Outlaw Style: Poems

Ebony: John Wilkes Booth Recites “The Raven”

Ebony: JohnWilkes Booth Recites “The Raven” In cold Louisville to commit eloquent murder and be praised, he rehearsed before the mirror— Richard’s winter of discontent, Macbeth, the Moor. His train the week before delayed by blizzard, he’d fought off black wolves, as he later claimed, and paid a sleigh driver to haul him over snow. At Corby’s back in St. Joe he had closed the card with an encore from Tennyson’s cavalry charge, but he must have craved something darker after his own bleak December. It was a slow Tuesday, January nineteenth, and if he knew the birthdays of Robert Lee and Poe converged, he never said, yet he did change his program. Bronchial problems persisting since Christmas had altered his delivery and pitch, and the winter tour had left him weary. Perhaps his lowered register, the new romance of a damaged instrument, lured him to the poem. His father, Junius Brutus, had heard once in person the poseur he called“The Nevermore” and seen the urban ladies swoon over“that contraption, of sham melancholy and gothic gesture,” and yet, he asked his bastard sons—all apprentice actors— to add the verses to their memory store. Wilkes would have seen the ebony bird as both omen and threat, for even at Tudor Hall, the sullen boy had come to scorn black servants and ordered them to bow. He called them curs and stormed 35 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 35 about for hours when a maid or valet cowered, his disposition drawing him to resent even hints of abolition. Brooding on future fame, he adored lost maidens and plantations twilit with wisteria, Jacobean dialogue, and other bits of curious lore but was never in love with death, as admirers reeling in stunned disbelief would afterward attest. Booth was called the American Adonis and played to packed houses, his brooding glamour magnified in the lens of opera glasses. Scholars had praised his Romeo, though one critic quipped,“His oratory seldom equals his rapier play.”A known bon vivant, he excelled at target practice and banter, served brandy fit for a prince, and wrote his mother near the close of a triumphant tour,“My goose does indeed hang high.” He jested with the pet names of stage-door grisettes and debutantes alike. That week at Woods Theater there was little to protect him from their desperate notes and flowers. The evening before, he’d polished off a flask of cognac in the green room and succumbed to the charms of a jade who arrived with an armload of roses. He japed the following morning,“I wore the camel hump of Crookback Dick, but wished for Othello’s silk regalia to mimic the pillow scene.” When the moment arrives, the velvet curtain rustling behind him and purple, applause succumbs to silence, a cough, then a deeper hush. He stands downstage in immaculate black, traces of the Moor’s burnt cork 36 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 36 smudging his neck over a silk cravat. The auditorium is still tainted with echoes of the black ram tupping a white ewe.“Edgar Poe’s poem‘The Raven,’” he says, “yet another tale of a lady lost.” He raises the shut book in his hand. It is, in fact, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. He pauses, preening, touching his new moustache. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary . . . ,” he recites, eyes fixed on something in midair before him. The spell is set as Booth’s brooding voice moves through the lines, but his mind wanders to his adopted motherland’s demise, the Richmond Examiner’s report from New Year’s Eve: Today closes the gloomiest year of our struggle. The Gettysburg disaster, Chattanooga fallen, the Ape offering amnesty to any rebel raising the white feather— and with that thought, his voice a lute in tremolo, he begins to flaw the lines, to stray and splice the lyric with the play. The“rare and radiant maiden” is Desdemona accused, the“very error of the moon” what lures an ominous bird of yore. Not one noise from the wings or pit attempts to prompt him back, as he is given to such flights from script. The jet of his moustache and pomaded hair shine, as smoke from the wan gaslights wafts. Soon he has laced the woeful ballad’s grieving scholar with...