Stepin Fetchit

Turner Classic Movies (one of the best channels on television) has been elevating its game this month with a Tuesdays-and-Thursdays series called "Race & Hollywood: Black Images on Film." The idea is to show a host of movies that run the gamut, from the pro-KKK storyline of Birth of a Nation to post-civil rights films like Spike Lee's Get On the Bus. It is, of course, the early stuff that fascinates, like the only movie Amos and Andy ever made, Check and Double Check. (I only caught about three minutes of that one, and yep, it's pretty grotesque.)

The other night I watched a movie called Judge Priest, not because it was part of this series but because I had never seen a Will Rogers movie and, living as close as I do to Will Rogers State Park, I was curious. As an added bonus, the film was directed by John Ford, whose work I've been exploring ever since creating a TiVo "wish list" (one of my favorite features of the TiVo, by the way).

I'm not sure this film quite reveals what the big deal was about Will Rogers. Sure he's folksy and amiable, and you definitely get the sense that he's warm and likable, and even finds a way to enjoy the company of the blowhards and the self-important. But the plot of this particular movie is just plain silly, Ford's direction is remarkably unremarkable (except for a bit of business with his brother Francis and a spitoon), and nowadays pretty much everything else gets lost amidst all those Kentucky-fried images of happy darkies singin' and struttin' in the South of the 1890s.

You get Hattie McDaniel (a superfluous "s" tacked onto her name because somebody at the studio couldn't be bothered to get it right), five years before Gone With the Wind, singing as she works, sometimes with three other black serving-women harmonizing behind her. (Although, notably, Rogers himself joins in a couple times, maybe not singing perfectly but certainly getting into the spirit.) You get the white characters, who all wear their Confederate memorial badges, practically bursting into tears every time their Glorious Cause is mentioned--and the stars-and-bars flag plays a major emotional role. (Please remember--my Confederate bona fides are substantial--but I remain wholly ambivalent about that flag.) You get a climactic moment when Judge Priest, having been forced to recuse himself from the really stupid trial at the center of the plot, urges a band of blacks to start playing "Dixie" outside the courthouse in order to help sway the jury. And in the middle of all that, you get Stepin Fetchit.

I had never seen one of his movies, either; only brief clips of him, here and there. His shambling "coon" act is really amazing to behold: damn near incomprehensible from the slurring, but then that may have been the point of it. (The idea of "coons" is controversial: on the one hand, it represents degrading white perceptions of blacks as shiftless and lazy; on the other hand, it may also be true that many blacks used this idea to their own advantage by playing up to these preconceptions and thus, essentially, flying under the radar. There is also the possibility that in all that incomprehensible muttering, often the blacks were finding a way to comment on their white bosses without the bosses ever knowing a thing about it.) Fetchit slumps and shuffles, stares with big vacant eyes, and tries to connive or steal whenever he can get away with it. There is even one startling moment when our hero Judge Priest, the much-revered Will Rogers, hears Fetchit's character Jeff refer to a song that isn't quite edifying to the Confederacy and jokes that if Jeff mentions that song again, he (Judge Priest) might just join in with the lynch mob. It's very obviously meant as a joke; but boy, talk about the passage of time sucking all the funny away.

Stepin Fetchit wasn't the man's real name, of course. He was Lincoln Perry, a Key West native who was every bit as literate and intelligent as Stepin Fetchit wasn't. (He was once a writer for the Chicago Defender.) The Fetchit character was created on the vaudeville circuit, and eventually it made Perry a millionaire. He was in fact the first black millionaire actor, and even though he squandered the money on pink Rolls Royces and Chinese servants, the fact remains that his success opened a door for subsequent black actors. He later became a Nation of Islam member and received a Special Image award from the NAACP.

Now, in context, I have come to see the tragic dimensions of Stepin Fetchit. Playing down to whites' low expectations made Lincoln Perry a millionaire; but he did his job so well that he became emblematic of the worst of white prejudices and, as a result, couldn't get work anymore. A true case of someone who was destroyed by his own success. From a fleet of twelve cars to the charity ward at Cook County Hospital, Lincoln Perry was a smart man who nonetheless couldn't keep up with the times. White prejudice elevated him, and it's a cruel irony that the slow fade of those prejudices helped to tear him down. There's a movie in this story, if anyone ever dares to make it.