Little Town on the Prairie (Little House 7)

These DARKies CAN’t be BEAT!

We MARCH in TIME and CUT a SHINE!

Just WATCH these DARKies’ feet!”

The man in the middle was clog dancing. Back against the wall stood the four raggedy black-faced men. One played a jew’s-harp, one played a mouth organ, one kept the time with rattling bones, and one man clapped with hands and feet.

The cheering started; it couldn’t be stopped. Feet could not be kept still. The whole crowd was carried away by the pounding music, the grinning white-eyed faces, the wild dancing.

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There was no time to think. When the dancing stopped, the jokes began. The white-circled eyes rolled, the big red mouths blabbed questions and answers that were the funniest ever heard. Then there was music again, and even wilder dancing.

When the five darkies suddenly raced down the aisle and were gone, everyone was weak from excitement and laughing. It did not seem possible that the whole evening had gone. The famous minstrel shows in New York surely could not be better than that minstrel show had been. Then a question ran through the whole jostling crowd, “Who were they?”

In their rag-tag clothing and with their blackened faces, it had been hard to know who they were. Laura was sure that the clog dancer was Gerald Fuller, for she had once seen him dance a jig on the sidewalk in front of his hardware store. And as she remembered the black hands that had held the long, flat, white bones between their fingers and kept them rattling out the tunes, she would have been certain that the darky was Pa, if the darky had had whiskers.

“Pa couldn’t have cut off his whiskers, could he?” she asked Ma, and in horror Ma answered, “Mercy, no!” Then she added, “I hope not.”

“Pa must have been one of the darkies,” Carrie said, “because he did not come with us.”

“Yes, I know he was practicing to be in the minstrel show,” said Ma, walking faster.

“Well, but none of the darkies had whiskers, Ma,” Carrie reminded her.

“My goodness,” Ma said. “Oh my goodness.” She had been so carried away that she had not thought of that. “He couldn’t have,” she said, and she asked Laura, “Do you suppose he would?”

“I don’t know,” Laura answered. She really thought that, for such an evening, Pa would have sacrificed even his whiskers, but she did not know what he had done.

They hurried home. Pa was not there. It seemed a much longer time than it was, before he came in, cheerfully asking, “Well, how was the minstrel show?”

His long brown whiskers were as they had always been.

“What did you do with your whiskers?” Laura cried.

Pa pretended to be surprised and puzzled, asking, “Why, what is wrong with my whiskers?”

“Charles, you’ll be the death of me,” Ma said, helplessly laughing. But looking closely, Laura saw the smallest white smudge in the laughing-wrinkles at the corner of his eye, and she found a very little black grease in his whiskers.

“I know! You blacked them and smoothed them down behind that high coat-collar!” she accused him, and he could not deny it. He had been the darky who rattled the bones.

Such an evening came once in a lifetime, Ma said, and they all sat up late, talking about it. There would be no more Literaries that winter, for spring was coming soon.

“We’ll move back to the claim as soon as school lets out,” Pa said. “How will all of you like that?”

“I must be looking over my garden seeds,” Ma said thoughtfully.

“I’ll be glad to go. Grace and I’ll pick violets again,” said Carrie. “Won’t you be glad, Grace?” But Grace was almost asleep in Ma’s lap in the rocking chair. She only opened one eye and murmured, “Vi’lets.”

“How about you, Laura?” Pa asked. “I’ve been thinking that by now you might want to stay in town.”

“I might,” Laura admitted. “I do like living in town better than I ever thought I would. But everyone will be moving out to hold down claims all summer, and we’ll come back to town next winter, won’t we?”

“Yes, I really think we will,” said Pa. “We might as well, as long as I can’t rent this building, and it is safer for you girls going to school. Though we might as well have stayed on the claim this winter. Well, that’s the way it goes. Get ready for a hard winter, and there’s not so much as one blizzard.”

He said it so comically that they all burst out laughing at the joke on them.

After that, there was moving to think about, and in the warming air scented with damp earth, Laura felt less than ever like studying. She knew she could pass the examinations, even if her grades were not as high as they should be.