For the Love of Topsy (& Bopsy)
* this is written out of a rush of “fandom energy” idk if that’s a thing but last nights episode of Lovecraft Country hit all my Black Performance nerd spots (despite being the type of scary-thing I would generally NEVER watch after dark!!) so i got some stuff to say — so, spoilers! + also bunch also a bunch of Black theater history *
*just a heads up, i got deep infatuation with complicated depictions of black femininity*
*not criticism, just some Black nerd gushiness*
my mind keeps returning to the shadow…the amorphous drip of recognition..the floating signifier. I chase it in most that I do. my gaze is dark and inquisitive . doubtful at times. viscerally sensitive… what of the dirty images I can’t distance myself from? i plait my hair at night and smile Topsy into the bathroom mirror. I think there is something minstrel about myself in red lipstick but i wear it anyway (with the appropriate lip liner) and smile boldly in the face of onlookers all the while wondering if they chase away the same 19th century perversions of vision I swallow every morning. (iPhone Note from 1/3/2017)
One of my Best Friends cannot understand why I was not more spooked by the Topsy + Bopsy demon-picaninny-creatures from this weeks episode of Lovecraft Country. I honestly don’t understand it either but I think its rooted in my longstanding positive obsession with the figure/character/idea of Topsy and all that she embodies in the history of Black femme performance. I went looking for everything I’ve ever written about her. I remembered the above excerpt from a long note about Black representation that I jotted down 3 years ago. I remembered a short paper I wrote in undergrad for a course on“The Performance and Politics of Black Authenticity.” I remembered when a group of us staged a production of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum and I read for and was cast as Normal Jean Reynolds and my friend closed the show with Topsy Washington hauntingly joyous proclamation “i got madness in me and that madness sets me free.” I see all the black dolls around my house and I think of the way I sought them out. I think of when I first started crafting my performance person Lil Cotton Flower as “slutty slave girl” and was very clear that they were “progeny of an insensate picaninny.” I think of that one time someone in Chicago described my “Marvelous Tar Baby” act as like watching a Kara Walker drawing come to life. I remember the time I told this person chatting me up in a hot tub that I think my work mobilizes the same fixations as Walkers, but where she turns to ‘the grotesque’ I turn on ‘cuteness’ and sensuality.
So now that Topsy has re-entered the Zeitgeist as the twined haint in Episode 8 of Lovecraft Country, conjured by white supremacist wannabe wizard pig-cops to plague Black girlhood (embodied by the character Diana, portrayed by Jada Harris) I wanna take a second and pour out from my archives a lil’ love for Topsy, to whom I owe so much!
First: a turn to Black Performance scholar Jayna Brown! (whose work set my Black performance theory + practice obsessions in motion, thank you Jasmine Johnson for assigning it!)
The two chapters from Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, “Little Black Me: The Touring Picaninny Choruses” and “Letting the Flesh Fly: Topsy, Time, Torture, and Transfiguration” speak to specific moments in the evolution of black theater and their implications for the black body in relation to itself and white audiences. Brown’s thoroughly researched account of black performers begins with the export of “America’s Greatest Coon Cantatrice,” Belle Davis, a fair-skinned singer from the black theater circuit who traveled Great Britain with two black boys “Sonny and Sneeze.” Black specialty acts like that of Davis and her small “picaninny chorus,” were en vogue for much of the 19th and early 20th century in America and abroad. Throughout Europe these acts were given new meaning as the appearance of the “beleaguered black bodies” of young minstrel performers stood to represent the bodies of serfs and child laborers (Brown 27). The moving black body wore “slavery, urban poverty, and creative resilience,” the convenient parts of this imagery were co-opted by European labor movements, but they subconsciously resonated with larger European audiences for the way they reflected the paternalistic nature colonial relationships (Brown 29, 35). The language of black suffering as articulated through writing and the artful disfigurement of body and sound in minstrel performance was used by white European and American activist to further dramatize their respective causes. Blackness was manipulated and carefully packaged to stimulate the sympathy of white women and Christians by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and by English writers illustrating the cruelty of child labor (Brown 44, 46).
Picaninnies, Golliwogs and Sambo were icons that predated Belle Davis and paved the way for the reception of black performers as gleeful instruments of entertainments as happy in their condition, just as faraway colonial subjects and American slaves were, and always in need of white patronage and benevolence (Brown 48–49).
The “lesser races” were conceived of as “locked in a perpetual state of childlike simplicity, prone to excess, always emotional and immediate in their responses” (Brown 48). The untamable young black slave girl, Topsy from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, embodies this ethos and exist as a means for black women to perform a complex variant of resistance. As a character built for white women, Topsy existed as a “therapeutic opportunity….to access realms of freedom womanhood was otherwise constructed against” (Brown 71). As Topsy, and other female minstrel forms including burlesque, white women got to “act out” and disregard the stoic purity they had been culturally ascribed to. While engaging their own freedom they invoked their power over and access to the black female body (Brown 72). But when Topsy was played by black performers like Ida Forsyne, the characters movements tap into a sense of a spiritual reclamation of the black body Free from the respectability politics of the New Negro and seemingly immune to the violence of chattel slavery, Topsy exist as the embodiment of “the disruptive creativity of the black female child,” whose acts of transcendence reflect that of black performers from the 19th century to present times (Brown 58).
And I think our comic drawing young heroine Diana “Dee” Freeman surely embodies this sense of “disruptive creativity.” She first uses her art in this season to express her mother’s desire for adventure (hence the creation of “ “Orynthia Blue” who Hippolyta becomes in Episode 7) and challenge her father’s patriarchal practices of “leaving the wife behind”as he goes off to chart new territories for the safety of negroes.
Second: Topsy makes another appearance in “Permutations,” exhibit 9 of George C. Wolfe’s racial satire, The Colored Museum. In this vignette, “very southern and very young,” Normal Jean Reynolds speaks in dialect, hair in month old plaits wearing a “very simple dress” (Wolfe 47). Sexual “relations” with “all the bad things folks never should have thrown away” leave her pregnant and hidden by her mother for fear of the judgment of the “neighbors” (Wolfe 47). In solitude she delivers an egg and is left to imagine what will come of the many heartbeats she hears inside. Normal Jeans babies will arrive on their own time, seeming to emerge from nowhere like Topsy and the orphaned picaninnies of the 19th century. She imagines them “all kinds-a shades” with hair “growin’ every which-a-way.” Her babies will be special “’cause not every day a bunch a babies break out a white egg and start to live.” By turning Topsy into a mother Wolfe not only gives her access to the “sacred duty of motherhood,” historically reserved for white women in this context, but allows an image once regarded as “the quintessential symbol of black artistic denigration and humiliation” the ability to birth a nation that will literally break through the limitations of white supremacy and “Fly!” (Brown 76, Wolfe 49).
And Lovecraft Country’s “jig-a-bobos” do be jigging! I deeply appreciated the incorporation of impressive Chicago-style footwork into their creep-choreography ( shoutout to the choreographer Jamaica Craft). And aside from the pure creep factor, the syncopation of Topsy and Bopsy (performed by Kaelynn Harris and Bianca Brewton) really harkens back to the virtuosic minstrel + vaudeville performances of folks like Ida Forsyne and Aida Overton Walker. I love the messiness of how such a grotesque caricature of Black girlhood could also embody so much freedom. The poet e.e.cumming’s described Josephine Baker’s performance of Topsy Anna as a “incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner.” And Misha Green’s ask to the choreographer for this episode was to create a “nightmare minstrel jig.” Yet, folks have read into the work of Baker an undercurrent that troubles this neat connection between In one of the most moving pieces of academic writing I have ever read Jayna Brown describes Topsy’s performative refusals of death by centering Ida Forsyne’s account of the character spinning “over and over and up” while white audiences and critics could see was her black body spinning “over and over and dead.”
BONUS: I refused to watch Christina’s reenactment of the Emmett Till murder (thank you fast-forward feature) but I do think that in this episode which featured Minstrelsy so prominently there’s something interesting to be said about about white women performing black suffering for her own personal/egoic reason. If she had not been laugh-crying so maniacally i might think she did it out of love (or something like that) for Ruby but I really think that was just some white she-devil shenanigans and a way for the writers to force the audience to witness the horror of Emmett Till’s murder without playing into the “truama-porn” of black suffering. Either way, I could do without it but i think its an interesting play with the idea/history of “female minstrelsy” — there’s something very Saidiya Hartman Scenes of Subjection about it!
