Apeiron Review | Issue 18

The Last Minstrel Show Jim Ross I wore blackface. In 1960, three years before the March on Washington, four years before the Civil Rights Act became law, I was a 13-year-old eighth grader at a Catholic elementary school putting on its annual minstrel show.

We didn’t use conventional blackface—shoe polish or burnt cork. Instead, nuns segmented their old seamed black stockings, poked eye, mouth and nose holes in them, and had us slide them over our heads. The intent, to amuse, was to make us look as black as midnight. And knowing old nun stockings covered our faces made us feel perversely funny. We looked like low-budget bank robbers.

Nearly all the students had white skin. The handful endowed with their own God-given black skin were given a waiver when it came to nun stockings and allowed to be black in their own, natural way. Calvin even got to sing a solo.

We kicked off with, “I’ll be down to get you in a taxi honey, better be ready ‘bout half past eight”—the “Darktown Strutters Ball,” a 1917 jazz-foxtrot tune made famous by The Six Brown Brothers.

Our class clowns, Mick and Artie, then came stage front to perform an Amos-n-Andy type routine. They scripted it, and the nuns said, “Okay, say that” and “No, you can’t say that.” In rehearsals Mick tripped exiting the bleachers and we laughed, so the nuns said, “Keep that in.”

We followed with “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand,” the signature song from The Music Man. Harkening back to halcyon days in River City, Iowa, this one conjured up a true white man’s minstrel, played by white men wearing their God-given skin tone.

Calvin then brought the audience to tears. The nuns had chosen him to sing the archetypal ballad of Eire, “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,” probably out of a twisted sense of irony, which came across most strongly in the line, “come ye back . . . when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.”

In closing, the stocking-faced ensemble sang, “Me and my shadow, strolling down the avenue,” credited to Billy Rose, Dave Dreyer, and Al Jolson. This tune belongs in the minstrel songbook alongside Jolsen’s “Mammy.”

I doubt any white classmates found the minstrel show racist. Not then. Three years later, in 1963, my stocking-faced brother was performing in the minstrel along with his stockingless black classmates.

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