Ultra gum magic trick revealed

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 Bl ackface Minstrelsy and the

American Working Cl ass

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.

{ Acknowled gments }

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