I BECOME A BENEFICIARY.
It may as well be owned that I had no natural aptness for the banjo, and
was always an indifferent player; but for dancing I had, I am confident,
such a remarkable gift as few have ever had. Up to this day, I do not
think I ever have seen a step done by man or woman that I could not do
as soon as I saw it,--not saying, of course, how gracefully. I am not,
however, so vain or proud of this gift as I used to be, and should
hardly have written the foregoing sentence at all, had it not seemed
necessary to a proper understanding of subsequent passages in this
narrative.
I was still so small of stature, and yet capable of producing so much
noise with the coppers on my heels, that, by the wholesale clerks and
young bloods about town, I was considered in the light of a prodigy, and
made to shuffle my feet at almost all hours and in almost all
localities. It was by this means, at some place of convivial resort,
that I attracted the notice and admiration of a conductor on the
Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad. He determined to have
so much talent with him all the time, and prevailed upon me to be his
train-boy.
Here, as on the lake, I had the exclusive privilege of selling books and
papers to the passengers. The great railways were not then farmed by a
single person or firm as now. I was my own agent and the regulator of my
own prices and profits. Both of these latter I found it convenient to
make large, and was again the possessor of more money than I cared to
spend.
It was my business to carry water through the cars at stated intervals.
On a day train I could afford to perform my duty with promptness, when I
had sufficiently worried the passengers with my merchandise. But on a
night train--which came to my lot just as often as a day train--I took a
more lucrative and, I fear, less reputable means of quenching the thirst
of travellers. There were no sleeping-cars in those times, and, I
believe, no water-tanks in the passenger-cars. My memory may fail me in
this matter of the water-tanks, but I am certain that I never filled
them, if there were any on our road. I don’t know whether more people
travelled then than now, but I remember the trains were exceeding long
ones in those hot summer nights, and the people became terribly thirsty.
And this is the way I comforted them:--
Taking a barrel of water, a pailful of brown sugar, and a proper amount
of a well-known acid, I concocted lemonade which I sold through the
train for five cents a glass. When thirsty lips asked piteously for
water, I would tell the sufferer, with perfect truth, that there was not
a drop of pure water left on the train. I blush to write that I
sometimes sold fifteen dollars’ worth of this vile compound in a night.
I was taught how to prepare it by a man who travelled with a circus, and
who assured me that all his ice-cold lemonade was concocted in the same
way; and that, far from having killed anybody, it gave perfect
satisfaction to the gentlemen and ladies from the country, who were his
principal customers.
The only excuse I have to offer for myself now is, that I was not
conscious then how great a villain I really was.
* * * * *
Toward the middle of the summer the cholera became so prevalent in the
Western cities that I thought it prudent to retire from the active life
of a train-boy, and live quietly on my earnings. I settled myself,
therefore, at a fashionable boarding-house in Toledo.
Here the landlady, fearful of the dust and anxious for the integrity of
her carpet, made a remarkable compromise with me to the glory of
æsthetics. Whenever there was a pressing request from the boarders for
me to exercise my feet, she would bustle in with a large roll of
oil-cloth, and spread it uncomplainingly on the parlor floor near the
piano to the music of which I danced. This was, I think, the first
introduction of clogs as a drawing-room entertainment. I soon came to be
invited out as a sort of cub-lion; and thus it happened that the rumor
and dust of my accomplishments spread gradually throughout the city.
One evening I strolled into what was then the St. Nicholas, and,
stepping to the bar, which came just up to my juvenile shoulders, I
demanded authoritatively of the bar-tender if he had any good pale
brandy. He said that he had. I told him in the same imperative tone to
give me a ten-cent drink, “and none of his instant-death kind either.”
This made somewhat of a sensation among the frequenters of that
fashionable resort. They evidently mistook this brandy-bibbing as a
swaggering habit of mine; whereas I was honestly prescribing for myself
what had been recommended to me as the best preventive of cholera.
Having swallowed and paid for the brandy, I was preparing to withdraw,
when I heard this dialogue going on behind me:--
“Who for pity’s sake is that?”
“That? why, that’s just the boy you want. But can’t he dance though!”
Turning, I saw a couple of well-dressed men seated together at the end
of the room. I had barely time to observe that one was a stranger to me,
when the other called me to him, and introduced me to Johnny Booker.
Now I had heard the songs, then popular, “Meet Johnny Booker in the
Bowling Green,” and “Johnny Booker help dis nigger”; and when I was
aware that I was standing before the person to whose glory these lyrics
had been written, I was very much abashed. I looked upon a great
negro-minstrel as unquestionably the greatest man on earth, and it was
some time before I could answer his questions intelligibly.
In the course of a few minutes, however, I was conducted into a private
room, where I was made to dance “Juba” to the time which the comedian
himself gave me by means of his two hands and one foot, and which is
technically called “patting.” My performance, it seems, was
satisfactory, for I was engaged on the spot.
Mr. Booker was then waiting for the rest of his company to join him; and
when they arrived, I was instituted jig-dancer to the troupe, with a
weekly salary of five dollars and all my travelling expenses.
The other performers came I know not from what dismembered bands, to the
relief or grief of I know not what distant hotels or boarding-houses.
But, I will venture to say, no landlord, to whom the more reckless of
them may have been in arrears, could have regarded their movements with
a more lively interest than I did, after their arrival at Toledo. As
they came straggling in, one after the other, with their bass-viols and
guitars and banjos in mysterious bags of green-baize or glazed
oil-cloth, I looked upon them as I might have looked upon people who had
come from another world.
If some of them appeared a little seedy, in the long interval between
this and their previous engagement, and if others wore their coats
strangely buttoned over their shirt-bosoms, I put it down of course to
the peculiarity and privilege of genius. When I walked through the
streets to and from rehearsal with these strange beings, it was a
triumphal procession to me. I seemed crowned for the time with the glory
with which my young imagination had invested everything belonging to
them.
It is impossible to convey an idea of the gratified ambition with which
I prepared for my first appearance on the stage. The great Napoleon in
the coronation robes, which can be seen any day in the Tuileries, was
not prouder or happier than I when I made my initial bow before the
foot-lights, in my small Canton flannel knee-pants, cheap lace, gold
tinsel, corked face, and woolly wig.
I do not remember any embarrassment, for I was only doing in public what
I had already done for the majority of the audience in private. If I had
acquitted myself much worse than I really did, my _début_ would still, I
am convinced, have been considered a success.
So great, indeed, was the local pride of the good Toledans in their
infant phenomenon, that after the company had exhibited a week, my
name--or rather the _nom de guerre_ which I had assumed--was put up for
a benefit. On that day I had the satisfaction of seeing hung across the
street, on a large canvas, a water-color representation of myself, with
one arm and one leg elevated, in the act of performing “Juba” over the
heads and carts and carriages of the passers-by.
At night the house was crowded, and I was called out three times; but
what afterwards struck me as unaccountably odd was, that I received not
one cent from the proceeds of this benefit. When my salary was paid me,
at the end of the next week, I was assured that “this benefit business”
was a mere trick of the trade, and I was forced to content myself with
the fact that I had learned something in my new profession.