Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (review)

Reading about blackface is often like learning about sex from someone who hates sex; you're not sure why anybody ever enjoyed it. Whites enacting their ideas of blacks was wildly popular among rich and poor, young, old, from antebellum circuses through 1940s movies, and its echoes still sound in comedy, yet most accounts feature the writer's disapproval of racism. That may make us feel better, but it obscures the popularity and impairs analysis. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. avoids that self-congratulatory trap as he examines the career of Thomas Dartmouth "Jump Jim Crow" Rice. While engaging race as it haunts American performance, just as it haunts American life, Lhamon points out that ahistorical piety about racism "turns a tangle into a binary" (10). Instead, he leaps into the tangle.

Lhamon has done a great service in gathering this source material, 300 pages of plays and songs performed by T. D. Rice. Now those who study and theorize about T. D.'s potent blackface appeal have the raw material of his performances conveniently available. (Headnotes for each song and play would have helped. The footnotes vary in utility, some repetitious, some too spare.) The ninety-page introductory essay has its own value. Beyond biographical summary, the author makes the case that "Jim Crow" Rice was embraced by and represented both races in culturally significant ways. Like Eric Lott, Lhamon emphasizes blackface as a form of worker solidarity, whites and blacks thinking aloud about oppression, power, and opposition in the forum of public performance, exemplified by T. D.'s black characters' triumphs over whites. Sensitive to historical process, the author refutes the idea of blackface as monolithic by arguing that, after T. D., minstrel groups commodified blackface into oppression. Particularly intriguing is Lhamon's notion that blackface may be "the central metaphor for what it means to be an American" (1). Fascinating ideas, vigorously wrought.

However, three frustrations arise. The first stems from that authorial vigor. It feels peculiar to criticize an active voice while passive voices enervate so much scholarship, but Lhamon's is hyperactive, turning nouns into verbs, slinging metaphors with abandon, and inventing words, as if his writing could mimic his dancing subject. Fun at first, the zing becomes tiring. The mind yearns for simple sentences, even passive ones, that don't try to dazzle. Discussing T. D.'s burlesque Otello, Lhamon devotes a paragraph to coy innuendo: "Desdemona's song is pregnant"; T. D. "bodied forth the seed"; the play "delivers an objective correlative . . . of love"; Desdemona "delivers" (80-81). Because metaphors dominate the book, it takes another two paragraphs to be clear that he means an actual baby. Style is not the opposite of substance, but its means of expression; these verbal pyrotechnics obscure the substance, as if Lhamon did not trust his evidence.

With meaning seemingly assigned for literary effect, clarity wobbles, which is the second frustration. Did women watching the character Bone Squash really "worry this Bone" (54), a glimpse of historical titillation, or does Lhamon simply like the salacious pun? He labels his first section "Lateral Sufficiency" but doesn't explain his meaning. While he criticizes recent scholarship for freezing race, gender, and class into rigid categories because of a "lack of knowledge about the performances" (25), his next paragraph reveals what the rest of the essay confirms, that he focuses more on the scripts than on what T. D. did with them, i.e., performances. Routine comic bits—a finger bitten, a head-butt—are not "prodigious even for farce" (51). T. D. may have kept Iago alive in his Otello because of his "recognition of the larger social momentum" (87) of blackface, but Lhamon leaves the assertion unexplained and ignores the performance practicality that killing off a main character in this comedy would kill laughs.

Most notably, seeking to award T. D.'s preeminence as "the moment when...