Leonard Reed joined the Whitman Sisters in 1927. Moving up from carnivals, he had learned his trade on the TOBA circuit. His headstrong personality collided with Mabel Whitman’s, and he lasted only a few months with the sisters, but during that time, he met Willie Bryant and assembled the Shim Sham, the two young men thinking little of it as they moved on to what they saw as bigger things.
Their eyes were not on the TOBA circuit. Reed was born in a teepee in Lightning Creek, Oklahoma. His mother was Choctaw Cherokee, and her great-grandfather was black. As for his father, Reed said, he was “white and Irish or something. He was a huckster. He sold blankets and whiskey to the Indians. He had an affair with my mother and her sister. They run him out of Oklahoma.” When Reed was two, his mother died. Later, he was adopted by a mixed-race high school principal. Willie Bryant’s mother was a French-Canadian showgirl, and his father was part black, part Native American, also from Oklahoma. Both Reed and Bryant were light enough to pass.
The dance that gained Reed his first carnival job was the Charleston. He learned it on the playground of his white school. All the local theaters in Kansas City held Charleston contests, and after Reed entered his first and won, he began entering as many as he could. He would enter one, perform, run to the next theater, perform, run back to the first, get the prize, run back to the second, get the prize, and so on, through an exhausting and lucrative evening. Eventually, a black usher snitched on him.
I was standin’ there after the contest. I saw the manager and could tell that something was up. So I grabbed the prize money and ran. The manager started yelling, “Catch that nigger! Catch that nigger!” When somebody said, “Where?” I didn’t even think about it, I was so nervous. So I chimed in with, “Catch that nigger!” The theater was letting out, and everybody was coming out the side entrance. I just ran through that shuttle, right through the alleyway. And when I was running, yelling, “Catch that nigger,” they all started runnin’ along with me tryin’ to help.
Another time, when Reed was performing the Charleston with black dancers, someone pulled him off the stage and told him not to be up there with those niggers. Reed was forced to blacken his face, though even that wasn’t sufficient. His sweat made the cork run. Reed’s foster parent, a graduate of Cornell University, arranged for him to attend the college, but Reed had been there only a few weeks when a white minstrel troupe arrived and put on a promotional Charleston contest. Reed couldn’t resist entering, and after he won, he was asked to join the outfit. Again he blacked up, this time to share the stage with whites. The cork, he said, made his face sore.
Ever the chameleon, Reed worked in both black and white theaters. “Every time you looked up, you’d see me. But I always had a different act: Pen and Ink, Cutout and Leonard, Leonard and Crackaloo … Nobody knew what I was or wasn’t.” His vaudeville act with Willie Bryant was a carefully paced, eight-minute package. The men looked dashing—checked blazers and straw hats for the afternoon show, tuxedos for the dinner program, top hat and tails in the evening—and every rhythmic accent was carefully matched by an accent in their arrangement. Their slogan was “Brains as well as Feet,” which meant that in addition to dancing, they told jokes. Performers who talked were usually paid better.
Traveling with Reed and Bryant was their valet, a much darker-skinned child named Frankie, who excelled at a sitting-in-a-chair dance. Bryant would introduce Frankie as the team’s valet and egg him on, saying, “Come on, boy! Show ’em how you can dance!” Offstage, Bryant would call the boy a little black son of a bitch. (“Well, we had to be white, and he had to be black,” Reed explained, years later.) By the time they reached Birmingham, Frankie’s hometown, the boy was fed up. “If you call me any more names,” Frankie said, “I’m gonna tell ’em you’re a nigger.” Frankie was also sick of being presented as the pair’s valet. That evening, Bryant introduced him as “a gentleman with us who can really dance.”
During their layoffs from the white theaters, Reed and Bryant would work in black ones. But again, they were told on. “They found out that we were colored who could go white and be around the girls. They didn’t like that,” Reed remembered. “After that I never did work white again.” It was 1933. Reed became a successful dance director of black revues. Bryant took over a big band and taught his musicians to do the Shim Sham. Later, he became a popular emcee, a radio host, and an honorary mayor of Harlem. When his band toured the South, a sheriff made him stand on a platform, because it was against the law for whites and blacks to share a stage. “You may be colored like you say,” the sheriff said, “but the audience doesn’t know it.”
If Reed and Bryant had been seeking advice about these matters, they could have asked the Whitman Sisters. Decades before, the sisters had also performed in white theaters. They, too, were light enough to pass. But they turned away from white showbiz. As Mabel Whitman explained, “You never have a real light colored star on the white stage. When we get too light, as we are, they won’t really welcome you.” Women like the Whitman Sisters and men like Reed and Bryant made certain people nervous, afraid that someone might make a mistake.
Essie Whitman told a story about how, in the late 1890s, the theater owner Oscar Hammerstein had hired her and her sisters, but had required them to wear blackface and woolly wigs. That in itself wasn’t unusual—a convention that might have also served as a disguise. For the finale, however, Hammerstein asked them to set free their chestnut hair and take off their makeup. It was like Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses, but in reverse. “The audience was always puzzled,” Essie remembered, “and someone was sure to ask, ‘What are those white women doing up there?’ Then they would recognize us as the performers and laugh in amazement.”
Was the audience initially fooled into thinking that the makeup was the sisters’ actual skin? If so, when spectators recognized the sisters as “the performers,” were they recognizing them as white women masquerading? Were they laughing at the effectiveness of the blackface deception or suddenly seeing the sisters as colored and laughing at how silly it had been to think of them as white? Did anyone recognize the deeper joke, the mockery made of racial categories? It would be nice to think so. So few stories about playing across the color line end in laughter.