Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show by Richard Wiley Read Free Book Online Page B

see its source. It wasn’t the same sound that had serenaded them from the bay these last long days, but was rather the strung-out strains of whistles and drums.
    Einosuke and Fumiko, the girls and Aunt Tsune, strained their eyes, trying to match a vision with the cacophony, but when Manjiro touched them they all looked back inside the treaty house to find five of the eight lords who’d attended the American banquet, Lord Abe in the middle, already sitting behind the table. It was as inspiring a sight as it would have been if the Shogun himself had come. There was an area directly beside the treaty house that had been roped clear, but now that area, too, was packed with lesser members of the Great Council. To have these lords in attendance but not inside the treaty house seemed an unprecedented public demotion, and while Manjiro bowed toward their father, whom they all could see among the outcasts, Einosuke only stood there, embarrassed and appalled. Just then, however, the whistles and drums grew louder, and when the musicians came coughing into view everyone was united again, watching the approach of the outside world.
    â€œHe does know how to make an entrance,” Tsune said. “I’ll give him that much.”
    The musicians had burst from the stand of pines with such power and muscle that they made the trees look small. It did not seem likely to Manjiro that the American Commodore could have picked these men for size alone, since the first requirement of musicians, even in America, had to be their ability to perform, but the drummers were as thick of body as young sumo wrestlers, with necks that looked like the beams that held up the treaty house. They played their drums as if they were trying to break into them, and the flute players, too, seemed to want to pry the music out of their instruments as if it were enclosed in jars. Even so, they didn’t play badly, and for the first time both brothers understood how directly connected music was to war.
    The effect on the Japanese was quite what Commodore Perry must have wanted. The musicians numbered twenty-four and wore red jackets with tight white wigs on their heads, their faces pink as fish bellies, sweating under the cool March sun. Even though they were big men they were trying to march across the sand lightly, like they’d no doubt done while practicing on the deck of one or another of the American vessels, and their feet looked small. The music itself dictated their pace, but as they came closer and the sand got deeper, those in front bogged down. Their movement wasn’t slowed, but they had to pick their feet up higher, like horses might, flipping bits of sand into the tightly packed crowd. They marched right into the treaty house, boots twisting sores into the delicate tatami, and the moment they turned, freezing in their positions like dolls, a brass band, which had also been hiding in the little pine forest, burst into a breezy version of “Anacreon in Heaven,” the American national song.
    â€œHere comes the man himself I’ll bet,” said Einosuke, so captured by the moment that he started rubbing the netsuke carvings that held together the drawstrings of his various pouches.
    The band came the same way the fife and drum corps had, but stopped short of the treaty house, turned and folded into itself, and separated again to form two columns. The anthem finished just as the musicians faced each other, from either side of the newly formed and deathly silent corridor. For two full minutes no one moved or spoke. Even the wind, which had been playing out among the waves all morning, seemed to stop the whitecaps in their cresting while the seconds ticked away. It was like a moment of prayer followed by a drum roll so soft at its beginning that people thought it was only a new wind rising in the pines. But pretty soon the tip of a shaft came out of that sound, the American flag below it, and carrying the shaft in his thin