Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof

Chapter 8. The Civil War & Beyond Back to Where We Began: And Notions of High & Low Culture; Dividing to Conquer, 186?–1871

119 Chapter 8 The Civil War & Beyond Back to Where We Began And Notions of High & Low Culture; Dividing to Conquer 186?–1871 VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: & it comes to pass that the North & the South gather together their armies. EYE OF THE BLACK VOICE: See them don they now their blue & gray apparel. VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: & go forth against their enemy. Hear the guns boom & blood cry out. Hear the muffled DRUM drum DRUM drum as they come to order, strike up the bands . . . (DRUM DRUM) & the land is rent in twain from the top to the bottom, fields are bloodied, cities cremated . . . & the rich get richer, the poor need more, & Time & the Press & Church & State & the AMERICANists Forward March as the bands play on, ONE, 2 THREE, 4. DRUM Drum { Bill Harris } 120 Lincoln, faced with a slavery condoning Constitution, showed both his cheeks as he waffled, wavered, wobbled & swayed, then, in a gambit to pulp the heart of Dixie’s “black money,” began, bit by bit, smidgen by shred to liberate by law & ploy, ploy & law, a politically correct chosen few, more to wound the South than heal the enslaved; lastly proclaiming the emancipation of kit, kin & caboodle to fight & forever be free. Abolitionists applauded. THE CONFEDERACY: (Panning the notion) The fight’s about the Union, not our niggers. THE ENSLAVED: (Eye the North Star. Flee.) VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: Drum DRUM Drum DRUM. EYE OF THE BLACK VOICE: 1863, The year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Buddy Bolden is born. He will lose his mind after picking up the cornet during the bloom of the post-war brass band craze, but not before forming the first jazz band. FRANCOISE SAGAN, née QUOIREZ: (1935–2004. French novelist.) “Jazz music is an intensified feeling of non-chalance.” VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: “It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America,” harps uncool Isadora Duncan. “Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.” She also declared, { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 121 “The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.” EYE OF THE BLACK VOICE: She, San Fran born (1878?–1927), revolutionary dancer, social critic, progressive thinker, theorist, advocate of the poetic spirit, inventoress of modern dance, fitness guru . . . VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: . . . thought jazz rhythm didn’t express America but expressed the “primitive savage.” Of Isadora, Teddy Roosevelt, who didn’t know much about art, but knew what he liked, said she seemed to him “as innocent as a child dancing through the garden in the morning sunshine and picking the beautiful flowers of her fantasy.” Was this, do you think, despite, or because of, her reputation for near nude dancing? Was the Bull Moose happy to see her or was that a big stick he was carrying? ISADORA: (Robes a-rustle) “We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.” VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: Isadora, you mean Like, Like, Like, primitive savages in, in, in like the Land of Opportunity, perhaps? { Bill Harris } 122 RASTUS: Was in her & she denied what it is for what it was. Typical of the undetected in the infected. Wrap itself around your throat—like, well—like, you know— VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: We conclude our Isadora quotes with, “The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.” RASTUS: Whoa, mama. Ignorant arrogance. Deadly. VOICE OF THE BLACK EYE: This & all of her strokes of wit were said or writ’ we must assume with that enviable but grating AMerican lack of the ironic. EYE OF THE BLACK VOICE: 1863 Congress passes Stay Out Of The Army for $300. Law is protested by New York’s Irish immigrants, a.k.a. b’hoys, Bowery Boys. PADDY: (Irish immigrant. Voice of New York’s Bowery Boys, a.k.a. B’Hoys) If abolitionists crave a cause, why not ours? Emancipate us. We’re closer in kind & care than these baboon’s cousins they seek to deslave. The coloreds are fatter fed, warmer housed, finer clothed than our malnourished, shanty quartered, ragged arses. & who champions our cause? Why, WHY should WE, “saucy boys . . . Irish teagues & outlandish jack tarrs,” with no way to pay, why should WE, go to war o’er...