Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

the show knowing that payment was dependent upon their getting through the whole act. A generous camp owner might smuggle them to a hut and give them a chunk of pie and a place to sleep, but they were often shortchanged and simply told to scoot. Thereafter, they would bunk down for the night in the forest and pray that it wouldn’t rain. There were, of course, those nights when his colleagues were offered food and shelter and Bert was left out, butwithout giving the matter a second thought the three boys stood by him and refused to accept either food or shelter unless the colored boy could share in the spoils. On each occasion the outraged camp owner hastily withdrew his offer to the white boys, which eventually soured the relationship between the four of them for in such dire circumstances it was impossible for the three white boys to hold their resentment at bay. Week after week they struggled from one lumber camp to another, dodging insults and trying to ignore the emptiness in their stomachs. Young Bert began to feel increasingly redundant and responsible, and at night he heard them talking and wondering whose idea it was to bring the coon along as the novelty part of their act. Why had their employer been foolish enough to think that the addition of the tall nigger boy would make them special among the scores of other lumber camp troupes who were parading the northern reaches of the west coast? Bert endured long nights in which he listened as the white boys’ tempers began to fray, and then unity was finally achieved as they fell into fits of laughter and shared with one another crude imitations of Nigger Bert and his heavy languid singing style while Bert lay “sleeping” under the tall, doomed trees of the lumber camp, all the while trying to shut out these noises of betrayal. And then one morning he shared with them the news that he could take no more of the treatment they were all receiving, and he asked if they would forgive him if he returned alone. The three boys stared at him in astonishment. Guilt caught them unawares, and they pleaded with him that he stay and finish what they had started as a team. Their insincere words disappointed him, but he simply let them know how grateful he was for their support, both now and in the past, yet he insisted that it would be best for everybody concerned were he to leave them to tour by themselves. This time there were no objections and nobody tried to make him stay, but Bert knew that it would be difficult for him to return to Riverside and face his father after this latest misadventure.Desperation sent young Bert to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, where he eventually accepted work as a Hawaiian impersonator singing some of the favorite coon songs of the day, but it was a chance encounter with a member of Martin and Selig’s Minstrel Show that changed his destiny. A jet-black nineteen-year-old boy stood with his banjo working the corner of Market and O’Farrell Streets, hoping that he might find a talent to complement his own. Hoping that he might find an end man. Hoping that he might find a friend.
    He first sees George in the fall of 1893. The boy is down on his luck, toes poking out of his shoes, backside hanging out of his pants, but he gives off confidence as he tries to scratch a living on the Barbary Coast. This strange boy, who he guesses to be about the same age as himself, is standing on a street corner clutching a banjo and eyeballing all who pass him by. Bert stares at the little man, who looks as though the word “defeat” has been knocked clean out of his vocabulary, and then it occurs to him that if he too is going to be scraping a living he may as well do so in the company of somebody with whom he might talk. But it is George who takes the initiative and touches the imaginary brim of his invisible hat. “They call me George Walker. I’m from Lawrence, Kansas. How about yourself?” He stares down at the short, black man-boy and begins to laugh, at