Show Boat

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse. She knew whereof she spoke, for it was literally by a breath that she had escaped being called Mississippi.

“Imagine Mississippi Ravenal!” she often said, in later years. “They’d have cut it to Missy, I suppose, or even Sippy, if you can bear to think of anything so horrible. And then I’d have had to change my name or give up the stage altogether. Because who’d go to see—seriously, I mean—an actress named Sippy? It sounds half-witted, for some reason. Kim’s bad enough, God knows.”

And as Kim Ravenal you doubtless are familiar with her. It is no secret that the absurd monosyllable which comprises her given name is made up of the first letters of three states—Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri—in all of which she was, incredibly enough, born—if she can be said to have been born in any state at all. Her mother insists that she wasn’t. If you were an habitué of old South Clark Street in Chicago’s naughty ’90s you may even remember her mother, Magnolia Ravenal, as Nola Ravenal, soubrette—though Nola Ravenal never achieved the doubtful distinction of cigarette pictures. In a day when the stage measured feminine pulchritude in terms of hips, thighs, and calves, she was considered much too thin for beauty, let alone for tights.

Magnolia was enchanted. She sprang up, flew round to him. “Were you really? An actor? You never told me. Mama, did you know? Did you know Papa was an actor on a show boat?”

Parthy Ann rose in her wrath. Always taller than her husband, she seemed now to tower above him. He defied her, a terrier facing a mastiff.

“What kind of talk is this, Andy Hawks! If you’re making up tales to tease me before the child I’m surprised at you, that thought nothing you could do would ever surprise me again.”

“It’s the truth. The Sunny South, she was called. Captain Jake Bofinger, owner. Married ten times, old Jake was. A pretty rough lot we were in those days, let me tell you. I remember time we——”

“Not another word, Captain Hawks. And let me tell you it’s a good thing for you that you kept it from me all these years. I’d never have married you if I’d known. A show-boat actor!”

“Oh, yes, you would, Parthy. And glad of the chance.”

Words. Bickering. Recriminations. Finally, “I’ll thank you not to mention show boats again in front of the child. You with your La Vernes and your Hard Harrys and your concerts and broken legs and fires and ten wives and language and what not! I don’t want to be dirtied by it, nor the child. . . . Run out and play, Magnolia. . . . And let this be the last of show-boat talk in this house.”

Now the band struck up. The kerosene lamps on the walls were turned low. The scuffling, shuffling, coughing audience became quiet, quiet. There was in that stillness something of fright. Seamed faces. Furrowed faces. Drab. Bitter. Sodden. Childlike. Weary. Sometimes, startlingly clear-cut in that half light, could be glimpsed a profile of some gaunt Southern labourer, or backwoodsman; and it was the profile of a portrait seen in some gallery or in the illustration of a book of history. A nose high-bred, aquiline; a sensitive, haughty mouth; eyes deep-set, arrogant. Spanish, French, English? The blood of a Stuart, a Plantagenet? Some royal rogue or adventurer of many many years ago whose seed, perhaps, this was.

The curtain rose. The music ceased jerkily, in mid-bar. They became little children listening to a fairy tale. A glorious world of unreality opened before their eyes. Things happened. They knew that in life things did not happen thus. But here they saw, believed, and were happy. Innocence wore golden curls. Wickedness wore black. Love triumphed, right conquered, virtue was rewarded, evil punished.

They forgot the cotton fields, the wheatfields, the cornfields. They forgot the coal mines, the potato patch, the stable, the barn, the shed. They forgot the labour under the pitiless blaze of the noonday sun; the bitter marrow-numbing chill of winter; the blistered skin; the frozen road; wind, snow, rain, flood. The women forgot for an hour their washtubs, their kitchen stoves, childbirth pains, drudgery, worry, disappointment. Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. It was Anodyne.

“If I was going to be a river,” she announced, “I wouldn’t want to be the Illinois, or like those. I’d want to be the Mississippi.”

“How’s that?” asked Captain Andy.

“Because the Illinois, it’s always the same. But the Mississippi is always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”

Doc was oftenest her cicerone and playmate ashore. His knowledge of the countryside, the rivers, the dwellers along the shore and in the back-country, was almost godlike in its omniscience. At his tongue’s end were tales of buccaneers, of pirates, of adventurers. He told her of the bloodthirsty and rapacious Murrel who, not content with robbing and killing his victims, ripped them open, disembowelled them, and threw them into the river.

“Oh, my!” Magnolia would exclaim, inadequately; and peer with some distaste into the water rushing past the boat’s flat sides. “How did he look? Like Steve when he plays Legree?”

“Not by a jugful, he didn’t. Dressed up like a parson, and used to travel from town to town, giving sermons. He had a slick tongue, and while the congregation inside was all stirred up getting their souls saved, Murrel’s gang outside would steal their horses.”

Ravenal had got into his costume with the celerity of a fireman, and together he and Magnolia were giving a performance that was notable for its tempo and a certain vibratory quality. The drama that unrolled itself before the Paducah gaze was as nothing compared to the one that was being secretly enacted.

Between the lines of her part she whispered between immovable lips: “Oh, Gay, why did you do it?”

A wait, perhaps, of ten minutes before the business of the play brought him back within whispering distance of her.

“Money” (very difficult to whisper without moving the lips. It really emerged, “Uh-ney,” but she understood). “For you. Marry you. Take you away.”

All this while the lines of the play went on. When they stood close together it was fairly easy.

Magnolia (in the play): What! Have all your friends deserted you! (Mama’ll make Andy send you away.)

Ravenal: No, but friendship is too cold a passion to stir my heart now. (Will you come with me?)

Magnolia: Oh, give me a friend in preference to a sweetheart. (But how can I?)

Ravenal: My dear Miss Brown—Miss Lucy—— (Marry me).

Magnolia: Oh, please don’t call me Miss Brown. (When?)

Ravenal: Lucy! (Where do we play to-morrow? Marry me there.)

Magnolia: Defender of the fatherless! (Metropolis. I’m frightened.)

Ravenal: Will you be a poor man’s bride? (Darling!)