Acres of white cotton and a hundred wooden cabins housing five hundred Black workers. Cotton is picked from the stalk and brought over to a humming cotton gin. Women on porches chat over chores, while keeping an eye on wandering children. The local preacher extols repentance to a backslider, and folks sing hymns in rare moments of leisure.
What sounds like a South Carolina plantation in 1845 is also, in this case, a New York City exposition in 1895. Black America, which took place between Brooklyn’s Third Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street (then Ambrose Park), was a combination slavery cosplay, ethnographic exhibition, Black performance review, and all-around spectacle. Ticket holders were purchasing a full day’s worth of entertainment. For twenty-five cents (a dollar for box seats in the arena), attendees entered an Ambrose Park transformed, at a cost to the organizers of a stated $13,000 a week ($400,000 in today’s money).1 Before the performances, which changed weekly, visitors were free to walk around a recreation of the plantation life imagined in sentimental minstrel songs.
Over a hundred cabins were built to form the Renaissance Faire style village, which housed more than five hundred Black performers, who traveled north to playact slavery.2 Reviewers fixed on the Southern performers’ authenticity. Lou Parker, a hiring agent for the production, was reported to have “spent the greater part of the winter traveling through the South selecting the talent, and declares that for every one he engaged he rejected at least nine”.3 The Black performers themselves tempered this commitment to historical realism: living in cabins for the multi-week production, they added placards expressing their own identities, like “Pilgrims from Savannah”, “Four Little Atlanta Girls”, “The Eighth Ward Club of Philadelphia”, and “Home of the Tar Heelers”.
Beyond the cabins lay an ersatz cotton field, ingeniously manufactured from real cotton plant stalks, with cotton fluff loosely attached by wire, and a functioning cotton gin.4 One strains to imagine the complicated feelings of the formerly enslaved picking cotton for show. With a production of this scale, there may have been current share-croppers who found they were making better (and easier) money plucking cotton from faux plants. This live-action roleplay of plantation life created a dangerous form of cognitive dissonance. A built-in assumption of the Northern production was that Black people were moving toward a form of modern twentieth-century respectability (defined entirely in White terms). Yet the ease and leisure of the enslaved performance erased the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery.