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99 The Real Thing DAVID KRASNER I’m the real thing I dance and sing. —AIDA OVERTON WALKER, “I Wants to Be an Actor Lady” (1903) “We finally decided that as white men with blackfaces were billing themselves ‘coons,’” wrote the performer George Walker of the Williams and Walker Theatrical Company in 1906, “Williams and Walker would do well to bill themselves the ‘Two Real Coons,’ and so we did.”1 Walker and his partner, Bert Williams, did indeed “do well,” becoming the dominant black theatrical company from 1899 to 1909. Their productions of In Dahomey, (1902–5), Abyssinia (1905–7), and Bandanna Land (1907–9) were among the most bankable musical vaudeville shows on Broadway.2 At the peak of their career, George Walker reported the company’s payroll at $2,300 per week, making them one of the most successful companies of the time.3 In Dahomey attained success in London during its 1903 tour, and the company maintained successful engagements from there.4 Capitalizing on the “coon song” craze, Williams and Walker appropriated the term “coon” and applied it to their show. The script for Two Real Coons has been lost, but the idea of being the “real coons” was not lost on black performers. Williams and Walker, and their friend and rival Robert “Bob” Cole and his company, Cole and Johnson, displayed throughout their writings and actions an acute awareness of the “real” as a cultural signifier and marketing tool. For Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, interest in the real as a commercial device made it possible to break mainstream show business ’s color barrier. The real enticed white audiences because realism was in vogue. For the educated white bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, historian T. J. Jackson Lears contends, “authentic experience of any sort 100 DAVID KRASNER seemed ever more elusive; life seemed increasingly confined to the airless parlor of material comfort and moral complacency. Many yearned to smash the glass and breathe freely—to experience ‘real life’ in all its intensity.”5 Being quite cognizant of this fact, black performers sought to contrast their “realness” with white imitation. White minstrelsy’s “seeming counterfeit,” Eric Lott’s coinage describing a “contradictory popular construction that was not so much true or false as more or less pleasurable or politically efficacious in the culture that braced it,”6 was dissolving. Although blackface would be revived in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1940s, by the turn of the century America’s interest in racial “counterfeiting” waned, replaced by an obsession with the real. The “real thing”—to co-opt the period’s jargon —signified what Miles Orvell calls the “tension between imitation and authenticity,” which “has been a key constituent in American culture since the Industrial Revolution and assumes critical importance in the shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries that we have called—in all its encompassing multiplicity—modernism.” Orvell adds that the emphasis on realism eventuated popular productions that “catered increasingly to a taste for lifelike imitation that floated easily over the border between life and art. It was an excess of such theatrical representation—which might include everything from real food eaten on stage to real horses used to enact battle scenes”—that reflected “the taste for realism in literature.”7 When black performers created “life and art” by putting on the “coon” mask and attaching the term “real” to it, they complicated (and contributed to) the semiotics of realism in American culture. Following Toni Morrison’s call for a “re-interpretation of the American canon,”8 I hope to show that African American performers played a critical role in defining American culture at the turn of the century. Emphasis on realism in America at the time was certainly broad, but the significance of black performers’ contributions to this cultural event has largely gone unnoticed . Black performers are rarely mentioned in studies of how American realism took root.9 This disparity is due at least in part to the negative value judgment labeling realism retrograde. Such condemnation is exemplified by Amy Kaplan, who remarks that from “a progressive force exposing the conditions of industrial society, realism has turned into a conservative force whose very act of exposure reveals its complicity with structures of power.”10 I shall argue, however, that realism by black performers was a tactic used to dismantle the structures of power. Not all black performers opposed what was then the status quo; in fact, the use of...

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