Jim Crow
The next in a series about imitation and difference in American pop culture—and racial integration. It concerns the character “Jim Crow,” riffing on yet another piece from A New Literary History of America, the anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors—a Third Ear “resource bible.”
The anthology presents U.S. history through a chronological series of the nation’s “literary” “texts.”
“Literature” is anything in letters, and a “text” (textus—whence “textile” or fabric) is any artifact that “weaves” a narrative—films, paintings, sculpture, novels, photographs—whatever.
In A New Literary History of America: the speeches and scribblings of Puritans, Pilgrims, and adventurers; the Declaration of Independence; the Inaugural Addresses, Vetos, and Debates of Presidents; Constitutional Amendments, legislation and Bills of Rights; famous court cases; slave and Indian captivity narratives; maps, songs, plays, our novels and poetry. Everything from Linda Lovelace’s Deep Throat pornography to the country music “poetry” of Hank Williams and Chuck Berry’s “Rollover Beethoven.” The transcript of Alan Lomax’s tape interview with Jelly Roll Morton. Boxing bouts. Alcoholics Anonymous and the Pentecostal Church. Hip Hop, sports writing, NFL negotiations, baseball games—these are all “texts” in A New Literary History of America (2009).
Outdoing Nikole Hannah-Jones’ assertion, in The 1619 Project, that American history begins with the arrival of the first African slaves that year (in fact, there were servile Africans brought to the American continent a century earlier)— Marcus’ anthology begins in 1507, when “The name ‘America’ appears on a map,” and ends with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
The history that follows was inspired by W.T. Lhamon’s contribution to A New Literary History: “1830, May 21: Jim Crow jumps the American stage: Rogue Blackness.”
When I asked Greil Marcus to explain how Jim Crow went from being an African folklore trickster, to a blackface stage character, to the name of Southern segregation itself, and finally, by extension, led to the undoing of segregation through the interracial imitation in rock & roll—his response was: “Read Constance Rourke.” Meaning, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931).
I did. Her observations contributed to the piece that follows as well. Along with her influence on the “philosopher of the blues,” Albert Murray, and his opinions.
Boning up on my research of the author of the original essay, I found this old tidbit, attributed to W.T. Lhamon:
What this country needs along with justice and a modicum of dignity is a magazine that takes popular culture seriously, one that pays attention to the same things that Rolling Stone does [or used to], but at the level that the New York Review attends to books.
I couldn’t agree more.
“Jump Jim Crow”
After Stephen Foster was born on that auspicious Fourth of July in 1826, midst the death knells sounding for the man who immortally said that “All men are created equal” (Thomas Jefferson), and the second wave of bells tolling for the man who once said that “liberty once lost, is lost forever” (John Adams)—four years later, another American character was born, also to the sounds of music.
His name was Jim Crow.
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Blackface minstrelsy was already a nascent public art form in 1830, when stage actor Thomas D. Rice inserted a minor black character, similar-but-different from earlier stereotypes, into a play based on a short-story about radical democracy, The Rifle.
In the early 1820s, prominent American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest, acclaimed for his 1826 depiction of Shakespeare’s “dark Moor,” Othello—and for inciting the 1849 Astor Place riots that began with a feud between himself a British actor, created an earlier blackface character.
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According to Constance Rourke—writing in 1931 (when the word “Negro” was not the twenty-first century pejorative it is today, but a term of respect among the “New Negro Movement” and Harlem Renaissance literati)—in the early 1820s, at almost precisely the moment when Rourke’s other “primitive” American archetype, the Backwoodsman (eg. Davy Crocket, et al), appeared in legend and on stage:
…the southern plantation Negro was drawn on the stage in Cincinnati by young Edwin Forrest. Made up for the part, Forrest strolled through the streets, where an old Negro woman mistook him for a Negro whom she knew; he persuaded her to join him in an impromptu scene that evening. This little sketch seemed unimportant, but Forrest had studied the Negro character; he inaugurated a tradition for faithful drawing.
Other impersonations, like the caricatures of African-Americans by George Washington Dixon in the low-life Bowery theaters and oyster cellars of New York, would follow, and probably inspired T.D. Rice.
But in 1830, T.D. Rice would transform this particular blackface character into an American archetype, one who would later lend his name to Southern segregation. The character, whom all America, and soon the world, would know as a song, and a dance, called “Jump Jim Crow” (or simply “Jim Crow”), has African roots.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, stage name “Daddy Rice,” the actor who made Jim Crow a household name, learned to imitate slaves while touring the South. He allegedly took his character from an old black stablehand with a crooked leg and a deformed shoulder, whom Rice claimed to have seen dance and sing, and:
Weel about and turn about, and do jis so
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.
Rice supposedly learned the “jump” (the dance), bought the man’s clothes off his back (to wear as an “authentic” costume), and brought them to all the world on a stage.
What Rice was really watching, or claimed to have watched, in this self-mythologizing origin story, was the continuation of a folk tradition, a trickster figure transplanted from West Africa to the American South. Like the Raven or Coyote in Native American storytelling traditions, the Crow or the Vulture have a special place in West African folklore.
Often such tricksters are outwardly foolish animals, who nevertheless get their way through craft, cunning, and mischief. The trickster figure is universally one of the oldest archetypes in the history of human storytelling. Every culture has a version of the trickster, who is always a mediator of oppositional concepts—life and death, heaven-earth-and-hell, good and evil, people and animals, etc.
The founder of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, thought that because many of these animal tricksters—ravens, crows, vultures, coyotes, foxes—are carrion eaters or scavengers, neither hunters nor herbivores—this places them somewhere “in-between” the dietary classification of most animals, and associates them with the boundary between life and death, as some of them are literal “death eaters,” or scavengers of dead animals.
In other words, a trickster is what anthropologists and mythologists call a “liminal” figure, someone on the threshold, in-between. The trickster is mimesis and alterity, sameness and difference, simultaneously.
In transatlantic African-American tradition, in the New World, the Crow became a human folk figure, a man named “Jim Crow”—known for outwitting masters, escaping, and generally doing as he pleased. The black stablehand T.D. Rice supposedly copied would’ve been copying a popular song-and-dance based on this folk trickster.
Tricksters are central to African-American folklore and literary tradition, as they embody one of the basic survival strategies available to people in chattel slavery and institutional racism: remain calm, play dumb, and be smart. Make subtle observations while trying to manipulate the situation to your best advantage.
Or, as Ralph Ellison put it, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.”
Part of what Skip Gates and black literary and musical tradition call “signifyin’.”
What the Rolling Stones, in a cheeky outtake from Exile on Main St., claimed not to be doing (but were—copying and altering black music and lingo to their advantage).
The Afro-American trickster’s approach is part of the essence of “being cool,” as the Afro-Atlantic historian Robert Farris Thompson has it: trying to maintain some kind of calm and transcendent equilibrium in the face of extreme adversity.
To this day, the avian crow remains a trickster in-between. Outwardly squawky, sometimes comical, troublesome to farmers and planters, the crow is one of the most intelligent, big-brained corvids in the bird kingdom: capable of advanced learning, human-training, and the imitation of speech, just like parrots. They are also one of the few animals who, like the coyote, raccoon, and rabbit, have managed to thrive on the boundary of urban encroachment.
(There’s a large specimen perched on my garden fence right now.)
In the nineteenth-century, as Constance Rourke wrote in 1931: “the crow was a comic symbol for the Negro himself.”
As a black bird, no doubt, a comic symbol for European-Americans—as seen in Frank Bellew’s 1863 caricature of the Emancipation Proclamation: “The Bird of Freedom and the Black Bird”—where the freedman is represented as a crow with conspicuously large beak “lips,” shaking talons with the American Eagle.
Right up to the notoriously controversial blackbirds from Disney’s Dumbo (1941), who speak in conspicuously “black” dialect, as they joke about the elephant’s aspirations to fly.
This may help explain what, I thought, was an apocryphal story about the Black Crowes—who successfully covered soul classics like Elmore James’ “Shake Your Money Maker” and Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle”—a yarn I heard years ago on VH1’s Behind the Music.
The band’s producer at the time suggested they change their name from “Mr. Crowe’s Garden” to the “Kobb Kounty Krowes”—after their hometown in Cobb county, Atlanta, Georgia.
Frontman Chris Robinson was incensed: The Kobb Kounty Krowes? The KKK?!
“Fuck you! No way. What are you going to do? Drop us?”
I was shocked to discover, only recently, that the Black Crowe’s producer at the time was the otherwise amiable, musical monk Rick Rubin, who had just changed names himself, from his hip hop-oriented Def Jam label to the rock-oriented Def American records.
Whether the native New Yorker was messing with Robinson, didn’t appreciate his brand of Southern rock, was trying to get fired, or genuinely considered the “Crow” moniker off-color for a white rock & roll band… the connection between black crows and racism persisted in what was probably, for former hip hop producer Rick Rubin at the time, an uncharacteristically pointed jab. Or perhaps a lapse into the folly of youth, a stupid joke. Who knows?
Fittingly enough, the Black Crowes’ original name, Mr. Crowe’s Garden, was taken from a 1903 children’s book, Johnny Crow’s Garden, about a crow who sows a garden, which all sorts of animals attempt to pilfer—including the Lion, Monkey, and Elephant, the central characters in “The Signifying Monkey” lore of African-America (which I wrote about here). Johnny Crow’s Garden concludes with another animal trickster central to black folklore, who tries to help Mr. Crow: “the Fox, who put them all in stocks”—only to have Johnny Crow emancipate the garden thieves and invite them to his harvest banquet.
As Constance Rourke notes, nineteenth-century black Americans saw such “beasts and birds as emblems of himself and of others; his mood was of companionship,” between humans and the natural world, represented by symbolic animals in “alliance with man,” but whose “unchanging stress was upon the human character” of such animals—at a time when enslaved Americans were often regarded as beasts of burden themselves.
The African American folk hero Jim Crow suggests black nineteenth-century Americans may have also considered the crow self-emblematic, part of their own tradition of “cryptic bird and animal fables,” consorting with “the two sagest creatures in the animal world of the Negro, the fox and the jaybird,” per Rourke.
According to Rourke, even the actors who performed representations of such black folk allegories were “endowed with animal magic.” Reprising Orpheus, anticipating Robert Johnson and Led Zeppelin, “The jaybird habitually took a sinister part,” in African-American folklore and its white imitations onstage, “descending into hell on Fridays; and other birds and animals were freely drawn in symbolical relations.”
Author Joel Chandler Harris brought the most famous African-American trickster character, Brer Rabbit, to the attention of white America in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), his anglicized versions of African folklore.
In Songs of the South (1946), Disney brought Brer Rabbit, the Tar-Baby, and an idyllic Bluebird (perhaps Rourke’s jaybird) onto the shoulder of the world, in the new cadences of an old minstrel song, “O Zip a duden duden duden, zip a duden day.”
In this sense, Noel Chandler Harris (along with 1940s Walt Disney) is the literary equivalent of T.D. Rice: a white artist popularizing African-American folklore.
The fact that T.D. Rice happened to stumble upon an African-American trickster as his musical inspiration for a racial caricature is truly astounding, and raises all sorts of interesting questions. Mediating between black and white, Rice’s blackface character became the actual trickster he was imitating, and Jim Crow would help to cause all sorts of real-life mischief in the process.
Arguably, the Civil War. As Rourke notes:
…the rise of the Negro minstrel coincided with a marked change in his place within the nation. Little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when The Liberator was founded; and minstrelsy spread over the land and grew in popularity as the struggle for emancipation gained in power through the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. The Negro minstrel joined with the Yankee and the backwoodsman to make a comic trio, appearing in the same era, with the same timely intensity. The era of course was the turbulent era of the Jacksonian democracy, that stormy time when the whole mixed population of the United States seemed to pour into the streets of Washington, and when many basic elements in the national character seemed to come to the surface. The Negro minstrel was deeply grounded in reality, even though the impersonators were white, even though the figure was a myth.
He certainly stirred the proverbial melting pot, and turned up the stove. But in this sort of mimetic cycle it becomes impossible to disassociate the chicken from the egg, or the head of Ouroboros from his tail. It’s hard to say to what degree Rice’s “Jim Crow” was a symptom of social unrest, and to what degree he was its cause.
Historical hindsight tempts us with the illusion that “Daddy” Rice was attracted to a trickster figure because this archetype is by definition the mediator par excellence, a perfect symbol for transgressing the color line. It seems highly improbable, however, that an actor was actually interested in copying a central archetype of black folklore, so much as he was simply interested in copying black folks for financial entertainment. It’s hard to account for this uncanny coincidence.
What we can say with reasonable certainty is that Jim Crow invigorated a cycle of imitation, and social revolution, that would endure through the twentieth-century. After the social negotiation between “black” and “white,” or abolitionist and pro-slavery America culminated in the Civil War, followed by a brief period of meaningful social mobility during Reconstruction, in which Southern blacks fleetingly occupied seats of political power in numbers unheard of before or since, “Jim Crow,” which by then had become a pejorative term for African Americans, was adopted to signify the new system of racial segregation laws that bore his name (“Jim Crow laws”) as well as the era in which these laws were enforced (the “Jim Crow era”).
When these laws in turn were challenged, in the mid-twentieth century, the trickster came back to life and danced again, as a similar period of social and musical foment accompanied the Civil Rights movement, encouraged in no small part by young mainstream America’s fascination with black music, and its imitation by white artists like Elvis Presley.
The crucial insight to be derived from the exhaustive scholarship on the subject of Jim Crow’s blackface minstrelsy it that it was, literally and figuratively, not black or white, good or bad. It was both, in varying measure, at various times.
In important ways, Jim Crow introduced America to the possibility that a “black” character could do what he wanted, when he wanted, and where he wanted, with whomever he pleased.
Of course, like all forms of symbolic revolution, the revolutionary potential of Jim Crow was neutralized, denigrated and celebrated, then reabsorbed into the American status quo.
The generation of African-American stereotypes before Jim Crow consisted of deferential or dimwitted Sambos, or demur Dinahs and Coal Black Roses—characters invoking what cultural historian W.T. Lhamon calls a “calming blackness” invented to assuage white anxiety about uprisings and rebellion.
Jim Crow, on the other hand, was a provocative and oppositional icon. Still inherently and grotesquely “racist” by today’s standards, he none the less leapt to challenge previous stereotypes, and popular assumptions.
Rice and other blackface performers, like his partial role model George Washington Dixon, were young, white, working class men in their twenties, performing in a national popular theatre whose audience was itself thoroughly working class and disruptive—and often biracial.
To cop a pun from Lhamon, these young roughnecks used the Crow to flip the bird at bourgeois respectability. Working class theatre-goers in the North, black and white, came to watch Jim Crow musi-comically navigate America’s conflicted mass of racial feelings, while middle and upper class spectators came to watch the lower classes as much as the show itself.
A month after his 1830 debut, Rice was advertising lyrics to be sung by Jim Crow, written by the black New Orleans street singer, Pickayune Butler. By contrast, later minstrel troupes like Christy’s Minstrels used lyrics by “the first great American songwriter,” racial ventriloquist Stephen Foster. In this sense, Rice seems to have had at least some concern for “authenticity”—claiming he dressed in a stablehand’s rags, and later, actually employing a black songwriter’s lyrics.
A year after Rice debuted the character, Jim Crow was symbolically powerful enough that the Richmond Enquirer could use the phrase “jumped Jim Crow,” to denote someone who had “gone over to the opposition”—joined the abolitionist movement. By 1832, Jim Crow had jumped to the opposition, was advocating for equality, and condoning violence to get it:
I’m for freedom,
And for Union altogether
Aldough I’m a black man
De white is call’d my broder
…
An I caution all de white dandies
Not to come my way,
For as sure as they insult me,
Dey’ll in de gutter lay
In 1838, the Boston Post could proclaim, “The two most popular characters in the world at the present are [Queen] Victoria and Jim Crow.”
A mere mid-show novelty act had entered Western consciousness, and soon morphed into a full-blown theatrical form—the complete, three-act minstrel shows in which Stephen Foster found a new market for his sheet music.
Jim Crow jumped from the stage to the page, and made numerous literary appearances as well. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) features protagonist Ned Higgins (who shares Hawthorne’s initials), eating spiced cookies in the shape of Jim Crow, nine times throughout the novel.
Herman Melville’s Ishmael whimsically imagines his whaling voyage in Moby Dick (1851), “quite literally, in the display type of a minstrel theatre bill,” in three acts, says Lhamon.
Instead of three-part theater acts, the main attractions in Moby Dick appear as daily news items, which remain remarkably unchanged since the day Melville ripped them from the headlines, almost two centuries ago:
Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States
WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN
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The central trickster in another Melville novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), is Black Guinea, an African American crippled beggar (like Rice’s disabled stablehand)—who catches pennies in his mouth. As Lhamon observes, this is exactly what James Brown would still be doing a century later on the streets of Macon, Georgia, at the outset of his career.
Jim Crow the African trickster infiltrated popular consciousness on the fringes of working class theatre, in sideshows and entr’actes, as Rice’s imitation of a dancing stablehand. He later took center stage, as a stock character in the fully-formed, three-act minstrel shows (which Rice never performed in) that followed in the wake of Rice’s popular success.
At the height of the classic, three-part minstrel show in the 1840s and 1850s, these troupes were commonly banned in the South—for making fun of Southern plantation life, alluding to abolition, and humanizing slaves or freedmen.
The second act, or olio, was added to give performers time to prepare the set for the final act, and was often a sort of variety show that preceded the music and slapstick comedy of the third—both became the basis for vaudeville, which eventually replaced minstrel theater.
After the Civil War, as this form of minstrel theater declined in popularity in the North, a variation of it became acceptable in the South, as a nostalgic ode to “the Lost Cause” and antebellum life. (See the 1877 theater bill image above, which was likely from New Orleans.)
Black performers formed later troupes, and sang more authentic African-American spirituals, or “Jubilees.” Even in the early-twentieth century, Bessie Smith began her vaudeville and blues career under the tutelage of Ma Rainey, who in 1904 had joined a traveling tent show started by a black entrepreneur named Pat Chappelle, known as the “Rabbit Foots Minstrels.”
By that time, Jim Crow had become a stereotype, a racial epithet, and finally the name for the system of oppressive segregation laws from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century during the Jim Crow era.
Along the way, he became a signifier of racial difference, an icon of political opposition, and an irreverent rogue who thumbed his nose at respectable society and slavery, and lived by his wits—Huck Finn and his black buddy Jim racially rolled into one, as Mark Twain always dreamt (according to Leslie Fiedler, at least).
He was as ambivalent and indeterminate as the trickster he was derived from, a symbol manipulated at various times to advocate for abolition, as well as to legitimize slavery. Our historian, W.T. Lhamon, plays us out:
Jim Crow came into the house where all could rehearse the role, realize its incessant resistance to fit, and practice their reaction. Some saw themselves, or an energy they wanted to share, in Jim Crow’s volatile integration. Others saw in him a nightmare to outlaw. At its beginning, as now, this rogue blackness was a lightening rod summoning conflicting attitudes about radical inclusion, about real democracy.
On a final note, I think Constance Rourke and Henry Louis Gates have something to add, which might further explain why some versions of Jim Crow appealed to black, as well as white audiences.
For Rourke:
Minstrelsy was of course white masquerade, and the double use of the mask seemed to create a profound satisfaction for American audiences…it was part of a highly-conscious self-projection.
Gates, meanwhile, offers us another tale, about another African trickster, that makes it seem as if Rourke’s “double use of the mask” in the black and “white masquerade” of minstrelsy was almost predestined to become the defining feature of early African/American comic theater, and later blues and rock & roll.
And again, this black-and-white mythical precursor comes not from Europe or America, but Africa.
This time the trickster is Esu-Elegbara, the Yoruban spiritual mediator who appears at the Crossroads, the probable inspiration for the devil in the blues-legend of Robert Johnson, where he learned his chops.
Esu’s also the inspiration for the Signifying Monkey, another animal folk figure, the trickster Gates named his book after—his metaphor for the artist, the aping imitator who alters the stories which inspired him, as well as the critic— as interpreter between reader and “text.”
The myth is the story of “The Two Friends.” To Gates’ knowledge:
This myth is probably the most well-known of the Esu canon. Indeed, it is one of the canonical myths that survived the Middle Passage…
…from Africa to America.
Here (paraphrased, quoted, and “signified-upon” from Gates’ The Signifying Monkey) is the story of:
“The Two Friends”
Everyone knows the story of the two friends, who took vows of eternal friendship. But they forgot to include the spirit Esu in their vows.
When the time was ripe, Esu decided to put their friendship to a little test.
He made a cloth cap. The right side was black, the left was white.
While the two friends were tilling their fields, one on the left side of the road, the other on the right, Esu rode past them on horseback, wearing his two-colored cap.
When the friends took their lunch break, under the cool shade of the trees, one said, “Did you see the man in the white cap greet us as we were working? He was very friendly, no?”
“Yes,” said the other. “Very charming. But he was wearing a black cap.”
“It was a white cap, said the other. “He was riding a magnificently-decorated horse, the finest I’ve ever seen!”
“Then it must be the same man. But I tell you he was wearing a black cap.”
“You must be sun-struck—or blind,” retorted the other.
The two friends fell to quarreling, until some villagers had to intervene. The two looked to kill each other over what they had or hadn’t seen. But no one could stop the fight, or discover its cause.
Up to the fracas calmly sauntered Esu, hands in his pockets, pretending to know nothing of the trouble. “What is the cause of all this hullaballoo?” he inquired.
“These two close friends are fighting, and we can’t figure the cause,” said one bystander. “They look to destroy each other, and we can’t even make them tell us why. Please—do something!”
Esu broke-up the fight in an instant.
“Why do you two lifelong friends look to kill each other? Why are you making such a spectacle of yourselves?,” he demanded.
“A stranger rode through the farm,” explained the one friend, “greeting us as he went. He was wearing a black cap, but my friend says it was white, and that I must be fatigued or blind to think otherwise.”
“It was white!” insisted the other. One of them must be mistaken, he thought, but it was not he.
“You are both right,” said Esu.
“But how can that be?,” said everyone.
“I am the man who paid the visit over which you now quarrel, and here is the cap that caused the dissension.” Esu put his hand in his pocket and brought out the two-colored cap saying, “As you can see, one side is white and the other is black. You each saw one side and, therefore, are right about what you saw. Are you not the two friends who made vows of friendship? When you vowed to be friends always, to be faithful and true to each other, did you reckon with Esu? Do you know that he who does not put Esu first in all his doings has himself to blame if things misfire?”
Another African trickster, older than Jim Crow, wearing black and white, causing and quelling disturbance, who came to be associated with the mythical origin of the blues and rock & roll. Where we find him at his usual haunt, the Crossroads—that “devil,” Esu.
And so it is said:
“Esu do not undo me,
Do not falsify the words of my mouth,
Do not misguide the movements of my feet.
You who translates yesterday’s words
Into novel utterances,
Do not undo me,
I bear you sacrifices.”
—Traditional Oriki Esu
The praise poetry of Yoruban West Africa, to the spirit of the Crossroads—from “A Myth of Origins: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey,” by Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.
The prayer of the artist and critic. The prayer of the historian. My prayer for certain Americans in the twenty-first century, looking back in the smug certainty of their convictions about our irredeemably sinful past. You who translate yesterday’s words into novel utterances, do not undo me, do not falsify the words of my mouth.
History is more complicated, less black-or-white, and—to borrow a word from academia that has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, but here at the Crossroads, actually feels appropriate—more “intersectional” than we like to believe.
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