214
PARTISAN REVIEW
Being "highly pigmented," as the sociologists say, it was our
Negro "misfortune" to be caught up associatively in the negative
side of this basic dualism of the white folk mind, and to be shackled
to almost everything it would repress from conscience and conscioWl–
ness. The physical hardships and indignities of slavery were benign
compared with this continuing debasement of our image. Became
these things are bound up with their notion of chaos it is almost
im·
possible for many whites to consider questions of sex, women, eco–
nomic opportunity, the national identity, historic change, social
jus–
tice-even the "criminality" implicit in the broadening of freedom
itself- without summoning malignant images of black men
into
consciousness.
In the Anglo-Saxon branch of American folklore and in the
entertainment industry (which thrives on the exploitation and de–
basement of all folk materials), the Negro is reduced to a negative
sign that usually appears in a comedy of the grotesque and the un·
acceptable.
As
Constance Rourke has made us aware, the action of
the early minstrell show- with its Negro-derived choreography, its
ringing of banjos and rattling of bones, its voices cackling jokes
in
pseudo-Negro dialect, with its nonsense songs, its bright costumes and
sweating performers- constituted a ritual of exorcism. Other white
cultures had their gollywogs and blackamoors but the fact of Negro
slavery went to the moral heart of the American social drama and
here the Negro was too real for easy fantasy, too serious to be dealt
with in anything less than a national art. The mask was an in·
separable part of the national iconography. Thus even when a Negro
acted in an abstract role the national implications were unchanged.
His costume made use of the "sacred" symbolism of the American
flag- with red and white striped pants and coat and with stars
set
in a field of blue for a collar- but he could appear only with
his
hands gloved in white and his face blackened with burnt cork or
greasepaint.
This mask, this willful stylization and modification of the natural
face and hands, was imperative for the evocation of that atmosphere
in which the fascination of blackness could be enjoyed, the comic
catharsis achieved. The racial identity of the performer was unim·
portant, the mask was the thing (the "thing" in more ways than one)
and its function was to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced
