aged well—the plot involves a lot of dismal scuffling as two young blacks try to cheat an old one out of his money—but it enchanted the audiences of the day and brought Williams and Walker to London, and then to a command performance at Buckingham Palace.

The royal performance started out badly. While they were setting up on the vast lawn behind the palace, an affable Englishman in a red vest ambled by and asked Jesse Shipp, the choleric stage director, how things were going. Shipp took the opportunity to denounce every aspect of Great Britain. Hours later, Williams, watching the royal family assemble, pointed out Edward VII to Shipp. “That man?” gasped the stage manager. “My Gawd, that fat man with the red vest, is he the King?”

Williams went on stage terrified, but the show was a huge success. Edward received the star cordially afterward. “He told me … how much he enjoyed Shipp’s unrestrained criticism. I was grateful that the thing had happened where the monarch was a man of such great intellect … that we were not in Georgia, say, nor in Texas under similar circumstances.” The two men met again a number of times; Williams claimed to have taught the King of England to play craps.

Williams and Walker came home triumphant to star in other shows. In 1907 Walker got sick, and Williams went out alone in an opus called Mr. Lode of Kole. Walker was two years dying; during that time Williams split half his take with him. He missed his partner terribly, but, alone on stage, he developed a fuller character, the one that so moved Du Bois.

He still put on the burnt cork the age demanded. He was still the lazy coon. But beneath the blackface he developed a sort of tough plaintiveness, a melancholy pride at always playing against a stacked deck. When he sang his hardluck songs—“When It’s All Goin’ Out and Nothin’ Comin’ In,” “I’m a Jonah Man,” “Nobody”—he was able to make the audience feel at one with him in a world of rent collectors and tough bosses and bad odds. “All of this,” wrote Heywood Broun, “was built for us by a tall man, his face clownishly blackened with burnt cork, who stood still in the centre of the stage and used no gesture which travelled more than six inches.”

After Walker’s death, Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies as the leading comedian, at a reported annual salary of fifty thousand dollars. It did not make him particularly happy. “It’s no disgrace to be colored,” he said once, “but it’s so inconvenient.” He didn’t complain much, and he never showed anger. He lived a quiet life with his actress wife, Charlotte, read Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, Thomas Paine, and collected rare books. His favorite was John Ogilby’s 1760 history Africa: “I think that with this volume,” he said, “I could prove that every Pullman porter

is the descendant of a king.”

That was about as fierce as he ever got. But the young W. C. Fields, who revered him, said, “Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.... With all his philosophy, and he had a well-grounded philosophy, he would occasionally say, ‘Well, there is no way for me to know this or that thing, which you say is going on—I’m just relegated—I don’t belong.’ ”

In 1922 he went out on the road in Under the Bamboo Tree. He was so sick that he couldn’t dress himself, but he wouldn’t close the show; he didn’t want to put the other actors in the company out of work. During the run, his lawyer, Henry Herzbrun, came to see him in his dressing room. Williams was lying on a couch. The two men talked for a while about Eugene O’Neill and psychoanalysis. Then Williams said he wanted his will drafted. Later, he told Herzbrun, “They keep me out of a hotel where loafers are admitted without question, so long as they’re white. Then a professor or a lawyer or a doctor invites me up to his house. It’s a great, sad little world.”

He collapsed onstage a few days later. They brought him home to New York, and fifteen thousand people turned out to pay tribute to him. His wife, who thought him the handsomest man she’d ever seen, said: “It seemed such a pity that not only did he have to wear cork on his face, but he had to wear those grotesque cotton gloves as part of his make-up too.... As I stood beside him … after the last—I fixed his hands so that they would be seen. They were more beautiful than ever. Then the Masons came and added their rites. I saw the gloves. ‘Oh, please,’ I said, ‘don’t put those gloves on him. Once—this last time, let his hands be seen.’ I didn’t know, you see. He had to wear them.”