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Mr. Nobody

Here’s a wonderful, beguiling bit of text. I discovered it in the basement of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where I had gone in search of insight into the comedian Bert Williams and the world of variety entertainment to which he belonged. His archive is housed there. It consists solely of two bound folios embossed B.W. and looking vaguely like headstones.

Whose house is that?
Moggs.

What in the world is it built of?
Logs.

Mostly, what animals do you have around here?
Frogs.

What sort of soil have you?
Bogs.

What do you live on, chiefly?
Hogs.

Have you any friends?
Dogs.

Is this song, poem, punchline? How would it have sounded when Bert Williams delivered it in his sing-songy warble or as a dialogue with pantomime? What does it mean? Archival notes tell me that it was collected during the summer of 1909, when Williams brought his solo act to vaudeville, and performed again during his years with Ziegfeld’s Follies. On stage he was the poor, hapless sap dressed in rags, tails cut off his coat, fake collar, no cuffs, ratty white gloves, who suffered continual misfortune. Mr. Nobody. The Jonah Man. He told stories and sang original songs. He was a gifted mimic with perfect timing. The smallest gesture or sideways glance left the audience in stitches. In the archive, that glorious pantomime is gone. Only the words remain.

The theatrical bug bit Bert Williams early and hard. He got his start in show business at sixteen in Riverside, CA, working as a barker for a medicine show and a singing waiter in a Black quartet. At 18 he hit the road with three classmates from Stanford, performing in the lumber and mining camps around Monterey for unenthusiastic, sometimes hostile audiences of racist laborers. Undeterred, he decamped to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, where he sang ballads in taverns and joined a group of singing Hawaiians. He found a partner, George Walker, and together they made their way east to Chicago with an act they called “The Two Real Coons.” Williams refused to wear blackface, until he didn’t, until the act began to flag and the bright lights of Broadway started to recede and so on a lark backstage one night at the Wonderland in Detroit, 1895, he painted his face with burnt cork. The act went over, he later said, like a house on fire. He said he discovered his sense of humor that night. The blackface mask gave him a place to hide. Williams and Walker were in New York the next year and on Broadway by Easter 1903. “The way we’ve aimed for Broadway and just missed it in the past seven years would make you cry. We’d get our bearings, take a good running start and–land in a Third Avenue theater…I used to be tempted to beg for a fifteen dollar job in a chorus for one week so as to be able to say I’d been on Broadway once.”

 

I get that. As a writer, I understand his desire to broadcast himself and his talent to the world. He was hungry, greedy for the song of the I-singer. That hunger comes not from any absence, not to fill a hole, though it draws on a well of cold loneliness, but rather from an abundance of presence, from being present, recognizing oneself as present (here, now, inside a moment), and wanting to be there with others. The performer–and I include writers in that category–wants to bring others into the circle of that moment and to make a momentary community there of two or three or a thousand people. And to be rich and famous. We are Americans, after all.

Bert Williams helps me see that desire for communion. Unfortunately, that’s at least in part because the desire was so much more complicated for him than it is for me. Bert Williams was a Black performer in a segregated, racist society. “I was thinking about all the honors that are bestowed on me in the theater; how everyone wishes to shake my hand or get an autograph, a real hero you’d naturally think. However, when I reach a hotel, I am refused permission to ride in the elevator; I cannot enter the dining room for my meals, and I am Jim Crowed generally.” White people constituted much, not all, but much, of his audience, at least when he was with the Follies. Those hostile miners and ranch hands in California became the hostile Harolds and Arthurs from uptown. What did it cost him, granting them their innocence every night, their baroque contempt?

His audience hated him, in a way. So did most of the people who shared the stage with him. For years, all through the peak of his career, when he was one of the most famous and respected performers in New York, Williams was barred entry to Actors’ Equity. Not until W.C. Fields vouched for him did the union admit him to their ranks. His creative and financial success must have been laced with bitterness, sharpened by disappointment. I suppose I have to count myself as part of his audience. After all, here I am, watching him perform, as it were, trying to get close to him. I can only get so close, though, which is how he wanted it: “Nobody in America knows my real name, and, if I can prevent it, nobody ever will.”

 

What sort of soil have you?
Bogs.

What do you live on, chiefly?
Hogs.

Have you any friends?
Dogs.

The lines are delivered by a farmer to a visiting journalist. Williams splits himself in two, one half talking to the other. I hear his voice come through the lines, a rich array of notes, at once plaintive, acerbic, and self-mocking. I hear it in those hard rhyming monosyllables, a foot somehow heavy and light at the same time, light with laughter, a heavy undertow. And I hear it in the questions. A critic for the Chicago Defender described Williams as “a patient repository of a secret sadness.” He has reached down into that repository, that inner archive, rummaged around among its repressed desires and buried memories, and gathered them up into a dialogue, that most rudimentary form of theater: two people talking. Except here it’s one person pretending to be two. He does it with his voice, shifting the pitch from question to answer, or maybe with his body, or maybe just with his eyes, side to side. I don’t know. I can only imagine: one person alone on a stage talking or singing or talking-singing through a scrim of theatrical convention, character, and racist caricature about what’s missing. Ham is delicious but not if you have to eat it at every meal. Dogs are loyal companions but terrible conversationalists. He’s talking-singing about a kind of poverty that is lexical as well as economic and spiritual. Maybe his. Definitely ours.

Bert Williams collapsed on stage in Detroit and died soon after. He was forty-seven. He may have been the greatest comedian America ever produced, an ocean of comedy if all that was left of the ocean were the prints and paintings of Hokusai. His instruments: an untrained singing voice, a gift for mimicry, and large, balletic hands. His wife, Lottie, loved his hands. She insisted that his gloves be removed at his funeral.

Geoffrey Hilsabeck is the author of Riddles, Etc. and American Vaudeville, from which this essay is adapted. 

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