The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (review)

The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, And Class In African American Theater, 1900-1940. By Nadine George-Graves. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000; pp. 183. $45.00.

In the now well-established tradition of recuperating the histories of extraordinary women, Yale professor Nadine George-Graves has assembled the story of the Whitman Sisters Company, four African American women who produced and performed in vaudeville from the turn of the last century until the 1930s. Published by St. Martin's, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville brings to scholarly attention George-Graves' fine archival work which began as a doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University.

Intrigued by the once famous Whitman Sisters Company's lapse into obscurity, and undaunted by the scarcity of information, George-Graves pursued leads on the company's performances through notices in mostly small African American newspapers. The announcements and reviews helped the author track the Sisters' vaudeville circuit from town to town through the South, the North, and the Midwest. The chronology appears in an appendix to the book.

The Whitman Sisters danced, sang, and played banjoes. Mabel, the oldest, successfully produced and managed the touring company of thirty or so performers. George-Graves opines that making money was Mabel's primary objective. That an African American woman could be so successful in a world dominated by white men makes her and her company all that much more extraordinary and worthy of historical recovery. The company also gave many African American performers training and support, who in turn went on to have successful careers in show business. Some of these came out of the "picks" or child performers trained and supervised and held to strict codes of behavior by their stern and sometimes hard-spanking matriarchs Mabel and Essie.

But George-Graves has a more complicated agenda than recounting an African American theatre business success story. She sees the Whitman Sisters Company as a major player in the contextualizing of race, class, and gender issues in early twentieth-century American dance and theatre history. Alberta cross-dressed as a dapper young man about town. His/her dancing partner was the "baby doll" youngest sister Alice, who later became a solo night club performer. The four Sisters blacked up for minstrel acts, then later in the same show appeared as white women in blond pompadours. By performing what looked like white women with black men, the Sisters may have provoked anxiety from their integrated audience. George-Graves speculates that the whites especially would have become anxious with their aversion to any representation of miscegenation. Then when the women revealed themselves to be the light-skinned African American Whitman Sisters, the audience would experience relief and amusement, giving cathartic relief to the representation of a potentially dangerous situation.

A contemporary of the Whitmans reported that the women were discovered by a white agent who mistook them for white. They could pass, and did so sometimes, claiming kinship with Walt Whitman. But, says George-Graves, the Sisters identified with and remained loyal to African Americans. They specifically included in their company a dance chorus of women of many shades.

Mabel's representation of the minstrel role of "Mammy" exemplifies another way the Sisters deliberately performed racial issues. Appearing in the traditional minstrel opening of a plantation skit Mabel added religious songs to her characterization of "Mammy." George-Graves believes that Mabel, "by adding respectable religious songs . . ., was able to both capitalize on and critique this image of black femininity . . . to elevate her status and humanize her" (63, 64). The blacks in the audience would see that this was no stereotypical Mammy, even though the whites in the audience might miss the subversion: "blacks may have picked up on the more dignified portrayals...