Dancing in the Dark [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: two real coons, colored performer, orchestra stalls, New York, Bert Williams, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Picking up from the cultural criticism collected in A New World Order (2001), Phillips goes one step further, imagining himself into the life of Burt Williams (1874–1922), a vaudeville performer who became, in the turn-of-the-century years before Jack Johnson's championship, the most famous of black Americans. The result is not so much a novel as a loving biographical fiction, one in which Phillips, perhaps channeling Williams's natural (and often challenged) sense of dignity and propriety, shows the more humiliating aspects of his life in a kind of half light. Williams was the first black performer to don blackface and was a master, with partner George Walker, of the cakewalk. Phillips is amazing at rendering the wrenching contradictions of "playing the coon" as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois became prominent, and what those contradictions did to Williams's psyche—as well as to Walker's (who reacted very differently), and to those of their wives, Lottie Williams and Aida (née Ada) Overton Walker. Williams's life—emigration from the Bahamas; hardscrabble youth marked by racism; hard climb to stardom; relatively heavy drinking and dissipation; early, childless death—emerges piecemeal. Beyond a few set pieces, Phillips shies away from a full-on dramatization of Williams and Walker's stage act. (He includes some verbatim dialogues, songs and contemporary reviews instead.) The whole is suffused in Phillips's brilliant, if here filigreed, light. (Sept. 18)
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From The Washington Post

Bert Williams was America's first black superstar. In fact, the West Indies immigrant was the highest-paid performer in the country in the early 20th century. A composer, singer, dancer, comedian and recording artist, he appeared with his straight man, George Walker, on vaudeville and Broadway stages when black people could only buy seats in the balcony. In 1903 the pair starred in "In Dahomey," the first all-African-American Broadway musical; they traveled to London and played a royal command performance. After Walker's death, Williams continued to break color barriers as the first black star of the Ziegfeld Follies. His most famous song, "Nobody," has been recorded by Perry Como, Johnny Cash and Nina Simone. And for nearly all of his career, he worked in thick blackface, a racist cartoon drawn on his own handsome black face, playing what Caryl Phillips calls, "a shuffling, dull-witted, clumsy, watermelon-eating Negro of questionable intelligence."

This paradox -- the enormity of Williams's talent forced through the funnel of the times into low stereotype -- is at the heart of Phillips's novel, Dancing in the Dark. Phillips writes powerfully about philosophical and political questions through the exacting minds and complex souls of his characters, particularly Walker and his dancer and choreographer wife, Ada Overton. These questions are as resonant now as in the first years of the previous century. If you're a rarity -- say, a black performer on a white stage -- what are your responsibilities, and to whom? Your people, your audience, your art, posterity? How quickly do you try to make your uneducated audience progress? And what kind of sense does it make that whites themselves don blackface? "The fact is they do not like us, George," Williams says to Walker, "and they choose not to eat, drink, or live with colored folks, yet they must have some part of themselves that wants to be like us. But not like us truly, but some approximation of us; a strange creature of boundless appetite that they imagine to be us."

Phillips's Walker is the conscience and engine of Dancing in the Dark, brash, charming, thoughtful, a faithless husband but an ambitious activist. Offstage, he pushes for dignity and range in the team's material, believing "that the day has come for the Negro to storm the American stage and stake his claim to a position of equality alongside his fellow white performers." The struggle between Walker's dreams of an African American theater and Williams's willingness to play to the audience's lowest expectations is delicate, moving, dramatic.

But success for Williams is a sort of slavery: He's celebrated and rich because he hides himself -- his intelligence, his good looks -- with blackface and feigned idiocy. He may insist that his onstage persona is just a stereotype humanized, but he knows white audiences are delighted to have their prejudices confirmed by his performance while blacks -- including his father -- view him with growing disdain and disappointment.

The novel switches time frames, narrative devices and tenses, impressionistically covering the span of Williams's American life. Williams and Walker meet, and they struggle to perform in any scrap of show business that would have them. They work their way to New York in vaudeville as "The Two Real Coons."

W.C. Fields, who knew what he was talking about, said that Williams "was the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew." You never doubt Williams's sorrow or the reasons for it. But Fields's first claim is harder to understand. Nothing dates faster, harder, than popular humor. Phillips decides not to try (though he does include some excerpts from the act). There are good reasons for this, not the least of which is that when you portray something as demeaning servitude, it's hard to find anything good to say about it. And yet it's a problem. The reason Williams is compelling now is not that he corked up and played the fool -- plenty of performers of color did so -- but that he was so brilliant at it that he smashed color lines.

Success can enslave the most privileged performer. It makes sense that for a performer of color, especially with literal slavery in living memory, the bonds of that slavery are more encompassing and painful. Still, an artist of genius -- and Williams clearly was one -- sometimes has mastery over his audience, despite the humiliation, despite the audience's condescension, despite laughter in the wrong key and from the wrong people. But the Williams of Dancing in the Dark is a sad, restrained, bookish man, passionless, tentative and lonely. Even when confronted by others, he answers in interior monologues. Phillips begins his book with a haunting epigraph from Williams: "Nobody in America knows my real name and, if I can prevent it, nobody ever will." It's almost as though Phillips is too respectful of his subject's need for privacy, onstage and off. In the history of American entertainment he is a cipher. Unfortunately, he does not come much clearer here.

Reviewed by Elizabeth McCracken
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 209 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400043964
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043965
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #316,247 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed it with some reservations, November 30, 2005

By	Andre M. "brnn64" (Mt. Pleasant, SC United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I'm a Bert Williams fanatic. I have all of the current cds of his 80 surviving recordings and DVDs of his surviving films "Fish" and "Natural Born Gambler", as well as having read all three of his other biographies. So I eagerly awaited this fictionalization of his life.

Caryl Philips did a lot of research on Bert Williams and his partner George Walker and it shows. A lot of this stuff is close to the fact. I especially loved the sololoquies that he has some of the major characters exhorting in the book, such as Bert's wife Lottie's expression of her love for Bert, George Walker's feelings on his partner's thoughts, and Betr's final meditation on his father. Phillips has a beautiful way with the King's English and wonderfully articulates the innermost feelings of his characters.

However, while I'm aware that this is somewhat fictionalized and some artistic license is inevitable, some things are too far off the mark. First of all, Bert and Lottie DID adopt the latter's three neices as their own children, contrary to the book (one of them spoke fondly of Bert in a 1946 interview in Negro Digest), and the scene where Aida Overton Walker (George Walker's Widow) makes an explicit, drunken pass to Bert and suggests that her husband was sleepign with Berty's wife is a bit off the mark. Yeah, it spices up the story, but considering that these were real people, it gives me some pause.

But that aside, I would suggest the reader familiarize themselves with Bert Williams via his nonfiction bios and his recordings as it would help in fully understanding this story. That said, be prepared for an interesting read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dancing in a Dark, Dark World, November 25, 2005

By	Cecelia E Connally (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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"Dancing in the Dark" is a biographical novel of Bert Williams, the black entertainer who performed in vaudeville in the early part of the 20th century. He was one of the finest dancers and comedians of all times and eventually became the first black person to perform with the Ziegfield Follies. In his act, Williams played the slouching Jonah man, the careless, unlucky black for which everything goes wrong - a sort of "sad sack" character. To be acceptable to white audiences he has to play the shiftless, coon. Unfortunately, it was one of the only ways that white Americans would accpet a black on stage at the time. When Williams tried other roles, he failed. To perform his act, Williams had to blacken his face with burnt cork to cover his his light complexion and his racial pride.

Caryl Phillips uses a style of writing that allows several voices to speak: Williams, his wife Lotties, his long time partner George Walker and also Walker's wife, Ada who eventually becomes Aida. (And one wonders if the change of names is a play on the opera of the same name that is alleged to be an improper characterization of a black woman.) Although the style allows the reader to get the perspective of various characters, there were times that I was confused and had to take a second look to make sure that I knew who was speaking. While this style of writing may be pleasing to some readers, I felt it distracted from the story. Williams story is one that should be told, but Phillips makes it difficult to hear.

The subplot regarding George Walker, Williams long time partner, and the relationship between the two makes for interesting analysis. Walker is the more business oriented partner and demonstrates more apparent racial pride, but is also a womanizer, often risking his career and that of Williams with his frequent liasons, espcially with a white female. But all the while his loyal wife stays with him.

Lottie has conflicts over her hair and it is not until Madam C. J. Walker develops hair products for women that she is able to deal with it. Like her husband, who uses burnt cork to cover his face, she uses hats to cover her hair. Is Phillips trying to say that like her husband, Lotties is unable to accept her image as a black woman? Is she in conflict because she does not have "good hair" like her sister, a sister who comes to a tragic end.

Willliams conflict is over his desire to be an entertainer. But his only option is to appear in black face. He desperately wants to entertain and he is excellent at his trade, however, society forces him to perform a role that demeans the image of black Americans. Was it his obligation to give up his trade for the greater good of the image of African Americans? That is what he is faced with when black leaders confront him. It is interesting that Williams is a native of the Bahamas who does not experience realy racism untl he comes to America at age ll. One also wonders if Williams would have had a better life if he had folowed his dreams and stayed in Europe, where he has major successes, like many black expatriates have done over the years. Phillips uses the symbolism of ocean voyages, on which Phillips suffers, as an analogy of this crossing over.

One also wonders if Phillips is trying to say that all of the characters are subconsciously unable to accept their blackness but spend their life trying to accept the world as best they can. Is there an analogy here between Williams performing in black face and the resulting conficts and tradegies in his life and Michael Jackson who had changed his image to appear in white face?

Philllips innuendoes about Willaims sexaulity is also interesting. While Walker's sexaul promiscuity leads to his death from syphilis, Williams life of non sexual relaltions with his wife, leads to a tragic life for both of them. Or does Williams have syphillis also and does not want to infect his wife? The reader does not know. This is just one of the dark sides of this very dark novel. Is it his conflict over color or his conflicts over homosexuality that causes Williams to spend most of his off stage life in dark bars with a bottle?

While I enjoyed the book, I felt that there could have been additional character development, especialy about Williams' youth. Also his relationship with his father, a proud black man who only goes to see his son perform one time. He is so replused that he can never undertake it again.

The subject of Bert Williams is ripe for further investigation and analysis. While Phillips scratches the surface and raise interesting issues he merely perks the readers interest. It many ways he fails to get at the real character of Bert Williams. He portrayal of the dark side of Williams life is so dark, that perhaps we miss the real man.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "This is the only civilization in the world where a man's color makes a difference.", October 15, 2005

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

In this fascinating novel, Caryl Phillips tells the tale of Bert Williams, a "colored" performer from the early days of the twentieth century who partnered with George Walker and became an international star. Wearing blackface and doing the cakewalk, Williams played the bumbling comic, an ironic and difficult role for someone whose family emigrated from the Bahamas, where they were successful and had pride in their heritage.

As Phillips tells the stories of Williams and Walker, their marriages, and their professional successes and failures, he draws a portrait of the entertainment world from 1903 - 1922, when Williams and Walker were contemporaries of W. C. Fields, Eva Tanguay (who has a relationship with Walker), Ed Wynn, Buster Keaton, and the entire Ziegfeld Follies vaudeville troupe. Having once sworn that he would never don blackface, Williams eventually discovers that with blackface he becomes "somebody else's fantasy"--a "colored" man popular with his white audiences, a buffoon who does not threaten their fantasy of who he is. When he travels to England, where he and Walker perform at Buckingham Palace, he discovers a kind of acceptance that he never achieves in the US.

Though the theme sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed, Phillips provides unusual insights about how much a performer must play to his audience if he is to be successful, and through Bert Williams how demeaning that role can be, personally. Because Williams and Walker are distanced from each other, their wives, and most of the people they work with, however, they are not protagonists with whom the reader will easily identify. In addition, Phillips provides much background, using various points of view and numerous flashbacks, but he sometimes "tells about" the characters, instead of recreating events.

Despite these limitations, Phillips's prose style is stunning. His physical descriptions convey attitude, in addition to giving information, and his keen eye for detail depicts social differences with subtlety. His use of poetic repetition creates moods, and the elegance and formality of his language pay homage to Bert Williams and make of him a tragic hero. By including excerpts from plays, songs, playbills, newspaper blurbs, a quotation from Buster Keaton, a theatre program in which Williams shares the stage with Ed Wynn, and a newspaper interview, he creates a reality for the period and a context for Williams's struggles for acceptance. This fascinating look at America's early entertainment industry is told from a unique perspective and offers important observations about inherent prejudice. n Mary Whipple