“They did that down on the school campus — the play — where I grew up.”
“School?” The man raised an eyebrow.
“The college — it’s a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama’s Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it.”
The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. “I’m sorry — but the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in blackface — well, not blackface. But as a minstrel — ” The man’s laughter fractured his own sentence. “… Really!” He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. “That’s just awful of me. But maybe — ” he turned, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laugh’s detritus — “they only used the lighter-skinned students for the — ?”
“No,” Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. “No, they had students of all colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines.”
“Really?” the man asked, incredulously.
Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this.
“You know,” the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. “I would have loved to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than exciting — it might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of thing that all white people should be made to see — Shakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!”
Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was over — though the part of Cecily Cardew had been taken by pudgy little black-brown Milly Potts (“Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us…”), who’d jazzed up the lines unmercifully, strutting and flaunting every phrase as much as it could bear and then some, rolling her eyes, shooting her hands in the air, and making the whole audience, including Papa, rock in their seats, clutch their stomachs and howl (the women’s cackles cutting over and continuing after the men’s bellowings) — to the point where the other actors couldn’t say their own lines, trying to hold their laughter. Later, a more serious Papa had said that though it was supposed to be funny, it wasn’t supposed to be funny in the way Milly had made it so. But now it was hard to think of the play any other way.
The man said: “I don’t live in Apartment c 33, actually. You know what that was? That was the cell number Wilde had at Reading. ‘The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a — ’ ”
“What?” Sam asked.
“Kills the thing he loves,” the man intoned. “I was going to put c 33 on my door, once. But then I thought better. It’s a nice room, though. It’s right in front of Roebling’s old room.”
“Roebling…?”
“Washington Roebling. He’s the man who made this bridge.” The man raised his head, to take in caging cables. “Who hung these lines here? He took over the job from his father, John Augustus Roebling. The Bridge killed his father, John, you know. He’d already completed the plans and was at the waterfront, surveying to start the work — when a runaway cart sliced open his foot. It became infected until, three weeks later, tetanus did him in — with spasms that near broke his bones, with crying out for water. So the son, Washington, took it up. The problem, you see, was to dig the foundations out for those great stone towers.” The man gestured left, then right. “How to excavate them, there in the water, the both of them, with those gigantic dredging machines. They had to dig out, beneath the river, two areas a hundred-seventy-two feet by a hundred-two — for each about a third the size of a football field! You know how they did it? They built two immense, upside-down iron and wooden boxes. The bottoms — or, better, the roofs — were made of five layers of foot-square pine timbers, bolted together. They caulked them within an inch of their lives, covered them over with sheet tin, then covered over the whole with wood again. Then they dropped those upside-down caissons into the drink, with the air still in them. They let the workers down through shafts that were pressurized to keep the air in and the water out. Working on the bottom, the poor bohunks and square-heads they had in there dredged out muck and mud till they hit bedrock — seventy-eight feet six inches below the high-tide line on the Manhattan side and forty-four feet six inches below on the Brooklyn side. The workers had a nine-foot high space to dig in, all propped up with six-by-six beams. The pressure was immense — and they used what they called clamshell buckets to haul out the dredgings. Right at the very beginning, young Roebling was down in the caissons inspecting — came up too fast and got the bends. He was a cripple for the rest of his life. So he stayed in the room at the back of where I live now, surveying the work through the window with a telescope and directing it through his wife — the bridge — who went down to the docks every day to bring his orders and take back her report: spying through his glass at the stanchions he’d raised — twin gnomons swinging their shadows around the face of the sound, insistently marking out his days, till new navigators remap those voyages to and beyond love’s peripheries, till another alphabet, another hunt can reconfigure the word. There’re twenty corpses down under those towers. When it was all done, they poured concrete through the air shafts into the work space, filled it up, sealed it down to the bedrock. Twenty corpses, at least — ”
“They buried the men in the caissons?” Sam asked, surprised.
“I’m speaking figuratively. Some twenty workers died in the bridge’s construction — and do you know, no one is really sure of their names? I like to think of those towers as their tombstones. This one falling from the top of some steam-powered boom derrick, that one hit in the head by a swinging beam. I see them, buried, all twenty, in those hypogea at the river bottom, while the stanchions’ shadows sweep away the years between their deaths and the sea’s mergence with the sun, while the noon signal sirens all the dead swimmers through the everyday…” For a moment he was pensive. (Uncomfortable Sam thought again of the… Italian fisherman?) “Everybody always talks about John Augustus — a kraut, you see,” the man went on. “There’s nothing dumber than a dumb kraut, but there’s nothing smarter than a smart one — we all know that. The war taught it to us if it taught us anything. John built bridges all over kingdom come: over the Allegheney, over the Monongahela, over Niagara Falls, the Ohio — each runs under a Roebling bridge. You’d think, sometimes, he was out to build a single bridge across the whole of the country. And the plans for this one were, yes, his. But I want to write the life of Washington. (Don’t think it’s an accident John named his son after our good first president!)” Again, he nodded deeply. “Roebling — Washington A. Roebling — was this bridge; this bridge was Washington Roebling. He was born into it, through his father: every rivet and cable you see around us sings of him. Write such a life? It shouldn’t be too hard. To get the feel of it, all I have to do is to go into the back room, look out the window, and imagine… this, cable by cable, rising over the river.”
When the man was quiet, Sam said with some enthusiasm: “The plaque says the bridge was opened to traffic in 1883. That’s the year they started the first commercial electricity in New York City and Hartford, Connecticut!” because, along with and among his magic and tricks, Sam had lots of such informations — like the sixty stories of the Woolworth Building — and this was a man who might appreciate it.