Because of something I did many years ago, my dreams of running for public office or perhaps serving on some important board lie in a smoking heap, waiting to be swept up by society’s janitors and thrown into some fetid dumpster. I could claim that I’d forgot the transgression that caused this humiliation, but I would be lying. “Nobody could forget an outrage like that,” people would say. Hoots and hisses would overpower my feeble protestations. What’s more, there’s no way I could have been unaware of what I was doing.
By now, the prurient and suspicious among you are thinking that I stole money from the church’s Jell-O fund, or conjured impure thoughts about Miss Loomis, my seventh grade English teacher. It’s worse, infinitely worse, than those trivialities.
My nose-wrinkling misdeed took place when I was 19. Satan clutched my hand and dragged me down the devil’s footpath —before a large crowd of persons who had paid to see my societal gaffe. I cannot offer an excuse, not even one that involves cringing.
This confession became obligatory thanks to a recent lunchtime conversation about military service. I mentioned that I’d been in the Navy and had spent time at sea in the 1960s.
“Did you get to Europe?” asked one of my pals.
“I did,” I replied. “I was the lucky one in my family. My dad and my uncles served in the Pacific during the war.”
“No grass skirts and sarongs for you.”
“You got that right…” I began. At which point a dreadful flashback from the night of March 7, 1957, floodlit my mental auditorium. There had been a sarong. One of those colorful wraparounds indeed lurked in my past. I had not forgot it so much as suppressed it.
And it was in the Pacific, sort of. I appeared in a Millsaps College production of South Pacific. You may recall the male lead: Emile De Beque, the handsome expatriate Frenchman who owned a pineapple ranch or something out in French Polynesia. He sang “Some Enchanted Evening” and wore a white dinner jacket. Emile was beyond cool. I was not cast in that role. I played Henri, the Polynesian houseboy who fetched and toted for M. De Beque and cared for his biracial children. Henri was hard to miss because he sang “Dites-Moi” to open the evening. And wore a sarong.
Given today’s preoccupation with past sins, it was bad enough that two white tadpoles portrayed the Franco-Polynesian children, but it got monstrously worse. Which is why I won’t be running for office or becoming Commissioner of Boat and Water Safety.
Henri, being Polynesian and all, would not have been mistaken for a native Norwegian. I, not being Polynesian, wouldn’t have passed for Henri on a dark night underwater. The sarong helped, but not much. Our director — who has left life’s stage, making this confession possible — observed that we might use stage makeup to create a proper Henri.
Are you there yet? If you were Justin Trudeau, you damn sure would be, because yes, yes, I wore blackface. There, I’ve said it. Actually, it was a kind of tanface. But even with the makeup, no one came up to me and said, “Yo, Bro, how’s the show going?”
Several hundred playgoers observed my offense during the three-night run. Mercifully, the only published newspaper photograph of Henri was taken at a rehearsal, so I wore my own skin.
On opening night it snowed, if you can believe that. Had South Pacific been a summer production, I might have avoided all this. In 1957, I tanned like a fulltime yachtsman and, for stage purposes, would have been dark enough on my own. But it was wintertime in the segregated Magnolia State and my thespian re-tint now seems unfeeling. We didn’t have a single Polynesian at Millsaps in 1957. I can only hope that my portrayal as an ersatz Henri — and my distressing French accent — will not deny me passage through the Pearly Gates.
I’ll beg St. Peter to forgive my faux pas before the footlights, but I’d just as soon he didn’t ask about Miss Loomis.
William Jeanes is a Northsider.
