Fashion anna cora mowatt synopsis

Love and Th eft

RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE General Editors:

Arnold Rampersad and Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Bordering on the Body Th e Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture Laura Doyle

Love and Th eft Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class Eric Lott

“Who Set You Flowin’?” Th e African-American Migration Narrative Farah Jasmine Griffi n

Race, Rape, and Lynching Th e Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 Sandra Gunning

Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Saidiya V. Hartman

Th e Dialect of Modernism Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature Michael North

Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Desire and the Protocols of Race Claudia Tate

Black Hunger Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity Doris Witt

Th e New Red Negro Th e Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 James Edward Smethurst

Conjugal Union Th e Body, the House, and the Black American Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Neo-slave Narratives Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Racechanges White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Susan Gubar

Th e Melancholy of Race Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief Anne Anlin Cheng

Race and the Writing of History Riddling the Sphinx Maghan Keita

Mercy, Mercy Me African-American Culture and the American Sixties James C. Hall

Love and Th eft Blackface Minstrelsy and the

American Working Class

Eric Lott

1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lott, Eric.

Love and theft : blackface minstrelsy and the American working class / Eric Lott.—20th-anniversary edition pages cm.—(Race and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532055-8 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-19-971768-2 (updf)

1. Minstrel shows—United States—History. 2. Working class—United States. 3. United States—Race relations. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Title.

ML1711.L67 2013 791 ′ .12097309034—dc23 2012048853

Portions of chapter 2 and chapter 6 originally appeared as “Love and Th eft : Th e Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.” © 1992 by the Regents of the University

of California. Reprinted by permission from Representations, no. 39.

Chapter 5 originally appeared as “‘Th e Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” in American Quarterly, 43, no. 2 (1991). Reprinted by permission.

Quotations from the promptbook manuscript of H. J. Conway’s stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are reprinted courtesy of the Th eatre Arts Collection,

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Th e University of Texas at Austin.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Susan Fraiman

Judith Lott Richard Lott

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{ Contents }

Foreword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition, by Greil Marcus ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 3

Part I

1 . Blackface and Blackness: Th e Minstrel Show in American Culture 15

2 . Love and Th eft : “Racial” Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface 39

3 . White Kids and No Kids At All: Working-Class Culture and Languages of Race 66

4 . Th e Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures 92

Part II

5 . “Th e Seeming Counterfeit”: Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction 115

6 . “Genuine Negro Fun”: Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840s 140

7 . California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848 174

8 . Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production 218

Aft erword to the Original Edition 242 Aft erword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition 247 Notes 251 Bibliography 291 Index 319

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{ Foreword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition, by Greil Marcus }

Very early on in this study of blackface minstrelsy, focusing especially on per- formances in New York City in the 1840s, Eric Lott drops a quiet, as-we-will- see academic sentence—“We will have occasion to return to the juxtaposition of American blacks with the idea of governance, particularly the notion of slaves as poet-legislators”—that can go off like a bomb, revealing, in that mo- ment or much later, just how radically unconventional the book will be, and how rich its ambitions are. What did he just say? Slaves as poet-legislators? What parallel universe is he talking about?

Th at parallel universe is the recreation of the minstrel stages, and the opening of its psychic backstages, that Lott presents, or in deeper sense per- forms, in Love and Th eft . He focuses on New York in the 1840s—the center of a pop explosion in which the North, staging a version of the South, created, for the fi rst the fi rst time in the United States, a national art culture, a frame of reference that everyone understood. “From the nobility and the gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain, and from the member of Con- gress, down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America,” the reporter J. K. Kennard wrote in 1845 in the Knickerbocker , taking up the minstrel pro- genitor Th omas “Daddy” Rice’s original shout-and-stomp as the signpost for minstrelsy’s every manifestation, “it was all: ‘Turn about and wheel about, and do just so, /And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.’” Th at there is nothing obvious about this story can be glimpsed in a joke Lott quotes from 1849, from White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies (a minstrelsy handbook of the sort so popular, and so enduring, that into the 1930s the federal government was printing how-to minstrelsy guidebooks): “Why are minstrel companies like midnight robbers? Because they live by their deeds of darkness”—“a kind of disappearing act,” in Lott’s own words, “in which blackface made ‘blackness’ fl icker on and off .”

As a breach in the dialogue the American vernacular conducts with itself, in its way Love and Th eft was its own pop explosion. Th ough starting out in the ground cleared by Constance Rourke in her 1931 American Humor , where the blackface minstrel was set at the heart of American culture, less as a parody or mockery of blackness than, at times, an almost metaphysical transmission of black soul and black consciousness through white mediums, Lott retrieved minstrelsy from the museum of racist embarrassments, and he opened up a

Forewordx

fi eld—a fi eld not only of study, but of action. Th at Bob Dylan took Lott’s title for his 2001 album “Love and Th eft ” —Dylan placing the words in quotation marks to fl ag the borrowing, letting the title double back on itself as he rewrote bits and pieces of old songs from all across the landscape of American popular music—is only a hint of the ripples that continue to spread.

Following the appearance of Love and Th eft in 1993, in 1996 there was Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (with, on the cover, the comedian Eddie Cantor blacking up, in the mirror, an expression of shock and surprise on his face—is that me?). In 1998 came W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop , and in 2003 his vast compendium Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture . In 2000 Spike Lee con- trived the shocking present-day blackface fi lm Bamboozled , where the fi rst act was comedy and the second was tragedy; a year later Nick Tosches published Where Dead Voices Gather , a ghostly history starring the 20th-century black- face artist Emmett Miller. Th e next years saw Bart Bull’s revelatory Does Th is Road Go to Little Rock?—Blackface Minstrelsy Now and Th en, Th en and Now , David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843–1924 (2003), Nelson George’s Blackface: Refl ections on African-Americans and the Movies (2003), Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005), Ger- ald Early’s slithering “Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, the South and Exploit- ative Cinema” (2006), John Strasbaugh’s Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture (2006), and Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (2012). Th ere was the second coming of Bert Williams, the black blackface comedian whose 1906 recording “Nobody” remains a still mostly invisible turning point in American music: Louis Chude-Sokei’s Th e Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2006), Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (2006), Camille F. Forbes’s Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star (2008), and, most indel- ibly, Caryl Phillips’s disturbing novel Dancing in the Dark (2005).

Th e current went in every direction, through Ed Harris’s perfect blackface headshake in the 2003 Bob Dylan fi lm Masked and Anonymous (“I saw one of the last blackface minstrel shows at a country carnival,” Dylan wrote in 2006 of growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota) [ Chronicles , 234], Bruce Springsteen’s recording of the minstrel show-stopper “Old Dan Tucker” (2006), the outra- geous “Face Wars” episode of Th e Sarah Silverman Program (2007), Kara Walker’s racially cross-dressed panorama My Complement, My Enemy, My Op- pressor, My Love (2007), and the Broadway musical Th e Scottsboro Boys , in which the trials of nine young black African Americans, falsely accused of rape in 1931, all but one, who was twelve, convicted and sentenced to death, were formally presented as a minstrel show—with all the conventions of the

Foreword xi

form strictly in place. In the change in the weather of discourse that it set off , Love and Th eft allowed people to see what they might not have seen without it: the reappearance of the African-American blackface minstrel show in the Goats’ 1992 album Tricks of the Shade ; the coded and accursed nature of the blackface masquerade in Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001); the true cor- ruption of Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival , Margaret B. Jones’s 2008 account of her life as a white girl growing up with the Bloods in blackest Los Angeles, celebrated with a fl orid review in the New York Times by lead book critic Michiko Kakutani and a fawning Times lifestyle profi le in which Jones, now in her sylvan Oregon redoubt, swore that if it weren’t for her kids she’d be back in South Central in a minute; all of it, down to the author’s name, a complete fraud.

Love and Th eft does not need, here, a rehearsal of its theories, its arguments, its reshaping of the migrations of class in the United States, or the particular New York milieu it recreates so powerfully. What perhaps needs to be brought out is the weight of Lott’s title itself: the way in which, as white men stole the songs, speech, and gestures of American slaves or free African Americans, as they profi ted by turning black people into infantilized monsters of stupidity, they were, some of them, like Tom Rice, trying to speak with wit and dignity not only for but as African Americans, while others, less conscious or less noble, were caught up in an always shift ing drama of attraction in which the fl oor of any minstrel stage held an invisible trap door through which the per- former might plummet at any time. “When the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster,” Lott quotes Ralph Ellison, in his 1958 “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” “his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personifi cation of his disorder and chaos but that he will become in fact what he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped somewhere in the mystery of hell.” Th e test Lott sets for himself is whether he can live up to Ellison, in writing and thinking, and so oft en he does.

Sometimes this happens in the stories Lott has mined: the blackface per- former Ben Cotton recalling, in 1897, how, studying black people for the tricks of his trade—looking, in other words, for moves to steal—“I used to sit with them in front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night air in their weird melodies. Th ey did not quite understand me. I was the fi rst white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy,” or recalling how, in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , her “escape to the shed where she would spend seven years is made in a blackface disguise; even ‘the father of [her] children’ does not recognize her,” or high- lighting the 1833 minstrel song “Sambo’s ‘Dress to He’ Bred’rin,” which in its cadence and its words is the precursor, even the source, of the almost un- bearably eloquent anti-slavery song “No More Auction Block.” Sometimes it

Forewordxii

happens in phrases that jump out of the pages like buried epigraphs: “the cul- tural commodities of human commodities”; “the moment at which the intended counterfeit failed to ‘seem,’ when the fakery evaporated”; “musematic repetition in the minstrel show was linked in purely formal terms to blissful, ‘unraced’ moments of ego loss, and discursive repetition to ego-preserving feelings of racial mastery and self-assurance”; or a phrase as seemingly weight- less as “the frisson of trouble that clung to the minstrel show,” which opens up into realms of what Lott calls “panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure”: the count- less minstrel versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a kind of prelude to the Civil War on stage,” or those moments, in the heat of performance, where, for the players, or the audience, or both, the separation between the impersonator and the impersonated collapsed, and the whites in the crowd found themselves speaking of the actors as “Negroes,” and the actors found themselves unable to believe that they were not.

Th e heart of the book—the heart of the continuing story of the minstrel deformation, the minstrel dramatization, of American life—might be found, again, in that 1845 Knickerbocker article by J. K. Kennard. He was attempting a jape: “Th e Jim Crows,” he wrote, “the Zip Coons, and the Dandy Jims, who have electrifi ed the world, from them proceed our ONLY TRUE NATIONAL POETS.” As Kennard goes on to “echo Shelley,” as a joke, as the sign of an of- fense to decency, as a patent absurdity, Lott excavates the piece as if it were the lost mine—or the lost mind—of minstrelsy: “Th is strange piece, he says, in wonder at his own archival discovery, “is absolutely unfl inching.” “Th e popular song-maker sways the souls of men; the legislator rules only their bodies,” Kennard wrote. “Th e song-maker reigns through love and spiritual affi nity; the legislator by brute force. Apply this principle to the American people. Who are our true rulers? Th e Negro poets, to be sure! . . . Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur , than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

It is here, Lott says, that Kennard is “mastered by his own irony.” Th ose are the few words that allow all of Love and Th eft , the odyssey of the blackface minstrel and the land that the minstrel traversed for a century—in disguises more ambiguous, and harder to remove, than simple burnt cork, that the min- strel traverses now—to fall into complete relief. When a critic’s ear is as tuned as Lott’s is, a stray piece of research can speak in strange tongues, and then the critic speaks back. Mastered by its own irony : that is blackface, and that is America, the motto for a tombstone that’s yet to be.

{ Acknowledgments }

Walter Rodney once wrote that the authorial habit of absolving a book’s friends and helpers from responsibility for its shortcomings was “sheer bourgeois sub- jectivism.” Fortunately, any errors or nonsense I have committed will scarcely tarnish the example of those whose contributions I do not pardon. I acknowl- edge, above all, the collective settings in which I have been privileged to work. Th e Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies granted me a fellowship during which much of this study was written; many thanks to its director, Armstead Robinson, its staff —particularly Gail Shirley and Mary Rose—and its fellows for critical talk, prodding, and jovial abuse. Th anks are due as well to colleagues and students at the University of Virginia and at the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. As the book was taking shape, the UVa Feminist Th eory Group was an indispensable space of intellectual and political support and exchange, as, at an earlier stage, were the various Union Square Marxist study groups at Columbia University. I must thank Columbia’s Center for American Culture Studies and its director, Jack Salzman, for the chance to try out early notions in various settings. John Short and fellow teachers in the literacy workshops at the Borough of Man- hattan Community College’s Writing Center provided a formative example of collective academic work.

I owe a great debt to the staff s of the Harvard Th eatre Collection; the music, dance, and theater collections of the New York Public Library; the Harry Ran- som Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas–Austin; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Music Collection at the Library of Congress; and the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia. At Harvard Joe Keller and curator Jeanne T. Newlin provided aff able and expert help and advice; at the University of Texas Melissa Miller-Quinlan crucially expedited some microfi lming.

I am also grateful to my teachers; it is a pleasure to thank them aft er all this time. Jackson Lears, Tom Quirk, Albert Devlin, and Robert Bender got me interested in the study of culture, and Ann Douglas enlivened that interest. Steven Marcus made it impossible to think about cultural products separately from history, theory, and society. Th is study had its beginnings in a seminar paper for Jane Tompkins. Later, Andrew Delbanco, Steven Marcus, and Arnold Rampersad worked with me on the dissertation from which this book has grown, and made invaluable suggestions about its scope, procedure, and method—unawares in many cases.

Acknowledgmentsxiv

Several people gave me materials of various kinds, oft en from their own research and writing, for which I am much in their debt: Bluford Adams, Paul Cantor, Patricia Cline Cohen, Joe Donahue, Ken Emerson, Arnold Fraiman, Barbara Green, Noel Ignatiev, Gail Karp, Hal Kolb, Nancy Loevinger, Mary Mackay and Edward Wheatley, George Rehin, Lucy Rinehart, David Roediger, Jack Salzman, and Lillian Schlissel. Others read all or part of the manuscript and off ered extremely helpful criticism, sarcasm, encouragement, and advice: Stanley Bailis, Michael Bérubé, John Blair, T. J. Clark, Carol Clover, Dale Cock- rell, George Cunningham, Steve Cushman, Kathleen Diffl ey, Jonathan Freedman, John Frick, Michael Frisch, Saidiya Hartman, Gary Kulik, Jack Levenson, David Levin, Rip Lhamon, Chris Looby, Karen Lystra, Don Pease, Chuck Perdue, David Roediger, David Scobey, Alan Trachtenberg, Susan Willis, and above all Elizabeth Blackmar, Robert Ferguson, Eric Foner, and Michael Rogin. A grant from the University of Virginia’s Small Grants Committee aided me in gathering the illustrations for this book, and a gen- erous subvention from Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Prize has been much appreciated. Virginia Germino and Elisabeth Crocker were of enormous help in preparing the manuscript. Liz Maguire and Susie Chang at Oxford University Press provided incalculable support and enthusiasm, and I thank them.

Friends and family kept me going all down the line. Th e long-standing comradeship of Benj DeMott has taught me much of what I know about moral and intellectual passion. Michael Denning and Hazel Carby have long been advisers and exemplars; my work would have been far more diffi cult without them. Over the past few years Debbie McDowell has clarifi ed my thinking about a host of matters great and small. Conversations and excursions with Austin Quigley and Pat Denison brought to life the British music hall, close cousin (I subsequently realized) of the minstrel show. Tera Hunter mercifully took this project seriously; Andy Bienen’s understanding of rock ’n’ roll added dimension to it; Harry Stecopoulos’s interest and (constant) interrogation kept me at it. Mark Edmundson and Jahan Ramazani off ered a rich fund of encour- agement and sage counsel. Late in the day my brother, Brian, joked about the book going into “Chapter 11,” for which, as for so much else, he knows he has my thanks.

Th e dedication barely begins to repay the debt I owe my parents. As for Susan Fraiman, comrade and co-conspirator, she knows this book by heart— which says as much about her heart as it does about her importance in my life and work.

Love and Th eft

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Introduction

It was at this epoch that Mr. T. D. Rice made his debut in a dramatic sketch entitled “Jim Crow,” and from that moment everybody was “doing just so,” and continued “doing just so” for months, and even

years aft erward. Never was there such an excitement in the musical or dramatic world; nothing was talked of, nothing written of, and nothing dreamed of, but “Jim Crow.” Th e most sober citizens began to “wheel about, and turn about, and jump Jim Crow.” It seemed as though the

entire population had been bitten by the tarantula; in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the shop and in the street, Jim Crow monopolized public

attention. It must have been a species of insanity, though of a gentle and pleasing kind . . . .

— New York Tribune (1855)

Despite their billings as images of reality, these Negroes of fi ction are counterfeits. Th ey are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process

through which, like a primitive tribesman dancing himself into the group frenzy necessary for battle, the white American prepares himself

emotionally to perform a social role. —Ralph Ellison

Th e race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect

the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

—C. L. R. James

Blackface minstrelsy was an established nineteenth-century theatrical prac- tice, principally of the urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profi t. It has therefore been summed up by one observer as “half a century of inurement to the uses of white supremacy.” 1 While it was organized

Love and Th eft 4

around the quite explicit “borrowing” of black cultural materials for white dis- semination, a borrowing that ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Although it arose from a white obsession with black (male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruth- lessly disavowed its fl eshly investments through ridicule and racist lampoon. Yet I am not so sure that this is the end of the story. In light of recent discus- sions of race and subjectivity, we probably ought to take these facts and pro- cesses as merely a starting orientation for inquiry into the complexities of racism and raced subjects in the United States. 2 In doing so we shall fi nd that blackface performance, the fi rst formal public acknowledgment by whites of black culture, was based on small but signifi cant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation, which indeed appear to be inevitable when white Ameri- cans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy. Ultimately I am aft er some sense of how precariously nineteenth-century white working people lived their whiteness—a matter of the greatest consequence in the history of America’s racial cultures and their material or institutional transactions.

Th is study grew out of a dissatisfaction with erstwhile modes of racial critique, which in their political disapprobation, dovetailing with aesthetic disdain, were unwilling to engage with the artifacts and social realities of popular life, too ready to dismiss the mentalité of the popular classes, fi nally impatient with politics itself. Cultural critics have recently become more aware of the uneven and contradictory character of popular life and culture, the ambiguities or contradictions that may characterize the pleasures of the masses. 3 It is one of the arguments of this book that in blackface minstrelsy’s audiences there were in fact contradictory racial impulses at work, impulses based in the everyday lives and racial negotiations of the minstrel show’s working-class partisans. Indeed, there are reasons for thinking of blackface in the years prior to the Civil War as a far more unsettled phenomenon than has been supposed; critics of minstrelsy have too oft en dismissed working- class racial feeling as uncomplicated and monolithic, and historians of work- ing-class culture have usually concurred—or made apologies. 4 It seems particularly clear that in the pages of recent social history the antebellum potential for a labor abolitionism has not been adequately explored nor its failure accounted for, and that the minstrel show crucially helps address this question. 5

Th is agenda may seem an undue burden to place on a “counterfeit” cultural phenomenon such as the minstrel show. One ought, though, to take seriously Ralph Ellison’s ironic image of whites racially girding themselves by way of rit- uals that mirror rather than distance the Other, in which whites are touched by the blacks they would lampoon and are in the process told on, revealed. Studying the most popular entertainment form of the nineteenth century together with its characteristic audience is perhaps the best way to understand the aff ective

Introduction 5

life of race in that time and in ours. Th e minstrel show has been ubiquitous, cultural common coin; it has been so central to the lives of North Americans that we are hardly aware of its extraordinary infl uence. Minstrel troupes enter- tained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. 6 Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface perfor- mance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have fi gured signifi cantly in the white Im agi nary of the United States.

Without the minstrel show there would have been no Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); investments as various as Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” (1957), John Howard Griffi n’s Black Like Me (1961), or certain of John Berryman’s Dream Songs (1955–69) would likewise have been impossible. 7 Leslie Fiedler’s thesis in Love and Death in the Ameri- can Novel (1960) that our white male writers have been obsessed with white male–dark male dyads (Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg) fi nds intimate material expression in the blackface performer’s assumption of familiarity with “blackness.” Th e early history of motion pictures was bound up with blackface—witness its importance to such major cinematic developments as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), Birth of a Nation (1915), and Th e Jazz Singer (1927) 8 — and the movies have regularly returned to it since then, whether in Fred Astaire’s blackface tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Swing Time (1936), Melvin Van Peebles’s ironic Watermelon Man (1970), or the egregious post— affi rmative action Soul Man (1986). Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers, and other early country music stars routinely “blacked up,” as did ethnic vaudevillians such as Sophie Tucker; as Armond White has written, “some form of darkie mimicking has been the strongest musical tradition in pluralized American culture.” 9 Indeed, in minstrelsy’s cultural force, its racial crossings, and what the New York Tribune called its pleasing “insanity” (June 30, 1855), its emer- gence resembled that of early rock ’n’ roll. Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.

For an index of popular white racial feeling in the United States, one could do worse than minstrelsy. I am concerned in this book with its shape and resonance in the decades before the Civil War. Th e tone and format of the early minstrel show, with its knee-slapping musical numbers punctuated by comic dialogues, bad puns, and petit-bourgeois ribaldry, should seem familiar to anyone who has seen American television’s “Hee Haw.” (Th e resemblance is apparently not coin- cidental, for one scholar has speculated that the rural white tradition, and its commercial issue in modern bluegrass music, inherited much from the minstrel show—not least the black style of banjo playing on which minstrelsy partly traded.) 10 Although the makeup of minstrelsy changed continually aft er its

Love and Th eft 6

emergence at the beginning of the 1830s, it was confi gured at the height of its popularity as a semicircle of four or fi ve or sometimes more white male per- formers (there were very rarely female performers in the antebellum minstrel show) made up with facial blacking of greasepaint or burnt cork and adorned in outrageously oversized and/or ragged “Negro” costumes. Armed with an array of instruments, usually banjo, fi ddle, bone castanets, and tambourine, the per- formers would stage a tripartite show. Th e fi rst part off ered up a random selec- tion of songs interspersed with what passed for black wit and japery; the second part (or “olio”) featured a group of novelty performances (comic dialogues, malapropistic “stump speeches,” cross-dressed “wench” performances, and the like); and the third part was a narrative skit, usually set in the South, containing dancing, music, and burlesque.

Th is “ethnographic miniature,” in Cliff ord Geertz’s phrase, jumbled to- gether a dramatic spectacle based on an overriding investment in the body, a fi gural content preoccupied with racial marking and racial transmutation, and a social context of white working-class proximity to blacks (21, 444). We might almost call it a precognitive form: not, as in Geertz’s study of the Balinese cockfi ght, a story one people told themselves about themselves, but an encap- sulation of the aff ective order of things in a society that racially ranked human beings. What the minstrel show did was capture an antebellum structure of racial feeling, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available.” Minstrelsy brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood. 11 Th e minstrel show was less the incar- nation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic fi gure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences. 12 By looking at the formal aspects of minstrelsy in the context of its time, we may see its historically new articulation of racial diff erence.

Th is articulation took the form of a simultaneous drawing up and crossing of racial boundaries. Minstrel performers oft en attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed— minstrelsy’s mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation, what Homi Bhabha would call its “ambivalence” (“Other” 18) and what my title loosely terms “love and theft .” Th e very form of blackface acts—an investiture in black bodies—seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of “blackness” and demonstrates the permeability of the color line. I depart from most other writers on minstrelsy, who have based their analyses on racial aver- sion, in seeing the vagaries of racial desire as fundamental to minstrel-show mimicry. It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascina- tion and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cul- tural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white

Introduction 7

power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure. As it turned out, the minstrel show worked for over a hundred years to facilitate safely an exchange of energies between two otherwise rigidly bounded and policed cul- tures, a shape-shift ing middle term in racial confl ict which began to disappear (in the 1920s) once its historical function had been performed. 13 It appears that during this stretch of American cultural history the intercourse between racial cultures was at once so attractive and so threatening as to require a cultural marker or visible sign of cultural interaction. Th is requirement would eventu- ally wither away, or in any case transmogrify, not least because of the minstrel show’s success in introducing the cultures to each other. Th e blackface mecha- nism of cultural control, as John Szwed has suggested, also provided a channel for the black cultural “contamination” of the dominant culture: “Th e fact that, say, a Mick Jagger can today perform in the same tradition without blackface simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorp- tion of a black tradition into white culture” (27). In the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, however, culture was “attached” to race with some tenacity; blackface acts both enforced and, in the end, remapped this regime.

As I point out in chapter 1 , writing on the minstrel show has been inordi- nately partial. Minstrelsy, of course, was long enveloped in a reactionary nos- talgia that desperately needed debunking; partisans of blackface have always longed for the imaginary day of the strumming Sambo. 14 A superfi cially sim- ilar (and still very questionable) tradition, however, has celebrated minstrelsy for its “blackness,” seeing the phenomenon as a public forum for slave culture which might have liberating eff ects. Constance Rourke’s chapter on minstrelsy in American Humor (1931), for example, gave modern force to what might be termed a “people’s culture” position—one whose sources, as I show, can be found in the writings of Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and others. Th e revival of this impulse had everything to do with a 1930s reclamation of the “folk,” if not, as Warren Susman has suggested, with a new defi nition of “culture” itself (150–210): the extraordinary success of Marc Connelly’s near- minstrel show Th e Green Pastures (1929), the anthropology of Franz Boaz, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), the novels of John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston’s Th eir Eyes Were Watching God (1937), James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and so on. Rourke’s genial view is a relatively benign, and to that extent unhistorical, one, though it has the virtue of acknowledging both the extensive eff ect of black cultural practices on blackface performance and the public eff ects of blackface itself. Th is position, in fact, was partially defended in Robert Toll’s Blacking Up: Th e Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (1974), and some have ventured it in refur- bished form, but it has not been a position to which scholars regularly recur. 15

Harking back to a tradition of minstrel-show criticism that began with Frederick Douglass’s articles in the North Star, scholars and writers initiated a long-awaited political revisionism in regard to minstrelsy beginning in 1958

Love and Th eft 8

with Ralph Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” and crystallized— with attitude—in LeRoi Jones’s brief remarks in Blues People (1963). Th e most notable instances of this revisionism include Nathan Huggins’s powerful chap- ter on minstrelsy in Harlem Renaissance (1971) and Toll’s Blacking Up. Th ese works can indeed be taken as representative of the reigning view of minstrelsy as racial domination. James Dorman, for instance, writes: “Th e arrival of Jim Crow was to provide the fi nal ingredient in the total pattern of antiblack prej- udice” (“Strange” 118). In retrospect this necessary critique seems somewhat crude and idealist; in reading off from a text the stereotypes that a historical moment is presumed to have required it is typically presentist, and in viewing minstrelsy as the nail in the coffi n of cultural containment it is rather narrowly functionalist. Based on a politics of “positive” black images, images meant to replace racist types with what Stuart Hall terms the “essential black subject,” this strategy still, in certain instances, off ers the terms in which cultural struggle ought to be waged. At the same time, however, the engagement on the part of cultural critics with poststructuralist discourses, and a dismantling of binary racial categories in favor of multiply determined and positioned sub- jects, has begun to trouble the notion of “racial” representation itself. We must now recognize, as Hall argues, “that the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions” (“New” 28). To do so will require a much more sensitively historicist look at the uneven class, gender, and racial politics of forms such as the minstrel show. And it will require as well a subtler account of acts of representation. Where representation once unproblematically seemed to image forth its referent, we must now think of, say, the blackface mask as less a repetition of power rela- tions than a signifi er for them—a distorted mirror, refl ecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and the social fi eld there exist lags, unevennesses, multiple determinations. It will take a good deal of decoding to get at the meanings of blackface minstrelsy. 16

In contrast to both the populist and the revisionist views, which see min- strelsy’s politics as univocal, my study documents precisely the historical con- tradictions and social confl icts the minstrel show opened up. It fi rst reconstructs the antebellum cultural formation in which minstrelsy did its work (part I). One of our earliest culture industries, minstrelsy not only aff ords a look at the emergent historical break between high and low cultures but also reveals popular culture to be a place where cultures of the dispossessed are routinely commodifi ed—and contested. Th e heedless (and ridiculing) appropriation of “black” culture by whites in the minstrel show, as many contemporaries recog- nized, was little more than cultural robbery, a form of what Marx called ex- propriation, which troubled guilty whites all the more because they were so attracted to the culture they plundered. Indeed, for a time in the late 1840s min- strelsy came to seem the most representative national art. In this way minstrelsy became a site of confl ictual intensity for the politics of race, class, and nation.

Introduction 9

Th is interpretation is particularly suggested by my readings of blackface minstrel forms (part II). Each of the last four chapters concerns itself with a particular social and political situation, set of texts, and theoretical problem. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, dances, burlesque skits, and illustrations in conjunction with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, I show how blackface minstrelsy embodied and intervened in Jacksonian racial politics. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identi- fi cation as well as fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Th ere was a good fi t, for example, between the confl icted nature of the shows and the racial tendencies of their audiences, such that the artisan aboli- tionist constituency could rather benignly enjoy the same form of leisure that supported racist, antiabolitionist ridicule. Th is situation was aided by ideolo- gies of working-class manhood, which shaped white men’s contradictory feel- ings about black men. Because of the power of the black penis in white American psychic life, the pleasure minstrelsy’s largely white and male audi- ences derived from their investment in “blackness” always carried a threat of castration—a threat obsessively reversed in white lynching rituals. Notwith- standing that this threat was itself part of the fascination, or at least a price white men appear to have paid gladly in patronizing blackface performances, the minstrel show was constructed along several lines of defense against it. Th is is not at all to claim that the defenses worked—only that their intermittent failure provided blackface with its longevity and power.

Th e moment of minstrelsy’s greatest popularity (1846–54) was marked by a variety of bitter political controversies: labor struggles in New York and other major cities, the Wilmot Proviso debates over the extension of slavery, the Sen- eca Falls women’s rights convention, the Astor Place theater riot, the Fugitive Slave Law and its aft ermath, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and others. In signifi - cant ways this historical moment suddenly made the misappropriations and distortions committed in minstrelsy politically dangerous. Th e confl ictual character of minstrelsy only deepened with the approach of the gravest pre– Civil War threat to the social order of the Union, the debates over slavery that led to the Compromise of 1850. Stephen Foster’s “Plantation Melodies” unwit- tingly conjured up the hydra-headed confl icts; these melodies, and the vast dissemination of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in various politically divergent blackface theatrical productions—a kind of prelude to civil war on the stage—off er a lens through which to read a political crisis Michael Rogin has called “the American 1848,” a revolution on American soil.

Given this formal and historical complexity, it is no surprise that minstrelsy has overwhelmed most attempts to study it in all its variousness and diffi culty. Th e minstrel show was an entertainment form that called in turn on a variety of elements: folklore, dance, jokes, songs, instrumental tunes, skits, mock ora- tory, satire, and racial and gender cross-dressing or impersonation. From a

Love and Th eft 10

variety of locales, including city, backwoods, small town, and frontier, it impinged on a history of intense class, racial, national, and gender formation. Scholars understandably most oft en take one or another aspect of minstrelsy for focused study rather than the whole; and the few comprehensive treat- ments of the minstrel show have without exception read the printed record (songsters, playlets, and so on) of what was in fact a negotiated and rowdy spectacle of performer and audience. 17 I have restricted this study to the ante- bellum decades, and to the minstrel show’s performance amid the social and political life of (for the most part) New York City. Yet I have also attempted to do justice to minstrelsy’s various constituent parts as well as to its audience and its historical role, and in this I make no plea for my own sagacity. I have un- questionably poached on academic territory in which I can claim at best ama- teur competence. Writing this book has convinced me, however, that such an interdisciplinary attempt is worth the gamble and, especially given the habits of specialists and subspecialists, is an opportunity rather than an embarrass- ment. In addressing my study to a variety of fi elds and disciplines, I mean not only to properly portray a complex phenomenon but to help solidify the claims of cultural studies as a practice.

Accordingly, this book has been oriented by several specifi c debates. One of these is, of course, the discussion of blackface minstrelsy, in particular its po- litical status and eff ectivity as public performance. Also important are theoret- ical questions regarding the (post-Freudian) study of humor, the political interpretation of commercial popular music, the uses of folklore, the cultural exhibition of the body, and the political effi cacy of melodrama. A related debate concerns the usefulness of fi lm theory in the study of theater, a highly problematic but potentially generative development. Recent theoretical and political investigations of race, especially those oriented by psychoanalysis, are fundamental concerns, as are questions about the place of race in working- class culture and in the development of American nationhood.

Implicit in any work of this kind is also the question of American Studies as a fi eld in (perhaps perennial) crisis and its relationship to cultural studies. Th e American Studies of a generation ago cast its vision over a wider expanse of American culture than is now sometimes recognized; and it oft en functioned as a left -liberal “culturalist” alternative to American New Criticism, however much it may now seem like the literary equivalent of the Truman administra- tion. In fact there was a great deal of interchange between the British New Left and certain American Studies scholars, whether in the interested stateside re- ception of Raymond Williams’s and Richard Hoggart’s early work or the impact of Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (1964) on the early fi gures of British cul- tural studies. 18 Of course, the older American Studies emphasis on “representa- tive” texts and problems is out of date, while E. P. Th ompson’s (contemporaneous) defi nition of culture “as a whole way of confl ict” (“Long” 33) has off ered a deci- sive reorientation to a generation of cultural studies practitioners, including

Introduction 11

myself. Indeed, my focus on a highly elaborated if crudely executed popular stage form has arisen from the immense importance, in such a defi nition of culture, of cultural texts requiring relatively few “inherent resources” such as literacy or education and therefore off ering relatively unmediated access to those whose struggles make history. 19 Sorely neglected in the academic study of cultures until very recently, such forms have usually been central to their time—certainly more infl uential than the great literature so oft en taken as cul- turally representative. Although American Studies has in some sense been a pioneer (e.g., Constance Rourke’s American Humor, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land ), it has restricted itself to addressing what is “most American” and excep- tional about such forms rather than the richer questions of how cultures work, are contested, divide and cohere, or how transpersonal historical structures consort with human activity to produce social and political change. 20

I try in these pages to help reorient the traditions of American Studies by asking questions about the role of culture in the political development of a specifi c national entity. Th e challenge here is to resist the tendency in American versions of cultural studies to examine culture apart from political structures and movements—an airless “politics” of the cultural rather than social and political cultures. 21 To this end the signifi cance of current work in cultural studies lies in making it possible to situate the analysis of cultural forms, the various sorts of textuality and subjectivity most closely related to human agency, with regard to the analysis of social and cultural formations, the orga- nizations, processes, and overdetermined conjunctures that bear most signifi - cantly on political life. Th e greatest yield of this work is an understanding of “historical forms of consciousness and subjectivity,” in Richard Johnson’s words (43)—as I see it, the chief concern and special ability of cultural studies.

If at this juncture we are to understand anything more about popular racial feeling in the United States, we must no longer be satisfi ed merely to condemn the terrible pleasures of cultural material such as minstrelsy, for their legacy is all around us. As Antonio Gramsci once remarked, the “starting-point of crit- ical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself ’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infi nity of traces, without leaving an inventory” ( Prison 324). Only by beginning to inventory the deposits of feeling for which blackface perfor- mance has been responsible can we hope to acknowledge the social origins and psychological motives of “racial” impulses, reckonings, and unconscious reactions that lie so deep in most Caucasians as to feel inevitable and indeed natural. An equally urgent outcome of this undertaking will be to make our- selves aware of the resistant, oppositional, or emancipatory accents of the racial bad attitudes residing in American working-class culture today.

Love and Th eft is thus perhaps a product of its political times in investi- gating the ironies of cultural reaction, the potential reversals in a context of defeat. 22 Like much of the recent cultural theory on which it draws, it has been

Love and Th eft 12

marked by our age of “authoritarian populism,” as Stuart Hall has termed it, in its tea leaf–reading documentation of culture-industry contradictions and subversions in the face of overwhelming odds. 23 Th ere is, I would rush to add, justifi cation for this anxious attention: not only was blackface minstrelsy a pe- culiarly unstable form, but the social realities to which it in part contributed demand careful sorting out. Th e left has too oft en construed black Americans as saboteurs of class-based politics, their presence acting as an impediment to “real” social change. No less than writing off white working-class racial feeling, blaming black people themselves for being obstacles in the path of the Ameri- can experiment has been a nasty habit. 24 Th e story has usually taken the form of an imagined conspiracy of white liberals and black “extremists” who have foisted civil rights demands onto left initiatives and in the process aff ronted working-class whites. But, as Adolph Reed and Julian Bond observe, this tale presumes a prior equality between black and white, and consequently “denies the reality of explicitly racial stratifi cation within the working class and a his- tory of white working-class antagonism toward blacks—coexisting, certainly, with many exemplary instances of interracial solidarity—that stretches back through the 1863 New York draft riot” (733–34). Th is gnarled history stretches back indeed into the antebellum decades I consider here, and I advance a revivifying attention to its contradictions: the competing but sometimes col- lateral claims of black and white labor. Th e source of post–World War II con- fl icts in those of white workers versus black slaves and their abolitionist allies indicates the need to study carefully a moment when a possible interracial labor alliance went awry. Any vision of a renewed socialism demands that we consider race as more than merely “incidental” (as C. L. R. James urges) to the motors of political change. And if it is culture rather than shared work experi- ence that primarily creates the conditions for social movements, one critical task is to achieve a renovated public culture through inquiries into popular forms such as the minstrel show. 25

{ Part I }

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{ 1 }

Blackface and Blackness The Minstrel Show in American Culture

In the theatrical world, as in the aesthetic world more generally, ideology is always in essence the site of a competition and a struggle in which the sound and fury of humanity’s political and social struggles

are faintly or sharply echoed. —Louis Althusser

Th e current consensus on blackface minstrelsy is probably best summed up by Frederick Douglass’s righteous response in the North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were “the fi lthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complex- ion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the cor- rupt taste of their white fellow citizens,” a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy’s further commodifi cation of an already enslaved, noncitizen people (October 27, 1848). From our vantage point, the minstrel show indeed seems a transparently racist curiosity, a form of leisure that, in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted but irrepressible “plantation darky” and the foppish “northern dandy negro,” conveniently rationalized racial oppression. Th e culture that embraced it, we assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty or so be- nighted, like Melville’s Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic. I want to suggest, however, that the audiences involved in early minstrelsy were not universally derisive of African Americans or their culture, and that there was a range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability or con- tradiction in the form itself. My project is to examine that instability for what it may tell us about the racial politics of culture in the years before the Civil War.

Writing in Horace Greeley’s antislavery New York Tribune in 1855, an anon- ymous advocate of blackface minstrel songs celebrated the “earliest votaries of the colored opera”:

Why may not the banjoism of a Congo, an Ethiopian or a George Christy [one of the most famous blackface performers of the 1840s and 1850s], aspire to an equality with the musical and poetical delineators of all

Love and Th eft 16

nationalities? . . . Absurd as may seem negro minstrelsy to the refi ned musician, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that it expresses the peculiar characteristics of the negro as truly as the great masters of Italy represent their more spiritual and profound nationality . . . . [And] has there been no change in the feelings of the true originators of this music—the ne- groes themselves? . . . Plaintive and slow, the sad soul of the slave throws into his music all that gushing anguish of spirit which he dare not other- wise express. (“Black” 107)

Surprising lines, these, from a writer sympathetic to the idea of African- American art. We tend not to associate an approving view of minstrelsy with a determination to take slave culture seriously, let alone a determination to take minstrelsy as slave culture. Moreover, the writer’s egalitarian rhetoric links one of the strongest antebellum cases on behalf of minstrel songs with a sympa- thetic (if typically condescending) attitude toward black people. Th e moti- vating idea here is a Herdeŕian notion of the folk, articulated in the year of Leaves of Grass for much the same reason: to celebrate the popular sources of a national culture. It is possible, of course, to take such lines as evidence of the incomprehension that greeted minstrelsy, a position that is certainly defen- sible. But it does not fully account for the frequency of responses such as the one just quoted—the ready imputation of folk authenticity to patently “impure” songs such as “Ole Dan Tucker,” “Jump Jim Crow,” and “Zip Coon.” Nor does it explain the desire to put moderate racial attitudes and minstrel shows together.

Indeed, Margaret Fuller spoke in a similar vein about this cultural form. In “Entertainments of the Past Winter,” published in the Dial in 1842, she claimed that Americans were “beggars” when it came to the arts of music and dancing:

Our only national melody, Yankee Doodle, is shrewdly suspected to be a scion from British art. All symptoms of invention are confi ned to the African race, who, like the German literati, are relieved by their position from the cares of government. “Jump Jim Crow,” is a dance native to this country, and one which we plead guilty to seeing with pleasure, not on the stage, where we have not seen it, but as danced by children of an ebon hue in the street. Such of the African melodies as we have heard are beau- tiful. But the Caucasian race have yet their rail-roads to make . . . . (52)

We will have occasion to return to the juxtaposition of American blacks with the idea of governance, particularly in the notion of slaves as poet-legislators. Interesting here, in addition, is the assumption that the only music and dance which are not false coin are those found in blackface minstrelsy, which repre- sents, Fuller hints, something like the folk culture of an American peasantry. Th ese comments begin to suggest that when, in the decades before the Civil War, northern white men “blacked up” and imitated what they supposed was

Blackface and Blackness 17

black dialect, music, and dance, some people, without derision, heard Negroes singing.

Blackface minstrelsy as an African-American people’s culture: this may seem an odd view. But it is one perception of the minstrel show that has been understandably repressed in antiracist accounts of it. Most scholars have yet to appreciate W. E. B. Du Bois’s belief that Stephen Foster compositions such as “Old Black Joe” and “Old Folks at Home” were based on African-American themes; Du Bois included them in his assertion that black music was the “only real American music” (“Negro” 231; Souls 382). In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson similarly remarked that minstrelsy originated on the planta- tion, and constituted the “only completely original contribution” of America to the theater (87). Th ese judgments appear terribly misguided now, given that blackface minstrelsy’s century-long commercial regulation of black cultural practices stalled the development of African-American public arts and gener- ated an enduring narrative of racist ideology, a historical process by which an entire people has been made the bearer of another people’s “folk” culture. We ought nonetheless to know how such positive assessments of the minstrel show were possible as well as wrong. Without a fuller understanding of black- face performance, one that includes the intensely confl icted set of responses it called forth, we miss the part it played in the racial politics of its time—the extent to which, for that matter, it was the racial politics of its time—from its northern emergence as an entr’acte in about 1830 to the various New York stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the mid-1850s.

In the pages that follow I return the minstrel show to a northeastern polit- ical context that was extremely volatile, one whose range can be seen in the antinomy of responses I have identifi ed, themselves anticipatory of twentieth- century debates about the nature of the “popular.” On one side there is a dis- dain for “mass”-cultural domination, the incorporation of black culture fashioned to racist uses; on the other a celebration of an authentic people’s culture, the dissemination of black arts with potentially liberating results. 1 Let me suggest that one fi nds elements of both in early minstrelsy: there is as much evidence to locate in it the public emergence of slave culture (as Constance Rourke argued in American Humor ) or pointed political protest (as David Grimsted and William Stowe have written) as there is to fi nger its racism, this last needing little demonstration. Ultimately, however, this stubborn dualism is an impoverished, not to say obsolete, way of thinking about one of America’s fi rst culture industries. Our simplistic (and almost completely ahistorical) un- derstanding of minstrel shows comes partly as a result of swinging between one position and the other—or at least of the notion that these are our only choices.

Recent research into popular culture has allowed us to see the popular instead as a sphere characterized by cultural forms of social and political con- fl ict, neither, in Gareth Stedman Jones’s terms, entirely the “social control” of

Love and Th eft 18

the ruling classes nor the “class expression” of the dominated. Because the popular is always produced, capitalized, it is hardly some unfettered time-out from political pressures, a space of mere “leisure”—a clear enough distinction in the case of minstrelsy—nor does it arise in some immediate way from col- lective popular desires. But, as Stuart Hall has insisted, neither does it passively mirror political domination taking place in other parts of the social formation, as though it were only epiphenomenal—a form of dominant-cultural “rein- forcement,” as commentators on the minstrel show have oft en said—or, in the Frankfurt School scenario, wholly administered and determined. Since the popular emerges at the intersection of received symbolic forms, audiences’ ex- periences of authority and subordination in workplace, home, and social ritual, and new articulations by various producers of symbolic forms—local teachers and labor organizers, storytellers and journalists, theater managers and actors—it is itself a crucial place of contestation, with moments of resis- tance to the dominant culture as well as moments of supersession. Talking about the minstrel show this way reveals the most popular American enter- tainment form in the antebellum decades as a principal site of struggle in and over the culture of black people. 2 Th is struggle took place largely among ante- bellum whites, of course, and it fi nally divested black people of control over elements of their culture and over their own cultural representation generally. But it was based on a profound white investment in black culture which, for a time, had less certain consequences. My study documents in early blackface minstrelsy the dialectical fl ickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation, counterfeit and currency, a pattern at times amounting to no more than the two faces of racism, at others gesturing toward a specifi c kind of political or sexual danger, and all constituting a pecu- liarly American structure of racial feeling.

So far are we from any idea of what the vagaries of this structure of feeling might have been—the relationship of blackface to “blackness”—that it is useful to generate some sense of the contradictions and ambiguities in blackface rep- resentation and its place in American culture. Let me, for instance, elaborate what I mean in calling minstrelsy a popular form by returning briefl y to the symptomatic moments of the debate I have sketched. Each position has its partial force, and taken together they defi ne the range of possible forms and eff ects that could be produced in the minstrel show. To be sure, minstrelsy was an arena in which the effi cient expropriation of the cultural commodity “black- ness” occurred, demonstrated in what this Atlantic Monthly writer (writing in 1867) supposes is a hilarious account of “originator” T. D. Rice’s fi rst blackface performance in Pittsburgh around 1830:

Rice prepared to take advantage of his opportunity. Th ere was a ne- gro in attendance at Griffi th’s Hotel, on Wood Street, named Cuff ,—an exquisite specimen of his sort,—who won a precarious subsistence by

Blackface and Blackness 19

letting his open mouth as a mark for boys to pitch pennies into, at three paces, and by carrying the trunks of passengers from the steamboats to the hotels. Cuff was precisely the subject for Rice’s purpose. Slight per- suasion induced him to accompany the actor to the theatre, where he was led through the private entrance, and quietly ensconced behind the scenes . . . . Rice, having shaded his own countenance to the “contraband” hue, ordered Cuff to disrobe, and proceeded to invest himself in the cast- off apparel . . . . [Onstage] the extraordinary apparition produced an in- stant eff ect . . . . Th e eff ect was electric . . . .

Now it happened that Cuff , who meanwhile was crouching in disha- bille under concealment of a projecting fl at behind the performer, by some means received intelligence, at this point, of the near approach of a steamer to the Monongahela Wharf. Between himself and others of his color in the same line of business, and especially as regarded a cer- tain formidable competitor called Ginger, there existed an active rivalry in the baggage-carrying business. For Cuff to allow Ginger the advan- tage of an undisputed descent upon the luggage of the approaching ves- sel would be not only to forget all “considerations” from the passengers, but, by proving him a laggard in his calling, to cast a damaging blemish upon his reputation. Liberally as he might lend himself to a friend, it could not be done at that sacrifi ce. Aft er a minute or two of fi dgety wait- ing for [Rice’s] song to end, Cuff ’s patience could endure no longer, and, cautiously hazarding a glimpse of his profi le beyond the edge of the fl at, he called in a hurried whisper: “Massa Rice, Massa Rice, must have my clo’se! Massa Griffi f wants me,—steamboat’s comin’!”

Th e appeal was fruitless. Massa Rice did not hear it, for a happy hit at an unpopular city functionary had set the audience in a roar in which all other sounds were lost . . . . [Another appeal went unheeded, when,] driven to desperation, and forgetful in the emergency of every sense of propriety, Cuff , in ludicrous undress as he was, started from his place, rushed upon the stage, and, laying his hand upon the performer’s shoul- der, called out excitedly: “Massa Rice, Massa Rice, gi’ me nigga’s hat,— nigga’s coat,—nigga’s shoes,—gi’ me nigga’s t’ings! Massa Griffi f wants ’im,— steamboat’s comin’ !!”

The incident was the touch, in the mirthful experience of that night, that passed endurance. (Nevin 609–10)

Th is passage, in all its woozy syntax and headlong rush, is probably the least trustworthy and most accurate account of American minstrelsy’s appropria- tion of black cultural practices. Indeed this eulogy to the minstrel composer Stephen Foster reads something like a master text of the racial economy encoded in blackface performance. For one thing, it calls on minstrel devices (ventriloquized dialect, racial burlesque) to narrate the origins of minstrelsy,

Love and Th eft 20

as if this particular narratable event generated or secreted “naturally” the for- mal means appropriate to it; its multiple frames (minstrelsy within minstrelsy) amount to so many techniques of black subordination. True to form, a dimin- ished, not to say “blackfaced” Cuff has replaced Rice as this account’s center of attention. And its talk of opportunity and investment, lending and ownership, subsistence and competition is more preoccupied with cultural value than we might have expected. Its social unconscious, we might say, reveals a great deal of anxiety about the “primitive accumulation” it ostensibly celebrates. 3 Perhaps this is also why the passage is fully a third longer than what I have just quoted. Th e fascination with Cuff ’s nakedness, moreover, highlights the aff air as one of male bodies, in which racial confl ict and cultural exchange are negotiated between men. Cuff ’s stripping, a theft that silences and embarrasses him on- stage but which nevertheless entails both his bodily presence in the show and the titillating threat that he may return to demand his stolen capital, is a neat allegory for the most prominent commercial collision of black and white cul- tures in the nineteenth century. Cultural expropriation is the minstrel show’s central fact, and we should not lose sight of it. 4 But it is also a fact that needs explaining, for in itself it establishes little about the cultural commerce sug- gested by one performer’s enthusiasm as he gathered material for his blackface act: “I shall be rich in black fun.” 5

Even in expropriation there was a strong white attraction to the material which surfaced in less malign ways. White people believed the counterfeit, oft en sympathetically, as I have begun to suggest; the blackface hieroglyph so fully unpacked in the Atlantic Monthly account went largely unread. Th ere were, it is true, nudges and winks folded into claims like that of the Apollo Minstrels to be the “only original Negroes travelling,” or in the New York Her- ald ’s coy references to Christy’s Minstrels as “the very pinks of negro singers.” 6 But oft en, in the minds of many, blackface singers and dancers became, simply, “negroes.” How else explain the tireless references to “these amusing darkies” ( New York Herald January 21, 1848), as if the originals had somehow gotten lost? Early audiences so oft en suspected that they were being entertained by actual Negroes that minstrel sheet music began the proto-Brechtian practice of picturing blackface performers out of costume as well as in (see Fig. 1 ); and there are several existing accounts of white theatergoers mistaking blackface performers for blacks. 7 Even Mark Twain’s mother, at her fi rst (and presumably only) minstrel show, believed she was watching black performers. Like Marga- ret Fuller (and, as we shall see, Walt Whitman), Mark Twain was himself intrigued by what he called the “happy and accurate” representations of the minstrel show. 8

Of course, belief in the authenticity of blackface hardly ruled out racial rid- icule; the oscillation between currency and counterfeit in the minstrel show was related to but oft en discrete from the oscillation between sympathy and ridicule toward its representations. Indeed, the wayward valuations attached

Blackface and Blackness 21

both to irony toward the fakes and belief in them make the task of gauging audience response a dizzying one. What was the precise mix of irony, false consciousness, interest, and interracial recognition in a white Union soldier’s perception that two blacks in his barracks “look[ed] exactly like our minstrels” (Howe 91)? We are back where we began, but with a diff erence: although min- strelsy was indeed in the business of staging or producing “race,” that very enterprise also involved it in a carnivalizing of race, as the range of critical response has begun to suggest, such that the minstrel show’s ideological pro- duction became more contradictory, its consumption more indeterminate, its political eff ects more plural than many have assumed. It is worth asking what those eff ects could possibly have amounted to. Ultimately I would like to make some sense of the dialectical relationship noted in Constance Rourke’s obser- vation that “little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when Th e Liberator was founded” ( American 98). What was the brief shared history of blackface minstrelsy and racial ideologies of liberation? And was their relation- ship a story of racist compensation, or were there unsuspected similarities?

A Genealogy of Jim Crow

I begin with a brief genealogy of Jim Crow. 9 Th is will off er a glimpse of black- face’s ambiguous modes of authority based on certain of its earlier, as well as its minstrel-show, manifestations. Th e virtue of the genealogy, as Fredric Jameson suggests, is that it defamiliarizes the cultural object, revealing from a dia- chronic perspective, as in an X-ray, functional elements in forms such as min- strelsy that probably seem transparent enough ( Political 139). Although it will be necessary to trace the formal contradictions noted here in the various ap- pearances of blackface through to the American cultural contradictions they fi gure, this genealogy begins to suggest the range of purposes the black min- strel mask could serve, both onstage and in public. It thus constitutes a certain groundwork for that dialectic of white responses to “blackness” which I believe traversed not only the early minstrel show but antebellum racial feeling as well. 10

It would certainly be a mistake to see the minstrel types that began to emerge in the late 1820s as continuous outgrowths of slave tales à la Constance Rourke, though there exist certain similarities. Th ey should rather be placed at the intersection of slave culture and earlier blackface stage characters such as the harlequin of the commedia dell’arte, the clown of English pantomime and the clown of the American circus, the burlesque tramp, perhaps the “black- man” of English folk drama. Th is intersection establishes the political and emotional range within which minstrel songs characteristically worked. Th e twin infusion of these antecedents in minstrel representations lends a highly uncertain status to an already ambiguous stage tradition. 11 Clowns and

Love and Th eft 22

harlequins are as oft en lovable butts of humor as devious producers of it; slave- tale tricksters are frequently (though not always) champions, heroes, backdoor victors for the weak over the strong. Early minstrel fi gures overlapped with each tradition, tending more or less toward self-mockery on the one hand and subversion on the other. Th e overlap was registered, fi rst, in British produc- tions such as Cowardy, Cowardy, Custard; or Harlequin Jim Crow and the Magic Mustard Pot (1836), which marked a trend beginning in the 1830s of appending

Figure 1 Th e Virginia Serenaders, 1844 Courtesy of the Harvard Th eatre Collection

Blackface and Blackness 23

the name Jim Crow to all sorts of British clowns and Punch-and-Judy fi gures; 12 and, second, in the animal tales early blackface performers set to music, not to mention the alleged black derivation of the “Jim Crow” tune itself (about which more in chapter 2 ).

Th is contradictory lineage, the stage trickster overdetermined by the slave trickster, highlights some hint of danger in the earliest blackface types which few have been willing to grant them. Consider T. D. Rice’s mid-1830s version of “Clar de Kitchen”:

A jay bird sot on a hickory limb, He wink’d at me and I wink’d at him; I pick’d up a stone and I hit his shin, Says he you better not do dat agin.

A Bull frog dress’d sogers close, Went in de fi eld to shoot some crows; De crows smell powder and fl y away, De Bull frog mighty mad dat day. 13

Such small victories were won continually in early minstrelsy. Small and un- doubtedly self-diminishing though they were, the coded triumphs of black men over sinister jaybirds and black crows over patrolling bullfrogs were tri- umphs all the same, reminiscent indeed of certain slave tales. It might even be said that part of the triumph lay precisely in their recalling slave lore, in which foxes fl ee roosters, goats terrorize lions, and Brer Rabbit gleefully taunts Wolf.

Other early minstrel characters veered much more toward an intentionally ridiculous blustering, inherited less from the slaves or conventional stage fi g- ures than from the Mike Finks and Davy Crocketts of southwestern humor. Whether plantation rustics (Jim Crow) or urban dandies (Zip Coon), these fi gures of exaggerated strength and overwhelming power, as Lawrence Levine has suggested, have little in common with the slave tricksters’ underhanded manipulations and deceits ( Black 104). Th ere was thus a third tradition in- fusing the most common characters of antebellum minstrelsy, who, Nathan Huggins argues, were oft en little more than blackfaced versions of heroes from southwestern humor. 14 Characters based on those heroes, however, sometimes took on “black” lineaments as well (Toll 42); and there was in any case an inherited power that came with the bluster, however culturally fraudulent that bluster may have been. Selected verses from the fi rst song sheet edition of “Jim Crow” (published by E. Riley in the early 1830s) capture this ambiguity:

Come listen all you galls and boys I’se jist from Tuckyhoe, I’m goin to sing a little song, My name’s Jim Crow.

Love and Th eft 24

Weel about and turn about And do jis so, Eb’ry time I weel about And jump Jim Crow.

Oh I’m a roarer on de fi ddle, And down in old Virginny, Th ey say I play de skyentifi c Like Massa Pagannini.

I’m a full blooded niggar, Ob de real ole stock, And wid my head and shoulder I can split a horse block.

De great Nullifi cation, And fuss in de South, Is now before Congress, To be tried by word ob mouth.

Dey hab had no blows yet, And I hope dey nebber will, For its berry cruel in bredren, One anoders blood to spill.

Should dey get to fi ghting, Perhaps de blacks will rise, For deir wish for freedom, Is shining in deir eyes.

An if de blacks should get free, I guess dey’ll fee some bigger, An I shall consider it, A bold stroke for de nigger.

An I caution all white dandies, Not to come in my way, For if dey insult me, Dey’ll in de gutter lay.

(Dennison 51–57)

Th is is hardly the stuff of which revolutions are made; it was easy enough to patronize such happy-go-lucky bravado. Still, references to sectional confl ict (Andrew Jackson’s 1832–33 nullifi cation fi ght with John C. Calhoun over states’ rights) and to a black desire for freedom (only a couple of years aft er the Nat Turner insurrection), all in a context of general insolence, were cer- tainly nothing to be laughed off . Like most of the potentially subversive mo- ments of early minstrelsy, they are qualifi ed by “darky” dialect (in the theater) and orthographic derision (on the page); but in the mouth of the very fi gure

Blackface and Blackness 25

who had begun to make the question of national unity an issue, such lyrics could be dangerous, even if it was understood that the singer need not be taken seriously. One ought not immediately assent to the anthropological truism that social formations are always buttressed by the permission of certain experiences not normally permitted. With regard to antebellum minstrelsy so much remains to be seen. As Barbara Babcock-Abrahams notes, “Any form of symbolic inversion has an implicitly radical dimen- sion” (183). We should in any case avoid the essentialist notion that such representations are inherently anything, for given the right context, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White imply, they may indeed take on a transforma- tive capacity (14).

Th ese ambiguities were owing in part to the iconography such fi gures employed—that of blackface and male transvestism—features also commonly found together in public uses of blackface. Quite strikingly, many minstrel performers began their careers in the circus, perhaps even developing Ameri- can blackface out of clowning (whose present mask in any case is clearly in- debted to blackface), and continually found under the big top a vital arena of minstrel performance. Clowning is an uncanny kind of activity, scariest when it is most cheerful, unsettling to an audience even as it unmasks the preten- tious ringmaster. Blackface performers, oft en inspiring a certain terror as well as great aff ection, relied precisely on this doubleness. Ralph Ellison locates their specifi cally American resonance:

When the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personifi cation of his disorder and chaos but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped some- where in the mystery of hell . . . and thus lose that freedom which, in the fl uid, “traditionless,” “classless” and rapidly changing society, he would recognize as the white man’s alone. (“Change” 53)

Th e black mask off ered a way to play with collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them. Yet the intensifi ed American fears of succumbing to a racialized image of Otherness were everywhere operative in minstrelsy, continually exceeding the controls and accounting, paradoxically, for the min- strel show’s power, insofar as its “blackness” was unceasingly fascinating to performers and audiences alike. Th is combined fear of and fascination with the black male cast a strange dread of miscegenation over the minstrel show, but evidently did not preclude a continual return to minstrel miming.

Far from simple indulgence, however, the returns began to take on the aura of attempted mastery, of a culture trying to contain what Ellison calls “disorder and chaos” but which could more historically be called intermixture and in- surrection. 15 Th e eff ete but potent black “dandy” fi gure incarnated these threats, as in “Long Tail Blue” (1827):

Love and Th eft 26

As I was going up Fulton Street, I hollerd arter Sue,

Th e watchman came and took me up, And spoilte my long tail blue.

If you want to win the Ladies hearts, I’ll tell you what to do;

Go to a tip top Tailor’s shop, And buy a long tail blue. 16

“Raw, undomesticated bodily and collective power,” as Victor Turner would have it, the blackface trickster, “long tail blue” or not, suggests white men’s obsession with a rampageous black penis (“Myth” 580). As Ellison puts it, “Th e mask was the thing (the ‘thing’ in more ways than one)” (“Change” 49). Bold swagger, irrepressible desire, sheer bodily display: in a real sense the minstrel man was the penis, that organ returning in a variety of contexts, at times ludi- crous, at others rather less so. 17 Such contexts were contradictory in any case, invoking the power of “blackness” while deriding it, in an eff ort of cultural control, through the very convention that produced its power—the grease- paint and burnt cork of blackface.

Transvestism, of course, is subject to similar instabilities, though, as Marjo- rie Garber has powerfully argued, male cross-dressing can resist the stasis of ambiguity and thoroughly undermine traditional gender categories. 18 Garber herself admits, however, that women oft en become the target of such hu- morous disguises. Th is is certainly the case with minstrelsy’s many “wench” characters (played by men at a time when women regularly appeared on the legitimate stage), which off er one of the most revealing discourses on male sexuality in America at midcentury. 19

Gal from the South.

Ole massa bought a colored gal, He bought her at the south;

Her hair it curled so very tight She could not shut her mouth.

Her eyes they were so bery small, Th ey both ran into one,

And when a fl y light in her eye, Like a June bug in de sun.

Her nose it was so berry long, It turned up like a squash,

And when she got her dander up She made me laugh, by gosh;

Old massa had no hooks or nails, Or nothin’ else like that,

Blackface and Blackness 27

So on this darkie’s nose he used To hang his coat and hat.

One morning massa goin’ away, He went to git his coat,

But neither hat nor coat was there, For she had swallowed both;

He took her to a tailor shop, To have her mouth made small,

Th e lady took in one long breath, And swallowed tailor and all. 20

Th is portrait is fairly typical of the representation of black women on the min- strel stage, whether simply narrated or fully acted out; the two modes occurred simultaneously as oft en as not, the narrative detailing the jokey blazon, the oblivious “wench” ridiculed in person on another part of the stage. Th e anxi- eties aroused by such fi gures are also typical: the empowering insistence of the two “boughts” attempts to cancel the threatening open mouth (later to be “made small”), while the phallic nose and the engulfi ng, vaginal throat fi nally wreak revenge on the master.

White men’s fear of female power was dramatized with a suspiciously dra- conian punitiveness in early minstrelsy, usually in the grotesque transmuta- tions of its female fi gures. It is as if that fear were so fundamental that only a major eff ort of surveillance—like a dream, revealing its anxieties even as it devises its censors—would do. Th e widespread prostitution in the theater’s no- torious third tier, the literal analogue of the song’s wish to buy women, comes to seem an ugly kind of compensatory space given the unruliness of these stage fi gures, if the fi gures did not themselves contain the female threat. 21 Th ese “female” bodies, it is true, were “also” male, and minstrel performers did not hesitate to fl irt with the homosexual content of blackface transvestism (the master’s hat on the black “woman’s” nose), which no doubt created an atmo- sphere of polymorphous license that could blur conventional gender outlines (for men). But a fl ight from such “compromising” subtexts may in fact have produced the reassertion of masculinity in misogynist representations, which usually constituted the reactionary face of a perhaps more “undecidable” racial masquerade.

When we turn from these dramatic roles to the public display of the black- face convention, we fi nd as long a history. Victor Turner defends such dis- plays—in parades, protests, carnivals, processions—as a mode of “public refl exivity,” during which societies think in sometimes displaced and con- densed ways about their forms and functions. He links them to “times of rad- ical social change,” when they can form part of the “repertoire of prophetic leaders who mobilize the people against invaders or overlords threatening their deep culture” (“Frame” 36). For this reason Barbara Babcock-Abrahams

Love and Th eft 28

has likened stage tricksters to E. J. Hobsbawm’s “primitive rebels,” those back- ward, marginal antinomians who demonstrate quite literally that “oppression can be turned upside down” and who inspire myths and legends about their lives (Hobsbawm 24). Natalie Davis has more dialectically described these public performances as both harmless communal “safety valves” that defl ect at- tention from social reality and proposals of new social paradigms or models; they “can on the one hand perpetuate certain values of the community (even guaran- tee its survival), and on the other hand criticize political order” (97). In conjunc- tion with transvestism, the blackface mask has indeed been worn as an equivocal emblem of popular resistance, on behalf, variously—even simultaneously—of tradition and innovation. (Th e Boston Tea Party, with its howling “Indians” and “blacks,” is only the most famous American occasion.) In her essay “Women on Top,” Davis describes several instances of “ritual and festive inversion.” In the Beaujolais of the 1770s, for example, “male peasants blackened their faces and dressed as women and then attacked surveyors measuring their lands for a new landlord” (147). Th e “Whiteboys” of Ireland, for about a decade (the 1760s), dressed in long white frocks and blackened their faces, setting themselves up as an “armed popular force to provide justice for the poor, ‘to restore the ancient commons and redress other grievances’” (149); they tore down enclosures, pun- ished greedy landowners, and forced masters to release unwilling apprentices. Th ey referred to themselves as “fairies,” and signed themselves “Ghostly Sally”— prototypes, says Davis, of the Molly Maguires and Ribbon Societies of the nine- teenth century (149).

In each of these instances the “unruly” resonances of blackness and female- ness emerged from the dramatic frame into public, where they were put to new uses by men in a political realm that obviously excluded both blacks and women. Davis observes:

On the one hand, the disguise freed men from the full responsibility for their deeds and perhaps, too, from fear of outrageous revenge upon their manhood. Aft er all, it was mere women [or mere blacks, or indeed black women] who were acting in this disorderly way. On the other hand, the males drew upon the sexual power and energy of the unruly woman and on her license (which they had long assumed at carnival and games)—to promote fertility, to defend the community’s interests and standards, and to tell the truth about unjust rule. (149)

Th ere was no immediate internal racial context for blackface in these exam- ples, but the European slave trade provided the broadest conditions of possi- bility; and the assumed inferiority, sexuality, license, and perhaps even sense of injustice associated with women were clearly ascribed to black people as well. Davis does not mention whether blackface was seen as representational rather than abstract or “metaphysical” (recall the diabolical associations with black- ness that Winthrop Jordan extensively documented in White over Black ), but

Blackface and Blackness 29

there is no question that by the late eighteenth century blackface had taken on representational force, as the many sentimentally “noble” black characters on the British stage illustrate. Th e dynamic of the processional mask in these in- stances thus preserves the ascription of certain detested qualities to “black- ness” while momentarily paying tribute to their power, a power that even in peasants’ or workers’ movements is compromised by such ascription. Herein lay the meaning of blackface in the American context of rioting and revelry, though it is perhaps not surprising that in such a confl ictual racial scene the mask was increasingly used for reactionary purposes.

Susan Davis has demonstrated that in militia burlesques and Christmas street festivities, public “masking”—the assumption through disguise of a new or inverted identity—became common in northern American cities aft er the 1820s, precisely contemporary with the rise of minstrelsy (and over against similar traditions of black pageantry). 22 During carnivalesque Christmas Eve celebrations, for instance, roving young working-class men parodied the mili- tia, marched to the rough music of kitchen-utensil instruments, and brawled on street corners. On one occasion in Philadelphia in 1834, one hundred men in intentionally makeshift uniforms conducted elaborate sham maneuvers, ac- companied, one newspaper said, by a masked band of “Indians, hunters, Fal- staff s, Jim Crows and nondescripts.” Women and blacks, as usual, were the most frequent sources of disguise. While only public transvestism, not black- face, brought a stiff fi ne—a fact that underscores both the permissiveness of the popular theater and the possible radicalism of men in drag during this period—blackface cross-dressing, as in its extended European history, was a popular favorite. Such disguises appear to have served similarly duplicitous purposes as those of Natalie Davis’s peasants, but the American context added an even more troubling dimension. Gang attacks on blacks, mobbings of black churches, and battles between black and white gangs were commonplace hol- iday occurrences. 23 Other racially motivated mobs repeated the pattern: during the 1834 Philadelphia race riot in the Moyamensing district, some of the anti- abolitionist rioters who attacked the homes of well-to-do blacks, burned black churches, and destroyed racially integrated places of leisure wore black masks and shabby coats (Runcie 209).

Th is “blackface-on-Black violence,” as David Roediger has called it, would seem to indicate a fairly direct correspondence between racial hostility, public masking, and the minstrel show ( Wages 106). In many instances we fi nd this to be the case, but such a notion generally underrates the complexity of both antebellum racial politics and minstrelsy itself. Susan Davis suggests of the Christmas celebrations, for instance, that “masking made an ambiguous state- ment about race despite its violent mocking tone, for blackface found use as a way to play with racial identity, important in a city where black inferiority was taken for granted yet segregation was incomplete” (“Making” 193). Stage black- face was to be called on to negotiate just such contradictions in the culture of

Love and Th eft 30

the antebellum American popular classes—between “white egalitarianism” and interracial urban practices, 24 or between antislavery and antiabolitionism— called on so frequently, in fact, that its primary purpose appears to have been to provide “imaginary” resolutions to intractable social confl icts. Moreover, if minstrelsy was a theatrical celebration of how deeply American racism is “em- bedded into a sense of racial and class aff ection and even envy” (Grimsted and Stowe 95), this contradictory structure occasionally witnessed unexpected returns of indentifi catory desire. 25 At the very least, symbolic crossings of racial boundaries—through dialect, gesture, and so on—paradoxically engage and absorb the culture being mocked or mimicked (Szwed 27–28). Acting black: a whole social world of irony, violence, negotiation, and learning is con- tained in that phrase. 26