Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel
Daniel Wallace (Doubleday, 2007)
“Every night Henry remained open to the possibility that this was the night his powers would return.” It’s hard to imagine a more down-on-his-luck man than Henry Walker, Negro Magician, in 1954. He’s been with Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus for four years, and his magical powers are long in the past. He was hired because, if a crowd comes to see a Negro doing magic, and he can’t do any, they’ll at least get some comedy out of it.
“How low he had fallen. The memory of all he had once been taunted him.” This is a story about memory and storytelling. We’re going to hear his story as he has told it to his friends from the traveling show: JJ the Barker; Rudy, the Strongest Man in the World; Jenny, the Ossified Girl; and Jeremiah Mosgrove himself.
From Rudy, we get the story of Henry’s family coming down in the world, when he was ten. His mother died of TB, the house was lost to the bank, and his father took a job as janitor at a resort hotel. Henry and his nine-year-old sister, Hannah, had the somewhat illicit run of the place, and Henry has a fairy-tale encounter with a magician. Mr. Sebastian begins by teaching him tricks, proceeding to invest him, apparently, with magic, so powerful that he makes his sister disappear. It’s the kind of disaster a boy might never recover from.
Mr. Sebastian disappears too, as you might imagine; a desultory police search finds nothing. Henry and his father get on with their Depression lives, and find a manager for Henry’s career as a magician. Tom Hailey spots the pair as desperate enough to go for his suggestion that Henry pass as a Negro, with the aid of a sunlamp and some pills Hailey can provide. When Henry suggests that this might be telling a lie, Hailey says “Lying? Hardly. Do you think I could be in business for as long as I have if I were a liar? Absolutely not. It’s an illusion, Henry. It’s part of the act.”
It’s an illusion that couldn’t be sustained if the black teenager had a white father, and so Henry faces another loss, another disappearance. “It’s not the number of losses but their size that counts….a boy whose mother dies before his ninth birthday, whose luminous sister is stolen from him before his eleventh, and whose father falls into the hopeless arms of death and lies there dying a little bit every day in plain sight of his son and the world–these are the real losses, the ones that tear into the body and bleed the soul.”
This all sounds pretty bleak, but I found it compelling, too. The Chinese Circus is a perfect distillation of sacrifice and loneliness, but Henry has true friends there. The story of his life and losses gets told enough different ways, from enough different angles, to introduce doubt about which is the true story. The magic, for one thing–do you want to believe that Henry could saw a woman in half, and put her back together? Where did it come from, if it’s real, and where did it go? Was Mr. Sebastian the Devil, or was Henry just dazzled?
And of course, a story can be true even when it isn’t quite factual. A story that’s all loss can still be beautiful. We go through life accepting hearsay evidence as the best we can get; we live first, and understand later, if we ever do.
March 1, 2024 by email.
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