The Death & Exhibition of Master Juba
-- Introduction --

For a full discussion of this document see the following, from which this hyperdocument borrows, and where most citations for information can be found:

Stephen Johnson, “‘Surely he cannot be flesh and blood’: The early Victorian Anatomical Museum and the Blackface Minstrel,” in The Body in Medical Culture, ed. Elizabeth Klaver. SUNY Press (2009) 61-88.

This strange, infuriating and finally moving report was published in 1876 by T. Allston Brown, a long-time booking agent, writer and editor for the show-business trade journal The New York Clipper--and a well-known collector of theatrical memorabilia. In these few words he constructs a tale of a talented man of colour, a famed dancer who falls from the grace of the white race’s permission to perform, because he rose above his station -- and, finally, had to be punished. Written after the American Civil War, during a time of racial unrest, it should be treated with great skepticism. And yet, as you examine the various parts of this document, it has a good deal to tell us. As you link to its parts, consider:

• it was only the second posthumous reference to this much-praised performer, so has a proximity to those who knew him that gives it some credence
• there is circumstantial evidence to support its claims, as you will see
• it is written by someone who, however prejudiced in this instance, was an important historian of minstrelsy whose ‘facts’ (though not his moral conclusions) have generally been trustworthy

Does this mean that Boz’s Juba, so highly praised and so influential, could have been on display after his death? The answer is yes--it’s possible. But more important is what it says about the culture that created the document whether or not it is ‘fact.’

When Allston Brown made the display of Juba’s bones his punishment for rising above his station, he was only taking to an extreme the many ways the early Victorians displayed, and gained control over the body. It was a dancer’s hell to which Brown condemned Juba; the neatness of that punishment is suspect.

The document is excerpted from Col T. Allston Brown’s “Among the Minstrels of the Past–The Rise and Fall of Burnt Cork,” published in New York Clipper Annals, circa Jan 1877.

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