Juba! by Walter Dean Myers Page A

were dancing in the streets as happy and as dumb as starlings on a Sunday morning. That’s the way life was meant to be, Juba. Happy and as dumb as starlings on a Sunday morning.”
    â€œThey were great, Margaret,” I said. “You had them just perfect.”
    â€œAnyway, there’s a fellow who wants to talk to you, andhe said he’d been told you lived somewhere in this house,” Margaret said. “I told him maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. He’s a reporter from a newspaper in Newark, New Jersey.”
    â€œWhat does he want to see me for?”
    â€œHe wouldn’t tell me.”
    â€œWhere is he now?”
    The newspaper reporter was waiting for Margaret on the front steps, so I put on my last clean shirt and went down to meet him. Margaret sat next to me on the steps, took off her apron, and put it over her knees.
    â€œHere he is, mister, the great Juba!” Margaret said.
    â€œHello, my name is Bains,” the man said. “I understand that you are quite a dancer!”
    â€œYou want to put that in your paper?” I asked. “That I’m quite a dancer?”
    â€œWell, no. Actually, I’m doing a story on Charles Dickens. I wanted to talk to you about him,” the reporter said. “The Tribune said you were chatting with him after the main show and that you invented a new dance just for him. Is that true?”
    â€œI talked to some people after the show,” I said. “One of them said his name was Dickens.”
    â€œYou don’t know who Charles Dickens is?”
    â€œI know he liked my dancing,” I said.
    â€œCharles Dickens is an amazing author—can you read?”
    â€œI can read and write,” I said.
    â€œWell, you should read Nicholas Nickleby or The Old Curiosity Shop ,” the reporter said. “He publishes monthly in the London papers, and people over there adore him. What did he say to you?”
    â€œHe just said he liked my dancing,” I said. I felt a little embarrassed. So much was going on around me, and I wasn’t keeping up with it at all. Mr. Dickens hadn’t come up to me and said he was famous or anything. He had just said he enjoyed what he did, and I’d told him I enjoyed what I did. His exact words had slipped my mind.
    â€œIt’s not often a famous British writer has a conversation with a black man.” The reporter was standing and putting away his notebook.
    â€œWhat’s my color got to do with it?” I asked.
    He didn’t answer, just looked at me, nodded, and went on his way.
    Good. There was a lot of excitement going on, and I wasn’t sure if I could handle any more than I already had.
    Jack and Stubby came out with trays of oysters and fish, and I helped put them on Jack’s cart.
    â€œYou feeling okay now?” I asked Jack.
    â€œFair to middling,” Jack said. “Margaret said everybody in the world wants a piece of Master Juba today. She said people were knocking on her door as soon as the sun came up.”
    â€œMiss Lilly said a lot of people complimented her on the food, too,” Stubby said. “She asked me if I wanted to cook at Almack’s on weekends.”
    â€œAlways looking out for themselves,” Jack said. “I told Stubby he could probably get a better job if he held out.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” I asked Stubby.
    â€œJack said I needed to think about what went right and what went wrong and figure out how I could have handled the whole thing better,” Stubby said. “What went wrong was that nobody knew it was me who did the cooking. Pete’s spreading the word that Miss Lilly did the cooking, and she’s not walking away from that.”
    â€œHe sure can’t say he did the dancing.” Jack grinned.
    I went along with Jack and Stubby, selling fish and oysters. It wasn’t something I liked to do, and Jack usually didn’t want me along, but he was so