A Tale of Two Funerals: Surrogation and the Legacy of Florence Mills in Show Boat's Black Chorus (1927)

Abstract

A Tale of Two FuneralsSurrogation and the Legacy of Florence Mills in Show Boat's Black Chorus (1927) Bethany Wood (bio) Solemnity suffused the streets of Harlem on Sunday, November 6, 1927, as thousands of mourners thronged the route of Florence Mills's funeral procession.1 The local chorine-turned-headliner had been diagnosed with pelvic tuberculosis months earlier while touring in England with the revue Blackbirds. Knowing the cast and crew depended on her for employment, the thirty-two-year-old Mills had kept her diagnosis confidential and continued to perform, traveling with the show to Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool before returning to the United States in late September.2 Upon her return, Mills attended parties and discussed future projects, including a starring role in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies and a possible film version of the novel Porgy with Paul Robeson. Few knew of Mills's illness at the time and none, including Mills and her family, recognized its severity. Without fanfare, Mills entered the Hospital for Joint Diseases in late October and died November 1 from complications following an operation performed to alleviate her condition.3 In his book Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach discusses surrogation, the process by which individuals succeed a figurehead to perpetuate the departed's social and cultural function. Roach identifies various "vortices of behavior," events that function "to canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them … the grand boulevard, the marketplace, the theater district, the square, the burial ground—where the gravitational pull of social necessity brings audiences together and produces performers (candidates for surrogation) from their midst."4 The literal and metaphorical "burial ground" of Mills's funeral acted as one such behavioral vortex, which resonated with a second vortex [End Page 68] occurring in the actual and conceptual "theatre district" where Mills had made her career. On November 15, just nine days after Mills's funeral, Ziegfeld presented the first preview performance of Show Boat. The musical previewed in Washington, DC, traveled to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh again, and then opened on Broadway in late December, where it ran for 575 performances. The musical featured a chorus "of the most beautiful girls ever glorified by Mr. Ziegfeld," and, for the first time in a Ziegfeld show, the production included a contingent of Black chorus girls, several of whom had previously appeared onstage with Mills.5 The commingling of Mills's funeral with the musical's opening thrust Show Boat's Black chorines into the gravitational pull of these behavioral vortices, positioning the dancers as primary candidates to succeed Mills. The history of Show Boat's Black chorus girls, like much non-white dance history, lies largely outside the archive. Choruses in 1920s musicals functioned as a multitude, seemingly without individuality, crafted, trained, and critiqued as a cohesive unit. As Saidiya Hartman notes, "Every historian of the multitude … is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor."6 The nomenclature of the "chorus girl," deployed to evoke youth and vitality, positioned female chorus dancers as children, individuals lacking the agency, maturity, and importance associated with historical relevance. Rather than in individual chorus dancers, historical import rested in the era's famous impresarios, men understood as experts in discovering and shaping young women's "raw" talent into successful, artistic performances.7 Records of chorus girls from the period, particularly those who never achieved stardom, thus remain sparse, their histories overshadowed by the men who produced them. In conjunction with the chorus girl's lowly status, Black chorus girls confronted racist understandings of Black dance and dancers as essentially primitive, a construct that further distanced their stories and work from the cultural status that lends itself to documentation, acknowledgment, and preservation. Like the women Hartman studies, the Black chorus dancers in Show Boat were "young black women … destined to be minor figures" and thus were largely disregarded in contemporary and historical accounts.8 Accordingly, while studies analyzing "the chorus" in Show Boat abound, individual histories of the chorus dancers are rare...