The Strange Life and Stranger Afterlife of King Dick Including His
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2013 The trS ange Life And Stranger Afterlife Of King Dick including His Adventures in Haiti and Hollywood With Observations On The Construction Of Race, Class, Nationality, Gender, Slang Etymology And Religion Alan Thomas Lipke University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Scholar Commons Citation Lipke, Alan Thomas, "The trS ange Life And Stranger Afterlife Of King Dick including His Adventures in Haiti and Hollywood With Observations On The onC struction Of Race, Class, Nationality, Gender, Slang Etymology And Religion" (2013). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4530 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Strange Life And Stranger Afterlife Of King Dick including His Adventures in Haiti and Hollywood with Observations on The Construction of Race, Class, Nationality, Gender, Slang Etymology and Religion as a preliminary exploration of Pop Fiction, Pulped History and the Celluloid Politics of Cultural Neo-imperialism by Alan Lipke A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Master of Arts Department of History College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: K. Stephen Prince, Ph.D. Fraser Ottanelli, Ph.D. Kevin Yelvington, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 28, 2013 Keywords: boxing, policing, literature, cultural imperialism, privateer, prisoner-of-war Copyright © 2013, Alan Lipke THE STRANGE LIFE AND STRANGER AFTERLIFE OF KING DICK!! including His Adventures in Haiti and Hollywood from Kenneth Roberts’ Lydia Bailey WITH SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS ON The Construction of Race, Class, Nationality, Gender, Slang Etymology and Religion as a preliminary exploration of Pop Fiction, Pulped History and the Celluloid Politics of Cultural Neo-imperialism Dedication To my family, and all others who actively assert the primacy of life as she is lived above study of dusty documentation, and above those who spend their lives today on justification of yesterday’s prejudices. Above all, to King Dick, whoever and wherever you may be. I could never go a round with you, Dick, but it’s been fun going around with you. Acknowledgments Julie Winch of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for cluing me in that King Dick had a researchable history outside of Dartmoor, and Joanne Lloyd for providing the first and most important clue. Professor Marc Prou and my colleagues in the University of Massachusetts Boston’s 2010 Haiti Today onsite research seminar, and the administration of the University of South Florida for permitting me to go in the face of rumors of disease, poverty and who knows what other horrors. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Lois and James Horton, Robin F.A. Fabel, Timothy Wade Helwig, Justin Jones, Reginald Horsman, Bernard Diederich, Carlyle Brown, Louis Moore, Kate Ramsey, Mary Renda, and others who share my enthusiasm for King Dick. The archivists at Dartmouth College Rauner Library, at the Library of Congress, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, and the U.S.S. Constitution Museum, for their wonderful service, and the staff at the USF libraries for their patience with an old fart. Al Gore, DARPA, and the other inventors of the internet, for making the collation of King Dick’s sparsely-documented footprints possible. The directors of Listening Between the Lines, Inc., for tolerating my return to academia. Above all my wife for making all this possible, and my late parents for making it all necessary. Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iii Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Book I. The Past as Prologue Chapter the First: The Life and Times of Big Dick .............................................................4 King Dick at Dartmoor ............................................................................................4 Dick’s Atlantic World Adventure ..............................................................12 Big Dick in Boston.................................................................................................21 Chapter the Second: Richard Reconstructed......................................................................27 During the Reign of Good King Dick ....................................................................27 Dick and the Moral Law ............................................................................30 The Man’s Fate ..........................................................................................36 Dick in Reality, Fiction, and Academia .................................................................39 Reading Richard’s Reality .........................................................................39 Richard and Representation .......................................................................44 Dick’s Lifetime Summed Up .....................................................................50 Book II. The Palimpsest: King Dick in the Lydia Bailey Complex Chapter Three: Richard Meets Roberts..............................................................................57 Roberts’s Family Reminiscence ............................................................................57 Roberts’s Raced Revisionism ....................................................................60 Roberts Reinvents Richard ....................................................................................64 King Dick’s Guide to Haiti and Barbary ...................................................64 Capitalism, Class and King Richard, Race and Revolution .......................69 Sex with Big Dick ......................................................................................75 Big Dick’s Bestseller .................................................................................78 King Dick’s Religious MonoCulturalisms.................................................82 Richard Historicizes Roberts .....................................................................85 Chapter Four: Roberts’s Richard Remade .........................................................................90 Introducing “King Dick” to Hollywood ................................................................90 King Dick in Haiti ..................................................................................................93 “Promoting” King Dick .............................................................................98 King Dick Sells Lydia ..............................................................................102 King Dick is Dead; Long Live the King ..............................................................105 Coda: King Dick’s Centuries ...................................................................107 i Epilogue: What is to be Done? ........................................................................................111 List of References ............................................................................................................113 About the Author ....................................................................................................End page ii Abstract Richard “King Dick” or “Big Dick” Crafus, Cephas, or Seaver(s) first attracted attention by his size, strength and the authority he exercised as leader of U.S. African American Prisoners of War in Britain during the War of 1812. After the War he was celebrated as a boxing pioneer, ceremonial King of the black community and almost certainly auxiliary law officer. Very little has been known about his life, and much of that obscured by his black working-class status; his true standing within his own community remains mysterious. Yet paradoxically he’s been made much of, in academic writing and fiction alike right up to the present day. Although his life resisted the reduction of himself and his people to irrelevance and invisibility, I argue that his most prominent role has been as a palimpsest, a used canvas or marked screen onto which scholars and fiction- writers alike, as intellectual workers, have projected their images of the place of Blacks, blackness and racialized Others in the Americas and the Americanized world, including Haiti and Arabia. This thesis attempts to reconstruct his life and interpret his myriad reconstructions, to illuminate both dominant white and less-accessible minority discourses. The particular characteristics inscribed into Big Dick’s figure have helped define class and caste structures, public morality and the use of public space, and the working of the U.S. capitalist and cultural imperium in the marketplace of discourses. iii Introduction He was born in 1771, 1791, or somewhere in between. He was six foot three and quarter inches, six foot five, or seven feet tall. He weighed more than 300 pounds. He was born in Salem Massachusetts, Vienna, Chile, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) or the Sudan. He was descended from black royalty, had been enslaved—or not. He was a seaman, a powerful