28. The Black Booth: Part One

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME]

Peter
Welcome back once again to Adventures in Theater History. Today we’re embarking on a two-part adventure - an exploration of a little-known and largely unexplored chapter of the history of theater in Philadelphia. 

I’m especially pleased once again to be able to take advantage of the deep pool of talent that exists today in Philadelphia’s theater community. For this episode, we have two special guest artists. The first is Aaron Bell. Aaron is an actor whose many talents I have admired for some years now whenever I have seen him onstage in local productions, and I was thrilled when he agreed to be the voice of John A. Arneaux for these two episodes. The second voice, whom you will hear a little later on, is that of a longtime friend of mine and a colleague, the distinguished and redoubtable Brian Anthony Wilson, one of the stalwarts of Philadelphia’s theater community. He will be doing the voice of T. Thomas Fortune, the eminent civil rights leader and newspaper editor, who in his early years in New York frequently interacted with John Arneaux. Welcome to both of these fine Philadelphia actors.

The story of John A. Arneaux is one that I’ve been quietly researching and writing about for some time now. I’m really excited to finally share the results of my work with you, because I think it really breaks some new ground on the subject, and because this approach to his life and career does what I’ve been consistently trying to do in this podcast - tying the larger stories of American society and culture into the specific fabric of what was happening in Philadelphia theaters.

I’ve been thinking about the story of John A. Arneaux for so long, in fact, that you might say it’s one of the main reasons I started doing this podcast at all. In a real way, every story I’ve shared with you up to now, through all the two dozen episodes we’ve already released, was leading right to this story.

[TRANSITION  MUSIC]

Peter
January 25, 1887. A column published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, under the headline ‘The Stage’ previewed the week’s coming theatrical events in the city. The actress Lily Langtry was in town, it noted, and she had already led off her engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre with the familiar melodrama The Lady of Lyons. Farther down the same column, under the subtitle “At Other Theatres”, there was an additional item:

Aaron Bell, as Arneaux 
"A company of colored actors, under the management of Alexander G. Davis, will appear in Shakespeare’s great play of Richard III at the Academy of Music next Saturday evening, and the colored people of the city, as well as those of adjacent towns, are greatly interested in the coming event. J. A. Arneaux, the “black Booth,” and the leading members of the Astor Place Tragedy Company, of New York, have been brought together with the Standard Dramatic Company of this city, and it is claimed that this combination forms a company of the most meritorious actors the race has yet produced. R. Henri Strange, who has been highly praised for his acting, will assume a leading character in the play. The costumes will be brilliant and new and historically correct. Tickets are selling rapidly."

Peter
Though that last marketing ploy, common even today, may not have been strictly true, we do know that by the night of the show, Saturday the 29th of January, interest in seeing Richard III at the Academy of Music was suddenly peaking. The African-American population of the city, in particular, had turned out in force, and other people had come from as far away as Cleveland, New York City and Wilmington, Delaware. Even the noted African American actress and elocutionist, Henrietta Vinton Davis, had come up from Washington D.C. to be in attendance. 

That evening, the marble lobby of the Academy of Music was filled with latecomers securing tickets, and its elegant corridors and wide stairways were thronged with people excitedly trooping to their seats. Despite the performance being somewhat delayed in getting started, the expectant crowd was eventually rewarded with the sound of the Academy’s [SFX: Gong] traditional gong, and the sight of the red velvet curtain rolling up. Revealed on the broad stage of the grand auditorium was a solitary actor. [SFX: Welcoming Applause. CROWD sounds OUT] He was wearing a fashionably long waxed mustache, and costumed in a wig of flowing dark hair, a fur cap, a long cape, high boots, and black kid gloves with the thumbs cut out. The audience settled in as John A. Arneaux began his character’s famous opening speech:

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by the sun of York;
And all the clouds that lower'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. . . . . . 

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I - that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton, ambling nymph;
I - that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; –

Peter
Every actor knows the potent sensation of holding a crowd’s complete attention, as if their every breath was measured to the tempo of one’s lines. While Arneaux was confiding to his audience the scheming Duke of Gloucester’s plot to overcome the indignities of fate, and to wrest lasting power from an unfair universe, the actor could hardly have avoided the sensation that Shakespeare’s text had parallels with his own life. He had felt many times the limits placed on his life’s possibilities. Undertaking Richard III, a role that had long been a mainstay of the greatest Shakespearen actors, was itself, for a Black man, an act of bravery, a provocation.

Aaron, as Arneaux playing Richard III
Why, I, – in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,
But to command, to check, and o’erbear such
As are of happier person than myself;
Why, then, to me this restless world’s out of hell,
Till this mis-shapen trunk’s aspired head
Be circled in a glorious diadem! –
But then ‘tis fix’d on such a height; Oh! I
Must stretch the utmost reaching of my soul.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
In the Nineteenth Century, an era when much of white American society regarded Black performances of Shakespeare to be an obvious joke - belonging only to blackface burlesques presented in minstrel show dialect, John A. Arneaux would tread the very stage where hundreds of white actors had already performed, and where many had already done Richard III. Although providing a proper space for grand opera in Philadelphia had certainly been on the minds of the original founders of the Academy of Music in 1857, conventional spoken drama was in fact quickly performed there, despite the enormous size of the hall. It was a space that frequently challenged actors, even in an era where most performers were accustomed to filling large halls, using broad gestures and a lot of vocal power. 

As early as 1859, Dion Boucicault’s comedy London Assurance was offered to the Philadelphia public on the Academy’s stage, followed shortly afterwards by an evening starring the actress Mrs. D.P. Bowers - in a selection of scenes from various famous plays. In 1861, as the oncoming Civil War loomed over the country, Charlotte Cushman and John Gilbert had appeared in Guy Mannering. Later that same year, with the war now understandably dominating public attention, Philadelphia’s own Edwin Forrest had taken over the Academy’s stage. Forrest offered the public several weeks his long-standing and familiar repertory: Hamlet, Damon & Pythias, Richelieu, Virginius, Metamora, Jack Cade, Othello, Macbeth, and Richard III. In 1863, Louisa Lane Drew, another Philadelphia performer we’ve already profiled, had appeared in a benefit evening for Union military hospitals, playing Portia in the ‘trial scene’ from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Edwin Forrest returned again late in 1864 in Coriolanus - a production we described back in Episode 15.

Though Forrest’s Coriolanus was certainly a demonstration of Shakespeare’s continuing popular appeal in Philadelphia, the aging tragedian was by that point in time being supplanted by a new generation of actors. No one represented this trend more clearly than a young actor who had himself played the Academy stage only the year before, in August of 1863. That was when Edwin Booth made his Academy debut, presenting, among other plays, his version of Richard III.

In 1864 Booth had returned to the Academy as the title character in Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu, alternating with his portrayal of Iago in Othello. Booth and Charlotte Cushman also performed together that year in Macbeth, in a benefit show which again raised money for the United States Sanitary Commission. Edwin Booth then stayed on in the city for two additional weeks performing his own personal repertoire of roles at the nearby Chestnut Street Theatre. (And this was the new  Chestnut Street Theatre, of course, the third of the name, built in 1862 and located between 12th and 13th Streets, quite close to the Academy that had displaced its predecessor.) 

Edwin Booth was fast becoming the most famous and successful American classical actor - more than Cushman, Drew, or even Forrest. Handsome, talented, well-trained, with a mysterious air of melancholy, he was a star, collecting enormous box office returns and attracting plenteous press coverage wherever he appeared. He and his family already had a deep history in Philadelphia. Edwin Booth often stayed for long stretches in the city in the early 1860s, since his sister Asia and her husband John Sleeper Clark lived there, and his mother was usually part of their household. And as you recall, Edwin’s younger brother John Wilkes appeared as a visiting star at the Arch Street Theatre with Louisa Lane Drew. But the Booths' story in the city went deeper than that, back to the days when their father, the erratically brilliant Junius Brutus Booth, had arrived from England in 1821. There was a longstanding apocryphal story in Philadelphia theater circles that once the elder Booth, while playing Richard III at the Walnut Street Theatre, had been so wrapped up in the Battle of Bosworth Field that his climactic onstage duel with the actor playing Richmond went completely off the stage and out the side door onto Ninth Street. 

Whether that particular story was true or not, we do know that even as a teen, young Ned Booth had accompanied his father on his frequent tours, and learned the trade of acting first hand (while also attempting to be a brake on his father’s drinking habits). Not that he wanted to be just like his dad. He was interested in new trends in theater, after all. As a boy Edwin often revelled in ‘blacking up’ and putting on private minstrel shows for his friends near his Maryland home, and he might well have taken the easy and lucrative course of becoming a star of the minstrel stage. But instead he had followed the family tradition, taking on the great classical roles, and had made his professional stage debut as the minor character of Tressel in Colley Cibber’s popular adaptation of Richard III. 

As he rose to prominence over the years, Edwin Booth’s approach to Shakespeare was regarded as far more sophisticated and artistic than his father’s and Forrest’s old school stomping and roaring. Edwin’s approach to roles was introspective, measured, and artistically complete. He didn’t even necessarily have to appear in a different role every night, which had always been the standard way of doing business for actors like Forrest or his father. It was, in fact, soon after his Philadelphia appearance in 1864, that Booth would begin the record-setting run of his consecutive “hundred nights of Hamlet” at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. 

Though by the mid-19th Century Philadelphia had ceded national theatrical leadership to its neighbor a hundred miles to the north, and that is where Booth would build a theater of his own, Philly continued to maintain a special relationship with Edwin Booth. When still quite a young performer, he was given an honorary membership in the Shakespere Society, the first American literary organization devoted to the study of The Bard, an honor that was extremely gratifying to young Booth, who actively courted social acceptance from good society, and felt his lack of formal education keenly. It was in Philadelphia that Booth met and formed a lifelong friendship with the scholar Horace Howard Furness, who recruited him to give the charity performances that would help support the Sanitary Commission during the war. In 1863, Booth and his brother-in-law Sleeper Clark had even purchased the Walnut Street Theatre for $100,000. Indeed the Walnut was still under their management that fateful evening in April of 1865 when Edwin’s younger brother John Wilkes assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. The Walnut suffered a great deal in public esteem for a period afterwards, and its ownership (indeed the entire acting profession) fell under suspicion of somehow being associated with the awful crime.

Edwin Booth had thoroughly renounced his wicked brother (who had been killed after a long manhunt), and begged the nation for forgiveness, and eventually he managed to save his own career. Though Edwin studiously avoided Washington DC theaters for the rest of his life, he returned to those he knew in Philadelphia. In 1866 he played fifty-one consecutive nights at the Walnut Street Theatre, including twenty-one as Hamlet. In fact many other Philadelphia theaters were to host Booth during his frequent and highly acclaimed touring productions over the next two decades. These included not only the Walnut, but also the Arch Street Theatre and the new Broad Street Theater (which had been built across from the Academy in 1876. Members of Booth’s company had presented Henry V in front of President Grant at the Academy of Music as part of the Centennial Exposition that year. But the Academy did not see Booth himself on its stage again until November of 1877, when he played Shylock in Act III of The Merchant of Venice at a benefit for the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum. 

That show was a minor event in theater history, perhaps, but I mention it for a specific reason. On this return engagement, Edwin Booth would have certainly noticed a definite change in the composition of his Philadelphia audience: there was no longer a separate entrance and gallery for Black theatergoers. They could buy tickets in any section, and sit in the Academy’s seats with everybody else. What had changed?

Following the passage by the US Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Academy of Music and other theaters in Philadelphia had removed their long-standing and insulting restrictions on African-American theatergoers. Subsequently, many members of the Black community actively sought to increase their representation at all cultural events and venues throughout Philadelphia.

And that was not all. The ‘color line’ on the Academy of Music’s stage itself had been broken in October of 1877, when the Sunday school of the Shiloh Baptist Church held a benefit concert there, before a mixed race audience that joyously filled the hall. The Academy, with its location close to the Seventh Ward (the largest Black neighborhood in Philadelphia), and with its considerable social prestige, continued to be highly sought after to host cultural events featuring Black performers and sponsored by Black churches and associations. Other theaters nearby also saw an upsurge in African-American attendance. When Edwin Booth brought his touring company again to the Broad Street Theater across from the Academy in 1878, his business manager John T. Ford insisted on explicitly marketing the play to the city’s Black population. Disgracefully, but perhaps not surprisingly, Booth personally found this marketing campaign appalling. He groused in a letter to his friend, the critic William Winter: “Ford knows how I despise this thing, & yet he will persist. He takes credit for filling the houses by this damned  . . . business. I hope I shall never act with him again.” (Just to let you know: Booth actually threw the N-word in there, but I edited it out. Though he was certainly the best of the Booth brothers, in his private conversations and correspondence he could be just as casually racist as Edwin Forrest ever was. And that wouldn’t have made either of them much different from most other white actors of their day, either.)

But whether they liked it or not, Booth and other white actors would continue to perform for mixed-race crowds in Philadelphia. Despite the Supreme Court’s eventual overturning of the Civil Rights Act in 1883, Black theatergoers faced few restrictions in the city for the rest of the decade. In 1888 the Philadelphia Press dispatched a Black reporter to attend plays at all of the city’s major theaters, and not only did he encounter no problems, but he also noted that other Blacks in attendance seemed perfectly at home, and attracted no particular attention.  Though New York, as we said, was now the largest city in America, and was by now unquestionably the center of national theatrical activity, playing in Philadelphia, for any American actor, meant exposure to the largest audience of Black people. In fact, Philadelphia would have a larger African American population than New York City throughout the 19th century. In terms of pre-Great Migration America, Philadelphia was the ‘Big Time’, and the Academy of Music was the biggest stage in the country for any African-American performer. This fact would have been well-known to the ambitious and energetic John A. Arneaux.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
We’ve finally gotten back to our main subject, but I really had to lay in the story of Edwin Booth first to put that of John A. Arneaux into proper context.

Because Arneaux’s life story is now usually relegated to footnotes, or at least to brief passages in larger summaries of American theater of the 19th century. And as we’ll see, his relationship to Edwin Booth is key to the story that we’re trying to tell. Arneaux’s brief heyday lasted only between the years 1884 and 1887, and his subsequent disappearance from the historical record remains mysterious to this day.

The first definite evidence of his life and career shows up in New York City around 1876, and it shows that Arneaux was always attracted to the theater world. And he was not unreasonable, or a crazy dreamer, to feel this way. Due to the recent Emancipation of millions of formerly enslaved people, during Reconstruction the growing business of American theater provided both the prospect of employment, and also served as a source of narrative - the story of liberation that many audiences wanted to enjoy when they went to see a show. As we know, in those days it was a field with a growing demand for young male Black minstrel show performers, even ones with little training or experience. Performers of a serious bent might try to emulate the success of the Hyers Sisters Combination, an African-American troupe starring the sisters Anna and Emma Hyers from California, who were touring the country with a plantation musical melodrama called Out of Bondage. In 1876 Arneaux had joined the cast of another plantation melodrama with a similar name, Under the Yoke; or Bond and Free, performed entirely by a group of young Black New Yorkers. During its run at Manhattan’s Third Avenue Theatre, Arneaux (who was relatively light-skinned) was given the role of the white master of the plantation. An attempt to extend the run of the play by touring to other cities, as the Hyers Sisters had done, was without success, however, and the company of Under the Yoke came limping back home again. 

Like many young actors finding themselves down on their luck, Arneaux looked around for a day job. Our next evidence comes from a classified ad in the New York Herald on October 30, 1877, which states:

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Headwaiter (Colored) Desires a Situation in a hotel, restaurant or boarding house; Unquestionable reference. ARNEAUX, Rossmore Hotel.”

Peter
Beyond this, evidence of Arneaux’s early period in New York is rather thin, but we can learn from various classified ads and articles printed in the city’s newspapers that he displayed a willingness to turn his hand to those lines of work that were available to African American men of this era: waiting tables at restaurants and hotels, working in barbershops, performing on the variety stage, and working as a newspaper reporter, as we shall see.

So we do have these snippets about him that show up in various newspaper archives.  But interestingly, almost all scholarly or journalistic treatment of Arneaux’s life heavily relies on one other source: a chapter in a book entitled Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, by the Rev. William J. Simmons.  And there’s good reason to credit it. William J. Simmons was a substantial person, a well-known preacher, a journalist, and an educator from Louisville, Kentucky. His book Men of Mark was published in 1887, and we can surmise it was completed only after Arneaux had staged his Richard III in Philadelphia that year, because the performance is mentioned in it. The over 600-page long book is a series of short biographies, dozens of them, chiefly of important and eminent African American male figures such as Richard Allen, William Wells Brown, Ira Aldridge and Frederick Douglass. Simmons’ purpose in collecting these stories, he wrote in the book’s preface, was to inspire and guide his students in the lives of what he termed “great colored men,” especially those who had been born in bondage and had risen through applied education and sustained effort to accomplish great things. A formal portrait or drawing illustrated each man’s biography, and these were mostly fairly stolid depictions of eminent preachers and educators of their day.

John A. Arneaux’s entry in Men of Mark, however, is accompanied by one of the most striking illustrations in the book: an engraving of a statue bust, showing a handsome man with a piercing gaze and an impressive handlebar mustache, his shoulders classically draped. The bust is placed upon a pedestal, in a heroic manner. It was a pose, in fact, often used to depict scholars, artists, and authors elevated to high status in 19th-century Western culture. It was an image that was destined to be reproduced in the future to accompany almost every single historical assessment of Arneaux ever written, or posted on the Internet. Its visual impact alone seems to validate Arneaux’s reputation and to justify his inclusion in the pantheon of great African-American men of his age. I myself am very fond of it, and as you might have noticed, I’ve incorporated it into the cover art for this entire podcast series - there he is, down in the lower right hand corner, mustache bristling, looking, well, fierce. 

Here’s some of what the text in Simmons’ book says next to the illustration of Arneaux’s statue, and for our purposes we’re going to imagine that it was written down by Simmons pretty much as Arneaux told it to him:

Aaron, as Arneaux
“The father of J.A. Arneaux was Jean Arneaux, a Parisian by birth. His mother was named Louisa Belle before her marriage, and was of French descent. Young Arneax was born in the sTate of Georgia in 1855, and is therefore only thirty-two years of age; he is still a young man and is destined to rise to a wonderful lemnence in his profession. He is following fast in the footsteps of the late lamented Ira Aldridge, the great impersonator and remarkable actor. He is of medium height, fair and handsome. He often in ajok says he was born handsome, traded it off for fortune, and is now bankrupt of both.”

“In 1865 he attended the first public school in his native city where he only learned his a,b,c’s; next attended a small private school where he learned the fundamental branches. Then entering Beech Institute, he graduated after close application for four years. Then it occurred to him to go North and seek a better education. His parents had owned some property, but it had not yielded very much, so he was forced to work and pay his own expenses. In New York he was a student in German, Latin and other kindred studies. Being ambitious, he next went to Providence, Rhode Island where he entered Berlitz School of Languages and mastered French.”

” . . . His success was phenomenal at the Berlitz school, for he secured the head of the class with ease, after only a short time. He then visited Paris, and took two courses, one in the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres et Morals et Politique. One his way to New York returning home, he stopped at London and saw many of the sights and scenes worthy of visitation.”

Peter
Very impressive sounding, isn’t it? Simmons even reported that Arneaux spoke with a slight French accent. But, you know, here’s my take: Despite all the credence that has generally been given to this account by many historians, I think that  large portions of Arneaux’s personal history found in Men or Mark can be gently set aside, especially those dealing with his early life.

It is possible he did study French and other languages at the recently founded Berlitz Language School in Providence, Rhode Island, for at least some period of time - and maybe he even copied the impressive mustache of its founder, Herr Berlitz - sadly there’s no records to examine. But his assertion that he once took courses in Paris at the “Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres et Morals et Politique” is absurd on its face, to say the least. The Académie is a learned society of scholars, it’s not a school of any sort. In other published interviews, Arneaux claimed to have once studied at the “Institute of Paris,” even though no such institute ever existed. Plus, I can find no reference at all of him actually speaking French with anyone else. Indeed even in his own day, the Black newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune, who knew Arneuax well, once publicly challenged him to provide the year he graduated from that school in France, so he could write to the “Institute of Paris” and verify his credentials. Arneaux, tellingly, never took him up on the offer. Causing Fortune to then write:

Brian, as Thomas Fortune
“Mr. Arneaux is not a graduate of the Institute of Paris, nor any other institute, and it is questionable if he ever was in Paris.  . . Mr. Arneaux is a man of rare talents and some learning picked up on the highway  . . . but his ability to read men . . . was acquired as he labored behind a chair as an accomplished, ornate, and versatile tonsorial artist.”

Peter
So I think it’s more likely that Arneaux was a bit of a habitual fabulist, to put it kindly. And if Reverend Simmons said he wanted to tell the story of someone who had risen from being enslaved to success - well then he would give him that story. Like many people have done before and since, Arneaux found reality unsatisfying - with some justification, I suppose - so he created a better version of himself to show to the world. The more time one spends with him in the verifiable parts of the public record, the more one realizes that it’s likely large portions of his personal backstory in Simmons’ book - and elsewhere, as he related it - was mostly a fabrication.

Other evidence seems to indicate, in fact, that instead of coming up from the South to New York, Arneaux simply crossed the East River from Brooklyn, where an elderly and eccentric Frenchman named Simeon Arneaux who once owned considerable property in Brooklyn and elsewhere, could be found as the subject of an interesting 1884 newspaper story - after he was the victim of a robbery and assault by some local young toughs in the neighborhood of Park Slope. Simeon Arneaux is described by the reporter as an elderly Frenchman now living in some poverty, but that a certain unnamed person, who claimed to be a relative of his - had shown up on the scene while the reporter was investigating the crime, and this person has vowed to take some action, because, well, he had a personal interest in this property being restored to the unfortunate old man. Now, was this unnamed person John A. Arneaux? At this point I can’t possibly say, but I have my suspicions. Arneaux certainly seems to have hung around Brooklyn quite a lot for somebody trying to make it big in Manhattan. There’s definitely more digging in the archives of the Brooklyn Historical Society to be done, but to my frustration they’ve been closed to the public for two years now, due to the ongoing pandemic. All I can say is: I’m hoping to find out more about this intriguing mystery in the future.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
But for the moment, let’s stick with what we can definitely find in the available archives in the proper historical manner, and in other published sources. For instance: We can be certain that for a while John A. Arneaux was himself the leader of a travelling troupe of “authentic” colored minstrels.  A brief notice (in a longer article about other local minstrel shows) in the Boston Globe of March 30, 1881 states that “Johnny Arneaux’s Company” were getting ready to hold a benefit performance for the widow of the late John Brown, you know the guy who had been executed years before after his violent raid on Harper’s Ferry in hopes of sparking a slave rebellion. An interesting tidbit there, to say the least!

And Arneaux’s involvement in minstrel troupes may have gone back even deeper than that, in the New York Sun on September 10th, 1876, there was a long article written by someone calling himself “Monsieur X”, with a very detailed and passionate examination of the minstrel shows then being put on at the Third Avenue Theatre, where we know that John Arneaux - that guy with the French name that has an X at the end - had just been performing!

Aaron, as Arneaux
“I wonder if minstrels will ever learn that a trade is a trade, [and] that a man may sing like a black thrush and not act worth a cent.”

Peter
Take your work seriously, Monsieur X urged all minstrel performers. Think how Edwin Booth would perform a comic song, for example!

But however long or short a period he spent in minstrel troupes, Arneaux evidently found the experience of “blacking up” to portray a member of his own race not worth boasting about later on. Because, for a man who was rarely shy about touting his accomplishments, this was one he evidently did not care to have remembered, and never discussed it in any future articles or interviews.

But he was clearly determined to succeed in some form of show business. He did often admit that he performed at Tony Pastor’s variety theater at Union Square, with a song he wrote and even had published, entitled “Jumbo the Elephant King”. Now, the original sheet music for this song is in the collection of the Library of Congress, dated 1883. Jumbo the Elephant, as all you circus history fans know, was a huge animal brought by circus impresario P.T. Barnum from London to America in 1882. The song’s lyrics also reference Oscar Wilde, who was touring America in 1882. So that checks out. But I have never heard that song performed anywhere,   . . .  guess what? Aaron Bell, a fine musical theater performer, when he learned about its existence, was immediately interested in singing it for us. So ladies and gentlemen, for possibly the first time in history since 1883, Here is Aaron Bell singing John A. Arneaux’s composition: “Jumbo, the Elephant King!’

Aaron (sings)
I am an Elephant King, ha ha!
I am an Elephant King, ha ha!
An Elephant King is a very big thing
And the ladies me adore.
I am an Elephant King, ha ha!
Indeed an Elephant King, ha ha!
An Elephant King is a very big thing
Here on America's Shore.

Peter
Back to our story: Despite his evident ambitions, the song “Jumbo” may not have gotten John Arneaux any further bookings after he performed it at Tony Pastor’s. Indeed he seems to have left show business for a while. From the newspapers we can learn he was operating The Cosmopolitan, a “shaving and hairdressing saloon” for gentlemen on West 30th Street near Broadway, in what was then the heart of the theater district. In advertisements for his shop he pronounced himself “a thorough graduate of the tonsorial arts.” 

But: Arneaux did have one other highly marketable skill: the ability to write quickly, fluidly, and vividly.  In another aspect of his professional life that seems to have started back in the 1870s, he was frequently working as a professional newspaper man. The number and size of American newspapers had been expanding wildly during this period, and there was a demand for reporters of all backgrounds to supply lively copy. Even while pursuing his other jobs, Arneaux wrote either as a freelance reporter or as a regular staff for a great many publications in New York, both white and Black. He would later boast that he had worked for nearly every paper in New York City, “except for the Morning Journal” (which was a Democratic paper, and Arneaux was a fervent Republican). 

Looking at the articles that appeared under his name, we can see that he frequently used his journalism to protest injustices and slights against fellow members of the Black population of New York. Arneaux, was, in fact, what is generally termed a “race man,” and even while covering public meetings as a reporter, he did not hesitate to join in the debates himself about local and national issues affecting African-Americans. (or ‘Africo–Americans’, as he preferred to say. He personally disliked the word ‘colored’). Using the press pass that entitled him to freely travel on American railroads, Arneaux was able to attend political meetings around the country, adding his professional contacts among the small but growing network of Black American journalists. 

In March of 1884 Arneaux even attained a new professional distinction, that of the editor of his own newspaper. He had taken over a small literary publication, he gained control of a weekly paper that he christened the New York Enterprise, “an independent journal in the interest of the colored people.” His competitors in the field took wary note of his new status. warned T. Thomas Fortune:

Brian, as Thomas Fortune
“Rumor has it that Mr J.A. Arneaux is about to enter still another field of labor. He is to be editor of a newspaper. Misguided man,”

Peter
But Arneaux was undeterred by the difficulties awaiting him. Hiring new staff, penning vivid editorials, and liberally touting its own achievements, he quickly raised the publication’s public profile, boasting that it had “the greatest authority among colored people on social and political questions,”, and claiming that it had a circulation of 9000 subscribers (though its actual circulation was probably 3000.)

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Peter
Despite his rise to the editorship of his own newspaper, Arneaux had not given up on his dreams of theatrical glory. In the early 1880s he took over the leadership of The Astor Place Company of Colored Tragedians (a.k.a. the Astor Place Tragedy Company), which had been created in 1878 by the husband and wife team of Benjamin and Hattie Ford. 

Under Arneaux’s leadership, the Astor Place Tragedy Company began to strive for high standards and an increasing professionalism in their endeavors, fully intending to earn both money and critical praise for their work. To “elevate the race,” as the saying goes. This was not unheard of, but it wasn’t very common, either. They were true pioneers as Black Shakespeareans. After a six-month rehearsal period, they staged Othello at the Brooklyn Athenaeum in June of 1884. The large and deep-voiced Ford proudly played the Moor in the tradition of the great Ira Aldridge, while the smaller and nimbler Arneaux undertook the role of the wily Iago. The audiences, most of whom were apparently also Black, were enthusiastic though limited in number, and critical responses were mixed. Reviewers from various African American papers were gently encouraging, but a white reporters frequently took a decidedly racist and mocking tone in their reviews. A typical example went like this: “J.A. Arneaux was the name of the Iago . . he could not open his mouth without an encouraging yell from the audience, among whom, by the way, there were but a few colored people. Mr. Arneaux seems to have formed his ideas of histrionic art from some nightmare creation compounded of the illustrious Mr. Kean and a particularly agile marionette.” 

But numerous other positive articles were written about the company (some from as far away as England, where a correspondent for the London Era praised Arneaux’s “clear flexible voice” and said that he contrived to give full force to the ambiguous passages of the role of Iago, and that he managed to win a well-merited applause.) Ant that definitely improved the company’s reputation, for that production of Othello moved venues, travelling uptown to the Cosmopolitan Theatre near Broadway and 41st Street. Unfortunately, this time the reviews were scathing, the box office meager, and the run ended abruptly when the theater manager appropriated the money that was due to the company. 

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the Astor Place Tragedy Company steadily and doggedly continued to expand its repertoire, and its actors to improve their craft. Though they regularly received discouraging journalistic sniping (from the colored press about Arneaux’s “poor elocution” and his “effeminate” voice during a production of Macbeth, for example, and from the white press about his “over-acting” in a version of the play Damon & Pythias) the new presence in the company of the talented of the elocutionist Henrietta Vinton Davis seems to have greatly improved its artistic profile and standards.

Meanwhile, Arneaux continued to use his position as editor of The Enterprise to promote his acting career. He was not shy about touting his theatrical achievements to impress his fellow journalists and activists across the country. He was soon even corresponding with the budding young journalist Ida B. Wells at her home in Memphis, Tennessee. In April of 1885, Wells wrote in her diary that Arneuax had sent her a photograph of himself, and requested that she learn the role of Emilia in Othello, as “ ‘he may need me’ in that part”. Though Wells was intrigued by Arneaux’s offer, she evidently did not take up this opportunity.

But, forging ahead as he always seemed to do, Arneaux now felt that the Astor Place Tragedy Company was ready to support him in a new role for his repertoire: King Richard III. His former colleagues at The Sun newspaper agreed to judge a ‘contest’ he manufactured with a rival company, which “Editor Arneaux” won handily, unsurprisingly. And when he appeared in the costume “glistening with jewels” that he had obtained for the role, the crowd went wild!

Aaron, as Arneaux
“The applause was tumultuous, the recalls were warm, and the whole performance so thrilling that the ladies and gentlemen voted the medal of histrionic excellence to the richly robed Richard and his distinguished support.”

Peter
In October, he and Jones repeated their Othello at Steinway Hall on 14th Street. Now again the white press mostly sneered (“The characters were all Moors”, wrote the New York Times, and treated Othello “as if he had been common white trash” - thank you, New York Times). Nonetheless, the mostly Black audience was again encouraging, and cheered the proceedings lustily. 

By 1886, Arneaux’s double career was gaining momentum, and his various talents were increasingly in demand. He had bought out his former partners in the Enterprise, and was now its sole owner. He was writing poetry for newspapers, performing in plays with the Astor Place tragedians, and giving public recitations. Sometimes he seems to have spread himself a little thin, and would reveal his tendency for embroidering on the truth. After Arneaux delivered an address on drama, for example, to the Brooklyn Literary Union in May of 1886, an astute audience member noted that he had cribbed his entire speech from an encyclopedia article. When called out publicly on his plagiarism, Arneaux airily defended himself by invoking the privilege of actors to speak a deeper truth using words of others.

Aaron, as Arneaux
“If reading someone else’s remarks for the edification of cranks, without claiming authorship, is plagiarism, we are contented to share the title with such eminent personages as Messrs. Booth, Irving, and a host of other actors and readers.”

Peter
Now his rival editor T. Thomas Fortune, whom we’ve mentioned before, was not mollified by this line of defense, to say the least, and he called Arneaux to account in a series of articles over the summer. Nevertheless, in August of 1886, Fortune and Arneaux seemed to have repaired their relationship enough, anyway, to cooperate in hosting a Press Association banquet for colored journalists in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the eminent Frederick Douglass as the guest of honor. 

As an avid follower of news about the theater of the day, Arneaux would have been aware that in May of 1886 Edwin Booth had again played at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. But, even to devoted fans, it was sadly evident by this point that Booth’s career was in its final stages, and that his health was increasingly poor. Nonetheless, Booth had booked a joint tour with the great Italian actor Tomasso Salvini, and he was determined to soldier on. Booth would play Iago to Slavini’s Othello, and Hamlet to his Ghost. Salvini performed in Italian, by the way, and Booth in English, and though this must have been a startlingly strange production, the audiences then were there to see the stars more than to hear the text, and judging by the reviews - everyone was apparently well pleased. 

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Peter
But even as Edwin Booth's career began to falter, John Arneaux was deep in preparation to boost his own professional stage reputation to new levels. He was going to keep promoting his new star turn in Richard III, in all the Black newspapers he had rallied to his side, at all the largest theaters he could find, and in a personal acting version of the play that he himself had edited to suit his own talents. It would signify to the world that Arneaux was now a leading man, worthy of star billing. The Astor Place Tragedy Company had booked the Lexington Avenue Opera House in New York for the evening of October 29th, 1886. 

The young Black composer and conductor Walter F. Craig was tapped to lead a 20-piece orchestra. And the evening went well! The reception of the audience, which was primarily, again, African-American, was described by all as being rapturous, and numerous floral bouquets were thrown to the stage at Arneaux’s feet at the curtain. The New York Freeman felt Arneaux’s acting had “improved wonderfully, his voice more clear and his full force of expressions surprised his most ardent friends.” Other friendly journalists joined the chorus of praise, one hailing Arneaux as the “rising star of the race”, and another comparing his performance to those of William Charles Macready, John McCullough, Lawrence Barrett, and (you knew it) Edwin Booth. In fact, declared the New York Daily News, just as the classical singer Sisseretta Jones had earned the title of the “Black Patti” in comparison to a famous white opera singer of the day, “Mr. Arneaux merits the title of ‘Black Booth’.” The alliterative moniker “Black Booth” was repeated often, by Arneaux and his growing band of supporters and fans.

So well had things gone, in fact, that John A. Arneaux was able to tell his fans that he had a further happy announcement: thanks to the glowing reception to his Richard III by New York audiences, it would soon be seen again, in Philadelphia - which again, was where the biggest and most influential Black audience in America was to be found. Proclaimed the Enterprise

Aaron, as Arneaux
“Mr. Arneaux has signed a contract with Mr. Alexander G. Davis, and will appear as Richard III at the Academy of Music on the evening of January 27.” 

Peter
Even those who had once doubted him were now deeply impressed. Wrote Thomas Fortune:

Brian, as Thomas Fortune
“We have no doubt that the Quaker City people will give Mr. Arneaux a cordial reception, and we have no doubt that he will sustain the reputation he has made.”

Peter
So, as the story of John A. Arneaux finally intersects with that of Philadelphia Theater history, many questions remain to be explored: Who was Alexander G. Davis and how did he get the booking for Arneaux’s theater company at the Academy of Music? Who was the Standard Dramatic Company? Did Philadelphia already have a  Black classical acting troupe?  In what other ways might the stories of Edwin Booth and John Arneaux intertwine? How will Arneaux’s Astor Place Tragedy Company get the funds to finance this ambitious production? Will the whole venture, built on a rickety foundation of a largely fabricated personal history and a compulsive, if impressive, professional audacity, come crashing to the ground?  And if he succeeds, to what new heights of fame and fortune and adventure will Arneax rise next? What awaited “The Black Booth”?

Well, stay tuned, and in our next episode we will attempt to answer all of those questions. There are still lots of surprises to come! That’s our show for this week. Thank you all for your kind attention, and we’ll see you again soon. 

Special Thanks to Mike, who has recently joined our generous supporters on Patreon. We thank Mike and everyone else who has supported the show, or sent us an email, or left a review online. All those seemingly little things mean so much to us. They lift our spirits and give us the strength to go on with our work. Bless you all.  Our guest voices this week were Aaron Bell and Brian Anthony Wison. As always, the sound engineering and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci!

Be sure to look for additional material on our website: www.AITHpodcast.com.  Stay tuned for our next episode, which will relate the thrilling conclusion of “The Black Booth” here on Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia!

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© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.