Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(118)

In the auditorium the minstrels were taking a break from rehearsal. They sprawled around the stage on boxes and folded drapes, smoking.

“Good morning, Miss North,” Bones called out.

Mary stopped at the foot of the stage. “Good morning, Mr. Bones. How goes the minstrelsy trade?”

“In its usual way—thank you for asking—which is to say, proportionate with your people’s kind purchase of tickets. How goes teaching?”

“In its customary manner, thank you, with two steps forward and one point five back, or half a step forward when expressed in net terms.”

He came to the front of the stage. “A minute of your time, Miss North? Which I believe is one sixtieth of an hour when expressed as a fraction?”

They climbed up to a high row in the auditorium and sat on the fold-down seats, leaving an empty one between them.

“This thing you’re doing for our children,” he said. “So kind. Though there’s been some talk that it might be better if you didn’t come every day.”

She smiled. “Children will say that, won’t they? But the truth is, letters and arithmetic come best through daily practice. I try to make it fun, but there’s no substitute for the weekday grind.”

Bones looked at his hands. “The talk that you might come less often. It isn’t from the children.”

“Oh. I see.”

“It isn’t that we’re not grateful. What you’ve done for them is terrific. I see kids who couldn’t read who are writing now. I see kids who wouldn’t talk, and suddenly they won’t quit nagging me for money.”

“Well, then . . .”

“It’s just that these things don’t always end well. See what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I do. Surely it doesn’t harm them to learn? Quite the reverse: when their peers come back from the countryside, they’ll need to hold their own.”

“We’re not saying they shouldn’t be learning. We’re maybe asking, respectfully, if you’re the best one to teach them.”

Down on the stage the minstrels were rehearsing a slapstick piece, with a long plank and all its attendant physics. Mary had never realized how many men must be hit in the face before such a thing became funny.

“The fact is,” said Bones, “we’ve got our thing going on here, and people leave us alone. We have our trade, and this theater to work in, and a home of sorts for the children who’ve lost their people. While it’s just us, no one pays us mind. But if people thought we were mixing, they’d pay us more attention. Which for us is like daylight for vampires, you see what I’m saying? There’s an understanding between life and the colored entertainer. Your people give us a corner of the night, and we don’t darken your day.”

“But I hardly come and go with a fanfare. I use the stage door and I teach in the basement.”

“You may come discreetly into our place, Miss North, but I wonder how carefully you leave yours.”

“I don’t brag about what I’m doing, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do your friends know? Do your mother and father?”

“Yes, but—”

“And do they wholeheartedly approve?”

“No, but that hardly—”

“And so they talk to people, and people talk. Are we licensed for the number of shows we do? Are we allowed to sell drink? Did any of those orphaned children come with adoption papers and ration cards? And yet we are afforded the comfort of our small community because it would take wearisome paperwork to scatter us. We are forgiven our skins, you see, so long as no one—officially—notices.”

Mary hung her head. “You want me to stop coming.”

“It’s not anything I want, Miss North. We’re all partial to you. But you mustn’t think the children won’t get their schooling. I may not have your facility, but I can give them the language. And the manager he isn’t going to be teaching them any mathematical theorems but he has been known to balance the books.”

“What if I started coming less often?”

He pursed his lips and looked down on the stage. “Fine. What if you started today?”

And so here she was, leaving before she’d even had time to take off her raincoat. She wondered if the months of morphine had weakened her tendency to resist. Or else it was the solitude, in which the self hardened but also grew brittle.

It was always a lurch, coming out of the Lyceum into the crowd of white faces in the Strand. There was a period of acclimatization, until one stopped finding white skin strange. Until then it seemed unnatural and rather horrid, as if something medical or blanchingly industrial had happened to everyone. There was a moment before one understood that one belonged with them—a moment outside time, as if one had stood up too suddenly.





January, 1942





THE FOUR LOCAL MEN who brought Captain Braxton’s body back up the cliff to Fort St. Elmo had done the best they could to make it decent, straightening the limbs and wrapping a shirt around the ruined head. Simonson thanked them with a promissory note for kerosene, then had the surgeon decant the dead man into a coffin and nail it shut. The nails had to be extracted from the doorposts of the fort, and straightened on an anvil.