Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star Review

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Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star ReviewIntroducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star
Camille Forbes's Brave Biography of Bert Williams
This big book is densely packed with information, yet so clearly organized and well written it is a delight to read. Framing her comprehensive overview of Bert Williams's career in the context of American theatre and race relations from the 1890s to the 1920s, Camille Forbes illustrates Williams's extraordinary talent and the challenges he faced as a black comedian. In a 400-page biography that is fully researched, meticulously documented, and refreshingly jargon-free, Professor Forbes provides a story that is as entertaining as it is scholarly. She is most effective in re-telling Williams's songs, jokes, monologues, skits, films, and musical productions - many of which had me alternately laughing out loud or crying, sometimes both.
In her Preface, Forbes explains that while her archival searches yielded rich details about Bert Williams's performances, she found little about the private life of this man who generally kept his own counsel. Promising to "remain loyal" to the facts she found (p. xii), she relies on detailed examinations of Bert Williams's public life, along with his scant remarks about himself and some comments by those who knew him, to explore the man behind the burnt cork. The result is that this biography sustains an organic integrity that an exposé of the private man's inner life would not. Forbes found plenty about Williams the performer to pack into her book, and just enough about Williams the man to flesh out his complexities. He was, for instance, a loyal husband and doting father but a careless chain smoker and a heavy drinker; a man who enjoyed socializing with other black men but was offended when black entertainers would drop by his dressing room uninvited; a man who dreamed of furthering "mutual understanding between the races" (p. 225) by developing a serious Negro character in a major production but failed to respond when "opportunity knocked" (pp. 224-226); a light-skinned Bahamian who identified with the African American community long before becoming a U.S. citizen but had by then alienated a large number of African Americans by remaining the only black in the all-white Ziegfeld Follies.
As with her promise to let her materials speak for themselves, Professor Forbes maintains an implicit contract to present them objectively, without becoming didactic or pedantic. Carefully tracing Williams's career, she provides extensive background information, examines the layers of meaning in his character portrayals, quotes conflicting reviews by critics both black and white, and addresses the complex racial issues of the time. Following Williams from his first public appearances as a shy teen-aged barker at a medicine show in Riverside, California, to his days performing in minstrel shows in San Francisco and his rise to national stardom with his partner, George Walker, Forbes describes Williams's comic routines in detail, placing them in historical and social context. Her depiction of the dynamics between the William's Jim Crow character and Walker's Zip Coon (pp. 60-62) is particularly compelling, as are her descriptions of the interactions between the two men and Williams's transition to a solo career after Walker's advanced syphilis forced him to retire.
When forced to go it alone, Bert Williams returned to vaudeville with great success, soon joining the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910. Forbes portrays Williams's need to separate his offstage presence as an intelligent man from his onstage comic characters during this transition, and she carefully documents the African American community's outrage as the highly-paid comedian continued to create his black-face minstrel characters amid the otherwise all-white shows. With the exception of a year off from the Follies in 1913, some off-season performances, and a few films, the black comic continued to play to audiences that were predominately, if not exclusively, white - even after he left Ziegfeld in 1918. Using Williams's own words when available, but refraining from speaking on his behalf, Forbes is consistently thorough in reporting the nuances of his character portrayals and the implications of the choices he made.
From the early 1900s, when Williams and Walker were already the "premier black act in New York" (p. 70), until after his death in 1922, Williams was generally considered the top black comedian in the U.S., if not "the funniest man on earth" (183). Throughout his career, even as Professor Forbes maintains a sure objectivity dictated by her materials and the history of U.S. race relations, she clearly cares deeply for Bert Williams and keeps him firmly in the spotlight. As a result, this brave biography takes on a life of its own.
A brief review cannot do justice to the biography's fullness, texture, and complexities, nor does it begin to echo the wonderful descriptions of Williams's comic performances. Look for the accounts of the recording of Williams's most popular song, "Nobody" (pp. 143-146) and his skits with Leon Errol in the 1911 and 1912 Follies (pp. 215-219 and 226-228). These were some of my favorites, but you may well find some you like even better.
For the record, I should note that I was working at UC San Diego when Professor Forbes began her career there, and I attended some of her talks based on her preliminary research for this book. I did not see the book's manuscript in preparation, however, nor have I yet attended one of her readings or read the reviews. My comments are based on my reading of the copy of the book I purchased after it was published.Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star Overview

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