Introduction a Nigger in the Woodpile, Or Black (In)Visibility in Film History

Introduction A Nigger in the Woodpile, or Black (In)Visibility in Film History On the screen we see two white farmers talking to each other next to a pile of wooden logs. One of them places a stick of dynamite inside one of the logs, which he then slips back into the woodpile. When the white men exit, two Black men enter and surreptitiously steal several pieces of wood (figs. 5 and 6). In the next shot, we see the interior of a cabin where a large Black woman is preparing food next to a wood-burning stove (fig. 7). The Black thieves enter, and one of them places log after log into the stove until the inevitable happens—the concealed dynamite is ignited and the stove ex- plodes, blowing the cabin apart. The two white farmers then enter the smoke- and debris-filled cabin, looking and laughing at the Black thieves who, according to the film’s catalogue description, have been “given a pun- ishment they will not soon forget.”1 This comedy, A Nigger in the Woodpile (American Mutoscope and Bio- graph, 1904), demonstrates many elements that are typical of Black representation in early cinema.The three Black characters are played by white ac- tors in blackface, wearing costumes signifying their traditional racial “types”:Mammy in apron and bandanna;an uppity “colored deacon,”strik- ing a Zip Coon figure in top hat and tails; and his partner in crime, a harm- less, shabbily dressed, white-haired Uncle Remus. The film depicts African Americans as habitual thieves, this time stealing firewood instead of the usual chickens or watermelon. And the film’s “punitive” ending (a com- monplace in early film comedies) functions to bring about narrative closure at the expense of the Black transgressors.2 Although A Nigger in the Wood- pile contains elements, largely derived from the minstrel stage, that would seem to appeal to general (white) audiences, one wonders whether African Americans patronized such early films,and how they would have responded 1 2 / Introduction figure 5. White farmers set a concealed, explosive trap for thieves pilfering wood from their pile. A Nigger in the Woodpile (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1904). Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. to them.This question is particularly relevant because many potential Black moviegoers at the dawn of the twentieth century would have been recent migrants from the South who had fled from the kinds of poverty and violent repression that this film comically glosses over. Few scholars have explored how the rise of the cinema as the predomi- nant American entertainment during the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from their “traditional” homes in the South to increased social and economic opportunities in northern cities. Between 1890 and 1930, well over one million Blacks moved from the South to the urban North, making it “the largest movement of Black bodies since slavery” removed Africans to the New World.3 Although this “Great Migration” coincided with the years in which the cinematic institution began to take shape, stud- ies of both early American cinema and the African American migration have overlooked the significance of the entrance of Blacks onto moving picture screens and into film audiences. Introduction / 3 figure 6. Two unsuspecting Black thieves load up on wood. A Nigger in the Woodpile (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1904). Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. This book investigates how the urban and northern migrations of Afri- can Americans before, during, and immediately after World War I influenced, and were influenced by, the emergence and development of the cinema. I address two fundamental questions raised by the concurrence of the Black urban migration and the rise of the American film industry. First, how did the growing African American movement into urban centers influence the development of cinema as a major institution of American popular culture, including both its representational strategies and its practices as a social space? Second, what role did the cinema play in the process of modernization and urbanization of African Americans, in light of the fact that filmic representations of Blacks tended to be crudely stereotypical and retrogressive? Looking at some of the earliest relationships between Afri- can Americans and the cinema, from the medium’s emergence in the mid- 1890s to 1920, when both the dominant classical cinema and alternative Black “race film” production are firmly established, I argue that Black urban populations and the cinematic institution exercised greater influence 4 / Introduction figure 7. Inside the Black cabin, the head thief holds the booby-trapped log. A Nigger in the Woodpile (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1904). Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. over each other during these formative years than has been previously ac- knowledged. To be sure, the cinema’s early racial politics prominently in- cluded racist portrayals on screen, segregation in theaters, and exclusion from the dominant sphere of production. In light and in spite of these con- ditions, the cinema functioned as a major site in which Black subjects could see and be seen in modern ways; it served as a contested discursive and physical space in which migrating Black public spheres were constructed and interpreted, empowered and suppressed. I open with a description of A Nigger in the Woodpile not only because of its seeming typicality of Black representation in early films but also because it serves more broadly as a metaphor for the treatment of African Americans in the study of silent cinema. The film literalizes a common slang expression alluding to something suspicious, something uncertain, and, significantly, something concealed. Dating back to the mid–nineteenth century, (white) Americans have used the expression “a nigger in the woodpile” to indicate that something is amiss, that there is a “catch” or an unseen but important factor “affecting a situation in an adverse way.”4 Introduction / 5 Thus, at a metaphoric level, this phrase serves as an apt description for the way in which early films frequently conceal and reveal Black figures, creat- ing discomfort and disorder intended to amuse, fascinate, and/or alarm white viewers. In addition, I invoke this expression because I want to sug- gest that racial difference has functioned as something like the proverbial “nigger in the woodpile” of early film history and theories of film-viewer relations, including those developed by revisionist film scholarship.5 That is, Blackness has been an ever-present but strangely inconspicuous, and therefore insufficiently theorized, element of the cinematic institution, concealed by emphasis on gender difference in film theory and obscured by readings of early Black film images as uniformly negative stereotypes in film history. In addition, though scholars have long recognized that early exhibitors were anxious about racial mixing in their theaters, few have explored how the segregation of the social space of the cinema (including theaters that seated Blacks and whites in different sections during the same screening, theaters that designated separate screenings for Black and for white viewers, and theaters that served only one racial clientele) affected how early audiences, particularly African American viewers, experienced this new “democratic” or “universal” medium. Therefore, I invoke the phrase “a nigger in the woodpile” as a problematic, to examine how it and similar racist expressions, film titles, and scenarios reflecting the pervasive racism of turn-of-the-century American culture have forestalled the kind of critical engagement that would expose how the “unsettled and unset- tling” Black presence (to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison) influenced the cinema’s early social and aesthetic development.6 One significant way film historians have accounted for the vicious and casual racism exhibited in early cinema—from Edison’s short comedies to D. W. Griffith’s epic The Birth of a Nation (1915)—has been to relate it to the movies’ large immigrant audiences. For decades, film scholars have noted and questioned the cinema’s role in “Americanizing” European immigrants, debating the extent to which the movies actually functioned, for example, to teach Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Jewish newcomers how to speak American English and adopt the social customs, middle-class values, and racial ideologies necessary to assimilate into mainstream American life.7 Similar to Eric Lott in his analysis of blackface minstrel performance, Michael Rogin has persuasively argued that cinematic constructions of Blackness allowed ethnically and culturally diverse immigrants whose racial status was in dispute to become American by identifying as “white.” By appropriating Black identities, the most popular forms of American mass culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—minstrel perfor- 6 / Introduction mance, followed by Hollywood filmmaking—functioned to, in Rogin’s words, “move settlers and ethnics into the melting pot by keeping racial groups out.”8 Lott and Rogin offer crucial insights into how the systematic objectification of Blackness in the most popular forms of American mass culture of the last two centuries enabled the vast ideological task of ho- mogenizing diverse white ethnic clienteles. But their accounts unwittingly replicate the marginalization of Blackness that characterizes minstrelsy and the dominant cinema by obscuring the roles African Americans have played as the subjects of their own history with mass culture, as individu- als and communities who consistently challenged these racist and exclu- sionary representations. Instead of providing an account of the cinema’s social and representational development that revolves around the familiar paradigm of immi- gration, I propose an approach centered on the internal migration of Black people from southern and rural areas into northern and urban centers, and the unique pressures this movement brought to bear on Black representation, public circulation, and citizenship.

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