Parody and double consciousness in the language of early Black musical theatre

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by David Krasner

The central and driving force underlying this will to reconstruct the race lay in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. It was Du Bois, according to August Meier, who was most aware "of the complexity and sophistication of African culture" (264).(2) Drama critic Lester Walton recognized the significance of The Souls of Black Folk in his weekly column "Music and the Stage." Du Bois makes the powerful plea, Walton wrote in 1908, "that the history of art in this nation will not be written until the Negro has made his contribution" (6).(3) The Souls of Black Folk can be shown to be especially important, as Paul Gilroy points out, because it "sensitized blacks to the significance of the vernacular cultures that arose to mediate the enduring effects of terror" (119-20). Du Bois, Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., observes, "located the essence of a distinctive black spirituality in the roots of black American culture" (207).

Du Bois's description of double consciousness not only defined an important analysis of black American culture, but it characterized African American representation in the performing arts. Du Bois wrote: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (215).(4) This dualism and frustration, Du Bois adds, is the "history of the American Negro," and "this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge the double self into a better and truer self" culminates in a desire "to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face" (215).

Du Bois's comments specifically apply to many black performers at the turn of the century. The black actor or actress had to effect a public self through what Du Bois called a tertium quid, often performing as a "clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil" (271). The power of the Veil as a distorting mask is underscored by the fact that many African American performers, notably Bert Williams, had to wear blackface make-up because their real faces failed to conform to the caricature popularized by nineteenth-century white minstrel performers.

Will Marion Cook said in 1903 that "the terrible difficulty that composers of my race have to deal with is the refusal of American people to accept serious things from us. That prejudice will be educated away one day I hope" (300). The fact that Cook made this comment in the same year that Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk is by no means a coincidence. James Weldon Johnson, an active song writer during early years of black musicals, was deeply influenced by Du Bois's work. The Souls of Black Folk, Johnson wrote, "has had a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom's Cabin" (203). Anticipating many concerns voiced by Du Bois, Bob Cole's 1898 Colored Actor's Declaration of Independence maintained with great pride that, in his production of A Trip to Coontown, "we are going to have our own shows. We are going to write them ourselves, we are going to have our own stage manager, our own orchestra leader and our own manager out front to count up. No divided houses - our race must be seated from the boxes back" ("Pioneers" 48).(5)

For many black performers, questions arose: How does one get away from the popularized "coon songs" and the image of the "clownish darky" and establish, through re-appropriation of black representation, a more acceptable presentation? The success of African American performers during the turn of the century not only accelerated blacks to the legitimate stage, it also extended what Eric Sundquist calls a "tradition of performative subversion of white authority that reached back into slave culture" (8). Black theatre emerged in a state of opposition, creating a form of "hidden transcripts" characterized by a discourse that moved "beyond direct observation of the powerholders" (Scott 4). Parody surfaced as a performative subversion of white authority, undermining and destabilizing racist stereotypes.

This element of parody could be powerful. It was, for instance, used to great effect in Bob Cole's production of A Trip to Coontown (1897-1901). Cole and his partner, Billy Johnson, challenged minstrel stereotyping by signaling a change in approach. "No Coons Allowed!,"(6) the final song in A Trip to Coontown before the Finale, dramatizes the duality of black life in America, and creates a parody of racism:

There's a dead swell gentleman of color Saved up all the money he could find He call'd one night and said to his baby "My Lulu gal we'll go and cut a shine."

He put her in a cab and told the driver "To drive us to the swellest place in town I'm gwine to buy my gala fine supper So I want the finest place that can be found."