November 2, 2023 • 40 mins
If you’re an artist, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to create art that you’re not happy with at some point. But when Black artists have to look back at past works that didn’t age well on the race front, the regret can run deep. In this episode, Katie and Yves dive into Octavia E. Butler’s, Viola Davis's, and Ernest Hogan’s stories of remorse and reckoning.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
On Theme is a production of iHeart Radio and fair
Weather Friends Media. Today's episode of On Theme we might
(00:22):
regret this episode later.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Ah coom look alike to me.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm Katie and I'm Eves, And today's story starts with regret.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Oh, so we're gonna go d with this one? Should
I grab some tissues?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I mean, a little bit of soul searching and accountability
is required to write this rut.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
So okay, I'm ready, I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So you know, we talked in a previous episode about
how art making really forces us to try in public,
and sometimes we're happy with the outcome of that process,
but sometimes we don't love what comes out of the
other end. Sometimes we want to stuff it in the
back of a dark drawer, or bury it under ten
feet of dense Georgia clay, or better yet, pretend like
(01:48):
it never even existed. But because we can't turn back
the clock, we are forced to live with our regret.
So rather than treat the shameful work like a beautiful
baby that we birthed into a harsh, harsh world, might
choose to disown it instead treat it like in a
strange child.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
You know that sounds dramatic, but it is kind of
that serious folks will put a lot of time and
effort into some of their creations and then be ashamed
of them or whish they never created them in the
first place.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Are you speaking from experience, Katie? Are you the folks
you speak of?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I'm not too proud of it that there's no work
or too or several in my past that I wish
would have never seen the law to day for real?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
And which ones are those?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
You ain't gonna ask me the question, would you care
to tell everyone about your most embarrassing pieces?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Nah? Honestly not.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I think I'm good exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
It could be cathartic, though, And the thing is we're
not alone in our artistic regret. There are plenty of
people who have put things out for eyes and ears
and hearts and minds to enjoy and then poop poot
them later.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, And it's not always about poor judgment or bad
are either. It can be way more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
For sure. And it could just be that we get
older in our perspectives shift.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Or it could be that whatever message we are trying
to convey no longer says right with us.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Or it could be that the quality of the art
doesn't hold up to our current standard.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Or maybe we worked with the collaborator who's no longer
our favorite person.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
You get it. The reasons abound, but regret can hit
a little differently when you're a black artist. From the
jump in our art in storytelling, we can be forced
into certain roles, expected to act certain ways and talk
about certain things. We're stereotyped and we're type cast. We've
taken opportunities when we were hard up and jobbed. We're
(03:36):
few and far between, and we say and we say,
you felt that one, didn't you? I know that I
need and you are not alone in that. And we
say things about race before our thoughts have fully matured
or evolved. We stared down our own internalized racism.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
We're human, We make mistakes, we grow, we change our
minds period.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
And does that get even more complicated when you're dealing
with societies that have lots of hang ups around race,
Ones that love and hate to talk about race at
the same damn time. Ones We're feelings about blackness and
black people change on a dime, And sometimes we regret
work that did not age well in the race Department,
(04:21):
And that can be a heavy pill to swallow, because
a law can we carry the burden of race on
our shoulders. We ain't even have nothing to do with
this construction in the first place, But that regret can
feel pretty icky. But after that feeling has settled in
and we've come to terms with the fact that we've
done something we're not fully rocking with anymore, we get
the chance to choose how we're going to reckon with
(04:44):
our regret. And this is where we get to the
story of Ernest Hogan.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Part one, Ernest's Regret, Ernest Hegan.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
You remember that song that we heard up top. That's
the song that Ernest Hogan, a black man born just
a couple of months before Juneteenth in eighteen sixty five,
composed and wrote. But we'll come back to that song later.
So Ernest Hogan was born with the name Ernest Rubin
Crotis Junior, but he later started using the last name
(05:26):
Hogan for reasons that remained mysterious. One of many guesses
is that he took the name Hogan to capitalize on
the popularity of Irish performers at the time. But whether
that's true or not, and beyond if it was that
his clever marketing skills. Hogan was a man of many talents.
His work in the entertainment business began when he was
just a child. He was in the circus and traveling
(05:49):
minstrual troops. He acted in performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and eventually he moved on to vaudeville acts. Hogan busted
his chops on the stage, making it big with his performance.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Proless okay quick break for definitions. Miss shows were performance
in the eighteen hundreds where white actors in blackface would
be caricatures of black people in comedic sketches, or so
they thought were funny, and was the case with Hogan.
There were also black minstrel performers in groups who were
also in blackface. So by the beginning of the twentieth century,
(06:21):
mister shows were not as popular as they were in
the eighteen hundreds. And as you said, Bauville took that
spotlight instead, and those shows contained a bunch of different
acts like magic, comedy, dancing, singing. They was doing a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
True true, Thank you for that breakdown, Katie, So Hogan,
he had a lot of acclaim and the money followed too.
In nineteen oh one, he was reportedly one of the
highest paid Black Vautville entertainers of his time. So by
the end of the eighteen hundreds, Hogan had done his
laps around the business. He'd already made a noteworthy impact
on stage performance in the United States. But another field
(06:57):
where he made his name was music. As authors Lynn
Abbott and Doug Saroff put it in the book Out
of Sight, The Rise of African American Popular Music eighteen
eighty nine to eighteen ninety five, quote Ernest Hogan was
a conspicuous player in RAGTIME's initial commercial inscendency end quote.
In fact, he was called the father of ragtime during
his life. The people recognized Hogan's hand in the birth
(07:20):
and the success of the musical genre, even though its
origins preceded his published works. In it, ragtime music is
usually performed on the piano. Think of this. Hogan published
Lapa malaw in eighteen ninety five and called it a
(07:41):
rag The song even had a dance to go with it.
The lyrics went like this, hand upon your head, let
your mind roll far back back back and look at
the stars. Stand up rightly, dance it brightly. That's the
pass ma law ay sounds familiar.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I could think of a few songs from the early
they used a similar formula.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Because we were in the cafeteria dancing to their tailors.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Girl.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
It was an era, but yes, lapal Mala was a hit. Still,
it didn't create quite the buzz that the song Hogan
released the next year.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
Did.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Let me guess that's the song we heard at the
beginning of this episode.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Hmm, exactly. So we'll get into it after the break
and we're back and we're coming in hot with coon
songs sounds like my kind of diddy. I stop playing.
We are being serious here, Okay, okay, I'm trying to
(08:42):
give the people a history.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I I'll buy note.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So, coon songs were kind of like minstrel shows in
music form. They featured stereotypes of black people, and in
the eighteen nineties these songs were set to ragtime music
and ooh Katie. So called coon songs had a moment.
White folks ate these songs up the black dialect, the
positioning of black folks as inferior, black life being the
(09:08):
butt of the joke, all wrapped up in the neat
package of a jolly little tune that can be enjoyed
on a sunny Southern morning. Most cone songs were composed
by white people, but many were created by black folks,
and these songs were super popular in the late nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth The sheet music sold
really well, allowing white folks to perform the songs themselves
(09:31):
and to ingest and reproduce the stereotypes portrayed in them.
Of course, black folks had a lot of feelings about
coon songs. They perpetuated negative caricatures of Black people, and
they reinforced racism. White folks sung these syrupy, lively songs,
happily pleased to say words out loud that disparaged black folks.
(09:53):
Black and white people were so called coon shouters aka
singers of these songs, but white women got the most
notoriety from singing these numbers. Some black critics and musicians
rejected kum songs as harmful and crude. Others acknowledged how
they were crafted and performed skillfully about black entertainers, and
that they had gained popularity worldwide. So these songs gave
(10:15):
black entertainers opportunities, and they were testaments to their musical skill.
But what what was the cost of that.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
It just shows that we'd be talking about the same
stuff over and over, like has there been a new conversation,
because it really reminds me of like, do you remember
when Shotty low Ipraphy he was trying to have a
reality TV show called All My Baby Mamas.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I don't remember that. That sounds like parody, and I
don't remember that.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Nigga's a protested why people were mad. They're like, oh
my god, this is like showing stereotypes. Dad da da
da okay, And like five years later, here come the
Duggers with all twenty million of their kids and they
sexually assault on folks and stuff. White people were like,
let them cook, but like Black people were like, oh,
this is like so bad. It seems like it's an
example of that in every art form, like whether it's
(11:05):
reality TV, which we can like argue the merits of
its artfulness, but even like urban fiction that first of.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
All, urban fiction held us down throughout the middle school years.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh my god, we was passing in books site. But
like during Bill Cutton's campaign he went after urban fiction,
talking about Sister Soldia in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I don't remember that.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It's like do I think, like, as you said, white
people should be getting like rich off of singing coon songs. No,
but like should black people maybe.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah, which also I mean there's a whole layer of
respectability of politics that's involved in it.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Us wanted to look good in front of massive Essentially
how we choose to express ourselves out in public being
something that's highly policed by us ourselves, and here in
returns the internalized racism.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
But I mean, when you're when you've been police for
so long, you can take the police away because there's
a cop that lives in your head exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
It's subsumed as part of you now. And of course,
like I don't want to minimize that, because these are
questions that we should be asking. It's just that so
frequently we turn to this more so authoritative or definitive
way of looking at it rather than Okay, let's sit
down and think about the nuances of this should we
be doing or should we not? And I think that
(12:27):
also comes down to the conversations that we should be
having in public, and that conversations that should be happening
in private. But these coon songs are already something that
are so widely disseminated that they have their own gravity
at that point. So I can see how much turmoil
that causes in us collectively and individually because they've taken
(12:49):
on this life of their own. And it's like it's
so many things, because there's also the layer of us
choosing to and wanting to share our work beyond ourselves
and not being able to control how other people use it.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
I think it has a lot to do with shame too.
I'm trying to be empathetic for the people who are like,
we need to like not do this anymore, because I'm
trying to think, has there been an occasion where I
heard some piece of music or a movie or something
where I'm like, this should not be allowed And I
can't really think of one because there's just so many
people in the world. It's like some people can do
(13:26):
this coon shit, and some people can do like more
like you know, things that I would want to listen
to or watch or read. Stereotypes have truth in them,
so like if you're ashamed that you like watermelon, it's
a reflection.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Is what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
You know, It's like okay, like eat your watermelon, It's okay.
But I think it's like that shame and like that
respectability that you talked about, Like, oh, like, we can't
do this thing because it's perceived this way, even if
it's not a bad thing. So yeah, I'm trying to
be empathetic for the people who were kind of cool
on the coon songs and like trying to shut them down.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, we know that a black man composed and wrote this, Like,
now what do we do with it? Which I don't
know still hasn't been answered, but.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
It sounds like Ernest Hogan had some thoughts.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
He did he did, So now we've arrived at the
song the object of Hogan's regret, all coons look alike
to me subtitled A Darky Misunderstanding. First of all, I
love that subtitle.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Ray He's like, in case she did not understand.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
All coons look alike to me, I've got love the ball.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So to some up the story of the song, the narrator,
who's a black man, has a significant other named Lucy,
but she's not worried about him because she got a
new man who treats her even better. Plus, all coons
black men look the same to her anyway, so it
doesn't even matter which one she chooses. The narrator, on
the other hand, has not moved on. He doesn't understand
(14:49):
her change of heart, and he's hurt by what she said.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Rightfully so, Hogan died of tuberculosis in nineteen oh nine,
but of course the impact of his work and so
called Coon song in general lived on. Let me be clear,
I am not interested in belittling his accomplishments in stage
work are pioneer status in ragtime, But I am interested
in Hogan's feelings about all coons look alike to me
(15:13):
after he released it to the world. In the book
One hundred Years of the Negro in show Business by
fellow Black vaudeville entertainer Tom Fletcher, Fletcher talks about a
conversation that he had with Hogan. According to Fletcher, Hogan
said that the word kon was controversial, sure, but it
made him money at a time when making money was hard,
and it put some money in many other entertainer's pockets too,
(15:37):
And he said it injected more life into show business.
He pointed out how people went on to do their
own versions of the song without the word koon. I
put it on, and he acknowledged the musicians who played
Ragtime in back rooms, but never published their work. His
(16:00):
Ragtime Songs controversy over the content, notwithstanding documented a history
that could have been lost or at least fallen by
the wayside, had he not produced them. Fletcher paraphrased Hogan
in the book quote, with nothing but time on my hands. Now,
I often wonder if I was right or wrong. So
(16:22):
the thing that my mind is really pondering is the
fact that his name followed the recording everywhere, Like everything
you see in On, no matter who's sang it is
like this was composed by Ernest Hogan. So there were
many others who sang it, but we knew who it
was attributed to, and he just can't escape that reputation.
(16:43):
No matter what context is being presented in. Even if
there is conversation around the complexity of his legacy, the
issue with it being a Kon song and the word
Kon and the context of it all is still the
starting point of that conversation. Today, I feel a way
even talking about him now because it's like, yes, I
still get to talk about him, his very important legacy,
(17:06):
all that he accomplished, But the starting point of this
conversation is still about that work and the regret.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, he's probably like rolling around his grave that we're
talking about him like this, right hery is I got
wrote other shit took.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Another example of this kind of race related regret that
falls on the shoulders of black storytellers is Octavia Butler's
novel Survivor.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Part two Octavia is Regret.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Survivor was published in nineteen seventy eight is part of
her Patterness series, which also includes the books Pattern master
Mind of My Mind while Seed and Clay's Arc, but
Survivor wasn't included in the series its compilation Seet to
Harvest that was published in two thousand and seven. That's
because Butler didn't want anything to do with Survivor after
(18:08):
it was released. Survivor is set on another planet. The
book revolves around Alana, who was adopted by the Missionaries.
The Missionaries are a group of Christian humans who left
Earth due to the threat of the Clay Arc plague.
The native inhabitants of the planet, the Cone, have fur
and can change colors, but they are relatively human like.
(18:29):
Their social roles are determined by their fur color, and
there are rival tribes of Cone on the planet and
Alana ends up having to negotiate her way between the
missionaries and the two tribes in order to help save
the missionaries. Of course, folks have different feelings about the book.
There are readers that have recognized its merits and its flaws.
(18:51):
They've respected Butler's wish for it never to be reprinted,
and also said that it deserves a reprint. But regardless
of the criticism and pray, Butler did not like the novel.
She expressed this feeling in multiple interviews. In nineteen ninety,
Randall Keenan interviewed Octavia Butler over the phone for the
journal Kalalou. One of the things that I was most
(19:15):
embarrassed about in my novel Survivor is my human characters
going off to another planet and finding other people they
could immediately start having children with. Later, I thought, oh, well,
you can't really erase embarrassing early work, but you don't
have to repeat it. Octavia didn't erase it, but she
did make sure it wasn't disseminated much more widely than
(19:37):
it already was. She thought that the book wasn't finished
yet when she sold it to Double Day. She even
said at one point that she sold it because she
needed money to travel to do research for her other work,
a little book you might have heard of called Kindred.
She clearly wasn't proud of Survivor's treatment of race and species.
This is what she said in an interview with Teresa
(19:58):
Lyttleton for Amazon. When I was young, a lot of
people wrote about going to another world and finding either
little green men or little brown men, and they were
always less in some way. They were a little sly
or a little like the natives in a very bad
old movie. And I thought, no way, apart from all
(20:20):
these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage.
People ask me why I don't like Survivor, my third novel,
and it's because it feels a little bit like that
some humans go up to another world and immediately begin
meeting with the aliens and having children with them. I
think of it as my star Trek novel. Making art
(20:45):
is hard, and we can be our own worst critics,
and Butler did her fair share of publicly and privately
disavowing the book and asking people not to read it,
but it lives on. In an essay based on a
talk that she gave in twenty eleven, writer and activist
Alexis Pauline says about the novel, definitively, we need it,
and I've seen that sentiment also said by other people
(21:08):
who have commented on the work. Octavia's regret was so
deep that she didn't want the work to be reproduced anymore.
This self censorship is pretty much the opposite of what
happened with Hogan's song, which made its way onto sheet
music prints and into the mouths of plenty of performers
across time and space. Butler wanted no more witnesses, wanted
the story of Survivor to end there. But despite her
(21:31):
disdain and reasons for disliking the novel, many of the
people who did read it responded with consideration and thoughtfulness.
We're going to make work we don't love, and we
can't control how people receive it. Both Hogan and Butler's
stories feel like exercises in letting go, but from opposite
ends of a spectrum.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I wonder if the afterlife of these works deal with
the amount of autonomy like Octavia Butler had as opposed
to Ernest Hogan, they lived in different times and spaces,
and I mean by that point she was a well
known writer, and we you know, had gained significantly more
rights at that point, so she was able to censor
(22:13):
it to a certain extent. But like you said, Hogan's
just went on and despite him like, hey, I don't
like this song anymore. It's also very like comforting to
know that someone like as talented as Octavia Butler was like,
I was just doing this for check so I could
do the thing I really wanted to do, And it
sounds like she knew was like, Okay, these are the
(22:34):
books that were popular when I was a kid, Like,
let me just write one because I know it'll sell.
And I guess not really thinking too far into the
future of like, oh, like then I won't want people
to read it, though.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
But I wonder how much of that processing was happening
while she was writing it versus once it's published, because
at that point she had an opportunity to see how
people did respond to it. And it's one of those
things too, where you can't control how people receive it.
But I think that in this case, there is a
lot of ambiguity, way more ambiguity in her work than
(23:05):
there was in Hogan's. Like the conversation around race colonialism, captivity,
all of the things that come up in this work,
and so so many more.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
It is, like, I think, easier to misinterpret.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I think in the case of Octavia Butler's work is
more of a situation where the more you think about it,
the more many different ways you can flip it. Because
it's a plot, it's in its own genre, and there
are so many ways you can take it. Versus Ernest
Hogan's song was like a very straightforward plot. If we
think of it in terms of storytelling, it's not that
(23:42):
hard to follow versus how we can you can choose
to take one way down the road versus another way
down the road. When we think about things in Octavia Butler's.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Novel, right, I think people will misinterpret things all the time,
or like ascribe certain metaphors or meanings when there really
isn't any. But I think when that happens, and it's
like on the positive side, the author will be like, yee.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Ye, I thought, was it that sound good enough? Regret
HiT's different. In the Internet age, stuff lives on and
it's not ever going away. We have scream shots, ar
(24:30):
coved web pages, secret recordings, all kinds of receipts, so
it's easy for us to be reminded of our regrets.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I think with the Internet, the regrets cycle is probably
much quicker, just because once you put something out there,
there are you know, blogs that can like write something
about it, there's people on social media who can comment,
and you see it in real time, like it gets
flashed on your phone. You see the person like you
(24:59):
can basically see the person typing it out with the
little dots like oh this sucks or whatever, or oh
like this is so problematic or whatever the case may be.
And then you know, depending on how big your audiences,
that criticism might be on like the front pages of
New York Times, you'd.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Be like, oh damn.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
But that being said, I think the regret is probably
more instantaneous because of the Internet. But I don't know
if the artist expresses that regret because I feel like
people be like very defensive.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
So this makes me think of Viola Davis in the
twenty eleven movie The Help, which is based on a
novel of the same name by a white woman named
Catherine Stockett.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
Part three, Viola's Regret.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Go and google Viola Davis The Help, and you'll find
plenty of articles written over several years talking about how
she has misgivings about the story and taking the role.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Yeah, and if you haven't read or watched The Help,
I'll sum it up for you. The story said in
nineteen sixties Mississippi. In it, a white woman named Skeeter
collects the stories of black domestic workers for a book
that she's writing. The workers are treated poorly, and part
of Skeeter's mission is to expose this treatment. Once she
gets enough of the workers to open up, she finishes
the book, publishes it anonymously, and gives the profits to
(26:27):
the workers. Yola Davis plays Abilene Clark. Her character is
the film's narrator and a nanny who raises a white
socialized child. In the end, she leaves her job and
decides to become a writer.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
No one that ever asks me what it feels like
to be me. Once I told the truth about that,
I felt free.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
The movie was criticized for its white saviorism and its
forefronting of the white characters versus the black one that
the plot was actually focused on. In an interview with
Vanity Fair Viola, Davis talked about the conflicting feelings that
she had about the help. She felt like, quote, it
wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard.
Speaker 7 (27:13):
Playing a maid in twenty and eleven, and you know
my Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. It was like, that
was just so a part of how I saw it.
I saw stereotype, and I didn't want to put that
out there. I didn't want to be kind of blasted
(27:34):
by the African American community, especially to be totally honest,
but there is no way that you can read this
book and look at the script, and even look at
this movie and say that anyone was a stereotype.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
In that interview, you can hear her really wrestling with
so many things, the history of black women in film
playing stereotypical roles, her admiration for black actors who came
before her, like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly me queen, her
desire to play characters that are a round and complicated,
her hesitance to play a character that could be viewed
as tasteless or flat, her fear about receiving negative criticism
(28:11):
from black audience members, and her desire to take roles
that are meaningful, challenging, and worthy. Of her time in legacy.
She clearly wanted to make good art be part of
a story that was told.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Well.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, And in that last part where she talks about
how the characters are not stereotypes in the book, it
takes you back to Hogan's regret, how there were definitely
stereotypes in Hogan's music and Coon songs in general, but
he recognized that the situation wasn't so black and white.
But at the same time, it was like they felt
the way of the race on their shoulders. They felt
some sort of responsibility for representing the race well, being
(28:46):
good black stewards, not disappointing the Black delegation. Davis even
said in a twenty eighteen New York Times interview, the
responsibility of feeling like I am the great black female
hope for women of color has been a real professional challenge.
Being that role model and picking up that baton when
you're struggling in your own life has been difficult.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I really wish that we could release this weight for real.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
This predicament does also make me think, though, of the
difference between regretting your own work versus regretting being in
a part of someone else's. What do you mean by that, Like,
I feel like it probably hits different for Viola Davis
to be in like these white people's movie portraying the stereotype.
Like maybe if you wrote it and you're like, okay,
(29:28):
that was like in bad taste, or like I didn't
know enough and it was my thing and you can
kind of take full ownership over it, versus like I
was low key just like a pod and I'm embarrassed
now and you feel all this weight for like disappointing
Black people are not like portraying black people how you
wanted to or you think we should be portrayed, and
he was just like an employee.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah. I can't speak for a Viola Davis, but I
would imagine that's probably a different kind of shame. I
guess if shame would be the word to use, because
I guess the decision making was different. When you're writing
your own work or creating your own work, then you're
able to make those decisions at every step of the way.
But when you're stepping into something that has been fully
(30:12):
formed already and you're just one piece of the puzzle
in the entire ty of the image, then I can
see what you mean.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, have you heard of
that movie called The Best of Enemies? So Taraji p
Hinson is in it, and people kind of had the
same criticism. So it's like about this black woman who
befriends uh Kukuks clan member and they like form this
like unlikely duo.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
First of all, I'm not you're making this sound like
a buddy comedy.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
And try out.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
The way that the black woman that Taraji p Hinson
is playing and Atwater is portrayed is just like this
a you know, like there's no depth. She's just like
there as like a placeholder when she was like a
whole civil rights activist. But like when people pointed that
out to Taraji, she was very like defensive about it,
like she didn't publicly she didn't get it. So I mean,
(31:08):
I think kudos to Viola Davis for like publicly saying
like I wouldn't do this again, and like people be
thinking like actors are super rich and they can like
turn down any job. That is not the case for
a lot of people. And I think especially for Viola
Davis back in twenty eleven, like now she's noticed this
like huge actress, but like going back in the time Machine,
(31:29):
Like did she feel empowered to be like, no, I'm
not going to take this, Like I'm good financially without
this role.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And one thing that just came up for me is
how I think, from the outside looking in this, what
Viola Davis did and also going back to Hogan, what
he did can feel like very safe bets. Like I
think if somebody looking at the help would be like,
that's a very safe role of you to take, and
at the same time, it's like also not a safe
(31:57):
role to take, because Viola Davis herself knowledged how difficult
it could be for her to take this because she
knew all of the context of the role, all the
trappings that a role like that could come with, and
the backlash that she could receive for it. And it
was the same for Hogan because it was a very
safe thing to do because minstrel cy was already very
(32:19):
popular thing. Yeah, and he knew that in creating this
song he could have a hit that many people enjoyed.
So it was like a balance between safety and risk
that they were teetering on this tight rope across a canyon. Okay, imagery.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I also think like about the popularity of certain things,
like how does that impact her regret? Because The Help
was a very popular movie. It was a very popular
buck and became a very popular movie. And it's like
if you just did like an indie film, then I
many people saw, but it was the same thing. Would
you still feel that regret or like, are you feeling
(33:03):
that regret because of it's like the echo chamber of
people like commenting on it and like more people can
see you doing this thing.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
I think echo chamber is a perfect way to put it,
because I think it's an amplification of that feeling most
likely because if I have a feeling that's personal, I
know how that feels in my body and how to
handle it. But when that feeling is exacerbated because I
have a bunch of other people basically affirming that feeling,
I would imagine it's a lot bigger. And especially when
(33:33):
you're a person who's as big as Viola Davis is
in a movie as big as The Help is, So
can't feel good. And another thing that I will say
about that too, speaking of amplification, is that it wasn't
just once that she addressed it or that people asked
her about it, right I wonder what it was like
for her to say that out loud repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I think it's also freeing, like as a up and
coming actor who may like really look up to Viola
Davis like see her doing that too, Yeah, because it
could be, you know, what someone needs to hear so
that they don't get into a role that they suspect
they might regret later, or also like, Okay, I did
(34:18):
this thing that I regret. It's not the end of
the world. I can like build upon my body of
work and like that's not the thing that I'm truly
like known for.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I love that you said that, because I don't think
there's an answer to this question that we've posed around
what does regret look like in public? For black people
who are facing race related regret in their work, It's
something that has to be worked through in every single instance,
and clearly, like seeing other people talk about it out
loud in the way that they process it can be
(34:48):
something that's helpful for other people. And I don't know
if we can put that in a neat little bow. Yeah,
you know, these aren't the last times that this is
going to happen, Absolutely not, because can't be expected to
be perfect or to know everything about race. When we
create work and we're trying to do it authentically and
fearlessly and lovingly, then things aren't always gonna come out
(35:13):
right true.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
I regret this episode.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
But seriously, we might even regret it a little bit
more now because we convince someone to sing all coons
look alike to me? Talk about a COONa having trouble.
I think I have enough fumone.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
It's all about my Lucy Jenny's stubble, and she has
caused my heart. Mon, there's another COONa Baba from Virginia
in society.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
He's the leader of the day.
Speaker 5 (35:45):
And now my honey, Galla's going to quit me. Yes,
she's gone andrew a this coon away.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
She's no excuse to turn me loose.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
I've been abused.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
Now I'm all confused because these words She then did say, Well.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
All coons look alike to me.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
I've gotten lother ball, you see, And he's just as
good to me as you Nick ever tried to be.
He spends his money efree, I know we can agree,
So I don't like you know how all coons look
alike to me?
Speaker 1 (36:21):
The person you just heard singing that song was Coley Gilchrist,
and I couldn't let her leave without talking to her
about her experience of singing all coons look alike?
Speaker 4 (36:29):
To me?
Speaker 1 (36:32):
What kind of emotions come up in you when you
think about Ernest Hogan being a black man writing this
for white audiences.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
It was off putting and it kind of felt a
bit like, you know, I was almost judging him and
thinking he was a bit of a traitor for just
saying those things about the black community and painting us
in this picture. And although it was kind of used
at black people's expense, he was trying to create a
name and probably sustain himself back.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
In those times. So how did you feel singing it?
Just now?
Speaker 5 (36:58):
It was a bit hard to to just get over
myself in a sense and to get those words out
in the atmosphere and kind of shake off, you know,
any feelings I had towards it.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
But I think the biggest thing.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
That helped me is just putting on that actress kind
of facade.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Do you have anything else to add in terms of
your feelings about this, I.
Speaker 5 (37:18):
Would just say I would love to continue. This has
opened my eyes to a person and other people, other
writers like him, that I knew nothing about, but I
think it's important to continue to be a student as
an artist and to learn about basically your ancestors and music.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I think it's really good to continue to do.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Your research and learn, learn as much as you can.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Thank you to Coli Gilchrist for singing all Koons look
alike to me. Oh, and stick around through the credits
to hear Coli sing the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
Song all right time for my favorite and only segment
of this pot roll credits, Who What? When?
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Where?
Speaker 3 (37:57):
How would you like to give credit to you?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I like to give credit to braids.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I have been wearing my hair in small braids that
I've had in for like a month now, I think,
and I just love how I don't have to do
anything to it. I'm not really thinking about how it looks.
I have to put so little energy our thought into it.
Braids are so versatile, they're so useful. They're coming in
(38:24):
so many different shapes and forms, and I'm thankful for
the brads that I have in my hair right now.
Shout out to braids.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Okay, I'd like to give credit to old friends. I've
had an old friend reach out, so shout out to you,
old friend.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
I love it. That's it for today. See y'all next
week with another episode. On Theme is a production of
iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. This episode was written
by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and
produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on
(39:09):
Theme Show. You can also send us an email at
hello at on Theme dot Show. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Never said a word to hurt
the feelings.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
I always bought a presence by the score, and now
my brain with sorrow, am or really because she won't
accept them anymore. If I treated how wrong she may
have left me like all the rest. She's gone and
let me down. If I'm lucky, I'm going to catch
my policy and win my sweet thing away from town
(39:51):
before I'm worried. Yes, I'm desperate and I've been joned
and I'll get dangerous. Oh my, if these words she
says to me, well, all coons look alike to me.
I've got another ball, you see, and he's just as
good to me as you.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Nigga ever tried to be. He spends his money EF.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
Free, and I know we can agree, So I don't
like you, know how all coons look alike to me,
On Theme is a production of iHeart Radio and fair
Weather Friends Media. Today's episode of On Theme we might
(00:22):
regret this episode later.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Ah coom look alike to me.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm Katie and I'm Eves, And today's story starts with regret.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Oh, so we're gonna go d with this one? Should
I grab some tissues?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I mean, a little bit of soul searching and accountability
is required to write this rut.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
So okay, I'm ready, I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So you know, we talked in a previous episode about
how art making really forces us to try in public,
and sometimes we're happy with the outcome of that process,
but sometimes we don't love what comes out of the
other end. Sometimes we want to stuff it in the
back of a dark drawer, or bury it under ten
feet of dense Georgia clay, or better yet, pretend like
(01:48):
it never even existed. But because we can't turn back
the clock, we are forced to live with our regret.
So rather than treat the shameful work like a beautiful
baby that we birthed into a harsh, harsh world, might
choose to disown it instead treat it like in a
strange child.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
You know that sounds dramatic, but it is kind of
that serious folks will put a lot of time and
effort into some of their creations and then be ashamed
of them or whish they never created them in the
first place.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Are you speaking from experience, Katie? Are you the folks
you speak of?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I'm not too proud of it that there's no work
or too or several in my past that I wish
would have never seen the law to day for real?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
And which ones are those?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
You ain't gonna ask me the question, would you care
to tell everyone about your most embarrassing pieces?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Nah? Honestly not.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I think I'm good exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
It could be cathartic, though, And the thing is we're
not alone in our artistic regret. There are plenty of
people who have put things out for eyes and ears
and hearts and minds to enjoy and then poop poot
them later.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, And it's not always about poor judgment or bad
are either. It can be way more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
For sure. And it could just be that we get
older in our perspectives shift.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Or it could be that whatever message we are trying
to convey no longer says right with us.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Or it could be that the quality of the art
doesn't hold up to our current standard.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Or maybe we worked with the collaborator who's no longer
our favorite person.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
You get it. The reasons abound, but regret can hit
a little differently when you're a black artist. From the
jump in our art in storytelling, we can be forced
into certain roles, expected to act certain ways and talk
about certain things. We're stereotyped and we're type cast. We've
taken opportunities when we were hard up and jobbed. We're
(03:36):
few and far between, and we say and we say,
you felt that one, didn't you? I know that I
need and you are not alone in that. And we
say things about race before our thoughts have fully matured
or evolved. We stared down our own internalized racism.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
We're human, We make mistakes, we grow, we change our
minds period.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
And does that get even more complicated when you're dealing
with societies that have lots of hang ups around race,
Ones that love and hate to talk about race at
the same damn time. Ones We're feelings about blackness and
black people change on a dime, And sometimes we regret
work that did not age well in the race Department,
(04:21):
And that can be a heavy pill to swallow, because
a law can we carry the burden of race on
our shoulders. We ain't even have nothing to do with
this construction in the first place, But that regret can
feel pretty icky. But after that feeling has settled in
and we've come to terms with the fact that we've
done something we're not fully rocking with anymore, we get
the chance to choose how we're going to reckon with
(04:44):
our regret. And this is where we get to the
story of Ernest Hogan.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Part one, Ernest's Regret, Ernest Hegan.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
You remember that song that we heard up top. That's
the song that Ernest Hogan, a black man born just
a couple of months before Juneteenth in eighteen sixty five,
composed and wrote. But we'll come back to that song later.
So Ernest Hogan was born with the name Ernest Rubin
Crotis Junior, but he later started using the last name
(05:26):
Hogan for reasons that remained mysterious. One of many guesses
is that he took the name Hogan to capitalize on
the popularity of Irish performers at the time. But whether
that's true or not, and beyond if it was that
his clever marketing skills. Hogan was a man of many talents.
His work in the entertainment business began when he was
just a child. He was in the circus and traveling
(05:49):
minstrual troops. He acted in performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and eventually he moved on to vaudeville acts. Hogan busted
his chops on the stage, making it big with his performance.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Proless okay quick break for definitions. Miss shows were performance
in the eighteen hundreds where white actors in blackface would
be caricatures of black people in comedic sketches, or so
they thought were funny, and was the case with Hogan.
There were also black minstrel performers in groups who were
also in blackface. So by the beginning of the twentieth century,
(06:21):
mister shows were not as popular as they were in
the eighteen hundreds. And as you said, Bauville took that
spotlight instead, and those shows contained a bunch of different
acts like magic, comedy, dancing, singing. They was doing a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
True true, Thank you for that breakdown, Katie, So Hogan,
he had a lot of acclaim and the money followed too.
In nineteen oh one, he was reportedly one of the
highest paid Black Vautville entertainers of his time. So by
the end of the eighteen hundreds, Hogan had done his
laps around the business. He'd already made a noteworthy impact
on stage performance in the United States. But another field
(06:57):
where he made his name was music. As authors Lynn
Abbott and Doug Saroff put it in the book Out
of Sight, The Rise of African American Popular Music eighteen
eighty nine to eighteen ninety five, quote Ernest Hogan was
a conspicuous player in RAGTIME's initial commercial inscendency end quote.
In fact, he was called the father of ragtime during
his life. The people recognized Hogan's hand in the birth
(07:20):
and the success of the musical genre, even though its
origins preceded his published works. In it, ragtime music is
usually performed on the piano. Think of this. Hogan published
Lapa malaw in eighteen ninety five and called it a
(07:41):
rag The song even had a dance to go with it.
The lyrics went like this, hand upon your head, let
your mind roll far back back back and look at
the stars. Stand up rightly, dance it brightly. That's the
pass ma law ay sounds familiar.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I could think of a few songs from the early
they used a similar formula.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Because we were in the cafeteria dancing to their tailors.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Girl.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
It was an era, but yes, lapal Mala was a hit. Still,
it didn't create quite the buzz that the song Hogan
released the next year.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
Did.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Let me guess that's the song we heard at the
beginning of this episode.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Hmm, exactly. So we'll get into it after the break
and we're back and we're coming in hot with coon
songs sounds like my kind of diddy. I stop playing.
We are being serious here, Okay, okay, I'm trying to
(08:42):
give the people a history.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I I'll buy note.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So, coon songs were kind of like minstrel shows in
music form. They featured stereotypes of black people, and in
the eighteen nineties these songs were set to ragtime music
and ooh Katie. So called coon songs had a moment.
White folks ate these songs up the black dialect, the
positioning of black folks as inferior, black life being the
(09:08):
butt of the joke, all wrapped up in the neat
package of a jolly little tune that can be enjoyed
on a sunny Southern morning. Most cone songs were composed
by white people, but many were created by black folks,
and these songs were super popular in the late nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth The sheet music sold
really well, allowing white folks to perform the songs themselves
(09:31):
and to ingest and reproduce the stereotypes portrayed in them.
Of course, black folks had a lot of feelings about
coon songs. They perpetuated negative caricatures of Black people, and
they reinforced racism. White folks sung these syrupy, lively songs,
happily pleased to say words out loud that disparaged black folks.
(09:53):
Black and white people were so called coon shouters aka
singers of these songs, but white women got the most
notoriety from singing these numbers. Some black critics and musicians
rejected kum songs as harmful and crude. Others acknowledged how
they were crafted and performed skillfully about black entertainers, and
that they had gained popularity worldwide. So these songs gave
(10:15):
black entertainers opportunities, and they were testaments to their musical skill.
But what what was the cost of that.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
It just shows that we'd be talking about the same
stuff over and over, like has there been a new conversation,
because it really reminds me of like, do you remember
when Shotty low Ipraphy he was trying to have a
reality TV show called All My Baby Mamas.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I don't remember that. That sounds like parody, and I
don't remember that.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Nigga's a protested why people were mad. They're like, oh
my god, this is like showing stereotypes. Dad da da
da okay, And like five years later, here come the
Duggers with all twenty million of their kids and they
sexually assault on folks and stuff. White people were like,
let them cook, but like Black people were like, oh,
this is like so bad. It seems like it's an
example of that in every art form, like whether it's
(11:05):
reality TV, which we can like argue the merits of
its artfulness, but even like urban fiction that first of.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
All, urban fiction held us down throughout the middle school years.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh my god, we was passing in books site. But
like during Bill Cutton's campaign he went after urban fiction,
talking about Sister Soldia in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I don't remember that.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It's like do I think, like, as you said, white
people should be getting like rich off of singing coon songs. No,
but like should black people maybe.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah, which also I mean there's a whole layer of
respectability of politics that's involved in it.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Us wanted to look good in front of massive Essentially
how we choose to express ourselves out in public being
something that's highly policed by us ourselves, and here in
returns the internalized racism.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
But I mean, when you're when you've been police for
so long, you can take the police away because there's
a cop that lives in your head exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
It's subsumed as part of you now. And of course,
like I don't want to minimize that, because these are
questions that we should be asking. It's just that so
frequently we turn to this more so authoritative or definitive
way of looking at it rather than Okay, let's sit
down and think about the nuances of this should we
be doing or should we not? And I think that
(12:27):
also comes down to the conversations that we should be
having in public, and that conversations that should be happening
in private. But these coon songs are already something that
are so widely disseminated that they have their own gravity
at that point. So I can see how much turmoil
that causes in us collectively and individually because they've taken
(12:49):
on this life of their own. And it's like it's
so many things, because there's also the layer of us
choosing to and wanting to share our work beyond ourselves
and not being able to control how other people use it.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
I think it has a lot to do with shame too.
I'm trying to be empathetic for the people who are like,
we need to like not do this anymore, because I'm
trying to think, has there been an occasion where I
heard some piece of music or a movie or something
where I'm like, this should not be allowed And I
can't really think of one because there's just so many
people in the world. It's like some people can do
(13:26):
this coon shit, and some people can do like more
like you know, things that I would want to listen
to or watch or read. Stereotypes have truth in them,
so like if you're ashamed that you like watermelon, it's
a reflection.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Is what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
You know, It's like okay, like eat your watermelon, It's okay.
But I think it's like that shame and like that
respectability that you talked about, Like, oh, like, we can't
do this thing because it's perceived this way, even if
it's not a bad thing. So yeah, I'm trying to
be empathetic for the people who were kind of cool
on the coon songs and like trying to shut them down.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, we know that a black man composed and wrote this, Like,
now what do we do with it? Which I don't
know still hasn't been answered, but.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
It sounds like Ernest Hogan had some thoughts.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
He did he did, So now we've arrived at the
song the object of Hogan's regret, all coons look alike
to me subtitled A Darky Misunderstanding. First of all, I
love that subtitle.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Ray He's like, in case she did not understand.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
All coons look alike to me, I've got love the ball.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So to some up the story of the song, the narrator,
who's a black man, has a significant other named Lucy,
but she's not worried about him because she got a
new man who treats her even better. Plus, all coons
black men look the same to her anyway, so it
doesn't even matter which one she chooses. The narrator, on
the other hand, has not moved on. He doesn't understand
(14:49):
her change of heart, and he's hurt by what she said.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Rightfully so, Hogan died of tuberculosis in nineteen oh nine,
but of course the impact of his work and so
called Coon song in general lived on. Let me be clear,
I am not interested in belittling his accomplishments in stage
work are pioneer status in ragtime, But I am interested
in Hogan's feelings about all coons look alike to me
(15:13):
after he released it to the world. In the book
One hundred Years of the Negro in show Business by
fellow Black vaudeville entertainer Tom Fletcher, Fletcher talks about a
conversation that he had with Hogan. According to Fletcher, Hogan
said that the word kon was controversial, sure, but it
made him money at a time when making money was hard,
and it put some money in many other entertainer's pockets too,
(15:37):
And he said it injected more life into show business.
He pointed out how people went on to do their
own versions of the song without the word koon. I
put it on, and he acknowledged the musicians who played
Ragtime in back rooms, but never published their work. His
(16:00):
Ragtime Songs controversy over the content, notwithstanding documented a history
that could have been lost or at least fallen by
the wayside, had he not produced them. Fletcher paraphrased Hogan
in the book quote, with nothing but time on my hands. Now,
I often wonder if I was right or wrong. So
(16:22):
the thing that my mind is really pondering is the
fact that his name followed the recording everywhere, Like everything
you see in On, no matter who's sang it is
like this was composed by Ernest Hogan. So there were
many others who sang it, but we knew who it
was attributed to, and he just can't escape that reputation.
(16:43):
No matter what context is being presented in. Even if
there is conversation around the complexity of his legacy, the
issue with it being a Kon song and the word
Kon and the context of it all is still the
starting point of that conversation. Today, I feel a way
even talking about him now because it's like, yes, I
still get to talk about him, his very important legacy,
(17:06):
all that he accomplished, But the starting point of this
conversation is still about that work and the regret.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, he's probably like rolling around his grave that we're
talking about him like this, right hery is I got
wrote other shit took.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Another example of this kind of race related regret that
falls on the shoulders of black storytellers is Octavia Butler's
novel Survivor.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Part two Octavia is Regret.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Survivor was published in nineteen seventy eight is part of
her Patterness series, which also includes the books Pattern master
Mind of My Mind while Seed and Clay's Arc, but
Survivor wasn't included in the series its compilation Seet to
Harvest that was published in two thousand and seven. That's
because Butler didn't want anything to do with Survivor after
(18:08):
it was released. Survivor is set on another planet. The
book revolves around Alana, who was adopted by the Missionaries.
The Missionaries are a group of Christian humans who left
Earth due to the threat of the Clay Arc plague.
The native inhabitants of the planet, the Cone, have fur
and can change colors, but they are relatively human like.
(18:29):
Their social roles are determined by their fur color, and
there are rival tribes of Cone on the planet and
Alana ends up having to negotiate her way between the
missionaries and the two tribes in order to help save
the missionaries. Of course, folks have different feelings about the book.
There are readers that have recognized its merits and its flaws.
(18:51):
They've respected Butler's wish for it never to be reprinted,
and also said that it deserves a reprint. But regardless
of the criticism and pray, Butler did not like the novel.
She expressed this feeling in multiple interviews. In nineteen ninety,
Randall Keenan interviewed Octavia Butler over the phone for the
journal Kalalou. One of the things that I was most
(19:15):
embarrassed about in my novel Survivor is my human characters
going off to another planet and finding other people they
could immediately start having children with. Later, I thought, oh, well,
you can't really erase embarrassing early work, but you don't
have to repeat it. Octavia didn't erase it, but she
did make sure it wasn't disseminated much more widely than
(19:37):
it already was. She thought that the book wasn't finished
yet when she sold it to Double Day. She even
said at one point that she sold it because she
needed money to travel to do research for her other work,
a little book you might have heard of called Kindred.
She clearly wasn't proud of Survivor's treatment of race and species.
This is what she said in an interview with Teresa
(19:58):
Lyttleton for Amazon. When I was young, a lot of
people wrote about going to another world and finding either
little green men or little brown men, and they were
always less in some way. They were a little sly
or a little like the natives in a very bad
old movie. And I thought, no way, apart from all
(20:20):
these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage.
People ask me why I don't like Survivor, my third novel,
and it's because it feels a little bit like that
some humans go up to another world and immediately begin
meeting with the aliens and having children with them. I
think of it as my star Trek novel. Making art
(20:45):
is hard, and we can be our own worst critics,
and Butler did her fair share of publicly and privately
disavowing the book and asking people not to read it,
but it lives on. In an essay based on a
talk that she gave in twenty eleven, writer and activist
Alexis Pauline says about the novel, definitively, we need it,
and I've seen that sentiment also said by other people
(21:08):
who have commented on the work. Octavia's regret was so
deep that she didn't want the work to be reproduced anymore.
This self censorship is pretty much the opposite of what
happened with Hogan's song, which made its way onto sheet
music prints and into the mouths of plenty of performers
across time and space. Butler wanted no more witnesses, wanted
the story of Survivor to end there. But despite her
(21:31):
disdain and reasons for disliking the novel, many of the
people who did read it responded with consideration and thoughtfulness.
We're going to make work we don't love, and we
can't control how people receive it. Both Hogan and Butler's
stories feel like exercises in letting go, but from opposite
ends of a spectrum.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I wonder if the afterlife of these works deal with
the amount of autonomy like Octavia Butler had as opposed
to Ernest Hogan, they lived in different times and spaces,
and I mean by that point she was a well
known writer, and we you know, had gained significantly more
rights at that point, so she was able to censor
(22:13):
it to a certain extent. But like you said, Hogan's
just went on and despite him like, hey, I don't
like this song anymore. It's also very like comforting to
know that someone like as talented as Octavia Butler was like,
I was just doing this for check so I could
do the thing I really wanted to do, And it
sounds like she knew was like, Okay, these are the
(22:34):
books that were popular when I was a kid, Like,
let me just write one because I know it'll sell.
And I guess not really thinking too far into the
future of like, oh, like then I won't want people
to read it, though.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
But I wonder how much of that processing was happening
while she was writing it versus once it's published, because
at that point she had an opportunity to see how
people did respond to it. And it's one of those
things too, where you can't control how people receive it.
But I think that in this case, there is a
lot of ambiguity, way more ambiguity in her work than
(23:05):
there was in Hogan's. Like the conversation around race colonialism, captivity,
all of the things that come up in this work,
and so so many more.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
It is, like, I think, easier to misinterpret.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I think in the case of Octavia Butler's work is
more of a situation where the more you think about it,
the more many different ways you can flip it. Because
it's a plot, it's in its own genre, and there
are so many ways you can take it. Versus Ernest
Hogan's song was like a very straightforward plot. If we
think of it in terms of storytelling, it's not that
(23:42):
hard to follow versus how we can you can choose
to take one way down the road versus another way
down the road. When we think about things in Octavia Butler's.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Novel, right, I think people will misinterpret things all the time,
or like ascribe certain metaphors or meanings when there really
isn't any. But I think when that happens, and it's
like on the positive side, the author will be like, yee.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Ye, I thought, was it that sound good enough? Regret
HiT's different. In the Internet age, stuff lives on and
it's not ever going away. We have scream shots, ar
(24:30):
coved web pages, secret recordings, all kinds of receipts, so
it's easy for us to be reminded of our regrets.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I think with the Internet, the regrets cycle is probably
much quicker, just because once you put something out there,
there are you know, blogs that can like write something
about it, there's people on social media who can comment,
and you see it in real time, like it gets
flashed on your phone. You see the person like you
(24:59):
can basically see the person typing it out with the
little dots like oh this sucks or whatever, or oh
like this is so problematic or whatever the case may be.
And then you know, depending on how big your audiences,
that criticism might be on like the front pages of
New York Times, you'd.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Be like, oh damn.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
But that being said, I think the regret is probably
more instantaneous because of the Internet. But I don't know
if the artist expresses that regret because I feel like
people be like very defensive.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
So this makes me think of Viola Davis in the
twenty eleven movie The Help, which is based on a
novel of the same name by a white woman named
Catherine Stockett.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
Part three, Viola's Regret.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Go and google Viola Davis The Help, and you'll find
plenty of articles written over several years talking about how
she has misgivings about the story and taking the role.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Yeah, and if you haven't read or watched The Help,
I'll sum it up for you. The story said in
nineteen sixties Mississippi. In it, a white woman named Skeeter
collects the stories of black domestic workers for a book
that she's writing. The workers are treated poorly, and part
of Skeeter's mission is to expose this treatment. Once she
gets enough of the workers to open up, she finishes
the book, publishes it anonymously, and gives the profits to
(26:27):
the workers. Yola Davis plays Abilene Clark. Her character is
the film's narrator and a nanny who raises a white
socialized child. In the end, she leaves her job and
decides to become a writer.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
No one that ever asks me what it feels like
to be me. Once I told the truth about that,
I felt free.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
The movie was criticized for its white saviorism and its
forefronting of the white characters versus the black one that
the plot was actually focused on. In an interview with
Vanity Fair Viola, Davis talked about the conflicting feelings that
she had about the help. She felt like, quote, it
wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard.
Speaker 7 (27:13):
Playing a maid in twenty and eleven, and you know
my Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. It was like, that
was just so a part of how I saw it.
I saw stereotype, and I didn't want to put that
out there. I didn't want to be kind of blasted
(27:34):
by the African American community, especially to be totally honest,
but there is no way that you can read this
book and look at the script, and even look at
this movie and say that anyone was a stereotype.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
In that interview, you can hear her really wrestling with
so many things, the history of black women in film
playing stereotypical roles, her admiration for black actors who came
before her, like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly me queen, her
desire to play characters that are a round and complicated,
her hesitance to play a character that could be viewed
as tasteless or flat, her fear about receiving negative criticism
(28:11):
from black audience members, and her desire to take roles
that are meaningful, challenging, and worthy. Of her time in legacy.
She clearly wanted to make good art be part of
a story that was told.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Well.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, And in that last part where she talks about
how the characters are not stereotypes in the book, it
takes you back to Hogan's regret, how there were definitely
stereotypes in Hogan's music and Coon songs in general, but
he recognized that the situation wasn't so black and white.
But at the same time, it was like they felt
the way of the race on their shoulders. They felt
some sort of responsibility for representing the race well, being
(28:46):
good black stewards, not disappointing the Black delegation. Davis even
said in a twenty eighteen New York Times interview, the
responsibility of feeling like I am the great black female
hope for women of color has been a real professional challenge.
Being that role model and picking up that baton when
you're struggling in your own life has been difficult.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I really wish that we could release this weight for real.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
This predicament does also make me think, though, of the
difference between regretting your own work versus regretting being in
a part of someone else's. What do you mean by that, Like,
I feel like it probably hits different for Viola Davis
to be in like these white people's movie portraying the stereotype.
Like maybe if you wrote it and you're like, okay,
(29:28):
that was like in bad taste, or like I didn't
know enough and it was my thing and you can
kind of take full ownership over it, versus like I
was low key just like a pod and I'm embarrassed
now and you feel all this weight for like disappointing
Black people are not like portraying black people how you
wanted to or you think we should be portrayed, and
he was just like an employee.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah. I can't speak for a Viola Davis, but I
would imagine that's probably a different kind of shame. I
guess if shame would be the word to use, because
I guess the decision making was different. When you're writing
your own work or creating your own work, then you're
able to make those decisions at every step of the way.
But when you're stepping into something that has been fully
(30:12):
formed already and you're just one piece of the puzzle
in the entire ty of the image, then I can
see what you mean.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, have you heard of
that movie called The Best of Enemies? So Taraji p
Hinson is in it, and people kind of had the
same criticism. So it's like about this black woman who
befriends uh Kukuks clan member and they like form this
like unlikely duo.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
First of all, I'm not you're making this sound like
a buddy comedy.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
And try out.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
The way that the black woman that Taraji p Hinson
is playing and Atwater is portrayed is just like this
a you know, like there's no depth. She's just like
there as like a placeholder when she was like a
whole civil rights activist. But like when people pointed that
out to Taraji, she was very like defensive about it,
like she didn't publicly she didn't get it. So I mean,
(31:08):
I think kudos to Viola Davis for like publicly saying
like I wouldn't do this again, and like people be
thinking like actors are super rich and they can like
turn down any job. That is not the case for
a lot of people. And I think especially for Viola
Davis back in twenty eleven, like now she's noticed this
like huge actress, but like going back in the time Machine,
(31:29):
Like did she feel empowered to be like, no, I'm
not going to take this, Like I'm good financially without
this role.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And one thing that just came up for me is
how I think, from the outside looking in this, what
Viola Davis did and also going back to Hogan, what
he did can feel like very safe bets. Like I
think if somebody looking at the help would be like,
that's a very safe role of you to take, and
at the same time, it's like also not a safe
(31:57):
role to take, because Viola Davis herself knowledged how difficult
it could be for her to take this because she
knew all of the context of the role, all the
trappings that a role like that could come with, and
the backlash that she could receive for it. And it
was the same for Hogan because it was a very
safe thing to do because minstrel cy was already very
(32:19):
popular thing. Yeah, and he knew that in creating this
song he could have a hit that many people enjoyed.
So it was like a balance between safety and risk
that they were teetering on this tight rope across a canyon. Okay, imagery.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I also think like about the popularity of certain things,
like how does that impact her regret? Because The Help
was a very popular movie. It was a very popular
buck and became a very popular movie. And it's like
if you just did like an indie film, then I
many people saw, but it was the same thing. Would
you still feel that regret or like, are you feeling
(33:03):
that regret because of it's like the echo chamber of
people like commenting on it and like more people can
see you doing this thing.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
I think echo chamber is a perfect way to put it,
because I think it's an amplification of that feeling most
likely because if I have a feeling that's personal, I
know how that feels in my body and how to
handle it. But when that feeling is exacerbated because I
have a bunch of other people basically affirming that feeling,
I would imagine it's a lot bigger. And especially when
(33:33):
you're a person who's as big as Viola Davis is
in a movie as big as The Help is, So
can't feel good. And another thing that I will say
about that too, speaking of amplification, is that it wasn't
just once that she addressed it or that people asked
her about it, right I wonder what it was like
for her to say that out loud repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I think it's also freeing, like as a up and
coming actor who may like really look up to Viola
Davis like see her doing that too, Yeah, because it
could be, you know, what someone needs to hear so
that they don't get into a role that they suspect
they might regret later, or also like, Okay, I did
(34:18):
this thing that I regret. It's not the end of
the world. I can like build upon my body of
work and like that's not the thing that I'm truly
like known for.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I love that you said that, because I don't think
there's an answer to this question that we've posed around
what does regret look like in public? For black people
who are facing race related regret in their work, It's
something that has to be worked through in every single instance,
and clearly, like seeing other people talk about it out
loud in the way that they process it can be
(34:48):
something that's helpful for other people. And I don't know
if we can put that in a neat little bow. Yeah,
you know, these aren't the last times that this is
going to happen, Absolutely not, because can't be expected to
be perfect or to know everything about race. When we
create work and we're trying to do it authentically and
fearlessly and lovingly, then things aren't always gonna come out
(35:13):
right true.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
I regret this episode.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
But seriously, we might even regret it a little bit
more now because we convince someone to sing all coons
look alike to me? Talk about a COONa having trouble.
I think I have enough fumone.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
It's all about my Lucy Jenny's stubble, and she has
caused my heart. Mon, there's another COONa Baba from Virginia
in society.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
He's the leader of the day.
Speaker 5 (35:45):
And now my honey, Galla's going to quit me. Yes,
she's gone andrew a this coon away.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
She's no excuse to turn me loose.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
I've been abused.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
Now I'm all confused because these words She then did say, Well.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
All coons look alike to me.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
I've gotten lother ball, you see, And he's just as
good to me as you Nick ever tried to be.
He spends his money efree, I know we can agree,
So I don't like you know how all coons look
alike to me?
Speaker 1 (36:21):
The person you just heard singing that song was Coley Gilchrist,
and I couldn't let her leave without talking to her
about her experience of singing all coons look alike?
Speaker 4 (36:29):
To me?
Speaker 1 (36:32):
What kind of emotions come up in you when you
think about Ernest Hogan being a black man writing this
for white audiences.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
It was off putting and it kind of felt a
bit like, you know, I was almost judging him and
thinking he was a bit of a traitor for just
saying those things about the black community and painting us
in this picture. And although it was kind of used
at black people's expense, he was trying to create a
name and probably sustain himself back.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
In those times. So how did you feel singing it?
Just now?
Speaker 5 (36:58):
It was a bit hard to to just get over
myself in a sense and to get those words out
in the atmosphere and kind of shake off, you know,
any feelings I had towards it.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
But I think the biggest thing.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
That helped me is just putting on that actress kind
of facade.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Do you have anything else to add in terms of
your feelings about this, I.
Speaker 5 (37:18):
Would just say I would love to continue. This has
opened my eyes to a person and other people, other
writers like him, that I knew nothing about, but I
think it's important to continue to be a student as
an artist and to learn about basically your ancestors and music.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I think it's really good to continue to do.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Your research and learn, learn as much as you can.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Thank you to Coli Gilchrist for singing all Koons look
alike to me. Oh, and stick around through the credits
to hear Coli sing the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
Song all right time for my favorite and only segment
of this pot roll credits, Who What? When?
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Where?
Speaker 3 (37:57):
How would you like to give credit to you?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I like to give credit to braids.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
I have been wearing my hair in small braids that
I've had in for like a month now, I think,
and I just love how I don't have to do
anything to it. I'm not really thinking about how it looks.
I have to put so little energy our thought into it.
Braids are so versatile, they're so useful. They're coming in
(38:24):
so many different shapes and forms, and I'm thankful for
the brads that I have in my hair right now.
Shout out to braids.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Okay, I'd like to give credit to old friends. I've
had an old friend reach out, so shout out to you,
old friend.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
I love it. That's it for today. See y'all next
week with another episode. On Theme is a production of
iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. This episode was written
by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and
produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on
(39:09):
Theme Show. You can also send us an email at
hello at on Theme dot Show. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Never said a word to hurt
the feelings.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
I always bought a presence by the score, and now
my brain with sorrow, am or really because she won't
accept them anymore. If I treated how wrong she may
have left me like all the rest. She's gone and
let me down. If I'm lucky, I'm going to catch
my policy and win my sweet thing away from town
(39:51):
before I'm worried. Yes, I'm desperate and I've been joned
and I'll get dangerous. Oh my, if these words she
says to me, well, all coons look alike to me.
I've got another ball, you see, and he's just as
good to me as you.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Nigga ever tried to be. He spends his money EF.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
Free, and I know we can agree, So I don't
like you, know how all coons look alike to me,
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