Or on the telephone. At around the same time, Berryman regularly sought out another friend, the novelist Ralph Ellison, who later explained the odd routine to one of Berryman’s biographers:
During the period he was writing Dream Songs I grew to expect his drunken (sometimes) telephone calls, in the course of which he’d read from work in progress…. I can’t recall how many such calls there were, but usually he wanted my reaction to his uses of dialect. My preference is for idiomatic rendering, but I wasn’t about to let the poetry of what he was saying be interrupted by the dictates of my ear for Afro-American speech. Besides, watching him transform elements of the minstrel show into poetry was too fascinating. Fascinating too, and amusing was my suspicion that Berryman was casting me as a long-distance Mister Interlocutor—or was it Mister Tambo—whose temporary role was that of responding critically to his Mister Bones and Huffy Henry.
It’s an extraordinary scene: a white poet summoning the author of Invisible Man as a disembodied voice, enlisting a Black novelist as silent guarantor of authenticity in an elaborate racial masquerade. As Ellison intuited—and as was also true in the correspondence with Jarrell—the psychodramas into which Berryman projected his friends replicated the dreamlike dialogues within his poems. In both his poems and his social life, what Berryman was rehearsing was the production of a self. From Jarrell, Berryman sought the critical authority that could assure him that his “pseudo-poems,” and thus the life from which they sprang, were “real”; from Ellison, Berryman wanted the black background against which his flickering identity, his ghostly whiteness, could become visible, coherent, and powerful.
Peculiar as it may have seemed, ghastly as it was, Berryman’s minstrelsy was also typical of the form’s history. In his landmark book Love and Theft (1995), Eric Lott argued that, from the 1830s on, blackface minstrelsy gave white working-class performers a way to tap into the insurrectionary potential hiding within their fantasies of blackness while simultaneously reasserting their supremacy over the Black people who were the objects of their racist mimicry. Blackface thus not only lent itself to the brutalization of Black people; it also played an essential part in the construction and consolidation of its participants’ whiteness.
Those projects were linked. Over the course of the twentieth century, as actual blackface performances (largely but never entirely) receded from the American stage, minstrelsy’s legacy seeped into the culture, so that, for instance, Jim Crow, once the most famous character of the minstrel stage, became the name for the legal system that governed the racial segregation of American life. By the middle of the twentieth century—a period coterminous, not incidentally, with the civil rights era—the white performer in blackface was nowhere and everywhere. He lurked behind Elvis Presley’s uncanny channeling of the blues, Norman Mailer’s description of the postwar hipster as a “white Negro,” John Howard Griffin’s darkening his skin and touring the South for his book Black Like Me. Berryman’s minstrelsy at once sits alongside these contemporary examples and—anachronistically, scandalously—draws the source of their artifice to the surface. Henry doesn’t dream that he is Black. He dreams that he’s a white man in blackface.