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 Rose, 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 her red
trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she
would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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
the 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
Wilhelmj or 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 out, 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.