This Masquerade

It's easily one of the most unforgettable moments in English literature:

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.  I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.  I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.  I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot—toes, heel, and every part of a foot.  How it came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.

It's from Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, chapter XI. Later, Crusoe discovers, as he had previously suspected, that his island was being visited by native cannibals bringing their prisoners there to be killed and consumed by them. He rescues one such prisoner, and names him Friday, "which was the day I saved his life; I called him so for the memory of the time." Friday is represented by Defoe as a native, a "Carib" whose tribe practices cannibalism and worships a mountain god. But, at some point over the 300 years since the book's publication, Friday turned into a black man. One movie adaptation called Man Friday, starring Peter O'Toole (not the worst of the screen adaptations) even cast African-American actor Richard Roundtree in the title role. No one bothered to explain in that muddled film how or why a patently African man came to be a native of the Caribbean. To be clear, the man who Crusoe called Friday was a native of a Central American island. His complexion was probably dark, but he was a Native American, not an African.

In 1970, when I was attending a Catholic Parochial school in Columbia, South Carolina, an English teacher came up with the idea of staging a play made up of scenes involving characters from literature. Among the other characters in the play (none of which I can recall), a boy was chosen to play Robinson Crusoe, and because I was the last one to be cast in a role, the boy cast as Crusoe suggested that I could play Friday.

My 7th grade class was small, maybe 30 of us. I remember their names and faces. I remember three black girls in my class, but there were no black boys. My fellow classmates and I knew that our English teacher was not from the South, which wouldn't have mattered if the boy playing Crusoe hadn't mentioned that, since I was playing a "black" role, I could use burnt cork to blacken my face. The teacher immediately shot down the suggestion and ended the discussion. No blackface. I was somewhat worried that I was probably going to introduce the first white Man Friday to the stage. It never occurred to me what my three black classmates would've thought if I had worn black makeup in the play.

Rehearsals took place, which left me standing around watching most of the time because all I had to do in my scene was walk on and shake hands with the boy playing Crusoe. Since there was a musical accompaniment and a chorus that introduced the characters and the stories, none of us had any lines to speak. I had just a few seconds on stage in my scene, and a curtain call with the entire cast. When the performance took place, in front of our parents and the school faculty, everything went smoothly. I was dressed in an outfit of tattered shorts and a shirt, and after the performance my classmates and I joined our parents on the auditorium floor. Every person who approached me to comment on my performance said the same thing: "Wasn't Man Friday black?" My makeup (the burnt cork) was somehow conspicuous in its absence. And my teacher, who wanted merely to avoid the issue altogether, had instead unintentionally emphasized it. I remember my big brother, with whom I got along as most kid brothers do, laughed at me because I made the mistake of forgetting that my character was black, or that I wasn't committed to the role fully enough to put on black face.

That was in 1970. I was 12. In 1984 a young medical student had his photo taken with another person at a costume party. He was wearing blackface and the other person (some have speculated it was his date) was dressed in a KKK white robe and hood. The man (he was 25 years old) is now the governor of Virginia. To most white people (especially, I would say, in the South), racist insensitivities were less sensitive in 1984. In 1970 they were, if anything, much less sensitive. Contexts matter. The governor of Virginia went to some lengths to make himself look black in that photograph. It looks like he used black shoe polish. He was at a party with fellow medical students who all - evidently - thought it was funny. But if a teacher in a Catholic parochial school who was possibly not from the South (but why should that matter?) felt uncomfortable allowing a white boy to rub burnt cork on his face to make him look black in 1970, what the hell were those medical students thinking fourteen years later at that party? And how come it took so long for someone to locate that particular photo?

But if showing up at a party looking like that and then posing proudly for a photograph wasn't bad enough, the man in the photo's reaction to the resurfacing of the photo in the press last week made it worse by his confused and contradictory reaction to it. First apologizing for the pain that his unacceptable behavior had caused, within 24 hours he denied he was even in the photograph, even though it appears on his personal page in his college yearbook and has been there for 35 years. Then he apologized for wearing blackface at some other event at which he was presenting his impersonation of Michael Jackson. I'm not sure if there was a way that the Virginia governor could have "finessed" his way out of this shitstorm. Clearly, he couldn't think of a better way, although better ways certainly exist, to explain his 25-year-old self.

One way - perhaps the only way - he might have talked his way out of it (though it wouldn't have convinced everyone) would've been to use the same argument that George Orwell used in his examination of anti-Semitism in Britain:

"I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual."

The difference is that the Virginia governor is held by some people to a much higher standard than an ordinary citizen. His participation in any racist behavior is never acceptable. (This argument is inapplicable to the current American president - a fact that even his supporters would gladly accept.)  The late Reverend Jimmy Swaggart got away with proven adultery by going on his syndicated TV show with tears in his eyes, saying, "I have sinned!" I somehow doubt that the governor could do it.