Journey to a Land of Cotton: A Slave Plantation in Brooklyn, 1895

Abstract

Billed as Panorama of Negro, Nate Salsbury's 1895 Black pageant commemorated social evolution of blacks from the Jungles of Africa to Civilization of America.1 pageant integrated civic drama of historical pageantry, commercialism of variety show, and educational imperatives of ethnographic exhibition. Urban northerners were transported to sunny of antebellum era, rigidly hierarchical world where was king. Audiences milled around village, temporally and spatially displaced plantation Brooklyn's Ambrose Park with guidebook that drew their attention to characteristic scenes of remarkable verisimilitude: slave quarter buzzing with neighbors out visiting, scent of poultry and livestock, and blooms of realistic cotton field (whose bolls were held up with sticks and wire).2 Nearby, group of black southern laborers processed and baled cotton mule-powered gin. In evening, Black featured variety showcase of songs, dances, and customs said to be typical of black southern folk. Vocal soloists, sixty-three vocal quartets, and plethora of choral ensembles evoked Old South with familiar songs like My Old Kentucky Home and less familiar ones like The Cabin Where I Was Born and Ham Bone Am Sweet while dancers demonstrated folk dances like heel and toe and buck and wing. As grand finale, faces of immortal friends of bondsmen-John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, General Sherman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe-were displayed in heroic size as choir sang America background. As anthem rose beneath Lincoln's mute and benign countenance, one misty-eyed witness believed image of Great Emancipator to be especially fitting since it was he, observer noted, who had made a country for blacks where before it had been only an abiding place.3A master of outdoor entertainments, most Americans knew pageant's white manager Nate Salsbury from his wildly successful Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Black has been largely forgotten, despite being one of biggest outdoor shows of its time. Its popularity and contradictory message of progress and pacification reflected an era of racial retrenchment.4 Salsbury recruited nearly five hundred black southerners from Virginia and North and South Carolina who replaced Indians of Wild West Show, now on tour. Salsbury hoped his new show would redress financial damage caused by Panic of 1893 and steep overhead required for cast of hundreds.5 Black America's nostalgic depiction of African American past willfully ignored brutally inhumane unfreedom of slavery, indulging instead nostalgic view of slavery as beneficent institution, stopover transition between African barbarism and industrial modernity. show aimed to portray the peculiarities of Southern negro manner that most Northern persons have never been able to observe.6 see negro himself, Brooklyn Daily Eagle excitedly announced, the American citizen, and colored voter, process of evolution. . . . We get glimpses of working of his mind, learn what appeals will move him and what lines he is most likely to make progress.7What was public's investment identifying African American performers Black as individuals devoid of artifice that commercial entertainment entailed, other words, to see them billed as the real thing rather than actors and artists performing for paying audience? What satisfactions did such investments black naturalism provide for its white audiences? Outside pageant's walls, African Americans arrived New York City ever-greater numbers search of social and political equality unavailable to them South. Once settled, this population began to chafe publicly against deeply entrenched forms of northern discrimination. …