1Washington, D.C., 1863: President Lincoln is shot during a theatrical performance by the actor he had been watching, Booth. His body is subsequently embalmed and taken on a funeral train, stopping in a string of American cities on the way to its final resting place at Oak Wood Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. His remains are viewed by thousands of ordinary Americans.

2Somewhere in an American city, a room in a rooming-house, sometime in the late 20^th century: a week in the life of two roommates and brothers. A black man called Lincoln—nicknamed Linc [1]—is shot by his brother Booth. Before being fired towards the end of the play, Linc had worked as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade. From the president’s life, he had been requested to perform only one moment: the assassination. Sitting in a chair dressed in period costume, waiting for a customer to fire a blank at him before collapsing; then after a blackout, the performance would start again, with Linc switching back and forth, his impersonation alternating between his live namesake and the fallen, dying President.

3To impersonate the President convincingly and cover his blackness, the contemporary Lincoln is made to wear white make-up by his employer. Suzan-Lori Parks refers to the make-up as “whiteface”. The perspective adopted here will be avowedly narrow: to zero in on what may look like a detail, the make-up, in order to unravel its broader dramatic implications.

4The more obvious explanation for the presence of whiteface hinges on the play’s realistic bent. Without approaching Ibsen-level fastidiousness, the set and costumes are remarkably detailed compared to Parks’s earlier work—a tendency that has led her to be criticized for selling out to a facile, Broadway-worthy naturalist template, while others have noted her adherence to her metatheatrical and abstract grounding principles below the surface. [2] The character’s appearance in costume and make-up is convincing enough for a schoolboy to mistake him for the real thing, and ask him for an autograph—which the new Honest Abe ironically extorts in exchange for 20 dollars, swindling the boy out of the change (Parks 2001, 10). The play makes it clear that sartorial and cosmetic artifice are instrumental in identifying the character with the fore/faux-father he portrays.

5Topdog/Underdog is Parks’s second stab at inscribing the Lincoln figure into a play. In her first attempt, The America Play (1994), the Lincoln doppelgänger is known as the Founding Father and is hired to perform the same role at a theme park based on a physical resemblance—“dead ringers” (Parks 1995, 161)—to the late President. He also wears a costume and a fake beard to perform his role, meticulously cultivating his innate physical likeness, but no mention is made of make-up, despite his obvious blackness. On the other hand, Linc’s connection to the Great Man does not seem to go beyond onomastic predestination, [3] then placing greater emphasis on the role of costume, make-up and performance in the formation of his presidential identity.

6The two plays have been viewed as “companion pieces” (Foster 8) and a prime example of Suzan-Lori Parks’s reliance on “Rep & Rev” (repetition and revision), a practice rooted in jazz music that in literary terms could be translated as personal intertextuality. Here the revising dimension has been interpreted mostly in formal, dramaturgical terms: Topdog/Underdog being the realistic pendant to The America Play’s more abstract aesthetic, firmly entrenched in the sprawling, epic vein of the playwright’s early career. The repetitive aspect is then ascribed to the presence of an Abraham Lincoln impersonator as the protagonist. Let us posit that make-up as a point of divergence has been so far mostly overlooked and underestimated in the interpretation of the relation between the plays, driving the revising wedge further and differently than expected.

7Beyond the deceptively simple realistic surface, the white make-up is immediately identified by Parks in the stage directions as a cultural reference, namely an inversion of the performance tradition of blackface. Booth uses “whiteface” to insult his brother Linc and denounce what he calls his “hustle”, his humiliating acting job (“BOOTH: little whiteface shriveled-up blankshooting grub worm,” Parks 2001, 43), reminiscent of the commodifying processes of slavery: “BOOTH: You play Honest Abe. You aint goin back but you goin all the way back. Back to way back when folks was slaves and shit” (Parks 2001, 20). [4]

8The critical consensus surrounding the presence of whiteface in the play validates it as a reference to minstrelsy. This is further confirmed by Parks’s common reliance on past performance practices, from old chestnuts to vaudeville and freak shows—a blend Marc Robinson terms “Parks’s purposefully ambiguous interest in minstrelsy, Barnumesque spectacle and melodramatic dramaturgy” (Robinson 2). Deborah Geis notes that having “black actors in whiteface” amounts to “a kind of reverse minstrelsy,” which she views as a “reiterat[ion of] Parks’s idea that history perpetuates itself through simulacra and that each generation is called upon to imitate the previous one without questioning the nature of the falsehoods or performances involved” (Geis 109). Geis’s analysis of Topdog/Underdog follows the same pattern of carnivalesque inversion, complemented by an additional connection to the black literary tradition:

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One might situate this reverse blackface in the tradition of such works as Jean Genet’s The Blacks and other plays more directly critical of the minstrel tradition such as Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7. Here, Parks creates her own version of a trope that appears frequently in African-American literature: that African-American identity almost inevitably involves disguise and role-playing as part of the effort to function in a hostile culture.

10The claim here is that what Geis and others perceive as “the humiliating ‘mask’ created by the white make-up,” sharing Booth’s outlook on his brother’s position, can be approached differently if more attention is paid to the funeral arrangements for the historical Lincoln.

11Why? Because the dead President wore whiteface in his own way. The fate of his body has not garnered the same level of legendary interest as his highly theatrical death. Yet the funeral pageant in which his initial lying-in-state was replicated throughout a series of cities from Washington, D.C. to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois is unlikely to have escaped an erudite playwright’s attention. Although Parks has never mentioned her knowledge of the post-mortem destiny of the presidential corpse, her interest in—if not her obsession with—cadavers, suggest that her silence on that particular point should not be taken at face value.

12Without seeking to invalidate previous interpretations either, the methodological assumption is that an apparently minor or peripheral fact—in this case visual detail and historical anecdote—may be able to inform and change the outlook on the entire picture. Or, to quote Miss Miss in Pickling, the truth may sometimes be “Uh little off” centre. [5]

13My objective here is to rely on cultural history to renegotiate a dramatic reading, [6] and add a thread to the already complex web of intertwined meanings woven by Parks. [7] So how and why did President Lincoln’s corpse end up wearing white make-up? Here is how a witness described his experience on the day the president’s corpse was disinterred for a final time in 1901 before being laid to rest permanently under a thick coat of concrete:

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The dark brown Lincoln face was […] covered with a distinct rubbing of white chalk, which was applied by an undertaker in Philadelphia in 1865 on the trip west, when the skin inexplicably turned black and it was impossible to exhibit the body to the public without this thick covering […] it was the president beyond all manner of doubt. [8]

15The blackening of the skin was not actually inexplicable: skin discolouration is a marker of putrefaction and affects any corpse not buried quickly enough to conceal its effects. And although Lincoln’s body had been embalmed, following a procedure that had gained traction during the Civil War, embalming can only postpone decomposition for so long.

16The war period represents a turning point for American funeral practices (Laderman 1999). The pared-down Protestant rituals lost favour to be replaced by a procedure until then perceived as Pagan, along with more elaborate pageantry seeking to tone down or disguise the physical manifestations of death. The quick burial in a shroud and/or a simple, octagonal wooden box gave way to embalming, the exhibition of the corpse, and inhumation in an ornate, rectangular box no longer espousing the shape of the human body. The linguistic substitution of coffin for casket, originally referring to a jewel box, illustrated the concurrent valorization of the corpse and disconnection with the reality of death. The acceptance of embalming found its origin in the desire of families to view the repatriated remains of soldiers without decomposition adding insult to the injury of death:

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The number of deaths during the Civil War had advanced the art and social acceptance of embalming. Once a novelty viewed with distaste and even suspicion, the practice had become commonplace when the broken bodies of so many fallen soldiers were shipped from distant battlefields back home to waiting parents and widows.

18The nearly two-week long funeral train on which Lincoln’s body was taken tested the limits of the cosmetic procedure: the corpse’s darkened skin increasingly distressed viewers, so that several undertakers were called on to try to restore a paler skin-tone. While the 1901 witness did not clarify the nature of the connection between the corpse’s blackness and “the impossibility to exhibit the body” without previously applying a generous coat of paint over its face, the causality of racial anxiety can hardly be missed. What paratactic modesty took care to disguise in 1963 had been conveyed in much blunter terms a century before during the Civil War. Here is how a war correspondent worded a similar reaction:

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[…] the faces of those who had fallen in the battle were, after more than a day’s exposure, so black that no one would ever suspect that they had been white. All looked like negroes, and as they lay in piles where they had fallen, one upon another, they filled the bystanders with a sense of horror.

20The horror expressed is all the more arresting as, contrary to the presidential corpse, carefully washed, embalmed and stitched up to mask the effects of the lethal gunshot wound, some soldiers had sustained noticeably horrific injuries. While witnesses stressed the racial diversity at Lincoln’s funeral ceremonies, rejoicing in viewing bystanders of all races mingle, [9] seeing the President turn as confusingly black as the former slaves he had helped free, challenged their tolerance. What could now be read as another ironic manifestation of death as the great equalizer needed to be covered up instead.

21Now how does acknowledging the reference to the decomposing presidential corpse modify the reading of Topdog/Underdog? The use of make-up alone provides a way of analogically inscribing and incorporating the now ambivalent collective view of the former President. [10] Just as his contemporaries’ reactions to the spectacle of his corpse had been a schizophrenic blend of reverence and disgusted anxiety, the President has been both “revered as the Great Emancipator and in the last half century or so criticized as a white supremacist” (Foster 31). By opening up the interpretation to another, concurrent reading, beside the reenactment of the assassination, Parks visually illustrates this dichotomy and interpretive suspension: the white make-up enables the black character credibly to impersonate and revive the president, while the contrast in skin colour draws attention to the history of the President’s corpse. Neither alive nor dead, manifesting neither awe-inspiring gravitas nor insulting putrefaction, the President is painted as simultaneously black and white without the two colours ever appearing to blend, turning him into a visual oxymoron.

22In this respect, the presidential figure achieves a status akin to that of a series of effigies. As Joseph Roach argues, the corpse itself can constitute an effigy, defined as what “fills by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original” (Roach 36). As soon as life ebbs out of the body, the remains can stand in for, or perform, the deceased, but no longer be him/her. The corpse therefore possesses an inherently theatrical dimension, being a potential vehicle for dramatic embodiment. As a matter of fact, before visibly and embarrassingly putrefying, the embalmed Lincoln had not been prepared so as to look alive, but rather to resemble a statue. Whether the actual intention was to produce a final image of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, or had to do with the constraints of embalming, which hardens the body, the spectacle offered incorporated and played upon the reference to statuary. The result left the impression that Lincoln in death had been staged to perform and reproduce the public images of him already available during his lifetime. The details of the preparations were even shared with the general public, so that spectators were aware of being in the presence of a bloodless, emptied-out carcass. Here is how a journalist described the appearance of the corpse at the New York City lying-in-state:

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The long and bony body is now hard and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any more than the arms or legs of a statue. It has undergone many changes. The scalp has been removed, the brain scooped out, the chest opened and the blood emptied. All we see of Lincoln, so cunningly contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble.

24In other words, the corpse-as-effigy did not take on the status of an original—as could have been expected, by virtue of its being the actual remains of a person—, but became another addition to a series of existing representations. It can even be argued that Lincoln-as-president was already an effigy in the flesh (Joseph Roach includes “statesmen” among the categories of performed effigies, Roach 1996, 36), and that the legendary Great Man was a cultural construction made of a series of performances without an original—President Lincoln playing the part of Lincoln-as-President. Following that logic, the gunshot fired by John Wilkes Booth put on hold not only the performance of The American Cousin, but also of the presidency. In his public, unstatesmanlike collapse, the wounded Lincoln was reduced to his human condition, briefly superseding the trappings of power; the dying process marked a gap in the presidential sequence of performances, while effectively ushering in the passage from a live to a stone-like effigy. Parading the presidential corpse around a number of cities would then have been a way to make a statement about restoration and continuity.

25Parks’s focus seems to be on the humbling interruption of the presidency by the assassination, with Linc replaying the killing on demand and the arcade spectators deriving pleasure from watching him fall. Acknowledging the allusion to the presidential corpse amounts to integrating the final part of the historical narrative: the use of whiteface enables Parks to superimpose the post-mortem image of the made-up corpse on the funeral train. While the arcade audience watches a replica of the dying Great Man succeed his live, healthy counterpart according to a visible cause-and-effect logic, embedded into that plot from the start is the image of the dead Lincoln behind the white mask. Parks literalizes the body’s presence through the interplay of black(ened) skin/whiteface, effectively suggesting that her own Linc turns into a corpse whenever putting on make-up. This makes sense within the broader economy of the play: a dramatis personae featuring a Lincoln and a Booth undercuts any possibility of surprise, onomastically condemning Linc to death and announcing a repetition of History. And as with any story known to end in death, the predictable demise colours and ghosts the telling throughout.

26With this in mind, when reading the play again clues alluding to Linc’s corpse-like status seem to abound. Criticizing his brother for leaving behind the excitement of running a successful three-card monte operation, Booth connects Linc’s hiring at the arcade with a decline in his sex life. The description of what he perceives to be Linc’s static, sterile position—physically and metaphorically—hinges on the image of a decomposing body:

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BOOTH: When you dont got a woman you just sit there. Letting yr shit fester. Yr dick, if it aint falled off yet, is hanging there between yr legs, little whiteface shriveled-up blankshooting grub worm. As goes thuh man so goes thuh mans dick. Thats what I say. Least my shits intact.

28Linc’s receding virility is also conveyed by a pun on get up: the costume is referred to as the “getup” throughout the play, with Booth insisting on his brother’s inability to get (it) up, [11] as if donning the costume resulted in a semantic transfer, and a sense of castration—in other words, becoming a corpse logically precludes potency. [12] When Lincoln becomes concerned about being made redundant, Booth suggests he improve his act by infusing it with more life, stressing his brother’s excessive stiffness:

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BOOTH: Then you gotta jazz up yr act. Elaborate yr moves, you know. You was always too stiff with it. You cant just sit there! Maybe, when they shoot you, you know, leap up flail yr arms then fall down and wiggle around and shit so they gotta shoot you more than once.

30Linc twice mentions feeling cold (Parks 2001, 7 & 21), in contrast to Booth’s hot-blooded demeanour, with heat representing both sex drive and guns. Booth epitomizes the racist representation of the black man reduced to a synecdochic penis—a myth that Eric Lott has shown to be tied to popular perceptions of minstrelsy, conveying the anxiety and sense of threat before a powerful other:

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Bold swagger, irrepressible desire, sheer bodily display: in a real sense, the minstrel man was the penis, that organ returning in a variety of contexts, at times ludicrous, at others rather less so. Such contexts were contradictory in any case, invoking the power of “blackness” while deriding it, in an effort of cultural control, through the very convention that produced its power—the greasepaint and burnt cork of blackface.

32If Booth exemplifies that threat, Linc in whiteface corresponds to his mirror opposite, reversing the commonplaces of blackface: the white man as sexually weak, and the corpse as essentially impotent.

33Linc has renounced both agency and danger when leaving behind his lucrative career as a three-card monte dealer. After witnessing his partner suffer a fate similar to the President’s and being gunned down in public, [13] he chose what he believed to be physical protection, though it involved being constantly in the line of fire and replicating fictionally—with blanks—the trauma of his friend’s death. His desire for security, both physical and social (“a sit down job. With benefits,” Parks 1995, 51), is derailed when the arcade owner announces his plan to replace Linc with a “wax dummy” (Parks 1995, 42).

34While dedicated museums featuring wax figures constitute an identifiable form of popular entertainment, the “wax dummy” may also refer to a corpse. Substituting a corpse with its effigy and splitting the representation of the deceased into “two bodies”—an artificial, non-perishable double meant to offset the actual decaying corpse—is a well-known ceremonial ritual. The arcade owner’s willingness to trade Linc with a dummy is officially intended as a cost-cutting measure. But if Linc’s corpse-like status is taken into account, it means that, like Lincoln’s progress on the funeral train, his situation has become a race against the rot. In other words, he is cut because, as both a performer and corpse, he stinks.

35A supine cadaver in a state of livor mortis is commonly said to have a waxen complexion, as the blood has been drained out under the force of gravity, before the blackening caused by putrefaction occurs. But more literally, applying wax is used as a restorative device to recreate the features of the deceased after the embalming process, especially if a violent death has affected the integrity of the corpse. “Wax dummy” also happens to be the phrase used by William Walton, a close friend of the Kennedys, to describe the appearance of another assassinated president’s corpse during the brief, private debate over whether to allow public viewing of the remains. “You mustn’t keep it open,” he argued, “It has no resemblance to the president. It’s a wax dummy” (Manchester 443). [14] His opinion prevailed.

36July 1963, a few months before Kennedy’s death, is the date Parks selected as the beginning of her sole novel, Getting Mother’s Body (2003). The plot revolves around the quest to “get mother’s body,” in other words to disinter a corpse allegedly buried with valuable jewellery following mother’s wishes. Parks weaves allusions to the fate of the two murdered presidents: the location chosen as the starting-point of the journey, Lincoln, Texas, connects one president’s name with the location of the other’s assassination and final destination. [15] Parks’s obsession with corpses is foregrounded explicitly in the presence of a family of undertakers, and more subtly in the suggested conflation between the body and jewellery. This enables Parks to literalize the already mentioned linguistic evolution from coffin to casket, from the pine box to the jewel box, as a sign of the spectacularization of remains, and the post-Civil War invention of the funeral director—a clear theatrical analogy.

37In the absence of the play on make-up, it is through his “box” that Parks connects The America Play’s Foundling Father to the Great Man’s funeral history. A “Digger” by trade before parleying his physical likeness into a successful performance career, his lingering regret was to have missed the opportunity to bury his model, and take part in the funeral pageant: “If he had been summoned […] and boarded a train to Big Town where he would line up and gawk at the Great Mans corpse along with the rest of them.” (Parks 1995, 161) The box the character carries around and in which he preserves his collection of fake beards bears a strong resemblance to a casket: it is made of “cherry wood,” a traditional, dignified casket wood type, [16] and “lined with purple velvet” (Parks 1995, 159), a material and colour with established funerary associations. Later in the play, the connection grows more explicit with the box being referred to as a “Jewel Box” whose “jewels have long escaped.” Mentioned in immediate juxtaposition is “one of Mr. Washingtons bones” (Parks 1995, 185)—a form of syntactic editing leading the audience to associate the missing jewels with the bone.

38The hairs used to create the beards are not the Foundling Father’s own. In mentioning that “he’d secretly bought the hairs from his barber and arranged their beard shapes,” Parks suggests that the Lincoln impersonator has not entirely left behind his former profession—appropriating foreign body parts (even if only hair) with the sneakiness of a resurrectionist, storing them in a casket-like box and digging them out to perform in.

39Despite the obvious similarities within what amounts to a Lincoln diptych, approaching Topdog/Underdog from the perspective of whiteface shows that a single detail can alter the representational regime of the Lincoln impersonator, with Linc appearing at first sight more or less like a duplicate of the Foundling Father.

40If his routine calls for Linc to embody the dying President and his corpse at the same time, how can the juxtaposition, the hesitancy between life and death, presence and absence, be negotiated and expressed in performance? [17]

41From this vantage point, another play, Venus (1996), may prove to be a better-suited reference point and closer “companion piece.” In that work, Parks more explicitly exposes and explores the paradoxes of dealing with a living-dead figure. Venus is both alive, as her life story is told with a performer embodying her, and already dead. The announcement of her death at the very beginning of the play is closely followed by her presentation as a live character. That is to say, her proclaimed death is not just a reminder of her status as a historical character, but an invitation to superimpose her—in her case, anatomized—corpse onto the actor’s live body standing for her. The device creates a form of alienation effect, implying that the performer’s body is an effigy detached from the character. It also makes for a playful metatheatrical wink at the ontological status of history in the theatre in general: writing period drama amounts to handling corpses, so why not allude to it directly, all the while going through the motions of pretending that the characters are still alive?

42Parks’s oft-quoted personal metanarrative—“re-membering,” “dig[ging] for bones,” “hear[ing] the bones sing” [18]—points in that direction. It should not come as a surprise to see the particulars of real-life funeral practices materialize in the work of an author casting herself as an undertaker of sorts.