John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

And then there he is, Niles dancing down the aisle fluttering his palms in the air and rolling his eyes and mouthing along with the song—

We’s fond o’ gin an prone to sin

Now let this minstrel show begin!

Niles is winking and waving to his pals scattered in the house around them as he squeezes into the row, stepping on toes, always one to make a ruckus and be forgiven for it. He stands in front of his seat after Harry pulls his hat off it, waiting for the entertainers to make their semicircle, waiting for the Interlocutor, frock-coated and without blackface makeup, to call the session to order—

“Gentlemen,” the Interlocutor calls out in his booming voice, “be seated.”

— and Niles hitches his pants to make a show of sitting at once with the minstrels.

A few people in the seats behind them laugh. “I was detained on the steps,” he tells his brother, not lowering his voice all that much. “Ran into some of the Judge’s politicking comrades coming out from work.” The Thalian serves as City Hall as well as Opera House and Music Academy. “They said they’d heard I’d frozen to death.”

Niles is one week back from the Yukon with plenty of stories and no gold. The rumors have no doubt originated from the Judge’s constant grumble.

“ If my son desires to topple off of a glacier on some fool’s pilgrimage ,” he tells all and sundry who inquire of Niles’s adventures, “ that is his prerogative .”

“Mr. Interlocutor! Mr. Interlocutor!” It is Tambo, goggle-eyed in a bright orange checked suit and black fuzzy-wuzzy wig.

“Yes, Brother Tambo?”

“What you gets when you crosses a coon wid a octopus?”

“What would that be, Brother Tambo?”

“Don’t know what you calls it, but it sho can pick cotton!”

The audience laughs, Brother Tambo and Brother Bones shake their instruments, and the other minstrels shuffle their feet in appreciation.

“Don’t you think that’s rather demeaning?” asks the Interlocutor.

“De meanin of what?” pipes in Bones, the other end man, in a yellow swallowtail coat and red-striped trousers.

“Brother Bones, you are a buffoon.”

“Nawsuh — I’s cullid on bofe sides of de fambly.”

Another laugh, and a little undertone of discussion among the patrons. Harry wonders how far this group, down from the North, will dare to go.

“Mr. Interlocutor,” cries Brother Bones, clacking the ribs together to grab his attention. “Did you hear I gots me a new gal?”

“Excellent news, Brother Bones. What is her name?”

“They calls her Dinah the Drayho’se.”

“And why, pray tell, would they call her that?”

“Cause when she move—”

“—she got a waggin behind!” calls Niles along with the minstrel.

Waiting out back in the dark makes Coop feel like a thief again. Not the high, fine feeling when you’ve cleaned a mark out, when the goods are safe from sight or already sold and you can imagine the rich people faces in the morning, no, but that nagging tug at your insides Tillis used to smoke hemp to be shed of.

“ Dulls the senses a mite ,” Tillis would smile before a job, pupils wide as gopher holes, “ but it don’t make you stu pid .”

These are high-tone niggers all right, the Luncefords, Nun Street swells with white folks living right next door, and Alma don’t like him skulking round their house. Skulking . She learned all kinds of polite ways to say nasty things since she started working for the Doctor, and made sure none of the family ever set eyes on him. Lunceford has laid hands on Coop more than once, of course, stitching him up at City Jail on his Sunday evening visit, but never looked him in the face.

Alma comes to the door frowning.

“What you want?”

“It’s me.”

There is no gaslight at the back door. It takes her a long moment to figure it out.

“Lord help me. Clarence.”

“Name Henry now. Henry Cooper. Call me Coop.”

“Whoever you is, keep your voice down! They all in there — what’s that you wearin?”

“What’s it look like?”

“You joined up too? I be damn! Mr. Lunceford Junior and Royal Scott in there right now, wearin the same uniform.”

“Big-headed darkies gummin up the works for the rest of us.”

“Told me you was on the work gang, down South Cahlina.”

“Well, I aint there no more.”

Alma is round-faced and butterscotch brown, with wide shoulders and a nose that lays flat on her face. She always smells like cinnamon, even when she hasn’t been baking.

“You glad to see me?”

Alma cocks her head, looks him over. “Something don’t look right, you in that uniform.”

“I got as much right to wear it as any man. Hell, on my way from the station I seen old Joe Anderson dressed out like a policeman—”

“He is a policeman.”

“How the white folks let that be?”

“Cause we won the ’lection. Things took better since you was chased off.”

“Didn’t nobody chase me nowhere. I had some oppor tu nities to look out for down south—”

“Draggin a chain from your ankle—”

“That come after. They really made Joe a police?”

“We got six or seven that’s police. We movin up here, Clarence.”

“Coop.”

Alma smiles. “You done flew the coop, I expect.”

“Didn’t stop to look behind me till I cross that state line. And then the Army, they don’t expect no papers from a black man. They likely a good number of men I barracks with who don’t go by the name their mama call em.”

“You look real nice.”

Alma was sweet when she wasn’t worried about her people watching over her, had those dimples at the sides of her mouth when she smiled and never scolded too much if a man needed a loan to tide him over. They’d been tight as twine before Wilmington got too hot for him to stay in.

“How bout you step into the carriage house with me, we get back where we left off?”

“Wicklow be out there.”

“They aint put him to pasture yet?”

“Besides, they gonna need me, with company and all—”

“We only here till they service the transport, Alma. Aint nobody staying over.”

Alma looks back into the house, calculating. “I was spose to be home by now.”

“Tell them your sister took sick.”

“Reesha moved on to Charlotte, got married.”

Alma’s sister has a wall-eye and sour disposition. Coop holds his tongue.

“I might could just ask if they need anything else—”

“We spose to get back to the station by ten o’clock,” says Coop, catching her eye and holding it. “I been thinking about you all the way from Montana.”

“That’s where you been?”

“Fort Missoula. Girl, they got some winter there — snow come right up under my arms.”

Coop is a medium-tall man, dark skinned, his arms thick from years of wrestling barrels up a gangway.

“I lay up in that cot with the wind screaming past,” he keeps on, “and who you think I’m missing? Who you think I wants to have there under that blanket?”

Some of them you can’t be too nice with, they get spoiled by the sugar and start acting wifey, but Alma is a regular gal. He has thought of her, it is true enough, thought of her nights in the stink of the turp camp, thought of her in the long tramp up north, thought of her in the barracks when the others are snoring and only him and the coyotes are still twitching. Thought bout Alma and Lavinia and Inez Brown and Maude Bledsoe who is married to that railroad man and the little one with the spaces between her teeth he took up with in Greensboro before they caught him coaxing somebody else’s mule out of somebody else’s barn. He’s always had a way with animals, which was why Tillis took him on in the first place. But that one knock-kneed, yellow-eye son of a bitch had the devil in him. Hind legs squatting down, dug in and staring at him, a look in his eye that say “ Your time is up, nigger .”