Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity by John A. Hodgson

Reviewed by: Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity by John A. Hodgson Kristen E. Wood (bio) Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity. By John A. Hodgson. (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2018. Pp. 352. $29.95 cloth) John A. Hodgson's biography of Richard Potter traces the life of the Black celebrity who was once known nearly nationwide for his virtuosic ventriloquism, magic tricks, and set pieces. The son of an African woman and white man, Richard Potter lived as a Black man in the Black community of Boston, but he sometimes described himself as having West Indian or Indian background. The combination of his variable self-description, appearance, gentlemanly manners, and virtuosity left some white people in doubt about his racial identity. [End Page 336] This ambiguity, combined with his excellent showmanship, enabled Potter to travel not only in New England and Canada but also through much of the South, captivating audiences and earning both good reviews and significant amounts of money in the process. In addition to exploring Potter's skills, his audiences' responses, and the operations of racism in shaping his career, Hodgson pays close attention to Potter's family life and woes. As a celebrity, Potter was an undoubted success. As a man of business, husband, and father, he was less so. While Potter did not end his days in abject poverty or disgrace, neither was he able to provide his family with the financial and social security that was the goal of his exhausting touring schedule. He faced debts and lawsuits, his wife Sally's intemperate drinking, a disappointing son, and a white neighbor's ability to sexually abuse and impregnate Potter's young daughter with no legal consequences. Hodgson observes that Potter bore partial responsibility for some of these troubles: his frequent travel surely took a toll on his family and a significant share of his legal and financial troubles arose from performing without a license. In short, Hodgson is a fair-minded, careful biographer, neither claiming to read Potter's mind nor being a cheerleader-in-chief. For historians of American performers, Hodgson's biography will probably be most useful for its details about how performers trained, collaborated, and organized their tours. Hodgson excavates Potter's youth with great care, tracking down both his childhood years and how Potter began to learn his acrobatic skills in Europe, most probably from the Italian Signior Manfredi, how he met and began to tour with John Rannie, the Scottish ventriloquist, and how he shared billing with other performers, whether as a supernumerary or as the star attraction. Hodgson thus provides significant insight into the trans-Atlantic business of performance. In an invaluable appendix, Hodgson traces Potter's performances across two decades, noting location, venue, dates, co-performers, and sources. Historians of Black life in the early republic will value not only Potter's own unusual story but also the details Hodgson relates of Black life in and around Boston and Andover, New Hampshire, including [End Page 337] the workings of Boston's Black Masonic society. Hodgson also shows how Black New Englanders formed enduring connections, sometimes against their will, with whites. The Potter family's many connections to white families in the area included chattel slavery, employment, patronage, and something rather like friendly acquaintance. Hodgson largely eschews any theories and interpretation that looks past Richard Potter's life and the main actors therein. In his preface, he writes: "I think I serve Richard Potter (and scholarship generally) best" by sticking with "the facts and the story of his life" (p. xvi). This selfimposed limitation—a characterization Hodgson might well dispute—may frustrate some readers who wish for a richer contextualization of Potter's life. To call New England in 1830 "a religiously conservative society," for example, is to prompt the question, in comparison to what? (p. 197). We see little or nothing here of the uneven transformations that the Second Great Awakening wrought in New England and New York, for example. The treatment of family, dependent children, and sexuality also lacks some depth. The law's view that the rape of an underage child represented a crime against her father did not make...

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