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Dancing with "Racial Feet": Bert Williams and the Performance of Blackness

2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2004.0164

1086-332X

C. Forbes,

Music History and Culture

Egbert (Bert) A. Williams (1874-1922) was a black Bahamian performer whose comedic skill brought him the adulation of black and white Americans alike. Moving to the United States at a time when blacks in America faced de juresegregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North, he rose from obscurity to become not merely the "pioneer black comedian," in the words of biographer Eric Ledell Smith, but the leading comedian of his time.1 He possessed extraordinary versatility, and performed in various forms of popular theatrical entertainment, beginning in minstrelsy in the 1890s, later moving on to black musical theatre, vaudeville, and the Broadway musical revue. At the time of his death at age forty-seven, he was preparing to bring his star vehicle, Under the Bamboo Tree—in which he was the sole black actor—to Broadway. These achievements evidence not only Williams's success throughout his career, but also his unparalleled skill in managing white and black audiences, whom he addressed in distinct ways both on and off the stage. Remarkably, even as he sought to satisfy disparate audiences, he created a space for self-definition. Through his inimitable onstage character, he disrupted images of the stage "darky"; through his offstage presentation, he countered the Negro stereotype. In this essay, I analyze Williams's onstage and offstage interventions, examining his performative strategies during the later years of his career. Study reveals, however, that most scholars who have considered Williams have been primarily invested in the early years of his career: specifically, his sixteen-year partnership with black American George Walker.2 Notable exceptions are Smith, who chronicled Williams's entire career, and Sandra Richards, whose "Bert Williams: The [End Page 603] Man and the Mask" attends to Williams's career after his work with Walker, but does so mainly to illustrate what she perceives as a period of decline.3 Williams's years as part of Williams and Walker have merited considerable study. The two were the first black recording artists (1901), and first to perform a full-length musical on Broadway (1902); additionally, they and their company gave a command performance before the king of England (1903).4 These and other accomplishments demonstrate the duo's critical role in black musical theatre, which David Krasner has addressed in Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910, cogently analyzing the team's influential work of challenging prevalent black stereotypes and offering performers entrée into the theatre world as members of the all-black Williams and Walker Company.5 In addition, the Williams and Walker years were formative in Williams's career. It was then that he created his "Jonah Man" character and developed the bits for which he would become famous, including his legendary hard-luck song "Nobody," which might be considered the Jonah Man's anthem, and his poker pantomime. The "Jonah Man," Williams's reworking of a classic minstrelsy character historically called "Jim Crow" or "darky," was a dimwitted country bumpkin who spoke in Southern black dialect, and was performed in blackface. He dressed in oversized, ill-fitting clothing and was an indolent, ignorant character, generally inspired to do little more than eat and sleep.6 In Williams's masterful hands, however, the stereotype was fleshed out, transforming into the downtrodden unfortunate whom Williams would later describe as "the man who, even if it rained soup, would be found with a fork in his hand and no spoon in sight, the man whose fighting relatives come to visit him and whose head is always dented by the furniture they throw at each other."7 The engaging presence of the charismatic George Walker also played an influential role in previous studies of Bert Williams. Although Williams and Walker were a dynamic pair, the dark-skinned Walker, a comparatively diminutive man, was particularly bold and striking. His onstage character was also a revision of a minstrelsy type...