Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry by Sandra Jean Graham

Author:Sandra Jean Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

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CHAPTER 7

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Spirituals in Uncle Tom Shows, Melodramas, and Spectacles

A rainy night in Boston, spring 1876. The truck that paraded Uncle Tom's little log house with its smoking chimney through the city all week long had accomplished its goal: crowds thronged the theater. Most everyone in the audience had read the novel and seen the play several times before (it had been staged off and on in Boston for over twenty years!) but it didn't matter—every performance was a little different, and the sets were so grand and the cast so large, it was impossible to take it all in during one viewing. Fifty cents bought something for everyone: a moral story that the most ardent critics of the theater could not condemn. (Everyone knew that even Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had never set foot in a theater before she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, finally acknowledged its salutary potential.) An Uncle Tom so realistic you'd swear he'd been plucked right out of old Kentucky, and so pathetic that his very presence brought tears to your eyes. (Who could be immune to Shelby's final plea: “Oh! dear Uncle Tom! do wake—do speak once more! Look up! Here's Master George—your own little Master George. Don't you know me?”) And Little Eva floating up to the portals of Heaven! (Each of us ladies carried a dainty kerchief that night, which over the course of the performance passed through all stages of moisture, until it became as wet as the pavements outside.) Spectacular scenery—my favorite was the maze of bobbing ice floes during Eliza's treacherous escape across the Ohio River. The sassy, blackfaced Topsy, whose gleeful “Golly, ain't I wicked?” drew shouts of agreement from the audience as she sang her famous song and danced a breakdown. A virtuoso black banjoist with the fingers of Paganini. Sentimental songs, which supplied a good dose of emotion in case the acting didn't. And a spectacular plantation scene along the Mississippi River featuring over a hundred real black folk picking cotton, along with—and this is what I'd come to see—jubilee singers singing songs of the African race!1

Uncle Tom's Cabin was adapted for the stage before the serial publication of the story in the abolitionist newspaper National Era was completed, and before it appeared in book form.2 The immediate and spectacular success of the novel, published in March 1852, prompted numerous other attempts at dramatization by a variety of authors but never by Stowe herself. UTC (as it became known in advertisements) became a staple of theaters—urban and rural, legitimate and makeshift—well into the twentieth century. “Poor old Uncle Tom doesn't get much of a chance to rest in his grave,” a New York Times writer commented sardonically, “even though all the Uncle Toms have…joined the Freedmen's Bureau.”3

As theater historian Harry Birdoff and others have pointed out, stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were folk plays that defied easy categorization. Different versions survive today in script form, but UTC onstage lived in oral transmission, retaining its topicality long after

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