Deep Water by Thomas Ruys Smith

Author:Thomas Ruys Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Oh, Ain’t I Gone, Gone, Gone, Way Down de Ribber Road”

Minstrelsy’s fixation with the Mississippi River hardly went away after the Civil War. Continuing stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin alone meant that the association remained at the heart of popular culture. In 1876, for example, Henry Conway’s 1852 adaptation of the novel was revived in Boston. Much of act 2 took place on board a steamboat. Audiences were presented with “a panorama view of the banks of the Mississippi” featuring: “Cotton and sugar plantations with their buildings, negros huts, &c. Wind mills at work &c., &c., with every variety of prospects incidental to its scenery near New Orleans.”23 Yet the war clearly did mark a shift in the meaning of the minstrel show. For David Monod, minstrelsy, like many other American art forms, particularly changed its relationship to the South and to slavery after the Civil War: “Postwar minstrel shows became sites of mourning for the lost South. [. . .] By claiming authenticity and then portraying happy black slaves, minstrelsy in the late nineteenth century therefore [. . .] became an instrument of southern revanchism over a lost war.” Such shows implicitly and explicitly argued that the “Civil War [. . .] had been a mistake; black folks had not been improved by freedom; rather, the security of their perpetual childhood had been destroyed.”24 The Mississippi—already implicated in the postwar culture of reunion and nostalgia—continued to hold a central place in the medium.

Yoked to the changes in minstrelsy during these years was the emergence of the roustabout in popular culture. On the postbellum stage, roustabouts became veritably synonymous with minstrelsy. Luke Schoolcraft—who grew up in New Orleans and “spent much of his boyhood leisure along the docks”—claimed that his postbellum minstrel act “portrayed a type of colored man that was indigenous to the South after the war [. . .] the negro of the levee, the roustabout, with his queer dialect, and shuffling manner and happy-go-lucky ideas.”25 Well into the twentieth century, an article in the New York Clipper mourned the passing of the minstrel show in particular ways: “The bell tolled the requiem for our old time favorite [. . .] the quaint antics of the river roustabout.”26 Even in 1912, James Weldon Johnson would complain that “no manager could imagine that audiences would pay to see Negro performers in any other role than that of Mississippi River roustabouts.”27

The largely forgotten avatar of the roustabout would come to prominence in ways that would far transcend the minstrel role—even if he remained closely linked to it. His emergence as a multivalent and ambiguous figure in popular culture itself reflected the changing nature of black life on the Mississippi in the years after the Civil War. As Thomas Buchanan has demonstrated, the Mississippi and its tributaries had been vital spaces for black Americans, both enslaved and free, in the years before emancipation. As much as the Mississippi was the artery of slavery, it was also a conduit for black

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