“One Hell of a Metaphor”

This chapter argues that disparaging ideas of disability amplified perceptions of racial difference in blackface minstrelsy and freak shows, which shored up fragile notions of whiteness to wide audiences. This is evident in Thomas “Daddy” Rice’s 1829 creation of Jim Crow when he witnessed an enslaved, physically disabled man dancing and singing “Jump Jim Crow” and in P. T. Barnum’s 1835 promotion of the nation’s first “freak,” Joice Heth—an elderly, disabled enslaved woman who was supposedly an astonishing 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Thomas “Japanese Tommy” Dilward—one of only two black men to perform in blackface before the Civil War—epitomized the linkages between blackface and freak shows as a dwarf who gained fame as a cross-dressing, gender-bending fiddler.