More boos, though a few shout Amen from the balcony. Fun is fun, but it is possible to cut too close to the bone.
“I spose they’s a good number of you fokes out there considers youself Confederates.”
Cheers and rebel yells answer this. Niles looks around with shining eyes as the boys downstairs, most of them his old friends, hoot and stomp their feet. Their daddy, the Judge, fought for the Great Lost Cause, as did any man of his generation with two legs and ballocks hanging between them. The comedian has touched a nerve.
“An I is a former advocate of the Fusionist Party.”
Booing again. The Fusionists are the alliance of carpetbagger, nigger-cosseting Republicans and poor white Populists who dominated local politics in the last election.
“So I suggests we jine together an forms a co-lition betwixt the Confed-erates and the Fusionists — we call it the Confusionist Party.”
It is good enough to get most of them back on his side. If people get this het up over a pretend colored politician, Harry thinks, what will they do if a real one appears?
“Cause politics in Wimminton is the confusinist thing I ever try to wrap my nappy head around!”
Applause now, people conceding the truth of his point.
“If any of you fine peoples,” the Perfessor finishes, “care to hear the rest of my perambulation, I can be foun at the Abysinnian Embassy — Fo’th Street, co’ner of Bladen.”
The Darktown address gets the Perfessor a nice laugh to part with, the curtain beginning to rise before he is fully into the wings.
There is a battleship upon the stage.
Coop has done it in a carriage before, but never with springs like this. Usually they creak and groan, bringing out a lot of shushing from the gal, as if anybody from the house could hear. White people’s carriages. It always give him a little thrill, to think of the Mister and maybe even the white Missus parking their bottoms where his bare black ass been only hours before, busy at what they never want to imagine. Sweet Alma is on him, big warm breasts nestling his cheeks, rolling on him slow and tight and the leather against his ass so soft and warm. And these springs. A quiet ride, that’s what it is — if he ever runs into old Wicklow again he’ll have to compliment the man. Alma grips the back of the seat and presses close to him, smelling like cinnamon, calling him Clarence, Clarence baby, but that’s okay because there’s no one else to hear, not even the coach horse like a few times in white folks’ barns, grinding their oats without interest only a stall panel away. Maybe that’s how he’ll do it, he thinks, be Coop with the Indian gals by the Fort or whatever ones you can buy in Cuba if they go, be Coop for the stripes and the brass and the white men and the whole damn world you got to bow down to, and save Clarence, save the real man, for a sweet pretty woman like Alma Moultrie.
“Darlin,” he says to her, her big eyes drinking him in, the carriage rocking ever so slightly but with no complaint from the springs, “I been needing this for so long.”
The battleship rocks on plasterboard seas, and there is an intake of breath followed by a hum of comment as people recognize it as the Maine. It is only scrim, of course, unpainted but with the details somehow projected from behind it. Harry smiles at the relatively crude wave effect at its base, two long cutouts of blue swells that rise and fall rhythmically against each other to create a peaceful, safe-harbor illusion.
The operetta begins with the tenor up on deck in his uniform and Dolly St. Claire below, isolated in a spotlight extreme stage left, trading verses as the light turns golden sunset yellow—
Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low
And the flickering shadows — softly come and go
— the soubrette back home thinking of her loved one as he does the same on board in Havana’s harbor.
The Maine. Harry has studied the pictures, has read the accounts of witnesses and experts, and entertains the possibility that it was nothing but a boiler bursting to disastrous result, an unsurprising phenomenon given the enormous pressure brought upon rivet and seam in the massive steam-powered vessels. They are floating bombs, as every engineer will agree — but a torpedo in the night and an underhanded foe make for better newspaper circulation.
The soubrette and the tenor, called Aura Lee and Ensign Tom in the program, join in harmony for the last chorus—
Though the heart be weary, sad the day and long
Still to us at twilight comes love’s old song
Comes love’s old sweet song
“Excuse me, old boy,” says Niles, rising. “Got to put out a fire.”
It is a joke between them, recalling the first time the Judge took them on a hunt, and to entertain themselves after the day’s killing was through and the men had begun drinking they wandered back into the thick pines and Niles started a fire in the underbrush using the magnifying glass he’d got for his birthday and they tried to put it out with their own water. Each had consumed a full canteen of lemonade during the day and felt bloated enough to irrigate a cotton field in July, but the fire had outrun their ability to pee on it and the men had to be called to avoid disaster.
“Boys do what boys do,” the Judge had said, leading them deeper into the woods away from the smoke and the mocking hunters, “and men do what men do.” They had supposed he was going to cut a switch and have at them with it, choosing an isolated spot either to spare them public humiliation or preclude intervention if he was truly furious, but he only stopped and took his own out and proceeded to relieve himself for what seemed like the better part of an hour. No words were spoken, just the splatter of almost clear liquid onto dry leaves, the Judge staring into the distance with a placid look on his face.
“I would hope you boys have learned something about fire today,” he said when he’d led them almost all the way back to camp, “and something about bourbon.”
Old Uncle Zip, who had belonged to the Judge’s family before the Invasion and still served as guide for the hunting trips, came to them later with some praline candies he’d smuggled along. He sat on a log with them, sharing the candies, chuckling and shaking his head. “Don’t you boys worry none,” he told them. “The Judge boint down the backhouse at his daddy farm in Delco tryin the same speriment. An he uz years older than either of you.”
Harry watches Niles apologize to the last patron in the row and head back up the aisle. It is unlikely he will return, concocting some story about an old friend met in the lobby the next time they see each other, an old friend in some sort of a scrape that called for immediate assistance. The invitation to join him at the show has been a pretense, of course, a maneuver to put Harry in a genial mood and in a spot where raised voices and recriminations would draw the wrong sort of attention. Niles is devious, but so consistent in his ways as to be transparent.
Captain Sigsbee, played by the runt who looks like Roosevelt wearing a white beard and moustache, orders the young officer to undertake a vital and perilous mission — transporting a message from the President of Our Great Nation past the vicious minions of the Butcher Weyler, through the steaming Cuban jungles, and into the hand of the wily insurgent general, brave Calixto García. Captain and Ensign hold their hats over their hearts to sing The Army of the Free—