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The : A Study in Stereotype and Reality Author(s): Brooke Baldwin Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1981), pp. 205-218 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3787107 Accessed: 09-05-2017 14:06 UTC

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This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CAKEWALK: A STUDY IN STEREOTYPE AND REALITY

"Cakewalk" is the only caption on the 1904 picture postcard. In the center of the card the artist has drawn a black woman with huge lips, kinky hair, yellow hat, pink dress, green socks and orange shoes, lifting her skirt as she kicks her legs. She is flanked by two ludicrously dressed men. One sports a top hat and a green and yellow striped bathing suit under a red and white striped swallowtail coat. The other, a high-stepping fellow who carries a cane, is dressed in a straw hat, oversized red polka-dot bowtie, and mismatched striped pants and shirt.1 The impact of this visually strong image is overwhelming. The overall effect for the modern viewer is most unsettling. In fact, upon encountering this caricature in 1981, a person unfamiliar with turn-of-the-century popular culture might think he had discovered the unique creation of an aberrant mind. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Similar derogatory images proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not only on postcards. Sunday comics, illustrated humor magazines, children's toys, advertising, lithographs, sheet music covers, stereo cards, product boxes and assorted knick- knacks all featured stereotyped racial imagery in which blacks stole chickens, devoured watermelons, wielded razors, picked cotton, gambled, imitated white dress and speech, smiled widely, and danced and danced and danced. An 1893 trade card advertising Arbuckle's coffee depicted three "representative sports and pastimes" of "American Negroes," possum hunting, banjo playing and cakewalking. The cakewalk couple are elegantly dressed in pink and green, the woman smiling coyly as her partner struts proudly by. The text on the back of the card notes that "the American is a child of nature, and one of the most entertaining, interesting and happy of beings." The cakewalk, danced by the couple, "fond of display and gorgeous in their choice of colors," is explained straightforwardly as a "contest to determine the most graceful and best of walkers," in which couples "pass in serious and sober fashion, to the accompaniment of music" before judges who award a cake to the most deserving. Actually, among the many white-drawn renderings of the , this is one of the least caricatured. For, despite the accompanying comments made on the simple, happy-go-lucky black character, the couple is not drawn in awkward and exaggerated postures, nor in gaudily mismatched and ill-fitting costumes. A grotesque rendition of the event was the more common in the 1890's. An Arm and Hammer Baking Soda trade card gave a most inglorious account of the cakewalk tradition when it pictured a black maid leading a "bread-walk" of huge- lipped, bug-eyed "nigs' around a loaf of bread made with their product. And the manufacturers of "Three Black Kids" cigars placed a picture of two high- strutting, ragged boys dancing to the accompaniment of a banjo on the inside cover of each cigar box. The cakewalk stereotype was not only used to sell, it was used to entertain. Stereo cards, photographs which could be viewed in three dimension, were a popular parlor diversion in an age before television, and black subjects a favorite category of cards. An 1896 card, "Belle of the Cake Walk," pictured a black man

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 206 journal of social history in elaborately flowered drag, posing in a frozen dance position before a dilapidated shack. Other cards featured black-faced dancers or actual black models outfitted in the most outlandish costumes imaginable. Numerous toys also featured black cakewalking characters. A high-kicking paperdoll was comically resplendant in red and white striped pants and a green swallowtail coat, while a white-gloved dancer with spats and cane danced across the side of a tin noise-maker. And a board gamen "The Cakewalk Game,?5 featured on its cover a parade of couples dressed in a rainbow array of colors (one man wears an orange-checked suit with blue cumberbund and red tie!). Cakewalking "darkies" even decorated the walls of turn-of-the-century American homes. Currier and Ives, the New York firm whose famed, cheap lithographs catered to the popular tastes of millions of nineteenth-century Americanss in 1883 published "De Cakewalk" as one of their dozens of comic black subjects. And twenty years later, as testimony to the fact that popular interest in the topic had not waned, the Prang Lithographic Company printed a lush chromolithograph of a couple about to receive the prize cake. Twentieth-century in the age of inventions were not content however, to rely solely on drawings for their entertainment. In 1903 the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released three Ellm shorts featuring the cakewalk. Each of these pioneerings silent motion pictures is less than one minute long, but together they reveal much about what their audience knew of the dance.2 In "The Cakewalk," a black man in formal attire and beribboned cane leads two couples in the march. Both women wear proper, long, dark- dresses; the men, dark tails. Their movements are strutting, but "dignified." Considering the times in which it was filmed, this movie is remarkably understated in nature. It indicates that alternative views of the cakewalk were available for consideration; however, in this case, that alternative view may have existed only as a foil to the more flamboyant one. For the films companion piece, "The Comedy Cakewalk," depicts the dance in far greater accordance with the prevailing stereotype. This movie also features a leader and two couples, but now the women wear floral hats and flashy, mid-calf length dresses of striped silk, and one of the men wears a white duster coat and white top hat. The women raise their skirts as they strut by in much more animated fashion, and the leader stops the march at one point to do a -type step. These actions, of course, seem all the more "eccentric" when contrasted with the first film. "The Ballyhoo Cakewalk, except that it had a much larger cast of characters, was a recapitulation of the comedy walk both in costuming and action. The same company produced a film in 1907 entitled "Fights of Nations."3 This movie was a veritable catalog of racial and ethnic stereotypes, depicting fights among knife-carrying Mexicans, money-hungry , heroic Scots, and drunken Irishmen. The black segment, ;'Sunny Africa-8th Ave., New York," pictures a razor-slashing fight over a girl which temporarily interrupts a spirited cakewalk in a black dance hall. This placed the dance squarely within a whole set of stereotypes. Interesting also to those who note today that all American minorities have suffered at the hands of caricaturists, is the film's finale, i'America-Land of the Free," in which the ethnic characters from all the previous vignettes join whites at a military ball to rally around Uncle Sam and make up-all, that is, except the blacks. Besides the obvious fact that the moving picture was the ideal medium for portraying an activity which depended so much on motion caricaturists had

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CAKEWALK 207 another reason for wanting to capture the cakewalk and every stereotype on film. Photography lends an air of realism to what it shows; that which it pictures is more believable as "real life" than that which the cartoonist draws. This was not only true of movies, but of photographic postcards. Representative of these many cards is one captioned "Typical Negro Cakewalk." Among the six couples posing as if frozen in mid-step are a man dressed in an orange and yellow ragland coat, and a woman in a gaudy pink and blue dress with pink stockings. The caption implies that this is a documentary shot of an authentic black gathering; the greater possibility that it was an elaborately staged and costumed production directed by whites is never mentioned. Photography by no means replaced artist-drawn renditions, however. "The Cake Walk" was the title for numerous comic postcards, including one which featured a real gramophone record of the dance and a group portrait of a whole cast of stock black characters: a banjo player, a boy eating watermelon, a pair of lovers, and a gayly dressed cakewalk couple. It was even the subject for postal holiday greeting cards. One extending "Hearty Christmas Wishes" pictured a ludicrously dressed black man strutting alongside four dogs who mimicked his steps on their hind legs. And a Valentine card featured a man in a green knickers suit, monocle and sunflower bouttoniere, declaring to his lady love, "Ef yo' will only be ma wife, We'll dance a cakewalk all troo life." Whatever the popular medium, be it a magazine ad proclaiming that Knox's gelatine takes the cake, or a postcard souvenir of the cakewalk on the Atlantic City boardwalk, the purpose of the caricature was the same, to portray cakewalking blacks as buffoons who could never take that final step, no matter how high- kicking, into white culture and high society. But only the most superficial analysis of a stereotype would begin and end with the obvious observation that it afforded one group the chance to laugh at the "inferiority" of another. Closer analysis demands more questions be asked. Why, of all the activities in which blacks engaged, was cakewalking chosen as the subject of caricature? What did this particular stereotype allow caricaturists to imply about blacks that distorting other aspects of their life would not? Researchers have not yet pinpointed the origin of the cakewalk, but most believe that it began several decades before its widespread popularity among whites and concomitant stereotyping in white popular culture, in the slave quarters of Southern plantations. Because antebellum slave narratives were produced largely for their abolitionist propoganda value, they concentrated on the negative aspects of slave life and devoted little attention to slave culture. Thus though several mention Christmas festivities and corn-shucking parties, few go into detailed descriptions of the types of music and employed. It is not surprising, therefore, that the cakewalk is not specifically mentioned. However when the researchers of the Federal Writers' Project of the W.P.A. interviewed aged ex-slaves in the 1930's, there was no longer any need to suppress information about the happier moments of slave life. Blacks could now reveal that in spite of living under a system of repression and control unequalled in history they had retained a rich and vital culture. And in their reports the cakewalk is present. Louise Jones, an ex-slave from Virginia, reminisced about Christmas: "de music, de fiddles an' de banjos, de Jews harp, an' all dem other things. Sech dancin' you never did see befo. Slaves would set de flo' in turns, an' do de cakewalk mos' all night."4 Baker, an eighty-seven year old ex-slave from Georgia, told her interviewer that "Marse Allen" used to sing this song to the

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 208 journal of social history

slave children: "Walk light ladies, De cake's all dough, You needn't mind de weather, If de wind don't blow." She then laughed and added, "Us didn't know when he was singin' dat tune to us chillun dat when us growed up us would be cakewalkin' to de same song."5 But Estella Jones, another Georgia ex-slaves gave the WPA collection's most elaborate description:

Cakewalkin' wuz a lot of fun durin' time. Dey swept de yards real clean and set benches for de party. Banjos wuz used for music makin. De womens wor long ruSed dresses wid hoops in 'em and de mens had on high hats, long split-tailed coats, and some of em used walkin' sticks. De couple dat danced best got a prize. Sometimes de slave owners come to dese parties 'cause dey enjoyed watchin' de dance, and dey 'cided who danced de best. Most parties durin' slavery time, wuz give on Saturday night durin' work seasons, but durin' winter dey wuz give on most any night.6

Other ex-slaves related their memories independent of the WPA project. A South Carolinian told of Griffln, a fiddler who played for the dances of the whites as well as for the "annual of his own people."7 Some handed down their stories in the Afro-American oral tradition to their children or to other members of the next generation. In 1960 Leigh Whipple, an eighty year old black actor, related such a story told him in 1901 by a seventy year old woman who had been his childhood nurse. She explained that she was still in such good condition because her abilities as a "strut girl" had won her an easier life than that enjoyed bypleasure: most slaves. At her first plantation her master watched her cakewalking for idle

Us slaves watched white folks' parties where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we'd do it, too, but we used to mock em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better.

But her second master recognized her "value" as a dancer; he entered her and a partner in contests and wagered on them. When she won, she received presents and special privileges.8 In 1950, Shephard Edmonds, an ex- entertainerl passed on the memories of the cakewalk in antebellum Tennessee which his freed slave parents had passed down to him:

. . . the cakewalk was originally a plantation dance, just a happy movement they did to the banjo music because they couldn't stand still. It was generally on Sundays, when there was little work, that the slaves both young and old would dress up in hand-me-down finery to do a high-kicking, prancing walk-around. They did a take-off on the high manners of the white folks in the 'big-house, but their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point. It's supposed to be that the proudestcustom of movement. a prize stgrted with the master giving a cake to the couple that did the

The last two stories demonstrate that the purpose of oral lore is to inform the next generation not only of cultural forms, but also, and more importantly, of the meanings behind them. Unlike the sheer physical descriptions of the dance offered by the ex-slaves to white WPA interviewers, both of these stories told to younger blacks also imparted the message that the cakewalk was more than a recreational dance; it was an outlet for satirizing the manners of the whites who oppressed them. Both also related with some satisfaction that those whites who thought themselves superior to their slaves were so stupid that instead of recognizing the satire aimed at them, they became unwitting champions of it. This white belief, that black dance was a sinceren though not completely

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CAKEWALK 209 successful emulation of "higher" white cultural forms, characterized an early caricatured portrayal of "A New Year's Day Contraband Ball at Vicksburg, Mississippi.' ln 1863 Harper's Weekly woodcut pictured a hall crowded with dancing slaves, who ranged from fat, bandana'd mammies and ragged farmhands to finely dressed belles and dandy dudes. The facial features of some were grossly caricatured, while others were sympathetically drawn. The caption explained the wide range of characterization:

The negroes preserve all their African fondness for music and dancing, and in the modified form which they have assumed here have given rise to negro dancing and melodies in our theatres, a form of amusement which has enriched many. But the colored people should be seen in one of their own balls to enjoy the reality. The character of the music and the dance; the strange gradation of colors, from the sooty black of the pure breed to those creatures, fair and beautiful, whose position among their darker brethren shows the brutal cruelty of their male ancestors for generations, who begot them to degrade them, and who had thus for years been putting white blood into slavery. There is in these balls one thing which cannot fail to impress any observer. Coming as they all do from a degraded and oppressed class, the negroes assume nevertheless, in their intercourse with each other, as far as they can, the manners and language of the best classes in society. There is often a grotesque exaggeration, indeed; but there is an appreciation of refinement and an endeavor to attain it which we seldom see in the same class of whites. 10 The point of the whole scene was to show the blacks' "primitive appreciation" of white culture, which resulted in their "grotesquely exaggerated" version of it in imitative dancing. Incidental was the satirist's more astute observation that something of black culture, something potentially enriching, was retained in the scene, also. This Civil War era caricature is a rare example of contemporary white commentary on slave dancing outside of a minstrel setting. The scarcity of white planters' and travellers' accounts of antebellum cakewalking can be attritsuted to the same reasons that no secular slave music received much attention. Lawrence Levine, in his brilliant study of Afro-American folk thought, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, suggests the possibility that many white observers of slave society were either unaware of songs which blacks knew enough to keep to themselves, or unwilling to record that which didn't fit into their preconceived notions of black culture.1l Seemingly innocent , not songs of satiric and protesting social commentary, were what they believed blacks produced; thus, they were what they heard and recorded. Not only did antebellum white observers ignore the lyrics of secular slave songs; they also paid insufficient attention to the style of the music and the steps danced to it. Almost all secondary sources on slave music rely heavily on the 1820 travel account of Benjamin Latrobe, who vividly described the African dances performed in the Place Congo, because few other accounts which give such attention to detail exist. Most observers were content to note that the blacks did African dances, or danced "wildly." They shared the ethnocentric belief that, unlike Europeans whose culture had a form and style which differentiated a quadrille from a , Africans were cultureless and only engaged in formless, irrational, barbaric behavior. Thus, they reasoned, all black dances were alike and needed no further description than "wild." Even later black narratives are not as rich a source of information on slavery-era cakewalking as one would hope or might expect. The few descriptions cited earlier are not a selective sampling but an almost exhaustive compilation of those accounts which have been found so far. This lack of reportage, less

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms journal of social history 210 understandable than that among abolitionist slave narrators and ethnocentric white observers, most likely had two major causes. First, the WPA "informants't probably realized that these interviews gathered by government agents would be directed mainly to a white audience. And, as folklorists long ago discovered, there is a reluctance among people to share the secrets of their culture with strange data- collectors. Second, many of the WPA interviewers (most of whom were not trained folklorists) shared the same assumptions antebellum white observers held. When "informants" reported that slaves sang spirituals, interviewers often asked follow-up questions: 'iCould you sing one for me?" But when told that slaves held parties and danced all night, most simply went on to the next topic. The interviewers willingly believed that slaves could express a child-like faith in the white Christian God (whites had not yet guessed at the hidden-revolutionary meanings of spirituals), but they could not conceive of blacks participating in a rich cultural life independent of European forms. Thuss they felt no need to press the ex-slaves for further explanations of remarks which hinted that such a culture indeed existed. This dearth of information on the origin and form of the cakewalk in its folk setting (before it became distorted on the minstrel stage) does not mean, however, that modern scholars have been unable to analyze its component parts and its possible African roots. Indeed, Lawrence Levine is on firm ground when he asserts that there is "a wealth of evidence to buttress Herskovitz' assertion that the dance 'carried over into the New World to a greater degree than almost any other trait of African culture.' 5w12 Anthropologist Harold Courlander) in noting that the strut was a dance motif drawn from the black and not European tradition, reported that in the "secular dances of South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria'? he himself had observed "certain passages which were virtually indistinguishable from what in this country go by the name of the Cake Walk, ShuSe, and Strut.''l3 Musicologists William Schafer and Johannes Reidel have traced the cakewalk's characteristic i'Polyrhythmic structure" to African music, in which this is an "outstanding feature.''14 John Roberts also keys on the common rhythmic structure of the two musics in noting that the cakewalk's basic syncopated rhythm of f g 4 n in the right hand set against the steady 'ioompah" in the left, is directly traceable to African styles.lf Ragtime expert Rudi Blesh also calls attention to the fact that right handed syncopation against a "regularly accented bass' is a commonplace of both African music and plantation "folk melodies.l'l6 And historian Marshall Stearns returns to observations of the dance steps to make the same . He links the cakewalk to the Southern Ring Shout which he in turn traces back to the African Circle Dance. He explains that this became adapted to its American setting to become a truly Afro- American form. Its characteristic African shuffle step, he argues, was supplanted by the strut because of the satiric purpose of "taking off" on the grand strutting manners of the whites. 17 What Stearns and most other authors who mention the satiric element of the cakewalk fail to note, however, is that satire, or signifying, is itself a characteristic trait of black music. Few show adequate appreciation for satire as a cultural trait which gives black music a dimension beyond its rhythm. In Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, itself a sparkling example of black satirel Reed describes the phenomena of the "" as an outbreak of "Jes Grew.' Jes Grew is an "anti-plague" which causes blacks first, and then others to manifest their true nature. Its principal symptom is spontaneous dancing. At one point Reed

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CAKEWALK 211 pauses to reflect: "Don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith . . . Ask the dazzling parodying punning mischievous pre-Joycean style-play of your Cakewalking your Calinda your Minstrelsy give-and-take of the ultra-absurd." Ishmael Reed appreciates the signifying element of the Cakewalk. 18 Another trait that several slave accounts of the cakewalk mention is its contest- element. This in turn points to its essentially improvisatory nature and characteristic of responsoriality. Schafer goes so far as to label the cakewalk "a grand promenade with improvisatory possibilities.''19 Stearns explains the relationship between contest and improvisation by noting that iiin competition stress is placed on individual invention.'20 But no authors point out how the way the contest was decided exhibited the trait of responsoriality. Several accounts of contests, during and after slavery, indicate that the audience shouted support for any couple displaying unusual inventiveness or elegant execution. This cued them and the other couples as to how to dance in order to win the favor of the judges, often the audience members themselves. There was a constant give and take, call and response, between dancer and viewer that is but another essential characteristic of black music. Thus, the cakewalk can be identified as an Afro-American folk form with roots in African music through its traits of syncopation or supsended beat, polyrhythmic structure, signifying, improvisation, and responsoriality. All combine to make it a genuinely black cultural product, which is exactly why whites, from the beginning, attempted to coopt and stereotype it. When two groups with conflicting interests and differing cultures (in this case, racially stratified blacks and whites in nineteenth and twentieth-century America) are forced to coexist within a larger society, it is not unusual for the more powerful group to try to impose its values and culture on the whole community. For, the presence of viable cultural alternatives among those they label as inferior provides evidence which threatens to shatter their carefully but precariously constructed social definition of reality, a definition which justifies their domination and self- interested rule. If blacks are, indeed, inferior and cultureless, the reasoning goes, whites are justified, even duty-bound, to rule them with an iron and "guiding" hand. But, if they are, instead, intellectually and morally equal and capable of creative thought, the justification is removed. Dance was a prominent cultural strength of blacks, the cakewalk a particularly distinctive example of it, whose purpose was, after all, to satirize the competing culture of supposedly "superior" whites. Slaveholders were able to dismiss its threat in their own minds by considering it as a simple performance which existed merely for their own pleasure. To coopt the cakewalk, physically seize control of it, was within the power of whites who "owned" the blacks with whom they lived. (Of course, it continued to be danced surreptitiously by slaves who retained its mocking nature, also; but, what slaveholders didn't know about didn't worry them.) And, as previously noted, knowledge of the cakewalk was restricted largely to these Southern plantations in the antebellum period. As blackfaced minstrelsy developed in the postbellum period from its four-man origins to lavish and finally, mammoth, productions, the cakewalk appeared to a wider audience, but now in the guise of the walkaround finale. Rourke, in her classic study of American Humor, noted that this "minstrel climax of competitive dancing was clearly patterned on plantation dances which went back to Africa.''21 Some minstrel-like performances evidently did strive for authenticity, such as the exhibit presented at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, in which a plantation scene

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 212 journal of social history

was recreated for blacks who sang folk songs and did an old dance called the "chalk-line walk9' or cakewalk.22 But more representative was the "Black America" show, an extravaganza with a cast of five hundred which was staged in a Brooklyn park in the summer of 1895. The difference was, that while this show also claimed to be a "realistic ethnological exhibit," it was actually a stereotyped piece in the steadily deteriorating minstrel tradition. The abolition of slavery may have halted whites from seizing actual control of black cultural forms, but it did not deter them from recreating black life and culture on the white-controlled stage to conform to their own negative expectations. Robert Toll designates this "ultimate in white fantasies about the Southern Negro" as symbolic of the "final culmination of the ." It included a scene in which the entire cast descended on a watermelon cart to devour its contents. The first part of the show concluded with a cakewalk which the program claimed was not a predet'ermined performance. It explained the plantation history of the dance then instructed the audience to select the victors by shouting out their favorite couple's number. The performers responded to this shouting by increasing the pace qf the dance.23 This curious mixture of caricature and authentic dance characterized the tension which underlay all minstrelsy. As Schafer states, "minstrelsy was both racist and a way to marginally bring black music to white America."24 It at once presented actual black music and poked fun at it by labelling it "peregrination for the pastry." Postbellum white caricaturists substituted denial and denigration of black culture for their race's lost license to control it. Minstrelsy misrepresented this black creative form, while at the same time making in small towns all over America aware that any black culture existed at all. In most later shows, blacks were employed to do the dance which whites could never seem to master with equal style and verve; however, many cakewalkers were whites in . A typical blackface farce was 'iJes Like White Folks" in which a black girl with "aristocratic ideas" gets the notion to hold a fancy party highlighted by a possum walk. After cajoling her rowdy guests into a "proper" contest, she discovers that her brother has stolen and eaten the prtze possum. The scene ends in pandemonium.25 Imamu Baraka has commented on such farcical presentations of the cakewalk, "If it is a Negro dance caricaturing white customsl what is that dance when a white theatre company tries to satirize it as a Negro dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony."26 All in allz the relationship that was cultivated between the cakewalk, minstrelsy and the was an exceedingly uneasy one. Coon songs, later to be adopted by ragtime, grafted caricatured titles and lyrics onto cakewalk music to create a most curious hybrid, including such songs as 'iRastus on Parade," "De Darkey Cavaliers," and "Kullud Koons' Kake Walk.' This was to be expected of white hack writers and greedy music distributors, but even serious black ragtime composers were "stuck' with images inherited from the minstrel stage. Schafer and others have tried to demonstrate that though these black writers, from economic necessity, continued the familiar grotesque images, they gradually mediated and humanized them.27 In some cases, as with ' "Nobody," this is undoubtably true. But in other songs this argument is, at best, tenuous. Blesh takes this argument to its extreme in an apologia for Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me,t' which does not stand up to a critical reading of the text.28 Indeeds Hogan himself repeatedly expressed regret for writing this song in later life. Perhaps even worse than the titles and lyrics of these songs were the

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illustrations on their sheet music covers. The characters featured on Hogan's infamous hit were bug-eyed, blubber-lipped dandies sporting checked sports coats and diamond lapel pins. "The Coon's Trademark: A Watermelon, Razor, Chicken and a Coon," a hit performed by Williams and Walker, had on its cover drawings of all these familiar and derogatory stereotypes. These images appealed to a racist buying public, and enticed them to purchase the music. This is not to suggest, however, that the music itself went unnoticed and unappreciated. On the contrary, it was infectiously popular. Through the composition of rags, Schafer asserts, "blacks seized control of the image of blacks in popular music." Amidst the "verbal idiocy" of racist lyrics, "there arose a strain of vital and clear black music of great nobility and power."29 Whites had their stereotyped images of blacks visually and verbally confirmed, but aurally shattered. This ever present duality in ragtime cakewalk music, according to Blesh, allowed blacks to "project ragtime rhythms into the public consciousness through the medium of the coon song."30 Judging by the thousands of songs which were produced, the public consciousness was saturated. The tensions of this duality could play havoc with the careers and artistic temperaments of black artists who had to deal with the music every day. Comedian, coon song singer, and cakewalk virtuouso Bert Williams, for instance, had to conform to theatrical conventions of the black in order to obtain work; but, according to his biographer, Ann Charters, those same conventions "crippled his talent and limited his achievement." Though at times he transcended the stereotypes which his audience expected him to portray, at most times it would have been more "impossible for him to escape these stereotypes than to fly."31 Nowhere is the duality better illustrated, however, than in the partnership of Will Marion Cook and . Cook wrote the music and Dunbar the lyrics for the 1898 black musical, "Clorindy: the Origin of the Cakewalk." For Dunbar the project was a lowpoint in a career already plagued by demands to conform to stereotypes. Dunbar was embarrassed by his lyrics, which were in the worst minstrel tradition. Despairing at the contribution he'd made to the stereotyping of his own race, he vowed never to write such lyrics again (a vow he didn't keep).32 However, Cook's reaction to the opening performance reveals no such disappointment or shame. And, indeed, from his perspective, there was no need for remorse. Margaret Butcher wrote that "Clorindy, ahead of its time, hinted at the symphonic development of Negro syncopation and harmony not to be fully developed for ten to fifteen years."33 And James Weldon Johnson praised Cook's music for its i'musicianly treatment of ragtime."34 The sixty minute show, with a twenty minute cakewalk finale, was a huge success; and Cook's music was worthy of its folk origins. His exuberant reaction, therefore, is understandable: "My chorus sang like Russians, dancing meanwhile like Negroes, and cakewalking like angels, black angels!"35 The music brought prideful joy to its composer, despair to its Iyricist. Audiences may have perceived the cakewalk as a simple pleasure, but to black writers and performers it remained a sometimes joyous and triumphant, and sometimes compromising and painful, enigma. The retention of the contest element in what had become a performance piece, also added to the enigmatic quality of the dance. As in the 1895 "Black America" pageant, in many shows paid performers actually engaged in a contest. From the reminiscences of ex-dancers, it becomes apparent that these contests were not fixed, that competition with its accompanying traits of improvisation and responsoriality actually did take place. Stearns interviewed several dancers who

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 214 journal of social history gave this impression. "Rubberlegs" Williams, a jazz dancer who worked in a 1922 carnival plantation show, remembered that he "worked up a strut, and won the cake most of the time." Nettie Compton, who was a specialty cakewalk performer in an otherwise all white circus, in 1902, remembered that the male contestants improvised fancy tap and acrobatic steps in order to win. "Slow Kid" Thompson, who had been a cook in a Shreveport circus doubled as a cakewalker as did the rest of the black kitchen help.36 In a white carnival atmosphere alien to the folk settings of this black dance, managers felt a need to add these touches of authenticity. Yet, as if to neutralize this authenticity, they costumed and presented their cakewalkers as a troupe of clowns. The cakewalk contest became such a popular part of minstrel shows and musical revues that promoters took it off the professional stage and into the amateur tournament. Cakewalk contests popped up nationwide. These contests, ln turn fed back into the professional shows, with victors sometimes winning vaudeville bookings. In 1892 the first annual national championship, or Cakewalk , was held at Madison Square Garden, featuring fifty finalist couples who had won local competitions. Such contests were going concerns, charging admission for viewers and ofTering prizes as lucrative as $250. Angry black contestants in 1897 tried to have police arrest the management of the Jubilee for racially prejudiced judging.37 They were, of course, unsuccessful, but their ire shows the level of emotion that was invested in the cakewalk. Some contestants who travelled from contest to contest established reputations which rivalled those of paid performers. In 1899 the song, "'Doc' Brownss Cake Walk,'? celebrated the fame of a City black man who claimed to be the undefeated champion of these contests. The sheet music cover told "Doc's" story beneath a photo of him in cakewalk attire.38 On the ragtime stage certain performers also became known as cakewalk virtuousos. No major black musical or revue could succeed without a cakewalk number. Charles Johnson and Dora Dean's strobe-lighted staging and stylish dancing brought critical acclaim from the white press and inspired Williams and Walker to write the hit tune, i'Dora Dean.' Black Patti's Troubadours show combined operatic medleys with comic cakewalk numbers. The cakewalk sequence ended in the same razor-slashing pandemonium which had been "interrupting" the walkaround Elnales of minstrel farces for decades.39 The Whitman Sisters troupe performed the dance on the circuit, while the vaudeville team of Harrigan and Hart had inserted ';Walking for dat Cake, an Exquisite Picture of Negro Life and Customs" into their otherwise all-white show as early as 1877.4° And no 's Cabin troupe was considered complete without cakewalkers in gaudy costumes.41 However, it was with the comedy song and dance team of Bert Williams and George Walker that the cakewalk became most closely identified. Their actn which employed a drum-major cakewalk leader and seven parading couples, featured Walker's grace as a dancer and Williams' comic, feigned bumbling attempts to imitate the steps of the others. By 1898 their names were so synonymous with cakewalking that the American Tobacco Company decided to exploit the association by hiring the pair to pose for cigarette ads.42 The color photographs, which depict them in cakewalk postures and dandy dress (Walker wears a full- length gold coat, spats and a red and white striped vest), were used not only in the ads, but in a series of postcards and on various sheet music covers. The dance became so popular at the turn-of-the-century that it spilled over into white and even European society. At a time which has been described as the nadir of white American attitudes toward blacks - in an age of racist polemics,

This content downloaded from 209.190.225.66 on Tue, 09 May 2017 14:06:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CAKEWALK 215 lynchings, and disenfranchisement-a black dance became the rage of white society. An editorial in the 1899 Musical Courier spoke out vehemently against this situation, declaring:

Society has decreed that ragtime and cakewalking are the thing and one reads with amazement and disgust of historical and ai istocratic names joining in this sex dance, for the Cakewalk is nothing but an African danse du ventre, a milder edition of African orgies.43

But this response was, by its own admission, atypical. For example, one of the i'historical and aristocratic names" to which it undoubtably referred was William K. Vanderbilt, who had hired the black dancer, Tom Fletcher, to teach him the cakewalk. Vanderbilt gained some notoriety for this on his own, by displaying his newly acquired talents at an exhibition. But public attention was truly drawn to his terpsichorean activities when Williams and Walker made them the focus of a publicity stunt. The duo hand-delivered a letter to Vanderbilt's door, complaining of his exhibitionism and challenging him to a contest to determine the true cakewalk champion. Vanderbilt never responded, but the pair's point was made.44 And it is the point of their challenge which elevates this incident above that of a humorous historical footnote, and makes it instead a key clue in understanding why the black cakewalk became a white fad. When Williams and Walker accused Vanderbilt of "having posed as an expert" on the cakewalk, thereby "distracting attention from [them]," they were challenging much more than one white dilletante's right to cut into their livelihood. They were attacking the white race's attempted ultimate usurpation of this black cultural form. The cakewalk had not cast a spell over thousands of negro-phobes, transforming them into toe-tapping negrophiles. On the contrary, by 1898 white popular culture had so denigrated the image of the black cakewalker, and so infiltrated itself into the production of ragtime music, that white society was convinced that the dance was now its rightful province. White America, confident of its racial superiority and attracted by the rhythm and spectacle of the cakewalk, concluded in its self- appointed role as cultural arbiter for the whole society, that whites could best carry on the cakewalk tradition. White song-writers such as Holzmann and Mills, motivated by the lure of fame and wealth, contributed some of the best known rags of the era. As trained musicians, they applied the cakewalk formula in writing new tunes. But, as Margaret Butcher has noted, many white rags were "thin, superficial uses of ragtime's rhythmic and harmonic idiom."45 For most white writers of ragtime the music was not a folk form to be adapted to the needs of a new age, but an object to be 'icommercially exploited." The assessment of the modern scholar is exemplified by Schafer, who wrote that though most ears couldn't tell the difference between art and commercial rag, the "pseudo-rag" was a i'debased" form "which abandoned [cakewalk] rhythms and march structure for chaotic parades of arpeggios and trick fingering."46 Even John Phillip Sousa got into the act. Sousa, among the first bandleaders to recognize the adaptability of the march-like cakewalk to performance by brass bands, featured cakewalk syncopation in his 1900 performance at the Paris Exposition and the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Ironically, no black rags were played at St. Louis, only white, diluted forms. The cakewalk was so successful for Sousa that he even advertised for composers to submit new songs to him.47 And, in 1908, Debussy demonstrated his and Europe's appreciation for the music by composing "The 's Cakewalk,"48 (The Golliwog is a black -like creature popular in Europe.)

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However, these plans to seize control of the cakewalk from blacks hit some snags. Black performers remained the dancers really in demand, and still had to be imported into white shows. And while racist lyrics abounded, it was black- composed tunes which were whistled and danced to all over America. Margaret Butcher has written, "the appeal was not in what was said, but in the rhythm and ."49 Blacks continued to make America aware of the power and attractiveness of their cultural forms, despite white attempts to make it seem that they were not really black art forms at all. The ultimate usurpation, exclusive white composition and performance of the cakewalk, was a failure. And, at a time when the stereotyped view of the black was dependent on the belief that he was cultureless and incapable of artistic creation, this was intolerable. Thus, the burden of proving black racial inferiority was returned to white caricaturists, who had to make it seem as if black culture had never existed at all. They attacked the very strengths of the race which threatened to disprove their stereotypes. Cakewalkers were made to appear ludicrous. Their dancel which satirized white manners, was presented as a ridiculous and unsuccessful attempt to emulate white culture. Their dress was depicted as tastelessly gaudy; their postures, distorted. Instead of projecting grace, caricatured cakewalkers projected awkwardness. This image was then repeated and repeated and repeated until it was reinforced in the minds of all those people who bought postcards, sheet music, stereo cards and toys. Finally, this image supplanted the true one in American popular culture. It is sad that the memory of the ';cakewalk clown" has lingered on - sadder still that the true history of this folk form has been forgotten. The time is long overdue that the record be set straight.

Yale Universiw Brooke Baldwin

FOOTNOTES

1. All postcards and other artifacts described are from the collection of the author.

2. All are located in the film archives of the . "The Cakewalk" and "Comedy Cakewalks' are on FLA 3381, L.C. #367. The "Ballyhoo Cakewalk" is reel FLA 4107, L.C. #1093.

3. Also located in Library of Congress film archives, reel FLA 5382, L.C. #2412.

4. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York, 1977), 15.

5. George Rawick, The American Slave: Georgia Narratives (Westport, Ct., 1972), part one, 55.

6. ibid., part two, 348.

7. Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals ( \ 1977), 211.

8. Marshall Stearns, (New York, 1968), 22.

9. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950), 96.

10. Harper's Weekly, 1863, 337.

1 1. Levine, Black Culture, 17-18.

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12. Levine,BlackCulture,16.

13. Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music (New York, 1963), 202.

14. William Schafer and Johannes Riedel, TheArt of Ragtime (Baton Rouge, La., 1973), 75.

15. John Roberts, Black M"sic of Two Worlds (New York, 1972) , 52,198.

16 Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 7.

17 Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.

18 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York, 1972), 174

19 Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 8

20 Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123

21. Constance Rourke, AmericanHumor (New York, 1931), 88.

22. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York, 1971 ), 272

23 Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1974), 262-3; and Southern, op. cit., 274.

24 Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 15

25 C.I. Emms, Jes Like White Folks (Ohio, 1903) .

26. Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York, 1963), 86.

27 Schafer, and Riedel, Ragrime, xii, 15-19, 24-27.

28. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 88-9.

29 Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 19, 24

30 Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 13

31 AnnCharters, Nobody: TheStoryofBert Villiams (NewYork, 1970), 81-3

32 Addison Gayle, Oak and ley: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York, 1971), 87-8

33 Margaret Butcher, The Negro in American Culture (New York, 1956), 57

34 James Weldon Johnson, BlackManhattan (New York, 1930), 102-3

35 Southern, A{usic, 295

36 Stearns, JazzDance, 70-1

37 Charters, Nobody, 36

38 Terry Waldo, This is Ragtime (New York, 1976), 38

39 Charterss Nobody, 35-6.

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40. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 78, 86, 1 17-1 18.

41. Harry Birdoff, The World's GreatestHit: Uncle TomJs Cabin (New York, 1947), 347-54.

42. Charters, Nobody, 35-6.

43. Stearns,JazzDance,123.

44. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 122; Johnson, A8anhattan, 104-5 .

45. Butcher, Negro, 57.

46. Schafer and Riedel Ragtime, 6, 90.

47. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 74-5, 100; Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.

48. Peter Gammond, and the Ragtime Era (New York, 1975), 39.

49. Butcher, Negro 56.

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