Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (3 page)

The American sailors stood silent but bug-eyed, oddly dressed and chopstick straight, backs against the far railing, while the Japanese contingent of eleven walked by. For each of the eight great lords a high-ranking American naval officer acted as escort, but for Manjiro and the Dutch-speaking interpreter there was no one, and there was only a mid-level officer for Ueno, Lord Abe's surly and ubiquitous aide, who earlier that afternoon had referred to Manjiro as a “toad.” The interpreters were last to go in, so Manjiro took the opportunity to look into the nearby sailors' faces. It was a violation of protocol but impossible not to do so, and it was instructive as well. The American faces were strange—had not his brother always said so?—but they were also well kempt and contained, not like the ruinous and combative face of Ueno.

Below deck, in a hallway brightly lit with lanterns, Manjiro took his place at the front, directly behind Lord Abe and his aide. He bent over, nearly touching the great lord's shoulder with his nose as he tried to make himself small. Lord Abe, however, felt him there and said without turning, “Ah yes, I know your father, don't I? He is in Edo now, is he not? Come up to help cast these barbarians from our land?”

“Yes, sir,” said Manjiro, bowing farther down. Lord Abe's short stature often made him do so, so that his physical proximity to the lord might equal his social one.

“You really do speak English, I hope. It's not just hearsay, is it, not just a rumor that got out of hand, but something I can actually count on?

If asked that question under normal circumstances, say, in a Great Council antechamber or in a riverside geisha house, custom would require Manjiro to answer that his English was poor. But he knew the great lord would have no patience with such self-deprecation now. “I have had the honor of learning it well,” he answered, “but I fear there will be words I don't know, idioms, expressions whose meaning cannot be deduced by taking them apart.”

“Oh well, there are words I don't know in Japanese,” said Lord Abe, moving a hand up as if to push Manjiro's mouth a few inches farther away, “but let me hear you speak this English of yours before we go inside. It will calm my nerves. Say something to this gangling oddity standing here next to me. Don't just greet him, but compliment him. Tell him he's handsome.… Let's see, tell him he is handsome and ask him if all Americans are so tall.”

Manjiro had prepared for the difficulty of political speech, working hard on vocabulary these past few weeks. He would have been readier to make such trivial comments up on deck, to one of the sailors whose rank was low, but the “gangling oddity” now in question was a dignified-looking man with medals on his uniform and graying hair. And because he had been given the honor of escorting Lord Abe himself into the banquet room, his rank, perforce, could only be high. These cautions came to Manjiro in a split second. Of course he could neither question Lord Abe's choice of phrases, nor allow his own opinions any further rein. Already he had waited too long.

“You are handsome and tall,” he told the man. “Lord Abe asks if all Americans are like you.”

The officer was startled, but said, “Oh no, nothing like me, most of the time. By that I mean that at six foot three I am particularly tall, so much so that my wife can always spot me in a crowd. As to handsome; handsome is as handsome does, my wife always says.”

Manjiro's face fell but he caught it quickly and put it back up. He knew American measurements and had otherwise understood the words well enough, but just as he'd feared, he had little idea what was meant by them when put together that way.

“I think he's speaking in dialect,” he told Lord Abe, “but he says that he is unusually tall and that he's got a wife and that his wife is the only one in America who thinks him handsome.”

“That's pretty well spoken,” said the lord, not to Manjiro but to Ueno, his aide. “I wouldn't mind engaging these tyrants, you know, getting to know them better, if we were on their land instead of ours. But look, we're going in now.” He turned back to Manjiro. “Stay beside me and keep your ears open. The official language of these proceedings is Dutch, of course, so I want you to focus on what is spoken casually. If you hear deceit, note it and tell me later. Can you do it, young man?”

Manjiro said he would do his best, and when the banquet-room doors opened, sliding on rollers into the ship's wall, the Japanese lords got the elegant greeting most of them had expected a few minutes earlier on the deck. Though the light in the hallway had been bright, now they were faced with such brilliance that Manjiro thought it was like going outside in the morning and looking directly into the sun. The very plates on the banquet table were gold-rimmed—surely not brass or bronze—the utensils beside them were gold, and shining silver medals so decorated the chests of the waiting officers that they seemed like nothing less than the shimmering bellies of fish in a bowl. Manjiro didn't know whether to think it garish or fine. And he had just glanced at Lord Abe, to see how the great man was taking it, when English came from the mouth of the one man whose uniform was unadorned.

“How long we have waited for this day!” said Commodore Perry, smiling and extending his arms. “You are welcome, gendemen. Come in, we don't stand on ceremony here! Be casual, stand at ease! This is not a time for protocol!”

The Commodore's exuberance was dulled by the lengthy process of translating his words from English into Dutch and then into Japanese, but Lord Abe waited until the job was done before simply thanking the Commodore on behalf of everyone. There had been posters depicting the threat of foreign attack all over Edo lately, some serious, some comic, and now that Manjiro had his first close-up look at them he marveled at the accuracy with which the artists had caught the angular lines of the American face, the high noses and deep-set eyes; especially those of Commodore Perry.

“Well sit down, ease yourselves, my friends!” said the Commodore. “This, after everything else, is a time to relax, to let our hair down! How hard we've all worked to get even this far!”

As per earlier Japanese instructions there were eight guest chairs, with stools for the interpreters and Lord Abe's aide. Commodore Perry's banquet table seemed inordinately high, as if designed to embarrass the shorter visitors, and roughly formed a horseshoe with Americans sitting along both sides and the Japanese in the middle, closest to the door. Manjiro waited for Lord Abe to balance himself on his chair, then sat down himself, adjusted his
hakama
, whose long skirt was too stiff to tuck around his stool. He stretched, trying to make himself tall. The great lord's aide, the mean-spirited Ueno, sat on Lord Abe's other side and glared at Manjiro, for he was too low to give his usual, biting advice.

Commodore Perry spoke for a long time and seemed to leap after topics of conversation quite as a collector might leap after butterflies. “The weather!” he said. “Is it always so mild here during the early spring? My, my, and the wind is such that it warms an old sailor's heart! I must admit, I expected the north Pacific to blow us around much more than it has. But maybe it's just luck, maybe it won't hold. Is it unusual to have such fine weather this time of year, or do I detect a hint of approaching rain?”

Manjiro hated Dutch. His tutor had disliked it also, comparing it to vocalized lumps of coal, but what he hated most was the way the Great Council used it as a thick and cumbersome tool, an ugly tunnel through which good-sounding English was brought into normal Japanese. Part of what he felt was jealousy, maybe, since his skill was in English, but he also felt that if he were the primary translator there would have been a lively exchange from the beginning—something of the kind that poor Commodore Perry was trying to put forth—not this constipated, thick-tongued, dull concoction of ugliness that the lords were forced to hear now.

“Ah, yes,” came Lord Abe's slow reply. “It is no longer winter but nearly cherry blossom time. Is it unseasonable? I think you are right about the coming rain. But we will make you a gift of a few cherry trees before you go home. I mean, of course, if they are fine this year, if we have good trees to offer by the time you leave our shore.”

“That would be most kind,” the Commodore said, after Lord Abe's words had gone through Dutch and come out constrained. “And let me say something personal. I love the material I see on everyone, the cloth that makes up your extraordinary kimonos. I have written in my diary that we in America can learn a thing or two from you about formal dress, and perhaps about textiles in general.”

“I will make you a gift, a gift,” Lord Abe repeated, this time about either cloth or kimonos, but even when someone said something simple, as the two leaders tried to do several more times, the translations were slow and, to Manjiro's mind, often slightly wrong as well. Even Manjiro knew that Dutch, because of its neutrality, and because there were some few dozen Japanese who could speak it, had been useful when negotiating the treaty, but here tonight, once the wine was poured and the toasts were given, both sides grew quiet, defeated by the Dutch just as surely as much of the world had once been, finally letting the room's only chatter come from the gold forks and spoons as they came down softly to speak in murmurs to the golden plates.

Though in truth, as much as anything, it was a monument to the Japanese inability to be informal, it seemed to Manjiro that the central part of the meal was over in no time, not only because he had no food himself and had therefore been daydreaming, drifting back to earlier arguments with his brother, but also because when the eight lords saw how quickly the Americans ate they tried to match them, plunging heedlessly forward, stabbing at the great chunks of meat with their forks. They hunted them down, threw them into their mouths, closed their eyes and swallowed and reached their hands out for wine. It was like a comic scene from Kabuki, and though Lord Abe was their leader in everything else, in this speedy eating ritual his physical coordination did not nearly equal his rank. Meat fell into his lap and bright orange lengths of carrot bounced onto the floor beside Manjiro, long and thick as severed American thumbs.

“Everyone's drunk and this thing is impossible to handle,” Lord Abe whispered, showing Manjiro his fork. “Hide those damned carrots and sit up high enough to get the waiter's attention. Tell him to pour me more wine. Have you noticed that the Americans serve only themselves after the first cup or two? They serve themselves and not their neighbors! That is the first line of barbarism, don't you think, not tending properly to another man's cup of wine?”

That comment not only meant that Lord Abe himself was getting drunk, but that Manjiro now had to concentrate. And at just that moment, just as he corralled the carrots and swept them out of sight beneath his stool, Commodore Perry stood again and walked around the table to the center of the horseshoe, directly in front of the exhausted and panting lords. This time his voice was less exclamatory, as if all that quick eating had taken some of his energy away, too.

“In America we believe in treating guests properly, in feeding them and making them comfortable,” he said, “so tonight there will be no more speechifying, nothing in the way of politics, no more epistles from the president to read, and no more talk from me about this grand and historic moment. Instead, we have arranged a small entertainment, an amateur effort to be sure, but one prepared in earnest, through the sweat and labor of a few good members of our crew.”

As he spoke his smile grew wider, and when Lord Abe finally heard the words he, too, tried to smile. He turned to Manjiro and said, “Tell him this in English. Say that a country's true heart can best be judged through the endeavors of its amateurs. Tell him also that in that same spirit of amateurism, even a country's leaders, whether traveling the world or sitting at home, should not be afraid to open their mouths and sing.”

Lord Abe was sure of his own good singing voice and pulled Manjiro forward by his sleeve, but Manjiro had only begun to work the phrases into English when Commodore Perry strode back across the room and slapped the wall with his palm, raising a deep and hollow echo. The wall buckled into itself, as the Japanese now saw it was designed to do, and from the widening rectangle came two bizarre-looking creatures, the sight of whom made most of the Japanese lords stand out of their chairs. They were men, these creatures, that much was clear because they were clothed, but otherwise they looked more like Saru-tahiko, the monkey god, might look were he to suddenly climb out of a vat of steaming black bean paste. Their faces and arms were covered with the darkest stains and their knees seemed to come up to stab at their chins, while at the same time their hands were busy banging those knees back down. And against this dark tragedy of cindered skin their eyes and the palms of their hands were as white as bleached whale bone. Commodore Perry had called this an entertainment but it seemed to the visitors, even as the creatures grinned and shook their shoulders and pranced into the center of the room, like nothing short of a visitation by messengers from the tar pits of hell.

Music was coming from somewhere, but not until the monkey gods stopped directly in front of Lord Abe did Manjiro understand that their high-stepping dance was connected to that music, that there was a fiendish kind of syncopation going on.

“Mr. Bones?”
said one of the monkeys.
“Did you hear the news? I'm gain north on the railroad train.”

“Why no, Mr. Buford, I didn't know, how'd you do it, I say, how'd you do it? How'd you get away?”

Lord Abe had recovered enough to look wide-eyed at Manjiro, clearly expecting a translation, but all Manjiro could find to mutter was, “The thin one will go north, the other is surprised.”

“How'd I get de masta to let me go? Is that what y o askin'Mr. B.? Why, he's dead, that's how. Didn't you know it, I say, didn't you know? He's dead and set me free in his willl”