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Color Them Funny
| Article
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20172 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,669 Words |
| Author
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Gerald Early
Gerald Early is professor of English and director of African
and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St.
Louis. He is the author of Tuxedo Junction: Essays on
American Culture and editor of My Soul's High Song: The
Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem
Renaissance and Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity,
and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. |
THE ADVENTURES OF AMOS 'N' ANDY
A Social History of an American Phenomenon
Melvin Patrick Ely
New York: The Free Press, 1991
322 pp., $22.95
In the classic and controversial 1915 D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation, which chronicles the Reconstruction from white southern male eyes, a most perplexing scene occurs when, toward the end of the film, Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), held captive by the evil mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) who is forcing her to marry him, calls for help from a broken window. On horseback, "White Spies Disguised" (as the title board reads) rides off for help from the Ku Klux Klan. The disguised spies are white men in blackface, as the whole town, apparently, has been played by whites in blackface, so there is no real way to distinguish the white spies from other whites playing "authentic" blacks in the film. The viewer ultimately must ask who or what is being impersonated here? What is the meaning of black imposture on the part of whites? And how can one possibly tell, in a film where all the lead blacks are fake, who is a real black person and who is not? Were blacks, finally, the creation of the white imagination?
From the time that blacks came upon these shores and lost both their native religions and their languages, they have been engaged in the spirited business of reinventing themselves both as Africans (or ethnics) and as Americans simultaneously. There is nothing particularly new or startling either in this fact or the recognition of it. Most Americans have gone through the ironic conversion process of becoming American while also retaining and even overemphasizing their ethnicity. Groups such as the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and Asians come readily to mind as examples of this. What is most interesting about the case of the African-American (even this current appellation stresses the specialness of ethnicity and the quest for union, the idea of the one and the many) is that so many forces in the country have been so arraigned to thwart or complicate his or her attempt to create and shape identify on his or her own terms.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in this famous passage from The Souls of Black Folks (1903), asserted that black Americans were
born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
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