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 5. The Middle Passage: P. T. Barnum, History as Entertainment in Multi Voices, 1835–1842

41 Chapter 5 The Middle Passage P. T. Barnum, History as Entertainment in Multi Voices 1835–1842 But back to the 1830s: ’35, specifically, nearing the end of the Jacksonian era. The aforementioned abolitionist Garrison at the end of a pro-slavery mob’s rope, is dragged, half naked, over Boston cobblestones. A pattern emerges: abolitionists scold, theorize, sermonize, BLACK FACE MINSTRELS finding their form & way, act. Entertain. That same year, 1835, the U.S. cedes the Florida Seminole’s land. Under Osceola’s leadership the Seminoles & their black slaves exterminate 103 insurgent U.S. troops. Osceola is killed after a 2 year guerrilla war. The final solution to the problem, his people’s extermination, takes a couple more years. That same year, 1835, Phineas Taylor Barnum, “P.T.” (1810–1891), buys a black woman. One Joice Heth. She looks like an Egyptian mummy. She, it was claimed, had been nurse & breast feeder to Washington, George (1732–1799), when the big daddy of his country to be was her dear little George was he. Heth, { Bill Harris } 42 a slave, becomes the main attraction in Barnum’s first show business undertaking. “Humbug,” critics claimed. When she dies next year it is claimed she, Joice Heth, “is only 70some -odd.” Sadder but richer, Barnum’s meager freak fare, gathering no loss, rolls on. Just about then (still in the 1830s), buoyed by the up-beat down-beat, a-marching ONE, 2, THREE, 4, Hi-Ho-Hi-Ho, seeking inroads & a place in the sum, the aspirant immigrant AMERICANs go, “strong brawn’d,” as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), poet, nurse, nomad, sage, an eyewitness, calls them, off on their “journey-work” (the good gray poet again), off to the stalls, mills, mines, carts, railbeds, docks & shops, whistling Stars and Stripes Forever, clippity THREE, 4! clopp! while chasing the common wage, &, when, from the ranks of workmen a body of whites (naturalized or aspiring) meets a body of free &/or enslaved blacks to heft, heave & ho, supplying the wants & demands of AMERICA ’s consumers, there is, THE GREATEST NATURAL & NATIONAL CURIOSITY IN THE WORLD AGE OF 160 YEARS { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 43 to hear the alarmed elite relate it—a mongrel commingling of Pandora’s boxfuls of ethnic myths, music & mannerisms; an agglomeration, a mélange (hoarded from across the seas like vulgar secrets), some of the sum of particulars from the hierarchy of their lowly folks’ folk inheritances: (Ha Ha) polkas & jigs & flings & reels; & airs & tunes & strains & chants & shouts. Distilled extrinsic vestiges (Doodah) that drip, drop, dribble, spew & spout: a hybrid olio sluice, siphoned through the AMERICAN negro, without, the alarmed elite fear, “our sanction or supervision & will culminate in a crescendoing slosh & swirl, reshaped in the vessel of its newfound mold: AMERICAN MINSTRELSY in BLACK FACE, Black Face “a person made up as a Negro . . . make-up used by performers of Negro roles, usually exaggerated for comic effect,” Doodah Doodah Da. Still, at first & for a time they theater together: the new made in A-MERICA working class “just folks” folks in their “pit” & whores & aspiring sow’s-ear rag-ruffians, immigrants & blacks, each in their separated sections, segregated from the similarly segregated silk-purse whites in their boxes, for a programme as varied as the mix & flux of its onlookers: songs & dances comic & somber, arias, recitatives witty or bleak, comedia dell’arte: mocking but mild { Bill Harris } 44 ridicules & broader burlesques on the conduct & crudities of said foreigners, rustics, coloreds & fools. It’s ’round about then (late 1830s), when Abolitionists are demonized as Damn Yankee interlopers; a fractious array of free blacks, Quaker quacks, meddling moralist dogmatics, free soil fanatics, Union partisans, radical Republicans, all with their absurdist, cutting wedge notions of the (Hah Hah) humanity of niggers. Figures. “It’s the redman’s fault in the first damn place,” many think. “If they’d displayed any aptitude for work or authority the Africans could have been left where they were.” “We’re better off here,” we slaves are told, “than back in our African land of old. So much better off we should be overjoyed, here, in A-MERICA, at least we’re employed. & since we’re ‘naturally’ fit for labor ‘too low for whites’ our presence means the good old U.S.A. benefits too, by our lack of rights.” Well, alright. Aside: 1835 Sierra Leon: Sengbe Pieh (c. 1813–1879), father of 3, is kidnapped by 4 men on a narrow road. He is...