BLACK VARIETIES
THE MINSTRELS OF THE ROW
Picturesque Scenes Without Scenery—
Physiognomical Studies at Pickett’s
THE attractive novelty of theatricals at old Pickett’s tavern, on the levee, by real negro minstrels, with amateur dancing performances by roustabouts and their “girls,” has already created considerable interest in quarters where one would perhaps least expect to find it; and the patrolmen of the Row nightly escort fashionably dressed white strangers to No. 91 Front street. The theater has two entrances, one through the neat, spotlessly clean bar-room on the Front street side, the other from the sidewalk on the river side. The theater is also the ball-room; and when the ancient clock behind the black bar in the corner announces in senile, metallically-husky tones the hour of 12, the footlights are extinguished, the seats cleared away, and the audience quickly form into picturesque sets for wild dances.
It is a long, low room, with a staircase at the southwest corner, ascending to the saloon above; an unplastered ceiling of clean white pine plank, resembling an inverted section of steamboat deck, a black wooden bar at the southeast corner, and rude wooden benches of unpainted plank arranged along the walls and across the room from the bar to the stage. This stage consists of a wooden platform, elevated about a yard from the floor; and the little room under the staircase at the left side serves as the green-room. Tallow dips, placed about a foot apart, serve for footlights. Strips of white muslin sewed together form the curtains, which are attached by rings to a metal rod in the ceiling, and open and close much after the manner of the curtains of an old-fashioned, four-posted bedstead. These curtains were made by a mild-mannered brown girl called Annie, remarkable for deep, dark eyes, light, wavy hair, and wonderful curves of mouth, chin and neck; but poor Annie is no better than she ought to be, and loves to smoke a great, black, brier-root pipe.
Ere the curtain rose we found it extremely interesting to glance over the motley audience, largely made up of women less fair, but not less frail than Annie.
A sharp-faced Irish girl, with long fawn-colored hair and hard gray eyes; a pretty and ruddy-faced young white woman, very neatly built and fashionably dressed, the wife of a colored bar-keeper; a white brunette, with unpleasantly deep-set black eyes and long curly hair, who feigns to have colored blood in her veins; a newly arrived white blonde, who last week followed a roustabout hither from Ironton through some strange and vain infatuation; the notorious Adams sisters; a young Cincinnati woman of evil repute, whose parents live but a few squares up town, and have not for years exchanged word or look with their daughter, though she almost daily passes by the old home; and one Gretchen-faced woman, with rather regular features and fair hair, who has lately deserted a good home at Portsmouth to become the mistress of a stevedore—these comprised the white women present. Excepting the bar-keeper’s little white wife, they evidently preferred to sit together. But the picturesqueness of the spectacle was rendered all the more striking by the contrast.
Every conceivable hue possible to the human skin might be studied in the dense and motley throng that filled the hall. There were full-blooded black women, solidly built, who were smoking stogies, and wore handkerchiefs of divers colors twined about their curly pates, after the old Southern fashion. Some of these were evidently too poor to own a whole dress, and appeared in petticoat and calico waist alone; but the waists had been carefully patched and washed, and the white petticoats were spotlessly clean and crisp with starch. Others were remarkably well dressed—excepting their ornaments, which were frequently of a character calculated to provoke a smile. One little negro woman had a flat locket with a brilliantly-colored picture painted on it, and at least six inches in diameter, suspended from her ebon neck by a golden chain. Gold or imitation, yellow and glittering, flashed everywhere in ear pendants against dusky cheeks, in massive rings upon strong black hands, in fair chains coiling about brown necks or clasping bare brown arms.
It is a mystery how many of these women, who can not afford to buy two dresses, or who have to borrow decent attire to go out of doors, can refuse to part with their jewelry in almost any extremity, but we have been reliably assured that such is the case. As a rule these levee girls do not invest in bogus jewelry. It was curious to observe the contrast of physical characteristics among the lighter-hued women; girls with almost fair skins frequently possessing wooly hair; dark mulattoes on the contrary often having light, floating, wavy locks. One mulatto girl present wore her own hair—frizzly and thick as the mane of a Shetland pony—flowing down to her waist in gipsy style. Where turbans were not worn among the fairer skinned, the hair was generally confined with a colored ribbon. At least three-fourths of the audience were women, and of these one-third, perhaps, were smoking—several of the white girls were chewing. Of the men present, the greater number were roustabouts, in patched attire, often of the most fantastic description. Four musicians played lively old-time banjo tunes before the stage, and through the half-open door at the other end of the theater glimpses were visible of an expanse of purple, star-studded sky, a more deeply purple expanse of rippling river, the dark rolling outline of the Kentucky hills, and a long line of yellow points of light, scattered along the curving shore as far as the eye could reach. From without, the cool, sweet river air occasionally crept in by gentle breaths, and from within, the dim light of trembling candle-flame, the blue wreaths of heavy tobacco smoke, the sound of vociferous laughter and the notes of wild music, all floated out together into the white moonlight.
The little stage curtain rose, or, rather, parted, upon a scene originally ludicrous in itself, which evoked a shout of mingled glee and amusement from the expectant audience. The six performers were, with one exception, very dark men, with pronounced negro features; but they had exaggerated their natural physiognomical characteristics by a lavish expenditure of burnt cork and paint. The mouths of the end-men grinned from ear to ear; their eyes appeared monstrous, and their attire could not have been done justice to by any ordinary play-bill artist. It was a capital get up in its line, such as white minstrels could hardly hope to equal. The three principal performers were professionals from Louisville. The right end man had a tambourine with a silver rim, which he unfortunately smashed during the evening by knocking it against his pate, and as a tambourine performer he can not have many white rivals, tapping the instrument against his hand, elbow, knee, head, foot, with a rapidity which almost defied the eye to follow it.
After the first musical performance minstrel jokes were in order, including odd conundrums, “hits” at the patrolmen, and miscellaneous jokes of a humorous, but always innocent description. Here is a specimen:
“How dy’e feel to-night, Mr. Royal?”
“I feel’s as if I was in de clouds; an’ angels pouring ’lasses all over me.”
“Well, Mr. Royal, I want to prepose a kolumdrum to you. Kin you spell ‘blind pig’ with two letters?”
“Cou’se I kin. Blind pig?—let’s see!—pig? P-g, pig.”
“Wrong, sir; wrong. B-l-i-n-d, blind, p-i-g, pig—blind pig. Thar’s an ‘i’ in pig, an’ you left out the eye.”
“But if he’s got an eye, he can’t be a blind pig.” [Roars of laughter.]
“Hev’ you got a wife, Mr. Moore?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it sweet to hev’ a nice little wife?”
“Yes.”
“When you git up in de morning she kin give you a s-t-r-o-n-g cup of coffee.”
“Yes.”
“An’ give you nice, strong butter?”
“No; not strong butter.”
“An’ give you a nice, strong hug?”
“Yes.”
“An’ kiss you at the door, and say, ‘By-by, baby; dream of me?’”
“Yes.”
“An’ when y’ar just gone out the front way, open de back door an’ let a great big black niggar in de back way?”
Then they sung a song, with a roaring chorus, called “Cahve de Possum,” after which came more jokes, and then a most comical scene—really the best performance of the evening—between two men, one attired as a woman, with an enormously exaggerated “pull-back,” and the other costumed as a journeyman whitewasher. The effects of this scene upon the audience was extremely interesting. The women not only laughed but screamed and leaped in their seats, to fall back and laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks. A well built young black woman named Lucy Mason, whose face still bore the scars of a recent razor-slash, then came upon the stage, attired in a short petticoat with scalloped edges; striped stockings, which displayed a pair of solid, well-turned legs; and boy’s brogans. She danced a break-down very fairly, and was several times called out. Then a little roustabout, from New Orleans, danced a jig; and the performance closed with a lengthy but very comical extravaganza entitled “Damon and Pythias.” To the curious visitor, however, the merits of the performance, although an excellent one, were far less entertaining than the spectacle of the enjoyment which it occasioned—the screams of laughter and futile stuffing of handkerchiefs in laughing mouths, the tears of merriment, the innocent appreciation of the most trivial joke, the stamping of feet and leaping, and clapping of hands—a very extravaganza of cachination.
Midnight twanged out from the ancient clock, laughter was heard only in occasional chuckles, a roustabout extinguished the footlights with his weatherbeaten hat, the bar became thronged with dusky drinkers, and the musicians put their instruments by. Then the room suddenly vibrated in every fiber of its pine-planking to a long, deeply swelling sound, which suddenly hushed the chatter like a charm. Half of the hearts in the room beat a little faster—hearts well trained to recognize the Voices of the River; and the sound grew stronger and sweeter, like an unbroken roll of soft, rich, deep thunder. “The Wildwood,” shouted a score of voices at once, and the throng rushed out on the levee to watch the great white boat steaming up in the white moonlight, with a weird train of wreathing smoke behind her, and dark lovers of swarthy levee girls on board.
Cincinnati Commercial, April 9, 1876