What the eye hears, p.9
What the Eye Hears, page 9
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In his 1885 memoir, Isaac Williams would attest that, compared with his recollection of the breakdown back when he was a slave, the many minstrel shows he had seen were “as a counterfeit bill to a genuine one.” The analogy was common, and though many of the people who denied minstrel authenticity offered definitions of genuine negritude that were at least as troubling as any minstrel caricature, it’s probably safe to take Willams’s judgment at face value. It’s likely that minstrel mimicry left out subtle watermarks. That would be true of many later imitations.
In any case, identifying the African-American roots of minstrelsy only underlines what’s most unsettling about minstrelsy’s origin stories. The veracity of those stories is highly doubtful, yet the myths resonate because they are parables of appropriation—tales of stolen steps. They articulate guilt, or at least unease, about what whites have taken from blacks.
For early commentators, the standard explanation of minstrelsy’s popularity was that it was fun and cheap. Since the 1960s, writers have indulged in all manner of speculation into the psychology of the minstrels and their audience, much of it facile and reductive. For a cultural theorist, minstrelsy is a feast and a Rorschach test. At first glance, it can appear to be simple racial denigration, but the more you look, the less simple it seems.
In T. D. Rice’s farces, which minstrels performed into the 1850s, wily blacks invariably outwit white authority figures. During the “nullification crisis” of 1832, a foretaste of secessionist impulses, it was Jim Crow who suggested that if fighting broke out, the blacks might rise, “For deir wish for freedom / Is shining in deir eyes.” In Britain, he commended his hosts on their recent abolition of slavery. More coyly, back home he sang:
Now my brodder niggers
I do not tink it right
Dat you should laff at dem
Who happen to be white
Kase it dere misfortune
And dey’d spend ebery dollar
If dey could only be
Gentlemen ob color
It almost break my heart
To see dem envy me
And from my soul I wish dem
Full as brack as we
How much of this comedic inversion was seriously subversive, how much naughty provocation? Who is being envied, who laughed at? Who addressed, who included? Solid answers are inaccessible. Everything depends upon tone, attitude, body language. The evidence of how Rice’s mostly underclass public responded is limited to reports that he was immensely popular, that people laughed. If coded language was designed to fool hostile critics, it seems to have worked. But to fixate on the dialect or the word nigger and rest the case on minstrelsy as racial insult is to risk being as obtuse as those who missed the mockery in slave songs and dance.
Upsetting elites was uncontestably on the agenda. Acting black was a sure method for the proles Tambo and Bones to stick it to the stuffy Interlocutor, for young men to thumb their noses at middle-class moralizing. In turn, the guardians of refined taste looked down their noses at what they classed as low, common, vulgar trash. Elites found minstrelsy offensive, and not out of concern for the dignity of blacks. The sublimated aggression of black humor—mocking ’em every step—might have served as a model for how to make fun of those who have power over you: wear a mask. But just how deep the identification went is part of what the mask hides from historical inquiry.
Most often, blacks were the vehicle, not the target. Much satire was directed against European culture. Minstrelsy of the forties and fifties offered as many parodies of particular European operas, plays, and performers as it did plantation scenes. Minstrels worked up Ethiopian pas de deux and polkas. An 1840 playbill announced that William Whitlock would “jump, dance, and knock his heels in a way dat Mademoiselle Fanny Elssler neber did, neber can and neber will do.” The Viennese ballerina, then on tour in New York, adored by the upper crust and raking in huge sums, was irresistible prey for local boys. How better to bring down to size an embodiment of European high culture than for John Diamond to portray Elssler or Zoloe Zelica Taglioni-rina engaged in a Grand Trial Dance during “La Bayadere in Ole Kentuck”?
Class attitudes overlapped with nationalist sentiment. Americans were stung by European charges that the former colonies had developed no culture of their own. This anxiety courses through a century’s worth of commentary embracing minstrelsy as the only distinctively American contribution to theater and music. Minstrels made that claim for themselves, jigging around their role as middlemen, translators, thieves. What seems indisputable now—the disproportionate and defining influence of African-Americans upon American culture—was then a truth that could be told only slant, by white men in blackface.
In “Africanizing” European music, minstrels were Americanizing it, giving it American rhythm, attitude, style. Blacking up could serve as a form of cultural naturalization. That’s the alchemy it worked for the increasing numbers of minstrels who were first- or second-generation Irish-Americans. The stage was an arena where immigrant Irish could grapple for a higher place in America’s racial hierarchy; they could become more American by acting Negro, more white by blacking up. (That’s the rub of the pun, which appeared in Yankee Doodle in 1846, tagging “Pat Juba” as an “Irish-American” dance.) Many minstrels played it straight, if still under cork, sincerely aspiring to excellence on European terms, an aspiration bound up with social class. The tension between the respectable Interlocutor and the rowdy end men was more than comedy; on playbills, the paired portraits of minstrels in and out of blackface bespoke a desire to have it both ways. As early as 1854, the snooty New York Musical Review was gloating over the demise of Negro Minstrelsy through a “bleaching process,” and though the obituary was premature, the metaphoric cause of death showed the entwinement of class and color.
In dance, the bleach seems to have suffused more slowly. Aspiration would influence style, but this was counterbalanced by the exigencies of competition, the skill and speed and endurance displayed in Grand Trial Matches and valued by the culture of sporting and wagers. Dancing stayed low, with funny steps and gestures, and the “India rubber elasticity” attributed to Matt Peel’s Virginia breakdown. It may also be that there was an alternative channel in cross-dressing, which was plentiful in minstrelsy. As much as the wench dancers played for laughs, they were also praised for ease and grace. Perhaps the cross-dressing, misogynistic on its surface, was another licensing disguise, like blackface, an escape from the kinetic confines of laboring-class masculinity.
In short, blackface minstrelsy was and was not about black people. The humor was usually about something else: hypocrisy, pretension, infidelity, shrewish wives. It was irreverence, puns, slapstick, nonsense—the imperishable staples of comedy, especially the American variety. The costume and the darky dialect were sometimes integral to this, sometimes incidental. When minstrelsy did turn directly to the subject of slave life, slave characters tended to get the best of their masters through cunning shows of stupidity. A few songs implied sexual exploitation and brutality, but the minstrels’ preferred picture was singing and dancing, holidays, an escape from work, the kind of fun worth corking up for.
It’s possible to view this portrayal as a justification of slavery. Undoubtedly, some people did. And that possibility was heightened by a nostalgia that arose as the Civil War loomed, troupes of 1857 peddling the old-fashioned minstrelsy of 1842. In the songs that Stephen Foster wrote at mid-century, compositions that would spread wide and sink deep, the sentimentalism of parlor songs found expression in a slave’s longing for the old folks on the old plantation, rhetoric that fixed plantation life in a timeless past. As minstrelsy persisted and performers modeled their imitations on earlier performers, the conventions hardened and the jokes went stale. The slippery sass and sarcasm of Rice’s tricksters seem to have receded as the stakes turned bloodier.
This was the context for the development of one of tap’s ancestral dances: the Essence of Old Virginia. Dan Bryant (born O’Brien) may have given it the name in 1856, though other minstrels immediately adopted it as theirs. (Credit tended to go to whoever first put a dance’s name next to his own on a playbill.) It was a “characteristic dance”—“characteristic,” according to The New York Clipper, of “a rude and untutored black of the old plantation.” (Around the same time, the A. M. Bininger Company of New York advertised its whiskey with the catchphrase “Essence of Old Virginia” and an illustration of blacks dancing to the banjo. Same idea.) The music for “Essence of Old Virginia” published in banjo manuals of the late 1850s suggests a promenade, the melody ambling out unhurriedly and then skipping back. Contemporaneous press reports indicate that the dance was popular and funny. In Billy Newcomb’s essence, “the oddest outré positions and far fetched steps are executed with such apparent ease.” The Charleston Mercury described it as “the most natural delineation of the negro character we have ever seen,” and the word natural vibrates there, expressing the ease that reviewers valued in minstrel dancing, the persuasiveness of the characterization, and perhaps the idea of the Negro character being, in essence, close to nature.
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The minstrel instinct was to lampoon, which is what minstrels did to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Serialized in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was swiftly on its way to selling more copies than any other book that century besides the Bible. The story was even more popular onstage; productions were mounted almost continuously for the next eighty years. These shows always held a place for plantation jigs and breakdowns; they were another nursery for tap. Along with contested facts, the book harbored minstrel elements: the black boy addressed as “Jim Crow” and made to perform for a slave trader who buys him; the antics of that “funny specimen in the Jim Crow line,” the incorrigible Topsy, whose African Breakdown enlivened most stage productions and sometimes earned top billing for the actress or actor playing her. Some minstrel versions were antislavery; others presented slavery as a blessing or replaced tragic events with good times on the plantation. Frank Brower, after his Virginia Minstrel days, lived on his “Happy Uncle Tom” sketch, which turned Stowe’s martyr into a dull-witted end man compulsively dancing to the banjo.
In 1861, a Massachusetts soldier wrote home from Virginia about two blacks in the Union barracks who tried to outdance each other. The dancers might have been seeking food or favor or even celebrating their freedom—General Butler had declared slaves free once behind Union lines. But all the soldier wrote was that “you don’t see any true darkies in the North” and that the laughable dancers looked “exactly like our minstrels.”
Minstrels liked to make fun of the rubes who mistook them for actual black people. These stories are of a piece with tales of backwoods audiences rushing the stage to foil a villain. They’re jokes about miscomprehension, and they’re funny the way it’s funny when Tambo and Bones misuse words. You have to perceive the error to get the joke. Recognizing the accuracy of the imitation presupposed recognizing it as an imitation. Yet recognizing accuracy also presupposed some prior conception of the subject, a preconception that the imitation might reinforce, even circumscribe. Stereotypes sprout from such generalizations, and they can turn malignant. Around the time that minstrelsy exploded, a coarseness entered into the visual representation of blacks and blackface minstrels: bulging eyes, giant lips, reptilian faces. No actual people could ever have looked like that, and this distortion of “peculiarities” was unequivocally dehumanizing. It is these images—which made it onto thousands of postcards and bottle openers and toys—that now color our understanding of minstrelsy and everything that came out of it. It is these images that make discussion of minstrelsy’s ambiguities seem beside the point.
For the question wasn’t only how the representation of blacks affected the way they were perceived; it was how the representation of blacks affected the way they were treated. Already, in 1841, The Dover Morning Star was editorializing against the outrage of respectable colored passengers being forced into the “Jim Crow or Negro Car” on Massachusetts trains. The white mobs who broke up abolitionist meetings were sometimes heard to sing “Jim Crow.” In 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a lecture arguing that the only defense of slavery that truly worked in the North was the assumption of Negro inferiority, encapsulated in the word nigger cried by rowdy boys who “jump Jim Crow in the streets and the taverns.” If these were not the associations that T. D. Rice intended, they were associations that persisted. If blacks were more the weapon than the target of minstrelsy, they could still take the hit.
There were almost no blacks on antebellum minstrel stages, almost no blacks on any antebellum stages at all. (There were some in the audiences—laughing, reportedly.) Yet a professional black entertainer, especially a dancer, would be a minstrel by default, the role already defined—almost exclusively—by those who were not black.
4
DANCING JUBA FOR EELS
That Massachusetts soldier didn’t have to go to Virginia to catch blacks dancing. Recall Thomas De Voe’s account of how, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Long Island and New Jersey slaves regularly gathered at Manhattan’s Catharine Market to do “a jig or break-down” on a shingle. According to De Voe, some of these slaves were locally famous. One was Jack, who was “smart and faithful” and owned by Frederick DeVoo. When New York’s manumission act forced DeVoo to free Jack in 1827, the former master gave his former slave a new suit and told him, “If you go home with me, you shall never want; but if you leave me now, my home shall never more know you.” Jack chose the city. De Voe says he became “a loafer” and died in the market. An 1841 New York Tattler article parenthetically refers to the “black boys who usually dance juba for eels on Sunday morning,” and an 1842 piece in the sporting newspaper Flash mockingly describes a similar scene (the shingles, the challenge dancing, the eels) in a Philadelphia market. But to the American Angler’s Guide sixteen years later, the dancing was a custom of “some years ago,” a scene unjustly neglected by artists, a lost part of “New York as it was.”
About the neglect, the guide was mistaken. A folk drawing, labeled “Dancing for Eels, 1820 Catharine Market” but otherwise of uncertain provenance, shows two black men patting juba for a third one who jigs. The three white men who watch them most closely are recognizable as “b’hoys,” rough members of lower Manhattan’s working class whose sobriquet was meant to convey their Irish accent. In a very similar illustration from 1848, the dancer is caught mid-jig, thighs turned out, one boot-clad leg crossed behind the other. One hand rests on a hip; the other waves in the air, a stance that Robert Farris Thompson has traced to the Congo, but that in America signified Irishness and the hornpipe. The most prominent white observer leans in casually, approvingly. He, too, is a b’hoy, but not just any b’hoy. He is Mose, the pugilistic Irish-American fireman and local hero, star of the play that the drawing is illustrating, the Chatham Theatre’s 1848 production of New York As It Is.
New York As It Is was very popular, and what made it so popular was how it reflected working-class patrons back to themselves. They recognized Mose. In the play, a city fellow introduces his country cousin to the wonders of the metropolis, attractions that include a Sunday morning at Catharine Market, distinguished by a “niggar dance for eels.” This, too, must have been part of the world recognized by working-class theatergoers. But one of the ways they experienced it was through minstrel representations. The character of “Jack, a Negro and Dancer for Eels” was likely played in blackface, and other characters in the many plays starring Mose were known to express their love of minstrel performers, favorites at the same theater.
The pose of the Catharine Market dancer on the New York As It Is poster matches that of John Smith on the 1840 sheet music for “Jim Along Josey.” It’s nearly identical to an illustration of John Diamond, master of the Long Island breakdown, whose playbills promised “those unheard of, outlandish and inimitable licks, what is death to all de Long Island Darkies.” Minstrel songs of the 1830s and ’40s referred to Long Island niggers doing the double shubble. The Virginia Minstrels alluded to dancing for eels at the market, as did Jim Crow, who sang of Long Island niggers as rivals: “Dey raise a mighty dust / and tink dey make a show / but I neber seen one of dem / what could jump Jim Crow.” (This is from the same 1832 song sheet in which Crow calls on his brother niggers not to laugh at envious whites and expresses the intention of obtaining a patent for his act.)
The man who sang that, T. D. Rice, was a New York City boy. He grew up just a few blocks away from Catharine Market, in the Five Points district. This was the poorest part of town, the place where immigrants were forced together, Germans and Italians and Jews and especially Irish. It was also one of the few places where free blacks could find accommodation. After an outbreak of fever in 1820, doctors from the New York Board of Health catalogued the district’s inhabitants in detail: blacks made up a third of the population, and the report noted case after case of white women living with black husbands and of white prostitutes who served black customers. Court reports testify to couple after interracial couple put in jail for the crime known as amalgamation. Any harmony was tenuous. In an 1834 race riot, black-owned property was destroyed and blacks were lynched.
In music and dance, the crucibles of convergence were the many “negro dancing cellars.” One 1799 ad seeking a runaway slave named Peter described him as “a great dancer and a very quarrelsome fellow, and is noted as such in the negro dancing cellars.” The cellars were where people like Peter went to party, places documented in court records of brawls and murders. But not only blacks patronized such underground establishments. The white sailor Horace Lane was taken to one by a shipmate in 1804. In his 1839 autobiography, Lane remembered a black violinist and eight dancers “jumping about, twisting and screwing their joints and ankles as if to scour the floor with their feet.” Lane says he ran away disgusted, but other whites felt differently about twisting the night away. The spirit of fun comes through even in the most contemptuous accounts. In an 1835 book attributed to Davy Crockett, the backwoodsman expresses disbelief at the patrons (“worse than savages”) of a cellar: “Such fiddling and dancing nobody ever saw before in this world … black and white, white and black, all hug-em-snug together.” A police raid in 1840 found “a knot of little amalgamationists … applauding the exertions of a bit of a niggar [sic], who was jumping ‘Jim Crow.’”
