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2006 Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, , , and Spike Lee Jessica Metzler

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

GENUINE SPECTACLE: SLIDING POSITIONALITY IN THE WORKS OF PAULINE E. HOPKINS, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND SPIKE LEE

By

JESSICA METZLER

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006

The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Jessica Metzler defended on January 18, 2006.

W. T. Lhamon Professor Directing Thesis

Leigh Edwards Committee Member

Tomeiko Ashford Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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For David and Margy Metzler

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank W. T. Lhamon for his generous comments and insightful criticisms of this thesis. I am also grateful for the helpful advice and encouragement I received from Leigh Edwards, Tomeiko Ashford, Hanna Wallinger, Malin Pereira, and John Gruesser. I appreciate as well the time John Graziano, James Hatch, and Annette Fern took to answer my queries. Finally, I wish to thank Beth Howse, Fisk University’s Special Collections Librarian, for her gracious assistance as I completed the archival research that led to this thesis.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables…………………………………………………………………... vi Abstract……………………………………………………………………….... vii

INTRODUCTION: Chasing Golden Slippers ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: “’Course I knows dem feet!”: Minstrelsy and Subversion in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad.... 4

CHAPTER TWO: “I can’t strain wid nothin’ but my feets”: Humor, Authenticity And Representation in Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone ...... 22

CHAPTER THREE: “Feets do your stuff”: Spike Lee, Essentialism, and Contemporary ...... 35

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………… 53

NOTES…………...... 57

WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………….. 61

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………… 69

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Production History for Slaves’ Escape...... 55

Table 2: Cast Listings for Slaves’ Escape ...... 56

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ABSTRACT

This thesis, “Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Work of Pauline E. Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee,” addresses the position of Hopkins’s 1879 musical, Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad, Hurston and Hughes’s unproduced 1931 play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, and Lee’s 2000 film, Bamboozled within what scholar W. T. Lhamon has dubbed the “blackface lore cycle.” Viewing these works within the context of this cycle, which swings from virulently racist caricatures of blackness to obsequious imitation and vice versa, allows for an analysis of the sliding cultural currency given to minstrel stereotypes from the late nineteenth century to the present.

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INTRODUCTION

Chasing Golden Slippers

“The work itself is to me so exhilarating that if I have any regret it is that my face is not black and that with such education and force as I have, I cannot go right out into the open and battle for justice alongside . Washington”i

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a paper on Pauline E. Hopkins at the 2005 Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) conference. During the Q & A session following the panel, a fellow panelist remarked upon what she saw as Hopkins’s reserved, self- effacing personality citing what has become known as the “Trotter letter” among Hopkins scholars. The Trotter letter is an unpublished letter from Hopkins to James Monroe Trotter in which she details the events leading up to her dismissal from the Colored American Magazine when it fell into the hands of Booker T. Washington. The proof the panelist cited in her observation was a portion of the letter in which Hopkins tells of being given flowers and furs from John Freund (one of Washington’s “agents”). Quoting a line from the letter that reads, “As I am not a woman who attracts the attention of the opposite sex in any way, Mr. Freund’s philanthropy with regard to myself puzzled me,” the panelist asserted a belief in Hopkins’s self- deprecating nature (3). Such an observation is interesting when viewed in connection with Hopkins’s formulation of black womanhood in her magazine fiction and her most popular novel, Contending Forces, however it rang hollow for myself and several audience members. While the letter itself provides clues that Hopkins self-effacing modesty might well have been a rhetorical strategy to gain sympathy and credibility rather than a sincere declaration of feelings (the very next sentence in the Trotter letter reads: “I was so dense that I did not for a moment suspect that I was being politely bribed to give up my race work and principles and adopt the plans of the South for the domination of the Blacks”), those of us who were familiar with Hopkins the dramatist and Soprano could not reconcile a reading of Hopkins-as-demure with

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“Hopkins the diva” we knew. Such are the quandaries of beginning to explore the work of a writer presently undergoing that tedious process known as “re-discovery”—how to gain a complete picture of a widely unstudied literary figure. It is such territory that this project begins to explore while complicating contemporary issues of reception and interpretation. The process of uncovering the connections between works that range from archival manuscripts to contemporary film, specifically the plays Slaves’ Escape by Hopkins and Mule Bone by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and the 2000 film Bamboozled by Spike Lee, reveals that each of these artists are or were “performers” in their own right. Hopkins toured with her family’s acting troupe, starring as the lead Soprano in several productions of Slaves’ Escape, Hurston frequently performed dances culled from her anthropological field work, and Lee appears often in his own films. More saliently, perhaps, all were effective marketers and aggressive self-promoters. It is not surprising then that these works all consciously participate in a theatrical history of racial representation and comment upon a legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Scholars have explored the psychology of donning the “minstrel mask” at length. Eric Lott most famously identifies the impulses that led to blackface performance as “an investiture in black bodies,” maintaining that the “form of blackface . . . seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line” (6). But what can be said of the impulse to actively engage artistically with the history of nineteenth-century blackface? Hopkins, Hurston and Hughes, and Lee’s motives for such engagement all differ, though they each become concerned with questions of “authenticity” in relation to the act of performing race. The knowledge that race itself is always performative enters these works at various points. The sticky question of cultural complicity also rears its head often. I engage W. T. Lhamon’s formulation of the “blackface lore cycle” as the cyclical, continually shifting cultural currency given to blackface performance over time, as a means of analyzing minstrelsy’s images in these three works. I examine these works both in terms of their relation to this cycle and to each other. Beginning with Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape, I argue a connection to the blackface lore cycle that is contingent upon deliberate inversions of stereotypes. Referencing Eric Lott’s articulation of the “mixed erotic economy” of “love and theft” that fueled the popularity of the minstrel show, I examine Slaves’ Escape as a response to the blackface minstrelsy of post-civil war theater circuits (6).

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Moving from 1879’s Slaves’ Escape to Hurston and Hughes’s 1931 collaboration, Mule Bone, I examine the authors’ desire to create “authentic” representations of blackness against the “inauthentic” images perpetuated by the minstrel show. Tracing a history of black drama from Slaves’ Escape and the “blacks in blackface” phenomenon of the last half of the nineteenth century, through early black Broadway shows such as “In Dahomey,” to Mule Bone’s attempt to create the first “Negro folk-comedy”ii in the view of its authors, I note the play’s position as a descendant of Hopkins’s project in Slaves’ Escape and its similar figuration in the blackface lore cycle. Exploring the relationship between Mule Bone and discussions of racial representation, I rely upon Michele Wallace’s articulation of the problematics of cultural “borrowing” and Hazel Carby’s explorations of Hurston’s project of “reclaim[ing] an aesthetically purified version of blackness”iii in order to establish the role of “authenticity” in the dramatic racial representations of early twentieth-century black drama. Finally, I turn to Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled as indicative of a contemporary engagement with the same issues of racial representation, blackface minstrelsy, and authenticity that Slaves’ Escape and Mule Bone struggled with. Situating Bamboozled within the context of these earlier works, a picture of a distinct theatrical continuum emerges. All three works concern themselves with establishing an “authentic” portrayal of blackness against firmly entrenched cultural stereotypes, while finding such a task increasingly complicated as the minstrel show moved from readily identifiable stage productions to the hidden exploitation of mass culture television and film audiences. Such complexity leaves Lee open to accusations of complicity in the blackface legacy he sought to condemn in a far more aggressive way than the charges Hurston and Hughes would face when Mule Bone was finally produced in the 1990s. Using Waheema Lubiano’s conception of Lee as “guardian of the real,” I examine the contemporary cultural currency accorded to blackface minstrelsy images, thus linking Bamboozled to the blackface lore cycle. By opening such sites of critical inquiry into these scripts and screenplays, a glimpse of the concurrent social dramas surrounding the productions begins to unfold.

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CHAPTER ONE

“‘Course I knows dem feet!”: Minstrelsy and Subversion in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad

Despite Pauline E. Hopkins’s vast influence as a nineteenth-century black female playwright, singer, editor, journalist, activist, and novelist, the volume of scholarship on her life and work remains remarkably thin and incomplete. This holds especially true when it comes to Hopkins’s work as a dramatist. Enveloped in obscurity, Hopkins, the first black woman playwright,iv remains stuck in a void between disciplines. Although literary scholars have made recent and significant strides toward rediscovering Hopkins’s novels and biography, her dramatic works garner little attention.v Likewise, scholars of nineteenth-century musical theater note Hopkins’s plays, but usually only in reference to high profile black theater “stars,” such as Sam Lucas and the Hyers Sisters. Hopkins’s influential dramatic works fell between these cracks in current scholarship and became all but invisible, her influence ignored. The entry for Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins in Bernard Peterson’s Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 is indicative of this view: She [Hopkins] organized the Hopkins Colored Troubadours . . . in order to prod[uce] her only important play, “Peculiar Sam, or, the Underground Railroad” . . . Hopkins wrote articles for the “Colored American” . . . and was ed. of the “New Era” magazine . . . Her other writings included three unimportant novels, a work of nonfiction, and an unpub. dramatization of the biblical story of Daniel. (125, emphasis added) This profile appeared in 2001. It neglects to mention Hopkins’s role as editor of Colored American Magazine between 1903-1904, a magazine that championed anti-assimilationist values and dedicated itself to “race work” under her leadership. It also fails to note her significant contributions to the magazine as a writer from 1901-1904. It further ignores the ways her “unimportant novels” caused significant controversy when initially published due to her

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treatment of race and are now studied as important precursors in a black, especially black female, American literary tradition.vi I wish to situate my essay on Hopkins’s dramatic achievements, specifically her 1879 play, Slaves’ Escape; or, the Underground Railroad, within this climate of marginalization and misinformation. I will recreate a more comprehensive performance history of Hopkins’s play than currently exists, which will partly account for my decision to work with the crucial, unpublished version of Slaves’ Escape rather than with the different and more widely available version, Peculiar Sam. I will also examine the significant variations between the versions, which will further demonstrate the necessity of addressing Slaves’ Escape and not Peculiar Sam. The larger goals of this chapter, however, are to discuss the play’s position within what scholar W. T. Lhamon has dubbed “The Blackface Lore Cycle” and relate how the play’s subversive use of minstrel elements functioned as an impetus for the emergence of legitimate black musical theater in the early twentieth century. Lhamon discusses the blackface lore cycle in Raising Cain as a constantly moving cultural force. He identifies the beginnings of lore cycles as existing “in the casual gestures of ordinary life,” and asserts that “Their parts become tokens of transfer in marketplaces and other informal theatres where stress is stirred among miscellaneous populations meeting each other . . . These currencies are performed, competed for, and contested. That is, all the groups that participate in a lore cycle try to turn its gestures to their own uses” (76). When applied to blackface minstrelsy, the lore cycle “is surely one of the earliest sustained cycles that go through this transformation from folk to pop and commercial gesturing” (77). Lhamon traces the inversions of meaning and the cyclical nature of blackface lore from early T. D. Rice minstrel shows in the 1830s, to the firmly racist and degrading minstrelsy of the 1850s, to the popularity of black performance in the 1950s. Performances of Slaves’ Escape occurred at a pivotal moment within this cycle, which swings from virulently racist caricature to obsequious imitation and vice versa. From the hardened racism of blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s came the formation of black minstrel troupes after the Civil War, troupes that still portrayed the racist stereotypes created by their white predecessors. Slaves’ Escape emerged from this legacy in 1879, during the height of “colored minstrel” popularity, and after white minstrelsy began to veer towards a vaudevillian character.vii Unmistakably linked to its minstrel roots, the play documents the escape of a group of slaves (Sam, Jinny, Mammy, Caesar, and Juno) along the

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Underground Railroad. Their flight to Canada is prompted by the forced marriage of Jinny (Sam’s sweetheart) to Overseer Jim. The play consistently worked to subvert the racism inherent in the minstrel elements it employed and thus foreshadowed the rise of black musical theater in the early twentieth century. Hopkins’s work became a forgotten and unacknowledged precursor to such black writers, composers, and performers as Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Will Marion Cook. These figures in turn preceded the Jazz era, when the mainstream popularity of black performance cycled back to an emphasis on desire over derision;viii then on toward the macro-inversion of popular black performance in the 1950s and near simultaneous social change of the .ix An explanation of the different versions, performers, and venues is first necessary in order to facilitate a discussion of Hopkins’s work, as confusion often surrounds the production history of this play (see table 1). Two different versions of the play (A three-act version entitled Slaves’ Escape; or, the Underground Railroad and a four-act version, Peculiar Sam; or, the Underground Railroad) are still extant and the original handwritten manuscripts reside in the Pauline E. Hopkins papers in Fisk University Library’s Special Collections, located in Nashville, Tennessee. Each of these manuscript versions bear only a year—1879, and neither were published until 1991, when Peculiar Sam, or the Underground Railroad “a musical drama in four acts” appeared in The Roots of African American Drama, an anthology edited by Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch. Three years later, in 1994, Eileen Southern published a reproduction of the handwritten manuscript for this same version in African American Theater, a volume in a series on Nineteenth-Century American Musical Theater. In her introduction to the volume, which also includes the script and score for the Hyers Sisters production Out of Bondage, Southern states that the published script constitutes the original version performed by Sprague’s Underground Railroad Company from March 1879 until it debuted on the East Coast December 8, 1879: “The Hopkins play that made its East Coast premiere . . . differed considerably from the original copyrighted version. The title had been changed to The Slaves’ Escape, or, the Underground Railroad, the four acts compressed into three, the plot altered in some details, and two characters added” (xxiv). This different three-act version Southern describes is the unpublished manuscript (Slaves’ Escape hereafter). Southern’s labeling of the four-act published version (Peculiar Sam henceforth) as the original reaffirms Ann Allen Shockley’s assertion that Hopkins “began her writing pursuits as a playwright, composing a four-

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act musical drama, Peculiar Sam; or, the Underground Railroad . . . Later modified to three acts, it was presented as Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad at the Oakland Garden by the Hopkins Colored Troubadours” (289). Yet her assertion also contradicts Hatch and Hamalian’s claim in the headnote to Peculiar Sam that the published version was a revision of the three-act original, Slaves’ Escape: “Possibly to distinguish the title from Brown’s [William Wells Brown’s play The Escape], Hopkins in her revision called the play Peculiar Sam.”x My research does support Southern’s idea that the Z. W. Sprague company performed the published four-act version in an 1879 Midwest tour, yet my evidence also shows that Slaves’ Escape, the unpublished three-act version, is the play that was seen by much larger audiences in from 1879-1881 and garnered more publicity and press coverage than the small scale Peculiar Sam tour. Southern’s description of the differences between the original version and the revision (a changed title, the compression of four acts into three, the addition of two characters, and small plot changes) remains problematic in that it constitutes an oversimplification of the actual changes and ignores the thematic and representational significance of the differences. Southern ignores the four crucial and significant differences between the versions. The first two are structural—the addition of an opening scene and afterpiece and the deletion of the fourth act— while the last two deal with the play’s representations of religion and gender issues. The opening scene of Slaves’ Escape viewers encountered in July 1880 was that of a large-scale plantation spectacle involving, “[A] mansion in distance, set cotton bushes with cotton, slaves picking, immediately in front . . . seated with cotton in baskets.” The chorus’s opening song began the show, at the close of which the overseer “saunters on R speaks roughly, cracks whip, slaves work diligently, one groans as if struck.” This opening plantation scene mirrors the elaborate “scenic sets” used by early minstrel companies,xi yet Hopkins replaces the “happy darkies” with slaves who are decidedly not enjoying plantation life, as minstrel shows largely purported, and the overseer immediately occupies a position of cruelty. The effect of the addition of this scene is twofold: it first increases the initial similarity of the play to a standard minstrel show performance in its use of a large scenic set depicting old time plantation life, yet it also tempers this similarity by creating a somber tone from the beginning, quite unlike the comic dancing that propels the opening scene of Peculiar Sam. Slaves’ Escape begins with a chorus singing “Daniel,” a common spiritual usually called, “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,” about the

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Lord’s salvation as a gift to the oppressed, against the background sound of the overseer’s whip.xii While the curtain on Peculiar Sam may have parted to an offstage chorus’s rendition of “Daniel,” the spirited jig dancing that opens the first scene surely undermines whatever dramatic effect the somber song might have had. This initial portrait of the overseer who “speaks roughly” and “cracks [his] whip” serves to foreground Jim’s less than comic function. This script portrays the overseer as cruel and inhumane and immediately aligns Jim, who the program notes to be a , with white authority and control. The explicit contrast between the introduction of a common minstrel device—the plantation set—with an emphasis on slaves who function as the very antithesis of minstrelsy’s jolly caricatures serves to illuminate the subversive nature of the play. The thematic beauty of this carefully crafted opening scene, complete with five somber songs and no dialogue, creates a stark contrast to Peculiar Sam’s festive dancing numbers. Plantation spectacle scenes frequently populated black minstrel performances, especially at the Oakland Garden, during this time period. The “Cotton Plantation Scene on the Lawn . . . and the Entire Company in a Grand Plantation Festival,” followed by a “working representation of the boats Robt. E. Lee and the Natchez on the River, and concluding with the Largest Display of Fireworks ever presented,” comprised the highly publicized afterpiece to Hopkins’s play, the spectacle of which dwarfs even the opening scene.xiii This “famed plantation scene”xiv was not unique to the production of Slaves’ Escape, but a regular occurrence at Oakland Garden; usually a similarly billed event followed minstrel performances at the venue. In the month preceding the debut of Slaves’ Escape, “Haverly’s Colored Carnival” (otherwise known as Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels) performed at the Garden. Advertisements read: “After the performance in the Pavilion will be presented on the lawn a realistic COTTON PLANTATION . . . introducing the entire Company.”xv On July 3rd, two days before the premiere of Slaves’ Escape, the Corinne Opera Company also offered “The Great Plantation Scene on the Lawn, introducing the entire Company, including the Hyers Sisters Combination and Sam Lucas.”xvi Later in August, Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels again played Oakland Garden and again promised, “The Great Plantation Scene on the Lawn, at 10:15, with Sam Lucas In his Great Character of Uncle Pete.”xvii Thus, the “Cotton Plantation Scene” as an afterpiece to Slaves’ Escape, operated firmly within established minstrel show traditions as a finale of great proportions and spectacle that called upon the talents of the entire company.xviii Given these

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similarities together with the billed appearance of famous black minstrel stars Sam Lucas in the title role and the Hyers Sisters Combination as accompaniment, one can see why audiences attending a performance of Slaves’ Escape expected to see a formulaic “colored minstrel” production, receiving instead a cleverly cloaked protest drama. The second structural change revealed in the revision is the removal of the fourth act. The removal of this act in the Slaves’ Escape revision constitutes a significant structural re-centering. The fourth act, which takes places after reconstruction in Canada, shows Mammy and Caesar as an elderly married couple nostalgic for “massa” and the old plantation, while Sam, who has lost his thick minstrel dialect, has recently been elected to congress. The action occurs when overseer Jim, now a Massachusetts lawyer, arrives to “be frien’s ‘long wif you” and releases Virginia from their sham wedding vows so she can marry Sam.xix In a stark contrast, Slaves’ Escape ends with a dramatic tableau of all characters escaping on a boat across the river to freedom while Quaker John holds overseer Jim at bay with a pistol. The deletion of the fourth act serves several purposes. It first further distances the play from the Hyers Sisters’ production Out of Bondage, which also ended with the younger characters achieving affluence in the North during reconstruction. Out of Bondage, as I will discuss in some detail later, operated as a skeleton play designed only to highlight the music and dance numbers of its cast. While the 1880 Boston performance of Slaves’ Escape maintained its connection to black minstrelsy and musicals through performances by Sam Lucas and the Hyers Sisters, the loss of the fourth act indicates a desire by Hopkins to further foreground the primacy of her narrative and highlight its dramatic racial message rather than allowing the focus to linger too long on slapstick comedy. Hence the decision to end with a dramatic tableau instead of Sam’s announcement, given as he dances to a plantation chorus of “Golden Slippers”: “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will excuse me for laying aside the dignity of an elected M.C., and allow me to appear before you once more as peculiar Sam of the old underground railroad.” This substitution changes the final tone and indeed, the very message of the play.xx The jovial ending of Peculiar Sam works to undermine several of the play’s thematic meanings. As a free man, Sam adopts an educated “whiteness” in this act so different from his character as a slave that he must lay aside the “dignity” of this persona to act in a way perceived as embarrassing spectacle by comparison. This notion of a split between “high-toned” white dances as refined and black ones as uneducated is eliminated, along with the attendant value judgments, with the elimination

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of the fourth act. Therefore, while the fourth act of Peculiar Sam serves as an interesting basis for a discussion of reconstruction and the portrayals of such, to my knowledge Bostonian theatergoers never saw it.xxi Furthermore, Hopkins chose to cut this act from performances after the play’s initial run, which seems to indicate a feeling of dissatisfaction with it. The final two important differences between the versions deal with the play’s treatment of religion and gender. The introduction of the Quaker John character in Slaves’ Escape complicates the play’s treatment of religion at the same time that it moves the play further away from Out of Bondage and closer to somber performances of ’s Cabin. Quaker John’s character, specified to be an “educated negro,” becomes emblematic of the black Christianity to which Mammy and Virginia adhere with unblinking faith, one that reaffirms the intrinsic value of humanity and promises deliverance from oppression. Their spiritual faith is juxtaposed with Juno’s symbolic representation of paganism. Quaker John’s exaggerated speech patterns serve to emphasize the mythological origins of Juno’s name through the way he calls attention to the biblical origin of Jim and Sam’s names, by calling them James and Samuel. Juno, on the other hand, is the name of a Roman goddess, the equivalent of the Greek Hera, who was both wife and sister to the god Jupiter/Zeus. In Roman mythology, Juno serves as the goddess of marriage and family and a protector of women. As the emblematic guardian of female sexuality, Juno calls the legitimacy of Virginia and Jim’s marriage into question: [O]nly thing they done in the worl’ was, Marse he say, ‘Jim does you want to marry Jinny?’ Jim he say yas, course Jim say yas. Marse he say, ‘Jinny you want to marry Jim?’ Jinny her say ‘no’ course Jinny say no, what Jinny want igernunt old Jim. Marse say, ‘Well, you is man an’ wife, and Lor’ hab mussy on you soul.’ Dat no kin’ ob wedding’ Juno’s recollection in this passage correlates death (by framing the pronouncement of marriage in the language of a death sentence—may the Lord have mercy on your soul) with forced marriage (“Dat no kin’ ob wedding”). This connection between death and forced marriage, and rape by extension as its unavoidable outcome, is the first of many ways in which Juno provides much of the play’s commentary on miscegenation, portraying it as the result of sexual victimization of black female slaves by white slave owners. The most striking example of this occurs when she recognizes that Sam is holding the Master’s gun in act two and exclaims, “Why I know all ‘bout shootin’ dat gun. I used to go up into Missee room, and shoot dat ol’ gun at de

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bedstead, an’ Marse he wonder how dat bedstead come full o’ holes.” While most likely delivered comically, these disturbing lines illuminate Juno’s anger and aggression toward the sexuality of “Marse” and “Missee,” a serious subject for this “Topsy-like” character, and a significant inversion. In this respect, the play anticipates both Hopkins’s later focus on questions of “mixed blood” in many of her novels, including Contending Forces, and her use of symbolic or mythological names, particularly in her Contending Forces character Sappho Clark.xxii Juno’s symbolic paganism also serves as an interrogation of the racism inherent in white Christianity. It is Juno who co-opts the role of preacher in the camp meeting scene (this scene appears only in Slaves’ Escape, and not Peculiar Sam), while she later voices discontent with white Christianity in a conversation with Mammy: JUNO. Dar aint no use tryin’ to be like white folks, we’s just made fer nuthin’ but igerrant slabes, an’ I don’t b’lieve God wants nuthin’ to do wit us no how. MAMMY. You Juno, hish, fer we’s all His chillren, an He lubs us all jes de same. JUNO. But Mammy dey say dat angels am all white! How’s I gwine to be a angel mammy? I don’t believe God wants eny black angels, ‘deed I don’t! MAMMY. Why chile, we’s all to be washed in a powerful riber, an’ arter dat, we’ll all be white. JUNO. Golly! Den I wants to be washed now, so’s be sure. While no doubt perceived as humorous, this interaction presented the audience with a deeply subversive racial ideology that questioned current white epistemology. Mammy’s assertion that physical blackness can be washed off, that race is a completely external attribute, expresses a belief that directly contradicted racist white ideas of inherent black inferiority at the time, even as it seems to advocate assimilation as the key to salvation. Indeed, the river Mammy mentions symbolically refers to the river the party crosses at the end of the play when they enter “freedom” and race becomes a non-issue (at least in the play’s vision of Canada as a utopia). The subversive religious and gendered aspects of Juno’s character remain intact in Slaves’ Escape in a way they do not in Peculiar Sam. The addition of Quaker John creates a foil against which Juno’s subversive nature becomes heightened. The deletion of the fourth act ensures that Juno’s stance on black female sexual victimization remains salient and is not undermined, as it is in Peculiar Sam. The action in Peculiar Sam’s fourth act revolves around Jim’s return to free Jinny from their wedding vows: “Chile, I kno’s dat warnt no weddin’, de law

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wouldn’t ‘low it nohow” (122). This act places value on a white legal authority, still represented by Jim’s overseer character, over Juno’s intuitive and common sense observation from the beginning that “it warn’t no marriage.” In Peculiar Sam, Jinny stays morally true to these illegal vows until Jim, who has remarried and had children by this point, takes it upon himself to release her. Juno’s position as guardian of black female sexuality is further weakened in this act as she puts down the gun she had been pointing at Jim (the same symbol of a violent male sexuality she once used to penetrate the Master’s bed-frame) and laughs when Jim says he has merely come to be friends with them. In this act, Juno’s goddess-like potency becomes sublimated to white authority. Hopkins’s decision to cut the fourth act in her revision ensured that the serious issues Juno’s comic character addresses would not become destabilized. As a black woman operating in a tradition largely dominated by white , Hopkins undermines this aspect of minstrelsy with her serious treatment of the issue of miscegenation; portraying it as a result of the sexual victimization of female slaves by white owners, rather than a product of stereotyped black female lasciviousness. While such a theme would become prominent in her later novels, as well as in later generations of fiction by black women writers, as part of this play it rarely elicits critical commentary.xxiii Paradoxically, the employment of minstrel stereotypes and characteristics may be one reason behind the curious lack of recognition or scholarship surrounding her dramatic works, even as they subvert the misogyny and racism implicit in the entertainment form. The immediacy of theater as a medium relies on performance, and a crucial part of the performance consists of the reaction and interaction between performers and audience members. More than perhaps any other art form, plays do not exist in a vacuum. Their meaning and significance cannot be explored without first placing them within a specific cultural context. My belief that the significance of Hopkins’s play lies in its cultural relation to a blackface lore cycle requires that I deal with the version of the play the most audience members certainly did see performed—the unpublished Slaves’ Escape. By outlining the production history that I have pieced together from various sources including newspaper advertisements and the reviews and programs found in Pauline E. Hopkins’s scrapbook, I am able to show the significant instances when this unpublished version hit the boards (see table 1). I believe this to be the most comprehensive listing to date, and it will

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prove useful as I reconstruct the importance of Hopkins’s play within its specific cultural context. *** An understanding of the mindset of Hopkins’s audience during the summer of 1880 when Slaves’ Escape had its Oakwood Garden premiere, an audience simultaneously drawn to and repelled by blackness, may be gained by a perusal of the Boston Globe for those months. Boston theater audiences were still drawn to white cast performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the week of May 2, 1880. May 2nd also saw the Louisiana jubilee singers perform before an “enthusiastic audience.” A Globe review stated, “No better exemplification of the peculiar plantation music which the southern negroes have created could be asked than this excellent entertainment.”xxiv Then in June, Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels featuring Sam Lucas, Billy Kersands, and Tom McIntosh played a two-week run at the Oakland Garden from June 14- 28, 1880. An advertisement in the Globe promised a “Carnival of Negro Minstrelsy” and “An unprecedented Minstrel revival. The Largest Company in Existence. Reproducing all the salient elements of Plantation Life. Comprising a Monster Minstrel Achievement. Plantation Acts; Cotton-field Sketches; Flat-boat Frolics; Barn-yard scenes; Banjo Performances; Comic Dance Diversions; Burlesque Jig Dancing; Unique Negro Melodies.”xxv This show also featured “a realistic COTTON PLANTATION” on the lawn after the performance.xxvi This type of description was typical of advertisements for black minstrel shows of the time. Henry T. Sampson explains the idea behind the advertising of “colored minstrels” as “genuine” and thus worthy of patronage in this way: “Minstrelsy, created by white men in blackface who purported to give a true delineation of slave amusements on the Southern plantations, provided a natural vehicle by which Blacks could gain access to American show business. Who else could give a more natural and authentic portrayal of slaves’ lives than former slaves—real Negroes, the genuine article!”xxvii Thus black performers found themselves already typecast, before they even began their careers, by degrading minstrel caricatures. Robert Toll emphasizes the negative, haunting effects of such a legacy, “since they inherited the white-created stereotypes and could make only minor modifications in them, black minstrels in effect added credibility to these images by making it seem that Negroes actually behaved like minstrelsy’s black caricatures” (196). It is this legacy that Slaves’ Escape would soon begin to undermine, even as it drew from it.

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On July 5, 1880, an advertisement announcing the premiere of Hopkins’s play at Oakwood Garden appeared in the Boston Globe: This Afternoon and Evening, HOPKINS’ COLORED TROUBADOURS in the Great Musical Drama, ESCAPE FROM , introducing SAM LUCAS and the HYERS SISTERS COMBINATION. After the evening performance will be presented the COTTON PLANTATION SCENE on the Lawn, with Sam Lucas in his Specialties, and the Entire Company in a Grand PLANTATION FESTIVAL, with a working representation of the boats ROBT. E. LEE and the NATCHEZ, on the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, concluding with the LARGEST DISPLAY OF FIREWORKS ever presented. Cotton Plantation Scene, Sam Lucas, Oakwood Garden, yes, the stage was certainly set for Hopkins’s play to be received as another colored minstrel performance. Indeed, audience members no doubt expected to see a comic farce that night, but why did the anticipation of such a spectacle draw viewers by the hundreds? The answer behind such a draw rests in what else appeared in the Boston Globe that day. Bostonians, many of who would later attend Hopkins’s play in large numbers, sat down that morning and read a sensationalized story entitled, “Blood Will Tell, Especially When It Happens to be Black Blood.” The story details the surprise of a young white husband whose wife gives birth to “an infant with a dark skin, thick full lips, and a head covered with genuine wool, in short, a child with Unmistakable African Blood in its veins.” The doctor gave the woman’s mother two possible explanations for the baby’s appearance: “The first is too painful and horrible to mention,” referring, of course, to the suggestion that the baby’s father was not the husband, but a black man, and the second, that the woman’s blood “is of mixed purity.” The mother breaks down and admits that she had adopted her daughter, who was fair enough to pass to white, from a dying black woman. The story ends with the woman’s mother telling her son-in- law the truth about his wife, “[He] was beside himself with rage and grief. The unfortunate young wife has not yet been told the whole truth, the child having been taken into the country, where it is cared for by kind, respectable people, and as yet no other steps have been taken, though it is understood that the lawyers advise a separation, so the end of the cruel story cannot be told at present.” The striking juxtaposition between this horror tale of miscegenation with its underlying fear of black male sexuality, and lavish advertisements for entertaining “Cotton

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Plantation Scenes” and “Grand Plantation Festivals,” perfectly illustrates a white public’s conflicted attitude toward blackness—one of both fascination and repulsion. Eric Lott fully examines this phenomenon in, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. In his analysis of blackface minstrelsy, Lott asserts: Minstrel performers often attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed—minstrelsy’s mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation . . . It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure. (6) The large numbers of whites drawn to Hopkins’s play in 1880 were no doubt inflicted with this “cross-racial desire.” This white fascination with blackness drove audiences to Oakland Garden that week, where they were met with a play that did not conform to their expectations, where they were faced with a show that refused to be neatly categorized. *** Slaves’ Escape deliberately employs several textual, visual, and musical minstrel devices, which it then generally undermines and subverts thematically. With the exception of Virginia, an educated house slave, and Quaker John, an “educated Negro,” all characters speak in a thick minstrel dialect, including Jim the mulatto overseer. Hopkins’s use of language and dialect is one area of subversion. The description of the lead character, Sam, as a “peculiar fellow,” constitutes a prominent example of this. Use of the loaded word “peculiar” occurred often and in many different contexts during the mid to late nineteenth-century: slavery was a “peculiar institution,” instruments used in minstrel shows were described as being of a “peculiar nature,”xxviii a review of a minstrel performance in 1880 cites the “peculiar plantation music,”xxix and so forth. Early minstrelsy scholar Carl Wittke, described minstrel stereotypes in the following ways: “The stage Negro loved watermelons and ate them in a peculiar way . . . In minstrelsy, the Negro type . . . always was distinguished by an unusually large mouth and a peculiar kind of broad grin” (emphasis added).xxx The use of the word “peculiar” in Slaves’ Escape, normally a condescending term used in white speech and print to marginalize the Other and to create a linguistic barrier between whiteness and blackness, is interesting given the ways Hopkins appropriates the term with her lead character, Sam. When applied to Sam, “peculiar”

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does not signify the strangeness and oddness of a foreign curiosity. Sam’s “peculiarity” does not rest on any abnormalities characteristic of slave behavior, but rather on his actions of rebelliousness and revolutionary tendencies. In act two, scene two, Sam and overseer Jim engage in their first altercation over Jinny. Jim states that he wishes he had Sam “tied to the whippin’ post.” Infuriated, Sam head butts Jim and knocks him down. After Jim leaves with threats to sell Sam South and “take de res’ ob it out o’ Jinny,” Juno describes Sam’s actions to inquiring bystanders in this way: “O [it’s] nuthin’ only Sam’s been showin’ de oberseer how ’culiar he is, dat’s all.” Sam’s “peculiarity” in this scene derives from his desire to fight and overthrow the overseer, who represents white control, rather than an inherently othered inferiority—a significant inversion of the term. Jim’s character, who serves as the symbol of white authority throughout the play, also presents an interesting example of inverted stereotypes. Jim’s costuming directions instruct that he wear “immense false feet” in all scenes.xxxi The use of enormous feet was a device utilized in blackface minstrel shows as another way to make fun of “plantation darkies.”xxxii Lott characterizes the device in this way: “The oversized clothes performers typically wore, their enormous shooting collars and shoes several sizes too big, had the infantilizing effect of arresting ‘black’ people in the early stages of development” (143). While her audience would have expected such an “infantilizing” device on a slave character, Hopkins’s use of large feet on the overseer’s character acts as a deliberate inversion of a racist stereotype. The large feet allow the slaves to mock the symbol of white authority and control—the half-white, cruel overseer, while engaging the audience in such mockery as well. Indeed, Jim’s conspicuous feet cause him trouble throughout the course of the play. In act two, scene one, when Jim wears a sheet to impersonate a ghost and scare Sam, his feet give him away, “I know dem feet! ‘course I knows dem feet! (looks at them again) Dem’s de same pair o’ feet. I know dey is, kase dem feet never growed on no oder fellar but Jim in de worl’.” Realizing the disguise, Sam then captures Jim. The large feet—now symbols of bumbling white incompetence—allow Sam to triumph and regain control of the situation. They also instantly reverse the common minstrel trope of the “superstitious negro” who constantly fears ghosts. Jim’s enormous feet again serve as a liability for him and a source of amusement for the audience the second time Sam points a pistol at Jim and captures him in act three, “Drap dat knife mister, Fect if you don’t I’ll shoot, yas right into the most convenient place . . .‘deed I is,

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Ise gwine to shoot you right froo dem feet.” The act of threatening to shoot Jim through the feet serves a dual thematic purpose in terms of the play’s inversionary techniques. Since the feet now function as symbols of white power, shooting them literally cripples both Jim and the white establishment. Additionally, to the extent that the audience actively perceived this device as an inversion of racist stereotypes, the threat of shooting the large feet is the threat of killing the ugly stereotype, a threat the racially mixed audience applauded loudly. The complex representation of race in Slave’s Escape defies two-dimensional stereotypical portrayals of blackness. Jim and Sam are both specified to be mulattoes (Jim in the cast description, and Sam refers to himself as such early on). Furthermore, the costume list for one version specifies that Sam have a “Very Fair complexion,” an effect that would have necessitated the use of makeup if the actor (such as Lucas) were dark-skinned. Sam’s comic antics and malapropisms represent a stereotypical “blackness,” as inscribed by white minstrelsy. Yet here we find a blackness in whiteface. In contrast, Jim’s character represents white authority, and symbolic “whiteness.” He disavows his “blackness” by fulfilling the white role of overseer and declaring, “neber could bar free niggers no how,” as he voices his murderous intentions toward Quaker John. The confrontations between Sam and Jim mirror a conflicted public’s attitude toward race, a struggle over the “permeability of the color line,” Lott describes.xxxiii As Jim becomes an obvious symbol of faceless whiteness when he dons a white sheet to disguise himself as a ghost, he simultaneously turns into an object of ridicule when his large feet stick out from beneath the sheet.xxxiv Sam triumphs over, captures, and robs this whiteness, while a mixed audience cheers. The public’s internal struggle heightens as the audience sympathizes and roots for Sam—the clear protagonist, even though he embodies racial contradiction and public fear of miscegenation. The existence of highly subversive and serious elements in Hopkins’s play was made possible and accepted by audiences through its resemblance to a black minstrel show. Hopkins’s tendency toward “deconstructing racial stereotypes” throughout her body of work, as Elizabeth Ammons characterizes it, finds its genesis in Slaves’ Escape.xxxv In this case, the fact that deconstruction occurs in Slaves’ Escape, as it does in most of her other work, “from an analogous subject position” rather than an “a priori reinscrib[ing of] the power structure from a position of privilege,” should be viewed as ground-breaking. Produced alongside black minstrel productions such as Out of Bondage and the various Georgia Minstrel and Haverly Minstrel

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performances, which merely reinscribed negative stereotypes without any pretense of subverting or deconstructing them, Hopkins’s play adopted established minstrel elements out of necessity. In the theater climate of the time, an interrogation of racist stereotypes could only be mounted under the guise of giving the audience what it expected to see—blacks acting as caricatures in a predictable format. While Slave’s Escape follows a logical, narrative format, rather than minstrelsy’s established tripartite form, a multitude of similarities between the structure of the play and that of most minstrel shows are still evident. In fact, the play’s narrative structure within an external minstrel shell served as another inversion of convention, subverting what Lott calls an “early emphasis [. . .] on what film theorists have called spectacle rather than on narrative. The first minstrel shows put narrative to a variety of uses, but relied first and foremost on the objectification of black characters” (140). Where minstrel shows relied on the spectacle of exaggerated blackface makeup and broad comic gestures to cultivate audience engagement, Hopkins’s play foregrounds narrative and resists such objectification. The play’s parallels to formulaic minstrel shows, however, are evident and speak to the legacy of white and black minstrelsy it emerged from. In addition to the opening plantation scene and spectacle-driven afterpiece, the play seems to provide the well-known minstrel roles of interlocutor, middle man, and endmen at times.xxxvi Wittke describes the “first part” of a minstrel performance as “a well-coordinated program of songs and jokes, and lively repartee between the endmen and the middleman” (36). This description fits scene two in which Sam and Juno comically argue over the fact that no one ever takes her to Uncle Eph’s to learn dancing. At one point Sam threatens “Gal if you don’t keep dat mouf still, I’ll smack all de taste out of it.” When Sam finally promises to take her, she excitedly proclaims, “Go ahead ol’ boy, kin jes tear de house down if you want to.” Stage directions indicate that she “Shins round O round” and Juno, Sam, Pete, and Pomp begin a musical number. The stage directions further instruct: “Solo, quartette, chorus, merges into walk-around, with banjo, bones, and tambo, banjoist seated astride of table.” Hopkins’s manuscript notes the song “Climbing Golden Stairs” in combination with a walk-around—a common minstrel dance.xxxvii After the walk-around, the joking continues as Sam vows to marry Jinny “de Lor’ bein’ willin’ an de weather permittin’.” Pete rejoins with “Taint no use Sam, you’s got to do as marser say, you hyard what de preacher tol us, dat if were hard fer a mule to

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kick ‘gin a brick wall. Now boy you is de mule an’ slavery am de wall an’ ‘taint no use to kick agin’ it,” and exits laughing. This comic act replete with joking and jig dancing would certainly have brought traditional minstrel shows to mind. Likewise, the musical selections for act one vary between performances, but they draw heavily upon spirituals and minstrel shows of the time and included: “Good Bye Old Cabin Home, “Dem Silver Slippers,” “De’s Bones,” “Old Time Things,” and “Suwannee River.”xxxviii Tom McIntosh, a popular black actor who toured with half a dozen minstrel troupes,xxxix performed “Dem Silver Slippers” in Boston with Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels around the same time Slaves’ Escape was produced.xl This song is likely related to James Bland’s minstrel song, “Oh! Dem Golden Slippers,” which is noted at the end of an alternate version of the play.xli C.A. White composed “Good Bye Old Cabin Home” for the Hyers Sisters who performed it in Out of Bondage.xlii A possibly similar minstrel song entitled “The Old Cabin Home,” was also in use at the time.xliii “Suwannee River,” related to “Down on the Swanee River,” and Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” was another song with definite links to minstrelsy.xliv These familiar and popular songs served to draw audiences into the stage spectacle and qualified the other subversive aspects of the play. The play’s use of minstrel characteristics, while working to subvert their racist stereotypes in an attempt to move away from the degrading legacy of minstrelsy, constitutes Hopkins’s significant contribution to a black musical theater tradition. In 1879-1881, when Slaves’ Escape was performed, Hopkins’s singular production featured an all-black cast and a musical narrative dramatic structure (as opposed to skeleton plays like Out of Bondage, which served merely as a framework to uphold the music and dance numbers of its stars). In terms of the blackface lore cycle, this positions Slaves’ Escape as a precursor to the black musical theater of the early twentieth century created by Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Will Marion Cook. Bob Cole and Billy Johnson are credited with creating the first black musical comedy, A Trip to Coontown, in September 1897.xlv Thomas Riis documents the ways in which Cole worked to refute black minstrel stereotypes in More Than Just Minstrel Shows: The Rise of Black Musical Theatre at the Turn of the Century: A final sign of Cole’s challenge to minstrelsy in A Trip to Coontown was his inclusion, just before the finale, of ‘No Coons Allowed!,’ as direct a protest song as one can find in

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the musical theatre of the day. The text of the verse tells of a young man taking his date to the ‘swellest place in town,’ only to find a sign over the door reading ‘No coons allowed!” (15) A Trip to Coontown also saw Bob Cole don whiteface makeup to portray “Willie Wayside” a tramp in the show. A review in held this dubious praise for Cole’s performance: “Bob Cole, who plays Willie Wayside, the tramp, and in a white make-up which makes it almost impossible to guess his particular tint . . . showed last night that he is capable of playing any white part far better than most Negro comedians play black ones.”xlvi This reviewer’s attitude toward performing race centers on the question of legitimacy. While the review affirms the effectiveness of blacks parodying whiteness, it simultaneously champions the legitimacy of whites to perform blackness (who else could play black parts better than “Negro comedians”?). However, the fact that such discourse surrounded this play demonstrates a public contentiousness concerning portrayals of race—the same issues Hopkins addresses in subtle, yet complex ways in her work. While some credit A Trip to Coontown as the beginning of the rise of black musical theater, which strove to challenge inherited minstrel stereotypes, this trend can be observed in Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape eighteen years earlier. Bob Cole wrote about the state of black theater in an article for Colored American Magazine in 1902 as he was working on In Dahomey, the first full-length black musical comedy to hit Broadway.xlvii In his article entitled, “The Negro and the Stage,” about the role of drama in race relations, Cole denounced the current state of American theater stating, “I am sorry to announce that I find the American dramatist making severe usages of the Negro in their plays. They either use the Negro as villain, part villain in every instance with but few exceptions. And this has had a great deal to aid in keeping alive racial prejudices.”xlviii Cole further states his belief that “the greatest dramas of Negro life will be written by the Negroes themselves.”xlix James Weldon Johnson also notes Cole’s activist views in his autobiography, Along This Way: “Cole was the most versatile man in the group and a true artist . . . there was an element of pro- Negro propaganda in all his efforts” (173). This “element of pro-Negro propaganda,” served as the basis for Hopkins’s work as well. Her own work with Colored American Magazine would later show her to be such a staunch anti-assimilationist that she ran afoul of Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory politics (causing her to lose her editorship with the magazine), yet another way in which Slaves’ Escape served as a precursor to In Dahomey.l

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The collaboration between Cole, Jesse Shipp, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Will Marion Cook that resulted in the production of In Dahomey served as a decisive split from an earlier minstrel tradition. As producers, the company diligently worked to avoid perpetuating minstrel stereotypes. While certain elements of the tradition remained, Cole and the Johnsons consciously made a decision to do away with most. According to Riis: Many minstrel conventions were absent and most of the cast members did not don burnt cork, but audiences surely understood In Dahomey as a continuation of the older tradition . . .Yet many positive messages about blackness and Africanness were embedded in the songs and book of In Dahomey . . .While there are minstrel elements in the show’s script—the opening stump speech . . . for example—such conventions are just as frequently foregone.”li Thus Hopkins’s strategy of utilizing minstrel elements to subvert dominant racist stereotypes continued as blackface lore cycled toward this pivotal black musical, forming an important link between racist minstrel shows and turn of the century black musical theater. Hopkins’s play, Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, leapt into public consciousness at a critical moment in time. The late 1870s and early 1880s were a transitional period in the blackface lore cycle. Still hobbled by the racist caricatures of white minstrelsy in the 1850s, black minstrel troupes performed and reinscribed these stereotypes almost uniformly, until Slaves’ Escape. The cultural forces that compelled Hopkins to include racially subversive elements, and mixed audiences to applaud them, would strengthen and inform the rise of twentieth century black musical theater and a new generation of black composers and playwrights eighteen years later. By virtue of the pivotal role she fulfills as a precursor to a legitimate black musical theater, Hopkins and her dramatic works merit a significant amount of further critical attention and study.

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CHAPTER TWO

“I can’t strain wid nothin’ but my feets”: Humor, Authenticity and Representation in Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone

“I do not want to see what may be a splendid play, and the first Negro folk-comedy to be written by Negroes, be torn apart before it has even gotten started” --Langston Hughes in a letter to Zora Neale Hurstonlii

Unfortunately, the premonitions of disaster Hughes wrote of to Hurston proved to be well founded. Both the conception and production of Hurston and Hughes’s 1931 collaboration, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, were fraught with various social and political upheavals. While the authors sought to create “the first Negro folk-comedy” and concerned themselves with simultaneously depicting and defining an “authentic blackness,” a falling out between the two ensured that the play would never be produced during their lifetime. Staged for the first time sixty years later in 1991 at Lincoln Center in , its reception was not the favorable one Hurston and Hughes had envisioned. Mule Bone resides in an intermediate position between the re-appropriation of dialect and minstrel tropes Pauline E. Hopkins concerned herself with and the interrogation of visual culture and African-American complicity in the perpetuation of stereotypes Spike Lee would undertake in 2000’s Bamboozled. Given that Mule Bone occupies this unique position in a theatrical continuum that stretches from the racist blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century to the work of contemporary African-American artists wrestling with definitions and depictions of racial authenticity, the conception of “authenticity” found in the play deserves a close examination. In order to facilitate such an exploration, I am necessarily limiting my discussion of the authenticity Hurston and Hughes sought to portray to three interconnected areas: content (the use of authentic humor), performance (the inclusion of authentic music, dance, and staging), and the textual (adoption of specific speech patterns and dialect). By broadly framing my discussion of

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Mule Bone in terms of these three areas, it is not my intention to diminish the effect of all these elements working together as a whole, but rather to permit a closer analysis of the multiple strategies of racial representation observable in the drama. In progressing from theater still outwardly confined to minstrelsy’s representation of blackness to the desire for a revolutionary folk drama, Mule Bone worked to first identify and then undermine white strategies for the containment of blackness within racist stereotypes. It finally sought to advance an “authentic” blackness characterized by collected folk material, a specific brand of humor that involved playing “the dozens” and self-deprecation, and the songs and dances Hurston observed in all- black communities during her folklore collecting expeditions to the South. When unraveling the contradictions and controversy surrounding both Hurston and Mule Bone, it is useful to begin with Pauline Hopkins’s dramatic descendants—the turn of the century routines and Broadway musicals by composers such as Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson. Cole and Johnson produced the occasionally satiric A Trip to Coontown in 1897, and the two joined with James Weldon Johnson and Jesse Shipp to produce In Dahomey, the first full-length black musical comedy to hit Broadway, which debuted in 1903. David Krasner describes the dramatic climate these performers encountered in this way: “African American theatre found itself caught between two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority, and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage” (1). In the 1920s, the musical comedy Shuffle Along debuted and left a lingering impression on theatergoers, including Langston Hughes: “I remember Shuffle Along best of all. It gave just the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick—to that Negro vogue of the 20s that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing” (qtd. in Johnson 126). Of this show, Sam Dennison asserts: The black composers, lyricists, musicians, and entertainers did manage to blunt the cutting insult of the [a degrading minstrel show standard]; still, they replaced it with imagery of the black that was essentially white. Shuffle Along, with lyrics and music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, contained a number of songs that have no direct reference to color, but it also contained songs which offer little to dispel preconceived notions concerning blacks. (428) Tremendously popular with racially mixed audiences, Shuffle Along’s representations of blackness still evoked minstrelsy’s theatrical legacy.

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Mule Bone finds itself squarely located within this African-American theater tradition. A mix of folk tales, music, dance, and broad comic archetypes, Mule Bone suggested lingering minstrel stereotypes even as it sought to undercut them. The play insisted upon the status of “high art” for folk culture yet refused to “polish the roughness” of its characters or situations in accordance with Hurston’s wishes. This was something Hurston absolutely insisted on— preserving and presenting the real culture of the people she collected folklore from. Gayl Jones describes the challenge facing Hurston and Hughes as: [A] dual problem in Afro-American literary history. First, Afro-American folklore did exist as viable and complex literary forms and Afro-American writers from the turn of the century certainly made deliberate artistic use of these forms in their literary creations. Secondly, the distortions (human and linguistic) of minstrelsy also existed as literary models in the language and character of the interlocutor and Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The former was usually white and spoke in formal, standard, ‘intelligent’ and serious language (the beginnings of the ‘straight man’ in American comedy) while the latter spoke in dialect whose subject matter was limited to clownish discourse. (141) Jones further remarks upon the effect of the blackface minstrel show on African-American cultural production, stating: “Not only then was there the tension between the ‘pure’ oral and literary models as complex forms, but the uses of oral tradition and ‘black speech’ were further complicated by the intrusion of the ‘artistic models’ of the minstrel show and its reduction of the artistic possibilities of Afro-American oral tradition—speech and folklore—through distortion and caricature” (141). Jones here identifies the difficult cultural and theatrical terrain Hurston and Hughes were to navigate—how to incorporate folklore that relied upon a complex oral tradition while utilizing black vernacular speech patterns without the “distortions” of the minstrel show model creeping into their drama. Hurston expressed dismay at how “authentic” aspects of black culture were continually appropriated and misused by white playwrights, but felt that she and Hughes could present the material in a contextually appropriate way: “It makes me sick to see how these cheap white folks are grabbing our stuff and ruining it. I am almost sick—my one consolation being that they never do it right and so there is still a chance for us” (qtd. in Kaplan 126). Set in Hurston’s frequent literary locale, Eatonville, Florida, Mule Bone tells the story of two friends, Jim Weston (a guitarist) and Dave Carter (a dancer), who find themselves competing

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for the affections of the fickle Daisy Taylor. During a physical fight over Daisy, Jim hits Dave over the head with a mule bone. The ensuing fallout involves the whole town as a trial is held to determine whether an attack with a mule hock constitutes assault with a “dangerous weapon.” The trial divides the town into factions along religious lines, pitting Methodists against Baptists. Dave’s lawyer, Elder Childers, wins the case by quoting from the bible: “It says here in Judges 18:18 dat Samson slewed three thousand Philistines wid de jaw-bone of an ass” (136). He goes on to argue that “ya’ll knows dat de further back you gits on uh mule de more dangerous he gits an’ if de jaw-bone slewed three thousand people, by de time you gits back tuh his hocks, it’s pizen enough tuh kill ten thousand” (137). Mayor Joe Clarke agrees and banishes Jim from town for two years. In the end, however, the two friends reconcile and both reject Daisy in favor of their friendship and musical partnership. Scenes and characters familiar to readers of Hurston’s novels populate the play—townsfolk sitting on front porches playing “the dozens,” hoards of tall tales and acts of storytelling, the symbolic figure of the mule, and plenty of the “Southern flavor” Hughes stated Hurston provided (Rampersad 184). In his biography of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad characterizes Hurston’s creative role as the primary one: “Hurston’s contribution was almost certainly the greater to a play set in an all-black town in the backwoods South . . . with an abundance of tall tales, wicked quips, and farcical styles of which she was absolute master and Langston not much more than a sometime student . . . Whatever dramatic distinction the play would have, Hurston certainly brought to it” (124). Such a disparity in artistic contributions eventually led to the dissolution of the project and their friendship. Lofty ambitions marked the beginning of Hurston and Hughes’s collaboration as the two long-time friends conspired to create “A really new departure in the drama” and the “first Negro comedy” (qtd. in Kaplan 117). These dreams disintegrated during an argument over their typist, Louise Thompson. Hurston felt that Hughes and Thompson were attempting to cut her out of the project, which led her to quit the collaboration. Both Hurston and Hughes would go on to copyright different versions of the play and claim sole authorship. A series of misunderstandings and melodramatic correspondence aided by what Valerie Boyd, Hurston’s biographer, characterized as “both writers’ precarious footing with Godmother Mason” liii—their wealthy and domineering white patron—culminated in a ruined friendship and a play lost for sixty years (202).liv

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Controversy plagued the 1991 resurrection of Mule Bone as well. The idea to mount a production of the 1931 play met with resistance on several fronts. George Houston Bass, the executor of Langston Hughes’s estate, worried “that Hughes’s integrity might be jeopardized if the play were construed as stereotypical” (Hill 174). In an introductory essay to the 1991 edition of the play, Bass offers an apologist’s response to the work: One of the principal issues and creative challenges that has surfaced in the development of the script concerns the use of broad black comic types in the play which can be easily viewed in terms of the stigmas and offensive stereotypes of minstrel shows and the plantation tradition of American literature. A genuine appreciation for the richness of black folk culture and for the genius of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes has allowed us to look beyond the problematic aspects of the text and try to recognize the poetic insights and dramatic possibilities that could have been the thematic focus of the ‘Negro folk comedy’ Hurston and Hughes wanted to create. (3) Indeed, audience reaction was mixed. Tiffany Ruby Patterson recalls: “When Hurston’s play Mule Bone was performed on Broadway in 1991, it met with the hostility of an audience unprepared for the ‘Negro farthest down.’ Viewers of Mule Bone disliked its brand of humor, felt uneasy about the predicaments its characters faced, and were embarrassed by the earthy language in which these characters spoke” (183). Anticipating such a response, Bass’s glossing of the “problematic aspects of the text” belies the reality that it is precisely these elements of humor, stereotype, and dialect that Hurston and Hughes relied upon in their efforts to establish racial “authenticity.” The comedic elements of the performance (both textual and visual) were what Mel Watkins has called “characteristic of black American humor” (Real Side 12). In a discussion of Langston Hughes and humor in On the Real Side, Watkins asserts: African-American folk humor, despite its undeniable value in helping its creators overcome the burdens of slavery and segregation and its resonant, if muted, assertive thrust, was still considered an impediment to black political advancement. Most activists publicly called for harsher, more belligerent, and less conciliatory forms of expression . . . some blacks were simply embarrassed by Simple’s [Hughes’s fictional character that appeared in his humorous Chicago Defender columns] lack of sophistication and the lingering veneer of rural idiosyncrasies. It was a shortsighted, reflex response similar to the reaction twenty-six years later when Mule Bone . . . was staged for the first time in

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1991. On that occasion, too, critics and pundits debated the merits and pitfalls of authentically presenting certain unvarnished aspects of black humor in public forums. (424) Watkins argues that Mule Bone succeeds in presenting an “authentic” portrayal of black humor—one that arises from its rawness. Jim and Dave spend most of the play “cutting the fool” for Daisy and cutting each other with cracks like, “you mighty fast here now with Daisy but you wasn’t that fast getting’ out of that white man’s chicken house last week” and “you been leapin’ around here like a tailless monkey in a wash pot for a long time and nobody was payin’ no ‘tention to you, till I came along playing” (87; 95). This form of “unvarnished” humor highlights the complex role of stereotype in Hurston and Hughes’s work. As Michele Wallace notes in Invisibility Blues, “Hurston dared to laugh at racist stereotypes—even to risk verifying them—in order to make a point on behalf of ‘the folk farthest down’” (172). This penchant of Hurston’s—the perpetually tongue-in-cheek nature of her writing—pervades the body of her work, but she found drama an especially attractive genre. Hurston and Hughes were devoted to theater and performance as essential mediums in the expression of their art. Joseph McLaren notes that next to poetry, drama was Hughes’s favorite genre and calls Hughes “one of the guiding figures of black theatre” (1). McLaren contends: “The primary dilemma facing black dramatists in writing folk drama was that it had often been associated with negative stereotypical portrayals found in minstrelsy. Whether in the comic or tragic mode, Hughes wanted to offer a more genuine presentation of black life than that which had been produced by white playwrights” (4). Hughes articulated his aesthetic vision in his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes called for the honest treatment of racial themes in the works of African American artists and casting a critical eye on what he characterized as “the racial mountain,” which consisted of: “The Negro artist work[ing] against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. ‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites” (94). Hughes declared that “in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature with us” while asserting desire for “the rise of the Negro theatre” (94). Thus Mule Bone at one point promised to be the ideal project for

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Hughes and Hurston, both of whom privileged the experiences of the “folk” over the black intelligentsia, were devoted to the “honest” or “authentic” depiction of a rural underclass, and found themselves similarly bound by their contractual relationships with their white benefactor. Mule Bone became the natural outgrowth of the desire held by the pair to create “the first real Negro folk comedy” (qtd. in Kaplan 221). Hurston held the long-term belief that the folklore she collected as an anthropologist was a living thing, meant to be enacted and experienced viscerally and in a specific context. Hurston’s love of the theater began when she obtained a job as a lady’s maid to a singer with a touring repertoire company at age twenty-four. Valerie Boyd writes, “Zora also was instantly smitten by the stage: The sights, the sounds, the backstage atmosphere enchanted her. ‘Everything was pleasing and exciting,’ she would remember. ‘If there was any more Heaven than this, I didn’t want to see it.’” (69). Boyd further writes that at this time Hurston “became deeply interested in theater, seeing firsthand its power to entertain, and to move” (71). Hurston’s love of performance stretched throughout her career and deeply influenced her work. After Mule Bone failed to reach the stage, Hurston would work on several other plays and musical revues including The Great Day, which she envisioned as “presenting natural singing onstage—of ballads, work songs, and jook numbers” (Boyd 227). Boyd notes: [Hurston] believed it was time to let the world hear ‘the real voice’ of her people . . . Hurston wanted her ‘concert in the ’ to showcase the authentic West Indian folk dancing she’d seen in the Bahamas. By October 1931, she’d drafted a script and assembled a group of sixteen Bahamian dancers for a performance that would celebrate (and contextualize) the mighty, unembellished voices of ordinary black folk—the kinds of voices that rang out with sweet authority in the churches and fields of Eatonville, Mulberry, Mobile, and Nassau. (227) Thus the performative aspects of the folklore she collected were central to Hurston as a mode of conveying racial authenticity in her drama—songs were to be “raw,” the dances “real.” While it was never produced in her lifetime, it is fair to assume that Hurston had similar ideas about the importance of “raw” performance in mind for Mule Bone. In recounting the creation of the play, Boyd states: “Using the power of memory—and her natural gifts as a performer—Zora re- created the Eatonville milieu so authentically while working on Mule Bone that she sometimes reduced Langston and Louise to helpless, wet-eyed laughter, as she acted out all the parts, male

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and female, and changed her voice to suit each character” (200). As Wallace argues, “At a time when the Ku Klux Klan was still lynching blacks en masse, and the tone of racial wisdom, à la W. E. B. Dubois and Richard Wright, was dignified and dramatic, Hurston rejected the racial uplift agenda of the Talented Tenth on the premise that ordinary bloods had something to say, too” (Invisibility Blues 172). Wallace also calls for a reassessment of “Hurston’s self-conscious manipulation of a kind of dialectical minstrelsy that may be the crucial mark of Afro-American cultural and artistic productivity” (173). This “self-conscious manipulation” of racial stereotypes becomes evident in an examination of the way Mule Bone works to re-appropriate rural, Southern black culture from minstrelsy’s exaggerated caricatures. Watkins locates the complex dynamics of such representation in comedy, stating: McQueen’s shrill histrionics, Fetchits slack-jawed mumbling and shuffling, Kingfish’s conniving, and Sapphire’s over-the-top belligerence were movie and television exaggerations but, from to Watts, close approximations might have also been seen on street corners as well as in beauty parlors and barber shops where real life black folks still amused or embarrassed their friends by practicing the venerable art of ‘playing the fool.’ The problem with the period’s mass media representation of black comedy was context, lack of diversity, and the near exclusive focus on that comedy’s most frivolous and self-deprecatory guise. (Humor xxi) This problem of representation surely is that which can create a certain audience discomfort with Mule Bone. It is this question of representation and context that prompted George Houston Bass’s cautious remarks about the play in 1991. Attempting to define “the real” against stereotype led to the manipulation of minstrel tropes in Mule Bone including both characterization and the controversial use of vernacular dialect. In Hurston and Hughes’s hands, characters with the potential to devolve into caricature and an oral tradition with the possibility to be perceived as simply minstrel dialect become contextualized as a glimpse into authentic characteristics of a black culture the “white folk” are fascinated by. While Mule Bone’s two main characters, Jim and Dave, seem to clown for whites for a living, this action is never seen on stage; it is only told second-hand. When Dave describes dancing for the white folk it is a comic affair; he “gives a dance imitation of how he picked up the coins from the ground as the white folks threw them” (MB 79). In his self-mimicry Dave shows the joke to truly be on the white patrons, for what they received was a pale imitation of

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black culture while Dave and Jim profited from their fascination with blackness—the same fascination that drew crowds to see “genuine negro minstrels” in the nineteenth century. Jim and Dave’s playing, singing, and dancing for the white folk ironically mirrors the practice of white patronage of black artists, including Hurston and Hughes’s dependence on “Godmother Mason,” during the 1930s. The unseen white folk of the play represent Harlem’s wealthy white patrons and their desire to shape and possess “authentic” black culture. Indeed, “Godmother” required Hurston to sign a contract giving Mason the complete rights to all of her anthropology research. Hurston could not publish any of her work (be it fiction or research) without Mason’s express permission. Patterson observes: Du Bois summed up the predicament of the Harlem Renaissance: White patronage enabled African American artists to produce their work, but it guaranteed that they could not produce that work authentically. Without patrons, there would have been no Harlem Renaissance; with patrons, there was a short-lived uptown Renaissance, brilliant and beautiful, but more or less on order from New York’s white downtown. (159-160, emphasis added) The reality depicted in Mule Bone likewise shows that black artists who received white patronage truly reserved their “authentic” art for a black audience. As Henry Louis Gates has noted using Du Bois’s terms, the play is “a revelation of life ‘behind the veil’ . . . It portrays what black people say and think and feel—when no white people are around” (Debate 226). Mule Bone’s achievement exists not only in this revelation, but also in its uncompromising depiction of the veil itself. It shows how a community received and understood its members and contrasts such a reception with the oral description of how they were viewed outside of it. This public/private split lies at the heart of both the play and its reception. Watkins contends: “Since the relationship between audience and storyteller is crucial in any comic riff and folk tales were created for the entertainment of folks within the same community, the stories collected by blacks were likely to more closely represent authentic, in-group versions than those told to outsiders” (Humor xix). Thus the folklore Hurston collected during her sojourns to the South (once she was accepted into the communities she visited), the material she based her plays on, would have ostensibly been “authentic” versions of the tales and this authenticity is what Hurston desired to preserve and perform. Watkins further asserts:

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Outside of the black community, however, neither the ironic works of black writers [such as Hurston and Hughes] nor the increasingly critical in the humor of comics who worked tent shows, black clubs, and chitlin circuit theaters made a significant dent in a national consciousness that primarily viewed African American comedians as simple- minded buffoons and black comedy as a testament to racial inferiority. (Humor xx) One of the most controversial of these stereotypes held over from minstrelsy was the (mis)use of vernacular dialect that twisted and obscured an African-American oral tradition. Hurston, however, held firm ideas about the difference between “authentic” black speech and the stereotypical. Mule Bone serves as an example of her representation of this “true” speech. Hurston dedicated herself to replacing inauthentic minstrel dialect with what she saw as an authentic form of black dialect in her work: “If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt-cork artists, Negro speech is a weird thing, full of ‘ams’ and ‘Ises.’ Fortunately we don’t have to believe them. We may go directly to the Negro and let him speak for himself” (“Characteristics of Negro Expression” 846). In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates’s post-structuralist theory of African-American literature, he devotes a chapter to Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, crediting her with the invention of “the speakerly text” (Gates’s added third term to Barthes’s readerly/writerly textual dichotomy): Hurston’s very rhetorical strategy . . . seems designed to mediate between, for fiction, what Sterling A. Brown’s representation of the black voice mediated between for black poetic diction: namely, a profoundly lyrical, densely metaphorical, quasi-musical, privileged black oral tradition on the one hand, and a received but not yet fully appropriated standard English literary tradition on the other hand. (174) In his introductory essay to Mule Bone, Gates further states, “By using the vernacular tradition as the foundation for their drama—indeed, as the basis for a new theory of black drama—Hughes and Hurston succeeded quite impressively in creating a play that implicitly critiqued and explicitly reversed the racist stereotypes of the ignorant dialect-speaking darky that had populated the stages of the minstrel and vaudeville traditions” (Tragedy 22, author’s emphasis). Hurston’s scientific exploration of black vernacular and her careful replication of speech sounds in the communities in which she both lived and studied as an anthropologist led her to differentiate her use of dialect from both the inauthentic of the minstrel show and the poorly constructed (to her mind) language of other black writers.

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Her harsh review of Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children serves as a prime example of the latter: “Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf” (Review 913). Thus Hurston asserts that black writers were just as capable of portraying black characters “inauthentically” as whites were. Significantly, Hurston does not proffer an explanation for Wright’s inauthentic dialect, merely calling it “puzzling.” Similarly, she accuses the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and other musical groups that followed, of failing to present authentic black spirituals to white audiences: “The spirituals that have been sung around the world are Negroid to be sure, but so full of musicians’ tricks that Negro congregations are highly entertained when they hear their old songs so changed” (“Characteristics” 845). Wallace comments on this phenomenon stating: [A] verifiable instance of this kind of borrowing back and forth from authentic ‘folk’ culture to popular ‘stage’ culture was the case of the Jubilee Singers. In 1871, the Jubilee Singers began to tour the country and the world doing concerts to raise money to build Fisk University. I won’t rehearse the narrative of how these songs were translated into standard Western musical compositions and operatic form, whereupon vernacular tradition in black music went underground and resurfaced via gospel music and the sanctified churches. (Dark Designs 490) It was this kind of cultural tainting, the suppressing of a vernacular culture, that Hurston strove to counteract with depictions of those “lowest down” in her works. Though ever concerned with questions of authenticity, Hurston’s relationship to depicting an authentic form of blackness was a conflicted one. She condemned the minstrel show not for its use of deliberately racist caricature but because the white performers failed to play black characters convincingly: “Every one seems to think that the Negro is easily imitated when nothing is further from the truth. Without exception I wonder why the black-face comedians are black-face; it is a puzzle—good comedians, but darn poor niggers” (“Characteristics” 844, author’s emphasis). Again, Hurston refuses to engage in a discussion of why whites imitate black culture—it’s merely a “puzzle”—but asserts that their intention has always been to imitate faithfully, and in that mimicry, they have failed. Hurston here hovers around edges of what Eric Lott formulates as the cross-racial desire that accompanied the beginnings of blackface minstrelsy, as I discussed in chapter one. However, she consistently fails to engage in any

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philosophical speculation as to the origin of the adoptation and mutilation of folk culture she so despised. Hurston also neglects to mention the presence of black performers in blackface minstrel shows here as well, which might have added a more complicated dimension to her argument. Hurston does cite one characteristic of (authentic) “Negro expression” as the possessing of a constant state of innate originality. Appropriation or re-appropriation is the key to “authenticity” in Hurston’s view: “So if we look at it squarely, the Negro is a very original being. While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilisation, everything that he touches is re- interpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion of his new country” (“Characteristics” 838). In relation to dialect, one must note Hurston’s belief that what made black vernacular symbolic of an “authentic blackness” is the way in which it was a product of the manipulation and “adornment” of white English. The very act of appropriating and modifying culture to suit a black aesthetic creates authenticity for Hurston. As Hazel Carby argues in “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston”: Whereas Wright attempted to explode the discursive category of the Negro as being formed, historically, in the culture of minstrelsy, and as being the product of a society structured in dominance through concepts of race, Hurston wanted to preserve the concept of Negroness, to negotiate and rewrite its cultural meanings, and, finally, to reclaim an aesthetically purified version of blackness. (34) What becomes “purified” and reclaimed from white minstrelsy in this model is the variety of “authentic blackness” Hurston sought to define and portray. Wallace also comments on Hurston’s contradictions: “In her nonfiction writing, Hurston insists that Afro-American oral tradition is unique and irreplaceable, thereby seeming to confirm the notion of an irreducible racial essence. At the same time, she makes the counterclaim that ‘race’ as a way of categorizing and limiting a writer’s domain simply shouldn’t and doesn’t exist” (Invisibility Blues 180). While Hurston may always be a contradictory and contentious figure, her work remains compelling—perhaps because of this. Mule Bone provides us not only with an example of Hurston’s wit at its sharpest and the authors in their (dramatic) element, but also serves as an early example of the struggle against a legacy of minstrel stereotypes and their depictions of “racial authenticity” that continues in the work of contemporary artists such as Spike Lee.

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What was at stake for Hurston and Hughes in writing Mule Bone was a way not only out of the primitive/exotic and infantile/ignorant paradigms that circumscribed popular characterizations of in art, performance, and literature at the time but also an opportunity to depict and create a form of racial authenticity. The pair did so through presenting African-American humor usually reserved for non-racially mixed company, incorporating music and dance numbers gleaned from Hurston’s fieldwork, and utilizing what Hurston considered to be an “authentic” form of dialect. This concern with representing the “real” surfaces repeatedly throughout the twentieth century in the work of other African-American artists. Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled offers an example of this struggle to define the “authentic,” as I will explore in chapter three. While Hurston and Hughes firmly believed in the existence of a racial authenticity that could be portrayed, Lee’s work evokes questions of essentialism, complicity, and the very existence of the “real.” These works remain linked by a minstrel legacy that continues to underpin American theater and film. Mule Bone exemplifies a stage in the development of an African-American theatrical tradition that places it in a contested middle ground between blackface minstrelsy and postmodern film.

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CHAPTER THREE

“Feets do your stuff”: Spike Lee, Essentialism, and Contemporary Blackface

Film critics often take Spike Lee’s pictures to task for their failure to deliver a single, unadulterated “message,” for introducing numerous issues without resolving them, or even fully exploring them, and for taking on too many controversial subjects at once to find mainstream success or widespread appeal. “Muddled and confusing,” are words often applied to Lee’s films (Lyne 51). In a recent interview about Lee’s latest production, She Hate Me (2004), Lee indicated that “he wanted his movie to look and feel like the front page of a newspaper, a snapshot of a dozen stories that might not have any obvious relevance to each other” (Pols). Rodger Birt describes Lee’s work in different terms: “Lee has limited box-office appeal because of his tendency these days to make art films that appeal to a sliver audience, in much the same way that Woody Allen's films appeal to a small crowd of followers” (qtd. in Pols). Birt asserts, “He may not want to acknowledge that what he's making now are essentially NYU film school type of films” (qtd. in Pols). Whether Lee’s films are seen informally as “snapshot[s] of a dozen stories” or critically defined as NYU film school-esque art house offerings, his 2000 film Bamboozled certainly evinces this pastiche approach to filmmaking. Lee’s tendency to present contradictory “messages” that the film either cannot or will not resolve becomes central to any discussion of Bamboozled. Using the legacy of American blackface minstrelsy, Lee aims to compare the current state of African-American actors and entertainers in the industry with that of the nineteenth century. He asserts, in effect, that little progress has been made since the days of the “good ol’ plantation minstrel shows.” With this film we witness another turn of the blackface lore cycle—the shifting symbolism of blackface and the cultural currency attributed to it—as articulated by W. T. Lhamon. Lhamon identifies the beginnings of this blackface lore cycle in cross-racial economic

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sharings and describes the turning of lore cycles as the shift in public sentiment between derision and reverence that accompanies a specific cultural symbolism: The activity that became known as minstrelsy was largely the cultural symbolism of this mutual labor [the shared experience of rough labor by slaves and white indentured or poor immigrants]. The fate of this symbolism is a lore cycle. The fate is not fixed. The cultural symbolism of blackface performance, like other contentious cycles of lore, is sometimes, disdained, other times fetishized, sometimes buried, other times enhanced and elaborated. (66) In this way, Bamboozled becomes another turn in the blackface lore cycle. The film both invokes this history of complex cultural sharings and transactions while constituting part of this legacy itself. Lee resurrects nineteenth-century blackface performance in order to condemn a racist, contemporary entertainment industry. The difficulty of Lee’s premise rests in his portrayal of the history of blackface performance. Bamboozled captures the haunting power of visual culture to create and perpetuate racist stereotypes—most convincingly, perhaps, in the blackface- inspired artifacts that begin to populate Dela’s office and appear in the montage that ends the film. The film fails, however, to adequately explore the history it attempts to explode. Lee’s satiric look at the television industry is invested in creating and highlighting binary divisions: all TV executives are exploitative capitalists, while all black performers are necessarily exploited by both a corrupt system and a racist public; black performers themselves are complicit in their own exploitation unless they opt out of the “system” completely; and cross-cultural sharing becomes codified into categories of either appropriation or racial preservation. Such broad strokes effectively convey Lee’s central thesis: that black performers are still forced to “clown” by a public deeply invested in the racist stereotypes originated and circulated by the nineteenth- century minstrel show. The cost of such narrative brashness comes in the loss of the opportunity to deal complexly with the complicated issues raised. First, the film fails to present a nuanced picture of the complete legacy of blackface minstrelsy including those spaces for subversion effectively occupied by figures such as Pauline E. Hopkins and a host of nineteenth-century “blacks in blackface” performers like Sam Lucas. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes also present a study in the interrogation of the same minstrel stereotypes Lee concerns himself with, but escape inclusion along with other early

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twentieth-century black dramatists. Some of the earliest black performers the film references are Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, Bert Williams, and Hattie McDaniel, however it casts them firmly as exploited and consumed by their careers in the entertainment industry. The film focuses on the psychic toll donning blackface must have had on Williams while leaving unexplored McDaniel’s famously practical quote that it was “better to play a maid than be a maid.”lv McDaniel effectively illuminated the racism Lee targets by indicting both the entertainment industry and public perceptions for the choice of roles available to her on and off- camera.lvi At the same time, however, she revealed the possibility for subversiveness within such limited roles by implying, much like the characters in Mule Bone, that in performing a certain brand of “blackness” for white audiences one’s image and livelihood is still ultimately under one’s control. Bamboozled seems to advocate the inverse of McDaniel’s sentiment, asserting that it is better to face economic hardship than to “sell out” to a racist industry—as demonstrated most palpably by the division the film establishes between Manray and Womack. Secondly, the film fails to fully examine its own role within the industry it criticizes, leaving Lee open to accusations of complicity and essentialism—to claims he exploits black subject matter in manner similar to that which he condemns. This type of critique is at odds with those that compare Lee to Oscar Micheaux and see his films as actively working against a racist industry. In comparing Micheaux’s intent in his 1925 film Body and Soul to Lee’s work, Charles Musser notes: As the romantic hero concludes at the end of Within Our Gates (1919), ‘it is the duty of each member of our race to help destroy ignorance and superstition.’ It is the message of Body and Soul as well. It is Martha Jane's persistent, even absurd dream state that encourages African-American audiences to scream at her to ‘Wake up!’ as the film unspools. Martha Jane does finally respond to the audience's cries. She does wake up. And she does do the right thing. In this non-realist text, Micheaux thus delivered a message echoed seventy years later in several films by Spike Lee, notably School Daze (1988) and Do The Right Thing (1989). (349) Just as this “message” of self-empowerment has remained constant for seventy years, so has the praise and criticism received by both Micheaux and Lee. They are filmmakers lauded for creating politically conscious films about race and society and criticized for a lack of narrative control and the perpetuation of stereotypes. It is within this historical framework that

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Bamboozled operates as a fascinating part of the blackface lore cycle. It interrogates a contemporary desire for and emulation of “blackness” while simultaneously demonstrating the muddled nature of cultural transactions in the late twentieth century. Bamboozled’s action revolves around a black television executive, Pierre “Dela” Delacroix (Damon Wayans), who becomes fed up with his racist white boss’s demands for a “real” or “authentic” black TV show. His boss, Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), reaffirms Dela’s conviction that white America only wants to see African Americans in degrading roles as they clown for the camera. Sick of dealing with such attitudes, but locked into a contract with the network, Dela decides to create a show so offensive that he will be fired. The result, Mantan’s New Millennium Minstrel Show—a reincarnation of a nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show—becomes a huge hit for the network. Originally intended as a critiquing the roles contemporary African-American entertainers are forced to play, Dunwitty quickly strips creative control from Dela and its subversive “message” becomes whitewashed. Mantan brings blackface back into mainstream popularity. In the course of creating Mantan, Dela uses street performers Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson) as his stars while his assistant Sloan (Jada Pinkett-Smith) expresses her reservations from the beginning. The film attacks racist stereotypes primarily by exposing them as inauthentic portrayals of blackness. By employing such a strategy, however, the film cannot help but create the inverse. The act of defining that which is authentic by that which is not leads to an identifying of visual and cultural markers of authentic blackness. Herein lies the crux of the film’s inherent contradiction—how is it possible to critique a history of racist essentialism in the media from within the same industry without becoming complicit oneself? This contradiction becomes one Lee cannot resolve in the end. By creating his own version of authentic blackness, Lee simultaneously critiques and adheres to a concept of racial authenticity. Lee works to refute old stereotypes while validating new ones. He demonstrates the inherent racism of roles African American actors have traditionally been offered in Hollywood by marking them as “false” or “inauthentic”—they do not show how people “really are.” Yet he depicts a new set of roles deemed “authentic”—playing the “buppie” or the “wigger,” playing the “sell out” or the politically conscious activist, etc. Bamboozled attempts to disavow the existence of racial authenticity, yet creates a marketable brand of it. Both Mantan in the film and Lee himself become iconic figures—both become commodified.

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Questions of “authenticity” and complicity underpin the film’s narrative drive— interactions between the characters who are “keepin’ it real,” being “true” to their race, and those who are “selling out” by embracing a dominant, white ideology provide the film’s scenes of dramatic conflict and moralistic moments. Bamboozled and its subject matter alike eventually become subsumed within a culture industry that fetishizes and consumes images of blackness. The commodification of race both within and outside of the film becomes an important element to consider when situating Bamboozled in the context of the blackface lore cycle. Lee’s public opposition to the appropriation of black culture by non-blacks, which Bamboozled reveals and comments upon, highlights the complex nature of lore cycles and underscores the incessant nature of cultural transactions, the ways in which it becomes impossible to separate cultural theft and appropriation from cultural authenticity or re-appropriation. Thus, Bamboozled helps create a new chapter in the blackface lore cycle by presenting fetishized images in a fetishized medium. The film’s cultural symbolism becomes just another turn in an evolving, but endless cycle. Guardian of the “Real”: Spike Lee and Essentialism Wahneema Lubiano describes what she terms a “Spike Lee discourse” in her article, “But Compared to What?: Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse.” Lubiano defines this Spike Lee discourse as the non- critical response to Lee’s films by audiences and academics alike, and the subsequent establishment of films such as Do the Right Thing as “authentic” or “real” by these viewers: Lee’s presentation of images that resonate with factual reality is glossed as the general truth. The deification of Lee as ‘truth sayer,’ and his production as ‘real’ means that the indexing of his selections becomes the ‘essence’ of ‘Black authenticity’—and thus impervious to criticism . . . Both the celebratory and the hostile Spike Lee discourse have been amazingly, although not entirely, uncritically essentialist. (269-270) Lubiano argues that Lee aspires to represent the “real” and depict a form of “authentic blackness” in his films: “Being a voice for the ‘real,’ effecting ‘reality,’ then, is the way that Lee sees his cultural mission” (257). The danger inherent in the “Spike Lee discourse,” according to Lubiano, is the potential Lee’s filmic strategies have to essentialize blackness and reduce discussion about the social issues contained in Lee’s films to commentary on their “authenticity.” Published in 1991, Lubiano’s article focuses on School Daze and Do the Right Thing, but her argument remains compelling and is indeed complicated by 2000’s Bamboozled. Does Lee

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achieve his stated goal with this film—to force viewers to “think about the power of images, not just in terms of race, but how imagery is used and what sort of social impact it has”—or do the images and representations of blackness Lee utilizes have the opposite effect? (qtd. in Crowdus 9) Instead of deconstructing stereotypes, does Lee become complicit in the legacy he attacks by creating essentialist characters? Bamboozled, after all, is a film that deals wholesale in stereotypes: racist (and clueless) “wiggers” and soulless “buppies” populate the picture and provide fodder for Lee’s scathing satire while the characters in Mantan highlight vestiges of deep-seated cultural racism. Is it fair to say that in utilizing blackface as the instrument of his critique Lee, in Eric Lott’s words, “implicates himself in the act, and makes himself liable to the charge of minstrelsy . . . [because] the ideological filter of blackface runs so deep that there may be no escaping”? (Messenger 13) Bamboozled’s satire takes aim at both white racism and black complicity through invoking the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Lee’s use of black actors in blackface has led several critics to cite the film as an indictment of black programming on television networks such as UPN and the WB. Lee himself has called shows on the WB and UPN “borderline minstrel shows” and criticizes African American entertainers for accepting demeaning roles (Crowdus 6). Indeed, Dela’s father, Junebug (Paul Mooney), cracks jokes about both UPN and the WB in his stand-up comedy routine. While Bamboozled can be read as an indictment of both white-controlled and black-produced television, a startling irony lies in the film’s similarity to such television shows. In an analysis of black television and the Fox network, Kristal Brent Zook identifies four “key elements of black-produced television” (shows with black casts and “a significant degree of black creative control”) as “autobiography, meaning a tendency toward collective and individual authorship of black experience; improvisation, the practice of inventing and ad-libbing unscripted dialogue or action; aesthetics, a certain pride in visual signifiers of blackness; and drama, a marked desire for complex characterizations and emotionally challenging subject matter” (5). One of the elements Zook describes as characteristic of black-produced television is the cultivation of a certain aesthetic partially defined through markers of racial “authenticity,” meaning: “a pride in visual signifiers of blackness”—as exemplified by “afrocentric clothing, hair styles, and artifacts . . . Frequent references to Malcolm X . . . images of Yannick Noah, a world-renowned black French tennis player, and [on posters] . . . [and] Sportswear carrying the names of black colleges such as Howard and Spelman” (8). Such a strategy is both

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mocked and perpetuated by the film. Bamboozled’s spin-doctor Myrna Goldfarb (a white woman with a Ph.D. in Afro-American studies from Yale) invokes this aesthetic to help defend Mantan from public outcry and negative publicity. “Wear kente cloth,” Myrna advises, “invoke the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King,” she says, implying that such signifiers of racial authenticity will prevent the show from being perceived as racist. These methods of “keepin’ it real” combined with the secret weapon—Dela’s race (the show can’t be racist if its creator is black, Myrna argues)—are meant to ensure a lack of public outrage and, given the popularity of the show among mixed audiences, largely succeed. Despite Dela’s dire warnings that “the Negroes [will] run amok,” the criticism the show receives is limited at best and confined to politically “radical” black public figures like Al Sharpton and the Mau Maus—a militant Black Nationalist rap group. Notably, this notion of invoking “black authenticity” as a means to avoid criticism is the very one Lubiano explores in relationship to Lee’s films. Lubiano notes, “most of the reviews and articles written [about Do the Right Thing] began, were imbued with, and/or concluded with, references to how very realistic or authentic the films were; how much they captured the sounds, rhythms, sights, styles, and important concerns of African-Americans” (260). Also writing about Do the Right Thing, states: Lee brings to film a self-consciously Afrocentric aesthetic. He reveals the ins and outs of life in an urban underclass black neighborhood . . . Bourgeois black folks can watch Do the Right Thing and be reassured that they have made it, because the conditions of their lives are not like those portrayed on the screen. Yet they can still feel connected to their ‘roots’ because they enjoy the same music as the black underclass or have the same approach to ‘style.’ The film also displays designer clothing, emphasizing style and personal representation. At times, it seems like a two-hour runway where the current trends in ethno-fashion are on display (the use of African kente cloth in expensive leisure clothes, etc.). (174, 177) This “two-hour runway” effect is one of the essentializing aspects Lubiano cites in her analysis of Do the Right Thing. Lubiano also comments on the aesthetic of “black authenticity” cultivated in the film: “‘Blackness’ is Malcolm X, although, as Smiley’s picture and Lee’s quotes after the conclusion of the film remind us, ‘Blackness,’ then is also Martin Luther King, Jr.; ‘Blackness,’ then, is reduced to the sacredness that inheres in the proper icons” (273). Likewise,

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just as Myrna cites Dela’s “blackness” as a buffer against criticism, hooks asserts, “Spike Lee’s portraits of black masculinity have aroused no spirited debate. There seems to be tacit assumption that because he is a black man his images are ‘purer’ and therefore not subject to the same rigorous critique that, say, a Spielberg, or any other white filmmaker exploiting black subject matter, merits” (176). Of course, Do the Right Thing was produced in 1989, 11 years before Bamboozled’s release, and Lee is a director well aware of the reviews and criticisms his films receive. In fact, Lee stated that he developed Sloan’s character in Bamboozled as a response to criticism about the misogyny of some of his earlier films: “In terms of the criticism of my earlier films, that’s one thing that was true, that the female characters were not as multilayered as the male characters. So it was a definite choice to have Jada Pinkett Smith’s character, Sloan, be the most sympathetic and the most intelligent” (qtd. in Crowdus 6). While the treatment Sloan’s character receives is problematic at best, something I will return to later, does Lee’s awareness and willingness to address this particular criticism have implications for the rest of the film? Might Lee be addressing his own complicity in the entertainment world he criticizes? Lee, after all, includes himself in a listing of Bamboozled’s targets during an interview in which he rattles off over a dozen names including: “Ving Rhames, Cuba Gooding Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Diana Ross, Will Smith, President Clinton, Mother Teresa, malt liquor, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Johnnie Cochran, In Living Color, UPN, the WB, Quentin Tarantino, D.W. Griffith, the NAACP, athletes, rappers and myself” (qtd. in Seiler). The film itself, however, lacks a consistent ironic self-consciousness, which ultimately does its subject matter a disservice. While speculation on Lee’s motives would not be time well spent here, questions of “authenticity” and complicity nevertheless underpin the film’s characterizations and narrative drive. Referencing Lubiano’s characterization of Lee as invested in promoting the “real,” it becomes useful to look at who is “keepin’ it real” in Bamboozled. Certainly not the Mau Maus, though their collective identity is shaped by what they perceive to be their relationship to blackness (the group members include “Big Black Africa,” “1/16th Black,” and “Double Black”). The film mocks the group’s speech patterns and “pseudo-revolutionary” mission. They are portrayed as misguided and deluded—minstrel figures in their own right, a “misdirected Public Enemy or NWA,” according to Lee (commentary). The Mantan show and its audience members are equally misguided souls who either participate in their own exploitation or passively accept

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racist ideology. Dela fares no better; he becomes monstrous himself in the face of what he has created. Uncomfortable with his blackness to begin with—he has changed his name from Peerless Dothan to Pierre Delacroix and affects a ridiculous sounding accent—Dela becomes the quintessential “sell-out.” As Michele Wallace notes: In typical Spike Lee fashion, Delacroix’s motivations . . . are never made clear and vary incoherently. Delacroix is essentially a comic wooden stereotype of an Ivy League educated, upper class Negro designed by someone who has very little comprehension of this character type. Those who believe that self-esteem is a matter of racial identity . . . would say that Delacroix has a self-esteem problem. In my view, his greatest trouble is that he was poorly written. (Dark Designs 488) Operating within a realm of strict dichotomies and stereotypes, the characters the film depicts as “authentic” or “real” are those who haven’t “sold out”: Junebug, who prefers to perform in small black clubs rather than follow Dela’s advice to compromise and censor his act in order to perform on the Tonight Show; Womack after he “gets out” and quits the show; Manray before he “gets in,” claiming that nothing matters as long as he’s being true to his art—“long as I’m hoofin’”lvii he says; and most significantly, the film itself. The first scene of the film features a voiceover reading of the dictionary definition of “satire.” Lee thus heavy-handedly defines for the audience the purpose of the film. Not only is Mantan’s New Millennium Minstrel Show originally intended to be satiric, but Bamboozled is as well. It is the film itself that Lee wishes to define as authentic and “telling it like it is.” Bamboozled purports to equal truth. In the director commentary accompanying the DVD version of the film, Lee frequently states that he is showing things “how they are.” During the scene in which Dela and Sloan face a room full of non-black screenwriters preparing to start work on the Mantan pilot, Lee remarks that this is “[a] predominantly white staff, which is usually the case, even on African American shows.” When Dunwitty spouts his racist rhetoric Lee says, “I’ve met people like this.” As Myrna outlines the “Mantan Manifesto” Lee states, “that stuff is funny, but it’s true. Films come to New York, have no black people on the set, they gotta shoot 110th street, hire a couple of black PAs get some presence. Once they finish shooting in Harlem or the Bronx, that’s it—they’re done.” Lee’s insistence on “telling it like it is” is similar to Hurston and Hughes’ mission in creating Mule Bone. Just as they were invested in depicting the “real” and creating black authenticity, so is Lee.

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At its best, satire is a form dedicated to “truth-saying”—to revealing ironies and injustices, to exposing “folly, vice, or stupidity” as Dela’s voiceover during the film’s opening sequence reminds us. Bamboozled becomes problematic when the object of its satire begins to indict the form itself. For example, the film parodies Ving Rhames’s tribute to during an award acceptance speech and Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Oscar night antics. These black actors—according to the satire—have “sold out,” have bought into “grateful slave” stereotypes. They are traitors and worse—“inauthentic” because a Spike Lee joint has pegged them as such.lviii Yet by creating the “real” and the authentic by exposing that which is not, the film reinscribes the very categories of “authentic” and “inauthentic” it attempts to tear down at other points. The film mocks Dunwitty’s assertions that he is “blacker than” Dela or that Dela is “not black enough,” as patently absurd, yet it simultaneously condemns Dela for having issues with his race—for becoming an “oreo.” Dunwitty may not be in a position to determine whether or not Dela is “black enough,” but the film is, and it does. Lee’s position as messenger of the “real” again proves problematic when it comes to the film’s representations of women and its depictions of violence. While Lubiano characterizes the murder of Radio Raheem at the hands of the police in Do the Right Thing as clichéd, noting bell hooks’s assertion that the film does nothing to “explode or remap” clichéd depictions of racist police violence, can the same be said for the murder of the black members of the Mau Maus at Bamboozled’s end (280)? Is this white-on-black violence meant to overshadow or otherwise be measured against the Mau Maus’ murder of Manray? Both sets of killings become equalized in the following scene when a grief-stricken and armed Sloan confronts Dela equally upset at the deaths of her lover and her brother. Sloan herself then becomes the bearer of violence, killing Dela in a fit of grief and rage. If we are to see these acts of murder as communicative acts of resistance (the Mau Maus seek to kill the racist imagery Manray promotes; the police seek to kill the potential for black insurgency the Mau Maus represent), then Dela again appropriates and silences Sloan’s voice by wiping her fingerprints from the gun, giving the appearance of suicide to whomever should find his body. Dela’s death no longer represents Sloan’s wish to be heard (“you didn’t listen to me, but you’re gonna listen now,” she says as she points the gun at Dela), and her desire to kill the man whom she deems responsible for both Manray and her brother’s death. Instead, this murder becomes rewritten as Dela’s suicide—his final recognition of a fatal complicity in an inescapable legacy and his atonement for it. Sloan, arguably the “moral center”

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of the film, is prevented from owning her grief, guilt, and vengeance, much as the revelation of her sexual past earlier in the film prevents her from owning her intelligence and success. By adding a prior sexual relationship between Sloan and Dela to the script, Lee claimed to be “nuancing” her character and refuted the notion that “the revelation that she had sexual relations with Dela . . . compromises her integrity” (Crowdus 6). Lee points out that Sloan remarks, “Why is it that every attractive woman who’s successful, people always think that she slept with somebody to advance her career?” Well, perhaps it’s because directors like Lee—guardians of the “real”—depict them as doing so. While the audience has no doubt that Sloan is intelligent and driven and certainly deserving of her job (and perhaps even Dela’s) by virtue of merit, such a plot device—the demeaning way Dela refers to their affair as sleeping “with the help” and claims that it is indeed the way she worked her way into her position, combined with Manray’s territorial and disgusted response to the news—robs the character of her moral high ground and positions her back in the place so many of Lee’s female characters are relegated to—objects to be exploited or patronized.lix This is the representation of black women Lee chooses to select and define as the “real.” Likewise, the film represents arguably clichéd or melodramatic violence as the “real”— white cops murder blacks with impunity, black-on-black violence is senseless and misdirected— without ever exploring potentially more realistic outcomes, or attempting to portray the events in anything other than a superficial manner. Bamboozled’s reality is that no one has to live with the repercussions or lasting mental anguish of their actions. In this film, at least, reality means never having to say you are sorry. Consuming “Blackness”: Fetishistic Images and the Culture Industry The references and similarities between Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network and Bamboozled are numerous. Lee cites Network as an important influence on his film and has stated that without Network there would be no Bamboozled. Both pictures depict immoral and vile television executives who are only concerned about ratings, income, and the bottom line. Diana Christensen, Faye Dunaway’s character in Network, discovers ratings gold in the form of mentally disturbed news anchorman Harold Beale (Peter Finch). She sinks to reprehensible levels in terms of what she is willing to air as “news” in the name of entertainment, including soliciting terrorist activity in order to air the video footage, and a live murder. Network wrings its hands over a “TV generation” that believes everything it sees uncritically and thinks of

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life itself in terms of scripts, shows, and serials. Diana’s lover Max (William Holden) says of her, “I’m not sure she’s capable of any real feelings. She’s television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny.” Bamboozled moves beyond a condemnation of television to indict an “image-saturated society,” to borrow Sut Jhally’s termlx, that is unable to decode the various racist images and caricatures it is presented with. Diana’s brilliant idea in Network involves running either flat-out fiction or staged reality under the banner of “news,” implying the projection of something true or real while hiding behind the first amendment—networks in Bamboozled do something similar in order to air Manray’s murder. However, Lee’s treatment of the real, unreal, and surreal becomes far more slippery than Lumet and Chayefsky’s. In Network, an addled and insane Harold Beale addresses a television audience from behind the news desk. “Go to your windows,” Beale shouts, “I want you to go to your window and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’,” he cries in an apoplectic frenzy. And people do—all over the country. Beale’s audience cries out for their humanity, voicing their fear over rising crime rates, a depressed economy, and political corruption. In a subversive reference to this scene, Manray and Womack also ask viewers to “go to their windows” in the Mantan pilot. Just as Beale asserts that his audience “knows things are bad . . . we know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Manray and Womack declare that their viewers are tired of drugs, “crack babies born to AIDS-infested parents,” swelling welfare rolls, and overpaid pro-athletes. “I’m sick and tired of niggers, and I’m not going to take it anymore,” cries Manray, collapsing on the floor. Of course, neither Manray nor Womack suffer from Beale’s hallucinatory madness, even though they are equally exploited by various network executives. Their lines have been scripted for them; the camera angles imply that Dunwitty and his blond, Nordic-looking assistant wrote them. The suggestion becomes that what white Americans are tired of these days are both “uppity blacks” who “don’t know their place” and poor, urban blacks who are regarded with fear and unease. While Harold Beale could not offer his frustrated viewers a solution to their vague, postmodern unease outside of fruitless yelling into the night, the Mantan show presents a novel one—transporting their audience back to “a simpler time,” back to a time “when men were men, women were women, and Negroes knew their place”—a nineteenth-century plantation.

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The use of the minstrel show format in the “new millennium” allows blackness to be safely confined, commodified, and commercialized for a studio audience, much as it did in the nineteenth century. This is where Dela’s plan for a satiric show fails. Mantan’s New Millennium Minstrel Show taps into deep-seated cultural beliefs about race and representation, validates stereotypes, and becomes a hit. An acceptable, humorous, non-threatening blackness is now neatly packaged in a half-hour television show and for sale on t-shirts and Halloween masks. Dela’s assertions that what people really want to see are African Americans clowning for the camera prove correct. Blackface becomes the latest fad—the hula-hoop or pet rock of the new millennium—an utterly consumable commodity. The ironic or satiric value of Dela’s idea becomes subsumed in and destroyed by the culture industry—represented palpably by Dunwitty just as Diana and her boss Frank () represented it in Network. Once the network takes the show out of Dela’s hands, the marketing begins (posters advertising the show exist even before the pilot is shot), and the script is rewritten to eliminate satire. It becomes another tool of the culture industry, preying on audience passivity. Theodor Adorno and Maxwell Horkheimer describe the monolithic and all-powerful grasp of this capitalist culture industry in various writings. In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” they explore Marxism’s concept of commodity fetishism: No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its mode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the fetish, the work’s social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its use value—the only quality which is enjoyed. The commodity function of art disappears only to be wholly realized when art becomes a species of commodity instead, marketable and interchangeable like an industrial product. (1239) It is in this sense that Mantan fetishizes both blackness and blackface. Both become mass- produced, industrial products to be purchased by consumers. Parents purchase cheap, molded- plastic, “Mantan” Halloween masks so that their children may don a commercialized racial identity. Likewise, studio audience members begin wearing blackface makeup themselves— regardless of race, class, or gender. Perhaps one of the film’s most horrifying scenes occurs when various audience members in blackface stand up and declare, “I’m a nigger, too!” Such identification becomes acceptable within a system of commodity fetishism dominated by the culture industry. It becomes accepted practice for audience members to adopt this foreign racial

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identity because they are doing so in a mass-produced manner, which leaves no room for divisiveness. In a stark contrast, “white” Mau Mau member 1/16th Black, is spared the police gunfire he seeks because his racialized identity deviates from the acceptable. Even though he desperately cries, “shoot me too, I’m black! I’m black!” during the police execution of the rest of the Mau Maus, without the codified, commercial blackface mask, he finds that he’s not black at all. The notion that “blackness” can be purchased and consumed continues into the parodic “Timmi Hillnigger” and “Da Bomb Malt Liquor” commercials presumably aired during the Mantan show. While perhaps the sharpest element of satire in the film, they become problematic for viewers familiar with Lee’s own work in advertising. After all, Lee himself has created television commercials designed to target the “urban consumer” or “minority” demographics—to sell “blackness” in the form of Air Jordans. As Paul Gilroy notes in a discussion of the creation of Spike/DDB—a Madison Avenue advertising agency: The new company placed a respectable corporate imprimatur on the realization that the American ‘urban consumer’ (you know who they mean) now fixes planetary patterns for selling and using some highly profitable products. This shows that the culture industry is prepared to make substantial investments in blackness provided that it yields a user- friendly, house-trained, and marketable ‘reading’ or translation of the stubborn vernacular that can no longer be called a counterculture. (242, author’s emphasis) Do the “Timmi Hillnigger” and “Da Bomb” commercials serve as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that Lee himself cannot escape some level of complicity in the entertainment system he criticizes? It is impossible to say, however the parody commercials function as scathing indictments of the way a stamp of “authenticity” can be placed on the culture industry’s appropriations and thefts. The co-opting and appropriating of black culture the film comments upon allows us one way to look at Bamboozled within the context of the blackface lore cycle. Spinning, Riffing, and Bogarting: Cultural Transactions and the Blackface Lore Cycle in the New Millennium A vocal opponent of the appropriation of black culture by mass culture, Lee remarked in an interview about Bamboozled, “Well, as I’ve said in the past, and I’ll continue to say it, culture is for everybody. Culture should be appreciated by everybody, but for me there is a distinction between appreciation of a culture and appropriation of a culture. People like Dunwitty are

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dangerous because they appropriate black culture and put a spin on it as if they are the originators of it. There’s a big difference” (qtd. in Crowdus 5). Lee’s opposition to whites putting “a spin on” black culture illuminates the complex nature of a lore cycle, which demonstrates that everything is “spin” and culture will always refuse to be confined along racial lines. Lhamon discusses the early history of blackface performance as a way for whites to both identify and distance themselves from blackness: The blackface performer enacted an identification of whites with blacks. But the performance also allowed working youths, using that same metaphor, simultaneously to engage and to understand the belittling of blacks. Performers could represent, and publics understand, blacks as childlike or stupid. And they might construct their own whiteness as the polar opposite of what they were rehearsing as blackness. Thus, while the minstrel mask encouraged identification, it also encouraged racialist differentiation. (139) Eric Lott discusses early blackface minstrelsy as an exercise in “love and theft” arguing, “The heedless (and ridiculing) appropriation of ‘black’ culture by whites in the minstrel show, as many contemporaries recognized, was little more than cultural robbery, a form of what Marx called expropriation, which troubled guilty whites all the more because they were so attracted to the culture they plundered” (8). The ultimately transactional nature of such cultural forms is lucidly illustrated by Andrew Ross’s examination of jazz’s cultural discourse. Ross notes that in this discourse questions of imitation and authenticity form: [A] history in which hybrid cultural forms have themselves begged the question of imitation to the point of absurdity. To cite only a few examples: ragtime—a ‘clean’ black response to white imitations of the ‘dirty’ black versions of boogie-woogie piano blues; the cakewalk—a minstrel blackface imitation of blacks imitating highfalutin white manners; ‘moldy figs’—a generation of white middle-class jazz revivalists trying to sound like wizened, old New Orleans musicians who were themselves trying to sound like the real thing for the benefit of their white discoverers. (68) Such cultural transactions, “the everyday, plagiaristic, commerce between white and black musics,” in Ross’s terms, also formed the beginnings of blackface lore, the vestiges of which surface in Bamboozled.

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Thus the “spin” Lee disapproves of becomes embodied in his film. By utilizing black actors in blackface, Lee invokes a tradition of black performers putting their own “spin” on white entertainers who were “spinning” black performance themselves. Performers such as Mantan Moreland or Bert Williams performed in blackface because they had to, but at the same time managed to create an artistic legacy, to potentially transcend or subvert the racist mask they had been handed. While Lee’s film attempts to acknowledge this legacy, his exploration of it further muddies the waters of this uneven satire. Lee struggles with ways of critiquing a form used by both blacks and whites to different ends. How is it possible to completely deride the practice of blackface and its racist comedy when putting blacks in blackface simply mirrors what happened in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century—black performers in blackface because they had no other creative outlet? Is Manray, who is given the stage name “Mantan” after 1940s black comic and actor Mantan Moreland, appropriating the form when he delivers amazing dance performances (under the guise of satire or not) or is he simply selling out? This question is one the film never definitively answers. Lee’s stance on “spinning” and appropriating black culture evinces a disavowal of the very tradition it seeks to explore—the blackface lore cycle Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape and Hurston and Hughes’s Mule Bone participate in. When black actor Sam Lucas, who became famous performing in nineteenth-century blackface “Genuine Negro Minstrel Shows” and eventually became the first black actor to take on the role of “Uncle Tom” in both a stage and film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, performs the shuffling, comedic role of “Peculiar Sam,” he puts his own “spin” on the racist minstrel caricatures Hopkins devotes her work to undermining. Likewise, Hurston and Hughes’s use of Southern vernacular speech interrogated the “inauthentic” of the minstrel show. Thus there is no “pure” black or white culture for Lee to protect. Wallace addresses this ephemeral nature of racial “authenticity” in an article titled, “Bamboozled: The Legacy”lxi: For many black cultural historians, blackface minstrelsy is assumed to be the paradigmatic instance of an inauthentic, racist, and hostile representation of blackness. Scholars can argue endlessly about the degree to which such performers were or were not, in fact, influenced by direct observations of blacks . . . Invariably, whatever relative authenticity there may have been in the first appearance, or public performance, of a mode of cultural expression, its ‘authenticity’ quickly became a vanishing point, just

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before its incorporation into the sphere of popular performance practices, both on the stage and in the streets. By as early as the late 1860s, when it came to black culture, surely no one knew for sure what came from where. (35) This lack of a readily identifiable racial authenticity both haunts and undermines the film. Lee himself has become an iconic and commodified figure. His recent unsuccessful lawsuit against the newly created cable television network, Spike, demonstrates the currency Lee-as-commodity represents (Lee claimed the network name would cause people to incorrectly assume he was affiliated with it and the network to benefit from such an imaginary association). Lee recognizes that his name itself carries financial and ideological precepts and constructs so economically valuable as to warrant legal protection (while the courts didn’t necessarily agree in this case, in another lawsuit an injunction against a website address using his name was granted). Such commercialization extends to the content of his films as well. While film, by its very nature, exists as a commodity, one only has to look to the flood of merchandise bearing an “X” insignia that followed Lee’s 1992 film Malcolm X to realize how the content of Lee’s productions is easily commodified, fetishized, and merchandised. Once viewed with ambivalence, anxiety, or pride—but always as a real person—Lee’s film turned Malcolm X into a t-shirt logo, an iconic figure whose economic currency caught up to his cultural currency. As William Lyne asserts: Malcolm X is the image that has most come to symbolize black opposition and resistance in the late twentieth century. While he was alive, mainstream representations of Malcolm X depicted him as a terrorist, the violent, frightening flip side of Martin Luther King, Jr. In death, the terrorist has been redeemed, turned into an icon and allowed to speak through texts like . . . Lee’s movie (which spawned the lucrative X paraphernalia industry) . . . The Malcolm of Malcolm X is the same Malcolm available in other forms of popular culture for oppositional purposes—personally engaging and rhetorically fierce, but not much of a threat to the real relations of power. Any doubts we may have had about this were erased a few years later when the film’s ending set piece of a rainbow of children telling the cameras ‘I am Malcolm X’ became a television commercial with inner-city children using the same cadences to chant ‘I am Tiger Woods’ in an effort to sell sporting goods for Nike, one of Lee’s longstanding employers (54,56). The culture industry constantly consumes both Lee and his work and in turn renders them consumables. Thus Bamboozled enters into a lore cycle with indeterminate beginnings and

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unforeseeable endings, somewhere between fascination and derision rests the cultural currency of Lee’s work. While I have maintained Bamboozled to be an uneven satire, it is simultaneously a startlingly powerful film. Part of its influence relies upon Lee’s technical skill; his use of digital video for most of the scenes and film for those of the “Mantan” television show. This was a deliberate inversion of expectations on Lee’s part: Conventionally, the documenting or capturing of life—fictitious or real—is often expected to be rendered on film, while TV is often represented by video . . . We recognize when images come from TV because they are codified—by their grainy, pixilated, contrasty, harsh look. Spike and I decided to flip the conventional expectation—using Super 16 film images for the broadcast segments—so that anything that would theoretically have been shown on a television screen would be originated on Super 16 film, then blown up to 35 millimeter. This introduced a different sense of reality into the idea of this television show and brought it into a much more visceral sensibility. (Martin) Thus, fittingly, the technical “noise” of mini-DV during the scenes of character interaction mirrors the complex relationships portrayed on screen. Lee’s decision to utilize digital video serves to upend the “codified” images of race to which viewers have become desensitized. Such a strategy—that of allowing the medium itself to echo the skewed reality of the film—leaves viewers with the sense that the film offers more questions than answers in a very deliberate manner.

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CONCLUSION

The history of racial representation in visual culture is a long and complex one, yet the various images and stereotypes of the minstrel stage continue to permeate culture and influence contemporary artists. This thesis is necessarily limited in scope and in a longer version might have included the work of contemporary playwrights such as Suzan Lori-Parks and visual artists like Kara Walker in its discussion of the legacy of blackface. The absence of a chapter on early black film from the 1920s and 1930s was also a necessary concession to length and focus. In focusing specifically on Hopkins’s play, Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad; Hurston and Hughes’s drama, Mule Bone, and Spike Lee’s film, Bamboozled, I have attempted to provide a lucid portrait in the workings of lore cycles. This thesis views these texts as working in conjunction with one another as they variously interrogate, complicate, and subvert the racial and racist stereotypes that became culturally entrenched through the pervasiveness of blackface minstrelsy as a form of popular entertainment. Hopkins simultaneously employed and exploded such stereotypes in her musical production, and in doing so became a precursor to the black musical theater of the early-twentieth century, which saw the first all-black Broadway production (In Dahomey, 1903). Hurston and Hughes’s insistence on creating the “the first real Negro folk comedy” spoke to the stress both placed on performance as a means of investigating the intersections of race and representation. Finally, Spike Lee’s production highlights the haunting legacy and cultural currency nineteenth-century minstrelsy continues to work among African American performers. Within each of these works, a discourse of racial authenticity repeatedly emerges. Questions about the nature and very existence of “authentic blackness” surface in both the works and their audiences. Is there ever such a thing as a shared cultural experience? Does rendering such accurately constitute a site of racial “authenticity”? In a post-identity politics critical moment, do concepts of “authenticity” become synonymous with racial essentialism? That

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works in question both pose and complicate such questions speaks to the complex contemporary status of race, representation, and cultural transactions.

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TABLE 1

Production History for Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad

Date/Venue Title/Version Company

March 24, 1879 / Opera House, The Flight for Freedom* / four- Sprague’s Underground Rockford, Illinois act version Railroad Company

March 28, 1879 / Opera House, The Flight for Freedom / four- Sprague’s Underground Racine, Wisconsin act version Railroad Company

March 31-April 2, 1879 / Grand The Flight for Freedom / four- Sprague’s Underground Opera House, Milwaukee, act version Railroad Company Wisconsin

April 18-19, 1879 / Opera The Flight for Freedom / four- Sprague’s Underground House, St. Paul, Minnesota** act version Railroad Company

N/D / Buffalo, New York The Flight for Freedom / four- Sprague’s Underground act version Railroad Company

December 8, 1879 / Boston The Slaves’ Escape; or the Hopkins’ Colored Troubadours Union Opera House, Boston, Underground Railroad / three- Massachusetts act version

July 5-10, 1880 / Oakland Escape from Slavery; or the Hopkins’ Colored Troubadours Garden, Boston, Massachusetts Underground Railroad / three- act version

September 29, 1881 / Boston The Flight for Freedom; or the Hopkins’ Colored Troubadours Music Hall, Boston, Underground Railroad / three- Massachusetts act version

----- Sources: Advertisements, The Milwaukee Sentinel 28 March-2 April 1879; Reviews, The Milwaukee Sentinel 1-2 April 1879; Review, Daily Register [Rockford, Ill.] 25 March 1879; Review, Daily Herald [Racine, Wis.] 29 March 1879; Review, Buffalo Daily Courier n.d., Scrapbook, Pauline E. Hopkins papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville; Review, Boston Globe 9 December 1879; Advertisements, Boston Globe, 3-11 July 1879; Review, Boston Herald 6 July 1880; Scrapbook Program, Pauline E. Hopkins Papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville.

*During the Sprague Tour, performances of the play were billed as both The Flight for Freedom and The Underground Railroad. The complete title may have been: The Flight for Freedom; Or the Underground Railroad.

** Eileen Southern names this venue as the “opera-hall” of the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union in African American Theater, xxiv.

55 TABLE 2

Cast Listings for Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad

Date Title/Version Cast

March-April, 1879 The Flight for Freedom / four- Performed by Sprague’s Underground act version Railroad Company, starring Sam Lucas as Sam

December 8, 1879 The Slaves’ Escape; or the Sam Al. Holden Underground Railroad / three- Uncle Caesar Mr. Rollins act version Pomp George Tolliver Virginia Pauline E. Hopkins Mammy Sarah Allen Hopkins Jim William A. Hopkins Juno S. Williams Quaker John Paul Desmond

July 5-10, 1880 Escape from Slavery; or the Sam Sam Lucas Underground Railroad / three- Jim William. A. Hopkins act version Uncle Caesar WM. Cummings Pete WM. Cummings Quaker John Thos. Scottron Pomp G. W. Paine Augustus Fred Lyons Virginia P. E. Hopkins Juno S. Williams Mammy S. A. Hopkins With the Hyers Sisters’ Company

September 29, 1881 The Flight for Freedom; or the Sam Frank Nelson Underground Railroad / three- Jim William A. Hopkins act version Uncle Caesar George Deamus / George Simonds Pete George Deamus Quaker John T. Scottron Pomp George Wally Augustus George Simonds Mammy Sarah Allen Hopkins Juno S. Williams Virginia Pauline E. Hopkins

With the Hopkins Troubadour Quartette: Pauline E. Hopkins, Adah Hector, William S. Copeland, George Wally

------Sources: Advertisements, The Milwaukee Sentinel 28 March-2 April 1879; Reviews, The Milwaukee Sentinel 1-2 April 1879; Review, Buffalo Daily Courier n.d., Scrapbook, Pauline E. Hopkins papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville; Review, Boston Globe 9 December 1879; Review, Boston Herald 6 July 1880; Scrapbook Programs, Pauline E. Hopkins Papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville.

*Sarah Allen Hopkins and William A. Hopkins were Pauline E. Hopkins’s mother and stepfather.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION i John Freund, qtd. in Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Letter to W. M. Trotter, 16 April 1905. Colored American Magazine Correspondence folder, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville. ii Letter from Hughes to Hurston, qtd. in Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. 1931. Ed. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) 237. iii Hazel Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston” History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 34.

CHAPTER ONE iv Bernard L. Peterson, Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theater People, 1816—1960 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001) 125. v See Ann Shockley, “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion Into Obscurity,” Phylon 33 (1972): 22- 26; John Cullen Gruesser, ed., The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996); and Hanna Wallinger, Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Athens: U of Georgia P, forthcoming 2005). vi For a discussion of Hopkins as a literary foremother in an African-American female literary tradition see Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s foreword and Hazel Carby’s introduction to The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) vii-xxii, xxix-xlvii. vii Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1974) 195- 203. viii W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 76. Eric Lott also discusses the complex relationship between the simultaneous forces of attraction and repulsion toward blackness and black performance within dominant culture in, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), which I will return to later. ix Lhamon, 80-81. x Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch, eds., The Roots of African American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991) 97. xi Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: a History of the American Minstrel Stage (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1968) [c. 1930] 143. xii Music and lyrics to “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel” can be found in Southern, 145-146. xiii Advertisement, Boston Globe, 5 July 1880.

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xiv “The Summer Stage,” Boston Globe, 3 July 1880. xv Advertisement, Boston Globe, 21 June 1880. xvi Advertisement, Boston Globe, 3 July 1880. xvii Advertisement, Boston Globe, 21 August 1880. xviii Gary D Engle, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978) xviii. xix Pauline E. Hopkins, Peculiar Sam, or, the Underground Railroad. In The Roots of African American Drama, ed. Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991) 122. xx Ibid., 123. xxi For a discussion on the fourth act of Peculiar Sam and reconstruction see Martha Patterson, “Remaking the Minstrel: Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam and the Post-Reconstruction Black Subject,” Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage, ed. Carol P. Marsh-Lockett, (New York: Garland, 1999) 13-23. xxii For a discussion of the symbolic function of Sappho’s name see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 142-144. xxiii Ibid. xxiv Review, Boston Globe 3 May 1880. xxv Advertisement, Boston Globe 14 June 1880. xxvi Advertisement, Boston Globe 21 June 1880. xxvii Henry T. Sampson, The Ghost Walks: a chronological history of blacks in show business, 1865- 1910 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988) 4. xxviii Ibid., 2. xxix Review, Boston Globe 2 May 1880. xxx Wittke, 8. xxxi Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Peculiar Sam TS, Pauline E. Hopkins Papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville. xxxii Toll, 67, 253. xxxiii Lott, 6. xxxiv Some scholars equate the donning of the white sheet with the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. See Patterson, 20. xxxv Elizabeth Ammons, “Afterword: Winona, Bakhtin, and Hopkins in the Twenty-first Century,” The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser, (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996).

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xxxvi Detailed descriptions of the minstrel show format are given in Toll, Wittke 136-142, and Engle, xvi-xix. For a description of black minstrel shows specifically, see Toll 195-233, and Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980) 1-3. xxxvii Toll, 44. xxxviii Scrapbook Programs, 5 July 1880 and 21 September 1881, Pauline E. Hopkins Papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville. xxxix Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 401-402. xl Review, Boston Globe 17 August 1880. xli Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Peculiar Sam MS., reprinted in African American Theater, Eileen Southern, ed., (New York: Garland, 1994). The music and lyrics to James Bland’s song appear in Minstrel Songs, Old and New (Boston, 1882) 195-197. They have been reprinted by Southern, who lists “Dem Golden Slippers” among the musical numbers for Peculiar Sam. African American Theater, xxx, xxxv, 203-205. xlii Thomas Riis, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989) 10. xliii Words and Music found in Minstrel Songs, Old and New 202-203. xliv Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 24. Words and Music to “Old Folks at Home” can be found in Minstrel Songs, Old and New, 3-5, reprinted by Southern, in African American Theater, 195-196. xlv Thomas Riis, More Than Just Minstrel Shows: The Rise of Black Musical Theatre at the Turn of the Century (Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1992) 11. xlvi Review, New York Times 16 April 1898 (qtd. in Sampson, The Ghost Walks 149,151). xlvii In Dahomey’s Broadway premiere occurred on February 18, 1903. See Thomas Riis, introduction, The Music and Scripts of “In Dahomey,” by Will Marion Cook, Thomas Riis, ed. (Madison, Wis: American Musicological Society, 1996) xii. xlviii Bob Cole, “The Negro and the Stage,” Colored American Magazine, 4.3 (1902): 303. xlix Ibid., 305. l Hopkins, letter to W. M. Trotter. li Riis, The Music and Scripts of “In Dahomey,” 24-25.

CHAPTER TWO lii Qtd. in Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) 237. liii Charlotte Osgood Mason liv For a complete detailing of the dispute surrounding Mule Bone’s conception and the disagreement between Hurston and Hughes, see the 1991 Harper Perennial edition of the play, which includes introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and “the complete story of the Mule Bone Controversy.”

CHAPTER THREE

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lv Ann duCille references this comment by McDaniel to critics of her film choices in, “The Shirley Temple of My Familiar.” Transition, No. 73 (1997). 10-32. (27). lvi It is worth noting here the number of films in the 1920s and 1930s that sought specifically to offer roles for black actors that were not the stereotyped ones available in mainstream Hollywood productions. These included various “race films” by directors such as Oscar Micheaux (Within Our Gates, 1920) and production companies like The Colored Players Film Corporation (Scar of Shame, 1927). The 1930s also saw numerous independent all-black cast productions, which were often invested in deconstructing the racism inherent in Hollywood genre films. These included a number of all-black cast Westerns starring Herb Jeffries (one of these, Two-Gun Man from Harlem, 1938, also starred Spencer Williams and Mantan Moreland), and all-black cast horror films (Son of Ingagi, 1940, also starring Spencer Williams, and The Devil’s Daughter, 1939). Other independent films of the period featuring primarily black casts include The Duke is Tops (1938) with Lena Horne, The Black King (1932), Moon Over Harlem (1939), Song of Freedom (1936) and Big Fella (1937) starring Paul Robeson, to name a few. The history of race, cinema, and spectatorship is obviously a complex and lengthy one. In mentioning McDaniel’s relationship to the Hollywood studio system of the time, it is not my intention to ignore the role black independent film of the era played in expanding the performance options available to black entertainers. My focus on the relationship of McDaniel to mainstream cinema produced within the Hollywood studio system stems from Lee’s historical critique of the mainstream entertainment industry. lvii Dancing lviii “joint” is the term by which Lee characterizes his films. lix Lee has been frequently criticized for his depictions of black women in his films, perhaps most scathingly by bell hooks who notes, “Spike Lee may think that he is simply putting it out there the way it is, but he is doing much more. By portraying the subtle and not-so-subtle, sexist humiliation of black females by black men in ways that depict it as cute, cool, heavy, he re-inscribes those paradigms” in “Counter-Hegemonic Art: do the right thing,” Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990). lx Sut Jhally discusses the idea of an “image saturated” society in which people lack the visual literacy necessary to appropriately synthesize or deconstruct the media images they are constantly bombarded with in “article name” bib. Info.

60 This article was later re-titled, expanded, and republished in Dark Designs and Visual Culture.

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---. “Bamboozled: The Legacy.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, 3:1 (Summer-Fall 2001): 33-38.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

---. Introduction. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today. Ed. Mel Watkins. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002. xvii-xxv.

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Wittke, Carl. Tambo and Bones: a History of the American Minstrel Stage. 1930. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1968.

Works Consulted

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. New trans., Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.

Favor, Martin J. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Michaels, Benn. “American Modernism and the Poetics of Identity.” Modernism/Modernity. 1.1 (1994): 38-56.

Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. 1976. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.

Holden, Stephen. “Trying On Blackface in a Flirtation with Fire.” Rev. of Bamboozled. New York Times. 6 Oct 2000, late ed.: E1:14.

Johnson, Barbara. “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 130-140.

Taubin, Amy. “Spike Lee’s Own Scary Movie.” Rev. of Bamboozled. Village Voice. 4 Oct 2000. 12 May 2004 .

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jessica Metzler received her BA in English from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2001 and MA in Literature at The Florida State University in 2006. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at where questions of race, representation, and visual culture continue to influence and inform her work.

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