Cakewalk postcards at auction

My auction buddy Janet collects vintage African American postcards. Like me, she can’t stand the ugly ones that stereotype us as black people. At auction recently, she picked up a batch of cards, including three of the awful ones. 

Among the lot were four prized cards: Pictures of two lovely black couples from around the turn of the century doing the cakewalk. Not just doing the cakewalk but demonstrating how to do it.   

I saw the cards for the first time as we sat through an auction of glassware. I chuckled because they were so neat and amusing. They were also very complimentary. It’s not often that you find postcards from that era that show black people in a positive light. The couples were all dandied up in their finest dress, and the colors were both glossy and matte. 

The cards were also exciting because I could actually feel movement in the way the women pointed first their left foot out and then their right, danced with their shoulders and marched alongside the men, their arms intertwined. 

The dance sides of the card were imprinted: Cake Walk (Negro Dance) No. 1, No. 2, No.3, No.4. Franz Huld, Publisher, N.Y.

Someone had written the name Eugenie in ink. Eugenie was apparently the sender.

The address side included a cutout of one of the black men, with this imprinted on the card:

Private Mailing Card
Authorized by Act of Congress of May 19-1898.
(“Postal Card. – Carte Postale.”)
This side is exclusively for the address

The card was addressed to: Monsieur Maurice Remes, Marche au lait, 3. It was signed with the initials E / V. The 1-cent stamped appeared to be Belgian, and the date – a bit obscured – appeared to be 1904.

When I researched the cakewalk on the web, it seemed that the couple on the card were doing a stripped-down version of the dance, which made sense for the limited space. The dance I saw in photos and especially on early jerky film was high-energy, with rubber-legged men and quick-stepping couples.

Cakewalk the dance began as something called the chalk line walk around the mid-1800s, when Southern slaves walked a line with buckets of water on their heads, according to the site streetswing.com. By the end of the century, it had evolved into the cakewalk, a parody of the formal European ballroom dances enjoyed by slave owners. The dancers used “dignified walking, flirting, prancing, strutting, bowing low, waving canes, doffing hats, done in a high kicking grand promenade,”  according to the website. The slaveowners apparently found it amusing, and began sponsoring contests.

The husband and wife team of Charles Johnson and Dora Dean helped popularize the dance around 1890, incorporating it into their vaudeville act. Entertainers Bert Williams and George Walker also used it in their act.

The dance and the music accompanying it were a hit among whites, too, at the turn of the century. John Philip Sousa used the music in some of his marches, and Claude Debussey wrote the “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” as the final movement in his suite “Children’s Corner” in 1908. By the 1920s, the cakewalk had died out.

In his “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” in 1912, James Weldon Johnson wrote of seeing the cakewalk at a ball:

“There was a contest for a gold watch, to be awarded to the hotel head-waiter receiving the greatest number of votes. There was some dancing while the votes were being counted. Then the floor was cleared for the cake-walk. A half-dozen guests from some of the hotels took seats on the stage to act as judges, and twelve or fourteen couples began to walk for a sure enough, highly decorated cake, which was in plain evidence.

“The spectators crowded about the space reserved for the contestants and watched them with interest and excitement. The couples did not walk round in a circle, but in a square, with the men on the inside. The fine points to be considered were the bearing of the men, the precision with which they turned the corners, the grace of the women, and the ease with which they swung around the pivots. The men walked with stately and soldierly step, and the women with considerable grace.

“The judges arrived at their decision by a process of elimination. The music and the walk continued for some minutes; then both were stopped while the judges conferred; when the walk began again, several couples were left out. In this way the contest was finally narrowed down to three or four couples. Then the excitement became intense; there was much partisan cheering as one couple or another would execute a turn in extra elegant style.

“When the cake was finally awarded, the spectators were about evenly divided between those who cheered the winners and those who muttered about the unfairness of the judges. This was the cake-walk in its original form, and it is what the colored performers on the theatrical stage developed into the prancing movements now known all over the world, and which some Parisian critics pronounced the acme of poetic motion.”