Page 71 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

Den lay down de shubble

and de hoe,
Hang up de fiddle and de

bow:

No more hard work for
poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good
Niggas go,
No more hard work for

poor Old Ned —
He’s gone whar de good

Niggas go.
Such an aff ectionate showcase

for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-

dead) Uncle Ned was as essential
as ‘‘air,’’ in the white critic Bayard
Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs
like this were the ‘‘true expres-

sions of the more popular side of
the national character,’’ a force

that follows ‘‘the American in all

its emigrations, colonizations

and conquests, as certainly as the

Fourth of July and Thanksgiving
Day.’’ He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s
peak stretched from the 1840s to

the 1870s, years when the country

was as its most violently and leg-

islatively ambivalent about slavery

and Negroes; years that included
the Civil War and Reconstruction,

the ferocious rhetorical ascent of

Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s
botched instigation of a black insur-

rection at Harpers Ferry and the

assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincid-

ed with the publication, in 1852, of

via Getty Images. Right: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
‘‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’’ a polarizing

landmark that minstrels adapted

for the stage, arguing for and, in

simply remaining faithful to Har-
riet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against
slavery. These adaptations, known

as U.T.C.s, took over the art form
Tina Turner performing at a festival in Lake Amador, Calif., on Oct. 4, 1969.

until the end of the Civil War. Per-

haps minstrelsy’s popularity could

be (generously) read as the urge to Paradoxically, its dehumanizing to perform as themselves? When Low Nichols would write in his

escape a reckoning. But a good time bent let white audiences feel more they were hired, it was only in a 1864 compendium, ‘‘Forty Years of

predicated upon the presentation human. They could experience pinch. Once, P . American Life,’’ ‘‘There was not an
T. Barnum needed a

of other humans as stupid, docile, loathing as desire, contempt as replacement for John Diamond, his audience in America that would not

dangerous with lust and enamored adoration, repulsion as lust. They star white minstrel. In a New York have resented, in a very energetic

of their bondage? It was an escape could weep for overworked Uncle City dance hall, Barnum found a fashion, the insult of being asked to

into slavery’s fun house. Ned as surely as they could ignore boy, who, it was reported at the look at the dancing of a real negro.’’

What blackface minstrelsy gave his lashed back or his body as it time, could outdo Diamond (and So Barnum ‘‘greased the little ‘nig-

the country during this period was swung from a tree. Diamond was good). The boy, of ger’s’ face and rubbed it over with

an entertainment of skill, ribaldry But where did this leave a black course, was genuinely black. And painted his thick lips vermilion,

a new blacking of burned cork,

black would

his being actually

and polemics. But it also lent rac-
Left: Redferns ism a stage upon which existen- performer? If blackface was the have rendered him an outrageous put on a woolly wig over his tight

could become jubilation,
tial fear

blight on a
white consumer’s nar-
country’s cultural juggernaut,
curled locks and brought him out
as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of
contempt could become fantasy.
presumptions. As Thomas
row
would pay Negroes money
who

65