Description

In this searing book, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life span of the very first black performer in the U.S. to achieve the greatest degrees of popularity and fortune.After decades of battling for success on the point, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the kid of current immigrants in the Bahamas, created the significant decision to don blackface make-up and perform the “coon.” Behind this disguise he turned a Broadway headliner–as important a comic as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Watts. D. Areas, who named him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It's this dichotomy at Williams’ primary that Phillips examines in this highly nuanced, superbly written book, unblinking in its focus on the menacing compromises that constitute an identification.