Customer Reviews

Conjure Times: Black Magicians in America

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Slogging through this slim volume, I tried to imagine the readership being aimed at. The senior author, Haskins, is mainly known for children's books, but there is no indication anywhere on dust jacket or inside that this particular book was written with a young audience in mind. Yet the narrative style is exceedingly, wearingly simplistic, nearly at the level of Dick and Jane.

I found two crippling problems with the book. (1), The authors seem to have done little or no independent research, relying mainly on two earlier works by Jim Magus and Milbourne Christopher. (2), The authors seem to know almost nothing about their supposed topic, performing stage magic. Much of what they say about the magical feats presented by the magicians they discuss is comically nonsensical.

Anyway, the topic of the book is "black magicians in America," beginning with Richard Potter, the first native-born American magician of any race, and ending with David Blaine. You'll get very slender accounts of the careers of Potter, Henry "Box" Brown, "Boomsky," Alonzo Moore, William Carl, the Armstrongs, Jovedah de Rajah, Marcelliee, Chandu Hunter, Black Herman, the great Fetaque Sanders, Frank Brents, Odis Price, and contemporary performers such as Goldfinger and Dove, Lemont Haskins, Charles Green III, and of course David Blaine.

Alas, the narratives of the careers of these gentlemen are so under-researched and sketchily written as to be continually frustrating. Magicians will appreciate how profoundly ignorant the level of discussion generally is by a single, typical quote, from p. 128: "A classic magic illusion is the 'Broomstick Suspension,' which is just what the title suggests. A magician causes a broomstick to be suspended in mid-air." The reference is of course actually to the Broom Suspension, which goes back at least to mid-19th Century French conjurer Robert-Houdin, and involves using a broom standing on end on stage, inserted under the armpit of an assistant, to apparently suspend the assistant in midair. Presenting the manuscript to almost any magician in America, to be read and corrected before publication, would have eliminated essentially every one of these blunders... such as the breathless assertion that "The Pass" is a card trick!

Pioneering black magicians performed under conditions that would have discouraged almost anyone, and often had tragically short careers, dying in their 40s or 50s, after laboring in almost total obscurity. Maybe someday they'll be the subject of a well-researched, well-informed book. We'll have to wait...