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Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity Amma Y

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Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity Amma Y Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin In 1901, visitors to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, could pay 10 cents to watch emancipated slaves and two generations of free-born African Americans reenact scenes of slavery in an attraction called Old Plantation. This live display was supposed to “amuse and at the same time instruct” (Ahrhart 1901:42) the visitor about what slave life was like on the “old plantation befo’ de wah.”1 During the seven-month run of this attraction, the cast numbering over 150 black performers — touted as “genuine southern darkies” who had “never been north 1. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah,” News (Buffalo, NY), 6 May 1900, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, Newspaper Clipping Scrapbook, vol. 5, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Subsequent citations from the Buffalo News, the Buffalo Courier, the Buffalo Express, and the Commercial Advertiser that indicate a volume num- ber are from the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, Newspaper Clipping Scrapbook of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library; date and volume are specified. TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013 102 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00263 by guest on 27 September 2021 of the Mason and Dixie Line”2 — lived in “real” slave log cabins, picked cotton while singing work songs, and performed “camp style” meetings and cakewalks for visitors.3 Yet this “veritable glimpse of the Sunny South” reportedly required the creation of a spe- cial school by a Northern white showman to prepare the black troupe for their performances.4 “The principal of the school,” as a Buffalo newspaper reported,5 was Fred McClellan, a show business veteran with 18 years of managerial experience, including a five-year stint at Madison Square Garden in New York City and another five years at Buffalo’s Shea’s Theatre ( Journal of American Industries [ JAI] 1901a:20). For one month, McClellan taught his “pupils” — “negroes of all ages, sizes and shades of black” — essential elements of the late-19th-century minstrel stage. He taught them cakewalks and buck dancing, rehearsed them in singing “negro melodies” and “camp-meeting songs,” and “prepared [them] to reproduce the Southern negro at work and at play” for the world’s fair.6 To the modern-day mind, the scenario is outrageous: a white Northerner essentially estab- lishes a minstrel school 7 (which was located in the South) to teach Southern blacks how to per- form their “authentic” selves. Although two newspaper articles briefly mention this place of instruction,8 to date, I have located no archival evidence that confirms the school’s existence or what took place there. Still, the report — the mere suggestion — of a school may be enough to establish that minstrelsy had become a legitimate space for defining blackness, despite its obvious invention by white performers. Unlike earlier forms of blackface minstrelsy in which white performers such as Thomas Dartmouth (T.D.) Rice took lessons from their black inspi- rations, the minstrel school suggests both that whites in 1901 possessed knowledge of “authen- tic black culture” and that real black people somehow had forgotten how to be themselves. At a time when Jim Crow laws and lynchings were on the rise, these propositions are disturbing and make the school not so much a performing arts academy as a training ground for black peo- ple to learn how to embody the type of “darkey” that could be accepted by whites. That type of “darkey” was a white creation from the minstrel stage, a caricature of black culture that not 2. “Slave 96 Years Old,” Courier (Buffalo, NY), 12 May 1901, vol. 10. 3. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah”; “Old Plantation,” Express (Buffalo, NY), 28 July 1901, vol. 15; “Midway in Full Swing: The Old Plantation,” Express, 19 May 1901, vol. 11; “Midway Negroes Here,” Express, 12 May 1901, vol. 10. 4. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.” 5. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature: Evolution of the Southern Negro as Planned for Portrayal at the Pan- American,” Courier, 11 April 1901, vol. 9. 6. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.” 7. While the primary document uses the term “school,” I add the adjective “minstrel” to further highlight the per- formance genre this place of instruction upheld. 8. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature”; “Slave 96 Years Old.” Figure 1. (facing page) The front of the Old Plantation concession at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. (From Barry 1901; reproduction by permission of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Buffalo, New York) Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She writes about, teaches, and creates performance-centered methodologies of studying the past. She is currently completing two projects: a historical musical about Old Plantation black performers in the 1901 world’s fair entitled At Buffalo; and a book about the relation between laughter and the American slave experience, entitled Laughing after Slavery: The Performances and Times of Laughing Ben Ellington. [email protected] 103 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00263 by guest on 27 September 2021 only came to be known as an accurate representation of black people but also defined and con- structed blackness itself. Old Plantation is a compelling case study of an ironic shift in the minstrelsy genre: a per- formance act that was a conflation of black authenticity and white theatrical construction was now the basis for a curriculum on how to be black.9 An example of blackbody minstrelsy, where actual brown bodies replaced a white man’s blackened face, Old Plantation reveals that McClellan and his fellow white concessionaires successfully manufactured a sense of black authenticity10 for 1901 viewers, who regarded the attraction as an accurate ethnographic dis- play of Southern black culture. Old Plantation and the report of a minstrel school demon- strate not only that “blackness” is performable, as other scholars have long contended (Favor 1999:123; Lott 1993:39), but that it is a construction that can be taught, rehearsed, and directed by nonblacks. Lessons from the Minstrel Textbook Old Plantation followed a specific tradition of previous world’s fair displays under the same moniker (see Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:175). However, the 1901 display and the idea of a minstrel school were the inevitable outcome of 80 years of minstrelsy’s illogicality. Though variations on the history of minstrelsy have been established in contemporary scholarship, even in this special issue of TDR, a review of one genealogy highlights key developments that led to the creation of Old Plantation and the reports of its minstrel school. Early minstrelsy’s goal “was to reproduce the life of the plantation darkey”; one writer even argued in the late 19th century that this was its “sole excuse for being” (Critic 1884:308). Claims to accuracy and authenticity undergirded much of the enterprise. Writing of minstrel songs, J.J. Trux declared that, “the true secret of their favor with the world is to be found in the fact that they are genuine and real [...,] the veritable tunes and words which have lightened the labor of some weary negro in the cotton fields” (1855:72–73). Minstrelsy’s supposed accurate repre- sentations of Southern black culture gave countless audience members like Trux the impression that what was presented was true because “it [was] impossible to counterfeit, or successfully imi- tate” the original (73). Yet, blackface minstrelsy was the ultimate counterfeit. Conceived in the minds and through the bodies of white men, it was the paradoxical conflation of white theatrical construction and black authenticity. When T.D. Rice created Jim Crow, one of the characters that would make blackface minstrelsy popular in the 1830s, he ensured that minstrelsy would be an art form that perpetuated this conflation. An oft-citedAtlantic Monthly tale chronicles how, after “the casual hearing of a song trolled by a negro stage-driver, lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle” and after borrowing another slave’s clothes, the “obscure actor” not only “gave origin to a school of music destined to excel in popularity above all others” but also a theatrical act that blurred the lines of truth and fiction (Nevin 1867:608–9). From the white blackface minstrel perform- ers that audiences believed were real African Americans (Lott 1996:8), to the advertisements and sheet music that featured such descriptors as “negro,” “Ethiopian” and “blackface” to mod- ify the term “minstrelsy,” blackness was defined by the false face painted in the color of pitch black, the false dialect, and the false culture that minstrelsy presented onstage. The white the- atrical construction of blackness quickly became interchangeable with actual black culture and even actual African Americans. Critics of minstrelsy from mainstream audiences did not argue that it was ludicrous for white men to imitate plantation slaves, rather they were more adamant 9. Interestingly, as I was writing this article, Baratunde Thurston published his book How to Be Black (2012). Though an autobiography and satirical manual, the idea of Thurston’s book speaks to the idea of the ability to teach blackness that this minstrel school advances. 10. I borrow the concept of “manufactured authenticity” from Sarah E. Lewis (2011). Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin Ghartey-Tagoe Y. Amma 104 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00263 by guest on 27 September 2021 that any departures from its authentic black roots derailed the genre from its original goal.
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