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Making Minstrelsy of Murder: George Washington Harris, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Reconstruction Aesthetic of Black Fright

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Andrew Silver
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Extract

In George Washington Harris's Reconstruction sketch, “Trapping a Sheriff, Almost,” a rowdy Southern hero named Wirt Staples thunders outside of a courthouse waving a terrified African-American boy over his head in one hand and a dried venison steak in the other. With his muscles moving “like rabbits onder the skin,” and his hips and thighs “[playing] like the swell on the river” (Sut Lovingood, 244), Wirt Staples represents Harris's fantasy of Southern superiority reemergent amidst Reconstruction chaos. The sketch ends with Wirt throwing the venison steak at a Reconstruction judge's head and kicking the boy through the shop window of a watch repairman, assaulting a figure of Northern authority and brutally exiling the black threat from Southern territory. As a final, triumphant gesture, Wirt saddles his horse and bellows, “The Lion's loose, shet your doors!” (Sut Lovingood, 254). The collection in which the sketch appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool” (1867). was published by a Northern press and advertised along with titles of parlor humor such as Dick's Ethiopian Scenes, Tambo's End-Men's Gags, and Brudder Bons' Book of Stump Speeches. “It would be difficult,” the advertisement assures readers, “to cram a larger amount of pungent humor into 300 pages than will be found in this really funny book” (Sut Lovingood, 312).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 339 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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