"A Mirthful Spectacle": Race, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Base Ball, 1874-1888

Abstract

To sum up [Blue Stocking vs. Pink Stocking] game in general, it need only be said that, saving single item of color it like other well-played games. One peculiarity, however, noticeable, whether accidental or usual we don't know. It consisted in irresistible propensity for tumbling head over heels when in act of running bases or going for fly catches. The life of stereotype resides in death of its model, and perceptual deadening of those who carry it in their heads as a schematic search template for identifying other Sambo has caught baseball fever, and two clubs from Alabama and Mississippi respectively, have recently had a match in Demopolis, Alabamians winning. Heah now, why didn't you frow dat ball to de fust base y'rascal you? Was blackness a metaphor for material excesses of postbellum Gilded Age--or for stereotypical notion of African American baseball? One answer examines how minstrel theater penetrated baseball sporting world and how business of minstrelsy paralleled rise of professional baseball--burnt cork artists played ball, literary and graphic artists portrayed games as blackface farce, and nines reputedly engaged in Negro comedy. Current baseball scholarship seldom mentions post-bellum ballplayer, who brought to game a peculiar style and became object of blackness and agency in baseball representations. Perhaps most dramatic case of ethnic stereotypes is found in melding of blackface performance and baseball representations. This image-repertoire circulated in print media: sports narratives, illustrations, and cartoons. While life of black baseball stereotypes has been incorporated into scholarship on subject of minstrelsy--most recently, in works by Michael Hatt, Mark Ribowsky, David Zang, Michael D. Harris, and Brian F. Le Beau--any analysis of relationship between performance and visual-verbal representations has yet to be undertaken.1 One reason for this lack of critical inquiry is controversy surrounding blackface performance and its integral relation to history of American black cultural production. Iconologist W. J. T. Mitchell declares blackface minstrelsy's image-repertoire to be despicable and worthy of destruction, but he warns that racial and ethnic stereotypes seem to have a life of their own. If life of black baseball stereotype resides in death of its models, as this blurring of line between blackface comedic mask and colored ballplayers suggests, then who does image-killing and image-resurrecting? The answer can be found by examining specific works that reflect on adaptability of baseball representations. (2) Recently, minstrelsy has been subject to intense scholarly study. Historian Eric Lott defines blackface minstrelsy as an established nineteenth-century theatrical practice, principally of urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit. For Lott, one of its functions was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and finally to aid in construction of class identities over bodies of black people. The primary purpose of minstrel mask may have been as much to maintain control over a potentially subversive act as to ridicule, though blackface performers' attempts at regulation also appear to have been capable of producing aura of blackness. Lott calls this antebellum aura the seeming counterfeit. (3) For literary critic Saidiya Hartman, antebellum minstrelsy represents desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or black body as a sentimental resource and locus of excess enjoyment. According to Hartman, fungibility of commodity--specifically its abstractness and immateriality--enabled black body or blackface mask to serve as a vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment. …