"We Wear the Mask": Blackface Under the White Gaze

Bert Williams is an interesting and somewhat enigmatic (or introverted, rather) historical figure: a light-skinned Bahamian black man who performed throughout his career in the burnt-cork blackface of his minstrel show beginnings. In his comic-duo partnership with George Walker, billed as "Two Real Coons," as distinguished from minstrelsy by white performers in blackface, they played variations of minstrel caricatures, Walker as the pretentious-dandy "Zip Coon" and Williams as the oafish "Jim Crow" type. They were also recording artists, performed on Broadway, and, following Walker's death, Williams performed with the Ziegfeld Follies and recreated some of his acts for the film camera, as produced by theatrical managers Klaw & Erlanger and as, apparently haphazardly, distributed or not by the movie studio Biograph, namely this short, "A Natural Born Gambler," and another, "Fish" (1916), as well as the recently-rediscovered and mysteriously never-completed film with a mostly or all-black cast, "Lime Kiln Club Field Day" (1913).

I hope for a home-video release of the latter someday. A few minutes of the footage has been posted online, but as far a I know most of the seven reels or an hour-or-so of footage has only appeared thus far at film festivals (EDIT: It's since been streamed on the Criterion Channel). I'm especially interested if, as claimed, the feature works against some of the stereotypes that Williams and company otherwise employed in the short films. Indeed, there's a dissonance between what one today can see in something based in stereotypes as "A Natural Born Gambler" and the praise Williams received from his contemporaries. Even W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington seemed to agree on that topic--the former eulogizing Williams as "a great comedian, a great Negro, a great man," and the latter extolling him thusly: "He has done more for our race than I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts." Fellow comic W.C. Fields is said to have claimed him, "the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew."

In "A Natural Born Gambler," blackface isn't so much the problem. As opposed to "Fish," the other black characters don't wear any such charcoal, so in this case it comes across as akin to the usual grotesque amounts of makeup worn by slapstick clowns. Regardless, the main problem is that the comedy is dated slapstick mostly reliant upon racial stereotypes and ending with the enforcement of white supremacy (Williams is jailed for gambling by white police). Black men are portrayed drinking and gambling, as chicken thieves, as running scared from the devil in a graveyard, and as illiterate (e.g. "De Libray"). They try to hide their poker game from the gaze of the white law, but white men, by contrast, like the intended white audience for the film, outwit them and punish them for it. The coda of Williams miming playing cards--an act he'd developed on stage for years--alone in his jail cell is the highlight, and while it's easy to appreciate his expressive performance, it comes across, rather than funny, as a sad reflection of a white supremacist society and film.

At the time, the making of race films for a market of segregated theatres and African-American audiences was just beginning, and even the Ebony Film Corporation, established in 1915, was criticized for heavily exploiting racial stereotypes. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, reportedly, did better, but hardly anything from the studio remains today. Race-man Oscar Micheaux wouldn't make his first film until 1919, and relatively-uplifting representations of all or mostly-black casts, such as in the now-lost "The Railroad Porter" or the still-extant "A Fool and His Money" (both 1912/1913) seem to have been rare. According to Williams biographer Camille F. Forbes (in the book "Introducing Bert Williams"), distributing Williams's films in the segregated South was difficult and essentially doomed any plans for a series featuring the first black star comedian. And, on the other hand, as Ashley Clark says (in his essay "Beyond These Gates"), Williams was criticized by the black press for producing and directing such stereotypical portrayals, and he'd later become a cautionary tale in Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" (2000).

*"We Wear the Mask" is a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

(Note: Some outdated sources claim G.W. "Billy" Bitzer had something to do with this film, but that's impossible. As D.W. Griffith's loyal cinematographer, he left Biograph years ago, including to have since photographed the racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). Williams's short films are all the more intriguing because he appears to have been the main creative force in their entire production.)