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Watch closely now you may want to mystify your friends. After the spring is threaded through the straw, he bends the straw and straightens the string. Next, he clips off the peak of the straw and throws it away. Now he puts the straws together and pulls the string through. Presto, it's still in one piece. Believe it or not.
Not Listen closely now to today's episode, The Other of a Magical Negro.
I'm Katie and I'm Eves.
Now, Katie, let's talk about the different kinds of magical niggas or dare I say, melanated magicians, colored conjurer exhibit a actually magical black folks or people who use things like charms and spells as part of their religious and spiritual practices. People who know divination, who are healers, mediums, psychics, and things like gifted seers and dreamers. People who are say, colleagues with the supernatural.
If you forget to come back from Madame's rone, you and your family will be pushed for always and deternity. And then there's the trope of the magical negro. You know, the black character with some invaluable skill or gift, and mind you, that gift doesn't usually benefit them. This brand of magical negro uses their powers to help out the main read white character in some grand way, often at
a high cost. Their magic is really just a plot device used to move the story along and get the leading character to point in their development.
Last, but not least, though, is the black person who performs magic, the one who gets up on a stage or in front of an audience, or on the street or something like that and does acts that seem impossible. There are people who study the craft of magic and entertain crowds with harmless shows of mundane but still fascinating sorcery, and that is who we will be talking about today, Black magicians who work with the art of illusion.
All magicians are performing artists who use magic tricks to wow their audiences. They create illusions making it look like they cut a person in half. They use everyday objects like cards and pens, and tactics like misdirection to get people to fall for their sleight of hand.
And magicians even perform things like mentalism or the acts where they make it look like they're reading people's minds or telling the future by reading body language, or communicating with their assistance with coded language, and they're sometimes escape artists,
finding ways to get out of sticky situations. They'll have you holding your breath waiting to see how they're going to survive getting out of the strait jacket that they're in, removing the padlocks and the chains that they're bound by, and then escaping the coffin that they're.
Trapped in wouldn't be me. But all these kinds of acts were and still are part of the shows put on by black magicians. And the earliest Black American magicians were working in the nineteenth early twentieth century, so the stories that they told and the work that they did had different meaning than those of the white magicians at that time. Let me ask you something, Eves, when, because I know magicians are like you're really into magicians and magic and all that good stuff, Like when did that,
I want to say obsession? When did that occur? Like do you remember the moment you first saw a black magician and you're like, that's my shit?
I don't know.
I think honestly, I have always really been into the supernatural, the up hold, the weird, the offbeat, the odd, and the strange, so and that list can go on. So I feel like it was just a thing that was imbued to me from the very beginning. And I am just really fascinated by one performers in general, because you get up there and you have to entertain audiences, you have to keep them captivated over a certain amount of time.
And it's also something that I think is just.
Very enjoyable across time and across age and across culture, and that's really fascinating to me. So I think there's just so much possibility with magic, and I think to see black people do it is just another instance of seeing a black person do something that.
We may more often see white people do.
But also just there's so much power and joy and light and darkness at the same time in magic. So I don't know exactly. I don't know if that answers your question because I don't know exactly when it started, But.
Yeah, it seems like it's something that's just always been an interest to you. I feel like black people make magic shows like so much more fun because you know, we do not know how to act.
On the audience.
Yes, okay, Yes, let's talk about that because we love falling out of a chair laughing.
Ye, running away, yes, running away. See, I feel like the black magician that stands out in my mind. I do not know this man's name, but you know, back in the day at Atlantic Station, there's always this black man doing tricks with like coins and cards and stuff. I would be fascinated because I'm like, bro, really put that coin behind her ear?
Yes, and Katie, speaking of let's talk about your magic skills because.
You have wowed me with a card trick before.
Okay, yeah, very much. So. I only know one, and you know it was a little resty, but I was giddy, y'all for real, you did.
Okay, So everyone, let's travel back in time. Richard Potter was born in Massachusetts in the late seventeen hundreds. He was the son of a white man and an enslaved woman named Dina or Dinah, and he was the first black magician in the United States and maybe even the first American born magician period. His goal probably wasn't to make history in this way, though. He just wanted to perform, and that's exactly what he did. He started off as an assistant to a Scottish man named John Ranny Fyi.
Black magicians often began their careers as assistants to white ones in the late eighteen hundreds. In early nineteen hundreds, anyway, Richard traveled Europe, the Caribbean, and the US, learning the art of performance, and eventually he struck out on his own in the States, becoming a successful ventriloquist and magician, successful enough actually to buy a substantial amount of land, start a farm on it, and hire folks to work on it. When he and his wife Sally were away.
People love the show he put on. They cheered as he stuck a sword down his throat, laughed when he made an egg appear to jump from one hat to the next, clapped when he ran hot iron over his tongue and bent it with his feet. But he was not just some magical, magical negro immune to racism because he was an entertainer. There's a story, for instance, that in Mobile, Alabama, Richard and Sally were kicked out of a motel because white folks didn't want any black folks
staying there. Whether that specific story is true or not, they were successful black people touring the US performing tricks for large audiences. There are certainly stories we don't know about it.
And his life story. It's definitely spellbinding pun intended.
But one of my.
Favorite parts about his work, Katie Well, at least what I can say as someone who's never actually seen his work in person, is the way that his shows were marketed. If you look at some of the advertisements for his work, which you can do online, you'll see a list of magical acts and amusements along with the phrase quote an evening brush to sweep away care or a medley to please.
Richard Potters shows were officially a call to escape, a place where he could throw his voice as a ventriloquist into someone or something else, and where others could find joy in that escapism. It was a place that could have been a flight of fancy, but for Richard, as a pioneer in the field, it was a reality that he shaped for himself, a place that was carefree because in it he was able to conjure whatever his heart desired.
And there is something so freeing and powerful about that. How black magicians created something out of nothing on and off the stage. You know, they fashioned their own worlds and their own rules and ensured their survival, even even prosperity in the process. I mean, dude bought a whole farm. Black magicians were even too powerful if you look through the eyes of some people, even threatening because they had
the ability to full manipulate and charm. And I think that goes into some of the stereotypes about black people at that time or even even now, you know, like they're tricksters and can't be trusted, and you know, like the Slide of Hands was like, I really, I don't really know what this negro is up to. But the magicians had control over a world and a narrative that they created, and they had magically gotten people of all
races to buy into it. I'm thinking at this time too, the escapism is something that is interesting because these people are, you know, not even several decades out of enslavement, right, Like, they definitely have people that they knew personally that were affected by slavery. So it's kind of like you think of escaping now, it's kind of like, oh, I'm just going to escape the drudgery of everyday life. I'm going
to be entertained for you know, a couple hours. But I wonder what it was like back then to play with escape in that way.
Right, And I wonder if people would have even called it escapism or if they would have used a different word for it, because in that context, yes, escapism would be such a different thing. And that's not to minimize what we go through today, because it's not like we still don't have our personal challenges and that really dramatic
things can happen in our everyday lives. But of course, within that context of chattel slavery, it was something that they weren't so far removed from, So yeah, it is it's interesting to think about what escapism meant to them, what it meant or what it felt like in an embodied way to go into a place where you could maybe step out of your everyday concerns and maybe tap into a different world or a different space of imagination, to feel a sense of freedom.
In a society that you know is hierarchical, segregated, all these races come in together for a minute, an hour, whatever the case may be. This black magician's in charge, like they're creating the rules, they're creating the world that everyone has to buy into for that brief moment in time. I think it's like super subversive when you think about what black magicians were able to do, especially during that period of time.
So we've got a lot more blackety, black magic of our sleeves before our next act. We're disappearing.
And we're back top tier magic eves.
Thank you, thank you.
So the way that black people show up as magicians changes over the years, as to be expected. Henry Brown, who fled slavery in Virginia by traveling to Philly confined in a cramped wooden box, turned his experience into a show. He published a narrative about his escape, sold illustrations of that escape, and toured with a panorama that depicted scenes
of enslaved people's lives. When the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty passed, it made the threat of Henry's return to slavery ever more present, and he was nearly captured that year in Providence, Rhode Island, but he evaded capture and he took off to England.
In England, he used performance to tell the story of his escape. He even put together another panorama about the Indian Mutiny of eighteen fifty seven and uprising against British rule. The message that he communicated over and over in these performances was in anti slavery and anti colonial resistance. The stories he told as a writer, as an artist, as a showman all oflifted the power of subversion and resurrection.
And after spending years overseas, Henry returned to the States post Emancipation Proclamation, post Civil War, and post Thirteenth Amendment during the reconstruction years. By this point, he had started to use more magic in his shows, but he continued
to use his platform to entertain and educate spectators. The practice of escaping restraints was one that magicians have been using to keep audiences on their toes for a while, and Brown began to perform an act where he broke free from a sack wrapped with a chain in the lock.
He did this trick called the Spirit Cabinet, where he would be tied up and concealed, but would still be able to play instruments. He burned cards and then made them whole again. One ticket to a show described his entertainment as magic's sleight of hand, mesmerism, and electro biology. He called himself Professor h Box Brown and called one of his magic programs the African Prince's drawing room entertainment.
But magic didn't seem like it was just a means of escape to Brown. Henry Brown's work as a magician and as a resistor were intertwined. Even as he upped the bar on the stage, magic that he performed relaying the story of his enslavement and escape remained an important part of his shows. He dreamed up and brought to life a path to actual freedom that seemed impossible before and on stage, he used magic to make the seemingly
impossible appear real. He was able to use magic to communicate principles that he quite literally lived by, that what is imagined can be made manifest, that we have the power to make change, and that there is infinite possibility. He could use the popular appeal of magic, with its fancy illusions and all those elaborate ruses, to convince others of what was possible. Escaping slavery was possible, Rising against
slavery was possible, Ending slavery was possible. So it made sense that in the third act of his life, magic was his actual livelihood. Magic had kept him alive, and by using it to share his story and his ideals, perhaps it could save the lives of so many others?
Did you know that other abolitionists had beef with Henry Box Brown?
Whoy was that?
Because like slavery was still going on, because you know, he had shipped himself, mailed himself out of slavery, but slavery was still going on, right, And so he was going around doing all these like shows and lectures about exactly how he mailed himself to freedom. So they're like, other people aren't going to be able to do this, like chill out, like you're given all the secret sauce away.
So it's like, on one hand he was like, you know, shining a light on this terrible institution, and I guess like thumbing his nose kind of at the people that he tricked. But on one hand he was like low ki making so that other people could not do the same thing, which you know, who knows how many people would try that, because so many things can go wrong. You could literally just like starve to death or like die from dehydration, or be on your head too long, which I believe
is on his head for a while. Well he was upside down for a while, right, So but people were like, dude, be quiet for a second.
He was snitching on himself.
Basically, it's kind of like a magician telling all of their tricks. Yeah, you know, magicians don't want other magicians to tell the secrets to their magic either, because then that is the magic lies. Also in you not knowing how it happens, even if you know that it happened some way, even if you know that it wasn't an act of God that made this rabbit disappear, you know that there's something behind it, but you don't know what it was.
Yeah, he was definitely breaking like the magician code of conduct. So over the course of Brown's life, the US and black folks in it had gone through a ton right, The landscape of black performance changed a lot. By the late eighteen hundreds, the popularity of menstrel shows, which often
featured magic acts, had peaked and waned. Vaudeville, a kind of entertainment that included a variety of acts like comedy and singing, was on the horizon, and a couple of men who end up performing magic for a living were born. These fellows were named John Hartford Armstrong and Benjamin Rucker. Let's start with Benjamin Rucker, also known as Black Herman so Black.
Herman started out out peddling health tonics, fortune telling, and mind reading, but once he started gaining a little bit more traction, he began to throw more magic tricks in the mix, like creating the illusion that his assistant was levitating. His performance drew from Black spiritual traditions like root work and one act. For instance, he claimed that his tonic could drive the demon out of a possessed person, and he would plant people in the audience to drink his
tonic and then suddenly be cured. He moved to Harlem eventually, and he performed for large audiences at Liberty Hall, which was the headquarters of the Kingston division of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. There were plenty of black magicians who made up stories about their own lives, carrying this
mystique around their professions into their actual personal history. Take all of the black magicians that capitalized on people's obsession with the so called East by pretending themselves to be Indian or Hindu because that got them better career opportunities.
Okay, number one, I know a couple of people who could use that health timeic to drive out the demon okay on is that online number two. Black Hermon did contribute to the mystery of his life, but you know, in a different way. On tour in the thirties, he performed this elaborate stunt where he would appear to bury himself alive. He'd escape through a secret passage and return to the grave days later, only to be dug up
again just in time for his stage performance. So when he died, like Pharrell in nineteen thirty four, it was kind of like the Boy who Cried Wolf, because people thought that he was just playing around and he was gonna come back alive again.
Yeah, there were people who were like, wanted to go see the body, and someone who charged to go see his body because there was all of this a hoopla around the fact that he had made a big deal that I don't die, I can come back from the grave, And he didn't come back to life, but he did leave behind a legacy that was about preservation and about spectacle. He had become this larger than life character whose persona
and stories preceded him. His myth making around his own life and spiritual practices were really indicative of the ways that black folks embellished stories and find joy and freedom in refusing to reveal too much, keeping things close to the body instead.
Blackerman could not be confined to others perceptions of him or his blackness. He laughed in the face of stigmas and stereotypes about black people with the spectacles that he created around his tonics and escapes and cares. He was kind of a double agent, a trickster. The playfulness and mischief that he imbued and his performance gave his magic a sense of unbridled thrill and pleasure. He denied respectability.
He toyed with what was taboo, challenged what was sacred at a time when black folks were struggling to break down barriers.
More than a snake oil salesman, Black Hermon recognized his ability to wrestle with his own conflicts, his doubts, and his hopes regarding his history and self perception through his performance. Just because there may have been gaps in his knowledge of tradition and lineage, did it mean that he had to wallow in self hatred sunk in beneath this mountain of ignorance and misery. He could come back from the
dead as many times as he wanted to. His magic told black people that they could be whomever they wanted to be, even with what was taken from us, that we weren't bound to anybody's rules.
And I think that's the through line for a lot of black magicians, especially the ones that you know are catering to a black audience and do have that, you know, working knowledge of those that came before them.
Yeah. So I know this quote is used to death.
Child, It's used to death, but it really didn't make me think of the Audre Lord quote. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. I am just so fascinated by this kind of It feels like such a large, wild and kind of chaotic life and persona that he built.
I don't know why. I just imagined him going around.
Evil, laughing everywhere like he is, like you know, got multiple sides to him and is just always experimenting, always open. Just I just imagine him as this person who has so much for life and interest and curiosity in questioning things and how they worked and how people viewed him and how he viewed himself. And how he viewed his history.
Do you think for him specifically, or even magicians in general, you know how like when you tell in a lie and then you start to believe the lie, or like you get too like if the actor gets too deep into character. Do you think that for him, he kind of thought like, well, maybe I can come back to life, Like do you think that in living that life, they're like kind of fooling themselves, like I am actually magic, Like I actually can do these things that I'm telling the audience that I can do.
You know what.
I think it's an interesting question because I wouldn't want to say that they do fall for it, because they know that it's their profession, and so I don't want I wouldn't want to make it seem like they are gullible, you know, or naive in any way. But I do also think there's something that is is magical in itself of convincing yourself that those things can be true, even when you're the sole person as the magician who knows
how the tricks work. You see all the cogs, you see the wheels moving, all of the things that are going on behind the scenes. So there is something that could be endearing about a magician actually falling in love with the crafts so much that they start to believe that it could actually happen, that it could actually be some sort of supernatural magic rather than magic that happens in the natural world.
Let's talk about the Armstrongs. There's John Harper Armstrong, who is a magician who's performed at black churches and schools on the East Coast in the US in the early to mid nineteen hundreds, and he toured with his brother Joseph, but Joseph eventually left family business, and so John's first and second wives were also involved. So it makes sense that John's daughter Ellen Armstrong ended up in the business too.
But once John died in nineteen thirty nine, she took over, making her potentially the only black woman magician touring in the US at the time. Chalk Talk was one of her main acts, where she would draw cartoons on a chalkboard and sketch pad and invite audience members to participate in the act.
The Armstrongs did card tricks, mind reading, and sleight of hand tricks, but they also included black history in their shows. According to the book Conjured Times, Black Magicians in America. John Armstrong included the story of Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery in an act, and Ellen Armstrong did a version
of that same act featuring the boxer Joe Louis. Instead, a lot of the middle and working class black people who went to their shows wanted to go to them over the vaudeville shows because they were so educational.
The Armstrongs were intentionally uplifting black hissy story in black spaces by continuing to include black history in their shows and perform in black institutions. And Ellen emphasized that importance of memory and passing out knowledge that she got from her father, and we love Ellen for that. H Okay, magic history lesson over. Should we return to the present? Yeah, I think so, But the curtains haven't closed yet. The magic continues after the break.
In our own personal disappearing and reappearing act, We're back And Katie, you spoke with someone who is truly about the magic life, the Cole Cardoza.
The coal is a magician.
I use magic as a space to allow audiences to suspend disbelief and reimagine what's possible in the world that we live in today. I definitely think that I'm a non traditional magician. I mean, part of that is just being a black beer woman on stage. That just happens by default, so you know, it's not necessarily like an
intentional divergence from that. But yes, I think just inhabiting this body and how people respond to it on stage and how they respond to a magician who does not look like the norm changes the dynamic of the space to begin with. For me, it's important to name the stories of black magicians that have come before us that have oftentimes left out of the narrative of what it
means to be magical. Despite the fact that we see a lot of cishette white men in the role of a magician, what we understand is magic has been crafted and influenced by a woman in gender expansive people and people of color throughout history, and for me, as a black quer woman, is important to name those stories of black artists and particularly black women artists that have come before in this space. So that's something that I do.
I talk a lot about the role of Ellen Armstrong in her family in magic and incorporate some of the tricks that she did on stage in my performance as well. Because I think it's important that her story is not forgotten. But we, you know, as black magicians, we are responsible for a legacy of magic, and we're responsible for the stories of our ancestors in this space, and I think that there needs to be an accountability built into that.
You know, magic is not a passive art form and by default is a conversation, and I think a conversation that's really inherent in the Black community because it's the call and response conversation that you're having that I think that if you aren't familiar with black culture, like you don't see that kind of relationship in magic, which is why I think it resonates so much with Black people.
That in itself is a powerful part about this because to be able to do a call and response conversation with black people, when that's so inherent in our blood, in our bones. It's the way that we advocated for our freedom, quite literally demanded our freedom here in the US.
You have a really much more interesting conversation about magic and what it means to suspend disbelief and imagine something greater than I think that you do in you know, and then outside of that context, outside of the context of blackness. You know, from the beginning to the end of an effect, you oftentimes have everybody's undivided attention, and when you think about other forms of art, that's quite
rare to capture. I think one of the things that's so powerful about black magicians throughout history it's when you know, back in the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds is one of the few places that black people were allowed to perform, where they were especially allowed to perform for white audiences, which is a really important part about Henry Box's Brown
story and the work that he was doing there. Part of it is because he wanted to and part of it's because he was called into that work right because he used magic as a platform for advocating for the end of slavery, but also is because it's the only place he could. Magic became the way I mean him being able to escape during when the Feud Do a Slave Act was enacted and go to Europe like magic was a way for him to be able to secure his own freedom after he fought for it so desperately
on the Underground River. But think about the world that we live in today and how rarely we are granted the opportunity to hold space that way.
What do you think it is about magic that kind of goes across that barrier.
I think hope is what makes us human. And so when you introduce a conversation where people get the chance to hope and imagine something great, oftentimes they're in not I'm not talking about like the you know, the segregation that prevents black people from being seen in magic and all of that. We all know it's really difficult to this day for black people to get the same stages.
But I'm talking about in that moment, right when we're not talking about the structural stuff, but two people, when you get to see a magic trick, oftentimes people are drawn in to that end and they want to see the end of that conversation and they want to see the outcome. We walk through life always feeling like we have to expect the worst, any kind of like in uncertainty or hesitation, right, we bar ourselves up around it,
especially marginalized people navigating this world. Right, And so to be able to allow yourself like, oh, this card, this flimsy, little random piece of paper is going to move from one place to the next or vanish and reappear I'm down and I want to hold I want to see that happen.
Y'all can keep up with Nicole and her tour dates at black girl Magician dot com or at black Girl Magician.
On social Before we go, It's time for roll credits, where we give credit to something or someone that's on our hearts. This week, I'd like to give credit to houseplants. My houseplants are growing very nicely, and my houseplants are black house plants, and they know that, and so they keep my air nice and clean inside my house. Thank you, houseplants.
How do they know they're black? How do you know that they know they're black?
Because everything else in my house is black. So they just they recognize like black recognized black. Period.
So this week I would like to give credit to all of the people who are preserving and practicing and passing along traditions of their own spiritual medicines and indigenous
traditions of healing. We talked a lot today about some of the questionable practices of Black Hermon and the tonics that he was giving people, But there are so many people who are actually using our knowledge of herbal medicine to create tonics that make people better, that make them feel better, that make them heal in so many different ways, and so I just want to give a shout out to all of the people who have that knowledge and
are sharing it with others. We'll be back next week with another episode.
Bye Zia.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison.
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