Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Playtime, Part II B

I was just about to start wrestling this column onto the page, when I heard about our administration’s decision to review several of the museums at the Smithsonian. 

According to the post on the White House website some 10 days ago, a letter was sent to the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie Bunch, stating, in part, “This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” 

It brought me up short.

Why? Well, this column is the second part of a modest little exploration into the Shelter Island Players, and the history of theater on Shelter Island in general. While my “partner-in-time,” Maria Loconsolo, delves into the names, dates and facts of the case, I’ve been dabbling in some of its mysteries, and I’ve uncovered a few.

But then I came across a 2006 article by Shelter Island’s own redoubtable historians, J. Edward Schillingburg and his late wife, Patricia, entitled 1926-1927: Dances, Minstrels and Plays, that was, in part, about the “community house” (aka the “Community Club”) on Shelter Island which had been established by the ladies of the town in the 1920’s as a place to hold community events and entertainments for both pleasure and fund-raising purposes. 

I had a question for him about the information they’d included from The Suffolk Times of the period, as follows: “The Club held a minstrel show and dance at the Firemen’s Hall on Wednesday evening, April 7. Tickets were 50¢. The Firemen’s Hall was crowded to the limit last Wednesday evening and quite a few had to stay away because of lack of seats.

The Community Club’s Minstrel Show was given on that date to an enthusiastic audience. The curtain rose on a chorus of 15 ladies costumed as Aunt Jemina of pancake fame. Little black Sambo sat also on the stage as mascot. A lively program of songs and jokes was given. A quartette sang Go Along Mule with effect, and Sisters Angelina and Violet sang I’m Going from the Cotton Fields, as a duet. A number of clever local hits were worked into the show also.

The second part was a play, the Vinegar Vaudeville Agency, of which Eph, the janitor, was a shining star with Mr. Vinegar himself as a close second in comic impersonation. Solos by Walter Clark, Marion Payne and Mrs. Walter King, jigs by Mrs. Joseph Mack, Joseph Maurey and Dorothy Thompson, and violin music by Filmore Griffin, made up a large part of the agency’s offerings.

Miss Turner recited a piece and the brilliant comedians Thompson and Thompson appeared in a short sketch. Capt. Willard Griffing also gave a banjo piece. The show ended with a lively chorus Show Me the Way to Go Home. The floor was then cleared and Messrs. Smith, Walther and Clark played for dancing.’

“The minstrel show was so acclaimed that it was repeated the following week at the Greenport auditorium.”

Indeed, minstrel shows — productions in which only white performers were cast, many of whom wearing “black face” — were being presented decades before the Civil War and continued for many decades afterwards.

In fact, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture website, “The influence of minstrelsy and racial stereotyping on American society cannot be overstated. New media ushered minstrel performances from the stage, across radio and television airwaves, and into theaters.

Popular American actors, including Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney donned blackface, bridging the minstrel performance across generations, and making blackface (racial parody, and stereotypes) a family amusement.”

On that early April evening nearly a century ago, I can pretty much guarantee that the last thing on the minds of those good, big-hearted, community-minded Islanders was the goal of presenting anything like “a racial parody.”

They had gathered together for fun and fund-raising, not to be in any way deliberately insensitive or cruel to any person or group. Such a thing never would’ve occurred to them, and never had. They were simply asleep, deeply asleep, to a whole swath of their fellow citizens — those who were very awake to the doings of their white brothers and sisters, and who themselves, I’ll wager, slept very lightly.

So here’s my question. Given the administration’s directive (in which the African American Museum is, in fact, one of the eight under review), how will the powers-that-be, in their efforts to “[Restore] Truth and Sanity to American History,” view such salient primary research as that long-ago article from The Suffolk Times that the Schillingburgs discovered?  Will it and its ilk be considered “divisive or partisan narratives”? What will be excised?  What will be retained? And whose history will it be?