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. Rice was referring here to an English commonplace, but,as he would have been well aware, high life below stairs or somevariant of the term was commonly used in the United States also,to characterize pretentious and arriviste aspects of urban black be-havior.31With all this imitation going on, it was probably inevitablethat blacks would be mistaken for whites and vice versa.In 1820sand 1830s New York people had a fascination with passing, whether intentional or not, and a number of stories revealingmuch about race relations were freely circulating.In early Febru-ary 1835, the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer informed itsreaders of recent goings on in Albany.When it became knownthat a Justice of the Peace had lately married an Irish girl to a fullblooded negro, a mob gathered and took the matter in hand, 212 STORIES OF FREEDOM IN BLACK NEW YORKand blackened his [the Justice of the Peace s] face. The outragedjustice had defended his action in the local papers, claiming thathe was told the woman was a mulatto and that he would not havemarried the interesting couple had he realized that the womanwas white. We presume so, the Courier s writer opined, butcouldn t he tell a fair skinned daughter of Erin, from a mulatto,when he saw her? 32 But for all the outrage of the Albany mob, orthe self-righteous certainty of the Courier, an increasing numberof whites were having just as much difficulty as had the Albanyjustice in working out who was who.Now that most AfricanAmericans living in the North were no longer slaves and weredressing and disporting themselves on the city sidewalks in newlyassertive ways, all manner of whites had moments of confusionwhen dealing with their black neighbors.For many whites a well-dressed black was an at least slightlycomic figure, but such observations also carried an underlyingsense of disquiet, a fretful complaint at the blurring of the former,relatively clear-cut racial boundaries.William Blane, an Englishgentleman who visited Philadelphia in the early 1820s, recollectedthat frequently, on being desirous of ascertaining whether thebeauty of some finely dressed female was equal to her attire, hehad perceived under a huge Leghorn bonnet and lace cap, theblack face and great white eyes of a negress. Quite often he could hardly help laughing, so ludicrous was this contrast. Adecade later, the traveler S.A.Ferrall was walking down Broad-way in New York when he was struck with the figure of a fash-ionably dressed woman, who was sauntering before me. Havingovertaken her, Ferrall turned around, only to be shocked. O an-gels and ministers of ugliness! Ferrall later wrote, I beheld aface, as black as soot a mouth that reached from ear to ear anose, like nothing human and lips a full inch in diameter! Bothof these travelers derided blacks for copying white behavior IMITATION 213Blaine wrote of African Americans being so eager to imitate thefashions of whites but, unnerved by the apparent success ofthese particular African Americans in managing to look likewhites, the two white men had marked themselves off by lam-pooning the blacks facial features.33 To be sure, demeaning cari-catures of Africans and African Americans had a long history, butas the viciousness of Ferrall s description suggests, such negativeportrayals of black people took on a new importance at a timewhen other barriers were crumbling.It was not merely travelers or strangers who experienced theembarrassment of mistaking someone s racial identity, and whensuch incidents occurred, they commonly made their way into thenewspapers.In June 1834, the Sun recounted how a local whitedandy s attention was attracted by a tall and elegant female figurebefore him while he too strolled down Broadway.From behind,he was taken by her majestic mien, sent into rhapsodies byher neat little ancles, and enchanted with her taste in dress, but, as she stopped to cheapen an article of ornament at a store, he passed her, turned around, looked her full in the face, and be-hold she was black!!! Another young white man out on a spree came across a black girl on the Bowery.He went up to her andsaid Good evening O, I beg your pardon I thought you waswhite! She quickly responded that she thought he was a goodfor nothing booby, whereupon the aggrieved man tore off theyoung woman s bonnet and ripped it into pieces.34Whites were also mistaken for blacks.Often this was the resultof the white, for whatever reason, wearing blackface.Very earlyone morning in June 1829 a well dressed young man was seenreeling in Broadway. From a little distance, the obviously ine-briated man was taken for a negro, but on closer examination itturned out that his shining black complexion was only the effectof a beautiful coat of oil-paint, which some friend had laid on. 214 STORIES OF FREEDOM IN BLACK NEW YORKOccasionally, though, the confusion occurred without artificial as-sistance.Five years later a highly respectable gentleman fromthe South checked into one of the Broadway hotels.As a result of long exposure to the sun, the man was rather dark-skinned; in-deed, according to the Sun, at first sight he would be mistakenfor one a little touched with the niggur blood. As soon as thelandlord laid eyes on him, the agitated man ran upstairs to find hiswife, exclaiming to her, Wife, wife, did you know there was a realniggur down stairs? She doubted that this could be so, but herhusband was adamant: Curse me if it aint a true bill. He went onto add that I ve no doubt the rascal will want to marry one of ourdaughters before he goes away! O Lord! the startled wife ex-claimed.Eventually, the landlord confronted the guest: I begyour pardon, sir but but. Ah, yes I understand you, theguest replied, and gave him his card on which was the name Col-onel , of Charleston, one of the most respectable citizens ofSouth Carolina. The piece ended by noting that the joke wastoo good to lose and that the Colonel laughed heartily as heregaled the gentlemen in the sitting room with the story that eve-ning.35As a number of historians have pointed out, this was the periodin which whiteness was being invented, primarily by variousethnic groups that sought to distinguish themselves from blacks,but in the 1820s and 1830s that process was nowhere near com-plete.36 In 1826, one white New Yorker, angry at what he per-ceived as blacks trampling all over us poor white people, signedhis letter to the New-York Enquirer, An Unfortunate White Man
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