Florence Mills ran away with the show, mimicking and kicking her marvelous way right over the heads of all the cast and sheer up to the dizzying heights until she was transformed into a glorious star.
Shuffle Along was conceived, composed and directed by Negroes. There had been nothing comparable to it since the Williams and Walker Negro shows. It definitely showed the Negro groping, fumbling and emerging in artistic group expression. When its best artists were bought out by white producers and it was superseded by such elaborate super-productions as Blackbirds, which was projected and directed by a white impresario, there was no artistic gain for the Negro group. But the Negro artistes made more money, and thoughtless Negroes, like all good Americans, think that the commercially successful standard is the only standard by which Negro artistic achievement may be judged.
I have no prejudice against white persons leading and directing Negroes artistically and otherwise, if they can do it with more than merely technical competence. Negroes using the technique of the white peoples to express themselves must necessarily have to go to school to the whites. But it is no easy achievement for any outsider to get on the inside of a segregated group of people and express their hidden soul. Many white people see Negroes from a white point of view and imagine that they know all about the Negro soul and can express it even better than the blacks themselves. When I saw the white man's Blackbirds in Paris and remembered Shuffle Along I was very sad. The Blackbirds flashed like a whip from beginning to end, rushing the actors through their parts like frightened animals. There was not a suggestion in it of the inimitably lazy tropical drawl that characterizes Negro life even in the coldest climate. And that was the secret of the success of the charming Shuffle Along.
In the midst of my career as a dramatic critic I bumped into one of those acute snags which remain in the memory even as the scar of a bad wound that has been healed remains in the body. It wasn't because I was thin-skinned. When I went to work on The Liberator I knew that I would have to face social problems even greater than before, but I was determined to face them out. But what happened to me hurt more because it came from an unexpected source.
I think that instead of rewriting it, I will let the article I wrote at the time (for The Liberator of May, 1922) tell the story for me:
"Wouldn't your dramatic critic like to see He Who Gets Slapped?" So, very graciously, wrote the Theater Guild's publicity agent to The Liberator. Our sometime dramatic critic, Charles W. Wood, having deserted us for the season, I elected myself dramatic critic by acclamation. It would be pleasant to sit in a free front-row parquet seat along with "The Press," instead of buying a ticket for the second balcony. And as for the other seat—free seats come in pairs—I decided to take along William Gropper, Liberator artist of the powerful punch and vindictive line, and master of the grotesque.
So on the appointed night we presented ourselves at the box office of the Fulton. It was with keen pleasure that I anticipated seeing this fantastic play of Leonid Andreyev's, He, the One Who Gets Slapped. A curious and amusing theme!
The stubs were handed to Gropper and we started toward the orchestra. But the usher, with a look of quizzical amazement on his face, stopped us. Snatching the stubs from Gropper and muttering something about seeing the manager, he left us wondering and bewildered. In a moment he returned, with the manager. "The—the wrong date," the manager stammered and, taking the stubs marked "orchestra," he hurried off to the box office, returning with others marked "balcony." Suddenly the realization came to me. I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover of the theater, and a free soul. But—I was abruptly reminded—those things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro—He, the One Who Gets Slapped....
Gropper and I were shunted upstairs. I was for refusing to go, but Gropper, quite properly, urged compromise. So, brooding darkly, madly, burnt, seared and pierced, and over-burdened with hellish thoughts, I, with Gropper beside me half-averting his delicate pale face, his fingers, run through his unkempt mop of black hair, shading his strangely child-like blue eyes, sat through Leonid Andreyev's play.
Andreyev's masterpiece, they call it. A masterpiece? A cleverly melodramatic stringing together of buffoonery, serio-comic philosophy, sensational love-hungriness and doll-baby impossibilism, staged to tickle the mawkish emotions of the bourgeois mob! So I thought. I sat there, apart, alone, black and shrouded in blackness, quivering in every fiber, my heart denying itself and hiding from every gesture of human kindliness, hard in its belief that kindliness is to be found in no nation or race. I sat inwardly groaning through what seemed a childish caricature of tragedy. Ah! if the accident of birth had made Andreyev a Negro, if he had been slapped, kicked, buffeted, pounded, niggered, ridiculed, sneered at, exquisitely tortured, near-lynched and trampled underfoot by the merry white horde, and if he still preserved through the terrible agony a sound body and a mind sensitive and sharp to perceive the qualities of life, he might have written a real play about being slapped. I had come to see a tragic farce—and I found myself unwillingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I. As always in the world-embracing Anglo-Saxon circus, the intelligence, the sensibilities of the black clown were slapped without mercy.