Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  In addition to being a landmark work that represents a created experience of African Americans, Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera” fits into the larger history of American music, one that encompasses immigrant white and black folk cultures in the United States, as well as a troubled minstrel past. It might also tell us a little about the experiences of being Jewish—and not quite white—in the 1930s.

  The Specter of Minstrelsy

  A central issue that links the representation of race and gender in Porgy and Bess is the history of minstrelsy in the United States. Begun in the 1820s and popular through the 1950s, minstrelsy is a pernicious way of organizing visual and cultural stereotypes about black people in the United States that can still be felt today. In terms of Porgy and Bess, there are two connections I would like to make. The first is the popular origin myth of how minstrelsy began; the second has to do with the specific images that have been borrowed and that lie beneath the surface of several characters.

  Though the beginnings of minstrelsy as a practice has been written about and traced back to popular theater in the nineteenth century, one of the most common origin stories of minstrelsy connects back to an Irishman named Thomas Dartmouth Rice (aka T. D. Rice). Several sources identify T. D. Rice, a traveling actor, encountering a crippled black man (a slave, a stableman, the legends vary) who was dressed shabbily and singing about “Jim Crow.” T. D. Rice decided to imitate the crippled black man onstage as one of his acts, by dressing in tattered clothes, blacking up his face with burnt cork, and doing a dance that had the famous refrain: “Wheel about and turn about and do it jus so, Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.” Though T. D. Rice was not the first blackface performer, his Jim Crow performances in the late 1820s became so popular that he has become associated with the early stages of the whole style.

  In a provocative coincidence, or perhaps something more significant, in exploring the impetus for DuBose Heyward to write his Porgy novel, I came across an oft-cited paragraph from the court proceedings of the Charleston News and Courier. In the introduction to the 1928 edition of Porgy (the play), Heyward writes about his influences and inspiration for the novel and play:

  Court proceedings being quoted: Samuel Smalls, who is a cripple and is familiar to King Street, with his goat and cart, was held for the June term of court of sessions on an aggravated assault charge. It is alleged that on Saturday night he attempted to shoot Maggie Barnes at number four Romney Street. His shots went wide of the mark. Smalls was up on a similar charge some months ago and was given a suspended sentence.

  DuBose Heyward prose: Here was something amazing. I had been familiar with the tragic figure of the beggar making his rounds of the Charleston streets. Thinking in terms of my own environment, I had concluded that such a life could never lift above the dead level of the commonplace. And yet this crushed, serio-comic figure, over on the other side of the colour wall, had known not only one, but two tremendous moments. Into this brief paragraph one could read passion, hate, despair.

  Inquiry on my part added only one fact to the brief newspaper note. Smalls had attempted to escape in his wagon, and had been run down and captured by the police patrol.42

  A side note to this last sentence is that the goat cart (court proceedings) was used in the Porgy play from 1927 and the wagon (Heyward’s prose) made its way into most productions of the Porgy and Bess opera through the 1980s.

  Hence the characters behind the so-called beginning of minstrelsy as a genre and the specific inspiration that led to the source for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess turn out to be two crippled black men. Crippled black men! Why was it that, around ninety years apart (the 1830s for T. D. Rice and minstrelsy and the 1920s for DuBose Heyward and Porgy), a genre and then source for one of the most contested American operas would come out of such similar roots: crippled black men whose plights were taken up by white men who were fascinated by them. Was it their exotic foreignness? Was it the ridicule? Was it the desperate presentation of humanity?

  Returning to Thomas Dartmouth Rice: the character he developed—Jim Crow—also evolved into Sambo and Uncle Tom, the stereotype of docile and not very intelligent black men who were seen as being harmless and who sang, danced, and smiled a lot. Other negative characters that developed out of this tradition were the Buck (a large threatening black man who only wanted to rape women—preferably white women)—and the Trickster (who also could be called “Zip Coon”), a mischievous and dangerous character who brings trouble and cheats people out of their money and honor. In terms of women, the two most common roles are the Mammy and the Jezebel. The Mammy was a large black woman who took care of white families—cooking and cleaning, while her own family fended for itself. She was a domineering presence and was seen as completely asexual. The Jezebel is a highly sexualized black woman who tempts all men (especially white men) and loves to be sexually used. All minstrel stereotypes are limited in the depth of their characterizations and do not allow for fully rounded portrayals. They are shorthand references reinforcing a patriarchal white-supremacist ideology that prevent a role, or narrative, from developing and moving past established racist formulae.

  In Porgy and Bess these minstrel character types lie just beneath the surface of many characters. Though all of the primary roles in the opera are fleshed out enough to keep our attention and cause us to begin to care about their plight in the plot, the male characters of Sportin’ Life as the Trickster (with elements of Zip Coon) and Crown as the overly sexualized and dangerous Buck stay close to their formulaic stereotypes. The women’s roles (which I dicuss more fully in the next section) also reference minstrel stereotypes: Maria has elements of the Mammy; Bess is clearly borne of the Jezebel.

  The one male character who starts on one track, deviates a bit, and then returns to the minstrel model is Porgy. As a crippled beggar who charms spare change out of strangers, Porgy’s seemingly harmless nature easily fits him into the Sambo stereotype when we first meet him. In most productions, his “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” reinforces the persona of a poor black man who knows his inferior status and accepts his lot.43

  In Blackness in Opera I wrote about the different constructions of masculinity in early twentieth-century opera and brought Porgy into this comparative picture.44 As opposed to the heroism of the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century presents a time of crises and antiheroic behaviors in leading operatic men; I demonstrated this in analyses of the male title characters of Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf (1927), Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945). Though this is a trend for leading male characters in opera, there also emerged a different moral code for black and nonblack characters; black characters are not punished for their crimes and seem to have lower expectations placed on them. Unlike the tragic endings of their nonblack operatic colleagues, the black leading men do not pay for what they have done wrong; instead, they are forced into the role of the entertainer who sacrifices his humanity for the sake of leaving the audience with a rousing, hand-clapping finale.

  In the beginning of the opera, Porgy starts out in line with the Sambo image: he is happy to be back in Catfish Row after the busy day begging in the white city (for the “Buckra” money) and ready to pass the evening gambling with his neighbors. Porgy’s character as the Sambo minstrel becomes more complicated and expanded after he falls in love with Bess, especially after the depth of emotion they express in their duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” / “Porgy, I’s Yo’ Woman Now.” At this point, the happy-go-lucky Sambo moves into a more three-dimensional characterization wherein he starts to care about someone other than himself. He lives his life with Bess as a family; they take in Clara and Jake’s orphaned baby after the hurricane, and he defends Bess’s honor by fighting (and killing) Crown when he comes back to Catfish Row to claim Bess. Yet the final vision of Porgy recombines elements of the minstrel character after he learns about Bess running off with Sportin’ Life to New York City. While his disappoin
tment is palpable, Porgy reverts to the role of the entertainer as he puts on a happy face at the end of the show and leads the chorus in the rousing final number “Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Land.”

  Porgy’s optimism that he could be reunited with Bess is not what makes his character ring false at the end. What ultimately undercuts his integrity and heroism is that he has not earned them. By the end of the opera, he lives unpunished for the murder of Crown and within the larger context of his reality in Catfish Row: the brutality of Jim Crow and segregation, his crippled body, and extreme poverty. As I wrote in “From Otello to Porgy,” “the success of the final curtain is keeping the audience from making the connection between what we want to have happen and what lies within the realm of probability; the reality and Porgy’s fantasy are two entirely different things.”45 Porgy’s rousing final number re-inscribes the artificiality in the heroism of his character. Though he suffers unjust social circumstances, and we want him to triumph above such undeniable odds, his heroism has been ransomed by the minstrel imperative to have us clap and smile at the end rather than have us identify with him as a more true-to-life character who nobly suffers tragic consequences.

  Womanhood in Porgy and Bess

  What is at stake when we think about Porgy and Bess as “an American folk opera,” an embodiment of minstrel stereotypes, and an intersection of modern-day race, class, and gender dynamics—along with the rubric of a hypersexuality—when the work is performed today? In this section I focus on how racialized and gendered components work in the characterizations for the women in Porgy and Bess: Clara, Serena, Maria, and Bess. I extend the section on Bess by analyzing a specific scene (the confrontation with Crown on Kittiwah Island) in two versions, the 1935 opera and the 2012 production on Broadway. I juxtapose characterizations of Bess in the different shaping of this scene. At the end of this section, I bring in another voice—an interview with Leontyne Price—to explore an additional angle: how Bess has resonated with one of her famous early interpreters.

  While the opera comes from DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy, and the play Porgy that Dorothy Heyward adapted in 1927, the opera was called Porgy and Bess and increases the voice of Bess—her presence in the drama as a whole—as a more central character. Musically she does not have fullblown solo numbers (as Porgy does), but she has important numbers with the chorus and significant sections of solo singing in duets with Porgy and Crown. Most important, compared with the other women in the opera, Bess is the only character who goes through a significant evolution, changing and developing over time. Even though Serena starts out married and then loses her husband, this happens in the first scene of the opera, and her character is then set for the remainder of the opera. The other women have specific roles they fulfill and primarily remain static in terms of their character and beliefs.

  Early in the opera after the overture, Clara opens the first act with the nearly show-stopping, and arguably the most famous, number in the opera, “Summertime.” Though this aria has been transformed into every imaginable style, from multiple jazz standards up through Janis Joplin’s famous cover with Big Brother and the Holding Company,46 its original context is as a lullaby that Clara, a new mother and devoted wife, sings to her fussing baby. In the hubbub of the opening scene, which takes place on a Saturday night on Catfish Row, the men are playing a craps game and the women are socializing while the children are running around. Clara’s lullaby brings all of the groups onstage together as she walks between the men and women singing to her infant son.

  “Summertime” is remarkably high in the soprano range with a slowmoving lyrical line. Musically, Clara’s voice provides a counterpoint to the men’s and women’s choruses, her high, light soprano voice soaring over the more rhythmically active choral interjections. Clara’s voice signals her youth and innocence as an attentive and caring mother. In the familiar words to the lullaby (“your daddy’s rich and your ma is good looking”) she soothes the child to sleep with the message that the living is easy and their family is stable. Clara is married to Jake, a fisherman, who obviously loves his wife and child as he takes the baby and banters with Clara when he playfully sings “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” This is a young, promising family where we find a well-employed breadwinner, a devoted mother, and family plans for the child go to college. Yet this picture tragically changes through the course of the opera. Clara begs Jake not to take the boat out during the onset of the hurricane season, but Jake is eager to make money for his family. When Jake’s boat gets caught and lost in the big storm (at the end of act 2), Clara blindly runs out and perishes as she tries to find him. The young baby with so much to look forward to in the opening scene is orphaned by the end of the second act of the opera.

  Far from a minstrel stereotype, Clara is a role that brings an element of integrity to the opera; as a character her behavior feels genuine (she acts like a loving mother and wife) and seems to have the individuality of asserting her own independence. In act 2, when she runs out to look for Jake in the hurricane, she abandons predictability, even at the expense of making an uncharacteristically bad decision. Up to this point, nothing in her role had prepared us to think she would leave her baby and run out into a dangerous storm, risking her life. Such behavior makes her character appear to have its own agency, in that she can make decisions on the spot and not act from a predestined script; her behavior does not follow clear stereotypes but is wrenched between her love and sense of duty as a mother, wife, and young woman. When she and Jake die in the hurricane, a sense of optimism is lost in the plot. The embodiment of the community’s hope for the future has been randomly killed off.

  From the opening scene of the opera’s first act, a trope woven throughout the opera emerges: women bear the consequences of men’s shortsighted actions. Serena, the churchgoing, devoted wife of Robbins, is the victim of the first tragedy of the opera when Crown, in a drunken stupor and high on “happy dust” (the opera’s name for an early-twentieth-century version of cocaine and/or heroine), kills Robbins over an argument about the craps game. Serena is a soprano with a heavier voice that illustrates her older age and greater maturity than Clara, but she is still a woman in the prime of life. Her lament at Robbins’s funeral, “My Man’s Gone Now,” shows how easily the fate of women on Catfish Row is beyond their control and tied to the fortune of the men in the community. In the second scene of act 1, the funeral of Robbins has Serena pleading with the community of Catfish Row, and then with the funeral director, to help her pay for a proper burial for her husband so that his body is not given to be dissected by medical students. (Serena’s concern references the inadequate healthcare and discriminatory medical treatment African Americans have historically received. With evidence based on personal experience and the infamous cases of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (1932–1972) and the use of cells from Henrietta Lacks, Serena’s desperation in this scene was real and resonated with original audiences as well as audiences today.47) Without burial insurance, the dignified woman who prays and goes to church is brought to grief and vulnerability through the course of bad luck. Nonetheless, she survives and remains both an active character in the plot as well as a strong member of the community.

  Like Clara, Serena is not borne of minstrel stereotypes and instead embodies a different type of black woman onstage. With her young innocence, new motherhood, and high, sweet soprano voice that effortlessly soars in lyrical melodic lines, Clara fits the typical ingénue. Serena gives us something different, a black womanhood that is not usually portrayed. She is a woman in love, devoted to her husband, and financially aware (we see that she holds the purse strings when Robbins asked her for gambling money). We also see her character undergo hardship that she regally bears in her move from wife to widow. We hear her huge, controlled, warm, and powerful voice. She sings with the lyrical drama of a spinto or dramatic soprano that can also cross over to a well-managed vocal Broadway belt. Serena defies pigeonholing because she
takes on whatever she is asked to do. Though she did not have her own children, we know by the end of the opera, after Bess abandoned Clara and Jake’s orphan baby and headed up to New York City, that Serena will be one of the leading women in the community who will take over the raising and nurturing of that child (it is Serena who is holding the baby when Porgy returns from jail at the end of the opera). Serena is a single woman who might get married again, or not; however, she knows how to survive without a man (as she aptly lets us know in “My Man’s Gone Now”). She is a leader in the community and, to many in the audience who could make the connection, Serena well represents an unsung member of a black middle class who lives a respectable life, even when her financial situation is more precarious and survival depends on bringing the community together for collective empowerment.

  Maria is the older matriarch who owns a small restaurant business and is the de facto leader to whom people look when anyone is in trouble. Maria has a mezzo-soprano voice that shows her older age and commanding authority. Maria looks out for Porgy, and the audience knows that Bess has truly been accepted into the community of Catfish Row when Maria befriends her and convinces Bess to go to the picnic on Kittiwah Island. Maria represents the community values and shuns Sportin’ Life (in her number “I Hates Yo Struttin’ Style”), even when you think he might have worked his way into a partial respectability, with his big number “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” on Kittiwah Island. Though Maria certainly reflects elements of the Mammy minstrel character type, this is not the full essence of her character, and she upsets the Mammy elements she does express. As the Mammy, Maria is shown out of the workplace and in an all-black world; in the absence of caring for white families, she is as she would be at home. Her character takes her strength of tending the domestic sphere and uses it to hold the community of Catfish Row together.