On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Deconstructing Dixie

• • • Deconstructing Dixie Irealized with horror that Iknew those rubbery "Negro" humanoids on the screen. Those were my Saturday morning cartoons. As a kid, I'd watched all that jungle bunny stuff with unconscious, uncritical eyes. To see it again in Thought Music's deconstructed minstrel show at Franklin Furnace was to gag on that old racist muck. My legacy. Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn, and Robbie McCauley-Thought Music-put on the minstrel masks just to stretch them out. They make two assumptions. That those images still inform everything. And that no one wants to talk about it. America grew up on this shuck and jive. Minstrel shows began after the War of 1812 and by the 1840S were wildly popular. In Blacking Up, Robert C. Toll analyzes this "earliest uniquely American popular entertainment form" as a way for white audiences to work out their feelings about slavery. The caricatures onstage assured them that slaves were a peculiar, inferior, and happy lot. White performers in burntcork make-up had created a whole plantation mythology, featuring "empty-headed grinning darkies devoted to their masters." Real black people were allowed to join the shows just before the Civil War. But only if they, too, appeared in blackface and "acted the nigger." Sure, the images got more refined. But I knew the dumb TV bumblings of Amos In Andy in my own childhood. And I loved the land of zip-a-dee-do-dah. That's still America's paradise fantasy. Songs like "Swanee River" and "Summertime" push some sort of nostalgia button . Thought Music's last show, Teenytown, began with Carlos, Hagedorn , and McCauley in polka dot dresses playing washboard and spoons, singing hell out of "Dixie" and the rest. In Blacking Up, Toll concludes: ". . . the minstrel show, long after it had disappeared, left Deconstructing Dixie 163 its central image-the grinning black mask-lingering on, deeply embedded in American consciousness." By the end of a Thought Music show, we get behind the grin. But on the journey there we've gone through uncomfortable territory, perhaps hitting nerves at the Dorothy Dandridge/Hazel Scott sketch. ("Hollywood is just too hard without a white man.") Or at the exotic emigrant "what-race-are-you?" number. ("The trouble with us is we aren't even niggers.") Or at the monologue conflating the millions of slaves pushed off the ships in midpassage with a little girl who won't be picked to dance on TV because she is too dark and her hair isn't "good." Carlos and McCauley are black. Hagedorn is Filipino. They told me that after they performed at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, audience members questioned them: "How can you show this to white people?" McCauley said she thought the piece was hard for a new generation of black people who hadn't seen the really gross images, but could feel all the subtleties of racism in their lives. "Then when you present the strong images, they make a connection, and it's very sad." One older woman at the Schomburg was particularly upset about the cartoons. "Where did you find these.... I thought they were gone ... our dignity...." She felt ashamed. I had assumed that white people would feel ashamed. That black people would be angry. My misunderstanding made me feel more ashamed, made me feel like not discussing it. This is how these images do their dirty work. This is why racism is still a taboo topic. Once into the muck, it feels like quicksand. Racism, like sexism, has a lot to do with role-playing. Robbie McCauley grew up through the forties and fifties in Washington , D.C., and in Georgia. In the South, "you were clearly taught things to do in front of white people. And you accepted it as life or death.... Around white people, you really had to fix your face.... The smiling face. The serious face. But never the angry face.... It took me ,years to figure out how to look normal. I learned that from acting. How to be real." She'd wanted to be a teacher or historian, but found "some fire connected to theater." It taught her self-knowledge and self-esteem, when all along she hadn't quite liked herself. And hadn't known that she hadn't quite liked herself. In the late sixties, after graduating from 164 REGENERATE ART Howard, McCauley studied with Lloyd Richards at the...