The Banished Children of Eve (11 page)

She adjusted the blanket around the
doll. A round wooden head painted dark brown, big white eyes with black pupils, wide mouth with red lips that stretched into a grin. The white people's nigger baby. She couldn't have been more than eight weeks' pregnant with Mulcahey's baby when she visited Mrs. Dumas's on Bond Street, the downtown version of Madame Restell's, abortionist to the respectable, an establishment that operated in a mansion close to the unfinished cathedral. Mrs. Dumas shared space with a dentist and a newspaper, her offices in the basement, wooden shutters permanently closed against the street, like a whorehouse. Hanging over the sidewalk was a wooden sign with a large white tooth painted on it. Printed beneath in tall black letters was the word “
EXTRACTIONS.
”

Eliza bled badly after it. She drank the medicine Mrs. Dumas gave her. It smelled like camphor. She ripped up a sheet and put the rags between her legs and slept as much as she could. Mulcahey didn't seem to notice anything wrong until he tried to make love to her. He reeked of alcohol. She had fallen asleep waiting for him to leave the hotel bar and come upstairs. He was kissing her shoulder and rubbing her thigh. She was cradling a baby in her dream, an infant with big brown eyes. It took her a minute to get her bearings. Mulcahey's hand was underneath her nightgown. She pushed it away. “Jack,” she said, “I'm sick.”

He sat beside her, grinning the way he always did when he had had too much to drink.

“Something you ate?”

“Women's problems, Jack.”

He lay down and in a few moments was snoring. She went back to
Uncle Tom's Cabin
the next night. Although weak and tired, she got through the initial scenes without any problems. Then came the escape across the ice, the doll in her arms. She held it tightly, stroked its head, kept in mind the directions in the script:
Eliza strains her child to her bosom with a convulsive grasp, as she goes rapidly forward.
The grotesque face stared at her. Brown eyes, not blue; eyes like hers,
not Mulcahey's. “Eliza, move it!” Regan, the chief stagehand, said in a harsh whisper. Stagehands in both wings were pulling on ropes in a kind of tugo'-war, moving the wooden blocks back and forth, making a river of roaring ice. She jumped onto the first block. From behind her, offstage, the slave-catcher yelled, “Thar she is! Don't let her get away!” She jumped to the second block, then to the third. She was in the middle of the stage. The dramatic leap was next. The stagehands paused in their tugging. “Count to two,” Regan reminded them. The script repeated itself in her head:
Eliza pauses and looks behind, and then, nerved with the strength such as God gives only the desperate, with a wild cry and a flying leap, vaults across to the block that is momentarily stationary. She turns in disbelief to view her desperate achievement, and lifts her child up to heaven in a gesture of triumph.

Her foot hit the rim of the block and she fell forward. The doll and blanket went flying, bounced off the far end of the block, and fell into the make-believe river. The audience gasped. She crawled on her hands and knees. Regan gave the order to get the blocks moving again. The river ice churned wildly. She reached down between the blocks. “Oh, God,” Regan said, “the bitch is gonna get her arm broke.” She pulled the doll out before the blocks banged together. The blanket was gone, and one leg was missing. She clutched the doll to her so the audience couldn't see it.

Not once in the hundred-odd leaps since then had she fallen, but Regan insisted on bringing up her mishap at every performance. She stepped onto the first block and looked down into the doll's face. The same silly smile. From behind her came the cue: “Thar she is! Don't let her get away!” She was off and running, one block, two block, three block, pause, look behind, ice stops, jump, a two-footed landing, baby lifted into the air, a burst of applause, exit stage left.

She put the doll down and took off her shawl. Her blouse was wet with perspiration. Nothing to do until the shoot-out with the slave-hunters, then another break until the last scene when Eliza and her husband, George, would be reunited
with Madame de Thoux, George's sister, and Cassy, Eliza's mother, the whole cast Africa-bound, a convoluted ending but, since everyone had already read the book, one everyone readily grasped. Coming as it did after the respective death scenes of Eva and Uncle Tom, it drew some tears but soft, hopeful ones, not like the sobbing that attended the ends of the little girl and the Christian slave. “Mrs. Stowe should try her hand at comedies,” said Mulcahey. “She has a gift for endings that go past the happy to the hilarious.”

“There's nothing wrong with happy endings,” Eliza said. “They happen sometimes.”

A crowd of barefoot black-faced actors in ragged clothes walked around Eliza to the stage. A musical interlude. Nothing crude or in the fashion of a minstrel show. The audience was mostly country types, families from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, young soldiers, the fresh-faced kind on their way from upstate New York to their first taste of war. They were here to be uplifted. Eliza went out the stage door into the alley. The rain had stopped. The night air felt cold. She pulled the shawl close around her.

A group of actors were playing crack-loo against the wall of the theatre, pitching half-dollars that bounced against the brick and rang loudly when they hit the pavement. Carrie Drew, Aunt Ophelia in the play, had her hem hitched into her belt. She stood with her legs apart, her knees slightly bent, and pitched a coin in a high arc that barely kissed the wall and fell closer to it than any of the other coins scattered about. She did a little dance and picked up her winnings. A stagehand appeared at the door and shouted, “Girls, you're on next.” Carrie unhitched her dress and let it down. She was a woman in her thirties made up to look older. On her forehead was a set of India-ink wrinkles, drawn with a camel's-hair brush, and covered with a dusting of fine chalk. There were gray streaks in her hair. Behind her were the actresses who played Eva and Topsy: Eva, a woman of twenty in a blond wig with pigtails, wearing a long white dress; Topsy, a woman of about the same age, in blackface and a black wig with tufts of hair tied in red rags, and clothed in a faded, torn calico dress. The audience was required to believe that they were prepuberal incarnations of some of America's most cherished verities. “Representatives of their races,” as Mrs. Stowe described them: “The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor … The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation,
command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!”

Eva took a deep draw on her cheroot, dropped it, and crushed it with her foot. “Let me see that,” she said to Carrie. Carrie tossed one of the half-dollars high in the air. Eva caught it.

“How do I know this is the one you used?”

“Just gotta trust me.”

“Do I look that stupid?”

“Want an answer?”

They laughed and went up the stairs.

“Well, Eliza,” Carrie said, “I'm glad to see you escaped the slave-catchers. How was the trip across the river?” 

“Uneventful.”

“And how is our devoted audience this evening?”

“A full house ready to weep.”

Carrie turned her head and said over her shoulder to Eva and Topsy, “Come, my younglings, we mustn't disappoint.”

Eliza watched them go in. The two younger actresses were new in their roles. This was only their second week. Carrie had been there almost six months. For these three, as for the other migratory creatures of the stage,
Uncle Tom
was a convenient refuge that served as a resting spot between more promising engagements, a perpetually running play in which the cast was always changing, all except Señorita La Plante, the actress from somewhere in the South, whom everyone called Eliza.

*

Several nights before,
Stephen Foster had shown up to stand in the wings and watch the play. It was not the first time he had done so, but he was drunker than usual, swaying from side to side and forced to hold on to the curtains to keep his balance. He was so loud that Regan came over and threatened to toss him out.

“Eliza,” Foster said, “I must talk to you.”

She took him to a corner where the dust hung like Spanish moss on abandoned props and scenery. He had been in Jim Ryan's on Cherry Street, the lowest dive on a street lined with them, watching people dance—sailors, whores, thieves, soldiers. Darkie musicians were playing banjos and drums in the corner of the room, and the white trash was moving to it, legs pumping rapidly, arms swinging, people who had just met swaying together, sometimes dancing so close, and in such a frenzied way, their pelvises seemed to grind together. The music kept getting faster, and its pulse, its regular metric beat, was hypnotic.

“It made you want to move,” he said.

“What made you want to move?” Eliza asked.

It was the music he had heard on the Cincinnati docks, Olivia's music as she moved so naturally, so fluidly, when they stood outside the Negro church and listened to the voices inside. An ancient whore with lips and cheeks farded with red paint had come over, taken his arm, and moved him out onto the dance floor. He tried to go back, but she dragged him to the floor once more. He felt humiliated, but when he looked around, he realized no one in Jim Ryan's was watching anyone. They were each involved in the excitement of their own movement. The floor was moving up and down with the pounding of the dancers. It felt as if it might snap. The whore started to move furiously, flailing her arms.

“Uncle Tom,” he said. “Uncle Tom with music. New music. A new way to dance.” He moved his feet in a little jig. “Do you understand, Eliza?”

He could tell by her face that she didn't. He had gotten too drunk. But in the morning he would
be able to explain.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
with music. Not an opera. But a play interspersed with singing and dancing. Not minstrel music. But real Negro music. And real darkies. Up until now, Eliza had one of the few roles that a colored person could aspire to: Mrs. Stowe's mulatto girl who could almost pass for white. The American stage had darkies galore, from the tragic Othello, with Edwin Booth in blackface, to the dimwitted Tambo, played by any number of burnt-cork minstrels. It also had Coal Black Rose and Little Yaller Gal, the high-struttin', dark-as-midnight, big-as-a-barrel mammy and the silky, smooth-moving, coffee-colored siren. But the universal conventions of minstrelsy ordained that darkies need not apply. All roles were reserved for transvested white men, sometime pretenders to another sex as well as to another race.

Foster staggered, and Eliza took him by his arm. “I have it,” he said to Eliza. He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. He found what he was looking for in Jim Ryan's: a new moment in the history of the American stage.
A Play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Musical Direction by Stephen Collins Foster. And a Cast of Real Negroes Singing Real Negro Songs and Dancing Real Negro Dances.
He would do for the stage what he had done for the popular song.
“Susanna, don't you cry.”

Eliza said, “I'll see you back to the hotel once I'm done here.”

He sat for a minute until he saw Carrie Drew, another neighbor from the New England Hotel, and tried to talk to her. A thick-browed, cretinous-looking stagehand shushed him. He walked away and held the curtains for support again. He could see the faces of the audience in the first few rows. They watched solemnly as Eliza and her husband pledged their love. They laughed at the antics and language of Topsy. He knew that when the time came for Uncle Tom to die, they would weep—less violently than at the death of sweet, white, innocent Eva, but weep nonetheless—as innumerable audiences had wept at the suffering and death of Uncle. Toms played by Daddy Rice or one of his many counterparts, every black countenance in the play, field niggers and house niggers alike, a true pale face underneath. Except Eliza. When she came off the stage,
she kissed Foster on the cheek, and he saw the powder that was spread on her face to lighten her tan skin, the Negro equivalent of blackface. He didn't say anything more to her. He kept listening to the music from Jim Ryan's that was in his head. A thing no respectable audience of white people was prepared to hear, no matter how sympathetic to the cause of anti-slavery. He could sense the aspirations of the people in the seats: Give us black people devoid of any blackness, a spiritual and cultural cipher, black people in whiteface. Here is the trademark of the black race that we will accept: orphans devoid of history or memory, free at last to seek the values, traditions, history, culture, morals, religion, customs, ambitions, and presumptions of Anglo-Saxons, the lowest and darkest beginning their long evolution into the full stature of the highest blankness. Otherwise, let us have our mad and merry minstrels, everything about them, der big lips and dem big words and all dat clowning to remind us of the impossible gap between the black species and the white. There was a story in circulation that in an attempt to save money, the Christy Minstrel Show had hired
real
Negroes for the chorus, but they had been required to spread the burnt cork on their faces, big red ovals around their lips, until they resembled the true nigger, an innovation that was soon stopped when the white men in blackface refused to countenance such a seditious assault on the art of Ethiopian Impersonation.

Foster didn't stay to let Eliza take him home. He borrowed a dollar from Carrie Drew and went to Mike Manning's. The next morning he didn't remember much beyond having danced with a whore at Jim Ryan's.

The stagehand called Eliza back in for the gunfight with the slave-catchers. She went through the scene perfectly, her lines flowing on cue, without her having to think about them. When it was over, she sat by the back wall. No Foster to bother her tonight. She waited until it was time for Little Eva's death. Two stagehands sat on the rafters behind the proscenium, ready to crank their winches and lift Eva from her bed into heaven.