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’’