Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Minstrelsy Author(s): Eric Lott Source: Representations, No. 39 (Summer, 1992), pp. 23-50 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928593 Accessed: 07/07/2010 12:56

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http://www.jstor.org ERIC LOTT

Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy

I

THE BOUNDARIES SEPARATING black and whiteAmerican cultures in the nineteenthcentury were marked most vividlyalong the lines of property and sexuality.Traffic in slave commoditieswas as defininga racial practiceas the preservationof white racial purity.The blackface minstrelshow, we now com- monly believe, dedicated itself to staging or constructingthese boundaries. Eclecticin origin,primitive in execution,and raucous in effect,a theatricalaffair principallyof the urban North,minstrelsy has been summed up as, in Alexander Saxton's words, "half a centuryof inurementto the uses of white supremacy."' While it was organized around the quite explicit"borrowing" of black cultural materials for white dissemination (and profit),a borrowing that ultimately depended upon the material relations of slavery,the minstrelshow obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Though it arose froma white obsession withblack (male) bodies that underlies whiteracial dread to our own day,it ruthlesslydisavowed its fleshlyinvestments throughridicule and racistlampoon. Yet I am not so sure thatthis is the end of the story.In lightof recentwork on race thatproceeds frompostmodern accounts of subjectivity,we probably ought to take these factsand processes as merelya startingorientation for inquiryinto the great complexitiesof racism and raced subjectsin the United States.2In the followingpages, I want to put some of this work to use in the area of blackface,the first,formative public or institutional acknowledgmentby whites of black culture.In doing so I hope to showthat black- face performance arose from and embodied what we might call a mid- nineteenth-century"racial unconscious"-a structured formation,combining thoughtand feeling,tone and impulse, and at the veryedge of semanticavail- ability,whose symptomsand anxieties make itjust legible.3A reading of these symptomsand anxietiessuggests, contrary to currentwisdom, that blackface min- strelsywas based on small but significantcrimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation,which indeed appear to be inevitablewhen whiteAmericans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy.Ultimately I am after some sense of how

REPRESENTATIONS 39 * Summer 1992 ( THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 23 precariouslynineteenth-century white people lived theirown whiteness.This will later involve an argumentabout the uses of ethnographyin the historicalstudy of readers and audiences. Of course there is no doubt thatblackface witnessed the efficientexpropria- tion of the culturalcommodity "blackness"-a factwell demonstratedin an 1867 AtlanticMonthly article rather hypotheticallyrecounting blackface "originator" T. D. Rice's firstblackface performance,in Pittsburghin around 1830.4 Con- frontedone day withthe dazzling spectacle of black singing,the storygoes, Rice saw his "opportunity"and determinedto take advantage of his talentfor mimicry. Fortunately,intones Atlantic writer Robert P. Nevin,"There was a negro in atten- dance at Griffith'sHotel, on Wood Street,named Cuff,-an exquisite specimen of his sort,-who won a precarious subsistenceby lettinghis open mouth as a mark forboys to pitchpennies into,at threepaces, and by carryingthe trunksof passengers from the steamboats to the hotels." Aftersome persuasion, "Cuff" agrees to accompany the actor to the theater.There Rice blacks his face, orders Cuffto disrobe, and "invest[s]himself in the cast-offapparel." As Nevin puts it, on stage "the extraordinaryapparition produced an instanteffect." At thispoint somethingvery curious happens, and it bears quoting at length. A steamerappears on the Monongahela Wharf,and Cuff-"who meanwhilewas crouching in dishabille under concealment of a projectingflat behind the per- former"-begins to thinkof his livelihood:

Betweenhimself and othersof his colorin the same line of business,and especiallyas regardeda certainformidable competitor called Ginger, there existed an activerivalry in thebaggage-carrying business. For Cuffto allowGinger the advantage of an undisputed descentupon theluggage of theapproaching vessel would be notonly to forgetall "con- siderations"from the passengers,but, by provinghim a laggardin his calling,to casta damagingblemish upon hisreputation. Liberally as he mightlend himselfto a friend,it could not be done at thatsacrifice. After a minuteor twoof fidgetywaiting for [Rice's] songto end,Cuff's patience could endure no longer,and, cautiously hazarding a glimpse of his profilebeyond the edge of the flat,he called in a hurriedwhisper: "Massa Rice, Massa Rice,must have my clo'se! Massa Griffif wants me,-steamboat's comin'!" The appeal wasfruitless. Massa Rice did nothear it, for a happyhit at an unpopular cityfunctionary had set the audiencein a roar in whichall othersounds were lost.... [Anotherappeal wentunheeded, when,] driven to desperation, and forgetfulin theemer- gencyof everysense of propriety,Cuff, in ludicrousundress as he was,started from his place,rushed upon thestage, and, laying his hand upon theperformer's shoulder, called outexcitedly: "Massa Rice, Massa Rice, gi' me nigga'shat,-nigga's coat,-nigga's shoes,- gi' me nigga'st'ings! Massa Griffif wants 'im,-STEAMBOAT'S COMIN'!!" The incidentwas the touch,in the mirthfulexperience of thatnight, that passed endurance.(609-10)

This passage, in all its woozy syntaxand headlong rush,is probablythe least trustworthyand most accurate account of American minstrelsy'sappropriation of black culture. Indeed it reads something like a master text of the racial

24 REPRESENTATIONS economy encoded in blackface performance.For one thing,it calls on minstrel devices (ventriloquizeddialect, racial burlesque) to narrate the origins of min- strelsy,as if thisparticular narratable event generated or secreted"naturally" the formalmeans appropriate to it; itsmultiple frames (minstrelsy within minstrelsy) amount to so many techniques of black subordination.True to form,a dimin- ished, not to say "blackfaced"Cuff has replaced Rice as this account's center of attention.And its talk of opportunityand investment,lending and ownership, subsistence and competitionis more preoccupied with cultural value than we mighthave expected. Its racial unconscious,we mightsay, reveals a great deal of anxietyabout the "primitiveaccumulation" it ostensiblycelebrates.5 The fascina- tion withCuff's nakedness, moreover,highlights this as an affairof male bodies, where racial conflictand culturalexchange are negotiatedbetween men. Cuff's stripping,a theftthat silences and embarrasseshim on stage but whichneverthe- less entails both his bodily presence in the show and the titillatingthreat that he mayreturn to demand his stolencapital, is a neat allegoryfor the mostprominent commercialcollision of black and whitecultures in the nineteenthcentury. The cultural expropriationthat formed one central drama of the boundary-staging minstrelshow was already an unsettledmatter of racial intercourseand an injec- tion of "blackness"into the public sphere. But thissimultaneous construction and transgressionof racial boundaries is somethingthat itselfneeds explaining, as one performer'senthusiasm for his blackfaceact suggests:"I shall be richin black fun."6 A strongwhite fascinationwith black men and black culture,that is to say, underwrote this popular expropriation. Blackface performerswere conspicu- ously intriguedwith the streetsingers and obscure charactersfrom whom they allegedlytook the materialthat was later fashionedto racistends. There are sev- eral accounts of these men's attractionto their"donors," and it is no wonder that an aura of illicitsexuality-nineteenth-century observers called it "vulgarity"- shadowed the most chaste of minstrelshows.7 From the startit appeared that a sort of generalized illicitnesswas indeed one of minstrelsy'smain objectives.So much is suggested,at least,by the lengthsto whichreviews and playbillstypically went to downplay (even as theyintimated) its licentious atmosphere:

FirstNight of thenovel, grotesque, original, and surpassinglymelodious ethiopian band, entitledthe . Beingan exclusivelymusical entertainment, com- biningthe , violin, bone castanetts,and ;and entirelyexempt from the vulgaritiesand otherobjectionable features, which have hithertocharacterized negro extravaganzas8

One wantsto knowmore about those otherobjectionable features. Whatever they were, no one took veryseriously their absence fromthe minstrelshow, as an 1843 songsheet illustrationof the Virginia Minstrelsonly begins to suggest (fig. 1). the bone playerwith legs splayedwide; Dick Pelham on the

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 25 0 ' :-~, t ...... , r s .iJI\ . ' t1EI- . '

VIX Z.ZNI WeX A MCI XN S T RELX S-,

TI-r-0,111s ; stss |tal l P r' 'ij #D'R'I3LE t'1; '4Mb)- vst9X

I V'r / (1/g t,ZJau Yi/s',T!, _ 0/1t1 , T /) u,/rpw

t,,v//itilh~~~~~~~~~l.~i If/i ells . S .

FIGURE 1. Sheet music cover,The Celebrated Negro Melodies, 1843. Photo: Harvard Theater Collection,Cambridge, Mass.

26 REPRESENTATIONS verge of forcedentry of the tambourine; in ecstasybehind a phallic banjo: there is no attemptat realismhere. The whole scene has ratherthe air of a collectivemasturbation fantasy-true enough, we mightguess, in capturingthe overallspirit of the show.That spiritdepended at the veryleast on the suggestion of black male sexual misdemeanor,and the characterof whitemen's involvement in this institutionalOther of genteel culture will bear some scrutiny.While in Rice's act alone one mighthave seen predominantlyblack dancing set to music of the BritishIsles (oftenIrish jigs) withlyrics of a more or less racistnature, audi- ences appear to have believed the counterfeit(as we shall see), often so as to border on sexual fervoror, alternately,distaste.' We ought to make some sense of these obfuscations,the hintsand denials of vulgarity,the uneasy affirmationsof culturalexchange. This language was aimed at a racial structurewhose ideological and psychologicalinstability required its boundaries continuallyto be staged,and whichregularly exceeded the dominant culture'scapacity to fixsuch boundaries. Indeed the verynotion of secure racial markers,Stuart Hall has argued, is displaced when one acknowledgesthe consti- tutionof whitesubjectivity by the constantcoupling or complex playof racial fear and desire, "othering" and identification,ambivalence and attraction;at any moment,as in the examples above, the "surreptitiousreturn" of desire or guilt may unsettle the whole business.'0 In blackface minstrelsythis dynamic often tiltedtoward transgression.Of course I take for grantedthe casual and undocu- mentable racial intercoursethat creolized black culturalforms as it "blackened" the dominant culture,a process thatin one sense makes it difficultto talk about racial transgressionat all. Yet in the antebellumyears a kind of raw commodifi- cation was the economic contextout of whichblackface display emerged, and this display,in turn,depended upon the , imaginaryproximity of "raced" bodies. My subjecthere is the affectiveconsequences of thatproximity-an affair of dollars and desire, theftand love.

II

The formof the early minstrelshow (1843 to the 1860s) underscores the whitefascination with commodified "black" bodies. What minstrelsywas not is as importantas what it was. Narrative,for instance,seems only to have been a secondaryimpulse, even thoughT. D. Rice'sblackface burlesque afterpieceswere tremendoussuccesses in the 1830s. In theirfirst performances, the VirginiaMin- strels gave what they termed "Negro Concerts,"containing certain burlesque skits,to be sure, but emphasizingwit and melody; the skitsthemselves, like 's"Dan Tucker on Horseback,"seemed littlemore than overgrowncircus acts." An 1844 playbillpublicizing a "Vocal, Local, Joke-all,and Instrumental Concert" conveysboth the tenor and the substanceof early minstrelshows.'2 In

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 27 "sportingsaloons" and indeed circuses,among other New York working-classlei- sure sites, the Virginia Minstrels featured burlesque lectures, conundrums, equestrian scenes, and comic songs, finallysettling into an early version of the show form that would become standard minstrelprocedure. The evening was divided in two; both parts consistedmainly of ensemble songs interspersedwith solo banjo songs,and were strungtogether with witticisms, ripostes, shouts, puns, and other attemptsat Negro impersonation.There was as yet no high-minded "interlocutor"at whom some of the jokes were later directed.'3Very soon the program's firstpart came to center on the "northerndandy negro," while its second put the "plantationdarky" at center stage. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, as the firstpart began to be devoted to more sentimentalmusic (sometimes performedwithout blackface), Emmett's and other companies added a stirring middle or "olio" section containing a varietyof acts (among them a "stump speech"), the third part then often comprised of a skit situated in the South. Seated in a semi-circle,the Emmett troupe placed the bone and tambourine players at either end of the band, and though originallyall were comic per- formers,these two "endmen" began to assume chiefimportance in mostminstrel companies, particularlyafter the addition of the interlocutor-genteel in com- portmentand, popular mythnotwithstanding, in blackface.'4 The early emphasis was on what filmtheorists have called "spectacle"rather than narrative.The firstminstrel shows put narrativeto a varietyof uses,but it relied firstand foremoston the objectificationof black charactersin comic set pieces, repartee,physical burlesque. The primarypurpose of earlyblackface per- formancewas to display the "black" male body,to fetishizeit in a spectacle that worked against the forwardmotion of the show and froze "the flowof action in moments of erotic contemplation,"as Laura Mulvey has writtenof women in cinema.'5 With all their riot and commotion, contortionand pungency, per- formersin these shows exhibiteda static,functional unruliness that, in one com- mentator's words, "seemed animated by a savage energy," nearly wringing minstrelmen offtheir seats-their "whiteeyes roll[ing]in a curious frenzy"and their "hiccupping chuckles" punctuatingthe proceedings.'6Here was an art of performativeirruption, of acrobaticsand comedy,ostensibly dependable mech- anisms of humorous pleasure.'7 "Black" figureswere there tobe lookedat, shaped to the demands of desire; theywere screenson whichaudience fantasycould rest, securing white spectators'position as superior,controlling, not to say owning, figures.Behind all of the circumlocutiongoing on in descriptionsof blackface performance,then, we mustbegin to glimpsethe whitemale trafficin racial deg- radation whose cardinal principle was yet a supreme disorderly conduct-a revealinglyequivocal means of racial containment. In thisaffair, "blackness" provided the inspirationas well as the occasion for preposterouslyviolent, sexual, or otherwiseprohibited theatrical material that evinced how unsettlingwas the black power white performersintended to sub-

28 REPRESENTATIONS jugate. Even the ugly vein of hostilewish-fulfillment in blackfacesongs reads as a sort of racial panic ratherthan confidentracial power (though,to be sure, the result was hegemonic enough). One notes in particularthe relentlesstransfor- mation of black charactersinto things,as though to clinchthe propertyrelations these songs fear are too fluid.The sheer overkillof songs in whichblack men are roasted, fishedfor, smoked like tobacco, peeled like potatoes,planted in the soil, or dried and hung up as advertisementsis surelysuspicious; these murderous fantasiesbarely conceal the vulnerabilitythey mask, are refineddown to perfect examples of protestingfar too much. Here is "Gib Us Chaw Tobacco" (early 1850s): Naturplanted a blackbaby, To growdis weed divine, Dat'sde reasonwhy de niggers Am madea 'baccysign.'8

Although this verse comes on in the mimed accents of a cut-rateAesop, self- buttressingfairy tales like the above are so baroque thatone imaginestheir con- coction requiring a considerable amount of anxious attention.They are not unlike the "atrociousmisrepresentations" (as John Quincy Adams called them)in the infamouslyrigged 1840 U.S. Census, its imagined North populated with frightfulhordes of black lunatics and idiots.'9Indeed, in "My Ole Dad" (early 1850s), the ridiculous titularfigure mistakenly throws his washing in the river and hangs himselfon the line; he goes in afterhis clothes but drowns. His son subsequentlyuses fishingline to catch him,a bloated ghostwho returnsat song's end, interestinglyenough, to haunt his mistress.20In the realm of blackface impersonation,one might say, the house was always haunted, the disavowals neverenough to haltthe enslaved Other'sencroachment upon whiteself-identity; the continualturn to the mask itself,its obvious usefulness,suggests as much. Some songs came even closer to the heart of the matter.More successfully prophylacticthan "My Ole Dad" is "Ole Tater Peelin" (early 1850s): Oh, yallerSam, turn'd a niggerhater, Ah,oo! ah, oo! An' hisskin peeled off like boiled potatoe, Ah,oo! ah, oo!21

The protagonist of this little rhyme is called "tater peelin"; blacks snub him because he becomes colorless,neither "yellow, blue, nor black." Finallyhogs eat him,and plant his bones. It is difficultto say whetherone's speechlessnessbefore thissort of thingowes more to itsmerciless brutality or itsperverse inventiveness. In any case, the concern withfluid, not to say skinless,ego boundaries, together withthe imagined introjectionof objectifiedblack people, acknowledgesprecisely the fragilityof the racial boundaries the song attemptsto police. Obviously the

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 29 dilemma of "race" is a matterof the markingnot of whitepeople themselvesbut only,in particular,of the liminal "yaller"produced by intermixture,signifier of the crossed line, of racial trespass. In such songs it is as though whiteswere at a loss for language to embody the anxietythat in effectconstituted the color line, and thisindicates how extremethe consequent defensivenessmust have been. Often thisessentially reifying effort in the minstrelshow ran up againstmore intimatedangers. To get the forceof thosecharges of "vulgarity,"one mustattend to the way certain material-and, we should recall, performersthemselves- pressed home a sortof violentcorporeal reality,as in the followingstump speech (1849): Den I 'ginto sweat so ... I sweathalf de clothesoff my back-tumbled ober a sweat-cloth- tooka biteob dar steaksin de bottomob mypocket-and absquatulated,just forall de worldlike a Californiafeverite when he's bound for de goldregion!22

Or consider thiswhite man's bad (if not wet) dream, "AstonishingNose" (1859): Likean elephant'strunk it reached to histoes, An widit he wouldgib some most astonishing blows

No one dare comenear, so greatwas his might

He used to lie in hisbed, wid his nose on de floor, An whenhe sleptsound his nose it would snore, Lik a dog in a fight-'twasa wonderfulnose, An itfollows him about wherever he goes. De policearrested him one morningin May, Forobstructing de sidewalk,having his nose in de way. Dey tookhim to de courthouse, dis memberto fine; Whendey got dere de nosehung on a tavernsign.23

The immediacyof the object supervisinga loss of the spectatorialsubject-the anointingof an unsettledspectator with mud and manure, the blows of disem- bodied phalluses directed against the Law-seems immanentin the "objection- able features" (to recall the firstshows of the Virginia Minstrels)of blackface representation.Why indeed might this have been pleasurable at all? Fredric Jameson has noted thatfear, "the aestheticreception of fear ... the enjoymentof the shock and commotionfear bringsto the human organism,"is well-nighcen- tral to the experience of pleasure.24From eighteenth-centurynotions of the sub- lime to Roland Barthes'sjouissance, Jameson argues, the dissolutionof the subject in a paroxysmof threatenedmenace constitutesone way of transforming"sheer horror" into "libidinal gratification."How much more must this have been the case when, as in minstrelsy,the horror itselfwas based on a libidinal economy; when preciselythe threatof blackfaceacts was theirpromised undoing of white male sexual sanctity.If all the hilarityhere seems suspicious,it is perhaps because

30 REPRESENTATIONS it was both a denial and a pleasurable conversionof a hystericalset of racial fears. Images of the body may be of particularhelp in thisproject, offering a symbolic map of psychic,spatial, and social relationships,or a site for the particularcon- cerns of these realms to be secured or dissolved.25By way of the protuberant, "grotesque" blackface body, which,in the words of Peter Stallybrassand Allon White,denied "witha laugh the ludicrous pose of autonomyadopted by the sub- ject at the same momentas it re-open[ed]" the normallyrepressive boundaries of bodily orifices(183-84), the white subject could transformfantasies of racial assault and subversioninto riotous pleasure, turninsurrection and intermixture into harmlessfun-though the outlinesof the fun disclose itstroubled sources.26 Minstrelsy'sjoking focus on disruptionsand infractionsof the fleshamounted to a kind of theatricaldream-work, displacing and condensing those fears,imaged in the "black"body, that could neitherbe forgottennor fullyacknowledged.27 The overdeterminednature of these fears comes through in Mark Twain's reminiscencesof blackface.For the wayin whichhe chooses to celebratethe "gen- uine nigger show"-he devotes an entire chapter in his autobiographyto it-is througha complicated narrativethat involves escorting his motherto a Christy's Minstrelsperformance in St. Louis. This doubled comic situation,in whichTwain pays tributeto the fun of blackface acts by a dose of superadded humor at his mother'sexpense, not only places Twain himselfin the positionof son but evokes from him a certain amount of oedipal hostility.His mother is a woman of the church,and while she delightsin all sortsof noveltiesshe mustalso square these withher religiousproclivities. She was, writesTwain, "alwaysready for Fourthof Julyprocessions, Sunday-school processions, lectures, conventions, camp meet- ings, revivalsin the church-in fact,for any and everykind of dissipationthat could not be proven to have anythingirreligious about it."28Twain means to immersehis motherin some real dissipation-a desacralizingimpulse on the part of the son inspiredby the unease minstrelsyhas provoked in the writer. Twain gets his motherand one Aunt BetseySmith to go to the minstrelshow by telling them it is an exhibition of African music by some lately returned missionaries:

Whenthe grotesquenegroes [Twain here gets carried away with his ownconceit] came filingout on thestage in theirextravagant costumes, the old ladieswere almost speechless withastonishment. I explained to themthat the missionaries always dressed like that in Africa. But AuntBetsey said, reproachfully, "But they're niggers." (62)

Of course the novices are soon merrilyenjoying themselves, "their consciences . . . quiet now, quiet enough to be dead," Twain writes.They gaze on "thatlong curved line of artisticmountebanks with devouring eyes" (63), finallyreinvigo- rating with their laughter the whole house's response to a stale joke from the endmen. As is so oftenthe case in accounts of the minstrelshow, Twain's actually

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 31 reproduces standard elementsof blackfacejoking, here at the expense of blacks and women both. Indeed the linkingof these humorous objects is registeredin the syntacticalambiguity as to who possesses the devouringeyes, and thisdouble threat,along with the aggression Twain aims at his mother,points toward the sources of pleasure involved.Twain's enjoyment of blackfacefooling and funning arises froma source of humor Freud calls "degradationto being a child."29This, of course, was neitherthe firstnor the last timean ambivalentwhite male attrac- tion to blacks, (self-)degradation, and infantilepleasure were conjoined by way of an imaginaryracial Other. One mightspeculate withMelanie Klein thatTwain's infantsadism owed to blackface'sengendering of a longing for oral bliss whose absence he feltwas his mother'sfault and the "devouring"privilege of whichwas hers alone.30The black and female goads to such extremeambivalence naturally came togetherin black- face representationsof black women,who generallyfared farworse than Twain's mother."Lubly Fan" (1844) offersone of the most famous examples. (Twain has Jim sing "Lubly Fan" in chapter 2 of TomSawyer-a scene thatagain conjoins the naked powers of blackness and femaleness:Jim sings the song as he discovers Tom painting his aunt's fence in punishmentfor his truancy.)The reader will recognize "Lubly Fan" as "BuffaloGals," though not, perhaps, its originallyrics: Den lublyFan willyou cum out to night, Willyou cum out to night, Willyou cum out to night, Den lublyFan willyou cum out to night, An danceby de liteob de moon. I stopther an I had sometalk, Had sometalk, Had sometalk, Buther foot covered up de wholeside-walk An leftno roomfor me.... Her lipsare likede oysterplant, De oysterplant, De oysterplant, I tryto kissdem but I cant, Deyam so berrylarge.3'

The singeron the SmithsonianInstitution's collection of popular Americanmusic gets the ambiguous, almost uncontainableedge of thatrising last phrase exactly right.32"Dey am so berrylarge": allusive promise and exaggerated threat;desire so deep and consequential that it scarcelybears uttering,revulsion so necessary thatutterance is ineludible. What Mikhail Bakhtin called "grotesque realism,"which in Rabelaisand His Worldprovides the occasion forso much antibourgeoiscelebration, here offersup

32 REPRESENTATIONS its less than liberatoryeffects.33 This is, to be sure, antibourgeois,but it is black people, black women,as the world'sbody. While minstrelgrotesquerie surely had some hand in constructinga raceless popular community-idealof the "low" and vulgar,it was in thissense more historicallyuseful to some of the people than to all of them.Whether because images of black women abettedthe returnof rowdy audiences to the pleasures of childhood-to the totalizing,and thus terrorizing, connectednessof pre-oedipal bliss-or because theirexcess, troubling enough in itself,seemed additionallyactivated by black male potency,blackface performers tiltedtheir staves at the black female power theysimultaneously indulged: The otherday while riding Withtwo ladies by my side, I hardlyknew which one tochose [sic] To makemy happy bride;

I tookthem into Taylor's shop To getsome ginger beer- Theyflirted up and downthe room- The whitefolks they looked queer. One swallow'dsix milk punches, Halfa dozeneggs as well; But forede billwas brought to pay This darkeythought he'd shell. The otherate sixmince pies, Twelvejuleps quicklysped; And whendey axed me forde tin, Nowwhat do youthink I said?34

The minstrelshow's "black" female body clinched the horrorof engulfingwom- anhood, gorgingwomen depleting the bankbook. Here, it seems, the extraordi- nary energy of antebellum misogyny,perhaps even that contempt for white women intermittentlyrepressed through men's "protection" of themfrom savage black manhood, was displaced or surchargedonto the "grotesque"black woman. These images indeed make Klein's point that the child's longing for union with the absent mother-a longing both precipitatedand symbolizedby some black- face images; witness, indeed, the lingering resonance of the black mammy figure-is inextricablefrom its primitive desire forvengeance againsther. In this case it is the black woman as the world'smother.35 Black women apparentlycalled up related fears of castration,about which there was in blackface minstrelsyan inordinateamount of anxietyand fantasy. Blackfacefetish-images substituted in complexways for the terrorof the (b)lack.36 For example, a great deal of disguise tends to be put in play around thisfear (as perhaps whenJim sings "Lubly Fan"). Here is "Gal fromthe South" (1854), which attemptsto meet the threatwith the whitemale prerogativeof ownership:

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 33 Ole massabought a coloredgal, He boughther at thesouth; Her hairit curled so verytight She couldnot shut her mouth. Her eyesthey were so berysmall, Theyboth ran into one, And whena flylight in hereye, Likea Junebug in de sun. Her noseit was so berrylong, It turnedup likea squash, And whenshe gother dander up She mademe laugh,by gosh; Old massahad no hooksor nails, Or nothin'else like that, So on thisdarkie's nose he used To hanghis coat and hat. One morningmassa goin' away, He wentto githis coat, But neitherhat nor coat was there, Forshe had swallowedboth; He tookher to a tailorshop, To haveher mouth made small, The ladytook in one longbreath, And swallowedtailor and all.37

By now thisis prettyfamiliar stuff. The anxietieshere aroused are also familiar: the empowering insistenceof the two "boughts"attempts to cancel the threat- ening open mouth (later to be "made small") while the phallic nose and the engulfing,vaginal throatfinally wreak revenge on the master.As we have seen, white men's fear of female power was dramatized witha suspiciouslydraconian punitivenessin early minstrelsy,usually in the grotesque transmutationsof its female figures.It is as if that fear were so fundamentalthat only a major effort of surveillance-again, like a dream, revealingits anxietieseven as it devises its censors-would do. This song'swish to buy women seems an especiallysuspicious compensatorydemand, a commodificationthat the unrulinessof these figures both rationalizesand requires (one doubts thatsuch figuresthemselves contained the castrationthreat). Yet the vehemence of this wish, togetherwith the "gal's" hermaphroditic shape, may also point us in the direction of omnipresent nineteenth-centuryfears of the black penis.38 Especially instructiveexamples in this regard are the many songs in which black women get theireyes put out, as in "Old Blind Josey"(1854), whose violent protagonistis already (perhaps revealingly)blind:

34 REPRESENTATIONS Butden one nighthe [Josey]danced so high, He runhis heel in a blackgal's eye- Oh! Gollyme, but didn't she cry! UnluckyOld BlindJosey.39

Repeated ad infinitumsuch representationssignify, if we are to take seriously Freud's connectionof Oedipus' blindingand castration.It is perfectlyclear, more- over,that this fantasy resonated againstthe eroticwhite male lookinginherent in "black" theatricaldisplay. So variable are the possibilitiesof spectatoridentifica- tion in the theater,however, that we mightinquire as tojust whose castrationwas being constantlybandied about. On the most immediate level, collectivewhite male violence towardblack women in minstrelsynot onlytamed an evidentlytoo- powerfulobject of interest,but contributed(in nineteenth-centurywhite men's terms) to a masculinistenforcement of whitemale power over the black men to whom the women were supposed to have "belonged." Indeed the recurrenceof this primal scene, in which beheeled black men blind black women, certainly atteststo the power of the black penis in Americanpsychic life, perhaps pointing up the primaryreason forthe representedviolence in the firstplace. Yet it is still puzzling thatblack womenwere so often"castrated"-even if,to followthe meta- phor, they were allegorical stand-insfor white men whose erotic looking was undone by the black men theyportrayed as objects of theirgaze (no doubt this racial undoing, phallic competitionand imagined homosexual threatboth, was the fear that underlay the minstrelshow toutcourt). Or perhaps, extrapolating fromLacan, to castratethe already "castrated"woman was to masterthe horri- fyinglack she stood for. The elastic nature of spectator identifications,I would argue, suggests another possibility,one thatdoes not contradictthe general air of male vulnera- bilitybeing managed or handled here. The blackface image, I have suggested, constitutedblack people as the focus of the whitepolitical Imaginary. Black fig- ures (male and female) became eroticobjects both for other characterson stage and for spectatorsin the theater-with a constantslippage between these two looks. It followsthat whitemen found themselvespersonified by "black" agents of desire on stage; and thiswas of course an equivocal ideological effectbecause, in allowing white men to assume imaginarypositions of black male mastery,it threatenedan identificationbetween black and whitemen thatthe blackfaceact was supposed to have rendered null. "Old Blind Josey,"conversely, uses white men's imaginary"blackness" to defendthem against black male power. The song calls on tricksof (cross-racial)disguise that Michael Denning has shown to be endemic to working-classcultural production, and it does so in order to make the black male figureof "Old Blind Josey"a representativeof white men-already unfortunatelycastrated, as I have noted-striking out at a black woman who

The RacialUnconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy 35 seems not only female but also a cover forblack maleness'0 Her typicallyjutting protuberancesand general phallic suggestiveness(recall the master'shat on the black "woman's"nose) bear all the marksof the white-fantasizedblack men who loomed so large in racialized phallic scenarios.It makes perfectsense thatcastra- tion anxietiesin blackfacewould twinthe black penis and the woman, as not only in "Old Blind Josey" but "Gal from the South" and other representations. Another referent for whites of Lacan's threatening (m)other, Frantz Fanon argued, is preciselythe black male-an overlap too pressingto ignore in songs such as these.4' Thus the "castration"scene played out so oftenin minstrelsongs was an iter- ative,revealingly compulsive rebutting of black men bymomentarily empowered white men. Such dream-workdisguises are tellingproof of minstrelsy'sneed to figureblack sexual power and whitemale supremacyat one and the same time. In fact their imaginaryresolutions speak perfectlyto the structureof feeling behind them: the violence against black women vicariouslyexperienced but also summarilyperformed; the spectacle of black male power hugely portrayedbut also ridiculed, and finallyappropriated. Justas attackerand victimare expres- sions of the same psyche in nightmares,so theywere expressions of the same spectator in minstrelsy.This dynamic of masterywas both the genesis and the veryname of pleasure in the minstrelshow'2 We might,after Laura Mulvey,call thisdynamic the "pale gaze"-a ferocious investmentin demystifyingand domesticatingblack power in white fantasyby projectingvulgar black typesas spectacularobjects of whitemen's looking. This looking alwaystook place in relationto an objectifiedand sexualized black body, and it was often conjoined to a sense of terror.This may recall the charge, leveled mostcompellingly by Nathan Huggins in HarlemRenaissance, that minstrelcharacters were simply trash-binprojections of white fantasy,vague fleshlysignifiers that allowed whitesto indulge at a distance all that theyfound repulsive and fearsome. I would take thisline of thinkingmuch further;for, as Stallybrassand White argue, "disgustbears the impressof desire," and, I might add, desire of disgust.43In other words, the repellentelements repressed from white consciousness and projected onto black people were far from securely alienated-they are alwaysalready "inside,"part of "us." Hence the threatof this projected material,and the occasional pleasure of itsthreat. (I do not assume that black people escape such splits,only that these occur by differentmeans.) It is importantto grasp thatfor whiteAmericans the racial repressed is by definition retained as a (usually eroticized) component of fantasy.Since the racial parti- tioningso necessaryto whiteself-presence opens up the whiteImaginary in the firstplace, the latter'sstore of images and fantasiesis virtuallyconstituted by the elements it has attemptedto throwoff. Which is to say that white subjectivity, foundedon this splitting,was and is (in the words of Stallybrassand White) a "mobile, conflictualfusion of power,fear and desire" (5), absolutelydependent

36 REPRESENTATIONS upon the otherness it seeks to exclude and constantlyopen to transgression- although,in wonderfullyadaptive fashion,even the transgressionmay in certain cases be pleasurable.44And if only to guarantee the harmlessness of such transgression,racist "othering"and similar defenses must be under continual manufacture.This is the color line W. E. B. Du Bois was to speak of a halfcentury later,more porous and intimatethan his graphic metaphorallowed, and it is the roilingjumble of need, guilt,and disgustthat powered blackfaceacts. It should thereforecome as no surprise that minstrelcomedy went great stridesto tame the "black"threat through laughter or ridicule,or that,on the contrary,the threat itselfcould sometimesescape complete neutralization.Blackface representations were somethinglike compromiseformations of whiteself-policing, opening the lines of propertyand sexualityto effacementin the verymoment of theircultural construction.

III

Is there any way to know whetherour surmisesabout such represen- tationsbear a relationto the way theywere perceived in the nineteenthcentury? While the attractivenessof an "ethnographic"reception study has recentlygrown, few have had the temerityto attemptit in any but the present moment; what Janice Radway has called the "dispersed, anonymous, unpredictable nature of the use of mass-produced, mass-mediatedcultural forms"has perhaps seemed an insuperable barrier to the reconstructionof a cultural form'spublic even in earlierformations of the cultureindustry.45 Moreover, a seriesof questionsimme- diately arises: How constructa public? If one uses blackface reviews,fictionali- zations, mentions-in-passing,and other such responses, what is the relation of criticaldiscourse to audience response? How gauge such response? I would like here to attemptone sortof approach to these problems.To begin with,we might observe the practice of Marxist art historianT. J. Clark. Clark has read mid- nineteenth-centuryFrench paintingthrough "symptomatic" analyses of its con- temporaneous critics,and in thisway-by a kind of historicalethnography-pro- duced what are arguablysome of the most materialistreadings of historicaltexts in recent criticism.Clark makes an analogy withFreudian theory:if the uncon- scious is visibleonly in slips, silences,and (in)admissionsin conscious life,so the politicalunconscious of the public,though usually hidden by officialrepresenta- tionsthat are made of it in the discourseof the critic,can erupt out of gaps in this discourse: Likethe analyst listening to his patient, what interests us, if we want to discover the [public], are the pointsat whichthe rationalmonotone of the criticbreaks, fails, falters; we are interestedin thephenomena of obsessive repetition, repeated irrelevance, anger suddenly discharged-thepoints where the criticism is incomprehensibleare the keysto itscom-

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 37 prehension.The public,like the unconscious, is presentonly where it ceases; yet it deter- minesthe structure of private discourse; it is thekey to what cannot be said,and no subject is moreimportant.46

The nineteenth-centurywritten response to blackfaceminstrelsy cries out for such analysis.For the relationshipsof propertyand sexualitywe have seen to be crucial to minstrelrepresentations of black people tended, somewhat surpris- ingly,to disrupt many accounts of blackface. Most commentatorsbelieved min- strelsyto have derived at least in part from slave culture,and found affinities between the two thateffectively displaced the differences.Given thisperception of origins,anxieties arose about the precise nature of the culturalrelationships encoded in minstrelsy,a problem thatwas fleetingand murkybut unmistakably present to most of those who wroteabout the minstrelshow. It was in the rather obsessive accounts of minstrelsy'sorigins that these anxietieswere mostextreme. In what follows,I want to look at how even offhandcontemporaneous narratives of the minstrelshow's origins attempted to legitimateor resolve pressingideolog- ical questions raised by their subject. For all positionson the originsand make- up of blackface minstrelsyimplicitly or explicitlyrely on a theoryof the racial politicsof American culture.47 In these tales of minstrelsy's"ancestry," the moment of "racial" exchange between whiteand black men returnswith a vengeance. We should understand this as the desire to fixthe object of studyin the momentof its emergence, as if to uncoverthe pure thing(unadulterated by later, superfluous changes or events) were finallyto grasp its essence. One notes in this project the development of a discourse on cultural "blackness,"narratives of culturalacknowledgment by one race of another,accounts of a relativelytrivial cultural form that find themselves worryingthe minstrelshow's racial economy.They reveal how whiteperformers and audiences conceived of whatthey were doing in minstrelsy,and the extentto which ventriloquizedcultural formsconfronted them witha rather more trou- bling prospect than has been recognized. The momentthat interests me in these narrativesis the one in which black sounds fillthe air and fascinatedwhite men understand forthe firsttime that there are fameand moneyto be made. We have already seen an account of Rice's firstperformance; the same AtlanticMonthly writer,Robert P. Nevin, fixesthis earlier momentas well: As [Rice] saunteredalong one of the main thoroughfaresof Cincinnati,as has been written,his attentionwas suddenlyarrested by a voiceringing clear and fullabove the noisesof thestreet, and givingutterance, in an unmistakabledialect, to therefrain of a songto this effect:-"Turn about an' wheelabout an' dojis so,/ An' ebery time I turnabout I jump JimCrow." Struck by the peculiaritiesof the performance,so unique in style, matter,and "character"of delivery,the player listened on. Werenot these elements-was thesuggestion of the instant-which might admit of higher than mere street or stable-yard development?As a nationalor "race"illustration, behind the footlights, might not "Jim "and a blackface tickle the fancy of pit and circle,as wellas the"Sprig of Shillalah" and a red nose?Out of thesuggestion leaped thedetermination; and so it chancedthat

38 REPRESENTATIONS thecasual hearing of a songtrolled by a negrostage-driver, lolling lazily on thebox of his vehicle,gave origin to a schoolof music destined to excelin popularityall others.(608-9)

Rice is credited here with the higher development or logical conclusion of the culture of the streetand stable yard. Minstrelsyis claimed as the completionof black culture,its professionalemergence. For all the belief in the minstrelshow as authentic"national illustration," then, there is also in thisaccount a submerged melting-potversion of American culture avant la lettre-culturalmixing almost unconsciouslyacknowledged, and hastilyforgotten. These narratives,in other words, are rivetedby the momentof culturalexpropriation, and we should look to them,as Pierre Macherey'swork suggests, as much forwhat theydo not say as for what they do-the way they construct,and then sometimes blur, racial boundaries.48 The cultural mixing in these narratives,however, usually takes place as it were en lair; there is rarely any actual meeting between racial representatives (unlike the exceptional, harrowing,and probably fancifulaccount of Rice and "Cuff"). When there is such a meeting,the issues of ownership,cultural capital, and economics arise (as in the Rice and "Cuff"account). These are the two nar- rative paradigms of minstrelsy'sorigins: one in which mixing takes place by an elision of expropriation,through absorption (in both senses), the other in which it takes place bya transferof ownership,through theft (or occasionallypayment). In the accounts I have come across it is nearlyalways one or the other-obvious attemptsto masterthe fears and anxietiesI discussed in the last section.Both, it is safe to say,share an anxietyover the factof cultural"borrowing." And both, I would like to suggest,have as their purpose the resolutionof some intractable social contradictionor problem thatthe issue of expropriationrepresents. That of the first,I would argue, is miscegenation;that of the second, slaveryitself. If, as Joseph Litvak has suggested, "anxiety itselfhas a narrative (i.e., implicitly history-making)structure," both anticipatingand deferringthe "deconstructive cancellation of its sustainingtechniques," these narrativesof love and theftare manipulationsof historicalanxiety meant to overcome the threateningimplica- tions of theirprimary concerns.49 It should hardlyseem strangethat miscegenation be suggested (if in oblique and displaced form)in accounts of whitemen's fascinationwith and attractionto black men and theirculture, accounts in whichthe culturesmerge. And the logic of such accounts is that fascinationmay be permittedso long as actual contactis avoided; that is the way the passage above works. The white man is "arrested" and "struck"by a voice only.At the passage's end, when we do finallysee the black man "lollinglazily on thebox of his vehicle"-by whatmeans, through whose eyes, where was he before?-this suggestiveappearance indicates the reason for his absence throughout:black male sexualityis one componentof his arrestingvoice. In accounts like thisthere is a relativelytransparent white male attractionto and

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 39 repulsion from the black penis, for which,as in minstrelsongs themselves,the preoccupation withmiscegenation serves as a kind of shorthand.These two con- cerns-a jealous guarding of the prized whitefemale body and a fascinationwith black male sexual potencythat either precedes or followsit-amount in any case to the same thing: the twitchy"love" of my title.James Kennard,Jr.'s discussion (in an 1845 Knickerbocker)of the racial mixingattendant upon minstrelsy-he is carefulto saythat it happens "byproxy" (i.e., in blackfaceperformance)-clarifies the nature of the threat.A briefaccount of the beginningsof T. D. Rice's "imita- tive powers" is given,and then whimsyturns to distressedirony: Fromthe nobilityand gentry,down to the lowestchimney sweep in GreatBritain, and fromthe member of Congress, down to the youngest apprentice or school-boyin America, it was all: "Turnabout and wheelabout, and do just so, /And everytime I turnabout I jumpJim Crow." Even the fairsex did notescape thecontagion: the tunes were set to musicfor the piano-forte,and nearlyevery young lady in theUnion, and theUnited Kingdom, played and sang,if she did notjump, "Jim Crow".... [Negroesthemselves] were not permitted to appear in the theatres,and thehouses of the fashionable,but theirsongs are in the mouthsand earsof all.... (332-33)

"Contagion" indeed. Later in the articlethe author triesunsuccessfully to wish away the miscegenatingmusic (personifiedas "Dan Tucker"): Depend upon it,he willdo no suchthing, so longas theyoung ladies speak to him in such fascinatingtones, and accompanytheir sweet voices with the only less sweet music of the piano.Dan takesit as an invitationto stay; and doubtlessmany a loverwould like to receive a similarrejection from his lady-love; a fashion,by the way, like that in whichthe country lassreproved her lover for kissing her: "Be done,Nat!" said she, "and (sotovoce [sic]) begin again!"(335)

No wonder, then, that in this firstparadigm minstrelsy's"origins" are ordi- narilyso displaced and disembodied; talkof culturalmerging is too dangerously close to a discourse of "amalgamation."A bizarre amalgaphobia infectseven the briefestof accounts: "These songs,spawned in the verylowest puddles of society, at lengthfound theirway, like the frogsof Egypt,into places of admittedrespect- ability.On so darka subject it can hardly be expected that we should be quite precise in referenceto dates."50The repetitive,even obsessiveinsistence on black sexualityin theseencounters and in descriptionsof their"offspring" has a vaguely unconsciousor unmotivatedquality; it is less a rhetoricaltic or standardreference than somethingthat has slipped by. In an articlesympathetic to minstrelsy,one writerimagines "the hum of the plantation": I listenwith attentive ears-for I knowby experience the gratification in store for me- and soon catchthe distant tones of thehuman voice-now morefaintly heard, and now entirelylost.... Now,anew, I hear the sound of thosemanly negro voices swelling up upon the eveninggale. Nearerand nearercomes the boat, higher and higherrises the

40 REPRESENTATIONS melody,till it overpowersand subduesthe noise of theoars, which in theirturn become subservientto thesong, and markits time with harmonious beating.5'

If black men could do this withtheir voices, imagine what theycould do in the flesh! But they remain voices, withoutpresence, imaginativeprojections: these accounts seem to require that theyremain so, even as the black male is compul- sivelyreferred to. The accounts all suggest fears and desires that come in the shape of a social narrativeinvolving overpowering black men. That narrative surfaces in many contexts,but refersus in the end to the unresolved-and to these writersfascinating-threat of intermixturesuffusing the minstrelphenom- enon. Emblems of a relationship between the races that has been culturally repressed,minstrel songs, like the mulattochild of Thomas Jeffersonin William Wells Brown'sClotel (1853), returnedto haunt the mostrespectable of places. But miscegenation/homoeroticdesire is not the only kind of relationship whiteswould ratherhave forgotten,and the other narrativeparadigm thatorga- nizes tales of minstrelsy'sorigins expresses an overridingconcern withexchange value, the economics of race-slavery itself.Recall that in the AtlanticMonthly account above Rice gets the minstrelidea withoutmeeting the black man; it is only later that "Cuff's"clothes come in handy,and the issue of ownership,and value generally,emerges. (This is the only account containingboth paradigms.) The central issue of the second paradigm is so pressing that a later writer,in retellingNevin's Atlantic account nearlyword forword, nevertheless amends it in a strikingway. Nevin writesthat "Cuff was preciselythe subjectfor Rice's purpose. Slightpersuasion induced him to accompany the actor to the theatre" (609, my italics).Amidst an almostverbatim account, H. P. Phelps writesthat "a darkey... was induced, fora slightconsideration, to go withthe actor to the theatre"(166, my italics). Given the monotony,the happy plagiarismof the general run of these accounts,such minute shiftsare quite revealing,slips of the tongue in a "public" discourse. And what theydisclose is whiteguilt or anxietyaround minstrelsyas a figurefor the plunderingof black culture.Generally the intentionof thissecond paradigm is a denial or forgettingof slavery'sunremunerated labor-often dif- ficultto sustainas repressed economic factsreturn. In the mostbenign of these accounts,there can be no meetingbetween racial representativeswithout some kind of reparationmade by whitesto blacks-as in the following: One springseason of the LouisvilleTheatre, on a clear,bright morning, during the rehearsalof some playin whichMr. Rice had butlittle to do, as he was standingon the stage,at a backdoor thatlooked out upon therear of a stable-yard,where a veryblack, clumsynegro used to clean and rub downhorses, he was attractedby the clearness and melodyof thisnegro's voice, and he caughtthe words, the subject of hissong; it was the negroversion of "Jump,Jim Crow." He listenedwith delight to the negro'ssinging for severaldays, and finallywent to himand paid himto singthe song over to himuntil he had learnedit.52

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 41 This is obviouslythe legitimatingstory of cultural"borrowing": all accounts have been paid in full.The mentionof a "negro version"of "JimCrow" is no doubt a nice touch, implyingas it does the neutralityand simple differenceof versions; but it reveals, even as it attemptsto disguise, preciselythe differenceof versions, the implied inaccuracy of blackface minstrelsy'sappropriating "delineations." Even in accounts thatwould deny the notion of imbalance-in the evaluation of culturesor in culturalindebtedness-that imbalance,perhaps inevitably,returns. It does so most forthrightlyin referencesto the monetaryor commodity statusof minstrelsongs, as well as thatof theirblack "inventors."Most accounts at some point take up the issue of minstrelsy'sauthenticity, and are therefore litteredwith defenses against or assertionsof its"counterfeit" nature: "Base coun- terfeitsas theyare, theypass currentwith most people as genuine negro songs. Hence the false currencyimplied in the same writer'squip that"white men have blacked theirfaces to represent[Negroes], [and] made theirfortune by the spec- ulation" (333). The disapproval of this practicesuggests an uneasiness withthe surplus value thus generated; its falsenessseems to stem from the fact that its black "owners" are not equal buyers and sellers on the marketbut are "repre- sented," bought and sold, by brokers. On the other hand, the disapproval may not have directlyto do withslavery; a distrustof the "speculation"of minstrelsy may only be a cautious approach to the main chance-made riskyin the after- math of the Panic of 1837, perhaps. But though the "blackness"minstrelsy ped- dles may be a commoditylike any other,it ultimatelyderives, as these references continuallyremind us, from a certain southern commodity:"Those of us who have for so many years been looking anxiously forwardto the advent of the coming poet who is to take away fromAmerica the sin and the shame of never having produced an epic, or a lyric,commensurate with Niagara and the Rocky Mountains, will do well to get up a subscriptionand buy the author of [these songs], if his owner can be persuaded to part withhim."54 The claims of Young America notwithstanding,one wants to reply that the sin and shame lie some- where else. What all thissuggests, in any case, is thatblackface minstrelsy figured less as a palliativeto the economicsof slaverythan as an uncomfortablereminder of it. In this contextwe should recall the most horrificof the accounts organized bythis second paradigm. It is Nevin'snarrative in whichoutright theft and public embarrassmentare indulged; but here too, as I have suggested,simply narrating the "primal scene" introduces issues of economy,value, and ownership almost behind the author'sback. A great deal of space is allottedto Cuff'smode of sub- sistence,too much in factfor the part he playsas the lender of his "blackness"to Rice. He carries passengers' trunksfrom steamers to shore; he is, moreover,in activecompetition with another black man, "Ginger,"for business. Revealingly,it is midwaythrough Rice's performancein Cuff'sclothes that the "near approach of a steamer"-Cuff's livelihood-intrudes, and requires the song somehow to

42 REPRESENTATIONS end. And it must end because, as Nevin writes,"liberally as [Cuff] mightlend himselfto a friend,it could not be done at thatsacrifice" (609). This allegorically suggestive scene-suggestive against the grain of what its author wants to convey-is yet marked by certain complex displacements.The firstis the odd overemphasison Cuff's free labor-here located not in slave-holdingLouisville but in Pittsburgh,a swerveaway frommost other accounts, such as those of Noah Ludlow, T. Allston Brown, and Edmon S. Conner, which make the cultural "donor" a Louisville slave. It is as if,in thisfirst displacement, the factof slavery will be jettisoned in favor of industriousblack men "liberal" enough to "lend themselves"to white friends.But the shape of that last phrase, in which black people offerup theirselves like the talkingcommodities in Capitalor in Dreiser's SisterCarrie, already suggeststhe slave economy that "lending" is there to cover over.55And indeed the scene as a whole,with its successive subordinations of Cuff in Rice's minstrelperformance and in Nevin'suse of dialect,enacts a second dis- placement,this time fromthe free labor by whichthe passage initiallysought to distance itselffrom slavery.It narratologicallyreenslaves a black man who has evidentlyturned out to be more competitiveand enterprisingthan he should be. This ratherdesperate shiftingindicates the ambivalencethat minstrelsy's debt to black cultural production called forth-and which this origin-narrativepara- digm, I believe, was inventedto mediate or "manage." But we have yetto deal withthe mostcurious detailof thisscene, thatin which Cuff "let[s] his open mouth as a mark for boys to pitch pennies into"-suspi- ciouslyclose to whitefantasy, but possiblyobserved. Then again, perhaps Nevin had read Melville'sThe Confidence-Man (1857). In the thirdchapter, Black Guinea, a "grotesque negro cripple, in tow-clothattire and an old coal-sifterof a tam- bourine in his hand," makes his appearance: Shufflingamong the crowd, now and thenhe wouldpause, throwing back his head and openinghis mouth like an elephantfor tossed apples at a menageriewhen, making a space beforehim, people would have a boutat a strangesort of pitch-pennygame, the cripple's mouthbeing at once targetand purse,and he hailingeach expertly-caughtcopper with a crackedbravura from his tambourine.To be thesubject of alms-givingis trying,and to feelin dutybound to appearcheerfully grateful under the trial, must be stillmore so; but whateverhis secret emotions, he swallowedthem, while still retaining each copper this side theoesophagus. And nearlyalways he grinned,and onlyonce or twicedid he wince,which waswhen certain coins, tossed by more playful almoners, came inconveniently nigh to his teeth,an accidentwhose unwelcomeness was notunedged by the circumstance that the penniesthus thrown proved buttons. Whilethis game of charitywas yetat itsheight, a limping,gimlet-eyed, sour-faced person. . . began to croakout somethingabout his deformitybeing a sham,got up for financialpurposes, which immediately threw a damp upon the frolicbenignities of the pitch-pennyplayers.56

By the end of the scene, we realize with a jolt that this is probablya blackface performance;57the attentivereader recognizesanother of the confidenceman's

The RacialUnconscious of BlackfaceMinstrelsy 43 disguises. This is more than the Fidele'spassengers do, hence the dramaticirony here-Melville liftsthe mask forthe reader only.Indeed, a "purple-faceddrover," by implicationa slave trader,actually hints at capturingwhat he takes to be this black man (whichcasually links minstrelsy with the human trafficof slavery);the accusation of fraud only extends to Black Guinea's lameness. Melville thus exposes the minstrelizationof Cuffin Nevin'saccount: whatthese passengersand Nevin himselftake as "blackness,"Melville reveals to be part of a whitediscourse undergirdingthe minstrelphenomenon. However, thisturn only takes place when the limpingman levels his accusa- tion. Before that the reader sees a pitiable cripple doing his best amid a brutal "game of charity,"though Ann Douglas has rightlynoted that our sentimental- ized pityis itselfbeing savaged here.58We soon pay the price in embarrassment, but Melville brieflytries to make us as sympatheticas he possiblycan; for all its fakery,the passage above is mightilyeffective. We have no way of knowingthat Black Guinea's "secretemotions" are probablythose of a whiteman pretending to be a black man, and so we are shocked, drawn in. It is an act of blackness as "targetand purse," object of derision and repositoryof marketvalue. Only then does the accusation break up the illusion,"got up for financialpurposes." But that,of course, is what Melvillehas himselfbeen so carefulto construct-a sham thatworks, if only to embarrass-and he has done it bycommodifying the blazes out of Black Guinea. The consciousnessof black commodificationthat the writing forcesupon us worksall the more to make "blackness"into a marketablething of white interest,this time for the reader. In order for the passage to possess any kick,the racial economy so bitterlyexposed here must arouse before it exposes. Commodificationis, in a sense, itsattraction; it is whatseems "blackest"about it. It is preciselywhat is calculated to evoke the foolishpleasure of our pity,and Mel- ville's grim irony only confirmsthat the attemptto reveal minstrelsy'sfinancial purposes has itselfproved to be an act of minstrelization. Blackface here is one more con game. But Melville'srejection of it accords in strikingways with the thing itself.Far from a happily secured distributionof cultural needs and desires, racial counterfeitingin JacksonianAmerica appears actually to have defeated the effortsto master it-whether the masterywas attemptedby mystification or exposure-no less than ithaunted itspartisans. The writingsI have surveyedwere ineffectual,if various, plays for control of the ques- tions minstrelsyapparently raised and tried to resolve. What these narratives seem to have realized is that the minstrelshow flauntedas much as hid the fact of expropriationand itssubtexts, enslavement and intermixture.Such seemingly coherentand purposive accounts,in short,constituted part of a volatilediscourse on "blackness"-examples in themselves of blackface minstrelsy's racial unconscious.

44 REPRESENTATIONS Notes

My deepest thanksto Michael Rogin and Carol Clover fortheir acute and sympathetic editorialadvice. 1. Alexander Saxton, "BlackfaceMinstrelsy andJacksonian Ideology," American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1975): 27. For similaremphases see Ralph Ellison, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in his Shadowand Act (1964; New York, 1972), 45-59; LeRoi Jones, Blues People:Negro Music in WhiteAmerica (New York, 1963), 82-86; James H. Dorman, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow Rice,"Journal of Social History3, no. 2 (1969-70): 109-22; Alan W. C. Green, "'JimCrow,' 'Zip Coon': The NorthernOrigins of Negro Minstrelsy," Review 11, no. 2 (1970): 385-97; Nathan Irvin Huggins, HarlemRenaissance (New York, 1971), 244-301; RobertC. Toll, BlackingUp: The MinstrelShow in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (New York, 1974); Sylvia Wynter, "Sambos and Minstrels,"Social Text1 (1979): 149-56; Joseph Boskin, Sambo:The Rise and Demiseof an AmericanJester (New York, 1986), 65-94; and Houston A. Baker,Jr., Modernismand theHarlem Renaissance (Chicago, 1987), 17-24. This workrevises more genial (and often complacent) earlier work such as Carl Wittke,Tambo and Bones: A Historyof theAmerican Minstrel Stage (Durham, N.C., 1930); and Constance Rourke, AmericanHumor: A Studyof the American National Character (New York, 1931), 77-104. 2. Since thiswork is stillin the process of formation,any listingof it mustbe eclecticand inexhaustive:John F. Szwed, "Race and the Embodimentof Culture,"Ethnicity 2, no. 1 (1975): 19-33; Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History,"in Region,Race, and Reconstruction:Essays in Honor of C. VannWoodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 143-77; Houston A. Baker,Jr., Blues,Ideology, and Afro-AmericanLiterature: A VernacularTheory (Chicago, 1984); Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotypeand Colonial Discourse,"Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18-36; and Bhabha, "Of Mimicryand Man: The Ambivalenceof Colo- nial Discourse," October28 (Spring 1984): 125-33; Barbara Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy,and Voice in TheirEyes Were Watching God," in Black Literatureand Literary Theory,ed. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (New York, 1984), 205-19; the essaysin Gates, ed., "Race,"Writing, and Difference(Chicago, 1986); Stuart Hall, "Gramsci'sRelevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,"JournalofCommunication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 5- 27; Hazel Carby,Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist(New York, 1987); Paul Gilroy,"There Ain't No Black in theUnion Jack": The CulturalPolitics of Race and Nation(London, 1987); HenryLouis Gates,Jr.,The Signifying Monkey:A Theoryof African-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988); Philip Cohen, "Tarzan and the Jungle Bunnies: Race, Class, and Sex in Popular Culture,"New For- mations5 (Summer 1988): 25-30; the essaysin Kobena Mercer,ed., BlackFilm/British Cinema(London, 1988); Richard Dyer, "White,"Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44-64; the essays in Cheryl Wall, ed., ChangingOur Own Words:Essays on Criticism,Theory, and Writingby Black Women(New Brunswick,N.J., 1989); and Andrew Ross, "Ballots,Bul- lets,or Batmen: Can Cultural Studies Do the RightThing?," Screen31, no. 1 (1990): 26-44. 3. Here I am calling on Raymond Williams'sdefinition of "structuresof feeling,"cer- tainlyan apposite conception to thatof a racial or politicalunconscious. See Marxism and Literature(New York, 1977), 132-34; as well as FredricJameson, The Political Unconscious:Narrative as a SociallySymbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981).

The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy 45 4. Robert P. Nevin, "Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy,"Atlantic Monthly 20, no. 121 (1867): 608-16. 5. As does the minstrel"conundrum": "Why are minstrelcompanies like midnightrob- bers? Because theylive by theirdeeds of darkness";White's New Book of Plantation Mel- odies(Philadelphia, 1849), 31. 6. See Mrs. Anne Mathews,A Continuationof the Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1839), 1:239. 7. See, for instance,the "Interviewwith Ben Cotton"in the New YorkMirror (1897, clip- ping in New York Public LibraryTheatre Collection): I used to sit with [blacks on Mississippiriverboats] in frontof theircabins, and we would startthe banjo twanging,and theirvoices would ring out in the quiet night air in theirweird melodies. They did not quite understand me. I was the firstwhite man theyhad seen who sang as theydid; but we were brothersfor the timebeing and were perfectlyhappy. 8. New YorkHerald, 6 February 1843. 9. For his part, Mark Twain (like Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman)was intriguedby what he called the "happy and accurate"representations of the minstrelshow. See The AutobiographyofMark Twain,ed. Charles Neider (1924; New York, 1959), 60; and Eric Lott, "'The Seeming Counterfeit': Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy," AmericanQuarterly 43, no. 2 (1991): 223-54. 10. Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities,"in Black Film/BritishCinema, 28-29. This is suggested also by the historicalcoexistence in the mid nineteenthcentury of white supremacy and what George Fredricksonhas called "romanticracialism"; see TheBlack Imagein theWhite Mind: TheDebateonAfro-American CharacterandDestiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), chap. 4. 11. Hans Nathan, Dan Emmettand theRise ofEarly Negro Minstrelsy (1962; Norman, Okla., 1977), 118. 12. Quoted in George C. D. Odell, Annalsof the New York Stage, 12 vols. (New York, 1928- 31), 5:33. 13. Hans Nathan is very precise about the make-up of the firstminstrel shows; see Dan Emmett,118-34, 143-53. 14. On the basis of late-nineteenth-centuryperformer Lew Dockstader'srecollection that the early interlocutor'slack of "darky dialect" contrastedwith his black make-up, RobertToll concludes thatinterlocutors generally appeared in blackface;see Blacking Up, 63, n. 63. 15. Laura Mulvey,"Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema" (1975), now in her Visualand OtherPleasures (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 19. 16. See the pamphlet collectingEnglish reviewsof the 1846 Britishtour of the , EthiopianSerenaders, 22. The pamphletis located in the Harvard Theater Collection. 17. In thisthe minstrelshow is not unrelatedto televisionsituation comedy. I am indebted here to PatriciaMellencamp, "SituationComedy, Feminism, and Freud," in Studiesin Entertainment:Critical Approaches to Mass Culture,ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 80-95. 18. TheNegro Forget-Me-Not Songster (Philadelphia, early 1850s), 90. 19. See Leon F. Litwack,North of Slavery: The Negro in theFree States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 45. 20. NegroForget-Me-Not Songster, 30. 21. Ibid., 102. 22. "Peabody's Lecture, On the Great Soger Camp-Meeting,"White's New Book, 79.

46 REPRESENTATIONS 23. Charles H. Fox, CharleyFox's Sable Songster (New York, 1859), 74-75. 24. FredricJameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue," in his The Ideologiesof Theory:Essays 1971-86, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1988), 2:72. 25. Peter Stallybrassand Allon White, The Politicsand Poeticsof Transgression(New York, 1986), 192. This argumentrefines ideas drawn fromsymbolic anthropologists such as Mary Douglas, who have writtenof the body as a symbolicrepresentation of the social forcesthat produced it-bodily functionsand boundaries, pointsof entryand of exit signifyingsocietal relationsand values, in this case racial ones; see Douglas, Natural Symbols:Explorations in Cosmology(New York, 1970), esp. 65-81. 26. In the realm of fantasy,blackface degraded also the whitemen who made use of it- including,I would guess, spectatorsthemselves. The materialcapacity of burntcork or greasepaint, mixed with sweat and smearing under the flickeringgaslights, to invoke coal, dirt, or their excremental analogues was often acknowledged-Tom's humiliatingescape in the "Whelp-hunting"chapter of Dickens's Hard Times(1854), forinstance, a blacking-upthat is a not-quitetarring-and-feathering. Likewise, it was said of T. D. Rice thathis reputationdepended "upon his blackface;and how he con- trivesto keep it white,might be matterof grave debate, begrimed as it has been for the last ten years,at least three hours in each of the twenty-four";F. C. Wemyss,The- atricalBiography; or, The Life of an Actorand Manager(Glasgow, 1848), 179. 27. For the notionof popular fiction'splots, types, and disguisesas a kind of "dream-work of the social," see Michael Denning, MechanicAccents: Dime Novelsand Working-Class Culturein America(London, 1987), 81. 28. Twain,Autobiography, 62. 29. Sigmund Freud,Jokesand TheirRelation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey(1905; New York, 1960), 227. 30. Melanie Klein, Contributionsto Psycho-analysis,1921-1945 (London, 1948), 267-77, 282-338. 31. S. FosterDamon, comp., Seriesof Old AmericanSongs (Providence, R.I., 1936), no. 39. 32. TheSmithsonian Collection of American Popular Music (CBS) . 33. Mikhail Bakhtin,Rabelais and His World,trans. Helene Iswolsky(1965; Bloomington, Ind., 1984). 34. "Now Hold Your Horses, Will You!," Christyand Wood'sNew SongBook (Philadelphia, 1854), 9. 35. Anotherpossibility is thataudiences experienced a marginallymore positivenostalgia for nurture rather than infantrage; this was true of the wave of sentimentalblack images thatalso ruled the minstrelstage. I have been influencedhere byMichael Rogin'spsychohistorical interpretation of white attitudestoward Native Americans in the antebellum period; see Fathersand Children:Andrew Jackson and theSubjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975), 3- 15, 114-25. 36. See ChristianMetz, TheImaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and theCinema, trans. Celia Brittonet al. (1977; Bloomington,Ind., 1982), for an account of how the castration threatis managed byreplacing it witha fetish-substitute:"The fixationon [thefetish's] just before' [castration]is thus anotherform of disavowal.... The fetishsignifies the penis as absent,it is its negativesignifier; supplementing it, it puts a 'fullness'in place of a lack, but in doing so it also affirmsthat lack" (70-71). 37. Christyand Wood'sNew Song Book, 85-86. 38. In a talk entitled "Mirror Stages: Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon" (Universityof Virginia,30 October 1991), Barbara Johnson remarksthat if the phallus is almost by

The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy 47 definitionwhite, the penis must be black-which accounts here for its unruly and threateningpotential. Thanks to Michael Rogin for a similarpoint in regard to my essay. 39. Christyand Wood'sNew Song Book, 30. 40. Denning, MechanicAccents, 146-48. 41. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, WhiteMasks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York, 1967), 161. 42. In thinkingabout racial and gender disguise, and about theater-spectators'varying identificationswith blackface characters,I am indebted to Mark Nash, "Vampyrand the Fantastic,"Screen 17, no. 3 (1976): 29-67; and to Carol J. Clover's brilliant"Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,"Representations 20 (1987): 187-228. 43. Stallybrassand White,Transgression, 77. 44. Stallybrassand Whitehave an excellentstatement of how thisformation comes about in ibid., 193-94. 45. Janice Radway,"Reception Study: Ethnographyand the Problemsof Dispersed Audi- ences and Nomadic Subjects,"Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1988): 361; in the same issue see Lawrence Grossberg's"Wandering Audiences, Nomadic Critics."More generally see, for example, Carlo Ginzburg,The Cheeseand theWorms: The Cosmosof a Sixteenth- CenturyMiller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (1976; Baltimore, 1980); Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding,"in Culture,Media, Language: WorkingPapers in CulturalStudies, 1972-79, eds. Stuart Hall et al. (London, 1980), 128-38; Janice Radway,Reading the Romance:Women, Patriarchy, and PopularLiterature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984); len Ang, WatchingDallas: Soap Operaand theMelodramatic Imagination, trans. Della Cooling (New York, 1985); the essays in James Cliffordand George Marcus, eds., WritingCulture: The Poeticsand Politicsof Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986); David Morley,The Nationwide Audience(London, 1980); and Morley,Family Television: Cultural Power and DomesticLei- sure(London, 1986); the essaysin RobertC. Allen, ed., Channelsof Discourse: Television and ContemporaryCriticism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987); especially Allen's own essay, "Reader-Oriented Criticism and Television"; James Clifford,"On Ethnographic Authority,"in his The Predicamentof Culture:Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 21-54; Tania Modleski, "Some Functionsof Femi- nist Criticism; or, The Scandal of the Mute Body," October49 (1989): 3-24; and Guenter H. Lenz, "'Ethnographies': American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology,"Prospects 16 (1991): 1-40. 46. T.J. Clark,Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the1848 Revolution(1973; Princeton, N.J., 1982), 12. Clark'sremarks are evidently(although not explicitly)based on Pierre Macherey'sA Theoryof Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (1966; London, 1978). One ought to note that Clark makes a distinctionbetween the actual audience of art and a generalized or postulated"public," which, because theyare more continuousin the case of popular culture,I conflatein my account of audience response. See also Richard Dyer, HeavenlyBodies: Film Starsand Society(New York, 1986) for a related practice of reconstructingthe racial and sexual discourses in which, for example, movie starsbecome intelligible. 47. This sectionowes much to Edward W. Said, Beginnings:Intention and Method (New York, 1975), chap. 2; and to J. F. Lyotard'sreflections on the functionof "legitimatingnar- ratives"in The PostmodernCondition: A Reporton Knowledge,trans. GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), 18-20. The many accounts of the rise of minstrelsy,some brieferthan others,include "Originsof Jim Crow," Transcript 27 May 1841; James Kennard, "Who Are Our

48 REPRESENTATIONS Negro Poets?,"Knickerbocker 26, no. 4 (1845): 332; F. C. Wemyss,Theatrical Biography, 178-79; and Wemyss,Theatrical Biography of EminentActors and Authors(New York, 1852), 122; G. W. Curtis,"Editorial Notes-Music," Putnam'sMonthly 2, no. 11 (1853): 572; "Letterfrom a Teacher at the South,"Journal of Music 2, no. 21 (1853): 164; Sol Smith, The TheatricalJourney (Philadelphia, 1854), 53; "Obituary,Not Eulogistic: Negro MinstrelsyIs Dead," Journalof Music 13, no. 18 (1858): 118; Nevin, "Stephen C. Foster,"608-9; T. A. Brown,History of the American Stage (1870; New York, 1969), 310; and "The Origin of Negro Minstrelsy,"in Fun in Black; or,Sketches of Minstrel Life, ed. Charles H. Day (New York, 1874), 5-10; H. D. Stone, PersonalRecollections of the Drama (1873; New York, 1969), 240-41; Olive Logan, "The Ancestryof Brudder Bones," Harper'sNew Monthly Magazine 58, no. 347 (1879): 687-98; H. P. Phelps,Players of a Century:A Recordof theAlbany Stage (1880; New York, 1972), 166-67; Noah M. Ludlow, DramaticLife As I FoundIt (1880; New York, 1966), 392-93; E. S. Conner, "An Old Actor'sMemories" (1881), in Marshall Stearns,The Story ofJazz (New York, 1956), 111-12; J.J.Jennings, Theatrical and CircusLife (St. Louis, 1882), 368; WalterLeman, Memoriesof an Old Actor(San Francisco,1886), 92; Laurence Hutton, "The Negro on the Stage,"Harper's New Monthly Magazine 79, no. 469 (1889): 131-45; E. L. Rice,Mon- archsof Minstrelsy from "Daddy" Rice toDate (New York, 1911), 7-10; M. B. Leavitt,Fifty Yearsin TheatricalManagement (New York, 1912), 23-24; and Brander Matthews,"The Rise and Fall of Negro Minstrelsy,"Scribner's Magazine 57, no. 6 (1915): 755. 48. Macherey,Theory of Literary Production. 49. Joseph Litvak,"Back to the Future: A Review-Articleon the New Historicism,Decon- struction,and Nineteenth-CenturyFiction," Texas Studies in Languageand Literature30, no. 1 (1988): 127. On culturaltexts as symbolicor "magical"resolutions to lived social contradictions,see, forinstance, Stuart Hall et al., eds., ResistanceThrough Rituals: Youth SubculturesinPost-WarBritain (London, 1976), 9-74; and FredricJameson,"Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,"Social Text1 (1979): 130-48; and PoliticalUnconscious, 77-80. 50. "Obituary,Not Eulogistic,"118. 51. "Negro Minstrelsy-Ancientand Modern,"Putnam's Monthly 5, no. 25 (1855): 76-77. 52. Ludlow, DramaticLife, 392. 53. Kennard, "Who Are Our National Poets?,"336. 54. "Negro Minstrelsy-Ancientand Modern," 73-74. 55. Here is Marx: Could commoditiesthemselves speak, theywould say: "Our use-value may be a thingthat interestsmen. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourseas com- modities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothingbut exchange- values." Capital,Vol. I, trans.Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling,ed. FrederickEngels (1867; New York, 1967), 83. Here is Dreiser: Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion; theyspoke tenderlyand Jesuiti- cally for themselves.When she came withinearshot of theirpleading, desire in her bent a willingear. The voice of the so-called inanimate! Who shall translatefor us the language of the stones? "My dear," said the lace collar she secured fromPartridge's, "I fityou beautifully;don't give me up." "Ah, such littlefeet," said the leather of the softnew shoes; "how effec- tivelyI cover them. What a pitythey should ever want myaid."

The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy 49 Theodore Dreiser, SisterCarrie, ed. Donald Pizer (1900; New York, 1970), 75. What allows commoditiesto talkis preciselytheir exchange-value; it is thisthat masks their social characteras labor and givesthem a lifeof theirown. Under slaverythe opposite happens; self-owninghuman beings become voiceless things,pure socio-economic values. "Lending oneself" occupies a strange middle ground between the two, sug- gestingboth self-ownershipand an invitationto self-enslavement,particularly given the uses to which Cuff'sloan is put. It is in any case Nevin'sambivalence toward black labor that is represented here, comfortablewith neither slavery nor free labor; this ambivalence accounts for the shiftingdisplacements going on in his narrative. 56. Herman Melville,The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade(1857; New York, 1954), 17-18. 57. Carolyn Karcher has argued forcefullythat the confidence man's race is finallya riddle,that Melville's manipulations leave us no wayof knowingwhether he is "really" white(here in blackface)or black. While thisis generallypersuasive, and while I agree with Karcher's importantargument that the issue of slaveryis at the heart of The Confidence-Man,the specificimplications of blackfaceare centralto Black Guinea's first appearance; in the sixthchapter, Melville himself invokes the minstrelshow, and it is only later that race is successivelydestabilized. This hardlycalls Karcher's point into question-indeed it is probably central to it. See Karcher,Shadow Over thePromised Land: Slavery,Race, and Violencein MelvillesAmerica (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 186- 257. 58. Ann Douglas, TheFeminization of American Culture (1977; New York, 1978), 361.

50 REPRESENTATIONS