Booker T & Them: A Blues

Interlude 7

Interlude seven 01 Harris text.indd 76 12/13/11 11:25 AM In Which Is Related the Strange Out-of-Body Out-of-Time Encounter, with an Epigram, Stepin Fetchit, & Mach’s Principle of Gravity “De rooster chew t’backer, de hen dip snuff. De biddy can’t do it, but he struts his stuff.” —From Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) It is a strategy (Invent. Inventor. Invented.) adapted with great profit by Stepin Fetchit. It propels him also to stellar stardom. & now a Griffitherian cross-cut: (Invent. Inventor. Invented.) to a flash forward for a lengthy digression re Stepin Fetchit, before returning to POLARIS: See the 1920s & ’30s: Close up: Former vaudeville performer Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit. b. 1902, or, slow as he is, maybe it is really 1892. (Just below 01 Harris text.indd 77 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 78 ) the level of consciousness we hear a bedlam of hounds, applause, screams of laughter, screams of pain.) Fetchit credited with being the first featurebilled negro in an American motion picture. In a series of “delightful” “slices of Americana,” “period pieces,” & “family sagas,” Fetchit personifies squeamish, skittish, shiftless, mindless; a cipher (fit only for comic & psychic relief). He is a rascal who won’t behave, but is a threat to no one. Read this last line as (a) irony or (b) sarcasm, or (c) both. He reportedly makes more than a million dollars. Fetchit in stepping to fetch it, or do anything else, has mastered slow, almost no, motion. He, in his seeming lethargy, his natural or studied lassitude, is, perhaps, the prototype of Ernst Mach’s principle of gravity. Mach, 1838– 1916, asserts that all motion is relative & not innate in a body. The Austrian physicist and philosopher hypothesizes that the inertia of a body, any body, particularly, it seems, Fetchit’s lank & languid body, is determined by its relation to the force(s) of everything else around it. Thus, the “local” behavior of the body, particularly Fetchit’s, loath to work as it is, is influenced by the “global” properties of the universe. Thus Perry can argue, with Mach’s corroboration, that it isn’t so much he presents himself as ignorant & lazy, but that his frame-dragging is, considering with all due respect, Suh, 01 Harris text.indd 78 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 79 ) the totality of the phenomenon of time & space in the cosmology. & that is just the way thangs is. Maybe they is even meant to be that way, far as he can reckon, Suh. Whites love, are green-envious of, Stepin Fetchit. He, as they deeply wish they could, stops Time—Oh if they could truly do that, think how much they wouldn’t have to forget of their do-do doings & ways— & he is the quintessence of their idea of stopped progress for the coloreds. Fetchit is frozen in that make-believe belle epoch when their romantic self-reveries peak. So, yes, they love him even when he is ever so slightly getting his own way, snail-wiggling, like a stripper slow molting her sequins & feathers, out of some make-work chore conceived to watch him snail-waggle out of it. (Just below the level of consciousness we hear a bedlam of hounds, applause, screams of laughter, screams of pain.) Insert film clip. Judge Priest, 1934. Fox Film Corporation. Written by Irvin S. Cobb about “familiar ghosts of my own boyhood,” & who says of TR, “You had to hate the Colonel a whole lot to keep from loving him.” Judge Priest set in 1890 in a sleepy Kentucky hamlet, stars Will Rogers, world-famous, widely popular American humorist of the vaudeville stage, called, complementarily, 01 Harris text.indd 79 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 80 ) the cowboy Nietzsche, by the New York Times. Rogers/Priest promises chicken thief Fetchit/Jeff (billed, 1 below Hattie McDaniel’s 13th) a coon skin coat [writer’s emphasis] as pay for a minor chore. Fetchit/Jeff, overjoyed at the prospect of the discard coat, & with dozy zeal mumbles words to that effect. Asked if he can play “Dixie” on the harmonica he so happens to be holding, Fetchit/Jeff draaaaawlllllllllls he’ll play “Dixie” or, “Marching Through Georgia,” or anything else for dat coat. Fetchit/Jeff, slyly & Mercury-quick delivers his seemingly mindless, but caustically signifying slip-of-the...