Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

14 With Amusement for Allone side “a little black rascal of twelve years, assisted by two little whiteones of eleven or under were roaring a love song.” Elsewhere in the room,whites and blacks applauded a black man “who was jumping Jim Crow.” 8Black dancers, whether jumping Jim Crow or dancing for eels in streetcompetition, constituted a common sight in and around the CatherineStreet Market. A number of them came from Long Island (where slaverycontinued to exist until 1827) “to engage in a jig or breakdown,” recalleda white butcher, Thomas De Voe. According to De Voe: “Each had his particular‘shingle’ brought with him as part of his stock in trade.” While acompanion beat time with a heel or by striking a hand against a leg, thedancer performed on the board for monetary or other rewards, such as fishand eels. Another observer could well have been Micah Hawkins, a whiteman who owned a grocery store nearby and, in 1815, wrote an early blackfacesong. Sometimes, black fiddle players provided the backdrop for electrifyingbreakdown contests featuring the popular Bobolink Bob or thelegendary “Juba”—William Henry Lane, who reportedly had no equal.Lane, from lower Manhattan, dazzled Charles Dickens when the famedEnglish novelist watched him perform in a seedy underground dance hall. 9For African Americans, the dancing, the music, and the laughter notonly elicited small rewards from white spectators but also provided momentaryrelease from hard times. Whether dancing for eels in the streets orentering the noisy, multiracial world of taverns, oyster houses, and gamblingdens, they found brief alternatives to the rigors of work and hardscrabbleexistence.Not all blacks approved of such frivolity, of course. Some AfricanAmericans objected on religious grounds. Some warned that poor individualswere wasting their meager resources on liquor and vices. Others wereconcerned that such loose living only confirmed white perceptions of blacksas shiftless, immoral, and lewd. But, to many African Americans, the urbanshadowland of streets and taverns was a welcome place where, in the wordsof one historian, they “shucked off the problems of a workaday existence,reclaimed their bodies as instruments of pleasure not toil, and showed thatthe night time was the right time.” Some, such as William Johnson, a freeblack resident of Natchez, Mississippi, even enjoyed the sight of whites inblackface doing their own versions of jigs and jumping Jim Crow. In themid-1830s, Johnson watched “Daddy” Rice perform. 10In turn, as Rice and other white minstrel performers looked for materialto use onstage, they observed and studied black workers, dancers, andsingers. 11 One white minstrel, Ben Cotton, recalled spending time withblacks along the Mississippi, “twanging” the banjo with them: “They didnot quite understand me. I was the first white man they had seen who sangas they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectlyhappy.” Such “crossing over” into the black world could also be a source