Bodies in Dissent

Abstract

I wonder if dis is me?By golly, I is free as a frog.But maybe I is mistaken; maybe dis ain't me.Cato, is dis you?Yes, seer.Well, now it is me, an' I em a free man.But, stop!I muss change my name, kase ole massa might foller me, and somebody might tell him dat dey see Cato; so I'll change my name, and den he won't know me ef he sees me.Now, what shall I call myself ?I'm now in a suspectable part of the country, an' I muss have a suspectable name.Ah! I'll call myself Alexander Washington Napoleon Pompey Caesar.Dar, now, dat's a good long, suspectable name, and everybody will suspect me.Let me see; I wonder ef I can't make up a song on my escape!I'll try.As he subsequently confesses in song, Cato has literally stolen the clothes o√ his ''ole massa's'' back.''I dress myself,'' he proudly proclaims, ''in his bess clothes, an' jump into de street.''Piling on an excess of ironically inflated monikers bestowed upon the enslaved, Cato inverts his own crisis in naming himself by turning that dilemma into a multi-vocal, insurrectionist act.In his soliloquy, he transmogrifies his own self-fragmentation into signifying parody.Speaking on dual frequencies as both captor and captive, gentleman and minstrel clown, Cato (re)dresses himself both in the role of the ''suspicious'' fugitive as well as the ''respectable'' master, conflating and perverting the boundaries between each role.His drag act simultaneously stages the spectacle of a fugitive asserting his subjectivity through the tools of performance and using those same tools to mock and destablize the subjectivity of the ruling class.During this moment of self-making at the site of masquerade, Cato thus rejects the unchanging condition of burnt-cork ''blackness'' and instead harnesses the pleasures of fugitive emancipation borne out in costume.He has, in e√ect, traded in the sycophancy and self-abnegation of blackface persona.Whereas, for much of the play, his minstrel antics tra≈c in slippery and unsavory racial caricature, Cato's unlikely conversion from feckless burntcork puppet into ruminative and resistant runaway manifests the sociopolitical commentary at the heart of The Escape.Stringing together an inventive combination of ironies, malapropisms, and neologisms, he turns existential crisis into spiritual jubilation, self-estrangement into ecstatic selfrealization, and haphazard disguise into philosophical enlightenment.''Free as a frog,'' Cato encounters self-reckoning at the site of his alien condition and wriggles free of enslavement to perform a counternarrative to that of minstrelsy's master script.In his search for ''a place where man is man, ef sich dar can be found,'' he locates this site in the act of disguise.≤ Cato's encounter with himself at the very moment he commits to quite literally ''putting on ole massa'' provides the occasion to contemplate the profound ironies of black identity formation and self-recognition in the century that marked African Americans' freedom from enslavement.His startling and paradoxical movement toward self-recognition and a kind of alien(ated) awareness of the self-''I wonder if dis is me?''-confronts and transforms