J. Poindexter, ColoredCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
J. Poindexter, Colored
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
African Americans -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
By this time I has done localized Mr. Pulliam where he's standing over
in a corner talking with Miss Bill-Lee and a couple more ladies, and I
makes my way to him. Doing so, I has to pass behind some of the scenery.
On the other side it's just like a row of houses with roofs and porches
and all, but here on the behind-side of it there ain't nothing only
plastering laths and raggedy ends of burlaps and chicken-coop wire and
naked joists. It puts me right sharply in mind of some of these folks we
has been associating with up here--everything in stock devoted to making
a show for the front and nothing except the rubbish left over for the
backing. Well, I reckons it's always like that when you is
making-believe to be something you truly ain't, whether it's in a
moving-picture studio or out in the great world at large.
After I gives Mr. Dallas his coat he tells me to hang round if I wishes
to do so and watch 'em working. So I hangs round. But there ain't much
working done for quite a spell but, instead, a lot of general
speechifying and explaining betwixt this one and that one. Finally
though, the pestered man he yells out something about being ready to
shoot an interior. All hands rambles over to another part of the
building where there is more scenery which is fixed up to look like the
insides of a short-order restaurant. One of the young ladies and one of
the young gentlemen sets down at a table in front of the camera and lets
on to be eating a quick snack whilst a white man, which is dressed up
like a waiter and blacked up to look like he's colored, waits on 'em.
The two at the table appears to be giving satisfaction but the ruler of
the roost ain't pleased with the way the waiter acts out his part.
I ain't blaming him for not being pleased, neither. To start with, the
waiter is blacked up too much. He don't look like he's genuine colored;
he looks more like he's been shining up a cook stove and got most of the
polish rubbed off onto his face and hands. He don't act like he's
genuine colored, neither. I judges he must have studied the business of
acting like colored folks from watching nigger minstrel shows. He keeps
rolling his eyes up in his head and smacking his lips, the same as an
end-man does, which is all right, I reckon, when you is an end-man but
which does not fill the bill when you is letting on to be a sure-enough
black person; because for years past I ain't never seen scarsely no
minstrel man which really deported himself as though he had colored
feelings inside of him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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