Lhamon's Argument

image by David Heatley.

In Jump Jim Crow, Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, W.T. Lhamon makes an argument that I want to believe, though it feels a bit of a myth: that the early plays by Daddy Rice, the "Jump Jim Crow" Plays of the 1830's (Oh Hush, Virginia Mummy, Bone Squash, Flight to America, The Peacock and the Crow, Jim Crow and His New Place, The Foreign Prince, Yankee Notes for English Circulation), featuring characters called Gumbo Cuff and Gumbo Chaff and Bone Squash and Pirhouette and Juliette, were being produced for a kind of creolized American culture, that they were abolitionist in argument ("enter Jim Crow on a white horse") and revolutionary in spirit.

Their harshest critics were white upperclassmen (and John Quincy Adams, who claimed to be more flattered by the attentions paid to his stupid theories than by being elected President of the United States.) These types all approved of Shakespeare's Othello as a cautionary tale against mixed-race marriages and could not see similar moral content in the popular performances of Daddy Rice.

Such men went so far, in fact, as to counsel the "Desdemonas" of NYC to stay away from such entertainments as those provided by Thomas D. Rice, fearing that they might like the inconveniently living Jim Crow even more than the dead by the end Othello.

Rice matched this upperclass disdain with what Lhamon calls 'updain'. When he finally staged his Five Points retelling of "Otello," he revived Desdemona at the end, so she could live and love another day with her husband.

Oh, look here; Oh, look there!
Desdemona's come to life:
See her rise and ope her eyes.
Otello's once more got his wife.
Then dance and sing
'Till the whole house ring,
and never more his wife he'll smother.
And, if all right tomorrow night,
We'll have this wedding over.

Basically, Lhamon is arguing that Rice's methods might be unsanctionable from a modern standpoint, and are difficult to gauge since they were later coarsened into the blackface minstrel tradition, but what he was doing at the time was making an effort - the first in American Culture - to bring a free, eloquent and unselfconscious, spirited black character onto the American stage, a character that offered no apologies for wooing and winning all the Desdemonas of American life.

Lhamon makes no mention of him, but to me this sounds more like the great subversive Arlequino of the Italian Commedia Dell Arte (below) than any garish antecedents of Al Jolson.



Some quotes:

"Rice's Crow is a free agent, proudly black, sometimes childlike but never childish, and certainly not pitiful. He outwits the powerful whites around him in order to create a blackened version of working-class melodrama, streamlined as comic burletta, seductive with songs. His audience will not identify with a white character. They will identify instead with a white man's embodied desire for blackness."

"Jim Crow moved like a free man, crowed like a dandy cock, enjoyed the liberty of every public conveyance from steamship to bus to train, sitting where he wished. He took occupation of the public sphere. Jim Crow addressed, even challenged, men of every rank and colour."

"This transgressive power of Jim Crow is what the political regime of Jim Crow laws in the South projected on all African Americans, of every class, and thus used to contain them as a category following the North's betrayal of Reconstruction."

"Picayune Butler and a street songster called Old Corn Meal were blacks performing Jim Crow in New Orleans in those years... Certainly this vernacular nexus documents a mutual swapping back and forth among these white and black performers of an already-growing blackface repertoire. Looking back from the vantage point of his documented theatrical appearances in New Orleans, in 1835, 1836, and 1838, it is evident that T.D. Rice also modeled himself on Old Corn Meal. When he performed a skit titled 'Corn Meal' in New Orleans in 1836, he made the homage clear."

"Old Corn Meal's singing drew customers to his vendor's pushcart. There are dozens of references to him in the city papers beginning 12 May 1837 and continuing until the obituaries on 22 and 23 May 1842."

So he died a year before the alleged invention of the Minstrel Show, in NYC in 1843. Perhaps what was actually being invented was a brand more acceptable to the status quo, wherein the African Americans stayed in the cotton fields, or, if they didn't, longed to return there, way down south in Dixie.

And one more:

"His song 'Fresh Corn Meal' must have been a variant on the calls for 'Fresh Stroh Bare' with which black vendors thrilled me still in Baltimore during the early 1960's."

p.s. I first heard of this book here.