A Free State Read Online Free Page B

ready to leave Kimball and make a start in Philadelphia, Mulligan ceded the helm to me in all logistical matters. Our reputation preceded us, and by putting out word that we were forming a troupe we quickly attracted interest from local players. This is how we found Powell, Eagan, and Richards, who was later replaced by Burke.
    We put to good use what we had learned from Emmett and Whitlock, from Sweeney, and from the Colored amateurs we had studied and emulated. When we hit the stage there was no going back, for anyone. The curtain would rise upon us, seated in front of our painted plantation backdrop, and with a whack on the tambourine and my call of “ Good ebening, brudders and sistuhs! ” the hall was transfigured. We did not yet understand the nature of the illusion, nor that all the gaiety existed exactly because of the tragedy and injustice that even then bore down upon our nation. We would learn. But we did not know it then. When this elbow jabbed at the tambourine’s thump, and Eagan’s feet tapped out a tattoo as he played an Irish jig with an Ethiopian accent while Mulligan’s banjo kept up a constant commentary, now mocking, now assenting, and my bones rolled chittering challenges at the others . . . well, the audience was transported, and we were as well. Even when Burke would arise to deliver a recitation concerning the demise of Old Master, or of a favored hunting dog, the presence of the black mask insulated us, and our listeners, from a full encounter with tragedy. It was our escape from our own yoke. It brought us alive.
    Thus, the Virginia Harmonists. None of us, to be sure, had ever lived in Virginia. Yet we enacted our imagined scenesof plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our “Boatman Dance” and “Clare de Kitchen,” assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see. But I am getting ahead of my story.

3
    F or six months, we performed at the Walnut Street Theater for a percentage of the entry receipts. “Theater” was something of a euphemism—it was really a wooden barn, which eventually burned to the ground, taking half a city block with it. Then Barton opened his theater on Arch Street; our reputation was becoming firm, and he hired us for a week’s run, which became a two-weeks’ run, and then we became a fixture.
    Philadelphia was my Promised Land. The traveling life provided a sense of the new as long as you kept moving, as if you walked on water. Stop for a moment and you sank. But the city, at least at first, kept one afloat on a fizzing bath of stimulation and possibility. There was a great university, situated next to the lowest kind of taverns. Leafy, shaded sidewalks ran alongside fine wrought-iron fences, then gave way on the very next block to a series of dilapidated shacks sagging under a withering sun. If one walked two blocks onemight as well have been in a different city. Dust and ceaseless noise behind makeshift plank fences, covered with handbills and posters, behind which buildings rose and fell. Citizens only two years removed from changing wagon wheels in the mud promenaded now in fine carriages. On the sidewalks one bumped into, or steered around, clerks, ministers, lampmakers, thieves, professors, and prostitutes. One rubbed shoulders with more people in an hour than one might have met in a year in the country, yet the streets afforded a sense of privacy, almost of invisibility. People arrived constantly from points unknown and created entirely new identities for themselves, masks that hid their history.
    Even our theater wore a mask. It announced itself to the street from behind grand Doric columns that rose two stories and supported a frieze with bas-reliefs of scenes from