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  • "A Mirthful Spectacle":Race, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Base Ball, 1874-1888
  • James E. Brunson III (bio)

To sum up the [Blue Stocking vs. Pink Stocking] game in general, it need only be said that, saving the single item of color it was like other well-played games. One peculiarity, however, was noticeable, whether accidental or usual we don't know. It consisted in an irresistible propensity for tumbling head over heels when in the act of running bases or going for fly catches.

The life of the stereotype resides in the death of its model, and the perceptual deadening of those who carry it in their heads as a schematic "search template" for identifying other people.

Sambo has caught the baseball fever, and two clubs from Alabama and Mississippi respectively, have recently had a match in Demopolis, the Alabamians winning. "Heah now, why didn't you frow dat ball to de fust base y'rascal you?"

Was blackness a metaphor for the material excesses of the postbellum Gilded Age-or for the stereotypical notion of African American baseball? One answer examines how minstrel theater penetrated the baseball sporting world and how the business of minstrelsy paralleled the rise of professional baseball-burnt cork artists played ball, literary and graphic artists portrayed colored games as blackface farce, and colored nines reputedly engaged in "Negro" comedy. Current baseball scholarship seldom mentions the post-bellum colored ballplayer, who brought to the game a "peculiar" style and became the object of blackness and agency in baseball representations.

Perhaps the most dramatic case of ethnic stereotypes is found in the melding of blackface performance and baseball representations. This image-repertoire circulated in the print media: sports narratives, illustrations, and cartoons. While the life of black baseball stereotypes has been incorporated into scholarship on the subject of minstrelsy-most recently, in works by Michael [End Page 13] Hatt, Mark Ribowsky, David Zang, Michael D. Harris, and Brian F. Le Beau-any analysis of the relationship between performance and visual-verbal representations has yet to be undertaken.1 One reason for this lack of critical inquiry is the controversy surrounding blackface performance and its integral relation to the history of American black cultural production. Iconologist W. J. T. Mitchell declares blackface minstrelsy's image-repertoire to be despicable and worthy of destruction, but he warns that racial and ethnic stereotypes seem to have a life of their own. If the life of the black baseball stereotype resides in the death of its models, as this blurring of the line between the blackface comedic mask and "colored" ballplayers suggests, then who does the "image-killing" and the "image-resurrecting"? The answer can be found by examining specific works that reflect on the adaptability of baseball representations.2

Recently, minstrelsy has been subject to intense scholarly study. Historian Eric Lott defines blackface minstrelsy as "an established nineteenth-century theatrical practice, principally of the urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit." For Lott, one of its functions "was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and finally to aid in the construction of class identities over the bodies of black people." The primary purpose of the minstrel mask may have been as much to maintain control over a potentially subversive act as to ridicule, though blackface performers' attempts at regulation also appear to have been capable of producing an aura of blackness. Lott calls this antebellum aura "the seeming counterfeit."3

For literary critic Saidiya Hartman, antebellum minstrelsy represents the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and locus of excess enjoyment. According to Hartman, the fungibility of the commodity-specifically its abstractness and immateriality-enabled the black body or the blackface mask to serve as a vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment. As such, black baseball representations have been replete with black bodies providing levity amid catastrophe. Baseball representations readily absorbed the antebellum era's stock darky characters or low comedy types to portray the colored ballplayer.4

Historian David Roediger notes that most of minstrelsy's political content was given over to attacking emancipation, civil rights...

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