One day, in the early part of spring, my fifth grade teacher announced that our class would put on a minstrel show. Our blank pie-plate faces must have told her that we had no idea what she was talking about. So, in answer to our unasked question (WTF?), Miss Taylor passed around some pamphlets. But these flabby little booklets didn't make anything clearer; if anything it compounded our confusion, making it richer and more complex, turning it into a deep loamy soil of plain bewilderment. As I recall, the booklets had a photograph showing lots of people poised on the stage in a semi-circle, their faces unaccountably blackened, and contained a script of sorts, written in the densest Uncle Remus dialect.
Miss Taylor liked to do things, usually ambitious things. We'd just returned from a week-long trip to Philadelphia, paid for by our own bare-knuckled grade-school labors. We'd sold coat-hangers back to the dry cleaner, washed pots and pans for the neighbors, walked dogs, etc. So we knew whatever this was about, it would be A Big Deal. Miss Taylor, however, was less forthcoming about the whys of our collective projects. She wasn't anyone you felt you could approach with a question, either. She had a big hard butt, eyebrows penciled into a cross expression, tight knotted calf muscles, and was very nearly bald. As her student, sensing that protest would be futile, you sighed and did what she wanted.
I took my booklet home and studied it. What I couldn't get my head around was the black-faced part and the Uncle Remus accents. Why would we do this? We were all little white kids. This was before Brown vs. The Board of Education, so none of us even knew any little black kids. I read the dialect and tried to puzzle it out. I finally decided that white people were involved because no black person would be stupid enough to volunteer. I didn't know the word offensive but I was probably groping towards it, when I thought, It's rude.
Miss Taylor was nothing if not professional. We worked and rehearsed like Broadway pros. I remember I was in something resembling a chorus, and I have dim memories of rattling a tamborine, shouting Hidey, hidey, ho! at various intervals during the show. It was fine with me. I didn't want to be a performer with lines, saying things like, Mistah Bones! Ah hea'd you wuz in de jail. Why fo' you be's lock-ed up? My parents were going to come to this and I could already envision their ashen faces.
The whole show was two hours long, and we performed it gamely, if depressively, on stage, in the school auditorium. Miss Taylor, grim as usual, took her bows. Afterwards, still blacked up with a big white-ringed mouth, I rode home with my parents in one of those stark silences, still not understanding why this show even existed.
I suppose my parents, especially my father, didn't descend on Miss Taylor like the furies from hell, because of her Miss Taylorishness, for one. And because she periodically called them in to explain that I was a genius. As proof, my paintings, including the acclaimed What Music Feels Like to Me, were flapped in their faces with a gale force. Most of the time, instead of being in class, I toiled in the hallway, beavering on murals with other talented souls. It was an easy gig and I wasn't willing to give it up and rejoin the Blue Bird Reading Circle. My mom and dad probably sensed that, so they let things ride.
We never talked about the minstrel show, my parents and I. The event just settled within me as one of those icky experiences I didn't have much control over.
So here that memory still sits, occupying some thinly inhabited part of my brain, along with Colored Only signs I saw growing up, and the sight of black men in chain gangs. Recollections like that have been with me so long, they might even seem natural.
Except there was nothing natural about any of it.
Miss Taylor liked to do things, usually ambitious things. We'd just returned from a week-long trip to Philadelphia, paid for by our own bare-knuckled grade-school labors. We'd sold coat-hangers back to the dry cleaner, washed pots and pans for the neighbors, walked dogs, etc. So we knew whatever this was about, it would be A Big Deal. Miss Taylor, however, was less forthcoming about the whys of our collective projects. She wasn't anyone you felt you could approach with a question, either. She had a big hard butt, eyebrows penciled into a cross expression, tight knotted calf muscles, and was very nearly bald. As her student, sensing that protest would be futile, you sighed and did what she wanted.
I took my booklet home and studied it. What I couldn't get my head around was the black-faced part and the Uncle Remus accents. Why would we do this? We were all little white kids. This was before Brown vs. The Board of Education, so none of us even knew any little black kids. I read the dialect and tried to puzzle it out. I finally decided that white people were involved because no black person would be stupid enough to volunteer. I didn't know the word offensive but I was probably groping towards it, when I thought, It's rude.
Miss Taylor was nothing if not professional. We worked and rehearsed like Broadway pros. I remember I was in something resembling a chorus, and I have dim memories of rattling a tamborine, shouting Hidey, hidey, ho! at various intervals during the show. It was fine with me. I didn't want to be a performer with lines, saying things like, Mistah Bones! Ah hea'd you wuz in de jail. Why fo' you be's lock-ed up? My parents were going to come to this and I could already envision their ashen faces.
The whole show was two hours long, and we performed it gamely, if depressively, on stage, in the school auditorium. Miss Taylor, grim as usual, took her bows. Afterwards, still blacked up with a big white-ringed mouth, I rode home with my parents in one of those stark silences, still not understanding why this show even existed.
I suppose my parents, especially my father, didn't descend on Miss Taylor like the furies from hell, because of her Miss Taylorishness, for one. And because she periodically called them in to explain that I was a genius. As proof, my paintings, including the acclaimed What Music Feels Like to Me, were flapped in their faces with a gale force. Most of the time, instead of being in class, I toiled in the hallway, beavering on murals with other talented souls. It was an easy gig and I wasn't willing to give it up and rejoin the Blue Bird Reading Circle. My mom and dad probably sensed that, so they let things ride.
We never talked about the minstrel show, my parents and I. The event just settled within me as one of those icky experiences I didn't have much control over.
So here that memory still sits, occupying some thinly inhabited part of my brain, along with Colored Only signs I saw growing up, and the sight of black men in chain gangs. Recollections like that have been with me so long, they might even seem natural.
Except there was nothing natural about any of it.
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