Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930

1. Scenes and Scenarios: Reading Aright

chapter one Scenes and Scenarios Reading Aright1 The unique genre of lynching drama survives to enhance our understanding of U.S. culture between 1890 and 1930. During these decades, racial violence was often understood as a way of removing evil from society. Mainstream discourses and practices encouraged this interpretation, bombarding all Americans with the message that blacks threatened civilization and progress. In order to survive this era still believing that they were a race of decent people who did not deserve to be butchered, African Americans had to be cultural critics who read their surroundings dynamically. Many also became culture producers, providing art that both reflected and encouraged the community’s ability to view national tendencies critically. Lynching drama is one manifestation of black cultural criticism, and it reflects African Americans’ understanding that the most powerful messages of their time were multivalent. Their realities were shaped by communication that involved language but was never limited to it. Because meaning is created and conveyed not only through words but also through gestures, objects, and movement, there are countless resources for creating signs and symbols that represent and reinforce ideas and identities.2 Emerging from a rigorous interpretation of their surroundings, lynching drama indexes African Americans’ recognition that the turbulent decades of the Progressive Era made embodied practice important to all U.S. citizens. As a result, the genre of lynching drama provides access to what performance theorist Diana Taylor would call the archive and the repertoire of turn-of-the-century U.S. culture. As Taylor insists, “the archive” refers to “supposedly enduring materials” such as texts and documents, while “the repertoire” signifies “performances, gestures, orality, movement”—that is, practices that “enact embodied memory” (19–20). Western scholars have consistently privileged the archive, treating it as a resource whose content can be trusted because it is supposedly resistant to change and corruption. On the other hand, the embodied practices of the repertoire have been deemed fleeting and unreliable, having little importance in the production of knowledge. Taylor reminds us, however, that “the archive and the repertoire exist in a constant state of interaction” (21). Therefore, they should be examined together and on equal footing, and black-authored lynching plays present an opportunity to do just that. In fact, plays written by blacks at the height of mob violence emphasize the degree to which the nation accepted lynching as a valid scenario of exorcism.3 As Taylor explains, a scenario is a well-worn sketch or outline of action. Because it “resuscitates and reactivates old dramas,”“the scenario makes visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes” (28). Thus, a scenario “structures our understanding,” and “because we’ve seen it all before,” it can do so even if there are omissions (28). Racial violence was often interpreted as a legitimate scenario of exorcism because it contained what citizens had seen before: supposedly righteous white men casting out the evil forces that might threaten their wives and children. Though lynching was not always racially motivated, its most culturally significant form was inspired by a white supremacist impulse.4 After the Civil War, when blacks were no longer property, there was no financial reason not to kill them. This is when lynching took on the characteristics that we now associate with the term; that is, when lynching became ritualized murder. As Trudier Harris and others have established, crowds soon counted on a familiar ceremony. A sort of script developed, which included obligatory accusation and forced confession, followed by mutilation and souvenir hunting.5 Quite consistently,“white men, women, and children would hang or burn (frequently both), shoot, and castrate the [alleged] offender, then divide the body into trophies” (Harris 6). These predictable steps, and their standardization across the country, reflected white agreement with mainstream declarations that African Americans were immoral and bestial, that they were not citizens and perhaps not fully human. The torture of black bodies was therefore invested with significance. These rituals were possible and meaningful because, in the sign-system of U.S. society, the black body was consistently presented and interpreted as a sign of evil and immorality, as a symbol of all that would destroy the nation. Thus, when lynching became racially motivated, it also became theatrical; mobs created and conveyed meaning not only with words but also with 24 making lynching drama legible props, gestures, sounds, and movement. In essence, they...