The Cinema of Racialized Attraction(s): The John C. Rice–May Irwin Kiss and Something Good—Negro Kiss

At 3 o’clock in the afternoon of January 1, 1897, Black musicians Saint Suttle and H. C. Winn celebrated the new year in Chicago by having professional photographs taken at Hough & Son’s photography studio in the basement of 308 State Street. Coming in from the cold street, they placed their instruments on a table and proceeded to pose for a set of photos under the studio’s newly installed electric lights. Twenty minutes later the musicians left the studio with six tintypes, apparently satisfied with Hough’s work.

Suttle and Winn proceeded to show the portraits off to friends around town. Something in their friends’ reaction—mocking instead of admiration, perhaps—led the musicians to return to Hough’s studio late at night to demand a refund. Finding Hough still in the gallery at 10 o’clock, they pressed the photographer: “Do you think that looks like me?” Suttle interrogated, throwing the tintypes on the counter. Hough replied, “Certainly I do!” Suttle retorted, “Well I don’t! And if I don’t get my money back there’s going to be trouble in this place.” Hough refused to acquiesce, and Suttle drew a revolver. Hough shouted “Murder!” and the police came running. Chicago police officer Lane arrested Suttle and Winn after a hard struggle.¹ We don’t know how the episode was resolved, but given that Hough depended on Chicago’s entertainers for business it is quite probable that charges were quickly dropped against Suttle and Winn. The tintypes have been lost.

In the following year, Suttle and his dance partner Gertie Brown were invited by William Selig to perform their celebrated cakewalk dance and other parts of their vaudeville act for Selig’s polyscope at his recently opened studio at 43 Peck Court in Chicago’s tenderloin district. After performing their cakewalk dance with fellow performers John and Maud Brewer, the pair indulged Selig’s request to film a kiss—a subject inspired by the popularity of Thomas Edison’s 1896 subject The John C. Rice–May Irwin Kiss. Suttle and Brown kissed four times for the polyscope, laughing and embracing with amusement. Selig produced and marketed the resulting fifty-foot film as Something Good—Negro Kiss, a title perhaps meant to invoke the gaiety and levity of the moment alongside the straightforward identifier “Negro Kiss.”

These two episodes in Saint Suttle’s career as an entertainer come to us in different ways. The first is through contemporaneous tabloid newspaper reporting and a story that might presume to suggest something specific about the musicians’ character, but it is more indicative of the culture of presumptive criminality that attended the Black male figure in the urban sphere. It also speaks to an environment where performance and representation—especially for African Americans—were significant social forces and so serves as a lens to see the stakes operating in the creation and circulation of images of Black subjects.

The second episode, the filming of Something Good—Negro Kiss, comes to us not as words but rather as images. In 2017, film archivist Dino Everett rediscovered the film among a set of prints he had acquired from a collector in New Orleans. Following his rediscovery of this rare surviving early nitrate print, he and I collaborated on identifying the film’s producer, dating it, and identifying its performers.² Everett then restored the film, and we nominated it to the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress, to which it was added in 2018. For the registry, the film’s significance was clear. As the earliest known surviving film depicting Black affection and a rare example of uncaricatured representation of Black people in early cinema, Something Good—Negro Kiss is a remarkable addition to national cinema heritage (figure 1).

What I offer here is a gesture toward how we make sense of this artifact and understand its assumptions and appeals. I propose that what Something Good—Negro Kiss enables—indeed demands—is part of a broader project of rewriting the history of...