American Fun (21 page)

Such deception would work miracles for bigger and bigger business. One day it would make behemoths like
McDonald’s and Disney our household names and trusted friends.

THE POPULAR STORY GOES
something like this: Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice, a journeyman actor from New York City, was making a show stop in the Ohio River valley (Louisville, Cincinnati, maybe Pittsburgh), when he stumbled upon a nugget of comic gold. A disabled old black man (or was it a young boy?), with a hitched-up right shoulder and atrophied left leg, was out behind a barn throwing his body and soul into a folk song about “Jim Crow”: “
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,” he sang, as if giving himself instructions. “Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.” This was the late 1820s, and the enterprising Rice, knowing the vogue for strange new dances, stylized the unfortunate stranger’s gyrations, crafted the lyrics to fit an Irish folk tune, and borrowed a black man’s worn-out suit of clothes. Blackening his face with a chunk of burnt cork, he fashioned what he saw into a monstrous act that transformed mid-nineteenth-century American theater.

Rice wasn’t the first. Blackface, a long-standing English tradition, had cropped up long before in American frontier towns where blacks and whites were forced to mingle and thus developed a begrudging sociability. Like the Patriots who dressed as war-whooping Indians, or the members of northeastern Tammany societies who performed elaborate
Indian-inspired rituals as rallying points for an emerging middle class, young men who asserted their dominance through blackface both exaggerated racial differences to their own advantage and indulged in lewdness, by way of comedy, that was otherwise scorned or forbidden. Many of the early minstrels were outsiders and bohemians who enjoyed the carnival freedom of blackface, what
Eric Lott calls “
that fascinating imaginary space of fun and license outside (structured by) Victorian bourgeois norms.”

America’s growing white population was intensely curious about black culture, which could be seen in all of its public defiance from King Charles’s
Pinkster Days to Sundays on
Congo Square. “Blackness,” on the one hand, marked a moral danger zone where men were feared as sexual predators and women were identified, in the spirit of Sara Baartman—the wildly sensationalized “
Hottentot Venus” who toured European stages until 1815—as essentially voluptuous, desiring animals. Blackness also stood for a culture of “fun” whose diction, humor, music, and dance loosely informed blackface minstrelsy’s repertoire. Ironically, it marked a social freedom that was increasingly forbidden among middle-class whites. Blackface enthusiasts tried importing such “genuine negro fun” to the stage, a space of relative liberation, though all they offered was a cheap replica.

Edwin Forrest, perhaps the nation’s first bona fide celebrity, wore blackface onstage in the 1820s, but it was Rice, with his limping “rockin’ de heel” dance, who invented the overblown physical grotesquery that turned it into a national sensation. Whereas actual
African-American dancing of the period was, as
Hans Nathan notes, “
improvised” and naturally “ecstatic,” the theatrical heel-dancing inspired by Rice “demanded planned variety and … encouraged showmanship.” Not spontaneous fun but deliberate comedy, minstrel dancing “stress[ed] jolliness and clownishness for their own sake.” Rice’s equally important innovation was his comic character, the bootblack “Jim Crow,” whom he featured in dozens of songs, poems, monologues, and plays. This warm-blooded, hotheaded, fork-tongued fugitive dusts up trouble all over town—and throughout the society he’s supposed to serve—whether he’s charmingly pursuing “
de holy state of hemlock” or insouciantly telling an uppity
white mistress, who smirks at his interest in Shakespearean tragedy, that “
he should like to play Otello—and smoder de white gal.” In the 1830s, when T. D. Rice was indistinguishable from Jim Crow, he dominated
theaters from New York to London with his popularization of the African-American trickster figure.

It’s easy to be revolted by Rice’s Jim Crow—a white man making fun of blacks for the amusement of other whites. He lampooned African-American skin color, facial features, and dialect. He exaggerated genitals, breasts, and curves that played on stereotypes of hypersexuality. But as W. T. Lhamon Jr. convincingly argues, Rice’s Jim Crow, unlike the blatantly stupid clowns that Lhamon calls “
Sambos,” should be read for the deeply mixed messages that it sent to his “
overlapping publics”—working class, middle class, bohemian, even black. Jim Crow was a “
quick-quipping runaway who mocked slavery” and at the same time “pestered those who would enter into middle class aspirations or grasp at dandiacal pretensions.” In the twentieth century he became associated with a truckling
Uncle Tom figure, but in the antebellum period he was the original rebel who necessitated “Jim Crow” laws. Both the product of American racism and a critic of it, Jim Crow was pitched to heterogeneous audiences who laughed at different sides of his jokes: his burlesque of undereducated blacks, his attack on imperious and overeducated whites. Blackface may have “
inspired the laughter of cruelty as well as the laughter of affirmation,” as
Gary D. Engle puts it, but the overwhelming evidence points to its cruelty.

For most minstrels weren’t sending such a sophisticated message—most were showmen riding a wave of popularity. They played taverns and street corners. They jumped up during the intermissions of theatrical productions.
P. T. Barnum, in his early
circus days, always kept a blackface minstrel or two on hand. In the 1830s he blacked up himself when he couldn’t secure good talent: once, behind the tent, he defended an employee against a local white man, who then turned his violent force on Barnum, thinking he was being disrespected by a black. On another occasion, having lost his star minstrel,
John Diamond, to a competitor, Barnum allegedly scoured the Five Points dives until he landed a superior breakdown dancer. The best one, predictably, was a “
genuine negro”
who would have outraged respectable white audiences. This didn’t stop the prince of
humbugs. He blacked his dancer’s face with cork and transformed William Henry Lane into the world-renowned “Juba,” whose “regular break-down” in a New York bar would later command
Charles Dickens’s full attention:

Dickens doesn’t name “this lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly,” but he declares him “the greatest dancer known,” which in 1840s America was explicit enough.
Lane is believed to have been the only professional black minstrel until small troupes began appearing in the late 1850s. Notable among “Master Juba” ’s feats was to challenge his fellow Barnum alumnus “Master Diamond”—the other (and white) greatest dancer known—to at least three highly publicized dance-offs and ultimately to earn the latter’s public respect. Of course Lane didn’t perform
real
“juba,” the
patting kind.
He had learned to dance the Irish jig and reel from a renowned black dancer,
Uncle Jim Lowe, and thereby also elevated Catharine Market’s challenge dances to the middlebrow stage at Vauxhall Gardens. At the same time he took potshots at T. D. Rice’s grotesque tradition. In a cheeky announcement for an 1845 show, he promised “
to give correct Imitation Dances of all the principal Ethiopian Dancers in the United States. After which he will give an imitation of himself—and then you will see the vast difference between those that have heretofore attempted dancing and this
WONDERFUL YOUNG MAN.
”

Minstrelsy became an industry in the 1840s when
Dan Emmett’s sensational
Virginia Minstrels inspired musicians across the country to form their own blackface ensembles—or “
Ethiopian entertainments,” as they were sometimes known. Emmett’s stage-shaking variety show was built around the basic Jim Crow grotesquerie: five musicians in blackface
arrayed themselves in a line, constantly bantering and strutting their antics, spontaneously breaking into theatrics and dance, and working it all up in outlandish dialect. Their first
newspaper review called them “
rare boys—‘full of fun.’ ” When the English actor
H. P. Grattan saw Emmett’s chief competitors, the
Christy Minstrels, perform in Buffalo in 1843, he was so astonished by “
the fun of these three nigger minstrels” that he wanted to see it all over again. “The staple of [their] entertainment was fun—mind, genuine negro fun … the counterfeit presentation of southern darkies [whom] they personally wished to illustrate, and whose dance and
songs, as such darkies, they endeavored to reproduce.”
This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun—“genuine negro fun”—dominated popular culture in the 1840s, seizing even the most respectable audiences. The
Ethiopian Serenaders played the
White House in 1844,
starting a trend that in decades to come would amuse presidents Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, and Pierce. Like all popular culture, minstrelsy also headed west with the
forty-niners, and by 1855 there were five professional blackface groups vying for San Francisco’s gold.

Stephen Foster, composing hits in the 1840s and ’50s, rebuffed “trashy and really offensive” lyrics by the likes of Rice and Emmett (Rice had rejected some of Foster’s early numbers) and instead sold sanitized, sentimental songs to Christy’s (increasingly mainstream) Minstrels. With upbeat tunes like
“Oh! Susanna,”
“Beautiful Dreamer,” and
“Camptown Races,” the so-called father of American music favored nostalgia for an “Old Kentucky Home” over a voyeuristic peep into the slave quarter’s taboo frolics. The bet paid off, and the craze for his sheet music Fostered do-it-yourself minstrelsy in decent households across the land.

When Emmett formed
Bryant’s Minstrels in 1857, he introduced an unbeatable theatrical innovation. Dancing was of course a minstrel-show staple—Christy’s employed both a “somersault jig dancer” and a (cross-dressed) “negro wench dancer”—and much of it, by the fifties, was tightly choreographed, often involving a call-and-response routine between the star performer and the ridiculous “end-men.” But Emmett mined gold from an unrulier dance tradition that sprang the whole troupe to their feet. Clearly inspired by the ring shout and dances “for the eel” that were vanishing from urban public spaces, Bryant’s Minstrels
culminated their widely varied new sets—at
Mechanic’s Hall on Broadway, the main stage for American minstrelsy—with prancing, jigging, hand-waggling “
walk-arounds” in which all of the blackface musicians and their large supporting cast climaxed in a jerky plantation-style hoedown. They clapped and shouted and mugged into the footlights. Children and dwarves provided Barnum-like diversity, and performers rotated in a counterclockwise motion that tried to replicate this African-American rite.

Tearing a page from Stephen Foster’s songbook, Emmett published a volume of his popular “Walk ’Rounds” for folks who wanted to try it at home. In his introduction he vouched for his own authenticity: “
I have always strictly confined myself to the habits and crude ideas of the slaves of the South.”

But naturally there was nothing “genuine” about any of this “negro fun.” The fundamental safety of blackface minstrelsy depended upon its
in
authenticity: that the participants
weren’t
black; that the pleasure derived from their lewd gyrations was sequestered onstage, and done in jest; and that the threat of such unbridled pleasure—loud, brash, energetic, profane—was contained and controlled within a cartoon. Following the Civil War, when the rage for realism in popular culture combined with a loosening of race restrictions, more African-American minstrels took to the boards, and like their pioneer, William Henry Lane, they raised the bar for showmanship. For decades, however, they remained the victims of
P. T. Barnum’s original
humbug, performing only as blacks in blackface.

THE PERIOD FROM
the 1830s to the 1860s was one of widespread civic turmoil. Slave uprisings threatened Southern comfort;
urban riots (over race, class, religion, elections, patriotism, banks, you name it) rankled tenuous northeastern civility; and
Andrew Jackson’s
Indian Removal Act stirred up western race wars that would rage throughout the century. Though it didn’t always erupt in violence, ideological turmoil was also rampant: from America’s tiny towns to its overgrown cities, folks bumped chests over sundry issues that often erupted in bloody conflict—
Protestants fought Catholics, drys fought drinkers, abolitionists fought slave owners;
an efflorescence of political parties and native-born religions created divisions within the growing ranks of aspiring middle-class conservatives and progressives; and a bold, ethnically diverse working class stormed the streets for their claims to popular sovereignty. The most colorful exponents of this latter demographic were the boisterous young denizens of lower Manhattan (as well as Philadelphia and Boston)—the Bowery “
b’hoys” and “
g’hals.” Their nicknames approximated an Irish-American dialect, though this rowdy white subculture was multiethnic and many of them hailed from south of the Bowery—in the infamously seedy Five Points neighborhood. They were born to the fray—among pimps, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers, and in overcrowded tenements—and it was in their character never to back down. But they were also the era’s most glorious dupes, for politicians and promoters alike.

With their flashy styles and political fury, b’hoys resembled eighteenth-century
Jack Tars—right down to their rakishly knotted cravats. They split the difference between roughs and dandies: they wore short black jackets, double-breasted red flannels, flared black trousers, clunky work boots, and neatly brushed black top hats. They wore their pistols holstered and their bangs exaggerated, slicked with soap in a way that anticipated 1950s
greasers. They chomped blunt cigars and strolled with a “
swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy [could] imitate.” G’hals, for their part, were even more extraordinary, by dint of being streetwise working women in an age of compulsory domesticity. They worked long hours and partied at night. They trafficked in the latest gossip and slang and strutted in cheap, bright, extravagant versions of antebellum haute couture. They were recognizable from blocks away by bonnets that sprang out in all directions, “
with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers, and gigantic bows and long streamers of tri-colored ribbons.”