glad for the moment that Mahaly was not present at this apotheosis of her miracle child. But only for a moment.
He came in the place of honour on the programme, the spotlight full upon him, heralded by a fanfare of snare drums and saxophones. To my surprise, it was not the elegant gentleman I had promised my companions. He had left to lesser luminaries the fine raiment, the spats, and the gardenia. Even the neat moustache had been sacrificed to art. He had deliberately reverted to type. Barefoot, in ragged trousers, and a hat without a crown, it was a Sam’l any one in that audience would recognize, as we did, and love because he was their own. He had shown the intuition of genius; achieved the crowning artistry of imitating himself.
The audience, with one gasp of surprise, went wild. There were shrieks of welcome and approval, congratulatory howls.
“Attaboy, Slippyfoot!” they yelled. “You show ’em, King!”
And of course they laughed at him, as people always did and always would. But it was a new laughter, sympathetic, almost affectionate. Sam’l, I realized, had become to his public a sort of symbol, like the Charleston itself, like the tune “Dixie”; a reminder of a South that was passing now, and would never come again.
He paid no attention to laughter or to cheers; a ludicrous enough figure with his great flat feet and exquisitely awkward body, yet oddly dignified. It was the dignity of conscious power; Sam’l knew what he was about. Those melancholy, anxious hound’s eyes roamed over the enormous audience till suddenly they paused and lighted. He had found his white folks. He smiled at us; I think I had never seen Sam’l smile before. It was an experience; sudden, irradiating, infinitely proud and trustful. He was among friends.
He began to move, a strange, slow prance with measured jerks and pauses, which I recognized--Mahaly before the great god Mumbo-jumbo! Suddenly he crouched, shivering, trembling, and began to run desperately--all without leaving one spot; he fought against unseen enemies, shield before him, thrusting his spear, flinging his assegai; he moved away, drooping, heavy, a captive in chains; never losing a single beat of the wild rhythm, a single intricate double pat of the foot.
I began to understand what he was doing. This was no mere exposition of the Charleston “as it should be did, its origins, methods, and significations.” Sam’l, the despised and rejected of them, was interpreting his people for our benefit, dramatizing in dance the history of his race, even as Roland Hayes in song, as others in literature.
There was something hypnotic in that ceaseless beating rhythm, those constant, significant movements of the half-naked body. We saw through his imagination; we remembered through his race-memory. Hoeing and sowing; picking cotton under the eye of an overseer with a lash; escaping into the swamp, with bloodhounds following; terror he danced for us, the terror that crouches and prays and kills; ecstasy, the shouting joys of religion, the release of freedom--springing up and up as if he would dance with the stars.
There followed the humble, happy life of the quarters: picking a banjo, crooning as he patted and swung, flashing his teeth at a girl; rocking a child in his arms, tenderly, lovingly; bending up and down over a wash-tub, testing a flatiron with wetted forefinger; “washin’ dem dishes an’ settin’ ’em erroun’.” (We heard him humming his mother’s old working song to the timeless steady thump of the orchestra, and Aunt Lady smiled at me dimly.)
* * * * *
Now and again the music changed, and for a moment some familiar tune emerged. To the beat of “Greased my heel wid hog-eye lard,” we saw him slip stealthily along the hen-roosts, seize his prey and still it with a quick twist of the wrist; later he seemed to be shooting craps, down on his knees, shaking the dice and rolling them out, to delighted cries from the audience:
“He fives! He sevens! Attaboy, King! Roll your own! Babies, come to Papa!”
We rode a race with him, jockeying home to a grand-stand finish. (I thought of poor, astonished Miss Susy.) We saw him off to the war, strutting gloriously, twirling his baton at the head of a brass band, and we saw him slipping ingloriously home again, peering back over his shoulder as if he had seen a ghost; for Sam’l did not spare himself. Next he mounted the pulpit, wrestled with the Lord in prayer, laying off his hands in eloquent gesture, giving us the Word straight from the shoulder, so that a sudden hysterical voice out of the gallery shouted, “Yas, O my Lawdy! _I_ hears You callin’ me!”
And all the time his feet kept up that steady, monotonous, hypnotic beat and shuffle, shuffle and beat, as if they could never stop; as if they could never stop until the unseen force that manages the puppet show should cease to pull the strings.
When at the end he stumbled away out of the spotlight, dancing still, bent over double like an old rheumatic that leans upon a stick, there was a moment’s quiet.
Some two thousand people felt for that moment, perhaps, just what he intended them to feel: the loneliness of children in a world that has grown old, the helplessness of a simple jungle folk, a bandar-log, set down in the life of cities and expected to be men. “They ack so mean an’ ornery an’ outrageous ’cause they got such woolly heads!”
Then the audience followed him, as it had welcomed him, with shouts and shrieks of laughter.
But Sam’l’s white folks would never laugh at him again; dreamer of dreams that he was, seer of visions. Aunt Lady’s dear, wrinkled face was frankly wet with tears.
Her husband put an arm around her.
“Why, old honey, it’s only Sam’l at his monkey motions! What are you weeping about?”
“_I_ don’t know. What are you!” she countered snappishly.
FOUR DREAMS OF GRAM PERKINS
BY RUTH SAWYER
From _American Mercury_
Gram Perkins was not my grandmother. I had good reason to believe that she had died and received Christian burial a half century before I first set foot in Haddock harbour. Neither were the dreams of my dreaming; so my connection with her was always remote and impersonal. Nevertheless, I came to know through her all the horror and the fascination of a perturbed spirit.
For those who may not know the harbour, let me explain that it bites into the northern stretch of Maine coast. Summer resorters are still in the minority, and peace and beauty serve as perpetual handmaidens to those few exhausted, nerve-racked city folk who have found refuge there. I was there only a few days when the immortal essence of Gram Perkins confronted me. Perkins is a prevailing name at the harbour. A Perkins peddles fish on Tuesdays and Fridays. A Perkins keeps the village store in whose windows are displayed those amazing knickknacks somebody or other creates out of sweet grass, beads, birch bark, and sealing wax. A Perkins is framed daily in the general delivery window of the post office, and his brother drives the one village jitney.
It was Cal Perkins of tender years who indirectly introduced me to the mysterious dreamer of the dreams. Cal took me on my first scaling of the blueberry ledges. Standing like Balboa on the Peak of Darien he swept a hand inland and said: “Somewhars, over thar, lives Zeb Perkins. Hain’t never laid eyes on him myself, but Pa says you doan’t never want to hear him tell of them four dreams he’s had of Grandmother Perkins. Woan’t sleep ag’in fur a month ef you do.” It was not long before I discovered those dreams were as firm a tradition at the harbour as the “Three Hairs of Grandfather Knowital” are in Eastern Europe--only with a difference. Natives in the Balkans pass on their story for the asking; whereas in Haddock harbour they evade all questions leading to Gram Perkins, while their tongues travel to their cheeks.
One day Cal took me to the cemetery and showed me the Perkins monument. It was a splendid affair in two shades of marble with a wrought-iron fence and gateway, and all about it were the head stones marking the graves of the separate members of the family. I read the inscription on Gram Perkins’s stone:
Sara Amanda Perkins Beloved wife of Benjamin Perkins, Sea Captain 1791-1863 May she rest in perfect peace!
“Wall, she didn’t!” Cal hurled the words at me as he catapulted through the gate, shaking all over like the aspen back of the lot. I caught a final mumbling: “Never aim to stop nigh _her_. Pa says I might git to dreamin’, too.”
Here was distinctly unpleasant food for thought. Already she had a firm grip on my waking hours, and there was no relish to the idea of her haunting my sleeping ones. The manner in which she possessed the town was astounding. She lurked wherever one went, popping out with the most casual remark when one was buying a pound of butter or a pint of clams. And yet, for all the daily allusions and innuendoes, one never got at the heart of the matter; one never rightly understood why Gram Perkins was and yet was not five feet below the sod. As for the dreamer of the dreams, one never found him clothed in anything more solid than words.
I questioned Peddling Perkins one Friday when he came to our house with the makings of a chowder. “Tell me,” I began, “where does Zeb Perkins live and what relation is he to you?”
He paused in his weighing. The scales hung from a rafter in his cart and worked somewhat mysteriously. He might have been weighing out the exact amount of relationship he cared to claim. “Fur as I can make out he’s sort of a third cousin.”
“Did he ever tell you about those dreams?”
“No, m’am!” He fixed me with a fore-warning eye. “What’s more, he hain’t never goin’ to. I seen Scip Perkins--time he told him. Scairt! Never seen a feller so shook up in his life. Didn’t take off his clothes and lay good abed fur a week. No, m’am!”
I questioned the post-office Perkins one day: “Do you happen to know what Zeb Perkins dreamed about his grandmother?”
“Dreamed! Gosh, what didn’t he dream? Think of anything a sensible woman, dead and buried fifty years, stands liable to do and you wouldn’t have the half of it.” He finished snapping his teeth together to signify that he had gone as far with those dreams as he intended to go--for the present, anyway.
A few days later I took the matter to the village store. I even bought a chain and earrings of sealing wax to make my going seem less mercenary. “Those dreams,” I ventured, “how did they happen and do they belong entirely to Zeb?”
“They do, God be praised!” Whereupon the storekeeper retired behind the necklace for a good two minutes, and then partially emerged to whisper, “No one’s layin’ any claim at all to those dreams but Zeb. And I’ve always thought myself if he hadn’t had them, no knowing what he mightn’t have had.”
II
For two recurring summers I stayed fixed at this point. And then came a spring when I slipped off early to the harbour for trout. The Perkins who drives the jitney met me at the wharf as I stepped from the Boston boat. “Hain’t a summer resorter nor a bluejay here yit,” was his greeting. “Weather’s right smart--nips ye considerable.” And it did. The water in the brooks was so cold my fingers remained stiff and blue all day. But the fishing was good, and in the end I caught something more than trout.