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| Hattie McDaniel, c. 1910. Courtesy Margaret Herrick Library |
After antebellum white minstrel shows ushered in blackface, African
American minstrels displaced these racist displays and became the hottest thing in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
often showcased in vaudeville. It was one of the surest ways African Americans had to break out
of a life of menial labor given rampant discrimination especially during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era and its aftermath.
It was a natural progression from ministering in black churches, where song and dance were central to their faith. And, it’s
where Hattie McDaniel,
first African American Oscar winner, being featured in my book, Oasis III,
got her start. As I write in the book:
By 1908, Hattie began joining her
siblings for out-of-town performances in J.M. Johnson’s Mighty Modern Minstrels
and other such groups, which her straitlaced mother was none too happy about.
(Hattie should aim no higher than being a maid, her mother believed.) Their
earnings, though, helped the family survive…
… Hattie, then a high school
sophomore, got her big break when, at age 15, she landed a part with the Red
Devils, a minstrel show based in New York, now performing on the vaudeville
circuit. When they came to town, they scooped her up, dubbing her “Denver’s
Favorite Soubrette.”
She was on her way. “My oldest
brother Otis, who wrote his own show and songs, persuaded my mother to let me
go on the road with his company,” Hattie wrote some 38 years later. “I loved
every minute of it, the tent shows, the kerosene lights, the contagious
enthusiasm of the small-town crowds.”1
… Hattie was receiving great
notices and was such a gifted performer that, soon afterwards, she decided to
quit high school, resolving to make entertainment her life’s work…
Back in Denver, Hattie was wowing
audiences… But, the pay was low and opportunities were limited for blacks, let
alone for a black woman. Domestic work was always there for the taking as a way
to earn a few honest dollars while continuing her theatrical quest.
[Then she got married to Howard
J. Hickman] on January 19, 1911, beginning what was the happiest time of
Hattie’s life.
Hattie McDaniel-Hickman reached a
whole new level of artistry. Along with her now married sister Etta Goff, she
formed what would soon be called The McDaniel Sisters Company and
produced minstrel shows, starting with a benefit at the Mizpah Art Club… Free
as a bird, she paraded before her audiences sporting wildly protruding cactus
hair, dressed in an ill-fitting multicolored dress wearing shoes filled with
corn and painted in the blackest of black face, making her bulging eyes look
whiter than white.
She had learned from black
entertainment pioneers such as Williams and Walker, and Aida Overton, Walker’s
wife, who wrote, “In this age we are fighting the one problem—that is the color
problem.”… [Then, her husband died of pneumonia.] …
Utterly devastated, she retired from the stage for an appropriate period of
mourning. At the very same time opportunities for black performers were
withering, the stress of which may have contributed to Howard’s precipitous
decline. White performers such as Al Jolson dominated minstrel shows in
the waning days of vaudeville and very few black performers besides Bert Williams
and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were given theatrical billing. Hollywood,
meanwhile, was outpacing and outshining vaudeville, especially with its
blockbuster feature film The Birth of a Nation, which swept the country in
1915.
Black
performers had made great strides, not only as phenomenal entertainers, but in
advancing racial harmony through their rich artistry which would
soon birth jazz and blues. Al Jolson essentially stole their thunder, no
more poignantly than in “Mammy” in the finale of The Jazz Singer (1927),
the first “talking picture.” The
kind of song which Hattie McDaniel would have sung, as exemplified by Ethel
Waters in “Stand by Me, Mammy.” But,
the racism bred into American culture, as exemplified in The Birth of a Nation—to say nothing of the blackface mockery by the likes of E.P. Christy and
Christy’s Minstrels, which Jolson himself mimicked in Camptown Races (1948)—would
make for a complicated and long, hard slog—still ongoing.
Mary
Claire Kendall is the author of “Oasis: Conversion Stories of
Hollywood Legends.”
1 “I
Have Never Apologized,” by Hattie McDaniel, The Hollywood Reporter, 1947.
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