An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World

Introduction

This book was stimulated by my reading, many years ago, in the pages of Esquire, an offhand comment from the ever-fertile James Baldwin that black style was often (or did he say always?) a parody of white style. In the one example I remember, Baldwin noted, in those days of cool, that if a white man was wearing a coat with three buttons, a hip black man was sure to be wearing a coat with four. Something about that struck me, and this book is in large part an attempt to understand the reason for that kind of style. What aesthetic forms did it create? What did it try to speak to and what was the message? For in a country as new and various as the United States, at any given moment the cultural nucleus might be far less sharply defined than the numberless particles circling in sparks around it. So I began to extend my thinking to a range of American artists and philosophers whose work might from one point of view or another be seen to make its way by glancing off the predominant culture, or who themselves seemed to exist in some kind of space between worlds, like Native American shamans restlessly inhabiting the territory between the living and the dead, between the old world and the new, figures whose very poignancy and strength lay in their failure to be fully one thing or another.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson envisioned an America whose democratic values were in the particular keeping of its independent tillers of the soil.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

While we have land to labour then, he wrote, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.¹ One hundred years later, in the years of violence and wrenching change that began with the Civil War, cities Jefferson had not even dreamed of were filled with workbenches and spinning distaffs powered by steam. The Indians to whom he styled himself a father were crowded into bleak reservations; the descendants of the slaves who had worked his fields and waited on him at his table—some of whom bore his blood—were now embarked on an uncertain freedom; and women, many of whom were much like his daughters, were beginning to demand the equality called up by the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence he had penned. The old verities America had lived by, its Enlightenment and transcendental values, its religious faith, seemed to have little place in this new world of factories and railroads and streets swarming with the polyglot mob which Jefferson had feared as democracy’s greatest threat.

Women, Indians and African Americans, immigrants and expatriates, the marginalized and disaffected, what country had they? For they, the ex-slaves and the Indians, the cloistered women, the Europeanized expatriates and the impoverished immigrants—that shadowy side of America’s imagination, the unexpressed doubts or nightmares that might have lain under its old assertions—they were Jefferson’s children too. The forms they might adopt to live among their fellow Americans in this new era, the dodges and evasions they might practice in order to carve out a space of identity and freedom, are the subject of this book.

All great creators in some sense lie athwart their culture’s values. In the period I begin with there was already an American vanguard of writers who stood out by their direct challenge to the prevailing currents: Whitman, of course, in his style and often subject, if not his politics; Hawthorne, who as Melville famously claimed cried no in thunder to his culture; Melville himself, perhaps the most complicated and complete naysayer; that most hardheaded of nature lovers, Henry David Thoreau, and that strange, poisonous little hothouse fleur du mal, Edgar Allan Poe. But the artists and thinkers I’ve selected to write about expressed their opposition more indirectly. They neither collided head on with their culture nor surrendered to it—rather they slipped aside from it as it brushed by, lived in their art and works and persons a glancing life. Like the sequestered New England woman we shall soon come to, they told their truths but told them slant.

For Mikhail Bakhtin, the profound Russian critic, the novel was a literary form unlike any others, for it spoke not in one voice but in many, the voices of classes and castes, of regions and dialects, all creating, by what he called their dialogic relation, a constant interaction. Bakhtin’s novel was a work that was not a static piece of art, frozen in time, but a reflection of the complex workings of culture itself, a social mirror of a living world that was always in and of history.² But well before Bakhtin (and before the Structuralists, and the Post-structuralists, and the Frankfurt School) an American we will come upon in the fourth chapter of this book was developing ways of understanding the symbolic nature of our world and its workings. Charles Sanders Peirce, mathematician, philosopher, and many things else, had worked out an ingenious tripartite theory of the cultural transmission of symbols that grounded itself in the living experience of the process itself. Thirty years later, but still in advance of most of his European counterparts, another American Singular, Thorstein Veblen, was showing these symbols at work in the signs and rituals of social stratification. Genius knows no country, of course, but in a nation as new, as culturally, politically, and ethnically diverse as the United States, a country moreover so recently riven by a brutal civil war that had exposed so many of these divisions, there is a particular sharpness, an aptness, to such investigations. For—to return to Bakhtin—the country itself might be seen as a living and breathing novel, a many-tongued, many-sided work in progress.

The figures I write about here are a heterogeneous lot. What links them is their particular sensitivity to and quite conscious exploitation of the cultural symbols that they were inheritors of and the social nature of their position between two worlds. Working in isolation, or among a small group of their fellows, they created ways of being and expression that were neither crushed in open conflict with this new world of accumulation and sensual strangulation they found themselves in nor forced to surrender to it, but used their manipulation of its presumptions to create an alternative aesthetic and intellectual space. If they chafed against a culture they had fled, they were failures in becoming part of any other, and made of this failure their particular art. Like the New England woman writing poems that mostly lay in a drawer unread by anyone, or the philosopher freezing in an unfinished mansion that only parodied the mansion of ideas he was constructing in his mind, they were eccentrics in the deepest and most beautiful sense of the word, turning in orbits that sometimes intersected but never quite coincided with those of their peers. They were composers and dancers, poets and thinkers, yet had in common a singular ability to register their cultural moment. They were discoverers of the symbols and codes that animated and constrained their intellectual and social worlds, and they learned how to name them and how to use them for other surprising and sometimes subversive ends. They were survivors of the nineteenth century and its contradictions, and hailed and created the twentieth century and our own. Decentered, wily, marginal, wedged between the clamor of Triumph and the cry of Tragedy, they carved out a space neither tragic nor comedic, but something of both. Heads cocked to one side, they neither joined the triumphal march of a dominant culture nor threw themselves headlong against it.

.   .   .

The forms and the theaters of this resistance might be emblematized by the rise of a strangely ritualized performance by African Americans that Mark Twain saw—or imagined he saw—sometime in the 1890s.

It was, as Twain described it, a competition in elegant deportment in which, in a hired hall, elaborately dressed couples marched back and forth down the length of the room before a jury and perhaps five hundred spectators.

All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his countenance.

Here follows in Twain’s account a catalogue of empty grace notes: watch-chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows. The colored lady also has her accoutrements, perhaps a fan "to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind. The parade of individual couples ends and a review of all the contestants in procession commences, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and smirkings on exhibition at once. It has been a contest of surfaces, of pretenses, an elaborate playacting. The final review enables the panel of experts to make their comparisons and deliver their decision and the prize, with an abundance of applause and envy along with it. The negroes, Twain concludes, have a name for this grave deportment tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for. They call it a Cake-Walk"³ [fig. 1].

We see them, these cakewalkers, in old photogravures and engravings, grossly caricatured sometimes but also with their pride and elegance made emphatic, the men with their shoulders back, the leader raising his beribboned cane like the staff of a laughing hierophant, silk hats tilted to one side, the women lovely and saucy—some have appropriated their partner’s hat and cane and parade them with a fine wit (a satire within a satire?). Prancing to a new music whose syncopations had just now begun to spread beyond the confines of African American life, the cakewalkers are full of the ebullience of life. Better than almost anyone else in white America at the turn of the last century, the author of Pudd’nhead Wilson knew that race was a fiction built on a bad joke. Yet for Mark Twain, employing it in a send-up of the affectations of bad Victorian prose, the cakewalk was a vacuous parade of social inanities. An empty vessel. For the cakewalkers, the vessel was overflowing. Strutting and fluttering, they had come to a truth lying slantwise to white America, a truth that created a breathing room in the suffocations of the narrow space that a racialized society had made for them, a kind of aristocracy of the spirit in a democracy, for those outside it, that offered only opprobrium or silence.

Figure 1. H. M. Pettit, Close Competition at the Cake-Walk. A Popular Diversion of the Colored People in Which Many White Persons Manifest Great Interest, Leslie’s Weekly, January 5, 1899.

Some of the denizens of this book were connoisseurs of cakewalks, some wrote music to accompany them, or like Twain simply observed them. Still others wouldn’t have even known what a cakewalk was, but all of them, in their own way, responded to this nation of contending castes and classes, races and ideologies, by treading a subtle and symbolically laden dance. Like the shaman, they were experts in the manipulation of signs and languages, dancers between two worlds. Bowing and doffing, flirting and fluttering behind fans and ribbon-decked canes, the cakewalkers marched and strutted and once were joined, quite surprisingly, by a quasi-American who descended from his lofty perch to join the dance. We will come to Henry James in due course. But we might remember, as a kind of motto for this book, his words to a friend. It is by style, he wrote, we are saved.⁴

Chapter 1

Ghost Dance

The curing of a sick soul is a complicated and dangerous process. Often the shaman, the great doctor, must die a kind of spiritual death himself, must go on his own dark journey to bring back the soul that has lost its way. In 1870, about the time of his twenty-eighth birthday, William James suffered his own dark night of the soul. He had been in a state of general depression and philosophic pessimism. Then one evening, he went into a dressing room to retrieve some item.

Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human.

The image and James’s own fear entered into a species of combination with each other. The thought was horrible. Nothing James possessed, not his intellect, not his training, not his social position, could defend him against such a fate should the hour for it strike as it had struck the idiot boy. Under everything, he thought, "that shape am I."¹

The vision gradually faded. Yet while its effects lasted James wondered how other people could live, how he himself had ever lived, so unconscious of the pit beneath the surface of life.

William James, who had experienced the terrifying vision of his own potential nullity, was responding not only to his own crisis of vocation, but to a world whose religious foundations and intellectual assumptions had been shattered by steam and capital, by the end of a culture built on villages and age-old rural traditions, shattered by Darwin and by violence and mass migration. Cultures in states of anxiety, finding their old systems of meaning challenged beyond their capacities to incorporate new historical and social situations, either create new mythologies or invest the old ones with new meanings. New messiahs arrive, bearing in their teachings, in their histories if not in their very bodies, the solutions to these contradictions, the language that will speak these new mythologies.

As in the curing of the sick soul, the curing of the soul of a culture involves the translation of reality into a set of symbols, a narrative which the patient, the doctor, the community of souls themselves all accept, a tacitly and often unconscious agreed-upon fiction of representation.² Like William James, the intellectuals of post–Civil War white America keenly felt the contradictions of their society, felt themselves increasingly marginalized in an age of money and power. They were the shamans who were entrusted with the burden of creating the new mythology or the saving rejuvenation of the old symbols.

The power of science alone could offer little comfort to those caught up in the spiritual crisis of the age. Indeed, it offered only its own terrors. Fed on recent cosmological speculations, James wrote, "mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,

surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.³

Twenty-some years after William James’s horrible vision, in an isolated valley of the Great Basin among villages of reeds and sagebrush, in a world that was crumbling more profoundly and for many of the same reasons as that of James, another man was undergoing such a crisis of the spirit.

The Prophet

On New Year’s Day in 1889, in the midst of an eclipse of the sun, a Paiute Indian, named Wovoka—Woodcutter—lay dying. As a young man Wovoka lived with a white rancher and learned the hymns and prayers of a Presbyterian house. But Wovoka’s father had been a shaman, an unassimilated Paiute, and Wovoka, like many Indians in those days, lived in two worlds. As he lay sick with fever, and near death, he heard a great noise. He imagined he had gone to heaven, to the green place beyond the Dusty Path that white men called the Milky Way. God took him by the hand and showed him the people of heaven, white and red both, and they were all young, for when they died God had made them young again. There the people stayed, in that place where the meadows were always green, dancing, gambling, playing ball and the other old Indian games, among all the different kinds of animals that were good to hunt and beside rivers that were full of fish. Wovoka saw his own mother there, and many others that he had known on earth. Then God told Wovoka that he would give him great power and the authority to cause it to rain or snow and to do many other things. And God gave Wovoka dances and told him that on his return to earth he must teach these dances to his people and that they must meet often and dance five nights in succession. And God said that he must tell all the people that they must not fight, that there must be peace all over the world, and that the people must not steal from one another, but be good to each other, for they were all brothers.⁴

Thirty years before that dream, the Indians of that far-western basin suffered their last defeat at the hands of the whites. Now, traveling through the sparsely peopled desert land, a person would see in isolated spots at the edge of the few lakes or along the streams, or huddled beyond the hayfields of the ranches, or at the edges of the railroad and mining towns, or on bleak reservations, the Indians’ tule lodges and brush windbreaks or the shacks made of scavenged boards and stained canvas and flattened tin cans. These were the homes of Paiute, Shoshone, Bannock. By the 1870s the Indians had become workers in the fields and houses of the white invaders, laundering, cooking, irrigating the fields, making hay, herding cattle and sheep. The streams they lived along had been poisoned by the effluents of the mines and mills, diverted to irrigate fields of wheat and alfalfa in valleys where once they had harvested seeds and crickets and held huge rabbit drives. The salmon no longer came upstream to spawn, the piñon forests whose nuts they gathered in the fall had been cut down to fuel the charcoal kilns of the silver mines. In late summer the Indians gathered to do the old harvest dance and to ride boxcars over the mountains to Oregon and California to pick hops. They spent the money they earned on white men’s clothing—rough denim pants and canvas jackets, broad-brimmed hats, shapeless cotton dresses and colored bandanas. Many still slept on the bare dirt floors of their rush houses. These were the people out of whom Wovoka sprang and to whom he gave his vision and the dances he learned in the spirit land.

Years before Wovoka, when the whites first came to the desert valleys, there had been another dreamer, a shaman named Wodziwob, whom the whites called Fish Lake Joe. He too had dreamed such a dream, and had instituted such a dance. When he was old, Wodziwob decided to travel back to the land he had seen in his dream one last time. He sent his mind to the Land of the Dead, but he discovered there only a shadow world, not a green land of abundance. There were no flowers, no game, no dead ancestors restored to their strength and youth. He called out to the shadows but there was no answer. Then Owl responded, blinked his blank stare, and turned away. Wodziwob lived on, but he no longer believed in his dream.⁵

These were years of great trial for all Indian peoples in the West. The Apache, the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne, the Sioux had all suffered final defeats and were now on reservations. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened their lands to settlement. Those vast tracts of prairie and desert range on which bands of hunters and women with gathering baskets and digging sticks once roamed with the seasons, white men in Washington now deemed surplus and offered for sale to other white men—farmers and ranchers and speculators. The passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 was the final defeat of a way of life: henceforth Indians were to hold their land in individual allotments like white men, farming them like white men. In the white men’s plans the tribes were to dwindle away, become mere legal fictions, and Indian children would learn to sit in school like white boys and girls and to sing Christian hymns in churches.

On the Sioux reservations of the Dakotas conditions were particularly bad. Many of the Sioux—the Lakota, as they called themselves—had only lately come down from Canada to surrender themselves to reservation life. They still smarted under their defeat and tried to defy the breaking up of their land or raised futile obstacles. Drought had ruined their poor crops and the government reduced their beef ration—two million pounds at Rosebud, a million at Pine Ridge, less elsewhere. In the rough wood cabins and stained canvas teepees along the Grand and the Missouri, along Cedar Creek and the Cannonball and the White River and on the Rosebud, it was a starving time.

A Cheyenne named Wooden Leg remembered how fourteen years before, on a stream the Indians called the Greasy Grass and the whites the Little Bighorn, he had gone among the dead soldiers of George Armstrong Custer’s command and found in the pockets of the corpses wads of green paper. He had not known what they were until another Indian explained it was money, and that you could take it to the traders and buy things with it. Other Indians had found ticking pocket watches and compasses whose arrows pointed always to the north. They thought these must have been the soldiers’ medicines. Now in bleak military forts and on starving reservations these same Indians heard the tolling of bells in churches and schoolhouses and the brass calls of trumpets that jumped to the white men’s clocks. They knew what money was, and the women made fancy beaded pouches to hold ration tickets, pouches of the sort a man might once have worn to keep a charm for love or gambling or war. The old medicine bundles had become lost, their contents dispersed from disuse. The children were taken, sometimes by force, to the Indian schools and the Indians sat in mission chapels. The Lakota had become a sedentary people.

The great hunts were over. The buffalo herds had been systematically exterminated by railroad builders and soldiers. Now the people’s meat was given to them by the government and on ration day braves on horseback whooped and hollered as they chased some cow or steer cut loose from the chute at the agency. There was no sun dance. The young men, those who were not hardened against the whites, aspired to wear the tunics and buttons of the agency police.

In the winter of 1889 a group of Lakota went out from their reservation to find out the truth about the Indian prophet they heard had risen up beyond the Rocky Mountains. Not much is known of their trip, but a year later, in the winter of 1889–1890, a second Lakota delegation went west. They traveled by train on their Indian passes to Mason Valley, in western Nevada, where they found other Indians gathered to hear the Prophet. There they saw the man the Indians called Wovoka, or Woodcutter, and the whites, Jack Wilson. He was a tall man, an imposing man, and he had done much magic. Once, they heard tell, he made ice come out of the sky on a clear summer day; another time, on a rabbit hunt, an Indian had shot at him and the bullet had fallen from his clothing harmlessly onto the ground. He was a weather prophet, a visionary who had had a great dream with glad tidings for all the Indian people.

The Prophet gave the Lakotas paints and green grass and told them that he had gone to the white people, but they had killed him—you could see the marks of the wounds on his feet and hand and back. Then he had gone to the Indians. He told the Lakotas that there would be a new land coming. It would slide over the old land and any Indian who sided with the whites would be covered by it. In the spring, when the grass became green, the dead would return, for the Indians would have heeded the Prophet’s call.

That winter the dances began. The Arapaho were the first to dance for the ghosts to return as the Prophet had taught them. Now many Lakota were dancing too. The men and women held hands and shuffled in a great circle, singing as they danced. Dust rose from the dancing grounds and they sang the Ghost Dance songs.

Father, have pity on me.

Father, have pity on me.

I am crying for thirst.

I am crying for thirst.

All is gone—I have nothing to eat.

All is gone—I have nothing to eat.

They danced for hours, until they dropped with exhaustion, their skins slick with perspiration. Some foamed at the mouth. They said they had died, and in the trance of death they saw visions. They saw the new green earth and the eagle that was coming to carry them away to where the Prophet was with the ghosts.

The spirit host is advancing, they say.

The spirit host is advancing, they say.

They are coming with the buffalo, they say.

They are coming with the buffalo, they say.

They sang:

We shall live again.

With the arrival of the dance and the promise of the coming spring, the old ways began to revive. Medicine bundles long out of use came out of their storage places and the magic paraphernalia—the feathers and sacred paint and stones, the bone whistles—were gathered and restored. As if in a foretaste of the Prophet’s promise of paradise, the old games revived too, and once more the Pawnee were gambling, playing the hand game, now to gain not wealth but spiritual strength, to determine who would be saved. In their log shacks and canvas teepees, the women made shirts and dresses of white muslin for the dance and painted them with pictures of the sacred eagle and other images from their visions. Some of the shirts were peppered with holes to indicate the marks of the bullets that could not penetrate them. The shirts made the wearers invulnerable.

On the reservations the Indian agents grew alarmed at the