Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof

Chapter 15. The Long March of Change Continues: Vaudeville Arrives, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois & the Blues (at Their Beginning) Return & Rag’s Infection Rages, as We Consider Voodoo, Thermodynamics & Continue to Hear Dead People & Living Spiri

186 Chapter 15 The Long March of Change Continues Vaudeville Arrives, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois & the Blues (at Their Beginning) Return & Rag’s Infection Rages, as We Consider Voodoo, Thermodynamics & Continue to Hear Dead People & Living Spirits 1898–1900 EYE OF THE BLACK VOICE: Look on 1898: See a change on the Great White Way. See blacks light out for that storied territory. See the 1st black written & produced Broadway musical: “A Trip to Coontown” truckin’ with a load of taxing whitemen’s baggage rattling along behind. To be disgorged, they hoped, along the rocky, uncharted road to Show Business wonder as { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 187 opportunity enabled. See the likes of Robert “Bob” Cole (1868– 1911), Billy Johnson (c. 1858–1916), & Paul Laurence Dunbar open the gates to a long march of unbound colored talent. PADDY: ’Tis as if rag-time is a force & influence unwittingly & unwillingly called forth by President Cleveland “which in all time to come shall influence mankind.” Maybe for his own & our, his constituents’, the Americanists consumers, sake he would’ve been better served if he’d left the lid on that black box, left the veil unlifted , let sleeping forces lie. Calling for creation is like calling down the fire. Either, upon igniting, spreads beyond the will or skill of its evokers or practitioners to contain its defiant consumption. & what’s to be done with these all black black minstrels who trespass against the Good Old Way It Was? Has good old blackened faced MINSTRELSY been ragged into the pale? Have these black black minstrels ruined MINSTRELSY for all? RASTUS: (Smirking) Seems these blackened faced white aspiring A-mericanists are too busy failing at being colored to matter any more. Ha ha. PADDY: (Whisper) Is (Gasp) Blackened faced white minstrelsy (Shudder) { Bill Harris } 188 Dead? VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: Change is upon A-merica. Change. Energy. Conversion. Transformation. At all points of contact; flashpoints on multi-fronts. Change is upon A-merica. See Walt Whitman, U.S. poet, carpenter, celebrant of universal brotherhood, sexuality & democracy, wearer of his slouch hat as he pleased, indoors or out. Seated, listing slightly left, vested, rumpled jacketed, white shirt opened at the collar. His beard like ocean waves crashing against a rocky crags of his cheeks. WALT WHITMAN: (Incanting from his poem “Reversals”) “Let that which stood in front go behind, Let that which was behind advance to the front, Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, Let the old propositions be postponed.” VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: Change is upon A-merica. Critiquing Whitman, Greek born, wholly malcontented, partially blind, husband of a Japanese wife from a samurai family, U.S. journalist & author Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) says, “Mr. Whitman’s muse is at once indecent and ugly, lascivious and gawky, lubricious and coarse.” Oscar Wilde, née Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright. Author. Poster boy for “The Love that dare not speak its name” & wit, wrote in contradiction, saying of Whitman, “He has begun { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 189 a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era.” Change is upon A-merica at all points of contact. Like evolution, like from 1 stage to another, like postulated by French naturalist, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829) & picked up on & developed by British naturalist Russel Wallace (1823–1913) & Charles Darwin—like how survival was about adapting to the setting, like the process of the slow & steady when some thing changes into some thing more multifaceted & better. “Historians will have to face the fact,” Austrian ethnologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) said, “that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.” Yas yas, the change of cultures & things cultural, like blacks about-facing the notion of acquired characteristics that blackened faced Daddy Rice & his knot of shams had pimped since the 1830s &, in the doing, rousting that mishmash of faux niggers from the entertainment woodpile & sending them pratfalling on their deceitful white rumps. & “If your buttocks burn,” to quote an apartheidistic white South African proverb, “you know you have done wrong.” Doodah. Oh, yeah? Like blacks who had been repeatedly dirty done? & continued grabbling between exclusion & inclusion, this time as minstrelsy gadded to the next stage. (Nudge nudge) Vaudeville, birthed...