Notes on Olauda Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

 

 

     The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is well-written, though of less value as literature than as history.  Equiano himself declares that he has “no wish to adorn the plainness of truth” in his account (Ch. XII).  The historical information transmitted by slave autobiographies such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) cannot be disputed.  Equiano was early in the tradition, but he was not the first to compose such a memoir: A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince had appeared in 1772 and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho in 1782.  Equiano's story work remains a critical resource in understanding racial attitudes during his era and even today.  When Equiano wrote, slavery, though central to the American economy, was already controversial.  Debated in the Continental Congresses, the issue was put off in the interest of unity; banned in four states when the Interesting Narrative was published, it continued unrestricted in others for another three-quarters of a century.  As a victim and a contemporary analyst, Equiano’s insights throw dramatic light on several aspects of the barbaric practice. 

 

1

     Equiano places the origins of racism squarely on economic motives, saying that he does not suppose that those who mistreat Africans “are born worse than other men, they are “debauched” and “harden” themselves through “avarice” which “corrupts the milk of human kindness, and turns it into gall” (Ch. V).  Indeed, before the establishment of the slave trade and the immense profits it brought both shippers and plantation owners, Europeans typically regarded Africans as inhabitants of distant kingdoms rather like their own.  Shakespeare’s Othello is clearly noble and Iago’s racist jibes are untrue, symptoms of envy and malice.   Ne Vunda, ambassador of the Kingdom of Kongo to the Vatican during the sixteenth century, was honored with burial in Santa Maria Maggiore.  During the same period, Juan Latino, born a slave of Ethiopian origin, became professor of Latin at the university in Granada and the mixed-race Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence, called “il Moro,” became the first Duke of Florence.  The greed that magnified racism in the interest of economic interest is evident in the multiple times whites swindle Equiano even after he has attained free status.

 

2

     Race is further demonstrated to be incidental rather than essential to the practice of slavery by the fact that Equiano’s own Ibo father kept slaves and that he was owned by a series of Africans before being sold to whites.  Debit could bring any individual into slavery in  ancient Babylon and, though foreigners and war captives were enslaved in ancient Greece and Rome, criminals were as well, without regard for ethnic origins.  At a time when Britain represented the very margin of the known world, Bede relates an anecdote about Pope Gregory I (540-604 C. E.) commenting that the English youths offered for sale looked more to him like angels than Angles.  The word “slave” itself is derived from Slav because of the early medieval practice of capturing slaves in Eastern Europe.  Finally, even during the times of New World chattel slavery, the many native American and Black slaveholders proved that racial identity was not in fact essential in distinguishing slave from free status.  Rather than the source of white supremacist ideology, the myth of African inferiority is a rationalization to justify a patently immoral yet profitable system.

 

3

     Equiano specifically focuses on the injustices he suffers because of his African origins, scanting most other topics apart (from his religious enthusiasm), so the reader may well be surprised when, in the last chapter, in the second clause of a sentence, after noting his attendance in the House of Commons for its debate on ending the slave trade, he suddenly inserts, as though incidentally, “and was married on the 7^th of April to Miss Cullen, daughter of James and Ann Cullen, late of Ely.”  This is the sole mention of his wife. 

     The marriage was announced in a variety of publications, including the General Evening Post, the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Literary and Biographical Magazine, and British Review.  Several of these accounts note the groom’s prominence, the lavish table, and the large company of guests, while none records anyone’s objection to the match.  There had, in fact, never been laws against interracial marriages in the U. K. or in Europe.  This unanimity only became international in the twentieth century with the United Nations' inclusion of the right to marry "without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

     Americans who are surprised at the eighteenth-century acceptance of Equiano’s marriage are influenced by the United States status as an outlier, accompanied only by the likes of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa in prohibiting what in America came to be called miscegenation, a word designed to sound like an abnormality.  (The term was invented by pro-proslavery advocate David G, Croly in an 1863 pamphlet and has been little used in other countries.)  Because of the unique place of slavery in the American economy, such unions were long banned by law, beginning with a statute passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691.  Even at that time a certain Zephaniah Kingsley published an essay praising intermarriage, as a cause of healthier and more beautiful children, and better citizens.  Not until 1967 did the Supreme Court strike down such laws. 

     The peculiar American horror at sexual contact between Africans and Europeans, though belied by the commonplace rape of slaves and later by Black prostitution, is evident in the history of lynching.  The most common excuse for mob violence was disrespect for a white woman and the victims often suffered sexual mutilation.  Equiano was being prudent when he chose to live in the United Kingdom.

 

3

     Once Equiiano was converted to Christianity, he regarded himself as an adherent of the Church of England.  Yet he continued to be tormented by doubts, not about theology but about his own chances for salvation until he experienced a renewed commitment to the faith under the guidance of a Dissenter, very likely a Methodist, who guided him to a rebirth, relieving his fears.  While the efforts of the Society of Friends for social justice are well-known, in eighteenth-century Britain Methodists were also prominent in the struggle.  Wesley himself was deeply involved, corresponding with Wilberforce and writing in his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) that slavery was an “execrable villainy.”  In the United States, though, the issue caused the defection of supporters of slavery who, more than a generation after Equiano’s death, formed the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  More generally, the evangelical movement, including low church Anglicans, was likely to insist on the equality of all souls in God’s eyes, and, more broadly yet, religious groups as a whole have formed a significant element in many progressive coalitions, including nineteenth-century American abolitionism and the twentieth century civil rights movement.

 

4

     Although, as noted, Equiano claimed no literary value for his book, his articulate mastery of proper English doubtless served as strong prima facie evidence for his equality with Europeans.  Just as Frederick Douglass’ rhetorical powers impressed his audiences, apart from what he had to say, any reader of the Interesting Narrative must respect its author’s intelligence simply because of his skill at using language.  Although he certainly had to educate himself first in the English language and then in the conventions of European rhetoric, oratorical skills were highly regarded in oral African societies.  Readers of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart which depicts pre-colonial Ibo society (as well as The Arrow of God, a novel set in more contemporary times) will be familiar with the high prestige attached to verbal ability among the people of Equiano’s tribe.  I personally recall that, when I taught in what us now Delta State, Nigeria, that teachers’ meetings could occupy an entire day (to the detriment of instruction) as speakers rose to make elaborate, polite, and flowery statements as though they were in the Oxford Union or the House of Commons even on issues over which they had no control, seemingly for the pleasure of the rich language and the admiration of their colleagues.  When I complained about the protracted orations to the headmaster, he (a Yoruba man educated at the University of Kent) commented, “I think you Europeans have a different sense of time.  Why be always in a hurry?”

The Contradictions of Minstrelsy: Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses refer either to stanzas in “Jim Crow” or to lines in “Zip Coon,” and “Gumbo Chaff.”  The poems are appended. 

 

      The minstrel show was a leading form of American popular entertainment for decades.  What had been enjoyed as simple entertainment lost its savor when the form was eventually recognized as aggressively and perniciously racist.  Already in its heyday Frederick Douglass denounced minstrelsy with righteous anger, castigating the performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.” [1] 

     Douglass’ unqualified condemnation, while justifiable in a polemic, is reductive.   His disgusted rejection of minstrel entertainment contrasts dramatically with the attitude of W. E. B. Du Bois whose defense of the contributions of Black artists included “American music built on Negro themes . . . such as ‘Old Black Joe’” as well as praising James Weldon Johnson and composer Will Marion Cook whose works were, doubtless for commercial considerations, sometimes clearly derivative of minstrelsy. [2]  The penetration of minstrelsy to the most sophisticated Black artists is evident in Cook and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s operetta Clorindy: the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) which was heavily influenced by the genre’s conventions and included songs like "Who Dat Say Chicken In Dis Crowd" and “Hottest Coon in Dixie.”

     In their time minstrel shows were nationwide popular culture in a young nation, and were valued by many as a sort of unique national culture.  For some sympathetic to Black culture, far from being degrading, minstrel entertainments allowed music arising from African-American culture to become popular and “cross over” to a wider audience.  Since “negroes” were “the true originators of this music,” its performance might allow the race to “aspire to an equality with the musical and poetical delineators of all nationalities.” [3]  A popular music magazine in 1856 lamented the lack of musicality of many white Americans, noting that “we are still dependent on foreigners [Italians and Germans] for our music,” since “the only musical population of this country are the negroes of the south.”  “Compared with our taciturn race, the African nature is full of poetry and song. The Negro is a natural musician.”  The apparent praise arises, however, from a Romantic and racist premise: “the African nature is full of poetry. Inferior to the white race in reason and intellect, they have more imagination.” [4]

     A similar ambivalence is reflected in a comprehensive and detailed survey of Black performance in America published in 1889 which noted that that minstrelsy was “the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly, it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music.”  The qualifying phrase questions whether Black art can be art at all, while at the same time it concedes the quality and distinctly American character of performances developed from African-American materials. [5]

     The historical context confirms the ambiguity of what today seems an outrightly offensive art.  Minstrelsy began in New York City and its leading performers were virtually all Northerners and no defenders of slavery.  Performers like Thomas “Daddy” Rice claimed to be imitating valued Black models.  As an actor Rice sometimes played Uncle Tom in blackface in the extremely popular enactments of the novel which served as propaganda for the anti-slavery cause.  Dan Emmett, the founder of the first troupe of minstrel performers, was from frontier Ohio.  He, too, was an opponent of slavery and reportedly regretted having written his biggest hit “Dixie” when the South made it an anthem (Lincoln was very fond of the song as well).  [6]  Though his dialect songs no longer find listeners, Henry Work Clay in “Kingdom Coming” expressed rebellion against master and overseer and celebrated liberation (“ De whip is lost, de han'cuff broken”) in his work while in his life he maintained an Underground Railway stop.      

     Recent studies have argued for the complexity of the theatrical phenomenon.  A recent popular account claims that minstrel shows expressed a progressive point of view and attracted a multi-racial audience specifically because they “embodied the strivings and frustrations of laborers of all races and circumstances who were wise to their oppressive masters.”  In this writer’s view the blackface character is a “compellingly transgressive cross-racial persona, with its slyly veiled but unmistakable challenge to power.”  [7]  A scholarly treatment elides race while suggesting that minstrelsy was progressive.  The shows “represented, in a comic way, the natural and democratic values usually fostered by the Indian, the Yankee, or the frontiersman against artificiality and elitism.” [8]  Calling the minstrel form “shot through with ambivalence,” another academic study raises the possibility that blackface manifested a genuine “African-American people’s culture,” [9] while yet another notes that in general early “minstrels deplored the cruelty of slavery.” [10]

     Ambivalence emerges inevitably from the blackface tradition.  While the comic figures of the minstrel stage were portrayed as buffoons (a fate common to many comic characters), their antics accompanied the movement of music based in part on Black models to the center of popular taste, a dominance now globalized with the influence of blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues.  In this way the rise of minstrelsy might, like the prominence of Gnaoua musicians in Morocco, be viewed as a result of West African musical genius.  The fact remains that the minstrel stage constructed and perpetuated negative racial stereotypes which, while likely reassuring to the white audience, were socially destructive.  Despite this general effect, the songs and skits could sometimes express authentic aspirations of African-Americans while satirizing the master class.  Some minstrel comedy is embodied in projections of desire which apply to all people. 

     The polyvalence of what might seem on the surface a simple and unambiguous set of conventions is in fact inherent in its essence.  A masquerade in which a white person aped a Black (reminiscent of African masquerades and forgotten European ones) was capable of further turns.  Soon Black performers were imitating white ones imitating Black ones.  Once the African-American with the stage name of Juba (William Henry Lane) became sufficiently celebrated (in part through Dickens’ description of him in American Notes) to attract imitators, a viewer witnessing their derivative shows could see a white man pretending to be a Black imitating a white person in the role of a Black one.   The vertigo of such a situation is unsettling and clearly problematic.

     The original texts of the classic minstrel characters provide a body of evidence more direct and revealing than theoretical speculation or circumstantial historical investigation.  Among the most celebrated of the early minstrel characters were Jim Crow, originated by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, Zip Coon, performed by George Washington Dixon, and Gumbo Chaff, performed by both Rice and Dixon.  An examination of the songs attributed to each of these contributes to an understanding of the racial attitudes of the performers and their audiences.   

     The Jim Crow spectacle doubtless centered on the dancing which was surely expert but also exotic, and likely a bit grotesque.  Rice’s model was a disabled man whose performance entertained people in the same way as kings had once been amused at dwarfs.  The improbable makeup must have had a comic impact like Groucho Marx’s mustache when it was painted on, or Chaplin’s villains’ towering eyebrows.  These significant elements are lost.  The character of Jim Crow underwent considerable reuse and adaptation on the minstrel stage and beyond, but the present analysis, like those that follow, is based on the text of the original poem alone.

     Jim Crow appears in Rice’s song fundamentally as a hero, a man of prodigious abilities and appetites, a fighter and a lover.  With physical strength sufficient to “split a horse block” (13) he is “full of fight” (5).  The song concludes with an aggressive challenge to racists.

 

An I caution all white dandies,

Not to come in my way,

For if dey insult me,

dey'll in de gutter lay.     (44)

 

     Like Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Lancelot, Jim Crow is a lover as well.  He cannot stay away from the river due to the many “galls” there.  He admires women in Hoboken, too, where he sees them “drinking lemonade.” (26)  He is enthusiastic about marriage and looks down on divorce, imagining himself proudly strolling down Broadway with his wife on his arm. (40-42)  This final image is in a way definitive: what Jim Crow wants is respect.

     The song, however, is comic, enlivened by carnival spirit including the sort of fanciful boasts characteristic of the tall tales associated with the frontier.  Just as Davy Crockett was said to claim to be able to “whip my weight in wildcats” [11], Jim Crow boasts, “I wip my weight in wildcats.” (7)  Crockett claims to be “half alligator,” while Jim Crow says he could “eat an Alligator.” (7)  With similar verbal display Jim Crow’s fighting prowess leaves one opponent nothing but “a little grease spot” (6) while another turns gray with fright. (14)

     When Jim Crow comes to comment directly on politics, the views expressed are direct and uncompromising.  The singer contemplates emancipation, declaring that the slaves’ “wish for freedom” is “shining in deir eyes” and boldly stating an abolitionist position.

 

I'm for freedom,

An for Union altogether,

Aldough I'm a black man,

De white is call'd my broder.

                                          (39)

 Rice’s Jim Crow even goes into the political details of the time, noting the challenge to the federal government in South Carolina’s Nullification Act of 1832 and anticipating the Civil War.

 

De great Nullification,

And fuss in de South,

Is now before Congress,

To be tried by word ob mouth.

(34)

 

Dey hab had no blows yet,

And I hope dey nebber will,

For its berry cruel in bredren

One anoders blood to spill.

(35)

 

     In spite of the obvious insulting racial stereotypes implied by the makeup, the dialect, and the doubtlessly weird dance movements, Jim Crow as a character seems more a comically exaggerated frontier hero like Davy Crockett or Mike Fink than weak and simply ridiculous like the movies’ Lincoln Perry (Stepin Fetchit) or Willie Best.  

     Zip Coon is likewise a comic figure, boastful in spite of his uneducated language; though he claims to be a “larned skoler,” (1) though the reader suspects his deepest learning concerns the pursuit of the “possum up a gum tree” or the “coony on a stump.” (5) His love with Suky, though rustic, is mutual.  The frivolous tone of the song with its effervescent nonsense syllables is inescapable, but Zip Coon, like Jim Crow, has a partisan political position.  Like Andrew Jackson and many of the country’s working class, he opposes the United States Bank, but his next line is a startling one: “de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.” (32)  He then tops this declaration by naming Davy Crockett, who was found to have a good deal in common with Jim Crow, as vice-president. (47)  Zip Coon, far from accepting the status quo, clearly advocates grass roots rebellion.  He is appetitive and boastful, but these are the characteristics of heroes as well as fools.

     “Gumbo Chaff,” another character Rice popularized with a song and dance, while he begins in slavery, ends in bourgeois propriety, introducing his wife to neighbors.  A riverboat man skilled at cat-fishing, he is nonetheless mistreated by his master whose death then appears a matter of retributive justice. [12]  He has little doubt of the slaveowner’s posthumous fate.

 

An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,

For when he live you know he light upon me so,

But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below. (22-4)

 

     The deceased master’s wife seems to have troubles of her own including an acquisitive new lover whose exploitation of her wealth is the occasion for another sympathetic reference to Davy Crockett. (28)  Perhaps she also exercises less control over the slaves, for Gumbo Chaff runs off to New Orleans where he astonishes the locals with his “genius” at handling cotton bales: “dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.” (42)  In this free environment he flourishes, dancing and learning French, until he stows away for a return upriver to a satisfied retirement where he recounts his career for the amusement of “white folks,” a task he accomplishes by the very act of speaking of it. (63)

     Far from finding contentment in slavery, Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff all express the desire to escape their oppression.  In the first and last instances they achieve a respectable married life and in the second (in imagination, at any rate) the presidency of the United States.  The comic attributes of all three are in part the appetitive proclivities often prominent in comedy magnified by the exaggerations of “tall tale” lore.  Yet Douglass had good reason to complain that minstrel performers “pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens,” “corrupt” because they direct laughter at African-Americans as they coopt their skin color and thus reinforce the racism that has poisoned this republic since its founding.  Minstrelsy as a Creolized art, a mixture of European and African elements, was perhaps bound from its conception to a profound ambivalence.  

      The white working-class audience that patronized early minstrel shows, like the white working class in other eras, was able to scapegoat and mock African-American workers, while periodically recognizing their common humanity.  This vacillation was inevitably represented in popular entertainments during and after the practice of the country’s “peculiar institution.”  While some members of a white audience  might seek to elevate their own exploited position prior to the rise of labor unions by scorning identifiable groups of their fellow workers, women or immigrants if not non-white peoples, this reaction was neither necessary nor consistent.  White workers sometimes also extended a general human sympathy with slaves and Blacks, often in the popular sentimental mode of the day, and sometimes made common political cause with them on the basis of class.  The same ambivalence, unfortunately, is no less apparent in twenty-first century America.  Condemning the racism that clearly plays a role in minstrel entertainments need not involve blindness to the progressive tendencies of such performances and of the artists who composed them. 

 

  

 

1.  “The Hutchinson Family.—Hunkerism,” The North Star, October 27, 1848.  Douglass recommended instead the Hutchinson Family, a group of white singers who actively supported opposition to slavery as well as other progressive causes such as woman suffrage, opposition to the Mexican War, and Prohibition. 

 

2.  W. E. Burghardt DuBois, “The Negro in Literature and Art,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sep., 1913, Vol. 49, The Negro's Progress in Fifty Years (Sep., 1913).  Cook had studied in Heinrich Jacobson in Germany and in America with Dvořák.  He directed an operatic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1898.

 

3.  “The Black Opera,” first published in the New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1855,  reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, July 3, 1858.

 

4.  “Songs of the Blacks,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 15 November 1856.

 

5.  Hutton, “The Negro on the Stage,” Harper’s June 1889.

 

6.  Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the rise of early Negro minstrelsy, p. 275.  Emmet wrote the fife-and-drum manual for the Union Army.

 

7.  Sarah Richardson, “The History of the Real Jim Crow,” American History,  April, 2018. 

 

8.  Cory Rosenberg, “Ole’ Zip Coon is a Mighty Learned Scholar: Blackface Minstrelsy as Reflection and Foundation of American Popular Culture,” Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 3 Article 6, 2013.

 

9.  Eric Lott, "’The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1991).

 

10. Anthony J. Berret, S. J., “Huckleberry Finn and the Minstrel Show,” American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (fall 1986). 

 

11.  John S. C. Abbott, David Crockett: His Life and Adventures, pt. 4.

 

12.  Indifference or relief at a master’s death appears in numerous other minstrel songs as well, the most familiar being “Jimmy Crack Corn,” a song popularized by Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rice sheet music publication 1832

Jump Jim Crow
 

1
Come listen all you galls and boys
I's just from Tuckyhoe,
I'm goin to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow

Chorus

Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.
 

2
Oh, I'm a roarer on de Fiddle,
And down in old Virginny,
They say I play de skyentific
Like Massa Pagannini.
 

3
I git 'pon a flat boat
I cotch de Uncle Sam
Den I went to see de place
Where dey kill'd Packenham.

4
I went down to de riber,
I did'nt mean to stay,
But dere I see so many galls,
I couldn't get away.

 

5
And den I go to Orleans
An feel so full of fight
Dey put me in de Calaboose,
An keep me dare all night.
 

6
When I got out I hit a man,
His name I now forget,
but dere was nothing left
'Sept a little grease spot
 

7
I wip my weight in wildcats
I eat an Alligator,
And tear up more ground
Dan kifer 50 load of tater
 

8
I sit upon a Hornet's nest,
I dance upon my head,
I tie a Wiper' round my neck
And den I go to bed.
 

9
Dere's Possum up de gumtree
An Raccoon in de hollow,
Wake Snakes for June bugs
Stole my half a dollar
 

10
A ring tail'd monkey
An a rib nose Babboon,
Went out de odder day
To spend de arternoon.
 

11
Oh de way dey bake de hoecake
In old Virginny neber tire
Dey put de hoe upon de foot
An hole it to de fire.
 

12
Oh by trade I am a carpenter,
But be it understood,
De way I get my liben is,
By sawing de tick oh wood.
 

13
I'm a full blooded niggar,
Oh de real ole stock,
An wid my head and shoulder
I can split a horse block.
 

14
I struck a Jersey niggar,
In de street de oder day,
An I hope I neber stir
If he didn't turn gray.
 

15
I'm berry much afraid of late
Dis jumping will be no good.
For while de Crow are dancing,
De Wites will saw de wood.
 

16
But if dey get honest,
By sawing wood like slaves
Der'es an end to de business,
Ob our friend Massa Hays.
 

17
I met a Philadelphia niggar
Dress'd up quite nice & clean
But de way he 'bused de Yorkers
I thought was berru mean.
 

18
So I knocked down dis Sambo
And shut up his light,
For I'm jist about as sassy,
As if I was half white.
 

19
But he soon jumped up again,
An 'gan for me to feel,
Says I go away you niggar,
Or I'll skin you like an eel.
 

20
I'm so glad dat I'm a niggar,
And don't you wish you was too
For den you'd gain popularity
By jumping Jim Crow.
 

21
Now my brodder niggars,
I do not think it right,
Dat you should laugh at dem
Who happen to be white.
 

22
Kase it dar misfortune,
And dey'd spend ebery dollar,
If dey only could be
Gentlemen ob colour.
 

23
It almost break my heart,
To see dem envy me,
And from my soul I wish dem,
Full as black as we.
 

24
What stuf it is in dem,
To make de Debbil black
I'll prove dat he is white
In de twinkling of a crack.
 

25
For you see loved brodders,
As true as he had a tail,
It is his very weakness
What makes him turn pale.
 

26
I went to Hoboken,
To hab a promenade,
An dar I see de pretty gals,
Drinking de Lemonade.
 

27
Dat sour and dat sweet,
Is berry good by gum',
But de best of lemonade is,
Made by adding rum.
 

28
At de Swan cottage,
Is de place I tink,
Whar dey make dis 'licious
An 'toxicating drink.
 

29
Some go to Weehawk,
An some to Brooklyn hight
But dey better stay at home,
If dey want to see de sight.
 

30
To go to de museum,
I'm sure it is dare duty,
If for noting else,
Jist to see de sleeping beauty.
 

31
An dare is daddy Lambert,
An a skeleton on he hunkie,
An likeness of Broadway dandy
In a glass case of monkies.
 

32
De Broadway bells,
When dey carry full sail,
Around dem wear a funny ting,
Just like a fox tail.
 

33
When you hear de name of it,
I sure it make you roar,
Why I ax'd 'em what it was,
And dey said it was a boar.
 

34
De great Nullification,
And fuss in de South,
Is now before Congress,
To be tried by word ob mouth.
 

35
Dey hab had no blows yet,
And I hope dey nebber will,
For its berry cruel in bredren
One anoders blood to spill.
 

36
Wid Jackson at de head,
Dey soon de ting may settle
For ole Hickory is a man,
Dat's tarnal full ob mettle.
 

37
Should dey get to fighting,
Perhaps de blacks will rise,
For deir wish for freedom,
Is shining in deir eyes.
 

38
An if de blacks should get free,
I guess dey'll fee some bigger,
An I shall concider it,
A bold stroke for de niggar.
 

39
I'm for freedom,
An for Union altogether,
Aldough I'm a black man,
De white is call'd my broder.
 

40
I'm for a union to a gal,
An dis is a stubborn fact,
But if I marry an dont like it,
I'll nullify de act.
 

41
I'm tired of being a single man
An I'm tarmined to get a wife
For what I think de happiest
Is de swee married life.
 

42
Its berry common 'mong de white
To marry and get divorced
But dat I'll nebber do
Unless I'm really forced
 

43
I think I see myself in Broadway
Wid my wife upon my arm,
And to follow up de fashion,
Dere sure can be no harm.
 

44
An I caution all white dandies,
Not to come in my way,
For if dey insult me,
dey'll in de gutter lay.

 

 

 

Old Zip Coon (1834)
 

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip Coon will jump.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.           10
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

O it's old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me,
I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;
What do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,
Why chicken foot an possum heel, widout any butter.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.               20

Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a bery pretty notion;
Ebry time de wild goose, beckons to de swaller,
You hear him google google google google goller.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I tell you what will happin den, now bery soon,
De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon;   30
Dare General Jackson, will him lampoon,
An de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

And wen Zip Coon our President shall be,
He make all de little Coons sing possum up a tree;
O how de little Coons, will dance an sing,
Wen he tie dare tails togedder, cross de lim dey swing. 40
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

Now mind wat you arter, you tarnel kritter Crocket,
You shant go head widout ole Zip, he is de boy to block it;
Zip shall be President, Crocket shall be vice,
An den dey two togedder, will hab de tings nice.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.              50
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I hab many tings to tork about, but don't know which come first,
So here de toast to old Zip Coon, before he gin to rust;
May he hab de pretty girls, like de King ob ole,
To sing dis song so many times, 'fore he turn to mole.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.                  60
 

 

 

Gumbo Chaff  (1850)
 

On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana,
Dere's where I live, chock up to de Habbana,
Eb'ry mornin early Massa gib me likker,
I take my net and paddle and I put out de quicker,
I jump into my kiff and I down the river driff,
And I cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff
 

Now dis morning on a driff log tink I see an Alligator,
I scull my skiff around and chuck him sweet potatoe,
I cratch him on de head and try for to vex it,
But I couldn't fool de varmint now how I could fix it;        10
So I picks a brick an' I fotch'd him sich a lick,
But twant nothin' but a pine knot 'pom a big stick.
 

Now old Mass build a barn to put de fodder in,
Dis ting an dat ting an' one ting anodder;
Thirty ninth Decembur time come a rise ob water,
An' it carry Massas barn much farder dan it ought to;
Then old Massa swear, he cuss an' tare his hair,
Becase de water tuck de Barn off he cou'dnt tell where.
 

Now old Massa die on de lebenteenth of April,
I put him in de troff what cotch de sugar maple,                   20
I digs a deep hole right out upon de level,
An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,
For when he live you know he light upon me so,
But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below.
 

Den Missis she did marry Big Bill de weaver,
Soon she found out he was a gay deceiver,
He grab all de money and he put it in his pocket,
And de way he did put out was a sin to Davy Crocket;
So old Missis cry and 'gin to wipe her eye,
For she marry Bill de weaver she cou'dnt tell why.                 30
 

Now one day de sun gone down an' de days work over,
Old Gumbo Chaff he tink he'd live in Clover;
He jump into a boat wid his old Tamborine,
While shoonerhead Sambo play'd de Violin;
De way we sail'd to New Orleans never be forgotten,
Dey put me on de Levy dock to roll a bale of Cotton.
 

When I cotch hold de bale oh! den you ought to seen us!
First time dis child 'gan to show his genus;
I got hold de corner an' I give him such a hug,
An' I light upon him like a duck 'pon a june bug;                      40
Oh! you ought to been dare to see de Niggers laff,
For dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.
 

I lern'd to talk de French oh! a la mode de dancey,
Kick him shoe, tare him wool, parle vo de Francey,
None jaw Madamselle, Stevadors and Riggers,
Apple jack and sassafras and little Indian Niggers;
De natives laff'd an swore dat I was corn'd,
For dey neber heard sich French since dey was born'd.
 

I leab New Orleans early one day morning,
I jump'd aboard de boat jist as de day was dawning,                  50
I hide behind de wood where de Niggers allways toss'um,
And lay low like de Coon when him tries to fool de Possum;
I lay dare still doe 'twas rather diffikill,
An dey did'nt find me out 'till I got to Louisville.
 

Dare Jim beats de drum an old Joe's de fifer,
An I is dat child what can read an cifer;
Twice one is five den carry six to seven,
Twice six is twenty nine an eighteen's eleven,
So 'twixt you and me its very plain to see,
Dat I learnt to play de Banjo by de double rule of three.             60
 

Now I rive on our farm on de Ohio Bluff,
An' I tink of fun an' frolick old Gumbo's had enough;
Oh! de white folks at home I very much amuse,
When I sing dis song an tell 'em all de news;
So we'd music all night an dey set up sich a laff
When I introduced de Niggers to Mrs Gumbo Chaff.

John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.

Watching The Birth of a Nation Today

for the memory of Daniel Krogh who taught me about film sixty years ago


Now, when so many Americans are looking at American racism and rising in righteous protest, it is useful seek to understand the history of white supremacy in this country and why it has been so persistent in spite of its false and destructive nature. Viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation provides a view of the centrality of racism in the United States and the shell-game dodges by which some ordinary people may be convinced of its lies.

There is no doubt that D. W. Griffith is a master of film, not only for his fundamental contribution to the visual vocabulary of the medium, but for his creative shaping of the norms of popular culture in his narratives and characters. The vicious racism of The Birth of a Nation is so undisguised as to be likewise undebatable.

The film dazzled viewers when it came out in 1915 to great fanfare and a series of special premieres in various cities with substantial ticket prices, a thirteen-page program, and a storeful of other souvenirs. It was over three hours long not counting the intermission, with a grand orchestral score and no end of hype. It remained the highest-grossing film well into the sound era, until another fable of Southern history -- Gone with the Wind -- was released in 1939.

The publicity prominently featured the apparent endorsement of the federal government. President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected president since 1848, the man who resegregated federal agencies, is quoted in the film’s titles in praise of “a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” [1] Wilson invited Griffith and Thomas Dixon, Jr. who had written The Clansman, the popular novel and play from which the film was made, to show the movie in the White House. It was then exhibited to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Edward Douglas White proudly recalled his own Klan membership. This showing was also attended by cabinet ministers, almost a hundred members of Congress, and other high government officials.

The propaganda value of Griffith’s version of history was evident. Dixon bragged to the president, “This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.” [2] The pernicious effect of The Birth of a Nation led to the formation of the Lost Cause defense of the Confederacy, most obvious in the rebirth of the Klan itself which had become moribund but which surged after William Joseph Simmons viewed the film and decided to reorganize the terrorist group, designating himself as Imperial Wizard. In this new incarnation the Klan became hugely successful, gaining many members in the Midwest and the North and committing acts of violence and vigilantism while presenting itself as a benevolent patriotic fraternal organization.

Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel, was doubtless pleased at his reactionary role. Yet there are significant signs that he felt uneasy about the hatred he was inspiring. The film anticipates controversy, opening with “a plea for the art of the motion picture” against censorship and associating the new art form with literature, the Bible and Shakespeare. Another title card states disingenuously that the story is purely historical and not meant to characterize any race or group in contemporary American society.

He strove as well to displace the true theme by claiming in another title that the work’s theme is not race but actually “the ravages of war.” At the end grand allegorical scenes depict a suffering humanity below a mounted war deity succeeded by Christ presiding over a peaceful utopia, “a golden day when bestial war shall rule no more.”

Griffith took pains to insist that the skewed fantasy of his film was nothing but the historical facts. A number of titles note his research into history books and photographs to make his scenes completely authentic, and in interviews he justified one incident after another by pointing to what he claimed to be their factual basis. Nor was he singular in his depiction of the period. A similar view of Reconstruction was advanced by many academic historians, perhaps the most influential of whom was William Archibald Dunning at Columbia.

The film emphasizes the peculiar fascination with sexuality that lies at the root of American racial attitudes. Gus, the wicked “renegade” pursues Flora, the sweet little sister who plunges over a cliff to her death rather than submit to his embraces, and then the “mulatto” Silas Lynch tries to force himself on Elsie Stoneman. One cannot avoid thinking of the trumped-up rape accusations that often were the excuse for lynching, and the sexual mutilation of victims. Even a rumor or hint of forward behavior might trigger violence as the case of Emmet Till.

At the end of the film the Klansmen ride triumphantly into town with the young Cameron and Stoneman women at the head of the column. Griffith defended his movie as "an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites"; indeed, he claimed in a letter to the New York Times that he had made the movie "for one reason only—because it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites and whites.” He ridiculed the NAACP as "the Negro Intermarriage Society." [4] This irrational obsession with racial purity (in spite of the mixing through rape and sexual coercion) was so psychologically powerful that in 1967 when the Supreme Court ended the miscegenation laws sixteen states still outlawed interracial marriage.

Thus, a racist system that aims in fact at maintaining power and economic advantage of one group over another masquerades as a moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan reinforced this identity by supporting the cause of Prohibition and sometimes directing vigilante action against those thought to be immoral: loose women, unfaithful husbands, gamblers, and wife-beaters, some of them white. Tyranny and reaction has always tried to claim the moral high ground. One may think of Nixon’s attempt to characterize protesters as drug-users or common reactions to early AIDS activists. The continuing success of such tactics is evident in the strong evangelical support for right wing policies that in fact violate Christian principles.

The Birth of a Nation is quaint in many ways. Quite a few of Griffith’s Klansmen seem to be wearing toilet plungers on their heads instead of the better-known pointy dunce cap hoods. Though real African-Americans appear in crowd scenes, Griffith used white actors in crude makeup to play leading Black roles, causing the faithful Cameron servants to appear as grotesquely ridiculous as his villain Gus. Whereas in minstrelsy blackface was associated with comedy and light-hearted good times, here it seems explicitly ugly and sinister. The broad and artificial language of gesture of pre-cinematic stage actors is as dated as the stylized melodramatic plot line.

Like Leni Riefenstahl’s work, Griffith’s film will always be studied by students of cinema, but it deserves attention as well from those who despise its hateful theme but wish to investigate the foundations and the supporting myths of American racism. As always the artist is the one who records attitudes with the most precise detail and the strongest passion. In writing Sexual Politics, Kate Millet examined not feminist authors but D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, knowing that their works contained the clearest statement of the codes that enable patriarchy.

The viewer can appreciate the epic grandeur of the crowd scenes and applaud Griffith’s exploitation of the medium in new ways, pioneering close-ups, fade-outs, tracking shots, parallel action sequences, crosscutting and a host of other innovations. (The iris shots and tinting of certain sequences will please fewer today.) Yet one cannot forget for a moment the sinister deceitful message the great director meant to bring to America, a mission in which he succeeded all too well. The current demonstrations indicate what little progress has occurred in the last century.



1. Other quotations from Wilson’s The History of the American People included in the film are these. “The Policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.…in their determination to "put the white South under the heel of the black South.” "Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes.…In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”

Griffith did not use all Wilson’s racist comments by any means. This, for example, is in the book but not the film: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”

2. Letter quoted in John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, 20-21.

3. How odd that he should have been given that name.

4. These quotations are available by looking no further than the Wikipedia article on The Birth of a Nation. Original citations are available there.

O. Henry’s Novel Novel

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Guy Davenport.


     Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry’s only novel, is hardly a novel at all, but then his short stories are hardly short stories, either. Far from the “realism” widely practiced during his lifetime, O. Henry composed his work according to a structural standard which owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe’s use of abstraction and rhetoric more than to Flaubert's realism. Thus, his trademark surprise endings ignore plausibility, preferring the formal maneuver of an ironic reversal. His themes are trivial, often commonplaces or forgettable sentimental emotion, often nothing more than the most available idées reçues, yet his work is entertaining, carefully crafted, and presents a consistent and original vision.
     Cabbages and Kings is a collection of short stories, presented as narrations by various characters who play a role in the story. Their tales are bound not just by a common cast, setting, and narrative frame; the central issue, more a mental puzzle than a dramatic conflict, is resolved only at the end, when the medium changes from raconteur story-telling suddenly to motion pictures, at that time nearly new. Just to require more ingenuity of himself and his clever readers, the author has added an apparently adventitious correspondence to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Every addition is not so much part of a solution as it is a retarding of any solution at all. The author is a juggler whose audience gasps as he puts yet another object into the air.
     In the work as a whole one is never engaged by a central problem more momentous than a challenging crossword. One looks often in vain for psychological insight, absorbing specific detail, or moving emotion in O. Henry’s novel, often finding instead the most available and conventional thought. The same sort of patterning is observable on the smaller scale of the sentence. O. Henry’s favorite rhetorical device, the use of ironic semi-comic periphrasis, evident on every page of the novel, does not so much provide information useful for understanding as it makes wisecracks, abstracting the reader, making emotional identification unlikely, but allowing the intellectual delight of the author’s formal play. In both the work as a whole and a good many of its subsidiary units, the author is delaying the action, as one after another of the oddball characters take a turn, as throw-away one-liners fall this way and that from a marvelous almost hypnotic sparkler.
     It was such techniques that endeared the popular American author with the most advanced Russian Formalists. To critics such as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum [1], William Sydney Porter, who churned out stories for the market, almost four hundred before his death at forty-seven, who published a story a week in the New York World’s spectacularly illustrated Sunday Magazine for over a year, was a literary avant-gardist. The theorists of the revolutionary Soviet Union applauded a writer who used racist expression less for promulgating white supremacy than for simple convenience.
     Abstraction is characteristic of much comedy, in which the protagonist is viewed as flawed by the normative reader. Characters reduced to a single trait in the Theophrastian sense are familiar from Menander through Jonson to Neil Simon, and Cabbages and Kings can boast no psychological development or complexity. The authorial tone is consistently acceptance and warm amusement. The general run of locals are terminally soporific in the most familiar sort of tropical stereotype, [2] though their leaders combine a similar idleness with rapacious avarice and the capacity for violence. The expatriates of Anchuria are likewise capable of combining phenomenal laziness with terrific greed, but as outsiders they are a bit more cautious about hedging their bets.
     Every now and then what seems a point of principle intrudes, though it may in fact be nothing more than the occasional absurd demands of ego. Such “actions generated by core beliefs” such as “Beelzebub” Blythe’s conscientious refusal to blackmail someone who is standing him drinks or Carolus White’s inability to do a portrait to order that falls short of his artistic ideals are likely to seem more peculiar than principled. In general, though, this is a land in which everyone is out for number one. Their selfishness is a fact of nature, like the Vesuvio Fruit Company’s exploitative domination of the land.
     In a comedy like Cabbages and Kings no real harm can come to anyone, so the reader may simply relax and make the most of the passing drolleries. Though occasionally a death may be mentioned, the reader’s sympathy is never engaged in the least. The linkages of the various narratives only emerge in the conclusion, the reader having been pleasantly suspended until that point (stymied perhaps more by the unlikeliness of the plot as by its brilliance). As in a whodunit mystery, the point of the plot is to remain concealed until the conclusion.
     Apart from the broad and comely design of the whole, the strongest element in O. Henry’s novel is the wit and ingenuity of his richly comic periphrases. The prose regularly erupts in jokes released like a string of slightly damp firecrackers. Yet none of the jokes advances the story. Each acts to delay and distract the reader, passing time, running out the clock, until the final curtain.
     For example, the story proper begins by setting the scene, yet it is less a scene from nature than it seems a motif of a tropical shirt or perhaps a neon barroom fantasy. “Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.” With details like “vacuous” and “guarded” irrelevant except to underline misogynistic conventions, O. Henry entertains his readers while they await anything likely to launch a storyline. In this Margaritaville “the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.” (9) Since this world is satirical, the dancers must be “awkward” and the prima donna doubtless acts the role of a comically temperamental diva of the sort portrayed in Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor.
     In his role as consul John Atwood discusses with a pair of entrepreneurs their plan to introduce the phonograph to Anchuria. He warns them that the locals, being “simple-hearted children of nature” (73) might react in one of two ways. “They may become inebriated with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ or they will get excited and transpose the key of the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon.” (74) The series of moves, from the unlikely lexical choice of “inebriated” to the image of the Confederate officer, presumably apoplectic at hearing the Union anthem, then to the musical metaphor and the sudden rather Gothic axe and dungeon. It makes little sense – after all, both alternatives are hostile -- but it maintains an effervescent string of phrases, keeping the reader slightly off balance while suggesting the unpredictability of the plan.
     His method reliance on received ideas, in common with most comedy, is manifest. When Henry Horsecollar runs interference to free his own private co-conspirators from the threatening crowd of local conspirators by whom they are outnumbered, the rhetoric rises in a pyrotechnic display of racism.


"Then that cultured Red Man exhaled an arrangement of sounds with his mouth that made the Latin aggregation pause, with thoughtfulness and hesitations. The matter of his proclamation seemed to be a cooperation of the Carlisle war-whoop with the Cherokee college yell. He went at the chocolate team like a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter. His right elbow laid out the governor man on the gridiron, and he made a lane the length of the crowd so wide that a woman could have carried a stepladder through it without striking against anything." (83)


     Even the very opening term here is twisted to the point of dizziness. Horsecollar, who has seemed as sensible as anyone else in the story and more admirable than many, had been introduced to Mellinger as an “Injun. Tame Injun” (75) to indicate that his presence would be inoffensive. Yet in this critical moment the success of this “cultured Red Man” does not depend on his social suavity but rather on an altogether savage utterance wild enough to paralyze his antagonists. It is yet unclear to what extent their craven abashment is due to their being not quite white themselves, but a “Latin aggregation.”
     Racist bomblets continue to detonate in the following phrases. A Carlisle war whoop is a ironic reference to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the federal government’s most important Native American educational institution for forty years, whose goal was total assimilation to mainstream American culture under founder Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan "Kill the Indian: Save the Man." Then, in a reverse use of racist stereotypes, the “Cherokee college yell” makes an ironic comparison between an indigenous barbarian and an American college football fan. Somehow the careless use of racial pejoratives proceeds to proliferate out of control. The Latin Americans are christened “the chocolate team,” a belittling tag predicting their lack of resistance in the face of the masterful Horsecollar who himself is oddly equated to “a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter,” a phrase opening a nasty glimpse into nineteenth century Southern life (and into O. Henry’s readiness to make use of racist jocularity).
     O. Henry’s deft ear is attracted to such clichés and seeks sometimes to redeem them in better coin. To start the spin, a centuries-old proverb is put to the service of the most mercenary of interests: the Anchurian bureaucrats. “Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hand forever point to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.” (97) The reader can only sit back and watch as the author rings his changes on the topic of milk from the opening twist and the slyly pedantic slightly evasive “lacteal” through the effective image of graft and corruption as “milking time” to the dramatic climactic mention of “rich cream.”
     The national characteristics of Anchuria, while resting securely in racist stereotype, do convey some information about the Honduras that Porter came to know during his year residence there. The filibustering of private citizens and the neo-colonialism of the Vesuvio Fruit Company are indeed drawn from life. [4] The rapacious opportunism of individuals, institutions, and governments is a given, a subset really of the readiness of everyone in this fictional world to grab at the main chance. Meanwhile, though, until that big score arrives, all are satisfied with indolence, their ambitions daily delayed to make time for a drink and a sunset and some diverting conversation. In the last analysis, O. Henry’s theme is simple: “There is nothing doing now, let us tell a few stories before night falls.”
     Cabbages and Kings, indeed, may be said to be made up of such chatting. The experience of reading it offers pleasures not unlike those of the oysters as they enjoyed “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/ Along the briny beach.”


The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
   

     If the reader has been beguiled by the many conversations by the Coralian shore, as entertained, perhaps as the ingenuous mollusks, the denouement upon reaching the last page is not so final as theirs. To be devoured by O. Henry means no more than to relish passing a bit of time absorbed by the Vitagraphoscope [3] of his imagination.




1. See in particular the latter’s “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

2. Stereotypes may have their claims, of course. I recall entering more than one Nigerian office during the heat of the afternoon and finding half the workers dozing, heads on their desks.

3. The word Vitagraphoscope seems to be a neologism, perhaps compounding Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and sold by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Biograph, a film production and exhibition company founded by William Kennedy Dickson also in 1895. Dickson had broken from Edison.

4. Included in the long list of individual Americans (apart from U. S. military forces) who have meddled militarily in Latin America are William S. Smith, William Walker, William A. Chanler, Gregor MacGregor, and James Long. The Vesuvio corporation, of course, represents the United Fruit Company, which once dominated Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, leading to dictatorships of collaborators throughout the region and to such events as the violent repression of striking workers in Colombia in December of 1928 in which three thousand workers are thought to have been massacred.