On Feb. 1, 1899, the Geneva Daily Times commented on the Darktown Swells, an African American minstrel show. Typically, these featured people of color wearing blackface and enacting the demeaning stereotypes typical of the minstrel shows played by whites.
The review offered a unique critique: “There is the grotesque mimicry that has characterized the black man since he was freed from bondage. Why cannot black show people learn that to be themselves when upon the stage were to amuse! So long as they ape their white brethren — whose efforts in the same direction have long ago been rendered stale — the colored people will not be distinguished successes on the stage.” The reporter finds the popular entertainment past its prime, stale, trite, unfunny, and racially demeaning. He is enchanted by the singing and musicality of the Darktown Swells, both male and female.
What sets the observation apart from other reviews of minstrel shows is not only the progressive insight but the suggestion that the popularity of white minstrel shows was waning.
In Geneva, as well as across the country, minstrelsy was the single-most popular form of live entertainment. Beginning in 1897, one of Geneva’s fire companies, the Hydrants, performed sold-out minstrel shows each year at the Smith Opera House and in Penn Yan, as they did on Feb. 13 and 14 in 1899. On March 21, the Al Field’s professional minstrel company was so popular that the Aldermen of the City Council inexplicably did not have a quorum for the first time in their history, and the six who attended the meeting hurried across the street to see the show. Even the stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin drew upon African American stage stereotypes. Granted, Al W. Martin’s mixed race company of 60 performers featured the African American actor Milton G. Barlow as Uncle Tom, but it included as well The Pickaninny Band, The Creole Girls’ Band, and 25 colored men and woman buck dancers, as well as The Imperial White Band and, never to be forgotten, 10 Cuban and Russian Bloodhounds. Audiences would be thrilled to “see the giant colored boy, 8 feet tall, 17 years of age.”
Despite the complaints of the Times‘ reporter, the winter of 1899 certainly had numerous minstrel shows and related acts that presented people of color only if they mimicked the stereotypes whites imposed upon them. One clue to the reporter’s singular distaste is found in how the Times reviewed Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show that was performed in Geneva the previous June.
The reporter, who was possibly the same one who wrote the review of the Darktown Swells, objected to the parade that included 50 mounted Indians “wearing fantastic garb and war paint” while performing as the kind of savage Indians demanded by the white imagination. The Indians, the reporter opined, while guilty of wrongdoing,” were “more often wronged.” The reporter was equally underwhelmed by the performance later that day: “A typical western stagecoach, drawn by four mules, rattled into the arena, and was attacked by a band of desperate Indians ... picturesquely garbed in horse blankets and hen’s feathers [who] howled weakly, and were decidedly disappointing to numerous small boys whose imagination had pictured semi-naked, painted, howling aborigines.” He was, however, impressed by the other acts, including tumbling, acrobatics, and sharpshooting.
It was, again, possibly the same reporter who objected to some of the acts in Al Field’s show. While acknowledging the “originality” of Field’s role as a stage “coon,” his comedic turns were of the sort “that amuses for a few fleeting moments, but when these are elongated, distended, etc., etc., as they were last night ... it truly becomes ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable.’ More particularly was it of the order when a dozen men, dressed in Rough rider uniforms, danced about Mr. Field and fired revolvers at his feet. In what is termed ‘an up-to-date absurdity. In Cuba.’ This alleged farce is as excuseless and tiresome as the one Mr. Field introduced here last year and should be promptly eliminated.”
As with the Pawnee Bill show, the reporter disparaged the performance of race but thoroughly enjoyed the other acts; that is, the violinist, the juggler, the acrobats, and even the stand-up comedians.
As the tastes of the reporter suggest, minstrelsy was in the process of being supplanted by vaudeville, which arrived in Geneva in 1899. A year earlier, in March 1898, Robert “Bob” Cole Jr., brought his original play, “Trip to Coontown,” to the Smith Opera House. He was determined to counter the demeaning stereotypes imposed on him and other black performers. The lead character was portrayed with dignity. Cole played the “hobo” in white face, not that the reviewer at the time seemed to notice.
American entertainment, then as now, was trapped in the paradox of the performance of race. It plagues us still, as the recent film “American Fiction” (director Cord Jefferson) so brilliantly portrays. Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a serious, well-educated writer who rockets to fame only after he sells out by adopting the persona of a down-and-out African American who has not only escaped from prison but written an angry, inflammatory, trope-ridden memoir that makes him the darling of the white, literary elite, a best-selling author, and a celebrity. Perhaps it is a step forward that the film was made to such well-deserved acclaim, even though it was overshadowed by the disappointingly cautious “Oppenheimer.”
Linda Robertson is a retired faculty member from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she started the Media and Society Program. She has made several documentaries about the history of abolition in upstate New York, including Geneva.
GENEVA IN 1899: Darktown Swells
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30.03.2024
On Feb. 1, 1899, the Geneva Daily Times commented on the Darktown Swells, an African American minstrel show. Typically, these featured people of color wearing blackface and enacting the demeaning stereotypes typical of the minstrel shows played by whites.
The review offered a unique critique: “There is the grotesque mimicry that has characterized the black man since he was freed from bondage. Why cannot black show people learn that to be themselves when upon the stage were to amuse! So long as they ape their white brethren — whose efforts in the same direction have long ago been rendered stale — the colored people will not be distinguished successes on the stage.” The reporter finds the popular entertainment past its prime, stale, trite, unfunny, and racially demeaning. He is enchanted by the singing and musicality of the Darktown Swells, both male and female.
What sets the observation apart from other reviews of minstrel shows is not only the progressive insight but the suggestion that the popularity of white minstrel shows was waning.
In Geneva, as well as across the country, minstrelsy was the single-most popular form of live entertainment. Beginning in 1897, one of Geneva’s fire companies, the Hydrants, performed sold-out minstrel shows each year at the Smith Opera House and in Penn Yan, as they did on Feb. 13 and 14 in 1899. On March 21, the Al Field’s professional minstrel company was so popular that the........
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