Juba! by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

house and getting some more smoked oysters ready to sell to rich people,” Jack said, easinghimself up from the table. “You can come help if you want, but take your time. The oysters will always be there.”
    Jack and Stubby left, and I wanted to go, too, but my legs just didn’t seem to have the strength to move on.
    â€œJuba, there are things we can’t change in this world.” A soft voice spoke to me. “You’re old enough to know that by now.”
    I looked up to see Miss Lilly sitting across from me.
    â€œThat’s what I used to think, Miss Lilly,” I said. “But they just changed all my dreams about dancing and all my hopes to make something of myself. My dancing didn’t mean a thing. The only thing they see in a black man is a clown or a slave. How long did it take? Four minutes?”
    â€œYou used those minutes well, Juba,” Miss Lilly said. “They’ll come back again.”
    I doubted it.

CHAPTER
FOUR
    Jack Bishop was sick, so me and Stubby went down to the docks to buy fish.
    â€œTell them the fish are for the old Bishop,” Jack said.
    It was cold and rainy at four o’clock on Monday morning, and I didn’t want to go fish buying, even if it was for Jack. Stubby was all for it, though, saying that buying good food was a big part of cooking.
    â€œIf you buy old, tough meat, there’s not a lot you can do with it,” he was saying. “You got to boil it to death to get it so you can chew it. The same thing with fish. You get old fish and it starts falling apart on you before it’s done. Then it’snot good for anything.”
    â€œYou do the talking,” I said. “I’m not a cook and I’m not a fish buyer.”
    â€œThese fellows down here are rough,” Stubby said. “They won’t go for dancing.”
    â€œStubby, you don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe I’ll invent a new dance just for the docks. I’ll call it the octopus and dance like I have seven legs. How many legs does an octopus have?”
    â€œOctopuses have eight arms and no legs,” Stubby said. “So they don’t dance.”
    Stubby thought that was the funniest thing in the world, that an octopus didn’t have any legs. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he knew about octopuses.
    My mind was still halfway on the auditions. Jack said my hopes had been too high, which was wrong. My hopes hadn’t been too high. They were just where I wanted them to be. I knew I could dance, and anybody who saw me knew it. John Diamond was almost twenty, and he couldn’t dance next to me without looking second best, so he decided he was going to take away my chance. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and thought about punching him in the face. “Now you coon it up!” I imagined myself saying.
    And I didn’t want to hear any common sense coming from Miss Lilly or Jack Bishop or anybody else, white or black. They came around telling me they knew how I felt when theydidn’t know anything about it. It’s one thing if you don’t have anything going for you and people say they’re sorry you’re sad. You’re sorry, too, but you figure there’s a reason for you to be sad and you settle into it. But when you got something going for you, when you have feet people watch and a body that people want to see moving across a stage, nobody can tell you anything, because they’re nowhere near where you are.
    â€œHe’s only done what he knows how to do,” Jack said, telling me how I shouldn’t be mad at Fred Flamer. “You can’t blame a man for that, can you?”
    Yes, I could. I could, and it was filling me up inside to a point where I thought either I was going to have to puke it up or it was going to kill me.
    We reached the docks, and Stubby went over to one corner where a tall, thin fellow was standing next to a row of