Shane White Stories of Freedom in Black New York (2002)

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.In re-viewing the company s performance, the National Advocate s the-ater critic indulged in a few obvious puns, but even his account(and it is the only one extant) could not obscure the glow ofenthusiasm, the air almost of self-congratulation, that suffusedthe production.And with good reason, for virtually all present,whether members of the cast or of the audience, had either beenborn into slavery or at the very least were children of formerslaves, and few among them could have been unaware that theywere witnessing a bold black intrusion into the world of acting, anarena hitherto unthinkingly accepted as the exclusive and natu-ral preserve of whites.1The black theater company s choice of play was particularly ap-posite, for Shakespeare and his dramas were an integral part ofAmerican culture, and Richard III was probably the nation s mostSTAGING FREEDOM 69often performed and popular play during the first half of the nine-teenth century.The version seen by Americans had been exten-sively revised by Colley Cibber, an eighteenth-century Englishactor and playwright.Much as a modern day writer might adapt anovel for the screen, Cibber had not only pared back the drama sstructure, but had also purloined a few lines from Henry IV, V, andVI, and added some of his own.According to the literary criticGary Taylor, these changes muted the tragedy s ambiguities andrendered it overtly melodramatic. As a consequence, while theother characters shed some of their more unpleasant characteris-tics, Richard became, in William Hazlitt s words, as odious anddisgusting as possible. 2 Yet the openly manipulative and ambi-tious protagonist of the play, physically weak, hampered by dis-ability, and relying on his ingenuity and cunning to achieve hisown advancement, was not that far removed from the tricksterof African American folklore.3 Certainly the complexities of thejuggling act Richard attempted throughout the drama must haveresonated with the torturous process of negotiating their self-purchase that some of the actors and many in the audience had re-cently endured.A few years later, in 1825, the New York Spectator stheater critic commented with some irritation on the reaction ofthe African American section of the audience to a performance bythe British actor Edmund Kean playing Richard III: they rel-ished the sentiment of the play so highly, that they could not con-tain themselves, and their applause was obstreperous.The very ubiquity of Shakespeare in American culture had adifferent meaning to blacks than it did to whites.Indeed, the bodyof his work became an important part of the linguistic barrier thatwhites used to hem in the recently freed blacks in northern citiesand thus to continue their subjugation.The great dramatist hadrapidly become, for blacks, a suffocating presence whose wordswere frequently invoked to explain negative aspects of African70 STORIES OF FREEDOM IN BLACK NEW YORKAmerican behavior.In 1822, for instance, a white man in Norfolk,Virginia, believing that he and his wife were bewitched, killed ablack man whom he blamed for his problems.The National Advo-cate reported that the white Virginian got these strange notionsfrom a black fortuneteller, this modern witch of Endor, a ref-erence to Shakespeare s Macbeth.4 In late 1818, the same newspa-per related the story of a gentleman who retired for the eveningin one of New York s main hotels and, supposedly, began to readOthello.At the point where he was most interested with the bedchamber scene, he heard the sound of breathing in the room andcautiously looked under his bed, only to discover a gigantic black,who had concealed himself there for the purpose of robbery, orsomething worse. Here, the Advocate concluded, in a referencethat could hardly be missed, was Othello personified. 5Of course, Othello did its most significant cultural work in casesinvolving interracial sex.Apparently, any instance of a whitewoman being attracted to a black man was so horrible that news-paper editors were able to acquaint their principally white readerswith its details only by borrowing from Shakespeare.In 1827 theNew York Evening Post reported that an Othello has been recentlymarried to a Desdemona, who it seems considered him comely al-though he was black. In another case, a white woman was re-ported as having accosted her better half, who was a gentlemanof colour, and thinking herself slighted for some more favoredfair one, sought redress with a case knife, which she attempted tobury in the heart of her faithless Moor. In the unlikely event thatanyone had missed the point, the story was run under the caption A Female Othello. 6Not only did editors borrow characters from Shakespeare; theyalso appropriated his language, fairly peppering their broadsheetswith lines from the great bard s plays.In April 1820, the NationalAdvocate ran a hostile account of a meeting of free blacks that hadSTAGING FREEDOM 71been addressed by Garry Gilbert, a political hack who was seek-ing the black vote for New York Governor Clinton.The Advocatecaptioned the piece Black spirits and white, a quote from Mac-beth.7 This propensity to quote Shakespeare was most apparent inthe reporting from the city s courts.In the late 1810s and 1820s,the newspapers began to take interest in the life of the city s lowerorders, particularly that of the black population, but at least ini-tially writers seemed unclear as to what tone to take in writingabout them.The pattern that emerged was that writers would at-tempt to distance themselves from their subjects, archly droppingin latinisms or larding their stories with quotes, often from Shake-speare.The Sun s account of events at the Police Office in Octo-ber 1834, the morning after 26 dark shaded Five Point worthies.of every shade of coloring from the blackest Ethiopean, to thequarter blooded mulatto had been hauled out of a gambling anddrinking dive on the corner of Leonard and Orange streets, beganthus:Black spirits and white,Blue spirits and gray,Mingle, mingle, mingle,You that mingle may.8A few years later, whites who performed in blackface in the min-strel shows would parody this propensity, and of course perpetu-ate it as well, by continually referring to the authority of Shake-speare: you know what de Bird of Avon says bout De blackscandal an de foul faced reproach! 9All this helps to explain why the spectacle of a small group ofblacks performing Richard III on a warm September night in NewYork would challenge whites cherished cultural assumptions [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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