Black performers trapped in masks

Dancing in the Dark

A Novel

Caryl Phillips

Alfred A. Knopf: 216 pp., $23.95

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WITHIN vaudeville lived a quandary for black performers at the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand there was a wish for artistic integrity and authenticity as well as a need for self-respect, and on the other, the need for cold hard cash. That was the dilemma of Bert Williams (1874-1922) and his partner George Walker (1873?-1911) that Caryl Phillips reimagines in his novel “Dancing in the Dark.” Phillips illustrates the subtleties of the black theater pioneers, their aspirations, their ascension, their frustrations and their complexities as artists and as men.

Being a comedic master was not enough. Williams was pressured by white audiences to perform his half of the pair’s minstrel act in blackface. The pair made the leap to Broadway in the 1903 musical “In Dahomey,” and Phillips brings to the page how audiences must have received Williams. “[D]espite his size there is some elegance to his movement.... Of course, this is all the more comical to his audience for they have never before witnessed a Negro performer affecting such indifference in the face of such overwhelming approval. Back uptown in Harlem, few residents have actually seen him perform, but everybody is fully aware of his stellar reputation.”

With the gritty underbelly of a Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches tale, the humble beginnings of both Williams and Walker from vaudeville to success on Broadway and the London stage would be story enough. Yet it is the interior monologues of both men and their seething relationship with their white audiences that provide the novel’s deepest reflections of anguish. “He wants something from them that he suspects he can never have: their respect.”

The saving grace of the duo are the women in their lives, Ada and Lottie. Ada endures Walker’s intense womanizing from beginning to end, while Lottie, affectionately called “mother” by Williams, was a sexually frustrated wife, untouched by her husband, bearing the brunt of his turmoil.

In this regard, Williams is not the only one trapped in blackface, to wear a mask; in fact it seems to enclose everyone around him and subject them to act out their lives with a similar duality, a duality that challenges one to hold in the pain until it rots the gut. Everyone struggles even fleetingly for love: both wives, Walker’s harlots, Williams’ tortured soul and his black Harlem community at large; but no one gets the respect they long for, only pieces, the shattered glass of what they had hoped for.

The tale is broken into three acts: the early, and golden, years that devolve as the pair develop a sense of shame over the act they feel they must develop; the second chronicling their fame at its height and their deepest losses; and Act 3, in which Williams is the lone, reluctant Ziegfeld superstar:

“Only when he is sure that most of the cork has been removed does he stand and peel away his jacket, kick off the oversized shoes, and then collapse back down onto the uncomfortable chair. At forty-four he can feel an ominous fatigue in the deadweight of his body.”

Flashbacks of Williams’ past are illustrated in short takes, actual playbill quotes and bits of memory. He is the intellectual workhorse to Walker’s short-fused bravado. Phillips’ talent is in relaying Williams’ quiet plea for understanding, though the author’s verdict on Williams’ place in history is mixed. Even Williams’ own words -- perhaps justifiably so -- question his achievements as a pioneer. “Nobody in America knows my real name and, if I can prevent it, nobody ever will.”

In the end, to dance in the dark as a black man in blackface, to play the archetypal coon -- the simpleton conjured from the stained swath of Americana when the stage lights come on and the house lights go down -- Phillips’ Williams never makes peace with his decision, yet endures it as a necessary albatross.

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Ahmad Wright has written for Vibe, the Washington Post Book World and Upscale.