A Free State Read Online Free

be so. They certainly received no share of the profit we gained from their generosity.
    Corbett was a genial, expansive soul, an adequate performer, and a fine raconteur up to the midpoint of whatever bottle he was emptying. But he was a hopeless drunkard, and somewhere around Hagerstown he was jettisoned, with regrets, in favor of one John Mulligan, about whom I must now speak.
    Mulligan was ten years older than myself and had clearly served his own apprenticeship among the Colored players. He was an absolutely remarkable banjo player. Corbett had a limited repertoire, which he delivered competently, and with which he was content. But Mulligan was a fire-eater; his appetite for new songs, technical refinement, practice, was huge, as was his appetite for food. He was not nearly so girthy then as he later allowed himself to become. Mulligan was a large man in all senses, and deadly serious about playing the banjo. He had his eyes set on a musical ideal.
    My first encounter with him was not promising. Although I was well seasoned after three years with Kimball’s, I was not yet eighteen years of age, and when I suggested, shortly after his arrival, that the two of us rehearse a few songs together he merely grunted.
    â€œWhy don’t you get me some water, boy,” he said. “I am putting my banjer in tune.” He was sitting on a stool in one of the tents, like a giant toad on a small mushroom.
    â€œWhy don’t you get your own water,” I said. “The exercise will do you some good.”
    This got his attention, and he stopped tuning and regarded me, for a moment, with a fierce expression, which almost immediately gave way to laughter—at my cheekiness, I suppose. I must have been a very unthreatening sight, myself, skinny as I was then, and standing with my bones at the ready.
    â€œLet’s see what you can do, then,” he said, and without preamble launched headlong into “Buckley’s Hornpipe.” I was on top of it in no time and followed the tune’s tricky switchbacks and crooked repetitions with ease. On the third time through I executed a few dance steps as well, while playing, and I saw Mulligan note them with surprise and approval.
    When we had finished he avoided my eyes, but I saw him making some private adjustments in his assessment of me. Yet his first words were, “Now get me that water.”
    My response was a familiar obscenity, and I left him to find his own water. He never made the request again. And we were thenceforth on a much friendlier footing.
    I was in earnest about performing, by that time. The homelier aspects of the circus life—the animals, the mud, the lifting and pulling—had begun to lose their charm for me, andit was music that offered a path outward and upward. Negro minstrelsy had become a national sensation. The practice of “blacking up” had spread from Sweeney and a handful of others to feed a hunger that had gone unrecognized until then. In it, we—everyone, it seemed—encountered a freedom that could be found there and there only. As if day-to-day life were a dull slog under gray skies, and the minstrels launched one into the empyrean blue. Even the sad songs—here was the mystery—were enlivening. We had heard jigs, we had heard ballads, we knew polkas and reels. But these Negro songs combined pathos and grandeur in the same taste; gaiety and tragedy wore not separate masks but the same mask. The arrangements compelled your feet to move, lifted you. Nothing like it had been heard in the history of the world.
    Bands of four and five men—white men, of course—sprang up like wildflowers, holding forth from proper stages in real theaters in cities, and were attracting large audiences and large financial reward. The first of these bands that I saw was the Virginia Minstrels, so-called, with Emmett, Whitlock, Brower, and Pelham, in New York City. I went to see their performance at the old Bowery