enough interval in the day’s light duties. But when a mile or more of
dusty road lay between the show boat and the main street it became a
real chore. Carrying their heavy instruments, their scarlet coats open,
their caps in their hands, they would trudge, tired, hot, and sweating,
the long dusty road that led through the woods. When the road became a
clearing and they emerged abruptly into the town, they would button
their coats, mop their hot faces, adjust cap or shako, stiffen their
drooping shoulders. Their gait would change from one of plodding
weariness to a sprightly strut. Their pepper-and-salt, or brown, or
black trousered legs would move with rhythmic precision in time to the
music. From tired, sticky, wilted plodders, they would be transformed
into heroic and romantic figures. Up came the chest of the baton
spinner. His left hand rested elegantly on his hip, his head and
shoulders were held stiffly, arrogantly; his right hand twirled the
glittering baton until it dazzled the eyes like a second noonday sun.
Hotel waitresses, their hearts beating high, scurried to the windows:
children rushed pell-mell from the school yard into the street; clerks
in their black sateen aprons and straw sleevelets stood in the shop
doorways; housewives left their pots a-boil as they lingered a wistful
moment on the front porch, shading their eyes with a work-seamed hand;
loafers spilled out of the saloons and stood agape and blinking. And as
the music blared and soared, the lethargic little town was transformed
for an hour into a gay and lively scene. Even the old white fly-bitten
nags in the streets stepped with a jerky liveliness in their
spring-halted gait, and a gleam came into their lack-lustre eyes as they
pricked up their ears to the sound. Seeking out the busiest corner of
the dull little main street, the band would take their stand, bleating
and blaring, the sun playing magnificently on the polished brass of
their instruments.
Although he never started with them, at this point Captain Andy always
turned up, having overtaken them in some mysterious way. Perhaps he
swung from tree to tree through the woods. There he was in his blue
coat, his wrinkled baggy linen pants, his white canvas cap with the
leather visor; fussy, nervous, animated, bright-eyed, clawing the
mutton-chop whiskers from side to side. Under his arm he carried a sheaf
of playbills announcing the programmes and extolling the talents of the
players. After the band had played two lively numbers, he would make his
speech, couched in the absurd grandiloquence of the showman. He talked
well. He made his audience laugh, bizarre yet strangely appealing little
figure that he was. “Most magnificent company of players every assembled
on the rivers . . . unrivalled scenery and costumes . . . Miss Lenore La
Verne . . . dazzling array of talent . . . fresh from triumphs in the
East . . . concert after the show . . . singing and dancing . . . bring
the children . . . come one, come all. . . . _Cotton Blossom_ troupe
just one big happy family. . . .”
The band would strike up again. Captain Andy would whisk through the
crowd with uncanny swiftness distributing his playbills, greeting an
acquaintance met on previous trips, chucking a child under the chin,
extolling the brilliance and gaiety of the performance scheduled for
that evening. At the end of a half hour the band would turn and march
playing down the street. In the dispersing crowd could be discerned
Andy’s agile little figure darting, stooping, swooping as he thriftily
collected again the playbills that, once perused, had been dropped in
the dust by careless spectators.
Dinner was at four, a hearty meal. Before dinner, and after, the _Cotton
Blossom_ troupe was free to spend its time as it would. The women read
or sewed. There were always new costumes to be contrived, or old ones to
mend and refurbish. The black-hearted adventuress of that morning’s
rehearsal sat neatly darning a pair of her husband’s socks. There was
always the near-by town to visit; a spool of thread to be purchased, a
stamp, a sack of peppermint drops, a bit of muslin, a toothbrush. The
indolence of the life was such that they rarely took any premeditated
exercise. Sometimes they strolled in the woods at springtime when the
first tender yellow-green hazed the forest vistas. They fished, though
the catch was usually catfish. On hot days the more adventuresome of
them swam. The river was their front yard, grown as accustomed as a
stretch of lawn. They were extraordinarily able to amuse themselves.
Hardly one that did not play piano, violin, flute, banjo, mandolin.
By six o’clock a stir—a little electric unrest—an undercurrent of
excitement could be sensed aboard the show boat. They came sauntering
back from the woods, the town, the levee. They drifted down the aisles
and in and out of their dressing rooms. Years of trouping failed to
still in them the quickened pulse that always came with the approach of
the evening’s performance.
Down in the orchestra pit the band was tuning up. They would play atop
the show boat on the forward deck before the show, alternating with the
calliope, as in the morning. The daytime lethargy had vanished. On the
stage the men of the company were setting the scene. Hoarse shouts. Lift
’er up there! No—down a little. H’ist her up. Back! Closer!
Dressing-room doors opened and shut. Calls from one room to another.
Twilight came on. Doc began to light the auditorium kerosene lamps whose
metal reflectors sent back their yellow glow. Outside the kerosene
search-light, cunningly rigged on top of the _Mollie Able’s_ pilot
house, threw its broad beam up the river bank to the levee.
Of all the hours in the day this was the one most beloved of Magnolia’s
heart. She enjoyed the stir, the colour, the music, the people. Anything
might happen on board the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre between
the night hours of seven and eleven. And then it was that she was
banished to bed. There was a nightly struggle in which, during the first
months of their life on the rivers, Mrs. Hawks almost always won.
Infrequently, by hook or crook, Magnolia managed to evade the stern
parental eye.
“Let me just stay up for the first act—where Elly shoots him.”
“Not a minute.”
“Let me stay till the curtain goes up, then.”
“You march yourself off to bed, young lady, or no trip to the pirate’s
cave to-morrow with Doc, and so I tell you.”
Doc’s knowledge of the gruesome history of river banditry and piracy
provided Magnolia with many a goose-skinned hour of delicious terror.
Together they went excursioning ashore in search of the blood-curdling
all the way from Little Egypt to the bayous of Louisiana.
Lying there in her bed, then, wide-eyed, tense, Magnolia would strain
her ears to catch the words of the play’s dialogue as it came faintly up
to her through the locked door that opened on the balcony; the almost
incredibly naïve lines of a hackneyed play that still held its audience
because of its full measure of fundamental human emotions. Hate, love,
revenge, despair, hope, joy, terror.
“I will bring you to your knees yet, my proud beauty!”
“Never. I would rather die than accept help from your blood-stained
hand.”
Once Parthy, warned by some maternal instinct, stole softly to
Magnolia’s room to find the prisoner flown. She had managed to undo the
special lock with which Mrs. Hawks had thought to make impossible her
little daughter’s access to the upper veranda deck just off her room.
Magnolia had crept around the perilously narrow ledge enclosed by a low
railing just below the upper deck and was there found, a shawl over her
nightgown, knitted bed-slippers on her feet, peering in at the upper
windows together with adventuresome and indigent urchins of the town who
had managed somehow to scramble to this uncertain foothold.
After fitting punishment, the ban was gradually removed; or perhaps Mrs.
Hawks realized the futility of trying to bring up a show-boat child
according to Massachusetts small-town standards. With natural human
perversity, thereafter, Magnolia frequently betook herself quietly to
bed of her own accord the while the band blared below, guns were fired,
love lost, villains foiled, beauty endangered, and blood spilled.
Curiously enough, she never tired of watching these simple
blood-and-thunder dramas. Automatically she learned every part in every
play in the Cotton Blossom’s repertoire, so that by the time she was
thirteen she could have leaped on the stage at a moment’s notice to play
anything from Simon Legree to Lena Rivers.
But best of all she liked to watch the audience assembling.
Unconsciously the child’s mind beheld the moving living drama of a
nation’s peasantry. It was such an audience as could be got together in
no other kind of theatre in all the world. Farmers, labourers, Negroes;
housewives, children, yokels, lovers; roustabouts, dock wallopers,
backwoodsmen, rivermen, gamblers. The coal-mining regions furnished the
roughest audiences. The actors rather dreaded the coal towns of West
Virginia or Pennsylvania. They knew that when they played the
Monongahela River or the Kanawha there were likely to be more brawls and
bloodshed off the stage than on.
By half-past six the levee and landing were already dotted with the
curious, the loafers, the impecunious, the barefoot urchins who had
gathered to snatch such crumbs as could be gathered without pay. They
fed richly on the colour, the crowds, the music, the glimpses they
caught of another world through the show boat’s glowing windows.
Up the river bank from the boat landing to the top of the bluff flared
kerosene torches suspended on long spikes stuck in the ground. Magnolia
knew they were only kerosene torches, but their orange and scarlet
flames never failed to excite her. There was something barbaric and
splendid about them against the dusk of the sky and woods beyond, the
sinister mystery of the river below. Something savage and elemental
stirred in her at sight of them; a momentary reversion to tribal days,
though she could not know that. She did know that she liked the
fantastic dancing shadows cast by their vivid tongues on the figures
that now teetered and slid and scrambled down the steep clay bank to the
boat landing. They made a weird spectacle of the commonplace. The whites
of the Negroes’ eyes gleamed whiter. The lights turned their cheeks to
copper and bronze and polished ebony. The swarthy coal miners and their
shawled and sallow wives, the farmers of the corn and wheat lands, the
backwoods poor whites, the cotton pickers of Tennessee, Louisiana,
Mississippi, the small-town merchants, the shambling loafers, the lovers
two by two were magically transformed into witches, giants, princesses,
crones, gnomes, Nubians, genii.
At the little ticket window sat Doc, the astute, or Captain Andy. Later
Mrs. Hawks was found to possess a grim genius for handling
ticket-seeking crowds and the intricacies of ticket rack and small
coins. Those dimes, quarters, and half dollars poured so willingly into
the half-oval of the ticket window’s open mouth found their way there,
often enough, through a trail of pain and sweat and blood. It was all
one to Parthy. Black faces. White faces. Hands gnarled. Hands calloused.
Men in jeans. Women in calico. Babies. Children. Gimme a ticket. I only
got fifteen. How much for her here? Many of them had never seen a
theatre or a play. It was a strangely quiet crowd, usually. Little of
laughter, of shouting. They came to the show boat timid, wide-eyed,
wondering, like children. Two men of the steamboat crew or two of the
musicians acted as ushers. After the first act was over they had often
to assure these simple folk that the play was not yet ended. “This is
just a recess. You come back to your seat in a couple of minutes. No, it
isn’t over. There’s lots more to the show.”
After the play there was the concert. Doc, Andy, and the ushers passed
up and down between the acts selling tickets for this. They required an
additional fifteen cents. Every member of the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe
must be able to sing, dance, play some musical instrument or give a
monologue—in some way contribute to the half hour of entertainment
following the regular performance.
Now the band struck up. The kerosene lamps on the walls were turned low.
The scuffling, shuffling, coughing audience became quiet, quiet. There
was in that stillness something of fright. Seamed faces. Furrowed faces.
Drab. Bitter. Sodden. Childlike. Weary. Sometimes, startlingly clear-cut
in that half light, could be glimpsed a profile of some gaunt Southern
labourer, or backwoodsman; and it was the profile of a portrait seen in
some gallery or in the illustration of a book of history. A nose
high-bred, aquiline; a sensitive, haughty mouth; eyes deep-set,
arrogant. Spanish, French, English? The blood of a Stuart, a
Plantagenet? Some royal rogue or adventurer of many many years ago whose
seed, perhaps, this was.
The curtain rose. The music ceased jerkily, in mid-bar. They became
little children listening to a fairy tale. A glorious world of unreality
opened before their eyes. Things happened. They knew that in life things
did not happen thus. But here they saw, believed, and were happy.
Innocence wore golden curls. Wickedness wore black. Love triumphed,
right conquered, virtue was rewarded, evil punished.
They forgot the cotton fields, the wheatfields, the cornfields. They
forgot the coal mines, the potato patch, the stable, the barn, the shed.
They forgot the labour under the pitiless blaze of the noonday sun; the
bitter marrow-numbing chill of winter; the blistered skin; the frozen
road; wind, snow, rain, flood. The women forgot for an hour their
washtubs, their kitchen stoves, childbirth pains, drudgery, worry,
disappointment. Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth,
enchantment, laughter, music. It was Anodyne. It was Lethe. It was
Escape. It was the Theatre.
VI
It was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A place in
which one saw one’s dreams come true. A place in which one could live a
vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling
the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud,
give way to emotions long pent-up. When the show was over, and they had
clambered up the steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and
there was left only the dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them
stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to reality
from a lovely dream.
By eleven the torches had been gathered in. The show-boat lights were
dimmed. Troupers as they were, no member of the _Cotton Blossom_ company
could go meekly off to sleep once the work day was over. They still were
at high tension. So they discussed for the thousandth time the
performance that they had given a thousand times. They dissected the
audience.
“Well, they were sitting on their hands to-night, all right. Seemed they
never would warm up.”
“I got a big laugh on that new business with the pillow. Did you
notice?”
“Notice! Yeh, the next time you introduce any new business you got a
right to leave me know beforehand. I went right up. If Schultzy hadn’t
thrown me my line where’d I been!”
“I never thought of it till that minute, so help me! I just noticed the
pillow on the sofa and that minute it came to me it’d be a good piece of
business to grab it up like it was a baby in my arms. I didn’t expect
any such laugh as I got on it. I didn’t go to throw you off.”
From Schultzy, in the rôle of director: “Next time you get one of those
inspirations you try it out at rehearsal first.”
“God, they was a million babies to-night. Cap, I guess you must of threw
a little something extra into your spiel about come and bring the
children. They sure took you seriously and brought ’em, all right. I’d
just soon play for a orphan asylum and be done with it.”
Julie was cooking a pot of coffee over a little spirit lamp. They used
the stage as a common gathering place. Bare of scenery now, in readiness
for next night’s set, it was their living room. Stark and shadowy as it
was, there was about it an air of coziness, of domesticity. Mrs. Means,
ponderous in dressing gown and slippers, was heating some oily mess for
use in the nightly ministrations on her frail little husband’s delicate
chest. Usually Andy, Parthy, Elly, and Schultzy, as the _haute monde_,
together with the occasional addition of the _Mollie Able’s_ captain and
pilot, supped together at a table below-stage in the dining room, where
Jo and Queenie had set out a cold collation—cheese, ham, bread, a pie
left from dinner. Parthy cooked the coffee on the kerosene stove. On
stage the women of the company hung their costumes carefully away in the
tiny cubicles provided for such purpose just outside the dressing-room
doors. The men smoked a sedative pipe. The lights of the little town on
the river bank had long been extinguished. Even the saloons on the
waterfront showed only an occasional glow. Sometimes George at the piano
tried out a new song for Elly or Schultzy or Ralph, in preparation for
to-morrow night’s concert. The tinkle of the piano, the sound of the
singer’s voice drifted across the river. Up in the little town in a drab
cottage near the waterfront a restless soul would turn in his sleep and
start up at the sound and listen between waking and sleeping; wondering
about these strange people singing on their boat at midnight; envying
them their fantastic vagabond life.
A peaceful enough existence in its routine, yet a curiously crowded and
colourful one for a child. She saw town after town whose waterfront
street was a solid block of saloons, one next the other, open day and
night. Her childhood impressions were formed of stories, happenings,
accidents, events born of the rivers. Towns and cities and people came
to be associated in her mind with this or that bizarre bit of river
life. The junction of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers always was
remembered by Magnolia as the place where the Black Diamond Saloon was
opened on the day the _Cotton Blossom_ played Catlettsburg.
Catlettsburg, typical waterfront town of the times, was like a knot that
drew together the two rivers. Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky met just
there. And at the junction of the rivers there was opened with high and
appropriate ceremonies the Black Diamond Saloon, owned by those
picturesque two, Big Wayne Damron and Little Wayne Damron. From the deck
of the _Cotton Blossom_ Magnolia saw the crowd waiting for the opening
of the Black Diamond doors—free drinks, free lunch, river town
hospitality. And then Big Wayne opened the doors, and the crowd surged
back while their giant host, holding the key aloft in his hand, walked
down to the river bank, held the key high for a moment, then hurled it
far into the yellow waters of the Big Sandy. The Black Diamond Saloon
was open for business.
The shifting colourful life of the rivers unfolded before her ambient
eyes. She saw and learned and remembered. Rough sights, brutal sights;
sights of beauty and colour; deeds of bravery; dirty deeds. Through the
wheat lands, the corn country, the fruit belt, the cotton, the timber
region. The river life flowed and changed like the river itself. Shanty
boats. Bumboats. Side-wheelers. Stern-wheelers. Fussy packets,
self-important. Races ending often in death and disaster. Coal barges. A
fleet of rafts, log-laden. The timber rafts, drifting down to
Louisville, were steered with great sweeps. As they swept down the Ohio,
the timbermen sang their chantey, their great shoulders and strong
muscular torsos bending, straightening to the rhythm of the rowing song.
Magnolia had learned the words from Doc, and when she espied the oarsmen
from the deck of the _Cotton Blossom_ she joined in the song and rocked
with their motion out of sheer dramatic love of it:
“The river is up,
The channel is deep,
The wind blows steady and strong.
Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,
So row your boat along.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-hi-o.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-
hi-
O!”
Three tremendous pulls accompanied those last three long-drawn
syllables. Magnolia found it most invigorating. Doc had told her, too,
that the Ohio had got its name from the time when the Indians, standing
on one shore and wishing to cross to the other, would cup their hands
and send out the call to the opposite bank, loud and high and clear,
“O-_HE_-O!”
“Do you think it’s true?” Magnolia would say; for Mrs. Hawks had got
into the way of calling Doc’s stories stuff-and-nonsense. All those
tales, it would seem, to which Magnolia most thrilled, turned out,
according to Parthy, to be stuff-and-nonsense. So then, “Do you think
it’s true?” she would demand, fearfully.
“Think it! Why, pshaw! I know it’s true. Sure as shootin’.”
It was noteworthy and characteristic of Magnolia that she liked best the
rampant rivers. The Illinois, which had possessed such fascination for
Tonti, for Joliet, for Marquette—for countless _coureurs du bois_ who
had frequented this trail to the southwest—left her cold. Its clear
water, its gentle current, its fretless channel, its green hillsides,
its tidy bordering grain fields, bored her. From Doc and from her father
she learned a haphazard and picturesque chronicle of its history, and
that of like rivers—a tale of voyageurs and trappers, of flatboat and
keelboat men, of rafters in the great logging days, of shanty boaters,
water gipsies, steamboats. She listened, and remembered, but was
unmoved. When the _Cotton Blossom_ floated down the tranquil bosom of
the Illinois Magnolia read a book. She drank its limpid waters and
missed the mud-tang to be found in a draught of the Mississippi.
“If I was going to be a river,” she announced, “I wouldn’t want to be
the Illinois, or like those. I’d want to be the Mississippi.”
“How’s that?” asked Captain Andy.
“Because the Illinois, it’s always the same. But the Mississippi is
always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re
going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”
Doc was oftenest her cicerone and playmate ashore. His knowledge of the
countryside, the rivers, the dwellers along the shore and in the
back-country, was almost godlike in its omniscience. At his tongue’s end
were tales of buccaneers, of pirates, of adventurers. He told her of the
bloodthirsty and rapacious Murrel who, not content with robbing and
killing his victims, ripped them open, disembowelled them, and threw
them into the river.
“Oh, my!” Magnolia would exclaim, inadequately; and peer with some
distaste into the water rushing past the boat’s flat sides. “How did he
look? Like Steve when he plays Legree?”
“Not by a jugful, he didn’t. Dressed up like a parson, and used to
travel from town to town, giving sermons. He had a slick tongue, and
while the congregation inside was all stirred up getting their souls
saved, Murrel’s gang outside would steal their horses.”
Stories of slaves stolen, sold, restolen, resold, and murdered. Murrel’s
attempted capture of New Orleans by rousing the blacks to insurrection
against the whites. Tales of Crenshaw, the vulture; of Mason, terror of
the Natchez road. On excursions ashore, Doc showed her pirates’ caves,
abandoned graveyards, ancient robber retreats along the river banks or
in the woods. They visited Sam Grity’s soap kettle, a great iron pot
half hidden in a rocky unused field, in which Grity used to cache his
stolen plunder. She never again saw an old soap kettle sitting plumply
in some Southern kitchen doorway, its sides covered with a handsome
black velvet coat of soot, that she did not shiver deliciously. Strong
fare for a child at an age when other little girls were reading the
Dotty Dimple Series and Little Prudy books.
Doc enjoyed these sanguinary chronicles in the telling as much as
Magnolia in the listening. His lined and leathery face would take on the
changing expressions suitable to the tenor of the tale. Cunning,
cruelty, greed, chased each other across his mobile countenance. Doc had
been a show-boat actor himself at some time back in his kaleidoscopic
career. So together he and Magnolia and his ancient barrel-bellied
black-and-white terrier Catchem roamed the woods and towns and hills and
fields and churchyards from Cairo to the Gulf.
Sometimes, in the spring, she went with Julie, the indolent. Elly almost
never walked and often did not leave the _Cotton Blossom_ for days
together. Elly was extremely neat and fastidious about her person. She
was for ever heating kettles and pans of water for bathing, for washing
stockings and handkerchiefs. She had a knack with the needle and could
devise a quite plausible third-act ball gown out of a length of satin,
some limp tulle, and a yard or two of tinsel. She never read. Her
industry irked Julie as Julie’s indolence irritated her.
Elly was something of a shrew (Schultzy had learned to his sorrow that
your blue-eyed blondes are not always doves). “Pity’s sake, Julie, how
you can sit there doing nothing, staring out at that everlasting river’s
more than I can see. I should think you’d go plumb crazy.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Do! Mend the hole in your stocking, for one thing.”
“I should say as much,” Mrs. Hawks would agree, if she chanced to be
present. She had no love for Elly; but her own passion for industry and
order could not but cause her to approve a like trait in another.
Julie would glance down disinterestedly at her long slim foot in its
shabby shoe. “Is there a hole in my stocking?”
“You know perfectly well there is, Julie Dozier. You must have seen it
the size of a half dollar when you put it on this morning. It was there
yesterday, same’s to-day.”