Читать книгу Uncle - Cheryl Thompson - Страница 9

By the 1880s, the minstrel show had evolved into vaudeville, a reinvention of theatre into the variety show. Unlike mainstream theatre, vaudeville acts drew from all ethnic groups and genders, in all shapes and sizes, and ranged from ‘respectable’ thespians to circus ‘freaks,’ and from opera singers to chorus performers.

Vaudeville brought new meaning to Uncle Tom. With bills that combined humour, singing, and dancing, as well as an abundance of ethnic stereotypes presented in sketches and comedy routines, vaudeville transformed Stowe’s novel and its theatrical renditions into spectacles of racial mimicry and buffoonery. Consequently, there was a democratized feel to vaudeville that did not exist in earlier minstrel shows. It truly reflected the world of the turn-of-the-century North American city, with its wide variety of classes, tastes, people, and talents.

On December 12, 1893, an advertisement in the Hamilton Spectator announced a weekly engagement of an American vaudeville show at the Star Theatre. ‘The best ever seen, bar none,’ the ad declared, noting that matinee shows would be held on Saturday afternoons for ‘ladies and children’ at five and ten cents per ticket.¹ Half a year later, in late July 1893, Toronto’s the Globe reported that Cleveland’s Minstrels and European Vaudeville Company would give two performances on one day – a matinee at 2:00 p.m. and an evening performance – at the Grand Opera House.² Importantly, vaudeville was not the end of the minstrel show; instead, the genre became one part of a larger theatrical revue that would include burlesque, jugglers, and comedy acts.

Vaudeville shows dominated live theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century, until it was displaced by cinema. Vaudeville’s rise coincided with the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and with corresponding debates about the place of racial and ethnic minorities in North American society. Even though vaudeville grew out of the same low-class theatre that had spawned minstrelsy, its variety-show format did not singularly appeal to a majority white working-class audience, but to the general public. As it gained popularity, vaudeville challenged and eventually replaced the giant minstrel show industry as the dominant form of American mass entertainment. Still, as the popularity of vaudeville and minstrel shows intersected, white and Black actors were performing in both venues, which meant vaudeville not only kept blackface minstrelsy alive; it also returned it to its novelty roots, but on a variety stage.

During vaudeville, access to the theatre drastically changed from the earliest minstrel shows. First, when white women performers adopted racial masquerades in vaudeville, it democratized the stage. Women had been largely excluded from minstrel shows. When they took to the stage in vaudeville acts, white women, often in blackface, performed exactly as white men before them had done: they sang popular ‘coon songs’ in blackface. The term ‘coon’ referred to raccoons, whose thievery and guile were associated with Black people. The white markings on the minstrels’ faces evoked this reference and alluded to the long-standing association of Black people with animals.³ Coon sheet music often included illustrations that depicted Black people as careless, lazy, watermelon-eating tricksters or buffoons.

The vaudeville stage was highly eclectic. Not only did it include white women for the first time, but there were also Black women, men, and children, as dancers, jugglers, and just about anything that resonated with audiences who would have been familiar with burlesque and circus sideshows, which featured both Black bands and Black minstrel troupes. Additionally, mixed minstrel shows begin to appear onstage, featuring Black performers in one part and white performers in another, or sometimes together. But whereas white performers could turn to new material when interest in minstrel themes declined, Black performers could not escape their stereotypes.

In Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen explain that Black actors wore blackface, either literally or metaphorically, and performed minstrel stereotypes that emphasized qualities such as laziness, thievery, and dishonesty.⁴ These actors took on these personas not because they wanted to, but because it was the only way they could perform onstage in the nineteenth century. While white minstrel entertainers claimed to be pupils, or even kin, of the Black people they mocked, they just as passionately made it clear they were white. But because Black minstrel shows were presented and marketed as authentic representations of Black life, there was little opportunity for audiences to make the distinction between what was real and what was performative.

The third unique feature of vaudeville theatre was that it was intricately linked to the expansion of transnational capitalism across North America. For example, New York theatrical magnate Marcus Loew went to Toronto in 1913 to open Loew’s first theatre in Canada, the newest addition to his fast-growing chain of vaudeville and movie houses.⁵ This expansion north of the border created a larger theatre circuit and more opportunities for white and Black troupes.

As touring companies, including vaudeville acts, moved across the continent, trying to always end one engagement within a day or two’s travel of the next, they were constantly on the move between cities like Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Montreal, and Toronto, among other places.

As vaudeville grew, it absorbed nineteenth-century minstrel stage stereotypes and traditions. According to Susan Glenn’s study of theatrical feminism and the proliferation and popularity of racial and ethnic humour, ‘the commercial music industry and the popular theatre absorbed and reconstituted nineteenth-century minstrel stage stereotypes and traditions.’⁶

White minstrels, caught between their ‘authentic’ Black competitors and the versatility of variety and musical shows, prolonged the life of their form by shifting to more lavish productions with urban themes; some even abandoned blackface altogether. By stepping in and out of blackface, vaudeville standardized the genre’s other performative aspects – slapstick, buffoonery, comedy, and satire – which became standard theatrical repertoire in the early twentieth century.

By the time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was reborn as a vaudeville show in the 1890s, the pastoral plantation myth had created an idealized view of Southern society, as well as of slavery, uncles, and mammies. The impact of this idealized view was significant; three decades after the Civil War, the horrors of slavery had been long forgotten.

As a vaudeville act, Uncle Tom’s Cabin no longer commented on slavery and emancipation. Instead, this new version of Uncle Tom was emblematic of the dominant culture’s desire to keep Black men not only in the past but also perpetually old and desexualized. The figure of Tom, in other words, had undergone a visual death as he moved from Stowe’s novel to vaudeville’s theatrical bills. At the same time, the opening of the stage during vaudeville to Black actors, both in and out of blackface, marks the moment when Black entertainment became popular among both Blacks and whites. For the former, they could finally see themselves onstage, albeit still through a refracted lens, since the vast majority of playwrights and theatre managers at this time would have been white men.

Of the many Black performances that graced the stage in the 1890s, the most popular was a theatrical extravaganza entitled Darkest America. The show premiered in 1894, and together with 1895’s Black America, it came to be seen as the most ‘authentic’ minstrel show in history. It marked a fundamental change in direction. Darkest America was a conventional minstrel show in that the performers, even though they were Black, wore blackface.

Darkest America is important to the evolution of the figure of Uncle Tom because it speaks to the ways in which the stage authenticated cultural tropes about Black Americans. Whites could feel good after seeing Black minstrelsy, just as white readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin felt good about the docility and passivity of seemingly authentic characters like Uncle Tom. This newer form of Black minstrelsy reinforced white ideas about the inferior nature of African Americans and the merits of their continuing degradation by staging elaborate plantation fantasies in which Blacks were happy and foolish while the whites, by implication at least, were benevolent and protective.⁷

By 1897, Darkest America had become a true sensation. It was one of the first shows to feature many of the major Black entertainers of the time, including Sam Lucas (1848–1916), who went on to play Uncle Tom in one of the first film adaptations of the novel. The show’s scenes include vignettes plucked from the pages of Stowe’s book. For example, there is a cotton field with a fully operating cotton gin, and the infamous Louisiana sugar plantation that figured in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the place where slave owner Simon Legree has Tom whipped to death.⁸

The appeal of the Black minstrelsy in Darkest America lay in its supposed authenticity. Although Black minstrels regularly portrayed these typical themes, they also significantly modified them. In the plantation material they themselves wrote, the Black minstrels depicted the ‘Old Darky’ nostalgically recalling the happy days of his youth, the frolicking children, the tasty possum, the bright cotton fields, the perfume of magnolia blossoms, the lively banjo music, and the comforting warmth of his family.⁹ In this sense, Black performers from the 1890s onward acted out the ‘feeling’ of longing that Black people supposedly held for their Southern roots.

One of the best-known Black performers, Billy Kersands (1842–1915), whose long career began in the 1860s, played heavily caricatured roles that emphasized Black men’s supposedly large lips and mouth. Black audiences must have laughed at these characters for some of the same reasons whites did: the physical humour used in the ‘mouth routines’ and the literalism of these ‘ignorant’ characters were comic devices with general appeal. Not coincidentally, Kersands was famous for ‘Old Aunt Jemima,’ a song that became one of the signatures of his stage career.¹⁰ Black actors performing as plantation stereotypes like Aunt Jemima, a prototypical Mammy, set the stage for further uses of this stereotype beyond the theatre. When Black people saw Black actors like Kersands, they probably laughed at these characters. Laughing at these stereotypes might have softened their negative impact or it might have helped Black people forget the harsh realities of life.

While Kersands’s contributions to the stage are mostly forgotten, his Aunt Jemima rendition would have lasting impact on not only blackface performers but the American consumer-products industry that emerged in the 1890s.