W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by James V. Hatch

A word may be added concerning Lhamon's prose style, perhaps derived from his long immersion in minstrelsy. He is witty, he puns, and sometimes he employs the polysyllabic circumlocution of the nineteenth-century humorists. Occasionally he wraps us in a sentence that requires unlocking. For example, after quoting a paragraph from a positive review of Jim Crow's performance, Lhamon writes, "The middle-class journalist here lays his dream of joining one's tormentors right over the quite distinct ideal of lateral sufficiency that is in fact diagnostic of the mobility, and which Rice's character and his play are in fact promoting."

While Lhamon's reinterpretation of Jim Crow presents an inherent reprimand to all of us theatre scholars who have accepted the traditional legends, the story has not ended. David Krasner of Yale points out the Rice's correspondence in the Harvard Theatre Collection reveals him to be proslavery. More study is needed to see if Jim Crow can "jump" his old racist image.

James V. Hatch

City College, CUNY (Emeritus)