The blackface minstrelsy and acrobatics of Black Patti Troubadors’ Greatest Colored Show on Earth enlivened the north end of Asbury’s boardwalk that hot August day. As Sissieretta “Black Patti” Jones and her vaudeville group entertained the growing audience of white vacationers and locals at the orchestra pavilion with a story of “the dark continent,” Negro wait staff stood outside competing grand hotels across the street. The teenage boys sweated through their uniforms in the heat as they listened to Black Patti’s bel canto about the beauty of Africa’s savannahs and jungles ride on the summer breeze.

Despite the fanfare for the Troubadours’ unsavory minstrel performances, The Sandman continued to perform his own artistic spectacle nearby, using his colossal sand sculpture and theatrics to attract casino stragglers and vacationers on the fishing pier. For several summers, his whimsical works of sand art had drawn thousands of charitable and amused whites to his outdoor studio, Beirut by the Shore, including the American presidential family and wealthy business tycoons.

The Sandman confidently walked about the sand sculpture’s surrounding beach and boardwalk area in his red felt and tasselled tarboush, loose shelwar trousers, tucked shirt, and kubran vest. The traditional wear of his wife’s country had become his costume. He carried a tin bowl for tips as he regaled spectators with the inspiration for his art, a fable from the medieval anthology Alf Laylah wa Laylah. The nineteenth-century English translation of the anthology of near and far Eastern tales, A Thousand and One Nights, had barely traversed the Atlantic from Eurasia to infiltrate American popular culture, so The Sandman referred to his legendary art as portraits of his home.

The music at the pavilion had finally quieted for a comedic act, allowing The Sandman’s story to resound against intermittent laughter and conversation. As he embellished the ancient tale with improvised dialogue, the intrigued spectators quietly praised his sculpture of a powerful djinn and a fisherman netting exotic fish in a pond. Undulations and swirls of sand traveled from the djinn and fisherman towards a king and his grandiose Moorish palace, reflective of the Islamic Golden Age.

Mid-day, a blonde-haired child in a striped wool swim top and bloomers excitedly ran from the boardwalk stairs towards the glorious sculpture. As the child shouted that the castle was her new playhouse, she tripped over her feet and clumsily fell into the palace, collapsing the well-rounded qubba into the pendentive and the towering minaret of the section. As her parents and spectators laughed at the humorous ruination of his sculpture, The Sandman grew infuriated by their disregard. Every sand sculpture he created was a work of magic, and most importantly, a generator of profit. The collapse was earnings lost, especially in the late afternoon when beachgoers would soon be heading back to their hotels and homes.

Despite his cool composure and forced smile, the couple paid him ten cents for the mishap – the cost of a pint of ice cream or a can of vegetables. But The Sandman maintained his poker face and reasoned that he only had to finish the summer season. He and his family would then leave “Amrika” and return to Mount Lebanon’s picturesque landscape of mulberry trees, olive groves, wild lavender, and grapevines.

***

The white vacationers and hotel owners saw The Sandman as an exotic and mysterious Oriental addition to Asbury’s landscape, and he readily made a living from their wilful ignorance and sense of wonder. To them, he was the descendant of the “sandmen,” the ancient architects of sandstone and mudbrick megaliths across Africa — Egypt’s great pyramids of Giza and the temples of Luxor and Abu Simbel, the Phoenician port city of Tsabratan in Libya, the Saharan mosques and mausoleums of Timbuktu, and the elaborate Nubian pyramids of the Kushite Empire in Sudan. The sandmen had been enchanted by a powerful ifrit of the djinn race millennia ago with the elemental power to physically and telekinetically manipulate sand and stone. It was a gift that was inherited by their offspring in secret for fear of enslavement or life-threatening accusations of shaytanic sorcery by Muslims and Christians alike. This is the story The Sandman asserted to any person he encountered in Asbury.

In truth, The Sandman was a North African mason from the dissolving Ottoman Empire. He and his family had migrated to “Amrika” after a mulberry tree blight had debilitated Lebanon’s sericulture industry. For decades, The Sandman had helped build splendid silk production factories and luxurious Mediterranean-style homes for the affluent across Ottoman Syria’s mountainous regions and the Levant coastline. Following the blight, however, he struggled to find masonry work with estate owners or wealthier peasant farmers.

The Sandman’s wife had been a lower-class amila in a factory in the Bekka Valley; and like her husband, she had used her nimble fingers to weave art from nature. She could dexterously twist the gossamer threads of dissolved silkworm cocoons with a spinning wheel, similar to the wheel the ancient Phoenicians used to produce dyed silks for the imperial class. She would then weave the threads onto primitive handlooms and transform them into lustrous yellow baladi for French capitalists.

At the nadir of the industry’s collapse though, a future of poverty and famine loomed as far north as Antioch and as far south as Tyre. The Sandman and his wife were no longer able to afford the lifestyle they had grown accustomed to. They had invested all their wealth to match the affluent capitalists and farmers in the region: European-styled silk and flax linen clothing, Western products, a larger truck, imported red tiles from Italy to supplant their mud and thatch roof. Their family consequently migrated to New York City on the tail of other Ottoman Syrians seeking asylum and economic opportunity in the West and in tandem with a separate influx of Negroes escaping the uncivilized terrors of the Ku Klux Klan and segregationist whites in the American South.

After migrating to the Jersey Shore though, The Sandman and his family learned that the bigoted hellions from the southern states were embedded in every shoreline town in New Jersey, from Perth Amboy to Cape May. And upon their arrival to Asbury, The Sandman’s family was systematically relegated to the west side of the railroad tracks, where Negro, Italian, and Jewish residents had cultivated a savory culture and thriving neighborhood that compensated for their segregation from Asbury’s beachfront and east side splendor.

The Sandman’s wife had experienced prejudice and ostracization as an ethnic Druze in predominantly Muslim Mount Lebanon, and later, for marriage outside her endogamic community, so she understood the importance of taqiyah in their coming situation. The doctrine of taqiyah had been the Druze’s preferred method of survival for millennia after their exodus from Egypt. It was simply the art of dissimulation in a foreign or hostile environment to shield oneself from persecution and apostasy. Some Americans called this act of cultural minimization ‘assimilation.’ Other Americans referred to it as the burning of oneself in the melting pot. Regardless, the Sandman’s family had chosen to arrive to Amrika as Arab Christians and further adapted their appearance and practices to the country’s cultural norms as they learned them.

The Sandman’s work, however, required him to highlight his differences to captivate an audience. He and his Orientalist art needed to stand out on Asbury’s beachfront thoroughfare, which teemed with entertainment and warm weather activities daily — swan paddle boats, live vaudeville, casino games, a steam-powered Ferris wheel, and a wooden carousel. His cultural distinction, preternatural history, and unique dexterity gave him the power to bury his brown feet in Asbury’s hot sands. Unfortunately, as a brown-skin man, he was still prohibited from wading in those warm Atlantic waters past sunrise.

As the Sandman profited from his gifted hands, his wife worked as a kitchen worker at the popular Metropolitan Hotel, his eldest daughter as a maid at the competing Coleman House Hotel, and his teenage son as a saltwater taffy bagger at the candy store near the casino and fishing pier. The family had worked fastidiously for five years to reserve enough funds to restabilize their socioeconomic status and repatriate to Ottoman Syria or North Africa where the Empire was expanding. They were barely surviving Asbury’s frigid, northeast temperatures in the beach off-season and collectively felt it was time to return home.

***

The following morning, the Sandman began to transform mounds of sand into a new work of art on the beach before the sunrise brought the day’s influx of tourists. He wore an ankle-length qumbaz over his garments and a traditional Lebanese taqiah cap covered with a kufiya head cloth to pay homage to his wife’s Duruz heritage. His wife had complained the evening before of her longing for Lebanon after an offensive conversation with the white hotel manager, and The Sandman empathized with her.

That morning, with his wife in his heart and Lebanon on his mind, he used his creative energies to depict the history of silk to honor his wife’s past life as an amila in the silk factory. He sculpted the ancient Chinese empress, Xi-Ling-Chi, holding a silkworm cocoon that had fallen into her cup of hot tea. When she pulled the cocoon out, she found that it had unwound into a long silk fiber. A giant Mulberry tree festooned with more cocoons shaded the empress from Asbury’s bright sun as she studied her historic discovery.

As he brought the sand sculpture to life with his magical hands, a small group of Negro children dug holes to China on the shore and frolicked in the warm waters of the “mudhole” behind the casino. The mudhole was Asbury’s sewage-tainted strip of the beach reserved for non-white beachgoers. Unfortunately, Asbury’s turbulent wave breaks and recessions were not powerful enough to diffuse the wastewater and refuse that poured into the mudhole daily; nonetheless, mostly Negro locals and travelers risked their hygiene to temporarily enjoy the pleasures that privileged whites experienced without constraint.

The Sandman contemplated his own lighter-skin children’s recent exclusion from the segregated Palace Amusements as he worked, until suddenly the earth shook beneath him, collapsing his sand sculpture. The children on the shore frantically ran screaming towards him for help. When he stood, he could see that a massive whirlpool had formed at the surface of the water and was churning into a deep submarine pit that had opened. The Sandman reacted immediately and rushed to the shore. He dug his feet into sand to stabilize himself, raised his arms towards the growing sinkhole, and concentrated on the scene. Particles of sand began to ascend, as if being bifurcated from the ocean water; then larger masses of sand climbed upwards over the pools of water, as if reconstructing the collapsed limestone roof of a prehistoric cavern. Masses of sand from the ocean and shoreline danced and swirled in the air as The Sandman directed them towards the whirlpool.

Before the earth could swallow the children, the ebbs and flows of the ocean waves had returned to normal; but the adults and youth on the beach stood in fright and amazement at The Sandman’s miraculous manipulation of the sand. Unfazed by the passing event, The Sandman returned to Beirut by the Shore beside the boardwalk to recreate the sculpture of the discovery of silk nearly five thousand years before.

His secret had been revealed. He pondered this intensely as he rebuilt. He surmised that if rumor spread, then it would benefit him through his final weeks of Asbury’s beach season. He would remain a sandman blessed with the power to create; and he would also remain The Sandman, Asbury’s North African man of mystery.