"[T]he Imitation Dance served as a powerful act of defiance from someone who, more typically, would have lacked any means of broader representational control."

Dancing across the Color Line
James W. Cook

IV.

These intriguing wrinkles in the social fabric complicate our conventional portrait of a strictly segregated city emerging by the 1850s. The more pressing question, in fact, seems to be not whether, but how certain interracial spaces managed to survive within the racial caste system. My point here is not to argue against recent studies that have emphasized a symbiotic relationship between class anxiety and racial segregation. Clearly, the rise of market capitalism had an enormous impact on how the post-emancipation color line was defined and regulated. And in many cases, the ground-level results (segregated workshops, mob violence, minstrel stereotypes) point to a pattern of increasingly rigid racial differentiation. Yet this should not be the end of the story, nor our only story. The most fundamental lesson from Orange Street may be that the market revolution pushed the color line in multiple directions. We might imagine the east side of Manhattan as a kind of cultural crossroads during these years: one trail of consumers pointing to the Bowery Theater to view white men in blackface; another trail leading to the more heterogeneous milieu of Pete Williams’s dance hall.

But what, exactly, did they find there? Above all, they found a space structured by commerce, a world where everything was for sale. Williams, it is important to remember, first encountered Dickens, Judson, and Foster as cash-carrying customers. These customers, in turn, seem to have been drawn to a commodity perceived as unique: a "regular breakdown" in a market saturated with "counterfeit Jim Crows." In many ways, this was a seminal moment in the history of American bohemianism. Precisely because Williams’s offerings were not minstrelsy, they had to be confined to the lowest substrata of the cultural economy. The process was complicated, though, because it simultaneously generated small pockets of black capital and transformed white customers into underground nonconformists. The U.S. Census of 1850 provides our clearest measure of the sporting migration’s material effects. Eight years after Dickens’s visit, Williams declared five thousand dollars of property–a remarkably high figure for a resident of New York’s notoriously poor sixth ward.

Outsiders often denounced this market-driven race and class mixing as a horrifying erasure of social difference. An 1857 description by a local Protestant missionary was typical. Williams’s hall, he wrote, was a place where "the distinction of wealth, position, and character die as by enchantment. The white-gloved aristocrat, the buckram pimp of fashionable life, so far loses his drawing-room tastes, as to join hands with the greasy fingered negress." In actual fact, though, this hall generated its own particular forms of hierarchy and privilege. White men generally occupied the positions of consumers and literary chroniclers. A pair of exceptional black men played the roles of impresario and star. Poor women of both races acted as dance partners and sexual commodities. Policemen served as bodyguards and tour guides. And a much larger number of local residents occupied shanties behind the dance hall, far more concerned with day-to-day survival, one suspects, than Williams’s floor show.

We have already noted one important exception: Dickens’s initial encounter with the "landlady of Almack’s," a reference that may suggest that Williams had a wife and/or female colleague who helped him run the business. Dickens also mentions a dance partner swept "off her feet" by the male lead. Still, the sheer rarity of women observed in positions of artistic prominence and independent consumption serves to differentiate this venue from similar urban spaces five or six decades later. As one recent historian of American bohemianism has observed, it was only during the early twentieth century that white women found it possible to move into the front ranks of boundary crossers.

But here again, this should not be the end of the story. Indeed, what makes Williams’s hall particularly noteworthy are the frequent slippages in the hierarchies, the unintended consequences of the commerce. The most far-reaching of these involves the male virtuoso who first inspired Dickens’s to write. We now know a good deal more: that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of "match dances" against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.

Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus "trials of skill" as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets. What the letter demonstrates is not simply that Irish immigrants like Diamond imitated black dance moves performed in interracial contact zones, but that one of the first, putatively white imitators was in fact a black man who performed in blackface. For our purposes, though, the more crucial issue is how the accuser made his case. This is what the indignant correspondent wrote to the Sunday Flash:

The principal offense, in other words, had little to do with the display of non-simulated black talent (that much sporting men could see in the Points every Saturday night). Rather, the problem was that Barnum had "swindled" a group of men who prized fair wagers and authentic trials of skill far more than racial segregation.

One suspects that this scandal in the sporting underground was what drew Dickens to the Points six months later. Perhaps he had heard rumors about Barnum’s youthful prodigy, who could perfectly imitate Diamond’s imitations. And perhaps it was these very transactions that Dickens had in mind when he portrayed Lane "leaping gloriously" onto Williams’s counter and laughing "with the chuckle of a million . . . counterfeit Jim Crows!" Given his recent misrepresentations at Vauxhall, it is hard to imagine that Lane did not relish the opportunity to perform as himself for the era’s most famous author–no burnt cork involved. More certain is the fact that he soon capitalized on Dickens’s publicity, discarded Barnum’s bogus personas, and launched a public career that extended well beyond the Five Points.

Lane was part of at least three major dance contests against Diamond during the mid-1840s, all in east-side theaters patronized by sporting men. An ad in the Herald suggests the specific format:

Unfortunately, there seems to be no surviving record of how the contest played out. But the evidence we do have suggests that Lane garnered significant white support. One indicator is the lack of coverage in the Herald the following week. While Bennett had been eager to promote the contest, he was surprisingly silent about the results. Also noteworthy are the unapologetic references to the "friends of Juba," and the use of the term "art" to describe Lane’s dancing. Modern skeptics might argue that such friendship was a far cry from genuine respect; or that the white convention of locating black artistry in vernacular dance forms (as opposed to more intellectual pursuits) was itself a form of condescension. The particular context of these claims, however, points to a different conclusion. Publicly arguing for the superiority of black talent–especially against an Irish American champion, especially in a neighborhood known for its segregationist labor practices and Democratic politics–was no small gesture in 1844. And within less than a year, Lane was out on the road, headlining an interracial minstrel troupe of his own.

An 1845 playbill from Portland provides a sense of how Lane marketed himself:

Diamond, not surprisingly, ran similar ads with opposing claims. Diamond and Lane may have even conceived of the original contest together–as a money-making gimmick to benefit both parties. The flash press is full of similar scandals during the 1840s. Yet these possibilities do little to alter the larger significance of Lane’s playbill. At the very moment when minstrelsy was becoming an international industry, a black man from the Five Points was talking trash at the expense of the era’s leading white dancer. What’s more, he was using this talk to poke holes in the color line, not from some marginal site of underground struggle, but through market mechanisms generated by commercial minstrelsy itself.

This brings us to Lane’s "Imitation Dance," a kind of one-man cutting contest that served as the finale for most of his recorded performances during the mid-1840s. Another playbill from the same tour provides a typical description:

Recent scholarship has rightly pointed to the deep irony (and cruelty) of a commercial industry that forced Lane to imitate "himself." What also needs to be acknowledged, though, is the enormous market savvy expressed through these stylistic reversals. Lane did not simply claim superiority to the leading white dancers. More ambitiously, he made the blackface industry itself an artistic subject, the very focus of his signature performance. And in this sense, the Imitation Dance served as a powerful act of defiance from someone who, more typically, would have lacked any means of broader representational control. Each night Lane cleared the stage and publicly named his leading competitors. He then closed the show by demonstrating–move for move, gesture for gesture–the "vast difference" between his own art and "those that have heretofore attempted dancing."