Eu‑o‑oo‑ooo‑oooo! moaned the cornet titillating with pain, as the banjo cried in stop-time, and the piano sobbed aloud with a rhythmical, secret passion. But the drums kept up their hard steady laughter—like somebody who don’t care.
“I see you plowin’, Uncle Walt,” called a little autumn-leaf brown with switching skirts to a dark-purple man grinding down the center of the floor with a yellow woman. Two short prancing blacks stopped in their tracks to quiver violently. A bushy-headed girl threw out her arms, snapped her fingers, and began to holler: “Hey! … Hey!” while her perspiring partner held doggedly to each hip in an effort to keep up with her. All over the hall, people danced their own individual movements to the scream and moan of the music.
“Get low … low down … down!” cried the drummer, bouncing like a rubber ball in his chair. The banjo scolded in diabolic glee, and the cornet panted as though it were out of breath, and Benbow himself left the band and came out on the floor to dance slowly and ecstatically with a large Indian-brown woman covered with diamonds.
“Aw, do it, Mister Benbow!” one of his admirers shouted frenziedly as the hall itself seemed to tremble.
“High yallers, draw nigh! Brown-skins, come near!” somebody squalled. “But black gals, stay where you are!”
Whaw! Whaw! Whaw! mocked the cornet—but the steady tomtom of the drums was no longer laughter now, no longer even pleasant: the drumbeats had become sharp with surly sound, like heavy waves that beat angrily on a granite rock. And under the dissolute spell of its own rhythm the music had got quite beyond itself. The four black men in Benbow’s wandering band were exploring depths to which mere sound had no business to go. Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sunbaked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checkerboard.
“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!” somebody cried.
The earth rolls relentlessly, and the sun blazes forever on the earth, breeding, breeding. But why do you insist like the earth, music? Rolling and breeding, earth and sun forever, relentlessly. But why do you insist like the sun? Like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly?
“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”
But why do you insist, music?
Who understands the earth? Do you, Mingo? Who understands the sun? Do you, Harriett? Does anybody know—among you high yallers, you jelly-beans, you pinks and pretty daddies, among you sealskin browns, smooth blacks, and chocolates-to-the-bone—does anybody know the answer?
“Aw, play it, Benbow!”
“It’s midnight. De clock is strikin’ twelve, an’ …”
“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”
During intermission, when the members of the band stopped making music to drink gin and talk to women, Harriett and Mingo bought Sandy a box of crackerjacks and another bottle of soda and left him standing in the middle of the floor holding both. His young aunt had forgotten time, so Sandy decided to go upstairs to the narrow unused balcony that ran the length of one side of the place. It was dusty up there, but a few broken chairs stood near the railing and he sat on one of them. He leaned his arms on the banister, rested his chin in his hands, and when the music started, he looked down on the mass of moving couples crowding the floor. He had a clear view of the energetic little black drummer eagle-rocking with staccato regularity in his chair as his long, thin sticks descended upon the tightly drawn skin of his small drum, while his foot patted the pedal of his big bass-drum, on which was painted in large red letters: “Benbow’s Famous Kansas City Band.”
As the slow shuffle gained in intensity (and his crackerjacks gave out), Sandy looked down drowsily on the men and women, the boys and girls, circling and turning beneath him. Dresses and suits of all shades and colors, and a vast confusion of bushy heads on swaying bodies. Faces gleaming like circus balloons—lemon-yellow, coal-black, powder-grey, ebony-black, blue-black faces; chocolate, brown, orange, tan, creamy-gold faces—the room full of floating balloon faces—Sandy’s eyes were beginning to blur with sleep—colored balloons with strings, and the music pulling the strings. No! Girls pulling the strings—each boy a balloon by a string. Each face a balloon.
Sandy put his head down on the dusty railing of the gallery. An odor of hair-oil and fish, of women and sweat came up to him as he sat there alone, tired and a little sick. It was very warm and close, and the room was full of chatter during the intervals. Sandy struggled against sleep, but his eyes were just about to close when, with a burst of hopeless sadness, the “St. Louis Blues” spread itself like a bitter syrup over the hall. For a moment the boy opened his eyes to the drowsy flow of sound, long enough to pull two chairs together; then he lay down on them and closed his eyes again. Somebody was singing:
St. Louis woman with her diamond rings …
as the band said very weary things in a loud and brassy manner and the dancers moved in a dream that seemed to have forgotten itself:
Got ma man tied to her apron-strings …
Wah! Wah! Wah! … The cornet laughed with terrible rudeness. Then the drums began to giggle and the banjo whined an insulting leer. The piano said, over and over again: “St. Louis! That big old dirty town where the Mississippi’s deep and wide, deep and wide …” and the hips of the dancers rolled.
Man’s got a heart like a rock
