Dreams Bigger Than the Night (23 page)

As they climbed into the car, she followed them to the street, and as they pulled away, she stood there waving.

“It’s none of my business, T, but what went on between you two?”

T looked back and after a moment answered quite matter of factly, “While you were gone, I asked Sue if she had any pictures of her family and her eyes wetted up. That’s when she showed me a picture of her parents. You know the one-drop rule? One drop of Negro blood makes you black, even though you may be white as alabaster.” T breathed in deeply as if summoning the strength to continue. “Her parents were light-skinned Negroes passin’ as white. Somehow, it was found out. Her daddy paid the price.”

7

Driving to Kansas City presented them, once again, with the problem of housing. Their choices were few. The hotels in the cities were closed to them because of T’s color. They would have to find housing on the roads, which had tent cities, public campgrounds, municipal parks, and picnic-sleeping spots in a field or schoolyard. The road, a windy boulevard for indigent transients and migrant workers in search of employment, also attracted auto gypsies in old rattletrap cars piled high with tents, and tin-can tourists in model T Fords, loaded down with six children and a birdcage, wandering the country in search of the quintessential rural America and finding, not an Edenic land, but failing farms, auto garages, telephone poles and wires, billboards, ramshackle food stands, and litter.

Occasionally they took heart from a dairy and wheat farm that seemed to have escaped foreclosure or a vast blooming field that could be seen in the distance as the road opened. With auto pumps few and far between (they could make only twenty miles to the gallon) and restaurants outside major cities scarce, they stopped an itinerant kitchenware salesman and purchased utensils, two pots, and a pan. From farmers along the route, they bought milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables and cooked over rough fires in deserted places so as not to invite hostile looks from other campers who might resent T’s presence.

They averaged only thirty miles an hour owing to the numerous flat tires that halted traffic (a new inner tube cost ninety-five cents) and to road conditions where the pavement would suddenly end and miles of dirt stretch would follow. Occasionally, disabled cars that had misjudged the depth of a mud hole would block the road, and they and other motorists would attach ropes to extricate them. On some stretches of road, billboards warned motorists to fill up at the approaching station because the distance to the next one would tax the limits of their tank—and recommended buying a can for “emergencies” (metal can, one dollar; gasoline, nineteen cents a gallon).

The words “See America” may have had a special meaning for Jay’s parents and their friends, who took their first automobiles on the road to learn about life outside the cities and willingly stayed in tent camps or put up their own canvas coverings, but for T-Bone and Jay auto camping held no attraction. They sought out tourist cabins (one dollar a night) or cottages (two dollars a night), aiming for those advertising community kitchens and toilets, showers with hot and cold water, and the occasional extra service, like a haircut (thirty-five cents). The community kitchen enabled T, a brilliant cook, to establish himself as an equal among those who mostly prepared the meals, women. Once the guests sampled his freely offered fare, they stopped noticing his color. The picnic tables brought together people from every walk of life, poor and rich, ordinary and gifted, even the eccentric, like circus people, quack medical peddlers, Russian noblemen, cowboys, and wandering poets.

But above all, the car served as a common denominator; irrespective of the type of automobile—from Fords to Pierce Arrows—people rubbed shoulders and exchanged stories about their home states or the best route to Joplin or recipes or weather conditions or the world situation or mosquitoes or the best resting place for the night. Protocol dictated that you could say whatever you wanted about yourself, except your name; Jay suspected that the practice originated with unmarried couples.

Their third night on the road, they rented a cottage, but not before two people who had arrived before them tried to chisel the price down.

“You just ought to see what we had last night. The loveliest cottage with a toilet, bath, and hot and cold water—and all for one dollar. Why we’ve been getting them all along the line for that amount.”

The manageress, deeply tanned and wrinkled, listened patiently and finally agreed to their price, knowing that her “vacant” sign could remain out all night. A buck was better than nothing. It would pay for her groceries. Hoover’s filthy depression had brought out the worst in many Americans and made the rest vulnerable to the chiselers and cheats.

The cottage that Jay and T rented had two beds and a few pieces of furniture, so Jay willingly offered the woman three dollars, which she reluctantly took when he said that his three and the one she received from the couple in front of them made it an even four. Hell, the night before, the two of them had shared a bed in a cabin that had once been a chicken coop, and the smells still lingered. This time they had a place with cotton-stuffed mattresses, a store-bought table and chairs, a bureau with a framed mirror, coat hooks behind the door, a throw rug, and a gas plate. After a communal dinner, which the manageress laid on for an extra quarter per person, the guests sat around comparing notes. All agreed that this place, called “Kozy Kottages,” was a special treat.

“Christ,” said one of the guests, sopping up the gravy with a bread crust, “the last place I stayed in would’ve moved you to tears. It was a miserable little shack that would’ve blown over in a high wind. It was plastered with tin signs advertising every vile potion, from tobacco to so-called medicines. The manageress was a slattern in a soiled bungalow apron and a breakfast cap. Her husband, the general handyman, whined endlessly about the customers.”

At this point, a fellow, to the amusement of the others, imitated a guest at his last stop. “Why, some feller had th’ nerve to ast, ‘Is they a bathroom in connection with the room?’ Bathroom! Huh, what does he think this is, the Waldorf-Astory? An’ I says to him, ‘No, they ain’t no bathroom, but they’s a pitcher of good cold water in th’ room, an’ a cake of soap,’ and he looked at me like I was a pizen snake, and got in his shiny sedan and drove off. I dunno what folks are comin’ to these days.”

With everyone in a cheerful mood, they moved out of doors, where the manageress’s son had laid a fire in a stone enclosure. One of the guests, a drummer with pomaded black hair and a gold tooth in the center of his mouth, talked about a snake oil salesman.

“He done said he had medicines that can raise the dead and change your skin color. He calls himself ‘Doc Wonder,’ and has a medicine show just down the road apiece.”

T asked him how long it would take to reach the show.

“It opens for one week in East St. Louis. Even if you drive slow, you’ll make it in plenty of time. Look for the signs and the large white tent on the outskirts of town. You’ll hear plenty from the doc’ about the Energy Elixir. Get there early if you want a seat. After hearin’ Doc’s speechifying, you may just want to buy a case.”

“Have you ever been to a medicine show?” T asked.

“Don’t need to,” Jay said. “I’ve read all about them.”

“Jay, it seems to me you put far too much trust in readin’.”

“How else can I learn about what I’ll never experience for myself, like ancient Rome?”

That response stumped T, who finally conceded, “I guess there’s some things from long ago worth learnin’ about.”

The medicine show, booked into East St. Louis, attracted quacks and characters the equal of Mark Twain’s Duke and King. The billowing tent on the banks of the Mississippi held about two hundred folding chairs, a platform, and a lectern. Dozens of small tents dotted the landscape with camp followers and accommodations for all the peddlers. Cars of every type and age covered at least an acre of ground. Whether the suckers came for the medicines or the show, Jay had no way of telling, but the strutting and the posturing and the proclaiming and the testifying were certainly worth watching. Where else could you enjoy such free entertainment? No wonder the locals poured into the tent, their white shirts exhibiting great ovals of sweat under the arms, their pants supported by suspenders, and their straw hats used as fans to move the unstirring heated air and chase away the bugs. A sallow lady in a neck to ankle
shmattah
banged a rinky-dink piano, alternating march tunes with martial and sentimental ones. Next to her, a young boy, no more than thirteen, scratched a violin. He resembled the woman, and Jay guessed that his mamma had dragged him into this meeting with the promise that he could earn a nickel or dime.

Although they arrived early, the only seats were toward the back because of the size of the crowd. When T sat down, an indignant lady stood up and changed her seat. Jay assured T that they would not spend the night in this town.

Different charlatans took turns haranguing the audience about the diseases of modern life brought on by the economic collapse of the country and how their nostrums could dispel every conceivable ill. Time and again these drummers of dreams likened their products to miracles and stressed the need for “the patient” to believe. (Herbert Hoover had purveyed virtually the same message: be patient and believe.) As the quacks hawked their products, shills in the audience came forward to buy a bottle of the promised cure with a statement to the effect that they had tried everything and that if this stuff worked, then it was indeed miraculous. Upon purchase, the shills drank the beverage and a minute or two later leaped into the air and declared themselves cured. One fellow, who made his way to the front of the tent, carried a tapping cane and looked off into space as if blind. Upon gulping the liquid, he immediately discarded the cane and declared himself free of darkness. Other shills behaved in a similar manner, including a white man who claimed to have once been black. When the hallelujahs subsided and people rushed forward to buy the “miracle medicine,” the drummer always pleaded a shortage, which created a frenzy to purchase. Sending a young man to bring his entire stock from the car, the huckster would then urge the audience to purchase two and three of his bottles because he would not be back this way “for some time.”

Jay suspected that most of these quacks would never pass through these parts again owing to the bogus nature of their goods; he also suspected that since medicine and religion so often go hand in hand, a relationship that probably goes back to the beginnings of both, the religious diction that the drummers used was intentional. He silently wished someone would discover a potion for finding persons on the lam; wouldn’t that be a wonder drug?

The show ran for two hours twice an evening, from six to eight, and eight to ten. They left after the first, but not until T had bought two bottles of the elixir. On exiting the big tent, they encountered a group of forlorn men, standing around a Negro seated at a card table with a checker board. Across from the man sat a “Weary Willie,” a hobo, wagering pennies. The onlookers were also betting among themselves, for or against the players. The amounts ranged from a penny to a dime. To listen to these men, you knew at once that they had turned to gambling in desperation after having roamed the country for work, begging on the streets, besieging back doors, standing in endless soup lines.

In age, they ranged from fifteen to sixty-five, in education from zero to a Ph.D., in background from the cabbage patch to Back Bay. Mostly they came from the lower depths: generously tattooed, eating food out of a can with a knife, and using the double negative. Many of the men seemed to know each other and addressed their pals by monikers fashioned from some physical characteristic adjoined to a city, for instance, Chicago Slim and Denver Dopey. Generally, though, they used confected first names like Red, Whitey, Blackie, Shorty, Heavy, Crip. Jay gathered that they eschewed last names because they didn’t want friends and kinsmen to know their condition or their whereabouts. As one man said, “Tellin’ the truth can only get you into trouble.”

For over an hour, T-Bone and Jay watched the colored man beat the pants off all comers. Unable to resist the temptation, T finally jumped in and challenged the fellow to a game.

“I’ll pay you in hard cash if I lose,” said T, “but if I win, you give me your board. It looks special.”

“That’s jake with me,” said the fellow, who introduced himself as “Memphis Mike.” “This board is special, so let’s begin with a deuce.”

T threw down two dollars, to the oohs and aahs of the crowd. While their hands flashed, Memphis Mike broke into song.

Hand me down my walking cane,

Oh, hand me down my walking cane.

I drank and whored and used cocaine.

I’m gonna catch that Jesus train,

’Cause all my sins have caused me pain.

As the action heated up, Memphis repeated this refrain ever faster until Jay could hear the train and feared the chant would have a mesmerizing effect on T. To his credit, though, T got on top of the game and Memphis by intoning his own verses.

I’m gonna win Mike’s checker board,

I’m gonna win Mike’s checker board.

Carry it home as my reward

For all the sins I done abhorred.

With a flashing display of jumps and captures, T at last prevailed, but not easily. In a gracious gesture, T told Memphis to keep the deuce and walked off with the board under his arm and the box of checkers in hand.

T-Bone was to repeat his winning ways wherever they stopped for the night, collecting a few bucks for an evening’s play. The gamblers included the full range of the human bestiary, from professor to priest, all wearing the rags of poverty. Their floating checker game attracted two college boys, as broke as everyone else, who whined about FDR infringing on their personal liberties but took umbrage when T reminded them that the bribe of big business—whose bread I eat, his man I am—had done more to undermine a person’s rights than any FDR program.

Once they had extricated their car from the mass of tin cans that passed for automobiles, they drove through town, past boarded buildings and innumerable for-rent and for-sale signs. East St. Louis looked as if the entire place could be let or bought for a song. Jay could understand why its residents flocked to the medicine show. In hard times, liquor sales go up, also gambling and quackery, not just medical but political and spiritual as well.

They’d intended to bunk in St. Louis to catch Joe Frisco’s show at the Commodore Club and hear Louis Armstrong play the horn. But in light of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
cover story about the polio epidemic in the city and across the state, they decided to drive through the night to Kansas City. A pelting rainstorm made the roads difficult, particularly since some drivers slowed to fifteen miles an hour in the downpour. As they poked along, T began to reminisce about his playing days with the Kansas City Monarchs.