Much of black humor is developed around the ridicule of white people. As a response, how do we as black people make white people feel like the Other, the outsiders, or—even better—as nonsensical as their rules enforced upon us? Often, the target of the humor is cruel behavior (racist brutality, white supremacy, and so on), but through humor the power dynamics change. We make fun of white people for not being able to dance as well or as fluidly as we can, for aging more quickly, for not chastising their badass children hard enough, or simply for not understanding us, period. If you watch any vintage clips of Def Comedy Jam or ComicView, you’ll see this kind of mockery throughout the entire program.
This imbalance—how many of us are still unable to reflect on slavery in a way that foregrounds its horrors while acknowledging slaves’ intelligence and agency in spite of them—intrigues me. Perhaps this is why I am tired with contemporary films and historical photos about slavery. They do not explore the fact that although they were legal property, slaves were also human beings who found creative ways to subvert power and exercise their humanity even after laboring for hours in the blistering southern heat. I would have endorsed A Birthday Cake for George Washington if it had been about slaves’ propensity for making fun of white people right underneath their noses, which would involve a different kind of cake.
The cakewalk was a dance performed in the late nineteenth century at slave get-togethers. You lean or rear back and kick your feet out left and right or vice versa as you move forward. When I think of the cakewalk, I think of the innumerable times in middle school my black friends and I would impersonate white girls’ attempts to gyrate like us as they danced. They always missed the mark. What came naturally to us did not come naturally to them. They thought about how they danced; they had no sense of natural feeling and their movements were mechanical.
For black people, bodily expression is spontaneous and passionate. It is true that after a long day’s work the slaves would sometimes have to entertain the master and his guests, mainly so that they’d become too tired to think about rebelling. Even if the master had no guests, slaves would still be dragged into the household to sing, dance, and play music. If slaves couldn’t get a real instrument, such as a violin, they’d make do with other materials. White people would watch them dance, fascinated by the exoticness of it all. These spectacles were purposeful humiliations. But the cakewalk evolved as slaves’ own form of subversion. While serving at large and fancy parties in the early 1800s, they would watch well-to-do white people perform strict and stiff dances, like cotillions and quadrilles, and mimic them, exaggerating the bowing and small skips and hops and adding some high steps and jumps. In diaries kept by white people in the antebellum South, the cakewalk is not depicted as a form of satire. After all, why would a sweet slave mock his benevolent master? To white people’s eyes, this imitation seemed like flattery. They were delighted that the slaves were attempting their civilized dances. In fact, they would hold competitions and the winning slaves would receive a cake, hence the name. Yet they were being mocked, right in front of their faces.
The performance of the cakewalk is profound considering that slaves’ bodies were so subjugated and yet they still found a way to mock their owners, who watched in awe, unaware of their own humiliation through movement and mimicry. In African-American humor, white incomprehension is the basis for many jokes about white people. They cannot understand us and they never will, because they also cannot understand our language.
African-Americanists and scholars of race in America are well versed in signifying, which is the art of being able to talk around a subject without hitting on the point. Black people play with literal and figurative meanings without even thinking about it. Dr. Henry Louis Gates expounds upon this concept in his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Our use of our hands and eyes to enhance our stories only opens up more possible interpretations of our words. The dictionary is insufficient for us because oftentimes our words undermine strict definition. It depends on one’s intonation, the situation, and one’s geographical origin. It’s hard for me to think of examples because this reconfiguration of language is innate. It is not something that I believe you can wholly teach. One may be “She ain’t cut me no slack,” and another, “That music was bangin’”: the former representing a burden, and the latter refiguring what sounds like a nuisance into a compliment. In learning standard—i.e., white—English, we are taught to be as direct as possible. African-American English is created around the idea that indirectness is more fun. Similar to the cakewalk, our language had to evolve around and underneath dominant white social norms. It’s the inscrutability of our glances, the click of our tongues, the sucking of our teeth, and our fragmented sentences that communicate our emotions and character. This is a part of the black experience that white people cannot entirely access, and this exclusion gives us fertile ground to ridicule them—our own form of power.
What does this mean for black female slaves, whose position was unique compared to that of male slaves? In the United States, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when female comedians first started performing, that critics decided wit and humor were incompatible with femininity. However, historically female humor took place less onstage and more on the page, because in the theater they were relegated to playing masculine women, idiots, or prostitutes. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is perhaps the finest example of satire by a black woman.6 After Nat Turner’s rebellion broke out, slave owners across the South were scared about what might happen on their property. They had to retaliate, proactively treating their slaves with increased violence to invoke more fear. Jacobs goes into great detail about how drunk soldiers searched houses, whipped black people “till the blood stood in puddles at their feet”—some receiving five hundred lashes—and tortured still others with a bucking paddle. She then exclaims, “What a spectacle was that for a civilized country! A rabble, staggering under intoxication, assuming to be the administrators of justice!”
The humor Jacobs interweaves throughout her elegant prose demonstrates her awareness of the ridiculous society in which she lived. As a writer, she surveys her circumstances, analyzing them bit by bit, to ultimately reveal a different reality: one in which white people, who pride themselves on civilization and respectability, are the real savages. The biting sarcasm of her words allows her to have the upper hand.
This is what I want to tell my future children: slaves knew what was up. Even if they didn’t kill their masters, run away, or burn down plantations, slaves suffered horribly and knew that this suffering was wrong—and they had the ability to mine their trauma and find some kind of power within it by humorously belittling their oppressors, stripping them down to the bone to show their inhumanity. White people, not Africans, were the real savages. Enslaved black women were victims, but that’s not all that they were.