Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.(Book Review)

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; and The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Ed. Christopher Metress. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

In the fiftieth anniversary year of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, two authors give us never previously collected documents in very different volumes about the personification of racism in America as the history of Jim Crow. Lhamon's book places Jim Crow in the period before the Civil War as a popular culture figure of the market revolution who becomes "an inaugural icon of international popular culture" (8). Based on research in archives in England and the United States, Lhamon provides an original and interdisciplinary analytical introduction to a Jim Crow "cultural collage" (385). The collection of documents includes song lyrics connected to the folk song and the dance called Jump Jim Crow, and the first edited scripts brought together in a compilation of nine plays performed in England and America, beginning in 1830, by the white minstrel actor Thomas D. Rice. In addition, there are illustrations connected to the theatrical productions, two examples of "street prose," and biographical histories of Jim. Crow. In powerful, straightforward, and persuasive prose, Lhamon asks readers to re-evaluate the origins of Jim Crow through a reading of the Thomas Rice plays (385). He argues that while elites in the slave-trade Atlantic preferred to "bend" Shakespeare "to serve an ideal

of courtly hierarchy," the popular theater presentations of Rice's Jim Crow roused "bottom--up tendencies now associated with transnational popular culture" (5). In Bone Squash Diavolo or Othello, and in his performances of Jim Crow songs and dances, Rice's black characters moved about freely in the public sphere, sassy and rebellious, challenging and outwitting other men regardless of their color or class status. Lhamon's Jim Crow belonged to the world of "free and runaway African Americans moiling together with volatile European Americans ... a very real cross-racial energy and recalcitrant alliance between blacks and lower class whites.... a jumping, dizzy Jim Crow movement" (viii). Rice's transgressive interpretation of the Jim Crow figure did not long survive. In the mid-1840s, age prevented Rice from continuing his "nimble jumping," and he was cast as Tom in early productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin (31). Before his death in 1860, new forms of minstrel blackface transformed Jim Crow into the invidious racial stereotype. In the American vernacular culture evident in Rice's performances, Lhamon finds the origins of "white fascination with blackness" and the "moment when blackness first became widely popular in America" (vii). In looking closely at the "rubric and rite" of Rice's nineteenth-century plays, Lhamon urges readers to seize an opportunity to understand later and angrier popular forms, "ragtime, jazz, and ...