Personae - Harlem Renaissance PDF

6 Personae: White/Black Faces – Black Masks Wallace Thurman’s tragedy was that he saw himself only too well through the eyes of those who could not really give him an accurate measure of his true talent. W. E. B. DuBois described this dilemma of Negro identity most clearly in his Souls of Black Folk...

6 Personae: White/Black Faces – Black Masks Wallace Thurman’s tragedy was that he saw himself only too well through the eyes of those who could not really give him an accurate measure of his true talent. W. E. B. DuBois described this dilemma of Negro identity most clearly in his Souls of Black Folk. The Negro, he said, was a kind of seventh son, “born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world.” It is a strange, prismatic vision because that world “yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” As if in a room of mirrors, the Negro stands among a collision of images such that reality is indistinguishable, impalpable, not self-determined. “It is a peculiar sensation,” DuBois continued, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This remarkable and profound statement fails only to make explicit an important corollary: this “doubleconsciousness” opens to the Negro—through his own quest and passion—a unique insight into the vulnerable and unfulfilled soul of that other world; a possibility which, once grasped, liberates one forever from the snarls of that other world’s measuring tape. DuBois’s point was that the Negro was forever looking at himself through the eyes of white men, trying to be what he thought they were, or trying to be what he thought they wanted him to be. Self-consciously on view, the Negro’s sense of achievement—his manhood—depended ultimately on the white man’s view of him. Carl Van Vechten misplaced the theatrical image when he titled his Harlem novel Nigger Heaven. Harlem was no segregated balcony to Manhattan’s “theater,” where black people sat up high to watch the show of life go on. Rather, it was a stage; the performers played for all they were worth to a white world. Dance as no one can; sing with the humor or pathos no one else has; make jokes about oneself (make oneself into a joke), anything, everything but with style; turn to the audience and bow deeply and smile broadly and live in that rare luxury of applause, approval, love. If the figure of theater is appropriate, then the Negro was the performer in a strange, almost macabre, act of black collusion in his own emasculation. For that white world, itself unfulfilled, was compelled to approve only that view of the Negro which served its image. The theatrical stage itself, more than any other cultural phenomenon, opens a perspective into the pathology of American race relations. It exposes the white-black dependency which has defined race relations in the United States and which persists despite all reform. It has been a commonplace among blacks and whites that Negroes have had a special theatrical genius. And if we broaden the definition of theater to include the general entertainment professions of sports and music, recognized Negro achievement has most often occurred there. Perhaps this tells us nothing more than that entertainment has been one of the few culturally acceptable avenues to Negro accomplishment. Nevertheless, Negroes as well as whites have long assumed that blacks could make it in the world of entertainment. And since theater has been one of the few paths, it has not only provided ready opportunity for public adulation to those few black men and women with talent and tenacity, but it has also served to delimit the terms of Negro identity within the popular culture and to ensure the persistence of those limits. We must be prepared to consider not only the black artist’s willingness to work within limits that were often demeaning but also the cultural conditions which made the audience tolerate, only with the greatest anxiety, breaches of those boundaries. In what is normally understood as the theater, in this entertainment world broadly conceived, there has been no truly Negro ethnic theater until the last decade. There have been efforts to sustain Negro acting groups within black communities, but these, as far as one can tell, have not been ethnic in the sense that the Yiddish theater was. This failure is quite instructive. But we should first recall what were the characteristics of ethnic theater in America. The Yiddish theater will serve as an example. Following the American Civil War, during the same years that Negroes were making a place for themselves on the American stage, the Yiddish theater blossomed in New York City. It had been founded in Rumania in 1876, but it achieved its fullest flower in Bowery theaters around the turn of the century. Although the vernacular of the Eastern European Jew was depreciated by many—Jew and non-Jew alike—Yiddish was a means of maintaining ethnic authenticity. Yiddish guaranteed that the plays would be written by Jews and, being in a near argot, would reach the ethnic audience rather than a sophisticated critical establishment. Often the plays were treatments of themes from Jewish history. But the Jewish sense of community—common history, present experience, and shared symbolic and imagistic language—permitted some playwrights, who condemned what they called “historical plunder,” to exploit, in “realistic” plays, the shared experiences and emotions of the audience. Such realism, though often melodramatic, touched deep emotions. The themes were familiar to those new Americans: the shock of adjustment for the “greenhorn,” alienation of the newly uprooted, woeful loneliness from untimely death, economic and social hardship in a society that had set one free of traditional associations, self-sacrificing parents with ungrateful children. All was within the reach and comprehension of everyone. New plays were often no more than variations on stock forms and ideas. Indeed, the audience might be so familiar with the ideas that they might contribute or criticize from their seats. (This was a characteristic of the Russian theater, where the critics might be so vocal as to prevent a performance from proceeding.) But the audience was a vital part of the Yiddish theater, not because they laughed or wept on cue, but because they felt obliged to improve the performances. Finally, what made the Yiddish theater succeed was that it had an audience that would support four houses and four companies in New York City at one time, seven days a week. When one considers that language excluded most non-Jews from the audience, that was remarkable. These theatrical efforts remained so vital to the Jewish community that, by themselves, Jews sustained them.1 The culture-conscious black intellectuals of the 1920s were as anxious to produce a Negro theater as to promote the Harlem Renaissance. While there were notable efforts to develop a viable ethnic theater in Harlem—efforts which helped to catapult some individuals to commercial success—an authentic black drama never emerged. Many writers have shared Harold Cruse’s confusion and anger over the frustrations of dramatic enterprises that might have done for Afro-American imagination, culture, and language what the Yiddish theater did for the Jews. The 1920s seemed the right time, and New York seemed the right place, but it did not happen. Actually, this failure is understandable enough if one considers the history and traditions such efforts were contending against. Jews, and other immigrants coming into the United States starting with the end of the nineteenth century, were essentially alien to the American culture. Whatever hostility they might have encountered, there was no strong tradition for them in America, thus they were more free than Negroes to continue (or to develop) popular culture according to their own needs and traditions. Blacks, on the other hand, had been alienated within the American experience; alienation presumes no alternative culture. Furthermore, Negroes who attempted to relate to American popular theater from the Civil War on were faced with a very strong tradition of “black theater” extending at least into the early nineteenth century. The blackface minstrel reached far back into the past, fed the most popular imagination, and served very deep emotional needs. He had gone far toward defining, for the American mind, the characteristics of Negro personality and Negro theatrical type. This tradition was crippling to Negro ethnic theater in two ways. It provided a ready avenue to commercial success for those blacks willing to accommodate themselves to it. And the very powerful hold it had on American imagination and emotion narrowed the limits of social tolerance for black deviation. Of course it will be said that Negroes were only incidentally related to the origins of blackface minstrelsy. That is true. It developed out of early nineteenth-century circus performances by white men who blacked their faces, and it was formalized in the 1840s by white performers like Thomas D. Rice and Daniel Decatur Emmett. Despite standard explanations that these white showmen were mimics of southern plantation Negroes, there is very little evidence to support the claim. Close analysis of the minstrel shows reveal very little Afro-American influence in the music, dance, or inspiration. In fact, the two principal character types who define this theater —Jim Crow and Jim Dandy (or Zip Coon)—are unlike any concept of the plantation black or even the Sambo stereotype. Rather, Jim Crow (the rough, coarse, barbarian) is clearly a part of the backwoods and riverboat tradition, a blackfaced Mike Fink or Davy Crockett. Jim Dandy (urban, dandified, almost effeminate), on the other hand, is the blackfaced counterpart to Yankee Doodle. In short, these supposed mimics of slaves were really standard American comedy types underneath the burnt cork.2 The fact that the “Negro theatrical tradition” which black performers encountered in the late nineteenth century was of white creation made it, in many ways, all the more formidable. This very popular cultural phenomenon pervaded the American imagination and served important emotional needs. To understand the failure of Negro ethnic theater in the early twentieth century, it will be necessary to consider how this tradition had used the “Negro” to serve the white psyche and why that tradition would circumscribe Afro-American theatrical development to allow only grudging deviations from the model. By the end of the Civil War the minstrel show had become fixed into a rather elaborate form which persisted with white performers down into the twentieth century. The curtain rose on blackfaced performers playing a rousing opening. They sat in a row, facing the audience, costumed in the extremes; on the one hand, the careless abandon of Jim Crow, while on the other, the ruffled, ultra-stylishness of Dandy Jim—and all faces made up in the most grotesque burnt-cork caricatures of Negroes, with painted-on huge red clownlike lips. Usually, the center man, the interlocutor, remained in whiteface. The minstrels played and sang an opening, such as “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” while their legs and bodies moved in defiance of all rules of stage decorum. After the opening, the interlocutor would play the “straight man” to the humor of the “end men,” Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. He would engage them in a series of short conversations where the end men’s twists of meanings or crudeness would force the joke back upon the pompous and pretentious interlocutor. Jokes and conundrums would give way to “serious” sermons, speeches, or lectures on the most weighty moral, political, or scientific topics by the blackfaced comedians. And this would be broken by the “specialty” songs of members of the group. After the “first part,” there would follow the “olio,” in which a mixed bag of individual and ensemble song and dance would be presented. Wild banjo music and abandoned dance would give way to sentimental ballads and dances of slow, rhythmic, insinuating shuffle. The “olio” over, the “third part” would be a grand finale: rousing music—perhaps a medley —in which the ensemble performed, culminating in a “walk-around.” It was this highly stylized variety show with which Negroes made their first appearance in the commercial theater. Afro-Americans were thus faced with a “Stage Negro” who had become a dominant type for more than forty years. Black entertainers played this white creation rather than themselves. Charles Hicks, a Negro, organized the Georgia Minstrels in 1865, but he found the hostility to a Negro business manager so great among theater people that he turned his troupe over to a white man, Charles Callender. Callender’s Georgia Minstrels became the first successful all-black theatrical group. It featured entertainers like Billy Kersands and Sam Lucas, who were to become great names in Negro minstrelsy. This company, and black entertainers who followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remained very close to the traditional model, even to the extent that black men blacked their faces into grotesque masks in the way the white originators had. Negro entertainers had little commercial choice. They did make changes in the model, but the limits within which they worked were very crippling to their art.3 The discerning eye and ear can detect the minstrel tradition in presentday white comics (Jack Benny, Rowan and Martin, the Smothers Brothers) and black comics (“Pigmeat” Markam, Moms Maberly); indeed, the minstrels have deeply affected American commercial humor. But whatever the tradition’s contribution, it was hardly a vehicle to create an ethnic theater for blacks; not only was it white-created but the audience that made it commercially viable was also white. Blacks were permitted into this theater only to serve that audience. It became a place for Negro achievement and thus siphoned off black talent that might have developed an authentic ethnic theater. The audience (one should say the popular culture) had ingrained in its imagination a view of the Negro that was comic and pathetic. The theatrical darky was childlike; he could be duped into the most idiotic and foolish schemes; but like a child, too, innocence would protect him and turn the tables on the schemers. His songs were vulgar and his stories the most gross and broad; his jokes were often on himself, his wife or woman. Lazy, he was slow of movement, or when he displayed a quickness of wit it was generally in flight from work or ghosts. Nevertheless, he was unrestrained in enthusiasm for music—for athletic and rhythmical dance. Likewise, he was insatiable in his bodily appetites; his songs and tales about food would make one think him all mouth, gullet, and stomach. Indeed, performers gave themselves grotesque lips, creating the illusion of cavernous mouths. The stage Negro went into ecstasy over succulent foods—pork, chicken, watermelon—“lip-smacking,” “mouth-watering.” Whether he played in the Jim Crow or the Jim Dandy tradition, he never left these bounds. This caricature was patently the antithesis of the Protestant Ethic, as was the Negro stereotype. We must wonder why white men would have created this character and resisted alternatives. In the early nineteenth century, when the blackface imitator was emerging from the circuses into wide public appeal, the United States was experiencing dramatic expansion not only in physical territory but also in individual economic opportunity and personal political power. The American, who saw himself as a man characterized by risk-taking, enterprise, and achievement, was defining the American Dream in terms of individual success and upward mobility. But crisis was built into such a concept. For as the American Dream denoted success, it implied the possibility of failure and since success meant individual achievement any failure was personal. It could be a frightening and lonely road. But the way was definitely marked by formula, from Benjamin Franklin’s prescriptions for character through the moral preachments of McGuffey’s reader. No properly reared American boy or girl could doubt the essentials of character and success: industry (dedicated work in some useful calling), order (decorum, good manners, the avoidance of excess in emotions and all other things), cleanliness (the honoring of one’s own body and possessions but also the deference to the good taste and sensibility of others), punctuality (industry and order combined for efficiency and in deference to the opinion of others), frugality (negatively, not wasting, but positively, accumulating by deferring present consumption for future benefits). The dogma told everyone to work hard, to restrain, to deny pleasures for future success. But there was a complication that made for great anxiety. It was not all saving. One had to know how and when to spend. For economy and hoarding, on the one hand, merely anticipated the proper occasion and opportunity for risk and speculation. Everyone knew that great achievement required great risks. A man was allotted only so much in a lifetime; he had to make it count. The stinting was not only in things, but also in human substance. Of course, one saved money by patching and handing down old clothes; surely it helped also to serve cheaper foods, stretched for several days. But it was also necessary to husband one’s passions so that impulsiveness would not dissipate energy in frolics. The wise man knew that his opportunity would come, and he must be ready for it. He should be like a coiled spring— energy and resources hoarded—ready to unleash his full, preserved power at his target, at his chance. A young man might wisely choose to remain in his mother’s home a few years beyond adulthood. Perhaps, without a girl (or with the right one) he could defer marriage a few years. Failing in that, however, there was twisted a new knot of tension. For although controlling the size of families was essential, it was troublesome—technologically as well as moralistically. Sexual abstinence, not even moderation, was the surest policy, because mistakes—unwanted children—would be continuous drains on his well-husbanded potential. The incontinent or careless man might, at last, find himself spent, never having had a chance to strike out at his opportunity and now, if he were to see it, too encumbered to do so. Could the fantasies of such men have been other than the loose and undisciplined creatures of appetite—Sambo, Jim Crow, Jim Dandy?4 What would be more likely and more natural for men who were tied up in the knots of an achievement ethic—depending almost wholly on selfsacrifice and self-restraint—than to create a persona which would be completely self-indulgent and irresponsible? White men put on black masks and became another self, one which was loose of limb, innocent of obligation to anything outside itself, indifferent to success (for whom success was impossible by racial definition), and thus a creature totally devoid of tension and deep anxiety. The verisimilitude of this persona to actual Negroes, who were around to be seen, was at best incidental. For the white man who put on the black mask modeled himself after a subjective black man—a black man of lust and passion and natural freedom (license) which white men carried within themselves and harbored with both fascination and dread. It was the self that white men might become—would become—except for those civilizing restraints of character and order that kept the tension real. How much better it was to have that other self in a mask, on stage, objectified as it were. How that tautness of fear and selfdoubt could be released in explosions of laughter once one saw that the fool —the animal, the corruption one feared most—was nothing more than a prancing darky on a stage. The entire theatrical “darky” character—from the actual face-mask itself with its grotesque mouth and lips and eyes, its wool for hair, the colorful and ridiculous clothing, to the actual style of song and dance-was calculated to achieve the effect of character and personality antithetical to respectable taste and manners.5 It was a cultural doubt, as well as personal, that compelled white Americans to use a black theatrical persona, defining themselves in contrast to it. Americans anxiously measured themselves through European eyes. And the nineteenth century was filled with contemptuous and condescending observations of American character and manners by Europeans. No one was more critical of Americans than Mrs. Frances Trollope. Nor was anyone more taken to heart than she.6 She delighted in describing the coarseness and vulgarity of men and their wives, who, within a few short years, had made fortunes or high rank in the military. But Americans bought her book, read that they were crude and vulgar, and were deeply affected by what she said. It was shortly after the publication of Domestic Manners that the New York Evening Post reported an incident which occurred at a theatrical performance. Between acts, it seems, a man in the audience, in order to talk, assumed a sprawling posture on a box railing: Hissing arose, and then bleatings, and then imitations of the lowing of cattle: still the unconscious disturber pursued his chat—still the offending fragment of his coat-tail hung over the side. At last there was a laugh, and cries of “Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!” with roars of laughter, still more loud and general.7 Americans were aware that civilized eyes were constantly appraising them. Americans were conscious that what was really being risked in the new world and its adventure—after all of the material achievement, the possibility, the opportunity, the individual freedom—what was in jeopardy was civilization itself. Americans, from the seventeenth century on, at least those of European origin, had never lost sight of the threat of chaos once the restraints of traditional order were undone. Democratization and expansion in the early nineteenth century seemed to be sweeping away propriety and order faster than people could accept. Nothing could be done to stop the revolution (surely nobody would have wanted to), but it made one wonder if the new American in the making was civilized enough to measure up to traditional judgments of culture.8 Here, too, the blackface minstrel provided a surrogate whose character combined the grotesques of manners that would be offensive to civilized taste. Jim Crow’s ragged costume, Jim Dandy’s dress which was always beyond the height of fashion, were both vulgar. Illustrations of performing minstrels—indeed, directions of stage action down into the twentieth century—always demanded that the performers break all of the rules of stage decorum. Not only were their bodies to move in very exaggerated ways—arms and legs flailing, head bobbing and rocking—but the performers were to sit with their legs spread wide apart, vigorously tap their feet to the music while making their faces grimace and contort beyond imagination. The minstrel’s dialect, whatever its relationship to true Negro speech, was coarse, clumsy, ignorant, and stood at the opposite pole from the soft tones and grace of what was considered cultivated speech. Whatever else, the minstrel’s dance utterly obliterated the highly formalized dance that was familiar to fashionable society. The black mask that white men put on was the antithesis of proper character and proper manners. These white faces in black masks were, one might say, their own alter-egos. Having Americans of African origin in the South and in northern cities was a great convenience to white men. The black-white polarity was too dramatic a symbol to ignore. By objectifying one’s horror through blackness one attributed to whiteness a quality of Tightness, but it could not remove the self-doubt that had caused the anxiety. Personal and societal doubt was deep and required continuous 1 sassurance. Yet, if there had been no black men around, white Americans, like their English cousins, might have found distant models to serve. The English, after all, delighted in the American blackface performers; they had their “Little Black Sambo,” their Indian niggers, their African niggers, their Polynesian niggers—all, with slight variations of the same stereotype. But the American whites, with the black man in their own home, so to speak, found themselves with the additional anxiety that their black countryman should not destroy his objectified fantasy. Negroes, in real life as well as on the stage, should not get out of character. If Negroes were men like other men, what then? But as long as everyone knew his role and kept within it, the blackface minstrel was not merely a kind of catharsis but he was also a pleasurable escape into naturalness. It was surely much easier to be a fool—to let oneself go—from behind the mask, from within one’s blackness, than as a white man. It was also easier for the audience to escape into the grotesqueness of a black persona at a circus or on the stage than to identify with an undisciplined white man for whom no such stereotype existed.9 The Negro stereotype and the blackface minstrel provided performer and audience with a way of being themselves—part of themselves at least. Thus the blackface minstrel objectified and therefore created a distance between white men’s normative selves (what they had to be) and their natural selves (what they feared but were fascinated by). With such a creation, one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character. It is not hard to believe that the white performers did find remarkable freedom behind their black masks. When black men put on black masks it was not really a different affectation. After all, American Negroes were no different in their values and expectations than their middle-class, white countrymen. If anything, black Americans in the late nineteenth century, with slavery in their recent past, were more anxious to prove themselves—to achieve—than were whites. And the formula for them was the same as it was for other Americans. Booker T. Washington is only a darker Benjamin Franklin, a poorer Andrew Carnegie. If anything, there was more at stake, for the black man carried not only the burden of self but also that of race. It was thought, and expected, that every individual success was exemplary. By the same token, every failure was not only an individual tragedy but evidence of racial limitation. One’s surrender to appetites—self-indulgence—might thus seem more frightening and guilt-producing, or it might seem inevitable, in the blood so to speak. Thus, Negroes might be more compulsive in their reining the animal within them, or they might be resigned to the inevitable: “We’ll never get anywhere,” or “Black men are more natural; we have more fun.” Whether striving to achieve or surrendering to racial inevitability, whether submitting to “blood” with elation or despair, black men accepted the Protestant Ethic and its terms for achievement. So the black masks that black men wore, placed on stage-externalized, objectified—those very qualities which certified failure in a commercial and industrial society. Black men, like white men, could use the theatrical grotesques as ways of marking distance between themselves and their horror. But since these were racial delineations—white fantasy’s conscription of black men to serve its needs—the problem of maintaining distance for the Negro was crucial and difficult. Bert Williams and George Walker, probably the most talented team of black theatrical performers at the turn of the century, tried to push beyond the limits of the minstrel character. They tried to use the stereotype as an instrumental satire. Or, when this team billed themselves as “Two Real Coons,” they were not portraying themselves or any other Negroes they knew. Rather, they were intending to give style and comic dignity to a fiction that white men had created and fostered and with which black men (on and off stage) conspired, being one of the few public selves that they were permitted. Some black performers attempted to achieve the distance between the stage character and themselves by the very extremities of the exaggeration. Grotesques, themselves, could allow black men, as they did white men, the assurance that the foolishness on stage was not them. Thus Billy Kersands, popular with Negro as well as white audiences around 1911, made himself into a freak entertainer. Claiming to have the largest mouth in the world —“If God ever wanted to make my mouth any bigger, He would have to move my ears”—did a dancing act with two billiard balls in his mouth. And the very popular Ernest Hogan pushed the darky characterization to the limits of unction and denigration. Neither he, nor anyone he could have known, ate watermelon the way his stage character claimed to. Hogan and Kersands prided themselves on playing at its most extreme what the audience wanted. That could be a personal insulation. “You have to be one to know one” goes the common riposte in namecalling games. Much humor, indeed, assumes this, together with the opposite insight that to recognize a fool makes one not a fool any longer; and that is very pleasing. Surely this is true of ethnic humor, whether on or off stage, especially as it is performed by members of the characterized group. For the comic accepts a demeaning characterization of his group, assuming to improve upon it with his claim of authenticity. Thus, he becomes superior because his perspective allows him to judge himself and his people and because his pose places him above even those who had disdain for him to begin with. Such a posture is common to both the professional ethnic humorists and the amateurs who intend merely to amuse others and put them at their ease. Jewish, Negro, Italian, they are as much as saying, “Yes you are right about us, but even you don’t know how right. Let me tell you.” Nor need one be a performer to play that game; the ethnic audience is served as well. To watch a slow-witted blackfaced incompetent on stage, or a Negro who stumbles through foolish predicaments, is at once to recognize an identity and to assume a superiority as viewer and critic. In this regard, there was no difference between a Negro whose anxieties were released through laughter at a blackfaced simpleton who cannot manage his life and a Jew who laughed himself into tears at a “greenhorn’s” incompetences as portrayed on the Yiddish stage. It is all a kind of masochism which converts self-Hatred—through its indulgence—into gratification and the pleasure of self-esteem. But the rub is that the contempt for self and race on which such humor turns must be ever-present to make it work. Lurking beneath the surface of amused accommodation was the uneasiness—“you have to be one to know one”—which might at any moment bubble up, twisting the smile into a grimace of hurt. Truth to tell, it was laughing to keep from crying. The black mask of the minstrel—its most figurative representation of the ethnic stereotype—was a substantive shield protecting more than selfesteem. The mask was a means of survival—only by wearing it in some form could black entertainers find work—and, even more, it was a defense against violence. The veteran comic Tom Fletcher recalled that many of the small southern towns his company performed in were so hostile to Negroes that violence was always threatening, murder seemed in the shadow of white men’s eyes. Signs which warned, “Nigger, Read and Run” chilled the hearts of Negro performers who played there. Yet, they hit upon a way. They would enter such towns in private Pullman cars, which were parked at a siding. Then, with their band, the entertainers would parade from the railroad car to whatever served as the theater; and after the performance, they would strike up the band and parade back to their Pullman. Whatever the number of shows—if there was a matinee or two-day stand—they would march to rousing music or they would not be on the streets of that town. And they seldom had doubt, Fletcher reports, as to what tune would do them the most good. “As soon as all the members of the company were on the ground we would start playing ‘Dixie.’ No matter how many different tunes we had in our band books, we could play that song in any key.”10 It was as if the modus Vivendi depended on the Negroes continuing to play their parts, off stage as well as on. And these black performers knew that their very existence depended on their never pretending to be other than their stage characters. Such an experience is emblematic of the great charade that whites and blacks joined in. The stereotype—the mask— defined the Afro-American as white Americans chose to see him; outside the mask the black man was either invisible or threatening. Negroes, accepting the pretense, wore the mask to move in and out of the white world with safety and profit. Tom Fletcher knew, without understanding, that the magic of the mask would work. He tells of entertaining alumni gatherings for Princeton University. He was barraged with hot-dog buns by the hostile audience in his first appearance in 1902. But Fletcher held his ground, played and sang, and was asked back every year after he had “broken the ice.” He never had trouble playing for white people, once they knew what he could do. What Tom Fletcher describes—finding accommodation within the role that was acceptable to whites—was little different from what other black people were doing throughout American society. The duality of self was everywhere commented on by Negroes. The domestic servant—soul of deference at his employer’s Long Island estate—swung in the Harlem cabarets on weekends; the placid-faced cook broke into shrieks of ecstasy in the store-front church; everyone played a role. Paul Laurence Dunbar had said it: Why should the world be overwise In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us while We wear the mask. And the theme is echoed in the blues: Got one mind for white folks to see, ’nother for what I know is me; he don’t know, he don’t know my mind. But as much as it was a passport into the white man’s consciousness, as much as it was an assurance of safety for that private self behind the mask, it was also a dissembler to one’s own eye. For to feel forced to parade in disguise before men who are hostile to all but their charade cannot but distort the hidden face. There is a danger of corrosion of the self in this pretense, and surely a rending of integrity. How, and when does one call upon the real self to dispel the make-believe and claim humanity and dignity? How could one make it clear that the public self was only a facade that covered a real man or woman? Ernest Hogan, just before his death, told Tom Fletcher of an incident when his characters became confused. Forgetting he was in the Deep South, Hogan went to the wrong (white) box-office to collect money owed to him. He was accosted by a white man; Hogan recalled, he “‘started cursing at me and raised his fist but I beat him to the punch and knocked him down.’” Hogan was smuggled out of the town and remembered,” ‘I didn’t get myself together again until I was in Australia with my own company.’”11 Hogan not only forgot where he was, but more importantly, he forgot who he was. And that is the point of the story—the point that Hogan wanted to make. Because, apocryphal or not, it was meant to assert the reality of that self which, indeed, was most often forgotten. In the later years of his life, Tom Fletcher had come to believe that his characterizations were of authentic Negro “folk.” He saw efforts of “reformers” to eliminate the racial stereotype from show business as simply hurtful to black entertainers. Criticism came from “outsiders” who did not understand. In fact, Fletcher insisted, these men and women who had done darky characterizations for a living, had done their part in changing conditions affecting Negroes: All of us knew what we were up against but we just kept plugging along, minding our own business, doing our work and always letting the other fellow open the conversation rather than forcing ourselves upon him. When the other fellow did the asking, our answers were always direct, and polite. This tended to make him forget a lot of things he had read or heard and to take us as we really were. As a result, season after season we could see barriers being let down, and in a way which would insure that they would not be raised again.12 Doubtless, Tom Fletcher and others who had joined in the charade could answer questions so that the white man would “forget a lot of things he had read or heard,” forget what he feared. The white man could be put at his ease, “to take us as we really were.” At least, so it would appear, but the profound question was never asked and never answered: who were these black men really? It was just possible that the trick had been too perfect; legerdemain had undone itself in a disappearance act where the self had vanished, but also the incantation to call it back again. This was the atmosphere in which a Negro theater would have to survive in the first decades of the twentieth century. James Weldon Johnson was right when he observed that the theatrical Negro was reduced to two voices, comedy and pathos. This convention, too, defined the limits of possibilities. Actually, travesty was the single comic mode in the minstrel tradition. And travesty, broadly speaking, continued to describe the Negro theatrical comedy. Travesty, recall, turns on the disparity between the actor and his costume which thinly disguised pretense. The small girl with her face powdered and rouged, in the high heels, furs, and baubles of her mother; the jester wearing the king’s crown; the peasant in the robes of nobility; transvestites (men in chorus lines, women acting as “toughs”) are classical sources of comedy. To make travesty work, however, the disproportion must be obvious. No matter how she stretches and struts and preens herself, it is impossible for the little girl to be her mother. Knowing that, the audience finds the pretense funny. It is possible to laugh at a jester’s antics as he wears the crown of his king, but were heto have more than the symbol of authority, were he even for a moment to be the actual sovereign that the crown represents, his actions would be something other than comic. So, too, the female impersonator whose maleness is in doubt may be a comedian but his humor will depend on something other than travesty. American Negro humor13 has been mainly travesty, if the term is considered in its most figurative sense. For it is not only clothes and other such costumes which symbolize classes. Language, or even a name, might do. In the South before the Civil War, for instance, slaveholders found a common source of amusement in the naming of their servants. Black butlers or waiters, haphazardly liveried, slow and inefficient (a common complaint), might be named Cicero or Caesar. A small black child, collecting wood for the kitchen, might answer to the name of Pompey or Maceo. Black slaves with such names were walking, living travesties even to those who knew Roman classics imperfectly. Such exaggeration deftly emphasized the right-ness of the servant’s condition. For what distorted mind could place African slaves on a parity with white men, heirs of that grand civilization those Roman names denoted? Lest there be doubt about that august heritage, white Americans had borrowed other names from the Roman republic—“congress,” “senate,” and “republic” itself—these, of course, without humorous intent. On stage, the names given to Negro characters have been important to comedy from the earliest blackfaced minstrel down into the twentieth century. Borrowing names from classical antiquity, from the Old Testament, or from the heroic national past, blackfaced comics pranced about drawing laughter every time their names were spoken. Sometimes the pretentiousness of the names was simply due to the pomposity of sound. Rastus is such a name, but also Old Testament names such as Rufus, Amos, and Moses had the same effect. So common, as humorous characterizations of Negroes, did these names become, connoting the stage personality more readily than the historical character, that they became embarrassments for genuine bearers and almost fell out of use among Afro-Americans. Bert Williams and George Walker, with characteristic inventiveness, went beyond simple travesty in their stage names. In Dahomey, for instance, they played private detectives Shylock Homestead and Rareback Pinkerton respectively. In the same play, the president of the Dahomey Colonization Society carried a name, Cicero Lightfoot, which rested as much on wellknown southern aristocracy as on classical Rome. Surely, the point was made when Rosetta Lightfoot (Mrs. George Walker) sang “I Want To Be a Real Lady.” Language—a symbol of civilization and social class—was another cloak of travesty for the stage Negro. The use, or misuse, of ponderous latinate words, the stiff, formal, pompous diction of the minstrels’ interlocutor (that name itself, indeed) served the pretense and exposed it all at once. The audience was asked to look at blackfaced performers (Ethiopian Delineators as they sometimes called themselves) occasionally pretending to be civilized, and they laughed because the frequent malapropisms and misunderstandings made the pretense ludicrous. The language of the minstrel was, throughout, the language of social pretense. The first thing that happened, in fact, was that all the blackfaced characters were called “Gentlemen,” and told to be seated. The conundrums and the repartee that flowed between the interlocutor and the end men were almost wholly plays on words, figures of speech, etc. Mr. Interlocutor might ask Mr. Bones if a sentimental ballad just sung had not touched him. Mr. Bones would give a series of answers, always missing Interlocutor’s specific metaphorical use of touch. “The man next to me touched me, and I’ll hit him if he does it again.” “Tambo touched me for five dollars, and he’d better pay me back.” Interlocutor would then shift to other sentimental figures—to be moved, to have a heart—with the apparent hope that Bones would somehow catch his meaning. But, of course, Bones would always lead him through intricate verbal frolics, never touching the point, and leaving the audience in stitches while Mr. Interlocutor shrugged with exasperation and relief as the next musical number started. The minstrel tradition always included a parody of formal oratory, again pointing up the importance of language. From the very first of his minstrel performances, Dan Emmett included long disquisitions on a collection of topical, political, and religious subjects. A man in the grotesque of blackface make-up would stand center-stage, and, with the most serious expression and intent, deliver a speech which might toss together the Mexican War, women’s dress styles, and the need for sound leadership in Washington. And despite the posture of seriousness, the oration would be laden with all of the mala-propisms and jarring collision of images that would at once emphasize the distortion, and ridicule the genuine political or clerical orator. This form of humor, too, was quite traditional in American culture, reaching into the backwoods, Davy Crockett tradition. Americans had always seemed to find great amusement in the elegance and inflation of language and posture. And here, too, was something of travesty, for the language and speech of great oration coming from the mouth of a blackfaced minstrel was humorous in its disproportion.14 Significantly, much of American oratory in the early years of the nineteenth century came very close to self-ridicule when it was most serious. Orators like Daniel Webster were using speech and formal rhetoric to clothe their meaning (as well as their personalities) in greatness. The long rhetorical periods, the flourish of elegant figures were stylistic emblems of grandeur—put-on in republican pretense—just as those pretentious names of senator, congressman, and president lifted quite ordinary men out of the pedestrian. Much was in doubt in a new republic that was trying to live the greatness of its idealism. Often it was language, posture, pretense that stood for the difference between the conventionality of everyday political life and the epoch-making (nation-making) challenge of their historical moment— that stood for the difference between the common-man origins which everyone jealously remembered and the statesmanlike postures politicians anxiously assumed. Oratorical style made the difference. Daniel Webster, that Yankee who was born in rustic New Hampshire and lived to serve New England banking and textile interests, found it important to sound like a Roman orator sounded. He had the language and the style to make tariffs and most mundane selfish interests sound grand and monumental. Oratory for Americans was like the names they chose to give their political institutions and the Greek columns they placed on their banks and other public buildings, costumes for greatness. Parodies of Webster’s speech in blackface not only ridiculed the posturing of the political orator but the fantastic pretense of black men playing the role of statesmen. The minstrel orator could satirize current events through the assumed ridiculousness of black pretense. The most popular speech of Byron Christy of the famous Christy Minstrels was a direct parody of Daniel Webster’s Seventh of March speech which supported the Compromise of 1850: What do de folks mean talkin’ ‘bout de Norf and de Souf? Do dey want to separate us from our brederin in de sun-shiney Souf? Do dey? Eh? umph? Do dese people (whats roamin’ round like hungry lions seekin’ whom dey may devour) want more? Eh? umph? It dey do let ‘em hab New Jersey, Hardscrable, or—or—or any other man. Do dese people want to tear up dat magnificent and mag-niglorious American flag what’s ravelin’ out in de breezes ob de atmosphere on de top ob de St. Nicholas Hotel? Eh? umph? Do dey want to strip it up and gib de stars to de Souf, and de stripes to de Norf? I answer you in clarion tones dat I hope may be heard from de risin’ place ob de sun to de cheer in which he sets down. Dey can’t do it, nor—nor any other man.15 Of course, often the travesty of the minstrel and his heirs was more direct, less figurative. Blackfaced characters, dressed as policemen, businessmen, politicians, by the 1920s had become standard material for stage comedy. The humor always depended on the disparity between the black man and the costume he wore as much as on the comic situation itself. Present-day popular comedy has revived this kind of travesty in television performances of “Pigmeat” Markham (an old trooper, whose career goes back into the active days of Tom Fletcher) and his recording success of “Here Comes de Judge.” It would seem that the “camp” vogue has discovered a new humor in a parody on a parody. But the cultural phenomenon of the minstrel travesty reaches deep into the racial pathology of Americans. For what white men in blackface objectified on stage was the conceptualization of the Negro as naturally foolish in roles that white men envisioned themselves playing in real life. A black man as mayor, senator, policemen, or clergyman was utter fantasy. But more, one step beyond the backwoodsman, the black man as human was fantasy too; or so it would seem from the performance of the theatrical Negro.16 Lest we ignore the tragic aspect of this psychology, we should remember that the compulsive racism in this travesty suggests potential crisis in white men’s identity. His own feasibility as human, eloquent, and grand depended on the farce. The white common man, whatever his distance from power, could sense his belonging to a civilized, democratic society to the degree that he could see the Negro as ludicrous in it. Notably, the white consensus about the tragedy of Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War (a concensus of historians, novelists, and journalists, which no amount of contradictory scholarship has managed to destroy) has it that radical Republicans forced upon southern society that very travesty which had been unthinkable—Negro rule. The sin was to have imposed, in real life, what because of its absurdity was comic on stage. One need only recall D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) to understand the power of the minstrel myth. All of the white men in blackface who played in that film were merely playing minstrel types. It would have been funny to those white audiences had it not been distorting real history and had it not provoked horrible fantasies about the political future of northern communities following the migration of southern blacks. Reconstruction was simply the other side of the minstrel coin. Nor were black men free of the effects of travesty and the minstrel myth. Intellectual blacks were horrified at Marcus “Aurelius” Garvey17 in the 1920s (his uniforms, titles, bombastic rhetoric, and seemingly wild fantasies about Africa) precisely because they saw him through the eyes “of others, who looked on in amused contempt and pity.” Men like DuBois saw Garvey as a minstrel; perhaps white men did too. One further characteristic of travesty will complete this consideration of the theatrical Negro as part of American popular culture. So far, it has only been suggested that travesty, aside from keeping the pretender in his place, may be a vehicle for social satire of the audience’s betters. That is clearly within this comic mode. For as the child preens and postures like an adult, and as the jester swaggers and bellows like the king, each, through exaggeration, is discovering the latent pretense and assumption of those they mimic. So, travesty often cuts both ways, making comment on the higher as well as lower order. This is easy enough to see in the Jim Dandy character. Always a stable part of the minstrel, he was an obvious travesty of urban Negro elegance, always in his “long-tailed blue.” He apparently had his real-life model. For, one traveler recorded seeing in Boston a black dandy “lounging down the street. He was a Sable Count d’Orsay. His toilet was the most elaborately recherche you can imagine. He seemed intensely and harmlessly happy in his coat and waistcoat, of the finest possible materials; and the careful carelessness of the adjustment of the wool [hair] and hat was not readily to be surpassed.”18 The ultra-elegant, almost effeminate Jim Dandy was as much a ridicule of the pretensions of the gentleman of fashion, particularly the parvenu, as he was of the urban Negro. Frank Du-mont, the famous Philadelphia white man who did blackfaced minstrels, exposed the dual satire of his performances. Demonstrating to a reporter his costuming technique, dressed finally in white ruffled collar and cuffs, bright blue velvet pants, and red velvet jacket, Dumont said with a grand gesture, “This is very genteel, dressy and in keeping with minstrelsy. It is also full evening dress as adopted by the ‘Four Hundred,’ so you see we are ‘in it’ so to speak.”19 It was this possible, yet incredible, juxtaposition that provided the broad format of theatrical Negro humor. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, upper class Americans were very vulnerable to ridicule. Many who had only recently acquired wealth tried, through conspicuous consumption and borrowed taste, to draw social distinctions which would define them as the American aristocracy. The very social fluidity that had permitted their rise made the task difficult; there was little satisfaction in an aristocracy based on money alone. Therefore, as the century came to a close, American society (especially New York City) witnessed the most grandiloquent spectacles, orchestrated by impresarios like Ward McAllister. Social distinction needed promotion and show.20 Without the “families” of European society, the Americans had to create an elite as they went along; Ward McAllister set himself that task for New York. During the flush and expansive 1880s and 1890s, New York society defined itself by giving parties of fashion and dinners of exquisite (mainly expensive) taste. The social events were patterned, as much as they could be, after English society. But social definition rested on public acceptance; people had to know what was going on, not merely those playing the game but the general public as well. McAllister’s genius (as well as his downfall) was in his willingness to exploit popular interest in the upper classes by holding press conferences and providing news for society pages. Thus, he gave public definition to the American aristocracy (according to his design) by making their antics a spectacle. It was from McAllister that a New York Tribune reporter mined the gold of the Four Hundred label. “Why, there are only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease. See the point? . . . When we give a large ball like the last New Year’s ball for 800 guests, we go outside of the exclusive fashionable set, and invite professional men, doctors, lawyers, editors, artists and the like.”21 The label stuck. The general public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for this kind of social news. Society was doing all that it could to prove itself fashionable with grand balls and grander dinner parties. And everything was given great coverage by the press, so that it would not be too much to say that “society” was on stage. The most notorious of the social displays was the Bradley Martin fancy dress ball of February 10, 1897. Dixon Wecter, writing about the event long after, estimated it cost $369,200 by the time it was over. The Waldorf Hotel had to be boarded up to keep the curious from looking in. Couturiers in New York and Paris were engaged for months designing costumes from the Renaissance or the Elizabethan period, or following the styles of Van Dyck, Madame Pompadour, or Marie Antoinette. Mrs. Bradley Martin herself came as Mary Queen of Scots. She wore “a bodice of black velvet lined with cerise satin, an overdress opened over a white satin petticoat, a richly jewelled stomacher, and a pointed cap of silver, together with a massive ruby necklace worn by Marie Antoinette and a cluster of diamond grapes which had belonged to Louis XIV.” Mr. Bradley Martin came as Louis XV. But probably August Belmont outdid the men in a full suit of steel armor inlaid with gold which cost him $10,000. Excitement was kept high when there were reports of crises: James Van Alen decided that mourning a relative’s death would prevent his dancing the quadrille dhonneur “which had been rehearsing for days at Mrs. Astor’s under the scrutiny of Professor Karl Marwig.” But all the problems of production seemed minor; the Ball came off as scheduled and very much as planned. It was such a success, indeed, that the Bradley Martins removed themselves permanently to England under the pressure of the notoriety that followed.22 Surely, there was no greater travesty, on or off stage, than the Bradley Martin ball. I suspect that it was this quality that excited the public interest and amusement. Yet, that affair was only an exaggeration of what “society” had been doing since the Civil War. Significantly, there are several parallels between these social functions and the minstrel theater: the costuming, the pretense, the excess, and the gluttony. And like the minstrel, the public performance of “society” was important. Whereas Ernest Hogan made public the connoisseur techniques of watermelon eating—the right sound when thumped, the right smell, the right way to savor it—Ward McAllister was no less public in his expertness about the mouth-watering, lip-smacking delicacies at Delmonico’s. It was more a difference in class than style. Like the minstrels, the upper classes had abandoned some of the most compulsive features of the Protestant Ethic. So when looking at “society” and the minstrels in the 1880s and 1890s, they seem to be parodies of one another. At least, “society’s” pretenses are no less grotesque than those of the blackfaced minstrels, and it seems to me more than likely that the lower middle-class white audiences made the connection. Frank Dumont’s expansive association of minstrelsy and the Four Hundred reveals a dimension of the minstrel as social commentary. Certainly, the blackface minstrels’ origins in the Yankee Doodle and Mike Fink characters would support such an idea and help to explain the contagious popularity of this theatrical form. The fad of the Cakewalk is just another facet of the same idea. This dance was the finale of Sam T. Jack’s Creole Show (1890), which was the first notable instance of its performance on stage. It became something of a craze for the remainder of the decade. All Negro shows featured the dance; towns and cities throughout the country had Cakewalk contests. Madison Square Garden, indeed, held the annual national championship, where very large prizes were given, and the top performers could be assured of a professional theatrical future. The traditional explanation of the origins of the dance tell of slaves prancing before the “big house” on Christmas or similar holidays to win the prize—a cake. There is doubtless some truth to this—such dances probably did occur on large plantations—but the dance of the 1890s is related only in name and idea. The Cakewalk featured Negro couples in fancy dress in large numbers (50 to 60 couples at Madison Square Garden). The couples pranced and strutted and twirled to lively music. It was spectacular. The winners were those who had style, flashiness of manner, elegance of costume, and could execute intricate figures and strutting steps to the rousing music. Whatever the dance’s origins, surely in the 1890s, this dance parodied the quadrille d’honneur that climaxed the fancy dressed balls of the Four Hundred, as the Cakewalk climaxed the minstrel show. And the contemporaries did not miss this point. For the Cakewalk was being done by “society,” and reported on the society pages of the daily press. Bert Williams and George Walker made advertising capital out of a report that William K. Vanderbilt had done the Cakewalk at a ball. With due publicity, the comedians, “dressed a point or two above the height of fashion,” left a letter at Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion as a formal challenge to a “cake-walking match.” Their letter placed the stakes at $50 because, as Williams said, “It’s a shame to take the money.” Of course, the match never came off, but an appropriate point was made. They were, after all, performers on a public stage—all pretenders.23 Americans were No-Man and Everyman; the newness and the openness of society created its special anxieties. White men’s selves depended on blacks being less than men; the wholeness of the black person too often rested on his accepting that white judgment and achieving applause through self-denial and self-depreciation. But real achievement