Free Show Boat by Edna Ferber

you’re going to live.… Oh, all right, all right! I was just talking …
    The
Cotton Blossom
lay moored to great stobs. Long, and wide and plump and comfortable she looked, like a rambling house that had taken perversely to the nautical life and now lay at ease on the river’s broad breast. She had had two coats of white paint with green trimmings; and not the least of these green trimmings comprised letters, a foot high, that smote Parthy’s anguished eye, causing her to groan, and Magnolia’s delighted gaze, causing her to squeal. There it was in all the finality of painter’s print:
CAPT. ANDY HAWKS COTTON BLOSSOM FLOATING PALACE THEATRE
    Parthy gathered her dolman more tightly about her, as though smitten by a chill. The clay banks of the levee were strewn with cinders and ashes for a foothold. The steep sides of a river bank down which they would scramble and up which they would clamber were to be the home path for these three in the years to come.
    An awninged upper deck, like a cosy veranda, gave the great flat boat a curiously homelike look. On the main deck, too, the gangplank ended in a forward deck which was like a comfortable front porch. Pillars, adorned with scroll-work, supported this. And there, its mouth open in a half-oval of welcome, was the ticket windowthrough which could be seen the little box office with its desk and chair and its wall rack for tickets. There actually were tickets stuck in this, purple and red and blue. Parthy shut her eyes as at a leprous sight. A wide doorway led into the entrance hall. There again double doors opened to reveal a stairway.
    “Balcony stairs,” Andy explained, “and upper boxes. Seat hundred and fifty to two hundred, easy. Niggers mostly, upstairs, of course.” Parthy shuddered. An aisle to the right, an aisle to the left of this stairway, and there was the auditorium of the theatre itself, with its rows of seats and its orchestra pit; its stage, its boxes, its painted curtain raised part way so that you saw only the lower half of the Venetian water scene it depicted; the legs of gondoliers in wooden attitudes; faded blue lagoon; palace steps. Magnolia knew a pang of disappointment. True, the boxes bore shiny brass railings and boasted red plush upholstered seats.
    “But I thought it would be all light and glittery and like a fairy tale,” she protested.
    “At night,” Andy assured her. He had her warm wriggling little fingers in his. “At night. That’s when it’s like a fairy tale. When the lamps are lighted; and all the people; and the band playing.”
    “Where’s the kitchen?” demanded Mrs. Hawks.
    Andy leaped nimbly down into the orchestra pit, stooped, opened a little door under the stage, and beckoned. Ponderously Parthy followed. Magnolia scampered after. Dining room and cook’s galley were under the stage. Great cross-beams hung so low that even Andy was forced to stoop a little to avoid batteringhis head against them. Magnolia could touch them quite easily with her finger-tips. In time it came to seem quite natural to see the company and crew of the
Cotton Blossom
entering the dining room at meal time humbly bent as though in a preliminary attitude of grace before meat.
    There were two long tables, each accommodating perhaps ten; and at the head of the room a smaller table for six.
    “This is our table,” Andy announced, boldly, as he indicated the third. Parthy snorted; but it seemed to the sensitive Andy that in this snort there was just a shade less resentment than there might have been. Between dining room and kitchen an opening, the size of a window frame, had been cut in the wall, and the base of this was a broad shelf for convenience in conveying hot dishes from stove to table. As the three passed from dining room to kitchen, Andy tossed over his shoulder further information for the possible approval of the bristling Parthy. “Jo and Queenie—she cooks and he waits and washes up and one thing another—they promised to be