The word “minstrel” shares the same root with minister—a servant, entertainer or imperial household officer. The word also meant a poet, a storyteller, a jester, a juggler, a workman. The French used the word to apply to musicians employed by the court to compose and play music for various events. But the word came to apply to itinerant musicians who traveled about seeking employment or what we call gigs. In the 18th century, the word came to mean essentially the same thing as a bard—a singer of heroic poetry accompanying himself on a lyre or other stringed instrument although this sense was limited to the medieval era. But starting in the 19th century in America, minstrel took on a whole new meaning.
Today, we tend to regard the American minstrel era as one of shameful racism where white people dressed in shabby clothes, smeared burnt cork on their faces, snatched up banjos and pranced around singing the way they thought blacks sang and danced. They mocked blacks and perpetuated stereotypes. As we will see, this is largely untrue. First, we should point out that whites performing in blackface preceded the minstrel era and that, while we generally say blackface minstrelsy started in America in the 1840s, the evidence shows that it had its beginnings in the 1820s. Like everything, minstrelsy evolved from something largely unrelated to what it eventually became.
To understand minstrelsy, we must first understand that the mind creates narratives to explain subconscious leanings and motivations too base to be seen or understood in the clear light of intellectual analysis. For example, a man can give you a million reasons why he prefers women with large breasts but the true reason is purely biological—large breasts indicate to him that she is good breeding material because she has plenty of milk to raise healthy offspring. This is regardless of whether the man even wants children. Women often claim to like a man with a compact, muscular buttocks because they find it “hot” or “sexy.” The truth is, his anatomical gift advertises to women that he possesses good thrusting power and therefore can impregnate women more easily and more often to produce healthy offspring. Again, this is regardless of whether the woman in question even desires to have children. Advertisers have known about this for years. They state that people who like to drive SUVs claim the vehicles are safer than ordinary cars (they are not) but the truth is, the people who like SUVs feel less intimidated encased in this bastion of metal than they feel in an ordinary car. They are careful, however, never to advertise their products to appeal to the subconscious desires.
When we are dealing race relations, the same subconscious motives present themselves and the mind must, once again, create a narrative to explain it that has nothing to do with the motive itself. In this case, we are dealing with the feelings of whites towards the color black. By studying the various roles of black characters in the theatre of the early 19th century in both Europe and America, we get an idea of what factors were at play (and many of them still play). Blackness we have always associated with fear and the unknown but also the low and the vulgar. A popular play in England called “The One Hundred-Pound Note” featured a bootblack named Billy Black whose face is always sooty. When the play came to America in 1827, Billy Black’s character was changed to black boy. The sootiness of his face and his occupation made the association natural to Americans.
Going back to the 18th century, the play “An Irishman in London—The Happy African,” was a farce written by William McCready that came to America in 1793. In it, a black maid named Cubba (played by a white woman, of course) and an Irishman named Murtoch are presented as outsiders to high white culture. Murtoch is brought low by McCready’s device of symbolically transferring Cubba’s blackness to Murtoch.
Then, of course, there is “Othello.” However Shakespeare intended the play to taken by the virtually all-white audiences that were the only ones to see it 300 years after it was written (1603), those whites took it to be a vindication of the moral wrongness of miscegenation—of course, by this, we mean specifically between black males and white females. White males took sexual relations with black female concubines as virtual birthright. No less a notable that John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, who stood opposed to slavery, decried the interracial relationship stating that “the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his color.” Adams was far from alone in his sentiment. He expressed the white male majority opinion.
So blackness as seen by white audiences in America as something “other” and something “low.” Black could never assimilate and so would always be on the outside. This, again, harks back to the subconscious idea that black represents the unknown, the unknowable, the shadow, the devil.
In Holland, they celebrate Christmas on December 6 as Saint Nicholas Day. The Dutch depict Nicholas as a bishop who ride a white horse. Running or walking alongside Nicholas is a fellow they call Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. He usually carries a sack of switches to beat the bad children with while Nicholas or Sinterklaas hands out the gifts to the good children. Pete is the shadow twin of Santa, his dark side. He’s lower than Sinterklaas and so runs alongside him instead on the horse with Nicholas.
The Dutch celebrate their Christmas as we do in America—with people dressing as Santa. The difference is that the Dutch also have people—often women—dress as Pete. They blacken their faces and don a Moorish costume. Here we see the difference between the subconscious motives and the narratives the conscious mind creates to explain them. Pete is black because he represents the “Other” or the “Outsider” but the Dutch decide to depict him as a Moor because consciously they cannot otherwise explain his blackness.
Getting to the root of the Black Pete legend, Nicholas is frequently depicted with children as he is also their patron saint. He is shown with three young boys. This refers to a legend when a terrible famine struck the region (Myra in Turkey or Anatolia where Nicholas served as bishop). A butcher lured three young boys into his shop under some pretense and then butchered them and placed the body parts in a pickling tub and then put the flesh up for sale as ham. Nicholas saw through the man’s unspeakable crime and resurrected the three boys. In the iconography and statues the boys are often depicted still in the tub.
What has that to do with Zwarte Piet? According to the French legend, after Nicholas resurrected the three murdered boys, their killer, Père Fouettard, becomes the servant of Nicholas and delivers punishments to bad children. Again, his evilness makes him a dark character and his name is a variation of Pierre or Peter and so he is Black Pete.
A disturbing image of Père Fouettard devouring the three boys.
In other European countries, Nicholas’s helper is even more frightening. He is called Cert or Krampus (“Claw”):
Krampus/Cert despite his horrific appearance (clearly he is the devil and notice he is black) only punished the bad children and rewarded the good. In this depiction, he gave the little girl apples while he takes her brother away (and she seems not the slightest bit upset about it). Below, we see Pete doing the same thing—taking away the bad children. Supposedly he sold them into slavery in Spain (Spain once conquered the Dutch and treated the people rather abominably). Pete and Krampus serve the same function because they are the same:
