The Ex-Slave Oral History Of Cakewalks

Cakewalks, for many, evoke visions of childhood and carnivals. Dancers promenade around a circle, hoping they land on a certain number that will be drawn so they can take home the prized dessert. Who knew this pleasing game had such a murky and complicated past that demonstrated how African Americans opposed their oppressors? Although the exact year and origin is still undetermined, ex-slave oral histories assert that the cakewalk began in slave quarters of Southern plantations. The cakewalk was a grand-promenade type of dance, where couples would take turns performing. The couple with the best dancing skills would then “take the cake,” an idiom that is still common today. But the cakewalk was more than recreational dance; it also gave a chance for the slaves to ridicule the whites who tyrannized them. The dancers would dress up in their finest
clothes and parodied the mannerisms and dancing of the white Southern elite. The cakewalk was directly inspired by a specific European couple dance called the Grand March. However, the enslaved dancers would highly individualize the dance by adding their own twists, shuffles, high kicks and other incorporated movements from African dances. Therefore, the cakewalk is a distantly African-American product that invokes the same creativity and inventiveness that can be seen in later African-American dancing and music. While one would think that the whites would punish the slaves for this act, in fact, many owners actually encouraged it.
According to the ragtime musician Shepherd Edmonds, who described the stories of his freed slave parents, “They did a take-off on the high manners of the white folks in the ‘big-house,’ but their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point.” Often the whites even assumed the role of presenting the cake instead of the slaves choosing amongst themselves, therefore once again demonstrating their authority over the slaves. In fact, whites became so enthralled with cakewalks that by the end of the Civil War, it became a regular routine in minstrel shows, a type of variety show where white people performed in blackface. During these performances, the cakewalk became a grotesque event, where the costumes became outrageously colorful and gaudy. The blackface performance presented the dance as a ridiculous and an unsuccessful attempt to parallel white culture. Cakewalk imaginary was also used on sheet music, advertising, prints, and toys, with African Americans being depicted as
cartoonish.
By the 1870s, African American actors began to perform in minstrels, though often still in blackface. While some African Americans were able to distinguish themselves from the white performers by bringing some humanity to the caricatures, the black minstrels continued to depict racist content. Still, many African American performers attempted to reclaim the cakewalk, thus ragtime historian Terry Waldo states, the dance became about “blacks imitating whites who were imitating blacks who were imitating whites.” Foe example, one well-known African American performer George Walker, gave the cakewalk the respect it need as the foundations of African American dance. Walker was not seen as a clown as he danced, but instead noted for his grace; as the African American newspaper The Indianapolis Freeman stated, Walker possessed “incandescent comportment” while dancing the cakewalk.
So next time you think the cakewalk is a “piece of cake,” consider how this dance expressed the representational and literal freedom of African Americans throughout the 19th century.