In February 2017, Galleria Cinemas in the Mall at Marathon, New Providence, collaborated with the Bahamas Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation (AMMC) on an event celebrating one of cinema’s earliest black Bahamian-American pioneers. Egbert (‘Bert’) A. Williams (1874-1922) left The Bahamas at age 11, shuttling for a while between New York, Florida and the Bahamas before settling in San Pedro, California. He embarked first on a career in vaudeville, recording songs as early as 1901 with his stage partner George Walker before moving in 1902 to Broadway, where he became the Ziegfeld Follies’ first solo black performer and one of the most successful comic actors of his ‘post-bellum, pre-Harlem’  generation.

The February 2017 New Providence screening and exhibition centred, however, not on his stage career, but on film. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, released the restored version of a 1913 title believed to be the earliest surviving film with an all-black cast. Retrieved from the MoMA vaults  in 2004, Lime Kiln Field Day was confirmed as a ‘historically significant’ title by the US Library of Congress in 2014, and released to audiences worldwide in that same year.

The film showcases Williams’ talents as a comic performer, but makes space too for vibrant scenes of black middle-class leisure and pleasure during a day out at the fairground. Loosely structured around a rom-com rivalry between Williams and other suitors competing for the attention of a local belle (Odessa Warren Grey), Lime Kiln Field Day also includes vignettes showcasing early twentieth century black performance: a lively cakewalk, a vertiginous merry-go-round ride, a parade and marching band. The restored film was hailed on its 2014 release as a milestone in black cinema. ‘There’s so much joy that we rarely see in films about black people,’ suggested US artist and photography scholar Deborah Willis; other critics hailed the film’s diverse screen characters, and the clarity of vision that the restoration allows.

But the film also revived controversies that have long pursued Bert Williams. Some saw the appearance of Williams in blackface as grounds for censure. Lime Kiln Field Day was made several years after Williams parted company with his long-time vaudeville partner, George Walker. Their double act had depended on distinctions between the dark-skinned Walker, whose onstage persona was a revised version of the minstrelsy ‘Zip Coon’ or ‘Jim Dandy’ character, while Williams played the nitwit Jim Crow, a ‘dimwitted country bumpkin who spoke in Southern black dialect, and was performed in blackface’ (Camille F. Forbes).

Walker continued to black up throughout his acting career, including in Lime Kiln Field Day. Despite the overt racism the practice entails, many critics see in Williams’ use of blackface a subtle critique of racial stereotyping. In a 1918 article on the craft of comic acting, Williams himself put the case simply. He writes, ‘It was not until I was able to see myself as another man that my sense of humour developed’. Blacking up meant for Williams assuming a mask that he could then manipulate to lead his audiences to new understandings of black presence on stage and screen. Later writers on Williams have drawn on careful analyses of his acting style to show how blackface for Williams involves a distancing from stereotypes of blackness. Williams’ biographer Louis Chude-Sokei, as well as later writers including Camille Forbes,  Michelle Ann Stepens and Elizabeth Muther, see blackface in Williams’ performances as a mask that allows him to ironise the conventions of minstrelsy. For these and other critics, Williams’ performances expose black stereotypes on stage and screen as the product of habits of racial thinking that can be broken by pointing explicitly to the act of masking, and exposing its falsity through parody, satire, quiet irony, and masquerade.

MoMA Chief Curator Rajendra Roy, who oversaw the restoration of Lime Kiln Field Day, is  more critical than Forbes or Chude-Sokei of Williams’ use of blackface. But Roy does suggest a further compelling reason for retrieving lost images of Williams.  In a MoMA video featured on this page, Roy suggests the Williams’ use of blackface provided a get-out clause for other actors from Lime Kiln’s all-black troupe. While Williams plays the clown in blackface, his collaborators appear au naturel, delivering to contemporary audiences enthralling images of a history of black performance and entertainment culture that is otherwise suppressed.

For Roy, then, this film offers tantalising insight into a middle-class turn-of-the-century experience that has been occluded from black history and cultural memory. The last word on this debate should however rightly go to Bert Williams. Already established as an actor who had worked to reinvent long-standing black character types in his stage appearances with George Walker, Williams reflected in 1918 that although ‘I have never been able to discover that there is anything disgraceful in being a coloured man….I have often found it inconvenient – in America.’ Following up this characteristically restrained comment on white racism with accounts of his own experiences of the ‘humiliations and persecutions that have to be faced by every person of coloured blood,’ Williams goes on to detail the strategies he uses—pacing, comic timing, mannered dialect, gestural restraint—to reveal on stage and screen the fabricated nature of blackness in the caricatural form it assumes in white imaginaries.

Williams’ careful navigation of the perils of black self-invention has been an inspiration to many. British-West Indian novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips wrote a biographical novel in his memory; generations of critics have worked to grasp the nuances of Williams’ ‘cryptic’, ‘baffling’, but always subtly satirical performances. The restoration of Lime Kiln Club Field Day adds to the treasure trove of films, songs, images and writings, many readily available online, that give contemporary audiences access to this often puzzling, but always quietly hilarious Bahamian star.

Image/video sources: MOMA/Alamy