Darktown Strutters.

Wesley Brown. Darktown Strutters. New York: Cane Hill P, 1994. 224 pp. $1195.

Anybody who thinks an historical novel about blackface minstrel days is "merely" historical hasn't been paying attention to Jim Carrey's The Mask, TV's In Living Color, rapper Biz Markie, or much of the rest of U.S. popular culture today. Ted Danson was only the bottom of the barrel. The legacy of blackface shines all around us, and we've still barely begun to tackle its wiles. This is why Wesley Brown's novel Darktown Strutters, an often profound meditation on performance, masking, identity, and equality in the American skin game, is so welcome and refreshing. Written in the surreal spirit of minstrelsy itself, peppered with wit and lancing dialogue, Darktown Strutters is a novel of ideas devoted to exploring the complex fate of black and white Americans caught, as ever, in a racial history they can neither surmount nor escape.

The novel spans forty or more years, from the advent of blackface performance in the 1830s through the up-tempo revolutionary drama of the Civil War and the improvised quality of post-War life to the centennial celebration of 1876. Brown is learned in the national and performance history that forms the backdrop of his tale, but he freely riffs on the known facts, which gives his story the aura of an alternate or parallel racial history, this time with (as it were) the bones laid bare. The novel opens with minstrelsy's primal scene: the appropriation of black dance, song, and style from a slave named Jim Crow by white performer Thomas Rice. Rice is soon making a name for himself in blackface, where before long he hears of the remarkable dancing of the son Brown bestows upon Jim Crow, Jim Too. Rice makes a deal with Jim's owner, a Mr. Churchill, who agrees to hire out Jim to dance with Rice's traveling minstrel show in a distant echo of antebellum America's only black minstrel star, Juba (William Henry Lane). Jim is thereby launched on a performance career that features, among many other events, dance contests against whites such as Jack Diamond (who was indeed Juba's sparring partner), run-ins with white mobs upset by the excellence of Jim's dancing and his refusal to wear blackface make-up, secret meetings with slaves to discuss abolitionist ideas and with Juba himself, a harrowing encounter with the 1863 New York Draft Riots, and, after manumission, a long stint with a women-led mixed-race minstrel troupe known as the Featherstone Traveling Theatre. All of this emerges from taut scenes that raise the largest questions of U.S. racial/cultural formation in the intimate occasions of everyday life. Part of the point of Darktown Strutters is in fact to suggest the local, personal consequences of and motives for major historical processes. Thus Brown acutely and energetically gauges the psychodynamics of white cultural appropriation (and black reappropriation), the emotional (not to mention political) economy of slavery and its aftermath, the interiority and racial affect of lower-class whites befuddled by imminent black emancipation, the connection of black arts to personal and political liberation (not to mention the potential conflict between personal and political liberation)--in short, the feel of living through what Karl Marx referred to as America's mid-nineteenth-century "revolutionary turn."

Turn implies performance as well as change, and Brown concerns himself not only with both of these but with both at once. In contrast to the conventional view of blackface minstrelsy as the nail in the coffin of antebellum racial stasis, Brown sees it--rightly, I think--as an arena in which ripping social transformation was registered and even activated. Putting on the Negro in more than one sense, white minstrels crossed in fantasy the racial lines they had been raised to respect; momentarily commanding white stages, the occasional black minstrel forced acknowledgment and even respect for arts and artists who had made minstrelsy possible. Brown lucidly imagines his way into this quite unstable situation. Rice is so taken with Jim Crow's dancing that he first mimics it and then ponders wearing blackface offstage as well as on--which, as Jack Diamond remarks, "`puts him several cuts above most men I've known who do a lotta damage tryin too hard to be white'" (81). Meanwhile, the black men exploited for such white self-enlargement may profit too; as Diamond shrewdly says to Rice: "`Well, when he showed you that dance, he was more than just some broken-down nigger slave. And once you allow somebody to be more than one thing at a time, ain't nothin nailed down no more, includin you!'" (27). Generating interest often means getting respect, and maybe more than that. These scenes and others capture the shape-shifting social momentum, the creeping fissures in the racial status quo, that seemed to drive blackface performance amid its desperate attempts to contain the changes to come. In the process they decisively recast our understanding of the minstrel show's cultural thefts, undeniably founded on a slave economy yet resulting in a certain degree of white self-othering and black agency. They point, that is, to the crucial shaping part black performers played in and around an unfortunate and peculiar entertainment institution that was nonetheless a central avenue of American cultural creolization.

Such ironies lie near the heart of Brown's tale. True to its epigraph from Ralph Ellison about the ambiguities that attend the mask in a land of masking jokers, Darktown Strutters explores the ruses of black masking and performance in a culture saturated and confounded by the masks and performances of a racial caste system. Reckoning Rice correct when he quips that, at least in minstrelsy, unlike slavery, "`... there's somethin in it for you'" (62), Jim makes good on his obviously constricted opportunity. He realizes a sense of personal and collective liberation through his dancing, at one point inciting a black uprising during a plantation dance contest, and more generally rallying underground resistance and acquiring literacy through the travel minstrel-show touring affords. So strong is the connection of minstrel dancing and freedom that, in a surprising move (for Jim and for novelist Brown), he refuses the idea of escape. A form of unfreedom, minstrelsy is at the same time a venue of possibility; Brown repeatedly compares Jim's role in minstrelsy to that of black liberation orators and agitators (Jim even gets to meet Frederick Douglass), and minstrelsy here is less the especial villain of much cultural historiography than one more American obstacle black people have had to thread their way through. This strikes me as an unusually sober and acute line of historical reflection, which Brown presents with some dialectical subtlety. Jim's friend Jubilee, for example, is one hell of a masking joker who specializes in taming down his murderous resentment and rebutting white supremacy in riotous, anarchic laughter; rejecting the evident hostility encased in white amusement at minstrel antics, Jubilee spits it back in grins and watermelon rinds--until at last he explodes in righteous violence. Indeed because even pre-War minstrelsy so resonated with the black cultural urgency behind its popularity, it carries with it in Darktown Strutters a whiff of danger that, to my understanding, did trail nineteenth-century minstrel shows. In the late 1850s, we know, Richmond and certain other cities outlawed minstrelsy for its hint of insurrection, perhaps an unthinkable prospect to us now; Brown has Rice assassinated, pointedly, by a Confederate loyalist, and he everywhere portrays minstrel shows delivering humanist home truths refracted through the distorting stage form appropriate to a society upended by racial confusion.

To wit, Darktown Strutters' central exhibit, a minstrel skit called "Who's Who In Paducah?" prods America's predicament of skin:

Are we who we are when we open our eyes?

Is my face myself or just a disguise?

Do we know who's who when our eyes are shut?

When the lids go down, do we know what's what? (90)

This too is reminiscent of certain nineteenth-century blackface confections, which occasionally had a surprising capacity for self-consciousness. (As do the white characters in Brown's novel, which eschews the luxuries of demonizing to portray whites caught up in major change and moved to entertain its ramifications; Rice feels a certain guilt about "`dancin the darky business'" [26], while Diamond, the better democrat, relishes his intimacy with otherness.) "Who's Who?" moreover articulates the novel's ultimate concern with the performative nature of racial identities--the baffles and bafflements of the visible in a world where we're all alike in the dark. Masking, Brown intimates, is the way of the stage because it's the way of the world, which has in turn taken the stage to heart and redoubled the confusion. Offstage antics in the novel increasingly take on the aspect of stage performances, and underscore the quotidian masking enjoined upon all by the racialist buffoonery of caste categories and codes. Collapsing, in the manner of Melville's The Confidence Man, two senses of the verb to act, Brown shows the regulatory force of the mask for blacks who must live up to white scripts even as they work them to other purposes. As one of Jim's fellow performers says, "`I know blackin up is US DOIN WHITE FOLKS DOIN US! But minstrelsy ain't the only place where that goes on. Like most of our people, I know I gotta stretch the truth in order to live. But long as WE know what we doin, it don't matter what white folks think!'" (138).

It is an inquiry into the ultimate stakes of the black mask's burden that drives Darktown Strutters. Having been affixed a priori, the mask defines an African-American condition; but it may also be subversive equipment for living. In many ways the central drama is Jim's persistent refusal to wear blackface. As long as he can keep the cork off, he surmises, he's untouched by the "nigger act" that is his meal ticket. Finally, in a very moving scene, Jim is forced by his co-performer/lover Starletta to acknowledge his implication in the tar with which they, and black people generally, have been brushed:

"It don't matter that you never blacked up. You made a name for yourself from

it, same as those of us who used it."

"That ain't the same thing!"

"No it ain't. But that don't mean it didn't leave a smell on you."

"Ain't no smell on me!"

"If there wasn't, baby, you wouldn't be alive; and I wouldn't be bothered

with you! ... Jim. We all hurt when somebody tries to turn us into something

that ain't human." (184)

There are no hiding places down here. Brown's acknowledgment of this dilemma rebukes claims of an authentic blackness above the fray in the name of accurately recognizing the terms of struggle without which, Brown hints, there's no possibility of effective rejoinder. There are no names apart, no selves outside the regimes of representation that box in black folk. Up against that, only guerilla mimicry, performative marronage, blistering reappropriations of racist myths, types, and masks remain. These don't amount to transcendence, but they do change the joke.

Indeed, Darktown Strutters suggests that black selves are not hostage to the labels and masks they are nonetheless forced to labor under. A performative negotiation of them, whether on the stage or in everyday life, has the effect in Brown's text of undermining and reorienting them. "'When I black-up,'" says Jubilee, "`I ain't gotta follow in behind what no white man did who put it on before me'" (93). Certainly the mask doesn't entirely colonize black identity. As Brown depicts it, blackface is merely the stage uniform of its cultural moment, one's ticket to public notice, where the struggle begins rather than ends. The terrific final scene of the novel--in which Jim in 1876 comes across a P. T. Barnum recreation of the "Southland as it really is" (220), complete with black actors playing the parts of The Contented Slave, The Wretched Freedman, The Comic Negro, and so on--seems familiar enough to raise the question of our current uniforms of racial representation, while suggesting again the performative devices that elude them. Captured for no reason by some nearby police, Jim is hauled to a photographer's tent to have his picture taken for a national police "Rogue's Gallery" with a tag around his neck reading THE CONNIVING UNCLE TOM. As the photographer snaps, an idea for a new dance step flashes into Jim's mind. When the photo is developed, the conniving Uncle Tom both has and has not lived up to his name; Jim's movements have ruined the picture. This splendid evasion is an apt figure for all the frame-ups foiled in Darktown Strutters.