The Weekly Screed (#898)

The roar of the greasepaint…

by David Benjamin

“Today we instinctively recoil at the sight of performers in the burnt-cork makeup and clownlike greasepaint that turned their skin pitch-black and their lips and eyes into giant cartoon features. But the foundation of American comedy, song, and dance was laid down by white and black minstrel stage legends.”

          — Yuval Taylor & Jake Austen, Darkest America

MADISON, Wis. — The historical interplay of black and white Americans is a labyrinth within a maze. The controversy in Virginia over the blackface images in Governor Ralph Northam’s medical-school yearbook, and the sheer ignorance that afflicts both Northam and his high-horse detractors, typifies our great conundrum.

Of course, being caught in blackface in the 21st-century is a firing offense. Northam needs to recede quietly from politics and perhaps open a bait shop on the Eastern Shore. Meanwhile, the rest of us — especially those hair-trigger Democratic presidential candidates — need to examine how deep and subliminal, in all of us, are the roots of Northam’s racist imposture.

 

According to linguist Jasmine Santana, blackface minstrel shows dating back to the1830s, “involved an extreme portrayal of the negative stereotypes about blacks as ignorant, foolish, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, happy-go lucky, and musical… Minstrel shows consoled the conscious of whites and reaffirmed the enslavement of blacks by depicting blacks as happier than their condition warrants, and a threat to society if free and empowered.”

On the other hand, minstrelsy was the earliest form of showbiz that was uniquely American. I learned this from from an eighth-grade music teacher, who limned the evolution of American popular music from the Virginia Minstrels to King Oliver and Paul Whiteman, and thence from “Rhapsody in Blue” to Coltrane and Brubeck, Chuck Berry, Elvis and Ella Fitzgerald.

 

Although minstrelsy’s racist progenitors — white men smearing their faces grotesquely with greasepaint blacker than the darkest darkie — intended the minstrel show to belittle and crush the butt of their jokes, they planted a dissonant seed in the American psyche. As they shucked, jived and joked in Negro mockery, they suggested to their audiences that African-Americans were a homegrown wellspring of song, dance, entertainment and creative ingenuity.

 

The most beloved songwriter of the19th century, Stephen Foster, composed “Dixie”, “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Black Joe,” and, somewhat ironically, “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair.” Every one of these standards was introduced and sung by blackface performers in minstrel shows.

An unspoken white concession to the musical gift of blackness turned into prophecy after the slaves were set free. The minstrel show — and its blackface tradition— did not fade. It grew. Black minstrel troupes not only climbed onto the Zip Coon train, they devised a more sophisticated and popular (especially with black audiences) format than their all-white forebears. One historian has noted that black (and mixed) minstrelsy added “a black political agenda to their stage performances.”

 

Indeed, every show started with the walkaround, with all the performers in a lively, hip-swinging, knee-knocking strut called the cakewalk. “White audiences loved the cakewalk,” wrote one music historian, “not realizing that it originated with plantation slaves imitating their master’s walk.”

Just as blackface minstrelsy was created to mock black people, black minstrelsy found ways to turn the tables and mock the racist masters who invented it. More important, minstrelsy was the only medium for black performers, in the Jim Crow era (“Jim Crow” was the stage name of a seminal white minstrel, Thomas Dartmouth Rice), to practice their arts and make a living.

 

Some of the great stars of early 20th-century entertainment began in black minstrelsy, among them the two goddesses of the blues, Ma Rainey and the incomparable Bessie Smith. Bert Williams, regarded as the best comedian of his era, started out as an “end man.” Raised in minstrelsy, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, re-defined the art and energy of American dance. Even Louis Armstrong, the veritable inventor of the jazz vocal, harked back to minstrel days.

 

All these showpeople, and hundreds more whose names are lost to us — from the Christy Minstrels to Callendar’s Consolidated Spectacular Colored Minstrels — were forced to accommodate ingrained racist stereotypes to please their white audiences. At the same time, they were conveying coded messages to black spectators. Double entendre became another gift to American culture from the winking patter of Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones.

Mark Aronson, writing in the Washington Post, said, “As ‘America’s longest-running form of popular entertainment,’ minstrelsy captures the story of American racism: It reduces individuals to racially defined stereotyped roles. Yet it also reveals the strange way white Americans yearn to see, and indeed idolize, black performers and black culture. Wearing blackface, a white person tries on a life he simultaneously disdains.”

Historians, music critics and showbiz mavens occasionally point out that aspects of minstrelsy keep surfacing, and not just in Ralph Northam’s yearbook. The Mr. Tambo/Mr. Bones formula is a staple of American comedy, from “Amos and Andy” and Abbot and Costello to “Sanford and Son” and beyond. Minstrelsy’s influence appears in the South African genre known as isicathimaya, championed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Other analysts see hip-hop as an ironic revival of minstrel style, minstrel rhythms and minstrel characters — as Snoop Dogg or Lil Wayne revive the garrulous versifying of Mr. Interlocutor.

 

Ralph Northam’s exposure as a casual bigot is useless as an object lesson to myopic white people like him, who lack the curiosity or humility to probe the foundations of a prejudice they’re loath to admit. Considering the tenor of the debate, I’m not sure anybody learned anything. All I got was a memory of eighth-grade music class and a reminder of America’s ambivalence about our  national original sin. Everything about the abduction of innocent Africans into the plantation South was obscene and barbaric — mitigated only by the tenacity, faith, creativity and subversive humor that has sustained black Americans despite the efforts of virtually every white institution to shut them up and keep them chained.

 

Music historians Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen said, “The black minstrel tradition has provided great entertainment and great art. Black performers have played it shamelessly, signified on it, or attacked it — but they’ve had to deal with it in one way or another. It’s something that every American or fan of American culture should care about. They should care because that culture wouldn’t exist without minstrelsy. And because minstrelsy hurts — a lot.”

Jerry Jeff Walker put it more simply: “Mr Bojangles, dance.”