Sam’l became at once every inch a horseman; he had great adaptability.
True, whenever he entered a stall he got kicked, horses being intuitive
creatures, not easily deceived. But Dr. Tom bore with him until one
morning he found Sam’l running his aged, cherished buggy mare, Miss
Susy, round and round the back lot, riding her neck like a jockey,
plying the outraged favourite with whip and spur--“jes’ givin’ the ol’
gal a breath-out,” he explained, “to take the rheumatics out’n her
knees.” Incidentally, he gave Miss Susy an attack of heaves from which
she never recovered.
After that Aunt Lady thought best to take Sam’l into the house under
her own eye, where there were less valuable things than horses to
learn upon; and that was the period during which we had discovered
him, dramatizing himself on the model of Judge Cornish’s stately old
factotum, Romulus. He had already, in his zeal, polished most of the
silver off Aunt Lady’s tea set, and he averaged one smash a meal;
whereas Romulus had never been known in his long career to break so
much as a teacup.
“Sam’l can’t seem really to _do_ things, somehow,” said Aunt Lady,
sighing. “He just does _at_ ’em. Play-acting, like. ‘Monkey motions’;
you remember?”
It was a game the little darkies used to play when we were all young
together, a left-over from the care-free days of slavery and the
plantation “street.” A leader, chosen for skill at pantomime, would
select something to imitate, and the circle around him must represent
the subject as best they could each in his own way, singing as they
went:
“I ack monkey moshuns, too-ra-loo;
I ack monkey moshuns, so I do.
I ack ’em good, and dat’s a fack:
I ack jes’ like dem monkeys ack.”
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.