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EXCERPT
We want to dance, too. Let's shin it for the Catherine Market ourselves. Let's enter the lists with the Long Islanders. Shucking our constraints, let's admit their old, low, and large ambition is also ours. Success attended them, De Voe says, and it has since attended others. Fascination adheres in these gestures, their contest, and their coining. To coin those gestures was to produce currency for exchange. As this currency accumulated interest, it was codified and it persisted. The gestures gathered momentum. When we can see their momentum, we can see their economy: the conditions of their cultural transmission. It is pretty to think that we might all share "in the end, an equal division of the proceeds." We all want those eels.
Catherine Market was a short sail in breezy weather, or a moderate row on still days, across the East River from the truck farms of Long Island. The skiffs from Long Island came from towns just on the other side, from Williamsburgh and Brooklyn, and tied up at Catherine Slip. At its edge was Catherine Market, which joined the Slip to Catherine Street, and thence to the rest of the city via the Five Points, which was six blocks up to Chatham Square and two over. From Chatham Square and the Five Points, the Bowery went uptown, Pearl Street downtown, Worth and Canal Streets across town one way and Division the other. Maps today still give us "Catherine Slip" at the wide spot where the market was.
Today, Catherine Slip seems to bisect the territory between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges that have put it in parentheses. The more recent subway tunnels further bracket the market a little way along in each direction, north toward Corlears Hook, south toward the Battery. In its day Catherine Slip handled most of the traffic that all those conduits came to replace. The bridges and tunnels made massive arteries to replace the delicately negotiating capillary action of Catherine Market, the Five Points, and its tributary veins.
Catherine Market was the spot where the goods of Long Island slipped in and out of the isle of Manhattan when the river was both a boundary and a conveyance. Catherine Market, like all traditional markets, paradoxically smudged that borderline and also reinforced it. The market's presence as the membrane of the city emphasized its border, but managed its permeability, too. The culture in and of the market did the same, as we shall see the culture of Catherine Market drew boundaries and managed their crossings.
At Catherine Slip the pedestrian and the riparian overlapped, like a skiff pulled across a shoreline, and those men who flourished in both realms had a special cachet. That's an initial reason why the slaves who planted and grubbed the potatoes, then rowed them across the water, then called their sales in the market were paid to dance there. Jersey, Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, and "our own" Negroes, said Thomas De Voe, danced out their regional affiliation and their identity. This overlap is first among several that are important in these early commercial performances of an independent Atlantic popular culture.
From its earliest instances, probably in the eighteenth century, this dancing for eels at Catherine Market addressed the issue of overlap. It appealed to several audiences who were finding different values in the dance at the same time. It was a yoking across perceived differences at least as much as it was a closing out or a separation. When they tied their hair in tea-lead, combed it out to imitate and mock the long wigs then in fashion, or wound their foreheads in eelskins, the dancers played out charismatic singularities that were to be made available to others. After all, appeal and exchange was what display in a market was about. And from the outset this dancing was supported, applauded, and desired by others.
Fascinated whites and blacks congregated to pay for that style and copy it. These marks of grace and difference they appreciated and wanted to absorb. They wanted to overlay this black cachet on their own identities--even as their own identities. And they did. Anyone today can see that the cultures of the Atlantic world are in good measure joinings and mergers that follow from such fascinations as occurred at Catherine Market. The dancing for eels was a performance of eclecticism that modeled later performance in the Atlantic world.
This early support of blacks dancing for eels is a sure instance of a public becoming patron to a specific style. In doing so it risks slippage from patron to patronize, nurture to condescension. So much depends on the slippery difference between the two. The crudest mistake we can make, however, is to assume that the connection between public and performance is unalloyed--either simple patrons or simple patronization. In blackface performance, both attitudes converge at once, kinetic in each other.
The overlays of rural and riparian, seafaring and metropolitan cultures indicated a willingness to merge and make combinatory that is associated with markets and bazaars. Roger Abrahams has studied market performance up and down the Americas. He describes market places as edgy areas, contact zones between cultures on the outskirts of towns or up against their walls. In markets, people wink at various civic constraints so that exchange may take place. In order to sell goods, creole language develops and extravagant gestures thrive. "For trade to occur," he has written, "frontiers have to be established that can be crossed, or zones created in which different peoples may come together with impunity. These sanctuaries are fire free zones, places in which difference itself, especially stylistic difference, is transvalued. In such environs, what other peoples make and perform becomes positively attractive."
I begin my study of the Atlantic blackface lore cycle in Catherine Market because I want to insist, with Abrahams, on the mingled behavior that "fire free zones" encouraged in the traditional market. At Catherine Market and other early spots for the performances of American culture there was an eagerness to combine, share, join, draw from opposites, play on opposition. An enthusiasm for the underlying possibilities in difference continually reappears in this popular-folk culture of the Atlantic diaspora. People in the market at Catherine Slip articulated these possibilities early. The market at Catherine Slip was a relay in the conduction of that culture, a relay that stamped what it passed on.
These overlaps of difference so attractive in the market will later be pointed at formally by the blackface mask. The mask is itself an excellent signifier of overlap as a principle. We wear the mask, said blackface performers, a good century before Paul Lawrence Dunbar enlisted the phrase for his poem.
We wear the mask, said Bob Rowley. Belonging to the Long Island farmer William Bennett, Bob Rowley was one of the favorites among the men dancing for eels at Catherine Market. When Rowley performed he overlaid his slave name with a performance name: "Bobolink Bob." The name was catchy in its alliteration but, more significantly, it pointed at his overlapping identity. The Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) is a field bird, a new world passerine, rarely vagrant in Europe, whose male's brown underparts and face change to black while it breeds in spring. Joining himself to these attributes, Bobolink Bob crossed close rural observations with the requirements of market performance. He was a proto-blackface performer for a new North Atlantic culture. One wants very much to have heard Bobolink Bob's whistle. I will show that this whistle is one of the most talismanic aspects of blackface performance, retained and referenced even as late as Al Jolson's performance in The Jazz Singer (1927).
Today Catherine Slip and the spot of its former market are surrounded by some of New York's earliest public housing: Knickerbocker Village to the east and the Governor Smith Houses to the west. China Town supplants the European and African ethnic mixture that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries populated the Five Points and Chatham Square. During the waves of Atlantic immigration that rolled up the East River throughout the nineteenth century this area gradually became the "Jewtown" that would bring forth Irving Berlin and a large portion of Tin Pan Alley. But the culture that came out of it had Catherine Market and the gestures of the Slip working through it no matter what the overlay.
The East River Drive hugging the shoreline stops pedestrian movement. Out on the river, Circle Liners, tugs, and barges press against the current. One hears the dull traffic on the bridges and highways, the white noise of the city's churning. But at Catherine Slip, now, the human touches of enterprise and exchange sound distant. The structures of the present baffle what went on here. Standing in the midst of these physical overlays it is hard to imagine how the capillary connections of Catherine Slip were commercially significant in its formative moment, around 1820. More important to imagine is how at Catherine Market cultural work was performed that proved important well beyond the city.
Gestures gathered into dance contests. Habits of response clustered observers into publics providing patronage. Conventions of praise and blame arched around the performances in the lists of Catherine Market. All these stimuli and responses arranged themselves in patterns like iron filings around a magnet. Their apparently mutable and delicate tracings--so easy to turn away from or scatter on the surface--conform to enduring force fields deeper than we have realized. Beneath these surface clues, patterns organize relations among citizens not only in the United States but also throughout the Atlantic world. This persisting template held for Catherine Market, as for its nearly neighboring theatres--the Bowery and the Chatham. It survived transatlantic crossing and held sway both south and north of the Thames. It held for the traveling minstrel show in metropolitan and frontier venues. It survived, even showed the way for, silent and talking films. It was popular on TV in the fifties and even now organizes much of MTV.
We will have to push back the fortress facades of Knickerbocker Village, forget the autos, erase the limited-access highways, bring down the bridges, and fill up the subways if we wish to recall Catherine Market as it was and enter the lists with the Long Islanders. There is also a further structure muffling the actuality of Catherine Market that we must sidestep.
We must work against inherited abstractions that have distorted or erased those who danced for eels at Catherine Market. People have tried to tell stories that made sense, and did damage, according to their needs. The first chroniclers of blackface performance accepted its declared premises. These first historians said blackface was about happy Negroes. Minstrelsy told of black people's genius for contentment, they said; it told of their supposedly simple southern ways. Theirs was organic harmony on the Plantation, the hands were in the fields; Ol' Massa and Missus were deservedly well-loved in the big house. From Fanny Kemble's fancied discovery in 1838 of "Jim Crow--the veritable James" to Charles Dickens's American Notes in 1842 and Robert Nevin writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1867 right up through Brander Matthews in Scribner's Magazine in 1915 and even Constance Rourke's path-breaking American Humor in 1931, historians of several sorts repeatedly validated the southern authenticity of blackface performance.
Then Hans Nathan's study of Dan Emmett in 1962 and particularly Robert Toll's history of minstrelsy in 1974 reversed many of the earlier understandings of the form. The racism in minstrelsy appalled Toll and the form's subsequent critics. The newly conventional embarrassment at white racism popularized in the fifties and sixties had so determined public responses that simply underlining the stereotypes in minstrelsy served as a satisfactory analytic maneuver for this new wave of scholarship. Current historians have extended Toll's noticing that the minstrel show was neither about authentic black life nor about an authentic South. Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and Eric Lott have more recently argued that blackface performance was a fantasy of northern white performers, largely from middle-class homes, who knew little or nothing of black life.
Although I have lived in the same culture that shaped the attitudes of this more recent group of critics, the story I will tell is rather different. One does not approve the abhorrent racism in most minstrelsy by emphasizing its presence, then moving on to discuss the form's other--even its counter--aspects. I analyze the multiple aspects in blackface performance because it was not a fixed thing, but slippery in its uses and effects. Indeed, this late in the cycle, it seems most important to notice how blackface performance can work also and simultaneously against racial stereotyping. The way minstrelsy saps racism from within has almost never been mentioned. Its anti-racist dimensions--occasionally abolitionist but usually supplemental to both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist doctrine--are remaining secrets among the phenomena of blackface performance.
Raising Cain is about this resistance to racism, for sure, but also about a wider recalcitrance. I want to bring out the broad interracial refusal of middle-class channeling that working men and women of all hues mounted using the corrupt tools bequeathed them by the marketplaces and other locations where they could make spectacles of themselves. Their refusal was not set in amber. It pulsed and warped over time. It was human--vibrant, confused, always mixed. Many of the workers in minstrelsy, most often early but also late, took the racism that was the given of their days and raised it against its original wielders. People work with what they have. What they have is mixed and messy. To think otherwise is the real fantasy in this business.
Much might be said regarding the shifting accounts of minstrelsy that obscure its complex cultural work. Historians have covered over what performers were doing as much as the altered physical structure of Catherine Market has obscured the early activities danced out on its ground. Commentators' shifting analyses say as much or more about the needs of successive eras as about minstrelsy. Nevertheless, the vernacular tradition--right up through Michael Jackson (who emblemizes the conflicted nature of blackface performance)--keeps alive insouciant practices whose party I, for one, am little loath to join. The patterns in these disdained actions persist down all the years of their exclusion from respect.
I, too, am doubtless misusing, therefore abusing, the legacy of blackface performance. What might I say in my defense? Only what is compelling in the stories I tell. What distinguishes my approach from those who have told their stories before me? I am not surprised to find culture corrupt and its measures mixed. Minstrelsy is often racist, growing more complex and more codified as time went on. So much is true of human action by all peoples. Minstrelsy usually misrepresents women, as have most men and women throughout history. In its development, minstrelsy bellied up to power; show me a movement that has not. When I speak about the achievements of blackface performance, I hardly condone its denigration of blacks or its misogyny. I condemn them. What I want most to account for, however, is the way blackface actions have often contradicted what was expected of them. Like the teeming, recoiling eels which early figured it, the conundrums of blackface performance have certainly flopped out of, and knocked over, all the buckets into which people poured them.
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