"The Scar of Shame": Skin Color and Caste in Black Silent Melodrama

Abstract

When blacks began to finance and direct their own films in the teens and early 1920s, they consistently produced domestic melodramas. Some of these early productions have racial themes which reorganize the world in such a way that black heritage is rewarded over white paternity; they are schematic renunciations of the prevailing order of things in white American society where, historically, the discovery of black blood meant sudden reversal of fortune, social exclusion, or banishment.' Feminist studies of literary, cinematic, and theatrical melodrama have suggested that the melodramatic world view favors the weak over the strong as it adheres to a moral order which privileges the lesser and handicaps the greater. Since these new theories have shown that there is something genuinely affirming for women readers in narratives which organize the world around the female character and her domestic haven in the home, I wondered if domestic melodrama had ever produced an analogous position for black viewers or readers, female or male.2 What I found surprised me. Although the black viewer is not exactly affirmed in the silent film text, this viewer is implicated in it in a way that is still pertinent to the whole project of understanding the subversive potential of domestic melodrama. At the outset I did not expect that it would be necessary to reconstruct the black viewer in history. Nor did I expect to find that cinema aesthetics and the aesthetics of racial distinction could be so closely linked. In fact, as I will argue, they are one and the same. My reading of The Scar of Shame (1927), one of the few silent melodramas with an all-black cast available for rental in the United States, is also an attempt to see how theories of literary and cinematic melodrama can be applied to AfroAmerican culture. Since, with a few exceptions, this heritage has not been submitted to any systematic analysis as mass culture, I offer this approach as an example of how we might deal with cultural products which are politically offensive to later generations of black American viewers.3 The advantage of this approach is that since it does not measure mass culture against high culture, the people who enjoy popular entertainment are not condemned by association with it. In order to consider the black viewer in 1927, whom we will never exactly know, and about whom we can always ask more, I will take up the problems of melodramatic mode of address, the use of the mulatta type, the subversive aspects of style, and the reception of the happy ending. An attempt to recon-