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

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."

To a swell restaurant the driver took them With his Lulu gal he started in so proud But that coon almost went blind When he saw a great big sign Up o'er the door which read "No coons allowed."

No coons allowed No coons allowed This place is meant for white folks that's all We don't want no kinky-head kind So move on darky down the line No coons allow'd in here at all.

So this coon got mighty offended Commenc'd to swearing vengeance by the yard To be thrown down in the presence of his baby 'Deed it hurt this darky's feelings mighty hard.

So he rush'd on downtown to a lawyer And told him bout the sign that he had seen He said "Boss can't you sue the firm for damage 'Cause I think that I've been tre[a]ted mighty mean."

So the lawyer took the coon to the courthouse And they started in the courthouse with a crowd But his head began to swim When he saw that sign again O'er the courthouse door which read

"No coons allowed!"

In discussing black musical theatre, critics have all but avoided the thorny problem of parody - inversion, negation, and reversal - that occupied the lyrics of many black songs such as "No Coons Allowed!"(7) Margaret A. Rose maintains that parody "in its broadest sense and application may be described as first imitating and then changing either, and sometimes both, the 'form' and 'content,' or style and subject-matter, or syntax and meaning, of another work, or, most simply, its vocabulary" (45). Linda Hutcheon argues that both "irony and parody operate on two levels - a primary, surface, or foreground; and a secondary, implied, or backgrounded one. . . . The final meaning of irony and parody rests on the recognition of the superimposition of these levels" (34). Bakhtin describes parody as the employment of another's speech (in the case of "No Coons Allowed!" racist terms such as coon, darky, kinky-head, and so forth), introducing "into that other speech an intention which is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, having lodged in the other speech, clashes antagonistically with the original, host voice and forces it to serve directly opposite aims" (185). On the one hand, white audiences probably received the text of "No Coons Allowed!" as a particular joke on a foolish African American who momentarily lost sight of his subordinate status; on the other hand, the parody of American racism was probably not lost on black audiences.

"No Coons Allowed!" portrays the underlying despair of blacks toward racism. African American reality, as Du Bois pointed out, exists within a virtual "twoness," as "an American [and] a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" (215). The metaphor of twoness defines the unresolved tensions of African American consciousness. The character in "No Coons Allowed!" lives out "twoness" in dramatic terms: as an American and a Negro, the double dislocation of identity and non-identity, living through the burden of racial prejudice. The intense and often bitter narrative of "No Coons Allowed!" creates a fractured and destabilizing racial image of African Americans forced to endure humiliation, degradation, and disappointment. The image of the character in "No Coons Allowed!" is divided, indeed ripped apart, not by any self-committed act, but by an external culture that habitually reminds him of his forced status as an inferior in virtually every arena of social interaction: restaurants, court houses, and so forth.

Adding to the parody is the fact that the music of "No Coons Allowed!," writes Thomas L. Riis, "is upbeat and cheerful in spirit, in striking contrast to the text" (20). The dual theme of the song is constructed on a lyric/music paradox: The lyrics imply that one think through the debasing foundation of Jim Crow segregationism; the music, however, sustains a lively beat, with no hint of sorrow, rage, or frustration. The inventiveness and originality of "No Coons Allowed!" lie in the artfulness with which the lyrics parody white domination while the music remains within the minstrel tradition, appealing to both whites and blacks.

"No Coons Allowed!" also establishes an underlying resistance to the dominant discourse by employing what Henry Louis Gates calls "signifyin(g)."(8) For Gates, signifyin(g) defines "a uniquely black rhetorical concept . . . by which a second statement or figure repeats, or tropes, or reverses the first" (Figures 49). The reversal in "No Coons Allowed!" problematizes racism: The chorus becomes the "second statement" acting as a parodic commentary on the primary discourse. Moreover, signifyin(g) not only turns the lyrics back on themselves, but it complicates the foundation of racism, since the narrator who sings the lyrics is himself black. The singer, probably Bob Cole, surfaces as a Trickster figure whose commentary on the circumstances in the narrative problematizes racism by appearing to be "against" the subject. By endowing himself in the role of a racist, Cole undermines racism by stealing it from the mouths of whites. If African Americans call themselves "coon," "darky," "Sambo," or "kinky-head," it will not be long before the words themselves lose their racist impact. The singer internalizes the tale by acting as the mediator who says one thing but means another, who uses indirection as a means of persuasion, and who employs a discourse of implication. Signifyin(g) in black rhetorical strategies, Gates notes, is often representative of the signifier "who wreaks havoc on 'the signified'" ("'Blackness'" 131).

The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms defines parody as "an ancient device of comic imitation or sustained allusion meant to satirize previous works or ideas for the sake of humor or serious criticism by using the original form and/or content as a model" (Myers and Simms 225). The definition is important in helping to emphasize the complexity of the position black writers and performers occupied toward the subject of their portrayals. Since black theatrical productions were often forced to delineate their characters and dialogue within a proscribed framework patterned after minstrel theatre, parody and signifyin(g) evolved as principal means of satirizing minstrel devices.

Parody of racism and the sense of double consciousness in African American life surface repeatedly in the lyrics of black songs. In Aida Overton Walker's popular tune from the Williams and Walker production of Sons of Ham, "Miss Hannah From Savannah,"(9) the lyrics are unabashedly self-confident and proud:

My name's Miss Hannah from Savannah Ah wants all you folks to understand - ah; Ahm some de blue-blood ob de land - ah, I'se Miss Hannah from Savannah!

This song's assertive nature suggests, according to Richard Newman, the singer's "strong sense of identity and self-worth" (478). White audiences may have found the African American dialect amusing, but the paradox and double consciousness lie in the singer's defiant tone. She may be from Savannah (an allusion to black regional inferiority), but she is also an American (blue-blood). In Du Bois's terms, the character draws our attention to "the two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (215).

Aida Overton Walker recognized her own historical position as an African American woman and responded to it with skill and determination. Her awareness of historical context included sensitivity to conditions of race and gender and to theatrical conventions as these affected the circulation and reception of productions by and among black people. The Souls of Black Folk, for example, appears to have had a considerable impact on Walker's public discourse. Du Bois wrote that the "problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colorline" (221). Three years later Walker voiced similar sentiments: "In this age, we are all fighting the one problem - that is the color problem" (571). Walker wanted to capture the attention of white audiences, but equally, if not more, she wanted to foster an awareness of the conditions which African American performers had to endure. In a 1906 interview, she voiced the following outrage at her life in musical theatre:

You haven't the faintest conception of the difficulties which must be overcome, of the prejudices which must be left slumbering, of the things we must avoid whenever we write or sing a piece of music, put on a play or a sketch, walk out in the street or land in a new town.

No white can understand these things, much less appreciate them. Every little thing we do must be thought out and arranged by negroes, because they alone know how easy it is for a colored show to offend a white audience.

Let me give you an example. In all the ten years that I have appeared [in] and helped produce a great many plays of musical nature, there has never been even the remotest suspicion of a love story in any of them.

During those same ten years I do not think there has ever been a single white company which has produced any kind of a musical play in which a love story was not the central notion.

Now, why is this. It is not an accident or because we do not want to put on plays as beautiful or as artistic in every way as do white actors, but because there is a popular prejudice against love scenes enacted by negroes.(10)

In "That's Why They Call Me Shine,"(11) a tune Walker created for S. H. Dudley's production of His Honor the Barber,(12) double consciousness and parody surface again:

'Cause my hair is curly 'Cause my teeth are pearly Just because I always wear a smile Like to dress up in the latest style 'Cause I'm glad I'm living Take trouble smiling, never whine Just because my color's shady That's why they call me "Shine."

Not only do the lyrics echo themes in Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1895 poem "We Wear the Mask," the text signifies what Du Bois calls living a "double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes . . ." (346). The lyrics of "Shine" draw our attention to the double consciousness of racial identity, and parody racism through inverting the position of the signifier. The signifier (Walker) inverts the signified (racial identification; i.e., names), subverting racist signification. "Shine," Richard Newman writes, "is almost a song of social protest in its antiracism" (479):

When I was born they christened me plain Samuel Johnson Brown, I hadn't grown so very big 'fore some folks in the town Had changed it 'round to Sambo, I was Rastus to a few Then Choc'late drop was added by some others that I knew

So when these clever people call me shine, or coon, or smoke, I simply smile, then smile some more, and vote them all a joke, I'm thinking just the same, what is there in a name.

Bert Williams adapted "Somebody Lied," a song written by Jeff T. Branen and Evans Lloyd,(13) incorporating it into the third act of Bandana Land (1907-1909). The lyrics of "Somebody Lied," writes Bert Williams's biographer Eric Ledell Smith, "contain an element of political protest that is surprising for 1908" (98). Parody of the American Dream is clearly defined in the song lyrics of "Somebody Lied":

George Washington, so his'try says would never tell a lie; I wish there were more Washingtons I do I hope to die

When I was but a little boy, somebody felt my head: Says he "you'll be a President some day" that's what he said.

Somebody lied, Some lied you see, There never was a President that ever resem- bled me Somebody lied, As plain as plain can see Somebody lied, As sure's you're born, Somebody falsified to me.

bell hooks maintains that, whenever African Americans created music, dance, poetry, and theatre, "it was regarded as testimony, bearing witness, challenging racist thinking which suggested that black folks were not fully human, were uncivilized, and that the measure of this was our collective failure to create 'great' art. . . . Responding to this propaganda, nineteenth-century black folks emphasized the importance of art and cultural production, seeing it as the most effective challenge to such assertions" (105). Building on nineteenth-century aesthetics, turn-of-the-century black theatrical productions served as a mechanism by which African Americans could communicate and create in a culture that rarely permitted them the opportunity to exist beyond menial service. Through performance African Americans expressed and transmitted their creativity to black and white audiences whom they could in no other way reach. Moreover, the will to deconstruct "coon-song" minstrel stereotypes prompted several black performers to create an artful and aesthetic use of parody and double consciousness in song lyrics as weapons in the struggle against the de-humanizing effects of racism.

Notes

1. Gates specifically frames the years 1895 to 1925 as the intellectual formation of the New Negro in ideology and practice ("Trope" 131-32).

2. See also Sterling Stuckey's discussion on Du Bois's influence over black art and thought (120-37).

3. Walton quotes from an unidentified source in The Daily Blade of Toledo.

4. The Souls of Black Folk was published on 18 April 1903. By June of the same year, it went into its third printing. Five years after publication, nearly ten thousand copies had been sold. According to Du Bois's biographer, David Levering Lewis, for "a controversial work about African-Americans by an African-American, such sales were exceptional and, by any measure, the book enjoyed an impressive run" (291).

5. Cole's comments anticipate by a quarter-century W. E. B. Du Bois's argument for a black theatre that is "About us, By us, For us, and Near us" ("Krigwa" 134).

6. Found in the collection of the Moorland-Spingam Research Center, Howard University. I am indebted to Esme E. Bhan for her help in finding rare material.

7. I am thinking here of Sam Dennison's postulate that during the turn of the century songs "about the black were more brutally insulting than at any time following the advent of minstrelsy" (423). Dennison's research is extensive and thorough, and his argument is well-documented. Still, there were many song lyrics which used parody and double consciousness to undermine racism. The flood of racist sheet music during the turn of the century is undeniable. Racism in general emerged throughout the United States during that time, as evidenced by the rise of Jim Crowism, lynching, and racist pseudo-science. The efforts to resist racism in song lyrics, however, did exist, as this essay attempts to prove.

8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes that the "language of blackness encodes and names its sense of independence through a rhetorical process that we might think of as the Signifyin(g) black difference" (Signifying 66). Tom Fletcher speaks of a coded language within the black performing arts community: "It was before the turn of the century that the many colored people in show business introduced a language or dialect of their own which they called 'professional language.' A distinctly original creation, it enabled us performers to hold conversations among ourselves that could be understood only by those of us in the theatre or allied amusement fields" (317). For an excellent discussion of signifyin(g) in a more general sense, see Abrahams 109-13.

9. Music by Cecil Mack (Richard C. McPherson), lyrics by Thomas Lemonier, J. W. Stern & Co., 1901. Music Division, Library of Congress.

10. Pittsburgh Leader, 11 May 1906; found in the Robinson Locke Collection, at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Lincoln Center Library, New York, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation.

11. Lyrics by Cecil Mack, music by Ford Dabney, Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., 1910. Music Division, Library of Congress.

12. The production of His Honor the Barber had been running for a number of years before Walker joined the cast in late 1911.

13. Published by Will Rossiter, 1907; found in the Music Division, Library of Congress.

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A Trip to Coontown. Music by Bob Cole, lyrics by Billy Johnson. New York: Howley, Haviland, 1897.

Walker, Aida Overton. "Colored Men and Women on the Stage." Colored American Magazine Oct. 1906:571-75.

Walton, Lester. "Music and the Stage." New York Age 26 Nov 1908: 6.

David Krasner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

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