The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

289 Pages·2006·0.825 MB·English

by  Louis Chude-Sokei

THE LAST ‘‘DARKY’’
A John Hope Franklin Center Book

Bert Williams,
THE LAST ‘‘DARKY’’
Black-on-Black Minstrelsy,
and the African Diaspora
Louis Chude-Sokei
Duke University Press
Durham and London 2006
∫ 2006 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
America on acid-free paper $
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone
Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
Frontispiece: photo of Bert Williams by
Samuel Lumiere, c. 1921. Courtesy
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
For Shirley Chude-Sokei.
Responsible for this Diaspora,
the only center possible.

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. Black Minstrel, Black Modernism 17
2. Migrations of a Mask 46
3. Theorizing Black-on-Black Cross-Culturality 82
4. The Global Economy of Minstrelsy 114
5. In Dahomey 161
6. Claude McKay’s Calypso 207
Notes 249
Bibliography 263
Index 273
The masks alone occasionally suggest a correspondence
to the chthonic realm and hint at the archetypes of transi-
tion, yet even the majority of them flee the full power of
cosmic vision, take refuge in deliberately grotesque and
comic attitudes. Such distortions are easily recognized as
the technique of evasion from numinous powers. Terror
is both contained by art in tragic form and released by
art through comic presentation and sexual ambience.
The tragic mask, however, also functions from the same
source as its music—from the archetypal essences whose
language derives not from the plane of physical reality or
ancestral memory (the ancestor is no more than agent or
medium), but from the numinous territory of transition
into which the artist obtains fleeting glimpses by ritual,
sacrifice and a patient submission of rational awareness
to the moment when fingers and voice relate the sym-
bolic language of the cosmos.
—Wole Soyinka, ‘‘The Fourth Stage’’
From the left, from the right, from the South, and from the North,
there rises the wall impassive
to the mole and the needle of water.
Do not seek, Negroes, for the cleft to find the infinite mask . . .
Ah, masqueraded Harlem!
Ah, Harlem, threatened by a mob wearing clothes without heads!
Your rumour reaches me,
your rumour reaches me, crossing tree trunks and lifts,
across the grey plates
where your cars float covered with teeth,
across the dead horses and the minute crimes,
across your great despairing King,
whose beard reaches the sea.
—Federico García Lorca, ‘‘The King of Harlem’’