Sometimes it seems as though the colored people ought to have a guardian
appointed over them. Now, you take a colored concert troupe, and though
they may have splendid voices, they do not know enough to take advantage
of their opportunities. People go to hear them because they are colored
people, and they want to hear old-fashioned negro melodies, and yet
these mokes will tackle Italian opera and high toned music that they
don't know how to sing.
They will sing these fancy operas, and people will not pay any
attention. Along toward the end of the programme they will sing some old
nigger song, and the house fairly goes wild and calls them out half a
dozen times. And yet they do not know enough to make up a programme of
such music as they can sing, and such as the audience want.
They get too big, these colored people do, and can't strike their level.
People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Roze, and Gerster, are sick
when a black cat with a long red dress comes out and murders the same
pieces the prima donnas have sung. We have seen a colored girl attempt a
selection from some organ-grinder opera, and she would howl and screech,
and catch her breath and come again, and wheel and fire vocal shrapnel,
limber up her battery and take a new position, and unlimber and send
volleys of soprano grape and cannister into the audience, and then she
would catch on to the highest note she could reach and hang to it like
a dog to a root, till you would think they would have to throw a pail
of water on her to make her let go, and all the time she would be biting
and shaking like a terrier with a rat, and finally give one kick at last
at her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as
though she would have to be carried on a dustpan, and the people in the
audience would look at each other in pity and never give her a cheer,
when, if she had come out and patted her leg, and put one hand up to
her ear, and sung, “Ise a Gwine to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin',”
they would have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out
five times.
The fact is, they haven't got sense.
There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking colored man
in that same party, that was on the programme for a violin solo. When
he came out the people looked at each other, as much as to say, “Now we
will have some fun.” The moke struck an attitude as near Ole Bull as he
could with his number eleven feet and his hollow chest, and played
some diabolical selection from a foreign cat opera that would have been
splendid if Wilhelmjor Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother
couldn't get within a mile of the tune. He rasped his old violin for
twenty minutes and tried to look grand, and closed his eyes and seemed
to soar away to heaven,--and the audience wished to heaven he had,--and
when he became exhausted and squeezed the last note oat, and the
audience saw that he was in a profuse perspiration, they let him go and
did not call him back. If he had come out and sat on the back of a chair
and sawed off “The Devil's Dream,” or “The Arkansaw Traveler,” that
crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger man than
Grant.
But he didn't have any sense. If some one will send a marked copy of
this paper to some of these colored concert troupes, and they will take
the hint, and sing nigger songs, they will make a heap of money, where
now they have to live on a free lunch route.