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.

During the opening show, a black classmate’s father marched on stage, let loose a blood-curdling cry, cuffed his son, and dragged him off, leaving the minstrel in disarray and his mystified family disoriented and humiliated. By the next morning, the town’s entire black community knew about what came down at the last minstrel show.

Before the incident, had anyone told the nuns the minstrel was racist, they would’ve been thrown headlong into a blackboard. Though most students weren’t directly abused, we all were unwitting witnesses and had to rationalize away what we saw. The most pernicious and vulgar form of abuse consisted of targeting certain students who the nuns abusively called lazy, useless, stupid, unworthy, moral failures who would never amount to anything. Today they’d be called learning disabled. Blackface minstrel shows, heaving kids into blackboards, emotionally torturing those who were differently abled— the many forms of violence and the profound vulgarity of it all fed implacably off each other.

Seared into the memories of my eighth-grade classmates was the day Mick’s comedic timing was off and he angered a nun. A deal was struck that for Mick to stay enrolled both his parents had to leave work and come to school pronto. The father was required to beat Mick in front of the class. I still see him removing his belt, rearing back, and flogging Mick, over and over, as if performing a scene from a passion play. Mick choked back tears, his father and mother cried, each of us watching cried bitterly. But teacher (left) and principal (right) stood by unmoved. After school, some of us wailed walking home. Mick’s mother lost her job.

I found Mick 40 years later and asked him about the whipping. A Buddhist by then, he said his father beat him at the slightest provocation “and I vowed I would never treat my children that way.”

I recently told my adult son and daughter about wearing blackface.

“Didn’t people know it was wrong?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? How could people not? ”

My daughter said, “You sang us to sleep with those minstrel songs when we were kids.”

“Every time, I remembered where I learned them, too.”

My son interrupted, “But you wore whiteface years later.”

I retold how, as a 26-year-old grad student at Howard University, I was invited by a friend to a Halloween party sponsored by the black women’s Order of the Eastern Star. Warned it was a costume party, I wore a white sleeved leotard and tights and smeared white greasepaint on my hands, face, neck, and hair.

As we reached the venue, the seated Worthy Matron looked up and gave me a toothy smile: “I can see you’re trying to win the prize.”

Asked what I was disguised as, I said, “A white man.”

A gentleman in a scarlet tuxedo exclaimed, “You look just like a Caucasian.”

We danced all night, the DJ dubbed me “moon dancer,” and I won best male costume. Best female costume went to a black woman dressed as a harem dancer. At the DJ’s direction, she and I paraded around the room, arm in arm. As cameras flashed, the well-lubricated audience chanted, “Black and white, black and white.”

My son asked, “So what’s the difference? Did your wearing whiteface balance things out??”

I said, “Everyone knew why I wore whiteface. They knew it was a comment on the perversity of minstrel shows and wearing blackface. The joke was on me. Instead of feeling like another slap, everyone was in on the joke.”