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Book Review
| Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2002. pp. + 260. US $27.95 cloth.
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| Most people wouldn't think further back than the Harlem Renaissance when considering New York City's black contribution to the national culture of the United States. The world the slaves made is located, imaginatively, firmly in the South, where most African-Americans trace their roots. Yet in the 1740s, 21 per cent of New York City's people were black slaves. In the same decade, this city witnessed the insurrectionary New York Conspiracy, led by waterfront workers, of whom almost a third were of African descent. And in the wake of abolition here, 80 years or so later, the first 'national' African-American theatre company was formed. |
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A microhistory, Sydney University historian Shane White's study of the African Company provides a rich depiction of black American life in New York City around the 1820s. (It does suffer from that antiquarianism that plagues such studies; the minuteness of detail, the need for speculation due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence, can be tedious. On the other hand, this no doubt enhances the book's value to theatre and black culture buffs.) White begins by pointing out that there has been only fleeting recognition of the existence of the African Company, seen only as an 'oddity', and that historians have neglected the creative response of African Americans in the North to freedom. And so he constructs a diverting historical cameo, which, set in the broader context of free black urban culture, is given its historical significance. |
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Discussing his sources (mostly newspaper accounts, especially of court trials), White elaborates the demand placed upon blacks to provide life histories to be edited by whites for a white audience. The irony is that his work is crafted almost entirely upon these sources; equally ironic is the centrality of actor James Hewlitt's life-story to it. When Hewlitt ends up in court defending himself against criminal charges (stealing and selling articles from a ship on which he was hired as a steward) White brings us back to this theme of the interrogated black man. |
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Perhaps the actor 'began to get involved with the underworld of New York City'. Perhaps he could have been a 'natural' black confidence man, thinks White. But it 'is unlikely that he would have been associated with anything as crass as breaking and entering or mugging' (p. 177). Why? Because he was a gifted actor? It is instructive to read, alongside White's book, Linebaugh and Rediker's 2000 study of the subversive waterfront economy of New York City in the mid-1700s, where tavern-keepers kept houses for both the 'caballing and entertainment of negroes' and for the fencing of stolen goods. Like Ralph Elliston, whose priggish account of hearing 'foul mouthed black workingmen' discussing opera is used to introduce the study, White seems to assume a pre-existing and impermeable caste hierarchy between entertainers, maritime workers, and petty thieves, in what seems a curious insularity from the historical realities of life in a pre-industrial port city. |
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'[F]rom today's perspective, what seems remarkable about these years ... was the fluidity of racial categories', writes White. 'The key here is the language used in everyday speech' (p. 214). His analysis constantly calls to mind that prescient line from The Tempest by Caliban: 'You taught me language, and my proft on't is/ I know how to curse'. White argues that freed blacks laid claim to the national culture by performing Shakespeare, and further that, in the wake of abolition, a predominantly white, youthful, male audience found this altogether threatening. Through linguistic devices, anxious white audiences ridiculed the black performers, white critics lambasted them, and such white hostility eventually destroyed this attempt to share, indeed to make anew, a distinctive American culture, replacing it instead with the abysmal farce of minstrelsy. |
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Unfortunately Stories of Freedom does not look into the longer histories of black engagement with Shakespeare. English slave traders set up the first permanent English factory in West Africa in 1618 soon after Caliban's hybrid native/slave character first trod the stage; 11 years earlier, slave ship crews anchored off Africa performed Shakespeare, a 'converted negro' translating the plays for the visiting African merchants. In America, as Lawrence Levine has shown, Shakespeare was the most popular playwright before and after the Revolution, his audience a heterogeneous microcosm of American society, the parodying of his plays 'an integral part of the national culture'. Even a nineteenth century minstrelsy joke, quoted by Levine as evidence for the ubiquity of Shakespeare in American popular culture (When was Desdemona like a ship? When she was moored), is startlingly evocative of that eighteenth-century New York waterfront culture described by Linebaugh and Rediker. |
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Given this long history it seems the decision by black actors, once liberated from slavery, to perform Shakespeare was certainly not the 'oddity' it may seem to our eyes today. Perhaps what is more extraordinary is the suddenness and ferocity with which Shakespeare was deliberately 'whitened'. Like fellow black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, who became the victim of a virulently racist London press campaign due to the pro-slavery lobby in that city, black American actors were to be excluded from a once comparatively inclusive culture. White points out that the period he is looking at is when 'whiteness' begins to be invented, and shows, very strongly, the 'eclipsing' of alternative possibilities for race relations signified by the closing down of the Company and Hewlett's failure as an individual to reap the promise of his talents. It would seem that the African Company constituted a distinctive cultural 'moment', occurring at a point when the future trajectory of race relations was unpredictable and open ended. A thought-provoking, fascinating historical study, Stories of Freedom will be of interest to cultural historians especially, but not only, of race. |
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| Flinders University |
VICTORIA HASKINS | |
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