The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-On-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (review)

Louis Chude-Sokei titles his study after Bert Williams, the famed—and infamous—symbol of blackface minstrelsy in America. But The Last Darky is not a biography; rather, Chude-Sokei explores a range of materials from and about the Harlem Renaissance, within which he consistently locates Williams as an influence. Chude-Sokei argues that Williams, who was born in the West Indies, retained an offstage identity outside of and in contrast with both his African American colleagues and the "real coon" he portrayed onstage. From this multiply-identified position, in Chude-Sokei's reading, Williams both observed and embodied the "emergent black counterglobalization that was pan-Africanism" (8). In his partnership with George Walker and throughout his history-making appearances with the Ziegfield Follies, Williams wore the blackface mask that won him the scorn of later generations who equated his stage image with the mechanisms of oppression. Chude-Sokei finds in this mask a more complex space of subversive play, and it is this subversive quality that he feels influenced Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Ellison, and numerous other political and artistic figures for decades after Williams's death. The Last "Darky" presents a series of theoretical explorations of the New Negro movement(s), followed by close readings of the Walker-Williams production In Dahomey and the writings of (arguably Williams-influenced) Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay.

In eschewing the structure of traditional biography, Chude-Sokei declines to present linear narratives either of Williams's life, his career, or of the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, the book begins with an evocation of Williams's debut performance with the Ziegfield Follies in 1915, and its penultimate chapter focuses on the 1902 production of In Dahomey. Throughout the book, these two theatrical moments are evoked, partially unpacked, and woven though discussions of assimilationism, separatism, anthropological theories of performativity, intraracial tension, gender conflict, and the multinational manifestations of on- and offstage "blackness" that the author finds lacking in previous analyses of Williams's work. Seeking to complicate the black-white binary, Chude-Sokei finds the non-American black elements of the Harlem Renaissance particularly relevant today, as immigration continues to increase "intra-racial cross-cultural competition," which threatens "to overshadow the rich legacies of creative contact and political interaction" (16).

Chude-Sokei's first three chapters are highly theoretical, drawing heavily from previous biographies of Williams (particularly that of Ann Charters) as well as the writings of George Walker and Williams himself. Williams's signature song "Nobody" provides the primary image of the performer throughout these chapters, as the author examines both Washington's and DuBois's endorsements of the Williams and Walker shows, with their appropriation of blackface tropes, as potentially uplifting for the emerging "New Negro race." Chapter 1 examines the self-erasure Williams experienced as he was conflated with "Nobody." This erasure was not merely the disappearance of an African American individual behind the burnt cork mask, but the loss of a distinctly un-American, Caribbean sensibility, which Williams worked to hide through careful study of the stage darky's persona. Chapter 2 delves further into this stage creation, holding up Walker's and Williams's claims to "natural" performance of "real coon" characters. This naturalness is seemingly authorized by Washington and DuBois, both of whom Chude-Sokei interrogates as representatives of the assimilationist movement. He links this apparent "naturalness," particularly with regard to Williams's blackface persona, to the concept of a black essence or "soul," which he critiques as a reductive, yet significant, development in African American identity politics. In Chapter 3, the careful, elevating approach of DuBois is contrasted with the riotous separatism of Marcus Garvey, whose carnivalesque call "back to Africa" collapsed in accusations of fraud against his own community. Building on a model established by Houston Baker, Chude-Sokei compares the "blending" tendencies of DuBois with the camouflage techniques of insects...