Historical Overview of Black Women in Mainstream Silent Pictures

Speaking to the multiplicity of Black representations transformed in silent productions, Stewart encourages us to read these representations in more divergent ways as she proposes that, “Early black film images should be read as being polyphonic, ‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking to’ constructions of Blackness produced by both whites and African Americans ….”⁶ It is this perspective that refers to the multiplicity and complexity of Black women’s performance under examination and that has direct implications for interpreting Keaton’s pictures. While Stewart examines both Black women and men in her study, it is her work on Black women that is most significant to the present study. She contends that, “Diverging from their male counterparts, the so-called ‘toms,’ these Black female domestics are presented as more overtly self-serving, autonomous, and sexually potent than their antebellum prototype. They also move relatively freely through (multiple) public spaces, frequently in contemporary, nonrural settings.”⁷ In critiquing these representations, she professes that although some of these pictures were designed to provoke racial humor, perhaps more importantly, Black women contributed to these pictures in other ways and perhaps visualized Black female desire for whiteness or maybe even exhibited Black frustration with their inability to access whiteness. Stewart acknowledges that Black women were not so different from white women who through their presence “register[ed] anxieties about interracial interactions.”⁸ Echoing a similar sentiment, Jan Chris Horak observing Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913, an all-black-cast film with performer Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey) suggests, this film in particular “documents African-American performers in nonracist and nonstereotyped roles at a time when they otherwise appeared only as vicious caricatures in American film. … The film ends with several takes of a kiss (one extremely long) between the Black hero (Williams) and heroine (Grey), the only known example of African-American sexuality on film in the silent period that is not the butt of comedy ….⁹ Notably, the black couple ride on a merry-go-round and partake in the festivities of an all-black fair where they are allowed to liberate themselves from the scrutiny of the white gaze; they escape the subordination they normally would have been subjected to even though Black actor Williams dons blackface. Similarly affirming the affection exchanged between the two Black characters rather than the disaffection more often represented, Allyson Field in review of Something Good-Negro Kiss (1898, an all-black-cast film) admits, “these [Black] performers are not the butt of any joke, nor is their kiss a punch line … [their] demonstrated joy and amusement seem genuine rather than performed.”¹⁰ Furthermore, when Blacks entered white spaces, they sometimes defied normative expectations of blackness as was the case in What Happened in the Tunnel (Biograph, 1903); a film that features Black actress, Bertha Regustus,¹¹ a maid who travels on a train with her white female employer and when the train emerges from a tunnel (a dark space), a white male admirer accidentally kisses the Black maid instead of the white female employer. The film, according to Ben Urwand, is “based on a scenario around a popular stereotype” and “ultimately[,] it expected its viewers to be familiar with the perceived undesirability of kissing a black maid.”¹² Providing another interpretation, Stewart believes the Black woman (in What Happened in the Tunnel) is temporarily empowered in that she can transcend her class and racial position momentarily when she is elevated to becoming an object of desire.¹³ Moreover, Stewart argues that:

the white men [in reference to similar films] react with disgust, as Black women are clearly inferior and completely undesirable substitutes for white women. The white women, in turn, laugh at their suitors’ embarrassment. Although the proximity of these Black domestics to whites is supposed to be rigidly circumscribed by their labor function, as it had been for centuries under slavery, these early films set up the transgressive joke by obscuring the white men’s vision. … But in addition to looking relations we have a staging of public and social relations in these films in which Black women are not playing clearly subservient roles. They look at and laugh into the camera, openly enjoying the white men’s embarrassment.¹⁴

Supporting this sentiment, Jane Gaines argues, “The maid gets the last word, however, rebuffing the scoundrel, and, although she laughs with the mistress, she firmly declines the role of surrogate.”¹⁵ It is apparent that the Black woman not only exhibits assertiveness but further achieves agency – a subject position that Black women similarly assume in Keaton’s pictures. Contributing to this discussion, Susan Courtney reads the interracial kissing scene in What Happened in the Tunnel in the following manner:

At the same time as the film’s racism thus depends upon conventional terms of sexual difference and heterosexual (male) desire, these women—traveling alone, pulling such a trick, and enjoying their laugh at the man—clearly signify female movement and transgression of male control. But, in a reversal of the gesture whereby the film manages racial chaos through conventional orders of gender and sexuality, we can also read the racial joke and its assumptions as the sanction and the limit of the women’s transgression. They travel without men, but with an evident racial and class order of mistress and maid that makes them appear as a ‘proper’ female couple. And their switch and laughter can also be read as in part complicit with the assumption that the black woman is not a proper object of desire for a white man.¹⁶

Expounding on the “trick” What Happened in the Tunnel plays, Tom Gunning suggests, “Race, in this genre of films which glory in the unfixing of identity, becomes a floating signifier, its transformation a joke … pulled on the sexual desire of the white male and his conniving boldness and risible repressions.”¹⁷ This filmic representation of a Black woman who assumes an ambiguous position as both an object of desire and derision, in her ambivalence is significant to reading and understanding the Black female presence in Keaton’s pictures. But more than this, What Happened in the Tunnel features Regustus¹⁸ – a Black actress who appeared in several silent pictures and who becomes exemplary of the complex representations Black women provided on the silent screen. Therefore, her presence in these early productions informs how we might read these early pictures and reviewing her performances conceivably invites us to expand and engage in a more robust discussion of Keaton’s pictures regarding the convoluted and complex ways of seeing as well as documenting Black female representations in silent pictures.

Previous Scholarship on Buster Keaton and Race

Prior to specifically examining Black women in Keaton’s pictures, it is necessary to review previous Keaton scholarship as it relates to race. For example, marking Keaton’s unique style as a comic performer and connecting him to the marginalized position Blacks assume, Todd McGowan suggests that Keaton represents “included exclusion” wherein “Keaton belongs, but his belonging shows that no one really belongs. Belonging always leads to a failure to belong, and ironically, it is the failure to belong that always leads to belonging.”¹⁹ Thus, it is Keaton’s alienation or exclusion from belonging that Blacks, as racial Other, share with Keaton (the white excluded Other) and this might explain why Blacks have been deliberately inserted into his pictures. In Keaton’s productions, the protagonist (Keaton), is frequently constructed as an outsider who is always in search of a romantic partner and who has to prove his worthiness through heroic feats before he can become an object of desire. His relatively small stature and size in comparison to the larger and more masculinized characters with whom he is paired – reflect his disassociation from normalized perceptions of maleness and when this is coupled with his effeminate appearance, both aspects of his physicality mark him as outside the dominant norm. Despite Keaton’s physical difference when combined with his comic characterization, this marks him as Other — an otherness he shares with Blacks. Furthermore, McGowan believes that “for Keaton the terrain of excess is internal to society. It is precisely by fitting in that one finds oneself out of place”²⁰ another marker of blackness. McGowan insists that, “when [Keaton’s] … films show that the insider is at once an outsider, that belonging also entails a failure to belong, they sometimes have recourse to racist images in order to convey the outside.”²¹ As an outsider, Keaton resembles the racial Other (particularly in his blackface performance) and McGowan maintains that many of these representations are exemplary of racist imagery; they imply that “not everyone fails to belong in the same way.”²² But more than providing racist images through Keaton’s inability to be regarded as an insider, Keaton performs in blackface and “uses black-face to mock his own character, to show how he is lacking and requires the excess of black-face in order to fit in. But what the act of putting on black-face fails to see, is that it inherently mocks those who are genuinely excluded.”²³ Although Keaton is constructed as an outsider, when he becomes an insider, he still manages to destabilize the insider/outsider divide which extends to his pictures that include contradictory representations of Blacks and specifically, Black women.

Despite the racist imagery that is infused in Keaton’s pictures, scholar Stephen Blackburn argues that:

With the primary exceptions of the grossly offensive black[-]face portrayal in Seven Chances [1925] and the stock African natives in The Navigator [1924], [B]lacks in Keaton’s films are not portrayed, as they were so often derisively stereotyped at the time, as lazy, conniving, thieving, or any more violent, cowardly, superstitious, or gullible than anybody else in Keaton’s manic world [though not to exclude the Black cannibals in The Navigator]. To be sure, they are, with several exceptions, portrayed in traditional service jobs. … Still, the presence of a [B]lack person in a Keaton comedy does not automatically mean a stereotyped portrayal, and the presence of a stereotype is not always a simple presence.²⁴

Blackburn’s assessment is relevant to the present examination because he suggests that not all Blacks in Keaton’s pictures are necessarily stereotypical and it is this position that propels the current study. The scholar further implies that while some of these representations may in fact be subversive, others hint at how the white comic (Keaton) merges with the Black character and in doing so, provides the possibility they are one and the same. Of course, although Blackburn makes this assertion, he is careful not to ignore the obvious stereotypes that unarguably appear in these pictures. Instead, Blackburn speaks to the presence of non-stereotypical Blacks who frequently balance the one-dimensional stereotypes that proliferate onscreen and force us to re-think and reimagine blackness in other ways.

Assuming an alternative position, Susan Linville challenges these views and instead proposes that:

Keaton’s silent comedies rely on troubling racial and ethnic stereotypes and racist blackface humor, they do not simply reify whiteness and blackness as racial opposites. Instead, they expose social anxieties about class stratification, masculinity and interracial dependence by generating a provocative interplay between Keaton’s familiar screen persona, often in white facial makeup, and his African-American and blackface counterparts.²⁵

Exemplary of Keaton’s racist imagery, Linville points to The Navigator (1924) which introduces a Black couple whom she reads as mirroring the behavior of a “naively portrayed African American couple who inspire [Keaton] … to pursue marriage ….”²⁶ Although Linville interprets this scene as stereotypical, I provide an alternative reading, however, this is not to dismiss Linville’s critique regarding the Black image nor dismiss her reading of the film’s gender and class implications, but considers other ways of interpreting this representation.

The Black Woman (and her spouse) Reflect the Unconscious Thoughts of the White Male Protagonist in The Navigator (1924)

Demonstrating the diverse ways in which blackness is constructed in Keaton’s pictures, as Linville suggests, it is important to examine The Navigator – a film that casts Keaton (as Rollo Treadway), heir to the Treadway fortune and Kathryn Maguire, daughter to a wealthy ship owner Frederick Vroom, who are drawn to each other when Rollo decides he wants to marry. After Kathryn rejects Rollo’s marriage proposal, he decides to travel to Honolulu. The film further centers on spies representing “two little nations,” who attempt to prevent each other from securing ships and supplies, and they discover their enemy has secured a ship (The Navigator) which must be destroyed. To execute the ship’s destruction, they decide to allow the ship to sail at sea during the night before crew members can board. Coincidentally, Rollo accidentally boards The Navigator enroute to Honolulu and Kathryn (detecting that Rollo may have been taken captive), also miraculously boards the ship. The two characters are unknowingly thrown together on virtually an empty ship and although Kathryn is resistant to Rollo’s marriage proposals, they are forced to rely on each other for survival. As stranded passengers, they endure several adventures that include: falling into the water, surviving a storm, seeing ghosts, launching ship repairs, and confronting Black “cannibals,” etc.

Interestingly, Donald Crisp (who previously played an abusive father in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, 1919), directs The Navigator with Keaton — a picture which of course deviates from the abusiveness observed in Crisp’s earlier film particularly since Keaton’s picture is a comedy. During production, “the majority of principal photography took place onboard a 450-foot cruise liner during a six-week voyage off the coast of Mexico.”²⁷ In the ship repair scene, Margaret Cohen notes that, “Keaton dons a diving suit and goes below to fix a jammed propeller, where he performs silent comedy with liquid physics. … [T]he underwater scene features comedy that is slapstick if not surrealist, as Keaton fends off a swordfish ….”²⁸ Aside from the underwater scenes, the couple’s greatest adventure occurs when the ship nears a small island on which natives (Black “cannibals” with body markings, dressed in loin cloths and wielding spears) reside. The cannibals, according to the American Film Institute Catalog, featured: Noble Johnson (as the chief), Clarence Burton, and H. M. Clugston,²⁹ among others. It is in the film’s second half that the Black male “natives” seek to devour the white couple and “Rollo’s encounter with hordes of dark-skinned, spear-wielding islanders … animates him into comic heroic action. Problematic racist images of dark-skinned savages thus contribute to a mise-en-scene for white male caricature and accomplishment.”³⁰

Although this scene is somewhat excluded from the present discussion, what can be discerned is that if the Black “natives” motivate Keaton to engage in comic action, the “natives” at least serve a vital function in advancing the film’s narrative even while they epitomize racist Black caricature and thus, participate in the denigration of blackness. More specifically, when the Black “natives” take the white Kathryn hostage, Rollo goes to the island to rescue her while dressed in underwater gear (used to repair the ship) and his costume frightens the “natives.” Yet, following Kathryn’s rescue, the “natives” decide to re-capture the couple which leads Keaton to ignite a series of explosives to retaliate against the encroaching enemy.

The Navigator contains two primary scenes that feature Blacks — the first scene occurs in the introduction which depicts a recently married African American couple that Linville references and the second scene occurs when the white couple arrive on the island to confront the intimidating Black “natives” (a group undeniably designed to conform to the Black stereotype). For the purposes of this discussion, the first scene that features the newly married Black couple, is the focus of my attention because it is this scene – a scene that is very brief in length which compels Rollo to desire marriage. Rollo resides in an opulent residence with an excessively decorated bedroom — a canopy drapes over his bed, window curtains with gawdy valences hang from the ceiling to the floor, and oversized furniture fills the massive estate. Notably, the “two mansions belonging to the lead characters” were located “in the 2500 block of Divisadero Stre[e]t, in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.”³¹ In fact, Rollo physically appears to be almost too small for such large and gawdy furnishings; he seems to be rather lonely in this opulent and humongous space. The camera then cuts to Rollo, who is dressed in a silk patterned robe which hides his pajamas beneath – clothing that signify wealth and affluence. But when he walks across the room to peer from behind the heavy drapes that adorn his massive estate and gazes below onto the city street from his upstairs window, he views a newly married Black couple sitting in an open top, t-model car. The brown complexioned woman is dressed in a white gown and wears a white headband with a veil attached. Her spouse is dressed in a suit (seemingly with tails) and wears a top hat. The newly married couple sit in the back of the vehicle bearing a sign that reads “Just Married,” while the Black chauffeur (who wears a chauffeur’s hat and white gloves) sits in the front. After slowing the vehicle, the chauffeur turns around to face the newly married couple to seemingly congratulate them on their recent marriage. In response, the groom delightedly extends his arms to embrace his bride and they lock arms affectionately. Perhaps because of the exaggerated display of affection the couple exhibit, this behavior has led some scholars to interpret the scene as stereotypical. Linville asserts, “Here in the film’s opening scenes, Keaton … perpetuates negative stereotypes of African Americans …”³² and engages in other forms of cultural appropriation. However, it is conceivable that Linville interprets this scene as stereotypical not only because of their exaggerated behavior but because the Black woman appears to be somewhat stout in size which likely conjures images of the overweight Black matriarch. Further informing Linville’s reading is that the couple may parallel the Black stereotype considering that the male resembles a dandy and the bride’s disheveled hair (even though a veil is attached to lower back of her head) conforms to the stereotype. But other than these markers and the emphatic smiles the couple display, or the embrace in which they engage, the characters may not totally conform to the Black stereotype. It is conceivable that they deviate from the stereotype since they emulate (white) heteronormative practices of marriage and behave in a manner consistent with any newly married couple.

More importantly, Linville speaks to the significance of the recently married Black couple when she claims, “Rollo mimics the newly-wed African-American couple because his is a kind of blank, passive, privileged white boy, ignorant of and unaltered by what the film seems to imply might be appropriate role models.”³³ To expand and provide support to Linville’s assessment, the black couple certainly ignite Rollo’s desire for marriage, made evident when the camera cuts away from the married couple and returns to Rollo observing a photo of his fiancée positioned on his dresser, leading him to remark to his butler, “I think I’ll get married. … Today. … We’ll sail for Honolulu tomorrow on our honeymoon – get two tickets.” Without question, Linville acknowledges, “the [black] … couple inspires pale male Rollo’s desire to imitate them, and he lamely proposes to the rich girl (Kathryn) who lives across the street.”³⁴ After expressing his desire for marriage, Rollo in preparation for his honeymoon, decides to bathe in his opulent bathroom which is decorated with a sunken tub surrounded with marble walls. Apparently, so distracted with his anticipated marriage, Rollo enters the sunken tub fully dressed in his robe and begins to bathe – a scene designed to provoke humor. Suddenly, Rollo realizes that he is bathing while still clothed, an indication of how distracted or overwhelmed he is with the prospect of marriage. It is conceivable that the woman’s photo on his dresser combined with his butler’s presence, both hint at Rollo’s alienation and isolation from others, therefore, the Black couple in the vehicle remind Rollo of his loneliness – a loneliness exacerbated by the all-consuming massive estate in which he resides. The newly married Black couple then function to propel Rollo’s desire for marriage, reflect his unconscious thoughts, and symbolize a union that has escaped him but which he secretly desires. Seeing this recently married Black couple reminds Rollo of the emptiness he experiences, despite the privileged lifestyle he leads, and makes him desirous of having some human connection with someone other than his butler who attends to his every need. The Black couple not only echo Rollo’s inner desire for marriage but may in fact predict his future since at the film’s end, after proving his self-worth to Kathryn, the young couple marry. In this early scene, the Black female character (along with her newly married spouse) functions as more than a comic character, but she (along with her spouse) seemingly becomes the catalyst for Rollo’s desire for marriage which ultimately advances the film’s plot. “Keaton as Rollo,” according to Linville, “enacts an upper-class WASP version of the kind of theft and blood transfusion that [Eric] Lott describes in Love and Theft”³⁵ and through mimicking the Black couple’s behavior, Linville insinuates that Rollo symbolically engages in the “love and theft” of blackness.³⁶ Exploring blackface minstrelsy, Lott proposes that, “The vast quantity of black … mannerisms … reported in almanacs and newspapers evinces the variety and frequency of interracial contact, and no doubt provided a readily imitable outline of white fantasies about black behavior….”³⁷ Blackface minstrel performers who engaged in the expropriation of black cultural practices basically participated in what Lott terms as the “theft of black cultural forms….”³⁸ Relating these views to The Navigator, when Keaton emulates the Black couple’s marital practice knowing that blackness is derided, he engages in both the “love and theft” of blackness (or Black cultural practices). Furthermore, even though the Black couple might in some ways conform to the stereotype, they deviate from the stereotype through the inspiration for marriage they provide to Rollo. Thus, the Black couple exceed the confines of the stereotype and serve a useful function in the film through the implication that materialistic consumption and exorbitant wealth (Rollo possesses) do not substitute for being genuinely connected to others or having meaningful relationships. The Black woman’s presence in this film matters because she symbolizes an object of desire (for the Black male figure), she becomes symbolic of a stable institution – marriage, and she (along with the Black male) exemplify that Black marriage is valued, particularly considering that historically slave marriages had no legal standing. Attesting to the value of slave marriages, historian Heather Williams argues that, “Despite the lack of legal status for a marriage between enslaved persons, despite the absence of civil protections, and despite the ever-looming possibility of forced separation, many enslaved people entered into relationships that they considered marriages.”³⁹ Given the historical significance of black marriages, these values were continued or passed on to later generations. Moreover, it is conceivable that a white couple could have been inserted in the film instead of a Black couple, but including a Black couple rather than white, was designed to provide comic relief due to the couple’s blackness. But more importantly, including the Black couple into the film’s narrative stands to humanize the lone white male who assumed that wealth alone would be sufficient for achieving a meaningful life. For Linville argues that while the film might stereotype the Black couple, the film “also spoofs something akin to what Frederic Jameson identifies as a process of ‘cooptation and class transformation,’ played out when the devitalized Euro-American middle class renews itself by appropriating African-American language”⁴⁰ and culture.

The Black Woman as Rescuer — Neighbors (1920)

Keaton’s picture, Neighbors, plays with racial masquerade when the white male protagonist develops an affection for a young white woman who resides in an adjacent tenement apartment building; young adults who are still residing at home. The buildings are so close that only a wooden fence separates the two lovers who exchange notes through a hole in the fence. The girl (Virginia Fox) sends a note to Keaton which reads “I love you” and he returns a note with “I love you 2.” When the parents discover their exchange, this provokes their disdain and escalates the tensions between the two families. The girl’s father (Joe Roberts) reacting to Keaton’s admiration for his daughter, begins to chase Keaton; a chase that occurs throughout much of the film until Keaton accomplishes his goal of marrying his neighbor against her father’s wishes. The girl’s father engages in a number of chases to thwart Keaton’s desire, some of which provoke humor. For example, when the father expresses his opposition to Keaton’s admiration for his daughter, Keaton defying the father, decides to swing on a clothesline from his apartment across the fence to reach the girl’s apartment. While the parents feud with each other below, the girl’s father detects that Keaton has invaded his home and retaliates. Responding to Keaton’s invasion, the girl’s father returns Keaton back to his apartment on a clothesline and attaches Keaton’s feet to the clothesline with clothes pins which leaves Keaton, suspended upside down hanging from the clothesline, to sail back across the fence to his apartment. Once Keaton reaches his apartment, he falls into a bottomless barrel and finds himself stuck in “a mud hole [wherein] … his actual father … (Joe Keaton) pulls him out [leaving] … the dazed [Keaton who] sits covered in a mud version of blackface.”⁴¹ With his face blackened, Keaton attempts to seek revenge against the girl’s father with a broom only to realize that instead, he has attacked a policeman in search of a Black criminal. Of course, since Keaton appears in blackface, he is presumed to be the Black criminal on the run, and when the policeman chases Keaton, in order to outwit the officer, Keaton abruptly removes the mud in a washtub to re-emerge as white. In this instance, the policeman is totally confused regarding Keaton’s identity, however, when the officer returns to searching for the Black criminal, Keaton engages in a second blackface disguise. While Keaton’s mother washes clothes, she realizes that a painter positioned on a scaffold above her washtub drops dark paint onto her clothes below. In disgust, she throws some of the darkened clothing toward the painter who then drops the paint bucket onto Keaton which leads him to be darkened for a second time. Removing the bucket from his head, the policeman sees the darkened Keaton and arrest him under the assumption that he is the Black criminal (even as the “real” Black criminal observes Keaton’s arrest from afar). In this blackface disguise, Keaton allows the “real” Black criminal to escape the purview of the white policeman since Keaton temporarily stands in for the Black criminal. Blackburn observes:

the African American makes good his escape down another alley; the first cop doesn’t realize his mistake until he gets into an argument with the second cop at the street corner. One possible … reading of the scene is that the cops are obsessive in their authority and are stupid. Give a black man an opportunity and he will be smart enough to take it. And, finally, cops cannot distinguish between blacks; that is, in effect the stereotype of cops—that they see all blacks as looking the same.⁴²

When the cop returns to chasing the perceived “criminal” Keaton, to disguise his identity, Keaton dons a double-sided face (one side is white and the other is black); he flips his head back and forth to further confuse the policeman. These blackface disguises certainly call upon Lott’s views on blackface minstrelsy, where he argues that such blackface performances allow whites to “expropriate [the] cultural commodity [of] blackness” while at the same time, they benefit from the “cultural commerce” of trafficking in blackness.⁴³ Keaton’s blackface performance exemplifies that while Keaton relies on blackface to escape his circumstances, at the same time, he acknowledges the racialism associated with Black criminality. Further linking Keaton’s performances to blackface minstrelsy, Lott suggests that “at the very least, symbolic crossings of racial boundaries – through dialect, gesture, and so on—paradoxically engage and absorb the culture being mocked and mimicked.”⁴⁴ Thus, the white male comic Keaton then absorbs blackness through his blackface performance. Moreover, when we consider Keaton’s effeminacy and his outsider status as one who is rejected as an appropriate son-in-law, his blackface masquerade certainly, allows for those “artists [who] immers[e] themselves in blackness to indulge their felt sense of difference.”⁴⁵

Distracting the two white officers who continue to search for the “real” Black criminal – who incidentally is more well-dressed than are other Blacks in the film; he wears a cap, white shirt, and suspenders; therefore, he too might participate in disguising his alleged “criminality.” Keaton, while being escorted by the police substitutes as the criminal the officers seek, diverts their attention when he stops to observe a baseball game through a hole in a wooden fence claiming that baseball legend, Babe Ruth, is about to bat the ball. The voyeurism associated with peeping through a hole in the fence (shown at least twice in the film), stands to reify the voyeurism afforded to white spectators who might subconsciously desire to be voyeurs of blackness. But when one police officer is knocked out from a ball that is hit outside of the park, another officer retrieves Keaton, even though Keaton initially assumed that this temporary distraction would facilitate his escape. When the second policeman, escorts Keaton away from the baseball park, the two (Keaton and the officer) walk next to a large-sized Black woman (who wears a checkered dress with a hat) and carries a laundry cart. Yet, when the white policeman accidentally falls on the sidewalk, the Black woman stops to upright the fallen officer.

To distinguish Black women (in Keaton’s picture) from white women, the Black woman is fairly well dressed, while the white woman (Keaton’s mother) wears an apron and is shown washing clothes in a tub with her hands, exemplifying the antithesis of what would normally be expected of white womanhood; the roles assigned to white women seemingly have been reversed with those assigned to Black women. This juxtaposition could parallel Stewart’s assessment that, “the Black female domestic becomes not merely an unthinkable replacement for beautiful white women but an ongoing competitor with the undesirable [less attractive] … white [female].”⁴⁶ Moreover, it is conceivable that, the Black female’s “status as sexual threat is simultaneously displayed and disavowed.”⁴⁷ Further defying racial expectations, the Black woman quickly resorts to lifting the white policeman from the sidewalk. In doing so, Keaton makes another escape attempt when he hides beneath the (white) laundry in the Black woman’s cart while the policeman continues to search for Keaton and mistakenly enters a nearby building. Following this scene, the camera then cuts to the Black woman, who arrives at home with her cart (a scene that many eliminate from their discussion) when she is met by her spouse and children, who sit on the front porch, indicating that they are awaiting her return. It is important to note that the Black woman lives in well-maintained home with a large front window surrounded by shrubbery; unlike, the tenement building in which Keaton, his love interest, and their parents reside. If we consider the racialization of these spaces, then Blacks are residing in more affluent abodes than are whites which clearly would have been inconsistent with how race was constructed in 1920s America. With the Black woman’s arrival, she leaves her cart and heads to the front porch but when she points to the cart and begins to explain her encounter with Keaton, the white laundry in her cart begins to rise slowly and beneath the white sheet is none other than Keaton. During this scene, her eyes widen and the camera provides a close-up of her face as she looks astonishingly at the laundry rising in her cart. The Black woman temporarily stands in amazement and then the camera cuts to the Black family rising from the front porch steps, as their rise coincides with Keaton’s rise beneath the white sheet. Fearing what might be beneath the white sheet and reminded of the historical terror associated with this material object, the mother raises both hands in the air and the family flees in the opposite direction of the rising sheet as the father figure grabs his children’s hands to vacate the premises.

The Black family, of course, believe they have either encountered the Ku Klux Klan (historically known for parading in white robes) or believe they have seen a ghost. The performance of the Black family seems naturalized rather than performed as they display a seriousness related to the rising sheet considering the fearfulness the white sheet’s implications provoke. This scene is strikingly reminiscent of the white children who hide beneath the white sheet in The Birth of a Nation (1915) that was deliberately designed to frighten Black children specifically and Blacks, generally. Further critiquing The Birth of a Nation scene, Andrea J. Kelley’s scholarship on the white “overstretched bedsheet” is significant in that she argues the bedsheet served as an improvised movie screen at different historical moments. Specifically, she claims “the bedsheet relocates the screen beyond theatrical spectatorship and institutional display and offers an underexamined history of encounters with makeshift screen surfaces.”⁴⁸ Kelley further illuminates how the bedsheet screen and “its material properties and its positioning in exhibitor discourse and popular representation made it complicit in a larger history of racist screening practices.”⁴⁹ Considering her discussion of the materiality of the bedsheet that became a device to segregate audiences on the basis of race, the bedsheet in her estimation symbolizes the “color line.” The bedsheet reified whiteness and became a signifier of the white robes Klansmen wore to intimidate Blacks as they inflicted violence (both physically and psychologically). Kelley (among others) insinuates that D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was responsible for popularizing the KKK’s exploitation of the white robes they paraded to reaffirm white power and supremacy; she adamantly declares:

Birth … helped transform the bedsheet into a notorious object of moving-image history. … It wasn’t until Birth’s national audience saw this depiction of the ‘bedsheet brigate’ that the Klan become synonymous with their white robes. … The imbricated and enduring histories of race and the sheet-screen extend to other iterations of Birth’s bedsheet-ghost trope as an object of racial terror, or, what I call the scare-sheet.⁵⁰

Notably, the film invokes the motif of cover either through the camouflage the white sheet provides, as well as, the black face disguise that Keaton exhibits. In doing so, the scene suggests that white privilege allows whites to temporarily engage in blackness or masquerade across racial lines which is less accessible to Blacks who are afforded fewer opportunities to transgress their racial difference. Kelley further suggests that in The Birth of a Nation, the bedsheet hints at or might be more directly connected to the film’s sinister implication of miscegenation (and the threat that black male rape posed to white female victimization). If we extend this critique to Keaton’s picture, when the white male Keaton rises beneath the sheet of the Black woman’s laundry cart, not only does the scene recall the KKK implication but it similarly recalls the miscegenistic impulses Griffith’s film implied. In fact, Lott connects miscegenation to blackface when he states, “It should hardly seem strange that miscegenation is suggested … in accounts of white men’s fascination with and attraction to black men [in this instance, black women] and their culture, for these are accounts in which the cultures merge. The logic of such accounts is that fascination may be permitted so long as actual contact is avoided.”⁵¹ Therefore, the rising sheet in Neighbors invites us to consider the interracial encounter between Keaton and the Black woman, an encounter which might hint at Keaton’s secret desire for or violation of the Black body associated with the Black woman who indirectly rescues him. In fact, the black female character in this film corresponds to Stewart’s assessment of the black female character in Laughing Gas (1907) where she argues,

The seeming independence of this character becomes the central tension in reading the film. In many ways she appears to enjoy a considerable amount of autonomy we might not expect for a Black woman in turn-of-the-century America. She travels alone in the same section of public conveyances as whites …. The stakes of representing racial difference in shifting modes of address—from presentation to narration—are outlined [in this film] … through the links made between Black circulation in public space and Black female sexuality.⁵²

Although in Neighbors, the link is less obvious between public space and Black female sexuality, it is still nonetheless hinted at subtly in that the white male disguises himself in the Black woman’s cart and follows her home to then surprise her spouse (and children) in the disguise of a Klan member—a group known for its intimidation of Blacks and perhaps even sexual exploitation of Black women. At the same time, the plausibility of an interracial encounter between Keaton and his Black rescuer, is subverted when we consider the Black woman has a spouse/family which stands to negate but not always deny the potential for interracial assault. To affirm the meaning of the film’s references to the Klan, Bambi Haggins argues that, “Historically, the black comic has retained the ability to get the audience laughing while slipping in sociocultural truths.”⁵³ Therefore, while the scene is designed to invoke humor when Keaton rises beneath the white sheet, this scene further speaks to the “sociocultural truths” of the threats and intimidation practices, groups such as the KKK exercised. Furthermore, this scene is significant because regardless of its implications, the white sheet allows Keaton to reclaim his whiteness (and avoid police detection) since he no longer appears in blackface even though blackface performance is hinted at the film’s end. For example, following the attempted disruption of Keaton’s marriage, his imposing father-in-law deliberately bends the “cheap” wedding ring during the marriage ceremony and then grabs his daughter to return home to separate the young couple. Despite being returned home, Keaton and the young bride flee their home (standing on the shoulders of some three men who already stand on each other’s shoulders to facilitate the couple’s escape) and after being chased, the couple jump onto a slide positioned on the back of a wagon with a Black man shoveling coal – a convenient escape that allows Keaton and his bride to slide into a coal bin. The preacher who previously attempted to perform the wedding ceremony stands inside the coal bin and seemingly sanctions their marriage when Keaton and the bride hold hands while the preacher raises his hand to the sky as though he is re-affirming their vows; the preacher then engages in shoveling coal. That Keaton returns to the coal bin and coal can be used to create blackface disguise through its darkening properties, is significant because it suggests that the young couple might have to resort to blackface in order to escape their parents who oppose the marriage. The film’s end hints that the white couple could potentially engage in blackface masquerade through darkening themselves with coal to escape the wrath of Keaton’s unrelenting father-in-law. Blackness, in this instance, serves as a disguise to protect whites who need to escape detection and while the film certainly hints at escaping whites who engage in fugitivity as a form of entertainment or comic relief, the reality is that when Blacks engaged in fugitivity, they did so for survival. Therefore, considering how fugitivity differs for whites relative to Blacks, when it is introduced in Keaton’s picture for entertainment purposes, we have to entertain whether or not this is an attempt to minimize Black fugitivity or maybe even “co-opt” Black fugitivity for the sake of allowing whites to vicariously experience the trauma associated with fugitivity at the expense of disregarding the life-threatening consequences under which Blacks were forced to survive.

Providing other perspectives on Keaton’s racial representations, Peter Hogue, revisits Keaton’s Neighbors and its construction of race to suggest:

The occasional blackface gags have seemed an embarrassment to all [of Keaton’s] commentators … but a retrospective look at all of Keaton’s films from the vantage of the 1990s suggests a provocatively split perspective on such matters in the films themselves. In some respects, the blackface jokes seem elements of the films’ abstraction: the images are in black and white, and so some aspects of the humor grow quite naturally out of the opposition of the two….⁵⁴

However, this critic believes that Keaton’s blackface jokes invited “convoluted results.”⁵⁵ In his estimation,

Mistaken identity and puzzles of identity are among the dominant patterns in Keaton narratives, and this aspect of blackface humor leads to a moment or two in which the Buster character seems uncertain of his own identity. … In Neighbors Buster seems to wonder for a moment or two if [the Keaton character and the father-in-law] are in fact related, … [and] the Buster character has at least one moment when some sense of enigmatic ambivalence in blood relations and family ties come into view.⁵⁶

Even if Keaton’s character subconsciously felt some relation to his onscreen father-in-law, although both are white, the father-in-law is a “dark” character who becomes Keaton’s enemy and given the unlikely juxtaposition between the two (one who personifies goodness—Keaton) and the other (who personifies badness —father-in-law), it is conceivable that the character’s (Keaton) perceived blood relations to his father-in-law hints at miscegenation (particularly if we assume that badness is linked to blackness). Thus, miscegenation is hinted at not only in the black woman’s presence but in Keaton’s temporary belief that his father-in-law (who becomes synonymous with blackness through his bad behavior) might be related to him.

Moreover, in Neighbors the Black woman circulates in white spaces implying that although racial segregation existed, it did not necessarily exist everywhere, at least not in (all parts) of Keaton’s pictures. In these productions, Blacks seemingly are integral to white landscapes, facilitate white escapes, and rescue whites even if they do so inadvertently. Although the film hints at these interracial alliances, less well known is whether or not during production to what extent Blacks and whites were allowed to intermingle on the movie set. Despite the film’s racist implications at certain moments, the Black characters constitute a family, depict a Black mother who is devoted to her family, and presents a Black woman who rescues white men (the white policeman and unintentionally, prevents Keaton’s capture). In this instance, some characterize the Black woman as a “faithful soul,” but I see her as more than this because she rescues the fallen white policeman and indirectly prevents Keaton’s capture, despite her stereotypical personification as a Black matriarch. While she may not symbolize a heroine, she is definitely a rescuer since she indirectly becomes responsible for rescuing the white policeman and Keaton, even though she may be unaware that she participated in Keaton’s escape.

The Black Woman as an Object of Desire — Seven Chances (1925)

Seven Chances (with Keaton as director) was adapted to the screen from a Roi Cooper Megrue’s similarly titled 1916 screenplay and represented Keaton’s first literary adaptation.⁵⁷ The picture features Keaton as James “Jimmie” Shannon, who is on the brink of financial disaster until he discovers that he stands to inherit seven million dollars if he can locate a wife in one day (his 27^th birthday), otherwise he will risk losing his inheritance (similar to Matrimony’s Speed Limit, 1913). At the film’s beginning, Jimmie is involved with Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer) whom he hopes to marry so that he can inherit his fortune and when he proposes to Mary, she initially agrees but when she learns he has to marry by 7pm, she declines his offer assuming that he is only interested in receiving his inheritance. Jimmie initially decides that even though his marriage proposal is rejected, he does not intend to marry anyone else. “However, his business partner, who is pending jail time after being tricked into a bad business deal, pleads with him to seek his inheritance because the money would prevent his imprisonment.”⁵⁸ In the meantime, Mary reconsiders her rejection of Jimmie’s marriage proposal and changes her mind, but it is “too late” because Jimmie is intent on pursuing a wife prior to the 7pm deadline. To facilitate Jimmie’s effort to secure a wife, his business partner selects some seven eligible bachelorettes for him to pursue – and much of the picture depicts his pursuit that includes approaching a woman who represents his first chance – girl in a big hat (Eugenia Gilbert); second chance – girl on a golf course (Doris Deane); third chance – girl who shreds “‘Will You Marry Me’ Note” (Judy/Judith King); fourth chance – girl who refuses his proposal (Hazel Deane); fifth chance – girl attending Country Club (Bartine Burkett); sixth chance – girl attending Country Club (Connie Evans); and seventh chance – girl attending Country Club (Pauline Toller/Toler). When they all refuse, Jimmie approaches others such as a girl in a car (Constance Talmadge); girl(s) among prospective church brides (Rosalind Byrne, Rosa Gore, Barbara Pierce, and Kate Price); girl who operates a crane (Louise Carver); and girl to whom he proposes while driving (Marion Harlan). Curiously absent from this group of named white women, are Black women, who although they have minor roles, cameo appearances, and remain unnamed; they are among the women Keaton either approaches or who avail themselves as eligible bachelorettes. While only two Black women are visible onscreen for only few seconds, these women are among the throngs of women who are considered for marriage to the white millionaire.

When Jimmie’s advisors (T. Roy Barnes and Snitz Edwards⁵⁹) recognize that he may not be able to meet the 7pm deadline, they encourage him to go to a church at 5pm while they advertise for a bride. Church scenes (and other scenes) were shot “at the corner of West Adams Boulevard and La Salle Avenue; the area around the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue; Bronson Avenue near Tenth Street and Olympic Boulevard; and the University of Southern California.”⁶⁰ In route to the church, Jimmie sees a woman who wears a coat with a fur collar, hat, heels, white gloves and carries a purse; she walks ahead of him and he gazes at her from behind. However, when he removes his hat and rushes to reach the woman, he detects that she is Black and declines to approach her given that she is rendered unmarriageable due to her race. That he approaches a woman who initially appears to be desirable but then, is later discovered to be undesirable parallels What Happened in the Tunnel when in the latter film the white male assumes he is kissing a white female but later discovers that he has mistakenly kissed the Black maid. In both films, the Black female represents the mistaken object of desire or constitutes a case of mistaken identity, yet at the same time, they momentarily hint at white male desire for the Black female. As for Seven Chances, while the Black character remains unidentified, her presence is significant because she is marked as a potentially desiring and desirable subject until her racial identity is unveiled. In fact, Stewart suggests that,

The well-dressed, rather stoic, Black woman in this film, placed in a public space for a short visual gag, points backward and forward in the ways her presence is both provocative and contained. She is the last diversion in the young white man’s quest for a bride, just as other Black female figures are posited as the most unlikely and outrageous variations on a theme. … For a brief moment, though, Black female domestics suggest how the cinema, in its pursuit of cross-class popularity and cultural legitimacy, did not simply marginalize people of color….⁶¹

Continuing his journey to locate a suitable wife, when Jimmie reaches the church, exhausted from his search, he temporarily lies down on a pew near the pulpit. While he remains asleep, so many unmarried women, most of whom are dressed in white veils and bridal attire, travel to the church that they employ a range of transportation services to meet the eligible bachelor – they gallop on horseback, roll on roller skates, ride on trolley cars, etc. With hundreds of women responding to the advertisement, they crowd the streets, church aisles, pews, and some even stand outside the church to demonstrate their genuine desire to secure a millionaire. When Jimmie awakens, the only remaining seats in the church are on the front pew near the pulpit where he is seated. Two women who sit on either side of Jimmie, initially, are unaware of his identity but when they determine he is the bachelor centered in the newspaper advertisement, a scuffle ensues between the women. While one woman takes Jimmie’s hand, the other scrambles to position herself closer to Jimmie and this leads to an onslaught of women who rush toward the eligible bachelor to clamor for his attention. One large-size Black woman, wearing an enlarged headpiece makes her way to Jimmie and stands next to him, while pushing other women away; a nod to interracial desire. Then, a minister enters the church from the pulpit and announces to the potential brides that they have been pranked and are victims of a practical joke. Hearing this announcement, the bachelorettes begin to castigate Jimmie and hold him responsible for the “horrible” joke which has been played on them. The large-size Black woman, disappointed with the news, hurls her fist towards Jimmie’s face to express her frustration with being duped. In this instance, she conforms to the stereotype because she resembles the Black matriarch and hints at violence; a characteristic associated with Black caricature. However, despite conforming to the stereotype, the Black woman is among the bachelorettes who desire to marry a (white) millionaire and conveys that she is a desiring subject as much as are white women; her overt desirability for a white male marks her, to some extent, as deviating from the Black stereotype film historian Donald Bogle described. Since this (second) Black woman hints at the possibility for an interracial pairing, the film due to the racial segregation that prevailed, averts this position. Furthermore, despite how the Black character conforms to the stereotype, the Black bachelorette is strategically inserted in the film to provoke laughter even while she is marked as eligible for marriage. To exploit the work of Maggie Hennefeld, whose research on silent comedy explores the role of the female body to provoke humor, certainly warrants referencing here since at least one of Jimmie’s Black females possesses a “large” body. Hennefeld questions, is the “abnormal” or “distorted” female body “abject or hilarious?”⁶² Her assessment hints at the complexity of reading the Black body in such comic productions. Furthermore, she poses “whether [we should] laugh or … cry (or both)” with the comic figure?⁶³ Both queries encourage us to consider the depiction of the large bodied Black female who is constructed as Other, not only on the basis of her race, but also on the basis of her size (designed to provoke laughter) and whose otherness is central to creating humor since the racialized and “abnormal” body signifies difference. Hennefeld’s views suggest that these characters stand to provoke both laughter and sympathy; views that are applicable to reading the Black women in Seven Chances because even though they are minor characters relative to the more prominently featured white women, they are visible and their presence attests to both Jimmie’s acknowledgement of diverse populations as well as entertains the plausibility of desirable Black women despite their ambivalence.

Finally, when Jimmie escapes from the church with the throngs of women chasing behind, Arthur Friedman who interviewed Keaton regarding this film, shared Keaton’s own views wherein he explains:

these women, all shapes and forms, … showed up with home-made bridal outfits on, lace curtains, gingham table cloths for veils, and the chase was on. And I led them off into the open country and was coming down the side of the hill and there were some boulder rocks on that hill and I hit one accidentally, sliding down that hill on my feet most of the time, and I jarred this one and it actually hit two other rocks, and I looked behind me in the scene and here come three boulder rocks about the size of bowling balls coming at me, bouncing down the hill with me and I actually had to scram to get out of the way.⁶⁴

Seemingly, as Jimmie escaped the throngs of women in pursuit of a millionaire, he was forced to escape the boulders that rolled down the hill, as both the women and boulders momentarily become synonymous as he orchestrates his escape. Moreover, Jimmie’s feats during the escape included running from a crane, running through a bee-hive, wading through water with a turtle attached to his shirt, diverting bullets discharged at a duck hunt, encountering a cow pasture, etc. Overcoming these obstacles, allowed Jimmie to finally reach Mary’s house so that they could be united in marriage. However, when Jimmie is told that he has missed the 7pm deadline, this decision is quickly reversed when it is determined that the correct time is a little before 7pm, therefore, the couple is allowed to marry.

In Seven Chances, while a Black woman is rejected on the basis of her race, considering that Keaton is seemingly attracted to her because of her class; the other Black woman, is marked as a potential bachelorette who desires to marry a white millionaire (despite conforming to the stereotype). Both women hint at the possibility for interracial relationships and demonstrate how Black women circulate in white spaces in Keaton’s pictures. Keaton’s interest in race, however, is not limited to these women but further includes Mary’s hired hand (Jules Cowles) — a white male who appears in blackface. Unlike previous films where Keaton himself is the blackface performer, in this instance, another white male character enacts blackface performance. The hired hand first appears on screen when Jimmie visits Mary and Jimmie is introduced to her handyman. The handyman (in blackface), wears a dirty shirt and pants while holding what appears to be a tool. He strategically engages in deference to Jimmie as he tips his hat upon their introduction. After Jimmie proposes marriage to Mary and she declines, Mary has a change of heart and instructs the handyman to deliver a note to Jimmie insisting that he must not marry anyone else. The handyman enacting the Black stereotype, struggles to mount a white horse without a saddle to deliver the note to Keaton. On another occasion, when the handyman approaches a railroad, he dismounts the horse to see if a train is coming and when he returns to the horse, the animal has escaped but then, the handyman narrowly misses the fast-moving train. In a later scene, the handyman stands in front of the church where the women congregate and he walks around baffled at the large number of women who enter the church. Certainly, his appearances are designed to provide comic relief and he has been strategically inserted to disparage blackness because we know that he is a white character who has adopted Black stereotypical attributes and appears in blackface. Through reenacting blackness and imitating the Black male stereotype (he walks lackadaisically with shoes too large and is confused that such an enormous group of women are in search of a millionaire); he, to some extent, becomes a mirror image of Jimmie (as the alienated white male Other). More specifically, the blackface performer represents the white male’s failure to become acceptable (like Jimmie) and he reproduces Jimmie’s near delinquency in securing a wife prior to the 7pm deadline, in much the same manner that he (the handyman) is unable to deliver Mary’s note on time. In imitating blackness, the blackface performer represents Jimmie’s dark side or what Lott terms his “social unconscious.”⁶⁵ The white actor in blackface performance, possesses a dark side that mirrors his fears and internal conflict with blackness yet he is so effective at performing blackness that his racially offensive characterization is more convincing than are the “real” Blacks depicted onscreen. While the creation of the Black stereotype evolved from white perceptions of blackness, this blackface performer has so internalized this perception, that he is even more effective at performing blackness than are Blacks themselves because the performance is based on a fabrication of blackness. It is conceivable that incapable white males (who lack certain attributes or skills) like the white actor performing in blackface, give validity to non-stereotypical Black females (who are not derived from fabrications). Thus, the non-stereotypical Black females in Keaton’s Seven Chances, even those who might possess some stereotypical attributes, exceed the conventional expectations associated with black racial representation.

The Black Woman—An Authority Figure Despite Her Subservient Status –College (1927)

College, begins when Ronald (Keaton) and his mother walk in pouring rain to attend his high school graduation ceremony. Ronald’s friend, Mary (Anne Cornwall), greets him when he arrives at the ceremony to deliver the graduation address; an address that denounces athletes for minimizing academics. Following the ceremony, Mary (the object of Ronald’s desire) reveals that she is college bound and inspires Ronald to attend college. Enamored with Mary, Ronald decides to attend Clayton College, the very same school where Mary is enrolled. With his arrival on campus, the dean expresses a keen interest in Ronald because of his public denunciation of athletes who lack an interest in academics and hopes that Ronald will be able to change the campus climate. Unfortunately, while at college Mary becomes estranged from Ronald particularly when she develops an attraction to “the school’s star athlete” (Harold Goodwin).⁶⁶ To finance his education, Ronald secures a café job as an “ice-cream tossing soda jerk”⁶⁷ but proves to be inefficient as an employee. Later, Ronald attempts to secure another service job which advertises for a Black waiter. In an effort to secure this position, Ronald appears in blackface and is hired but while working at the restaurant, Blackburn notes that, “this time, out of the kitchen comes Ronald [Keaton] wearing his white waiter uniform, white waiter hat, and blackface. He’s slower than the other waiters, doing his best….”⁶⁸ As a blackface waiter, Ronald is forced to contend with unruly customers and “his attitude is not that of a white man donning blackface in order to denigrate African-Americans. He has, in the plot, put on the blackface as a way to earn needed money.”⁶⁹ Yet, while working as a waiter, his supervisor is a Black woman cook (Madame Sul-Te Wan, an uncredited black actress; she previously appeared in The Birth of a Nation⁷⁰) who is dressed in uniform and instructs Ronald on how to deliver food appropriately. The Black supervisor is relatively thin in size (a direct contrast to the traditional large-size Black subservient) and she wears an apron coupled with a headpiece to mark her subservience. But more than this, she gives orders and exerts power as well as authority in the kitchen. Blackburn affirms, “Back in the kitchen, [Ronald] is talking with the female-African American cook. It’s apparent from the way she’s quietly smiling at him that she finds him attractive [or vice versa]. She herself is good-looking, has a straightened hair coif under her scar, and is wearing earrings. Without title cards, it’s hard to know what is being said, but it’s probably something flirtatious.”⁷¹ Insightfully, Blackburn insinuates that the Black male dishwasher seemingly is annoyed with Ronald’s affection for the Black female cook and interprets his behavior as one of jealousy. However, as the head cook, Sul-Te-Wan guides Ronald in his transition to waiter and when the blackface Ronald enters the kitchen door, he engages in what Blackburn terms the “darky shuffle”⁷² particularly when he encounters a Black waiter who exits the revolving door at the same moment he enters. The close encounter accidently results in Ronald’s blackface disguise being exposed and with this revelation, the Black workers (including Sul-Te-Wan, who waves a meat cleaver) pursue the white Ronald who flees the restaurant (another nod to Black fugitivity). Blackburn claims, “It is patently unrealistic to assume that [Ronald/Keaton] in blackface could fool black people into thinking he was black any more than he could truly fool white people. In fact, according to the stereotype, he could probably fool white people a lot easier than [B]lack people because the stereotype is that ‘all [B]lack people look alike’ to white people.”⁷³ Blackburn continues, “Nevertheless, as ever, [Ronald/Keaton] has displayed a willingness, perhaps because he himself is an outsider, to associate with, and even be identified as a member of the Other even while seeking to become accepted by the dominant”⁷⁴ power. The scene is significant because Ronald engages in blackness to transgress his whiteness, and therefore, temporarily becomes the racial Other. While working in the restaurant as a waiter, considering that all power and authority emanates from a Black female kitchen supervisor, Madame-Sul-Te-Wan; Ronald, even though he is white and male (yet disguised as a blackface performer), is forced to adhere to the commands, power, and authority of his Black supervisor particularly if he intends to succeed in his blackface disguise. That the Black woman assumes a power position (even though disempowered since Blacks were relegated to servant status), speaks to the expansiveness of this subservient role. Despite being a domestic, the Black female supervisor demonstrates how the Black woman not only occupies white spaces even though relegated to the background, she possesses power and authority, and becomes a marker of Ronald’s fabricated blackness when he engages in racial masquerade. Moreover, it is conceivable the Black female subservient restores the sexual appeal, Ronald, as the white male figure is denied. If Ronald views his Black supervisor as sexually appealing, then perhaps he regains the sexual appeal disavowed through his interaction with the Black female subservient – a pairing that further hints at an interracial encounter. Gaining sexual appeal then allows Ronald to become more attractive to his white object of desire (Mary), despite the fact that he has been fired, as when he later wins her affection after rescuing her from the white predatory star athlete with whom she was involved.

Aside from the restaurant scene, the Black woman character disappears from the film, but she marks Ronald’s otherness which becomes the primary focus of the film’s second half when he becomes a stellar athlete (in the aftermath of his many athletic failures) to gain Mary’s affection. Ultimately, Ronald leads the rowing team to winning a championship and when he rescues Mary from the captivity of her “star athlete,” Ronald now supplants or replaces the “star athlete” who symbolizes that white male heteronormativity has been restored when Ronald transitions from Other (weak, passive, unwanted, physically unfit) to becoming a non-Other (strong, active, desired, physically fit); a transition that could not have occurred without the assistance of the Black female character Madame Sul-Te-Wan.

The Black woman plays a significant role in College to the extent that she might also participate in making the scene humorous for whites who enjoy Ronald’s temporary disguise. Arguably, not only is the Black supervisor a signifier of power but she becomes a participant in the humor that Ronald intends to provoke as well as catalyst for restoring the sexual appeal that he lacks. Furthermore, the film introduces a Black woman who challenges her own domesticity in that she becomes an authority figure, she hints at the existence of racially integrated spaces even while relegated to the kitchen space, she becomes an object of desire and maybe even desiring subject, and she signals a turning point in the film when Ronald transitions from waiter to champion athlete that ultimately leads to his reunification with Mary.

Conclusion

Clearly, Black women in Keaton’s pictures speak to what Stewart terms as “polyphonic – ‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking to’ constructions of Blackness….”⁷⁵ These women reflect the unconscious desires of white male protagonists and become models of behavior that white characters desire to emulate as when Keaton decides to marry in The Navigator; Black women rescue white males who escape in-laws or policemen (even if unintentionally) when mistaken for a Black criminal in Neighbors; Black women temporarily are potential mates (objects of desire) to a white male bachelor in Seven Chances; and Black women become the voice of authority as well as signal turning points in a film’s narrative when white males engage in racial masquerade for employment purposes as in College. Of course, this is in no way to negate nor deny the racial denigration that these characters might have endured at other moments onscreen but they clearly suggest that not all Black women were necessarily reduced to exclusively stereotypical performances and some even exceeded the confines associated with the stereotype or were infused with non-stereotypical characteristics even while (sometimes) embodying the stereotype.

These representations also invite us to assess how Keaton viewed race and question whether or not his screen representations reflected these views. Of course, attempting to assess Keaton’s racial views is virtually impossible, however, we can consider that when Herbert Feinstein interviewed Keaton in the 1960s and was questioned on the black male comic Stepin Fetchit (who personified the black stereotype), Keaton admitted, the Black performer was “funny” yet he further acknowledged the danger associated with the stereotype Fetchit perfected. When Feinstein questioned, “you can see why some Negro groups might object to him [Fetchit] as a phony stereotype?” [Keaton responded] … “Oh, well, sure, because he plays stupid.”⁷⁶ Keaton’s response points to the distinction made between creating comedy and playing “stupid” – performances that likely reflect two different acting methods or styles. But because Fetchit either chose not to distinguish between the two, or was forced not to distinguish between the two, this is what marked him as controversial. Affirming these distinctions, Black actress Butterfly McQueen once admitted, “I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”⁷⁷ In McQueen’s assessment, she attempts to distinguish between stupidity and provoking humor and in doing so, she implies that while Black women created comedy they were not always conforming to the stereotype but when they engaged in reproducing stupidity, this performance devolved into the diminishment of blackness and solidified the Black stereotype. McQueen’s views certainly resonates with Black women in Keaton’s productions in her implication that not all Black women resorted to “stupidity” to provoke humor and one demonstrative example of an actress who defied this type of performance is Madame Sul-Te-Wan who even though she was constructed as a Black stereotype in College, she moved beyond this caricature. Furthermore, the Black woman (unnamed) in Keaton’s The Navigator and the Black women (unidentified) in Seven Chances both deviate from the Black stereotype in that, not only are they objects of desire, but they are also desiring subjects even though they might embody characteristics associated with the Black stereotype.

Considering Keaton’s Black representations, it is apparent that these women deviate from many of the dominant stereotypical representations that proliferated in silent pictures and may coincide with some of the non-stereotypical Black women depicted in all-black-cast silent pictures. What becomes glaringly apparent is that a monolithic representation of African American women may not exist in silent pictures because it depends on the film genre; it depends on whether or not the pictures were designed to appeal to predominantly all-white audiences or all-black audiences; it depends on whether or not the pictures were mainstream or independent productions; and it depends on whether or not the pictures employed white actors in blackface to depict Black women or employed “real” Black women as markers of blackness. Moreover, with the recent discovery of films such as Lime Kiln Field Day or Something Good a Negro Kiss, these all-black-cast films were made to the exclusion of the white gaze, and they depict Black actresses who were marked as objects of desire rather than derision. Furthermore, even in comic pictures such as A Reckless Rover, 1918 (a white company that specialized in Black productions, Ebony), a film that featured Black actress Yvonne Junior and Two Knights in Vaudeville, 1915 (another Ebony production) that featured Black actress Florence McClain, these Black women provided black middle-class depictions and although they might have been comic configurations, they were not necessarily reduced to exclusively stereotypes. Additionally, when we consider that filmmakers Oscar Micheaux (Black independent filmmaker), George and Noble Johnson (Black independent filmmakers), and Richard E. Norman (white independent filmmaker who specialized in Black films) produced pictures foregrounding Black women, these filmmakers provided a wide range of Black female representations that were not so different from those that appeared in Keaton’s pictures. For example, Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), centers Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), a school teacher who intends to raise money for a Black school; Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925) positions a Black church mother Sister Martha Jane (Mercedes Gilbert) — who attempts to rescue her victimized daughter (Julia Theresa Russell) from a “jack-leg-preacher;” the Johnson’s By Right of Birth (1921), features Juanita Cooper (Anita Thompson Reynolds)⁷⁸ whose white adoptive parents assume that she is Native American until her Black racial identity is unveiled; and Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926) centers Ruth Sawtelle (Kathryn Boyd) as the female protagonist who is taken captive on an airplane following a train station robbery. These Black women actresses, along with those who appeared in the early works of Black women filmmakers (such as Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Tressie Souders, Maria P. Williams, Madame E. Touissant Welcome, Birdie Gilmore, Zora Neale Hurston, Mrs. M. Webb, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston⁷⁹ et. Al), were not always reduced to stereotypes and exemplify the diversity of Black female representations that permeated silent and sometimes, sound pictures. Therefore, it is argued that the depiction of Black women onscreen in the silent era is not monolithic as previously assumed.

Although the examples enumerated above are minimal relative to the proliferation of Black images paraded onscreen during the silent era and although these examples may not have the capacity to alter the debilitating impact the more disturbing representations inflicted onto the Black screen image, at least, they do provide evidence of alternative Black representations. Thus, this essay advises that we should proceed cautiously in making blanket generalizations regarding the racial imagery films appropriated because Black representation is much more nuanced, complicated, and revealing than what we have been willing to entertain. Furthermore, while Black actresses were keenly aware of the marginalization they endured in the cinema industry, the limitations they encountered with casting decisions, lack of recognition received, minimal or non-existent screen credit accorded, and limited control they possessed when thrust into disturbing narratives – it is plausible that they navigated and negotiated these obstacles through their stellar performances. Many did so through elevating performances despite the roles assigned, some challenged the marginalization implied in these roles through negotiating with directors regarding how a part might be played, and others may have acquiesced onscreen but offscreen negotiated more on-the-set accommodations or higher pay. Regardless as to how they negotiated their subject positions, these Black women were savvy in the predominantly white world of cinema even when they understood they were facing a paucity of screen roles that denied them agency; they empowered themselves in subversive ways that led them to speak an alternative language or engage in a familiar discourse with those who understood their shared plight of working in a racially dismissive society and culture. For it is Miriam Petty who contends that actresses such as Hattie McDaniel (cast as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, 1939) exuded:

strong acting forms [that became] an important part of how she makes Mammy into an endearing and enduring cinematic moment. That [she] … evinces her deepest sorrow… on account of the untimely death of Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter, Bonnie, …[where] she openly shed tears provide a site of identification for the audiences, whom the film intends should be moved by Bonnie’s tragic death and its shattering effect upon Scarlett, and especially upon Rhett. But her tears also solidify this cinematic mammy as the apotheosis of the Lost Cause mythology …. These tears take on even greater relevance when considered in the light of the way that bossiness and irascibility are otherwise the dominant emotional notes of both McDaniel’s performance style in general and of GWTW’s Mammy character in particular.⁸⁰

Elaborating on the performance style of Black actresses, Samantha Sheppard argues that these women who were reduced to maids frequently gave “‘lip’ – biting criticism, sardonic stares, dismissive demeanor, or flippant wise-cracks—to their white female employers on- and off-screen that challenge Hollywood conventions, narrative strictures, and popular memory about these archetypes as the dutiful help.”⁸¹ In Sheppard’s examination of Lynn Nottage’s play By the Way, Meet Vera Starks, she proposes that the play (which focuses on Black actress Theresa Harris) engages in speculative fiction that relates to the archive of Black women’s media histories through what she terms “phantom cinema” – a term she defines as “an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt, trouble, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination.”⁸² Sheppard believes that, “Phantom cinemas are disquieting, and Nottage’s stage play—a ghost story—and digital paratexts—an archival apparition—‘trouble’ our vision of film history more than it clarifies it. In the end, we are not really closer to Harris’s ‘true’ film history but we are—in Vera’s shadow—haunted by Harris’s actual absence from it and our popular memory.”⁸³ According to Sheppard, “Changing the subject of dominant film histories” will allow many of those interested in these histories … “to excavate, experiment, innovate, and reimagine their lives, cinemas, and archives in stark new ways.”⁸⁴ This excavation process of Black women’s histories has been continued in Catherine Russell’s work on Harris made apparent in her argument that while many Black actresses achieved stardom if not onscreen then certainly they were stars “in an archive of marginalization, servitude and uncredited low-wage labour, but it is also an epic record of the racial events that take place every time she reappears with her quick spark, familiar face, and compelling gaze.”⁸⁵ Regardless of the methodological approaches employed to construct Black women’s histories these strategies stand to expose the multitudinous and myriad ways that Black women cultivated their onscreen performances as they were not always denigrating or conforming to societal expectations associated with blackness. Thus, Black women participated in creating escapist fantasies, provided diverse representations of blackness, and appropriated divergent representations for which they rarely have been acknowledged.