Day 28. Jim Crow

This whole process of working on the Brer Rabbit stories involves lots of different editorial decisions, and I'll be documenting all that eventually, but I wanted to write about a decision I had to make today, which was running into Jump Jim Crow in the story about Brer Rabbit raising a dust; here's the 1881 edition at Library of Congress:

Did a black storyteller really sing about Jim Crow? I doubt it. Jim Crow is the starting point of a blackface minstrelsy tradition that is older than Joel Chandler Harris himself (born in 1848), going back to the white minstrel performer (T. D.) "Daddy" Rice who sang and dance wearing blackface; Jump Jim Crow was his signature invention. Here's an 1832 publication of the song, and I'm sure Harris could have considered this as part-and-parcel of the African American culture he sought to portray in his pages, even as he himself was doing a kind of blackface writing.

And of course people will see the connection to Childish Gambino's This is America which plays with this iconic figure and pose at the start of the video.

So, I just left this Jump Jim Crow reference out of my un-framed version of the story. Even though these are (supposedly) Brer Rabbit's words in the story, I see that as an intrusion by Harris. Or, if he really did hear a storyteller singing that song, I would interpret that as the storyteller having some fun at Harris's expense.

Of course, it's all impossibly complicated; all of Harris's writings are a form of blackface. Perhaps eventually I will decide that it's just too much to cope with, and I'll retell them in some more clinical and scientific way... but that's a kind of whiteface that is wrong in its own way too.

Those larger issues are ones to ponder, but I really didn't hesitate to snip out this bit of Jump Jim Crow from the story. I don't expect that this is one of the stories I would include in a printed anthology since it doesn't have a lot of clear African analogues either, but I guess if that were to come up, I could reconsider my decision then. For now, I'm glad to have a version of the story ready to share which contains Brer Rabbit's wonderful trickster wit at work without any minstrel reference to Jump Jim Crow.