Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

first quietly, but then he loses the shoulders and begins to roar. “So they call you George Walker?” But his new friend isn’t laughing. He continues to look down at the short man-boy and he wonders just what kind of banjoclutching colored creature he has stumbled across. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker?” He wipes the tears from his eyes with the back of his sleeve, and then he extends a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Walker. Maybe the two of us should get ourselves acquainted.”
    .   .   .
    An hour later they are still standing together on the corner of Market and O’Farrell Streets. George asks him if he knows where he might smoke out a good end man for Martin and Selig’s Mastodon Minstrels, for he explains that he can’t go back to Mr. Selig until he finds somebody for the other end. Then, momentarily changing the subject, he leans his banjo up against the wall and volunteers the information that he has made his way out west from Kansas, singing, dancing, and suffering all the degradations of the colored road. Apparently Free Kansas wasn’t so free for George, who claims that he arrived in San Francisco penniless, cold, and hungry, but having at least picked up songs aplenty to place on his tongue and having acquired some classy colored strutting for his feet. However, he confesses to having discovered that for a nineteen-year-old colored minstrel boy, the west coast promises little and delivers less, but Bert already understands this.
    For over a year the two boys move together, in and out of the city’s saloons and variety halls, where they learn to obliterate their true selves on a daily basis. Fourteen hours each day in the California fog masquerading as southern “plantation darkies” or northern “zip coons,” rubbing shoulders with Gold Rush dreamers from the Latin, Asian, and European worlds whose own identities appear to breathe free in the misty western air. However, on the Barbary Coast these two boys are expected to perfect clumsy, foolish gestures, and then retire to the wings and silently endure the discourtesy of people mimicking them. Eventually the daily trauma of having to look up to the colored people in the upper balcony and silently beg their forgiveness begins to take a toll on their young spirits. They have both chosen to eschew blackface makeup, which angers most theater owners, but Walker and Williams, with George as the comedian and Bert as the straight man, are now growing weary of trying to be something other thanthe colored monkeys that the audience in the orchestra stalls assume they are paying to see. For over a year Walker and Williams sing and they dance, and they try not to live down to expectations, and they try not to look up to the upper balcony, and they remain true to their promise that for Walker and Williams, boys onstage dreaming of one day becoming famous men, there will be no blackface makeup.
    The Midway Plaisance: I had been told that this place, which was located on Market between Third and Fourth Streets, was formerly known as Jack Cremone’s. It was the first melodeon or variety hall in San Francisco to feature hootchy-kootchy dancers (also known as torso tossers or hip wavers), women who were happy to wind and grind and who, the establishment was pleased to note, did not regard their virtue as their chief asset. For ten cents a white man might enjoy the pleasure of watching female entertainment, and for a little more he might enter one of the booths on the mezzanine floor that were protected with a heavy curtain behind which it was understood private female entertainment might be procured, the nature of which remained your own business as long as the liquor continued to flow. George and myself performed here, long hard days and nights, from 1:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., as Walker and Williams, providing comic relief to men from the redwood forests who had come to the Barbary Coast to spend a half year’s wages on champagne and girls who stuffed banknotes into the