SLIP THE YOKE
213
seems to know he-she-its true name, because he-she-it is protean with
changes of pace, location, and identity. Further, the trickster
is
everywhere and anywhere at one and the same time, and, like the
parts of some dismembered god, is likely to be found on stony as
well as on fertile ground. Folklore is somewhat more stable,
in
its
identity if not in its genealogy; but even here, if we are to
discus~
Negro
American folklore let us not be led astray by interlopers.
Certainly we should not approach Negro folklore through the
figure Hyman calls the" 'darky' entertainer." For even though such
performers as he mentions appear to be convenient guides, they lead
us elsewhere, into a Cthonic labyrinth. The role with which they are
identified is not, despite its "blackness,"
Negro
American (indeed,
Negroes are repelled by it); it does not find its popularity among
Negroes but among whites; and although it resembles the role of the
clown familiar to Negro variety-house audiences, it derives not from
the Negro but from the Anglo-Saxon branch of American folklorc.
In other words, this" 'darky' entertainer" is white. Nevertheless, it
might be worthwhile to follow the trail for a while, even though
we seem more interested in interracial warfare than the question of
literature.
These entertainers are, as Hyman explains, professionals, who
in
order to enact a symbolic role basic to the underlying drama of
American society assume a ritual mask- the identical mask and role
taken on by white minstrel men when
they
depicted comic
Negroe~.
Social changes occurring since the 1930's have made for certain modi–
fications (Rochester operates in a different climate of rhetoric, say,
than did Stepin Fetchit) but the mask, stylized and iconic, was once
required of anyone who would act the role-even those Negroe'3
whose natural coloration should, for any less ritualistic purposes at
least, have made it unnecessary.
Nor does the role, which makes use of Negro idiom, songs, dance
motifs, and word-play, grow out of the Negro American sense of
the comic (although we too have our comedy of blackness), but out
of the white American's Manichean fascination with the symbolism
of blackness and whiteness expressed in such contradictions as the
conflict between the white American's Judea-Christian morality, his
democratic political ideals and his daily conduct-indeed in his
general anti-tragic approach to experience.
