Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. By W.T. Lhamon, Jr. (Cambridge & London, Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp.xi + 459, illustrations, index, ISBN: 0-674-01062-0)

In this book Lhamon analyzes the career of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, the famous or infamous “Jim Crow.” Rice’s career spanned the period from the early 1830s until his death in 1860. In the nearly two centuries since Rice first appeared, Jim Crow has come to signify American racism. However, Lhamon provides convincing evidence that Rice was other than a white man making fun of black people for white entertainment. Though at times Lhamon seems to be conflating blackface with real blackness, he admits that blackface was racist by nature and not a portrayal of authentic blackness. Arguably his most famous role, “Jim Crow” was a vehicle for Rice’s efforts to “change the joke and slip the yoke” (ix). The white massas became the real butt of the joke and turned some of the attention away from the grotesquerie of blackness that was blackface. In one of his best written statements Lhamon says: Lhamon claims that Rice’s ability to satisfy white desire for blackness was at the heart of his popularity. Rice’s blackface appeared when blackness first became popular in America. Lhamon examines the role of blackface as an entertainment form that attempted to integrate the struggle of lower class Whites with Blacks in a backlash against the oppression of the middle and upper classes. Although not quite integration, this type of performance stood against the segregationist values of elites like former President John Quincy Adams. Segregation was not the norm among lower classes, where cross-racial pairings were common. The frightening spectre of this “demotic brotherhood dressed in black” caused people with power to oppose and eventually ban Jim Crow (8). By the mid-nineteenth century they had managed to twist blackface into the more overtly racist minstrel show. For most of Rice’s career, Jim Crow remained a counterforce to the hegemonic usage of Shakespeare’s Othello. Later on his career, Rice’s play Otello turned the message of Othello on its head. While contemporary performances of Othello played up Othello’s wretchedness as a message against interracial marriage, Rice’s Otello survives the play and sires a literally half black, half white baby. Lhamon claims the baby’s appearance reflected both the desire of Whites for blackness as well as the desire of Whites to keep their identities separate from those of Blacks. Lhamon ends his book with the statement “Of all the footprints [Rice] left along Atlantic shores, the deepest is that Otello’s and Desdemona’s baby looks like us” (92). Lhamon may be on to something in our cultural ideas of the separateness of racial identities. The idea of “lateral sufficiency” is central to this book. Lhamon defines this as the idea that it is better stay poor, clever and honest than to rise to the pretentious heights of the upper and middle classes. In Rice’s plays, rich Whites are the villains and their interactions with victorious “Black” characters are richly coded in a way that perplexes middle and upper class readers. Lateral sufficiency is juxtaposed with the dominant culture’s notion that “everybody wants to be like us” (19). Even today, characters rarely move beyond their station in life for longer than the length of one television episode. While I question what the meaning of the victories of Black characters may have had to blackface audiences, it is certain that these plays are not written for massas. Lhamon states “although commonly referring to white bosses as ‘massa,’ not one of Rice’s characters is ultimately confined, defeated or mastered” (27). In Jim Crow plays and songs, massa ends up chopping firewood in hell. By enacting stereotypical ideas of Blacks while portraying “blackness” triumphantly, it seems Rice …