Read The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell for Free Online Page A

requests. I knew many tunes, but not the canal songs with their refrains about low bridges and unruly mules. These I had to learn. One evening a scruffy coal loader named Jimmy Lawson called out for me to play “Never Take the Hindshoe.”
    “Don’t know it,” I said over the din.
    Jimmy rose to his feet, unsteady. “I’ll sing it fer ya.” Blandin’s became quiet.
    Jimmy had been drinking and wasn’t any choirboy to start with, yet he managed to stumble his way through a song that warned against getting near a mule’s private parts, for, as it said, “the business end of a mule is mighty ticklish.” With these words, the room burst into hoots and howls—the mere mention of private parts, even those of a mule, the cause for great laughter.
    But not every canal song was of low humor. The boat men also entertained a variety of romantic notions—songs about the perils of the canal and verses about tearful ladies left behind, sung plaintively as if they had set sail for China. As silly as those songs seemed to me, the men enjoyed them. Soon, I came to share their good spirits, more so after I discovered that a glass of beer made it all go a little easier. In time, stubborn mules and private parts became funny to me too.
    What didn’t become funny were the cruel comments about the boatmen’s cooks or wenches, as they called them. These were unmarried women who, for pitiful wages, did the cooking and cleaning. Even after the meals were served, their duties were usually not complete until the master of the boat was fast asleep. I would feel myself flush when they were mocked, but, of course, I said nothing. Worse, I had to display some merriment, so I got good at acting amused when I wasn’t. And if I didn’t laugh heartily enough at a crude joke, it could be forgiven along with my other faults—I was slighter than most and didn’t drink whiskey or chew tobacco. But because of these shortcomings and, most surely, because I was there at the invitation of Daniel Blandin, I became, soon enough, everybody’s little brother.
     
    * * *
    I stood with my arms folded until my students realized that nothing would happen unless they were still. When all was quiet, I recited the very words that had been said to me just a few years before: “Dance is not a series of learned figures. It is a formal gesture between a man and a woman. You will learn the manners.”
    And thus it began with the etiquette: the proper way to approach a lady, when to bow and when to curtsy, how to escort a partner to her seat, when to withdraw. I told my students how I had been taught at the academy by Miss Burchett, a matron who always looked like she had just eaten a lemon and who recited rules till we were saying them in our sleep. To lighten the load, I scrunched my face and imitated her nasal declarations. “A gentleman is always introduced to a lady. A lady is never introduced to a gentleman.”
    My students laughed at the mimicry, but in Miss Burchett’s class we hadn’t even smiled for fear we would be made to sit in the corner. Miss Burchett acted like Moses come off the mountain—commandments for everything, and all of them designed to keep the sexes apart. “All intimacy ends with the dance!” she would proclaim at least once a week. And that, without fail, would lead to her golden rule: “It is better to be deemed prudish than indiscreet.” These rules had no good effect that I could see. For my part, I would have welcomed anything that might have even passed for indiscretion, a recollection I did not share with my students.
    In the lessons that followed, I started in on the quadrille: how the couples were numbered, their positions, where the head of the hall would be. Then came a walking tour of the basic figures: right and left, ladies chain, forward two, and chassez. By the second week it was time to play the violin and call out the figures. Soon my students could perform a simple version of the quadrille. Ahead of us still