It was the university students in the gallery; Aunt Belle called them boys. They stamped and laughed and clapped and made a lot of whistling noises to the bloodhounds, when they came on the stage.
“Why do they laugh, Aunt Belle?”
“Oh — well — I mean, lots of them come from big cities or even from New York. I suppose they think it’s just a funny little provincial theater.”
“What’s provincial, Aunt Belle?”
“Well, a small place, a little town, like ours; I mean to them, to lots of them, it’s a funny old-fashioned show, that’s why they laugh and have fun like they do, whistling at the wrong time to make the dogs forget to chase Eliza.”
It was fun for the university boys to whistle and stamp their feet. But people hushed at them and a man in front turned round and said he’d speak to the manager about this, and in the last act when Uncle Tom died, maybe the man had spoken to the manager, because the university boys seemed to be quiet in the gallery.
The university boys were grown-up young men like our Howard cousins, and Eric and Alfred who were at the university, too. The thing was, it was very exciting and maybe the university boys thought it was exciting, too, but in a different sort of way. They did not understand how it is for some people. They did not understand that when Aunt Belle said would Gilbert mind coming back with her so Tootie could sit next to the aisle, that aisle all at once, was the same as the aisle in church. They could not understand how some people could sit like that in the chairs with the red velvet in the dark, and it was like being in church.
The theater was dark and the lights that Aunt Belle called footlights were like ours in church, when we sit in rows, grown people and children like this, and the Sisters walk down the aisles to hand the candles to the children.
Lots of people do not know the things we know and that Uncle Tom was seeing a vision, like something in the Bible, when he saw Little Eva with a long nightdress and her gold hair, standing against the curtain that had wings painted on it, just where Little Eva was standing, so it made Little Eva look like the princess in our fairy book who had long gold hair, only the princess hadn’t wings, only maybe the university boys didn’t have that kind of book or maybe they didn’t know how to look at pictures or to see things in themselves and then to see them as if they were a picture.
Anyhow it was over. We went home. But the street would never be the same again, it would always be different, really everything would always be different. This street that we walked along, deliberately dodging ahead to thwart Aunt Belle and Ida (who would prefer, we knew, the short way across the bridge and up the hill), was the street down which, only yesterday, Uncle Tom had been pulled, complete with log cabin; the hounds we had seen, less than an hour ago, chasing Eliza, had snuffled and shuffled their way along these very paving-stones. Here by the Linden House, the procession halted and the slaves pushed together and Simon Legree took off his hat and got out a cigar. I could have wished the parade had got stuck near the end, then I could have looked and looked at Little Eva, I could have pushed forward and touched a gold wheel of her chariot.
Here the donkeys had slowed down, and they had one donkey pulling a log, I suppose to show how the cabin was built. Well, really there had been so much, you kept remembering bits of it; in the light of the play itself, the details of the parade came into different perspective, everything came true — that is what it was. Everything came true.
The street came true in another world; our side street past the Linden House in our small town that the university students, Aunt Belle said, would call provincial, was a street across which wheels of a great procession had passed. Oh well, I know it was only Little Eva in a jerry-built, gold chariot, and yet it was the very dawn of art, it was the sun, the drama, the theater, it was poetry — why, it was music, it was folklore and folksong, it was history. It was all these things, and in our small town, on the curb of the pavement, the three children — and maybe Tootie — who stood watching, were all the children of all the world; in Rome, in Athens, in Palestine, in Egypt they had watched golden chariots, they had seen black men chained together and cruel overseers brandishing whips. It was Alexandria, it was a Roman Triumph, it was a Medieval miracle-play procession with a devil, who was Simon Legree, and the poor dark shades of purgatory, who were the negroes chained together, and it was Pallas Athene, in her chariot with the Winged Victory poised with the olive crown, who was coming to save us all.
It was all these things and many more, and the names of many cities could be woven together on a standard to be carried at the head of this procession, and yet you would not have told half the story. It was art or many of the arts, concentrated and maybe consecrated by the fixed gaze of these same American children, who in the intensity of their naive yet inherent or inherited perception, glorifying these shoddy strolling players, became one with their visionary mid-European ancestors and their Elizabethen English forebears.
And it didn’t stop there, because when we got home everything was like that. If you take down one side of a wall, you have a stage. It would be like the doll house that had only three walls, and you could arrange the room without any trouble; a bed could be over there by the window instead of drawn up in the corner by the wall; Mama was sitting at the piano and it was still Mama and yet it was Little Eva’s mother and if Uncle Fred came in and sang Last night there were four Marys, like he did when Mamalie asked him to, then he would be Little Eva’s father.
Papa did not sing of course, and we would not want to change our father for anyone else and Uncle Fred was our uncle anyhow, but that is what you can do.
If Mama sits at the piano and plays Moonlight, the room is the same and there is always that difference that Moonlight makes when Mama plays it, but there was another difference. There would be someone else who was myself, yet who was the child of the Lady who Played the Piano; then I would be Little Eva and I would have an Uncle Tom who was not really an uncle, but it was like that. It was called a play, it was the first play we had been to. But a play and to play were the same, you could play now without any trouble. You could arrange the sofa that was too heavy to pull on the other side of the room and you could see how the room had only three sides and you could walk across the room and toss your head and say, “Oh, this is so hot, it’s so heavy,” and you could carefully push it aside when you sat down on a chair; although anyone could see that you had short hair with, at best, mousy duck-tails at the nape of the neck, yet you could toss your head and the gold curls.
It was the same gold as the princess had, who had the seven or the nine brothers, and I had brothers and could make up more by counting in the cousins. Then, I would be like that. But no one would know about it. Everything was the same, but everything was different. You could think about it in bed. Then everyone’s house would be open on one side and you would see it all going on. The Williams family across the street would be in bed, at least most of them would be, but Olive maybe would be allowed to stay up and help Professor Williams put away the stones that he had in little boxes for his students at the university.
I did not want to think of the university and the students but of the Williams family across the street, and Papalie and Mamalie sitting in their sitting room, and Ida in the kitchen. I did not tell Gilbert about it, and I laughed when he laughed about how funny it was when the bloodhounds didn’t chase Eliza but sniffed and scuffled in the footlights. The footlights threw new shadows, so that faces were different. Now I could see that their faces were different under the lamp in the dining room so that Mama said, “What’s the matter, Sister? Why don’t you eat your dinner?”