Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Youth on Stage in 19th century New York City
By Anna Mae Duane
New York African Free School # 2 at Mulberry St.
Judging by their absence from most histories of the early republican and antebellum eras, one might think that children, especially children of color, were largely hidden from the public worlds of print and politics. This historical invisibility would have come as a surprise for the young people attending the New York African Free Schools (NYAFS) in the 1820s. Far from being hidden from public view, they spent much of their childhood on one form of stage or another. In the years which marked the growing popularity of minstrel performances, appropriating black culture in the service of white supremacy, students at the NYAFS were learning how to deploy performances that blurred the very racial categories they were being taught to inhabit.
The NYAFS was created in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society, a group of elite white men whose members included Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, among others. They decided that a school would be required to help the children of enslaved parents learn how to occupy their eventual roles as freedpeople, even as New York remained a slave state, and would for the next forty years.[1] In so doing, the administrators, instructors, and students invested in the Enlightenment belief that education could enact equality, even as pro-slavery voices were making the argument that black people were somehow locked in a permanent childhood, and thus would be incapable of progressing into freedom.[2]
Thrust into an intensifying debate about the capacity of black children to succeed academically, the boys and girls who attended these schools were not simply students; they were living data points, asked to prove the thesis of their equality through public performances showcasing their intellect and erudition. Members of the press who attended these performances interpreted what they saw as testimonies to the black child’s ability to match or even exceed the accomplishments of their white peers. In an 1818 letter to the editor of the American Monthly Magazine, one writer attested that on a recent visit to the school, “I saw enough to convince the most skeptical that the colored race is abundantly imbued by nature with every intellectual and moral faculty.” “Those who believe,” wrote a contributor to the Commercial Advertiser, “that the African race is so far inferior to whites, as to be incapable of mental improvement would not require further testimony to the unsoundness of their opinions” than to attend a NYAFS performance.[3]
Many of these children would grow up to surpass the high expectations generated by their excellent school performances. The famous alumni who graduated from New York African Free School #2 included James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn an M.D., and Ira Aldridge, the first American of any race to play Othello in London. Notably, Aldridge, who would win fame throughout Europe for his Shakespearean acting, is nowhere to be found in the records of school performances, whereas Smith, who never openly sought the limelight as an adult, seemed to be on the school stage all the time. In one skit in 1822, Smith chastised a classmate for coming late to school. In his most famous moment at NYAFS, Smith had the honor of addressing the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited the school in 1824. His artwork was showcased as well as his oratory. Smith’s portrait of Ben Franklin is one of the most vivid images found in the collection of student work housed at the New-York Historical Society.
There is a peculiar entry in the records that chronicle another NYAFS student with the last name of Smith (possibly James McCune Smith) that departs strikingly from the carefully curated performances of erudition that we find elsewhere.[4] This student signs a comic song in dialect — a performance that we would recognize today as well within the minstrel tradition, especially considering the white audience before the child singer.[5]
Humorous lines spoken by J. M. Smith at a Public Exam:
“Maysa come look at my dumpy toe,
And carry over de water, —
Me work all day at the de spade and de hoe,
And my dumpy toe look at her.
She big and [sore], me cannot go,
Me wish me never had her,
For she be hurt and pain me so,
And de wit will make her badder.
Suppose you no carry me true de wet,
I den stay here and nurse her,
For over de water me cannot get
Oh now she pain me worser!!”
It’s a fascinating moment in a record largely dedicated to assembling proof that black children could occupy the same educational space as white children. It’s possible that this moment was crafted to take Smith down a peg by having him depart from the formal language used on school performance days. It’s also possible that Smith, or some of the other children, requested to perform a piece that would reflect the language they heard in the streets and possibly in their homes. In either case, the result was that both New York elites and members of the black community who attended these performances saw a black child move between the roles of statesman and street performer with alacrity.
Less than a mile away from this schoolhouse where Smith entertained white benefactors and black community members with his learning, a teenaged Ira Aldridge took part in another form of performance, at the African Grove Theater, on Mercer Street. According to Aldridge’s Memoir, he performed in Romeo and Juliet during the same era that other students were regaling audiences with skits about patriotism and punctuality.[6] In this performance space, African American actors — like the schoolchildren down the road — skillfully performed scripts written by white men. Yet rather than the condescending applause, the schoolchildren would receive for performing erudition, black actors who dared to place themselves in the roles Shakespeare had written found themselves harassed and attacked by white audiences who were offended by what they saw as presumption of unmerited privilege. One newspaper asked bitterly “how delighted would the Bard of Avon have been to see his Richard performed by a fellow as black as the ace of spades.”[7]
An 1822 account in the newspaper American related exactly how “delighted” the local white establishment was with a Shakespearean production at the Grove: a group of policemen was sent to arrest the actors mid-performance. Even as the newspaper adopts a mocking tone to disparage what they considered the absurdity of black Shakespeareans, the story provides a glimpse into how the stage itself shifted the authority from the invading policemen to the arrested actors, who slip between minstrelized dialect and Shakespearean rhetoric to move between stances of submission and superiority. When, as the newspaper recounts, “the watchmen interrupted the royal Plantagenet in one of his soliloquies with “Hello, you — there — come along with me,” the actor playing Richard “replied with a real tragic grin, ‘Fellow begone — I’m not at leisure.’”
“Not at leisure?” says the watchman. “We’ll find time for you, so come along.”
[At this moment several officers climbed on] “the stage and arrested his Majesty.”
“Where am I going?’ says he. “To de tower?”
“No, to the watch house,” said the Knights of the Lantern.
So forthwith Richard, Richmond, Lady Ann, the dead King Henry, Queen Elizabeth, and the two young princes were escorted in their tinseled robes, to the watch house, into which they marched with royal contempt and defiance. King Richard dropped his character and assumed Macbeth, and on his entrance, broke out:
“How now you black and secret
Midnight hags — what are you about?”[8]
The author of this reported exchange seeks to render the idea of black Shakespeareans ridiculous; his description of the actors as “Lady Ann, Queen Elizabeth and the dead King” drips with cruel irony, mocking the idea of dignified black royalty. Yet, even in this likely fictionalized exchange, the joke slips out of its intended trajectory. The black person, normally mocked by association with aristocracy, here instead uses that association to manifest a kingly dignity, if not authority. There is real audacity at play here, as the black actor dismisses the white watchman as a nobleman would shoo away a commoner. Perhaps even more interesting is the adaptation of Macbeth to decry the watchmen as “black and secret midnight hags,” re-purposing the era’s negative associations with blackness to condemn white misbehavior. We don’t know if Aldridge was at the Grove on that particular evening, but his time in the theater would have made him well acquainted with scenes like this, and given him a keen awareness of how deeply uncomfortable black performance made both cultural critics and law enforcement.
As students, both Smith and Aldridge found their pursuits the site of debate, and sometimes derision, on the printed page and in the performance hall. They knew full well that their speech, their dress, their movements were highly scrutinized, even as they learned how easily they could slip from one role into another. While white elites in New York City debated what scripts it might be proper to have black children recite, those same students were learning a host of other lessons: that the racial boundaries marked by language and culture were an illusion, and that the authority such boundaries gave white people could be undermined. Those lessons, inadvertently given but avidly absorbed, arguably provided the very education those students most needed to transcend the lessons their teachers sought to convey.
Anna Mae Duane is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she teaches classes in American literature, childhood studies and disability studies. Her latest book, Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys who Grew Up to Change a Nation (New York University Press, 2020) follows the life and work of James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet.
[1] By 1833, there would be six different schools that fell under the auspices of the New York African Free Schools.
[2] Consider, for example, Jefferson’s assertion that “To give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” Thomas Jefferson to Edward Bancroft (1789), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Lipscomb and Bergh (Washington, D.C., 1903-04): 1941.
[3] Quoted in Charles A. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools (New York: Mahlon Day, 1830), 45.
[4] I am hesitant to say that this definitively a performance by James McCune Smith because the handwriting is a bit unclear, and the approximate date given would be too early. Records of the New York African Free Schools 3 (New-York Historical Society): 19. That said, the surrounding performances all took place during years in which James McCune Smith would have been a student at the school.
[5] Jared Demick has identified a version of this in the July 1794 issue of European Magazine, and London Review, where it is briefly described as a “West Indian jig” (page 144).
[6] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius (London: J. Onwhyn, 1849); reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian, eds. Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock (London: Camelot Press, 1958), 39.
[7] National Advocate, September 21, 1821.
[8] American, January 10, 1822.