Introducing Bert Williams by Camille F. Forbes

2008-04-02
By Gregory Stephen Tate

Black identity in America has always been defined, confined and refined by performance. The grueling hourly, daily, yearly performances expected of slave labor in the fields, house and sleeping quarters most certainly framed African American identity formation, but  a performance of maximum subservience and utility was required under the racist gaze of the policing of Black social conduct.

As recently as the verdicts in the Rodney King and Amadou Diallo cases, extreme violence against blacks became the legal cost of being perceived as not performing black submissiveness properly. Violation of these codes led to the murder of Emmett Till among thousands of others for being thought to have given a bad performance of black cowardice before a hostile audience.  The fear of not performing Black compliance to the unwritten laws of white expectation have led African Americans to develop subtle and nuanced ways of communicating defiance and critique often unseen by the outside group.

Black scholar Camille Forbes' new biography of Bert Williams, the most successful and best remembered of American blackface performers couldn't have come at a better time than this election season--one where candidate Barack Obama can be seen routinely attempting, as Williams did, to ply his Blackness before trigger happy mainstream pundits  and quizzical Blacks. The well-read Williams was a tall, dapper, lightskinned man of Bahamian descent who wore corkgrease partly to portray and subvert minstrelsy's conventional Southern 'darkies'. In a hundred years the professional Black performance game has changed but its goal remains the same: to offer audiences, Black and non, consummate trickster performances of Blackness that offend none while advancing professional and sometimes  political agendas.

Forbes reveals Williams turn of the century stardom to have been a product of a time much like today when questions of Black authenticity and 'real-ness' were very much on the minds of consumers and producers of Black culture. Black minstrels labored under the burden of proving they were more authentic than their paler counterparts in burnt corkdom.  Williams and his ebullient, business savvy (and militant) stage partner George Walker billed themselves as 'The Two Real Coons'. Forbes reveals the ways Williams and Walker were also extremely ambitious and extremely black-identified race-men despite their cooning and corkgrease and even despite playing Broadway theatres that discouraged or outright refused even well-heeled Black patronage. 

So much were they revered by Black folk in turn that three leading race men of the day, Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson all saw the duo's strides towards equal pay and exhibition for their work as being at the vanguard of African American progress. Largely because all of them understood, as Du Bois poignantly observed, that the problem of the 20th century was 'the color line'--that what would hamper Black social justice movements more than anything was not Black capacity in industrial America but prejudices of perception. The stages Williams and Walker worked on thus became a fraught battleground for the nascent 20th century civil rights struggle as absurd as that might sound today. Or not, considering how much Obama's campaign has been built on him proving his superb Brer Rabbit ability to surf the slippery mine field of America's two-toned racial and political loyalty tests. Like Obama, Williams and Walker rose to success in a time when the perception of untrustworthy African ancestry could automatically disdain and distance one from other African Americans and bring on frenzies of sociopathic assault from others. 

Forbes documents how Williams and Walker's polish, scrutiny and self-censure of their troupe's every gesture  was at odds with mainstream critics who read their act as the result of natural rhythm rather than from a terror of provoking  alienation, rejection and rage. (Way before Berry Gordy himself was born, let alone Motown, Williams and Walker issued a code of public conduct for their troupe.)

Williams and Walker broke the barrier for blacks on Broadway in early 1900s; at their height the two were personally making the maximum $2000 a week just like their nearest non-Black minstrel competition. (To truly appreciate the scale of this achievement in period terms one need know that when Williams and Walker first teamed up in San Francisco they were lucky to make 7 dollars a week.)

In the wake of Jack Johnson's 1910 ring demolition of Jim Jeffries--a victory which the New York Times summarized as 'Johnson wins’ --was a bulletin that disappointed and saddened 30,000 men, women and children who thronged Times Square and went on to incite murderous riots against Blacks in Texas, Illinois, Nebraska, Arkansas, Georgia and New York City-- Forbes notes that Williams  risked life, limb and career with a timely skit in which he played a dimwitted boxing coon.

As with today's hiphop stars, Williams and Walker produced hit shows and songs, won major court and contractual battles that bettered the lot of top Black performers in the realms of management, monies, marketing and venues. They also made a point of presenting one face onstage -- that of conniving, thieving stock minstrel figures -- while being shrewd, tack-sharp dandies offstage, especially when they found themselves sitting across the negotiating table from theatrical powers like the Shuberts and newly formed Columbia Records for whom Williams made several hits.

Though hiphop--and even Oprah--are often gratuitously read as minstrelsy updated (with black conservative actors like Colin and Condi as the Uncle Toms) for presenting problematic images, Forbes illuminates the historic complexity of representations proferred by Black performers of all stripes: that of staging finely calibrated strategies for survival and success in a booming economy of professional black performance. This still bullish market is one that Williams and Walker laid the cornerstones for--our 24/7 racial show-and-tell auction block that continues to reward stage-worthy presentations of Black savagery, stereotype, subservience and even militant resistance, with fame, wealth, mainstream approval and humanity by proxy.

Gregory Tate is a cultural critic based in New York.