BONES: Music makes me feel so happy!
TAMBO: Well, you ain't goin' to be happy no more. You're going to be a 7th Cavalry soldier and I'm goin' to train you. I'm a first-class soldier trainer, I is. I'm a lion trainer, I is.
BONES: YOU is a lion trainer?
TAMBO: That's what I said. I'ze a hard-boiled lion trainer, I is.
BONES: You're a lion son of a gun.
TAMBO: Was your pappy a soldier?
BONES: Yes sir, he was at the battle of Bull Run. He was one of the Yankees what run.
[Rebel yells.] [More jokes followed by banjo and tambourine duets and sentimental ballads.
For forty minutes, the audience sang along with familiar tunes and shouted old jokes' punch lines.] BONES: I got a poem I can recite.
INTERLOCUTOR: Well, go ahead and recite it.
BONES: Mary had a little lamb, Her father killed it dead, And now it goes to school with her Between two hunks of bread.
INTERLOCUTOR: Mr. Bones, it's a good thing you can play that banjo better than you can write poetry.
At this invitation, Cassius played for twenty minutes without interruption.
He moved his audience from patriotic fervor to sentimental tears. His dance tunes pulled them into the aisles.
After his final note, Cassius froze again, chairs scraped, and men coughed.
The Interlocutor said, "Corporal Cassius: Pride of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, finest banjo picker North or South. Boys, Cassius is a Confederate veteran.”
When the rebel yell rose again, the Yankee soldiers slipped out of the hall.
Chuckling, Andrew said to Jamie, "A nigger pretending to be a white man pretending to be a nigger. Now, that's unusual.”
For their finale, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels promenaded, singing rousing tunes, until the manager jumped onto the stage, "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention! We are honored to have a hero among us this afternoon: Colonel Andrew Ravanel, the Tennessee Will of the Wisp, the Carolina Cougar, the Thunderbolt of the White Knights of the ... of the ..." He shook his head. "Can't say that name. It'd get me in deep!”
Laughter and cheers. Despite Jamie's protests, Jamie and Andrew were propelled onto the stage and the troupe resumed promenading while Cassius strummed "Dixie." Performers and audience sang until the manager drew the curtains.
When the curtains opened for bows, Andrew and Jamie stood at attention stage front. The troupe took four curtain calls before the Interlocutor called it quits and clapped Andrew on the back as if he were a fellow trouper. Some minstrel men left the stage, others shared a flask. Cassius rested his banjo on a chair and sat on the floor beside it, sticking out his legs. "Colonel, Captain. Been a long time.”
Andrew chuckled, "The last time I saw you, boy, you were climbin' an Ohio riverbank like the hounds of hell were after you.”
"Oh my, I was scared. Them Yankees was killin' everybody in sight!”
He shook his head. "Them olden times, mercy! I lives in Philadelphia now.
Got me a wife and two baby girls.”
"Philadelphia? Don't you miss the Low Country?”
Cassius smiled faintly. "Rabbit Foot Minstrels, we been everywhere — Boston, Buffalo, all over the country." He cocked his head, "How you farin', Mister Jamie? You find yourself a wife?”
Jamie made a wry face. "Haven't found a woman who'll put up with me.”
Andrew's eyes gleamed. "You're a headliner now, aren't you, boy? Bet you got plenty of money. All the money you need. You remember when I tried to buy you and Langston Butler's overseer shamed me?”
"I remember bein' sold, Colonel Andrew. Ain't the kind of thing a man forgets.”
Jamie said, "Andrew, I've got to get back to the Inn. Maybe you'll join us for supper?”
"You gonna invite this boy here for supper, too? Not much difference twixt him and your damn Yankees. He's got money. He can pay.”
"I believe" — Cassius started to rise — "I'll get this nigger makeup off me.”
When Andrew shoved him, Cassius and the chair went over backward.
Cassius's banjo skidded across the floor with a metallic ring. Cassius caught himself on his hands.
"I'm just a banjo picker!" he said to nobody in particular. Andrew lifted his boot and stamped it on Cassius's right hand like a man smashing a spider.
He would have stamped again if Jamie hadn't grabbed him with surprisingly strong arms and dragged him off as the manager entreated, "Colonel Ravanel, consider what you are doing, sir.”
Moaning, Cassius tucked his hand to his chest.
"Nothing's changed. You got that, boy!" Andrew was shouting as Jamie wrestled him outside. "Nothing has changed!”
Outside Hibernian Hall, Andrew rubbed his mouth.
His chest heaving for air, Jamie Fisher kept a short distance away. The short distance was a great distance. "Good-bye, Andrew. I wish you well. I have always wished you well.”
Bottle trees lined the lane to Congress Haynes's old fishing camp. At first, there'd only been a few bottles and Andrew had knocked them down. But whenever he visited the camp, there were more bottles, until the 975 niggers had blue, green, red, and clear glass bottles tied to the branches of every tree and bush strong enough to bear them. Colored light spots chased down the lane when the sun struck the glass and the faintest breeze was enough to set them jingling. One night, he and Archie Flytte had waited up, hoping to catch a nigger hanging a bottle, but Archie got jumpy after the moon set and the wind started. When Andrew asked if he was afraid, Archie was scornful. The bottles were supposed to scare off the spirits of the dead, and Archie wasn't dead by a long sight. But Archie left for Georgia before midnight and Andrew got drunk, and in the morning the cypress beside the porch, not ten feet from where he'd passed out, glistened with bottles that hadn't been there the night before.
The camp's broken front door had yawned open since Custer's cavalrymen booted it in.
Excepting rat droppings and leaves blown across the floor, the cabin was as he'd left it.
He'd been treated well in that overcrowded prison camp. Hard evidence against Klansmen was hard to find and many witnesses were afraid to testify. The Yankees turned Klansmen loose because they couldn't get enough evidence or didn't have enough room or simply lost patience. Josie Watling hadn't been caught and Archie Flytte hadn't come back after the night of the bottle trees.
When Andrew was in the prison camp, Rosemary had brought clean clothes.
She said, "I'm sorry. I'm sure this is hard for you.”
"Not at all," Andrew had replied. "I'm used to being imprisoned.”
He'd lied. The camp was a vise whose jaws screwed tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of him.
When Lawyer Ellsworth announced he was released on bond, Andrew stepped out of the camp gate, newborn, like a boy in the exciting world with no school today. But when Andrew returned to 46 Church Street, his wife wouldn't let him in.
At dusk, the wind off the river set the bottle trees to jingling. It was a fine sound. Say what you would about niggers, they made music.
Andrew felt fine. Late on a gentle spring afternoon, the river rolling past as it had before he came and would after he was gone, and all the lawyers and judges gone, too, Rosemary, Jamie — all of them gone.
Poor dear Charlotte had loved him. She had known who he was and loved him anyway. Sometimes he heard Charlotte's sweet voice in the bottle trees.
Andrew dressed in his Confederate Colonel's uniform and sat outside in the dusk. He'd forgotten how stiff the military collar was.
Small boats sailed up and down the river. Swallows swooped after insects.
A heron landed in the shallows and stalked fish, lifting one leg at a time. That'd be the last thing a fish would see, that motionless leg in the water, looking just like a weed or stick.