What the eye hears, p.15
What the Eye Hears, page 15
After the Reverend died, in 1901, Mabel took over. When the troupe played Birmingham in 1904, the Freeman noted two facts indicative of Mabel’s mettle: first that she was the only colored woman managing her own company, second that it was the first time in the history of Birmingham that colored people had been allowed seats in the dress circle and parquet. In 1911, the Sisters split, and it was under the name Bert Whitman that Alberta developed her strutting skills as a male impersonator. One of the kids with Mabel was a ten-year-old named Aaron Palmer, whom the press followed Mabel’s lead in dubbing the next George Walker. One of Alberta’s Three Sunbeams was the fourth Whitman Sister, a “rompish” adopted girl named Alice whom the Freeman rated the best girl buck dancer. By 1914, the Whitmans were reunited and about to begin two decades as perennial box-office favorites, two decades of notices in the black press judging theirs the greatest of companies. By 1919, Alice and Aaron had a child of their own. His name was Albert, though everyone called him Pops. He wasn’t four years old before he was stopping the show.
BLACKS IN WHITE VAUDEVILLE
On a Friday afternoon in 1912, an audience of record-breaking size gathered in a Philadelphia theater to witness a contest between Ginger Jack Wiggins and King Rastus Brown. Brown was the favorite, monarch of the East. It was announced in the Freeman that he had canceled engagements in order to stop the crowing of this upstart from the South. He went first, wearing a triumphant smile for all six minutes. In the end, though, it was Wiggins’s name the Philadelphia public screamed as the winner of the world championship and fifty bucks.
King Rastus did not relinquish his sovereign title, but then he and Wiggins moved mostly in different circles, geographically and otherwise. Though Brown was brown-skinned, he danced in white vaudeville, billed as the Chocolate Drop or the Lively Coon. “The white people all say he is a wonder,” reported the Freeman in 1909. Yet it was among black dancers that Rastus would be remembered. Questioned in the 1960s, they described a thin man who wore a derby, smoked long cigars, and loved his liquor. His endurance was as legendary as his imaginative fecundity: he could keep up his buck dancing for hours without repeating a step. Willie Glenn, half of a blacks-in-blackface team that toured the Keith-Albee circuit, recalled: “He could imitate anything, whatever the audience called for: a train, a drunk, different nationalities—Irish, Dutch, Jewish, Scottish. Then he’d say ‘Now I’ll go for myself’ and top them all.”
Since the days of Juba, blacks in otherwise white productions had become much more common. “The stage is the only profession open to the negro in which he has equal opportunity with the whites,” asserted the Kansas City Star in 1901. Vaudeville might just have been the most integrated profession in America, though it was usually assumed that one black act on any white bill was enough. The pay, while generally below the rates offered white acts, far surpassed the going wages in almost any other profession open to blacks; the highest-paid black acts pulled down figures that most white Americans could only dream of.
Probably the greatest number of blacks entered white vaudeville as children. A female singer, usually white, would surround herself with a few black kids, usually boys, who would sing and dance and unfailingly please the audience with their adorableness. In showbiz lingo, these were pickaninnies or “picks,” and they were “insurance.” They never flopped. Whether dressed as street urchins or done up in opera hats and tuxedo jackets, they were an advertised part of the show: Mayme Remington and Her Picks, Mattie Phillips and Her Jungle Kids, Naomi Thompson’s Brazilian Nuts. The picks normally put together their own numbers, and they didn’t earn much, but the job beat being an assistant in a medicine show.
Around 1908, ten-year-old Willie Covan, along with five other kids, hooked up with the singer Cosie Smith and headed for California, dreaming of orange groves. In Roundup, Montana, they performed for a theaterful of cowboys. “They had never seen coloreds before,” Covan remembered. “The cowboys didn’t care nothing about no prejudice. They loved the dancin’.” Afterward, a young fan took them to a saloon outside of town. “We tap danced like crazy. And they started throwin’ money. We danced and we danced, and we picked up that money and stuffed it into our pockets.” Then, along with the coins, came bullets. “They shot into the ground, and laughed, so we laughed too and danced like they told us to.” Outside later, the boys discovered that the coins were gold. Roundup was a mining town. In one evening, Willie and his friends had made eleven hundred dollars, probably more than their parents could make in a year.
Covan was born in Atlanta, but by the time he was six his family had moved to Chicago, joining the tens of thousands of blacks migrating north during these years, seeking opportunity and fleeing Jim Crow. A city boy, he would claim he had learned to dance by listening to the rhythm of streetcars. The only lessons he would admit to were informal tutorials by Ida Forsyne’s son, who had only one good leg and was known as Friendless George. In 1915, Willie was seventeen and ready to be recognized. When In Old Kentucky came to Chicago, he signed up for the dance contest, which drew the best from as far as Cleveland and Detroit. As was now traditional, judges were stationed on the stage and underneath it; a banjo player plunked stop-time through each contestant’s allotted minute. Covan got lucky, drawing number eight, which gave him an opportunity to survey the competition ahead of him. He realized two things: everyone started with a time step, and a time step wasted time. When his turn came, he jumped right in with his fanciest stuff. He won the hundred-dollar prize, and his friends carried him home on their shoulders. “Everybody knew I was the greatest dancer in Chicago!”
Among those fancy steps were wings, a class of moves that in their simplest form work like this: Perched on one leg, the dancer jumps up, but as he takes off, he scrapes the outer edge of his jumping shoe, sending that leg off to the side as his body continues upward; while still airborne, he pulls the leg in and strikes the ground one more time before landing. That’s three sounds in total: scrape, tap, land. The whole thing usually lasts a second or less, and calibrating the force of the jump requires musical timing. Many other fancy steps were “flash” steps—rhythmic but not necessarily rhythm-producing. Flash steps, more acrobatic, were helpful for a big finish or for whenever the band drowned out taps. What’s special about a wing is that it’s a cross between a flash step and a tap step. It’s a jump that makes noise. The initial scrape adds another sound to the tap dancer’s palette, longer than a tap, raspy or whooshing. Wings can be done with both feet—synchronized as three sounds or separated into six—or in alternation, with the wing launching off one leg and landing on the other. The leg that isn’t winging is free to swing or kick or strike the floor from multiple directions. Visually exciting variations emerged: the Pump, the Pendulum, the Saw, the Fly. And the winging leg itself could pack in more sounds between scrape and landing. Once there was a three-tap wing, four- and five-tap wings weren’t far behind.
Covan developed other tricks. A highlight of his act with his brother Dewey was Willie’s execution of the Double Around the World, a step he had probably adapted from Russian dancers then prevalent on vaudeville stages. To pull off an Around the World, a squatting dancer swings one leg in a circle parallel to the floor, periodically shifting his weight to his hands and raising his squatting leg to let the circling one pass underneath; if the dancer starts alternating legs, he’s doing the Double. During a matinee in 1917, the floor was slick, and the band kept accelerating. After they got offstage, Dewey turned to his brother and said, “You were doing it with no hands.” Willie did not believe him. Nevertheless, the next time they performed, Willie concentrated hard and did it again. And the next time that the brothers were on Thirty-first Street and State, the corner where black dancers in Chicago gathered to challenge one another, Dewey started bragging. Bets flew down. Willie was wearing a brand-new, sixty-five-dollar suit, and as he changed the impossible to the possible, he cut his pants at the knee. “It was worth it,” he remembered, even though he won only twenty bucks.
Covan would never forget how, around this time, he was given a pair of wooden shoes by the dancer he considered the best, King Rastus Brown. King Rastus didn’t cut his pants doing flash steps, and he wasn’t much of a comedian, either. Through the twenties, when King Rastus and Jack Wiggins could be seen only on the black circuits, Covan rose on the white ones. Yet he felt restricted, too. As an old man, he would tell about how he and his partner had stopped the show at the Palace in the early twenties, and got fired for being too good, and then moved to the Hippodrome, only to have the same thing happen, because the only spot for an act as good as his was second-to-closing and that spot was never ceded to a colored act. The story is partially verifiable in newspaper records, but the reasoning is still a bit off. It was possible for a colored act to play next-to-closing. If Covan wanted a role model for how a black tap dancer could be a headliner on the white circuit, one was readily at hand.
THE DARK CLOUD OF JOY
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1878. By the time he was seven, both of his parents had died. He and his younger brother moved in with their grandmother, who told them stories from her life as a slave. Robinson brought in money by shining shoes, and he danced in the street for pennies, often in front of the theater where George Primrose’s minstrel shows played. Robinson would later tell white reporters that Primrose had inspired him to become a dancer.
The dancing didn’t go over well with Robinson’s Baptist grandmother. She also disapproved of the boy’s petty thievery. He learned fast that he could dance and charm his way out of punishment, and it is remarkable, even considering his poverty, how many early Robinson stories involve theft. One of many accounts of the origin of his nickname (which might also be a Southern word for troublemaker or for “happy-go-lucky”) traces it to a child’s mispronunciation of Mr. Boujasson, owner of a Richmond haberdashery from which the young Robinson stole a hat. As for his given name, Luther, Robinson resented how other kids ridiculed him about it, so he beat up his younger brother, Bill, and took that name for himself. He forced his brother to go by Percy. All the misbehavior may have been too much for their grandmother, since she went to court to have the boys taken out of her custody. For a while, they lived with the presiding judge, but Robinson had other ideas. He had met a white boy named Lemuel Toney, who, dreaming of minstrel glory, had worked up a blackface act and needed a pickaninny. The interracial pair hopped a freight train and lit out for the nation’s capital.
Toney, discovered by George Primrose, took the stage name Eddie Leonard and was on his way to becoming one of the last stars of minstrelsy. He helped Robinson get work as a pick in The South Before the War. It was at this time, according to his fellow performer Tom Fletcher, that Robinson began to notice how each of the top dancers had a style. He started to do impressions, and out of those impressions he began to forge his own dance. Robinson traveled with the show and similar ones for a long time, not taking any of it as seriously as his poolroom activities. In after years, he would show reporters knife and razor scars from the period. During the Spanish-American War, he said, he served as a drummer in a colored regiment and was shot in the knee in a dance hall in North Carolina. The gunman was his unit’s second lieutenant. “I think he was cleaning his gun,” Robinson later told The New Yorker’s St. Clair McKelway. When Robinson showed McKelway the scar from the bullet and the lack of a corresponding exit wound, McKelway came to a simple conclusion: “The bullet must be somewhere inside.”
Robinson became a regular in the New York sporting clubs where black entertainers congregated. He was known for his comical singing—that is, until In Old Kentucky came to town and he won the buck-and-wing contest. His big break came when he was offered a job with Cooper and Bailey, a black vaudevillian duo. Cooper considered Bailey an unreliable drunk, so he hired Robinson as a replacement. In a derby and a tutu, Robinson played the fool to Cooper’s straight man, and he did not dance much at first. He imitated a mosquito by blowing air through his lips, and he and Cooper amused audiences with their comic arguments and dialect numbers such as “Oiy Oiy Yoi.” Since Cooper and Bailey had been advertised, not Cooper and Robinson, Robinson didn’t perform under his own name for the first six months. He was working, though, and in the big time.
That’s where he stayed, for more than a decade, honing his skills in show after show, town after town. When he and Cooper rolled into Denver in 1912, the Tribune found them the best thing on the bill:
The men, who are honest to goodness Ethiopians, not burnt cork “make-believers,” have that provoking flavor of real down Southern “darky” about them, which with homemade maple syrup is fast becoming a thing of the past. Cheap imitations have spoiled both. Both Cooper and Robinson are the genuine article and their chuckling guffaws, pigeon wing steps and cachinnating songs are a real vaudeville entertainment.
That same year, the Freeman cited the Cooper-Robinson act as a model that all colored performers should follow: clean, clever, up-to-date. “The negro gets a fair deal in modern vaudeville,” Cooper told the Duluth News-Tribune, citing vaudeville as the one business where blacks had an advantage: “My partner and I seem to be able to dance to ragtime and to sing ragtime in a way that few white dancers or singers can.”
Onstage, Robinson was a consummate professional. Offstage, he would draw both his partner’s pay and his own and use the money to gamble. One time, he took a pool cue to a policeman’s head. That predicament he talked his way through, but Cooper had to bail him out of trouble too often. This may have been why the act split up, and reunited, and split up again, though one of Cooper’s later partners cited another cause for the final breakup: Cooper’s marriage to a white woman. During the following decade, Cooper played the black circuits exclusively.
Whatever the reason, Robinson was on his own. He found help in Marty Forkins, a brash Irish-American manager from Chicago. Forkins’s wife, Rae Samuels, herself a successful vaudevillian, had seen something in Robinson: “Bo had that personality,” she recalled. “He could take the toughest audience in the world and take them in his hand and put them in his hip pocket.” Over the next years, Forkins and Robinson worked his solo act up the ladders of the Keith and Orpheum circuits. Before long, Bojangles was at the Palace in the number two spot. In lesser venues, he played next-to-closing, his act now an expansive eighteen minutes. Even when he wasn’t the headliner, reviewers often treated him as if he were. In 1922, the Los Angeles Daily Times could write assuredly, “Everybody must know Bill Robinson by this time.”
At the Grand in Chicago, he was billed as “The Black Daffydill: A Cloudy Spasm of Song, Dance and Fun.” On most marquees, he was “The Dark Cloud of Joy.” White critics habitually remarked on his flashing teeth and rolling eyes. They admired the “exceptional artistry” of his dancing, his perfect rhythm, but they also loved his imitation of a man on a pogo stick. The magazine The Dance described him as “the most efficient buck dancing machine on stage,” yet also took care to emphasize “that rare spirit of care-free abandon and sky-larking zest for which his race is noted.”
Louis Armstrong noted something else. In 1922, just after the young trumpeter moved from New Orleans to Chicago and just before he almost single-handedly transformed jazz into a soloist’s art, Armstrong caught Robinson’s act. What struck him first was how the dancer was dressed: “That man was so sharp he was bleeding.” In his dressing room, Robinson kept his suits spaced one inch apart, with matching shoes underneath. His favorite indoor sport, his wife once reported, was brushing his clothes with a whisk broom. For each performance, he changed outfits, and he always kept a towel in the wings so the audience wouldn’t see him sweat. During the appearance Armstrong attended, Robinson had to wait long minutes for the applause to die down after his entrance—applause for being Bill Robinson. Then the dancer looked up at the lighting booth and said, “Give me a light, my color,” and all the lights went out. The audience exploded in laughter, the kid from New Orleans loudest of all: “I hadn’t heard anything like that before.” The young trumpeter shared the crowd’s joy in Robinson’s jokes and mosquito imitations. “Every move,” Armstrong remembered, “was a beautiful picture.” Robinson was as dark-skinned as he was, and that meant something. So did the phrase Armstrong later chose to express what he was thinking as he watched Robinson that day in 1922: “Wow, what an artist.”
There was more to Robinson’s act than carefree abandon. A key part of it originated back in 1918, when Robinson saw some friends in the audience at the Palace and danced down the stairs to greet them. Thus was his stair dance born, or so he said sometimes. Other times, he said it came to him while he was dreaming of a different palace, in England. In that dream, he stood at the bottom of a staircase, waiting to be knighted. “I didn’t like the idea of just walking up,” he recalled, “so I thought I’d dance up. I danced up the stairs to the throne, got my badge, and danced right down again.” He said that his best steps always came to him in dreams. These stories are probably apocryphal, which isn’t to say that they hold no truth. Professional black and white dancers had been clogging on stairs since at least the 1880s. King Rastus Brown claimed that Robinson stole the idea from him, though Brown almost certainly stole it from somebody else. Notwithstanding such antecedents, Robinson was viciously possessive. There’s many a tale about what he did to those who dared use stairs: stop the act mid-performance, slap the offender, pull out a pistol. Once, when the dancer Eddie Rector replaced him in a show, Robinson sent him a cablegram warning him not to do the stair dance, on penalty of death. His effort to protect his claim was largely futile. When he attempted to secure a patent on the stair routine, the U.S. Patent Office denied the application.
