Historians estimate that one in four cowboys was African
American, though you’d never guess by looking at westerns. Are they finally
about to get the Hollywood treatment?
The Guardian
Anne Billson
Wed 11 Mar 2020
[Crying
out to be centre-stage ... Denzel Washington in The Magnificent Seven (2016).
Photograph: Allstar/Columbia Pictures]
In Hell on the Border, a
B-movie western set in Arkansas,
Bass Reeves saves the life of a judge, tracks down a dangerous outlaw, and is
appointed deputy US marshal. So far, so familiar. What makes this interesting
is that Reeves (1838-1910) was not just a real historical character, but the
first black deputy west of the Mississippi River.
And the film doesn’t tell the half of it. Reeves was a
runaway slave who sought refuge in Native American territories, where he
learned the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole languages. Later, as a marshal, he
would sometimes wear disguises to sneak up on the white bandits who operated
with impunity in the otherwise lawless region; this was when he wasn’t chasing
them long-distance on horseback, using Native American tricks to keep his
mounts fresher than those of the men he was pursuing. At his retirement in
1909, he claimed to have arrested more than 3,000 felons, never sustaining
serious injury despite close calls in which his hat and belt were shot off.
It’s a career that is crying out for the Hollywood
treatment, the way the lives of Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok or Billy the Kid
have been enshrined in American mythology via a multitude of films. But despite
a committed performance by London-born David Gyasi in the central role, Hell on
the Border is more of a well-meaning sidebar than a satisfying cinematic
experience. It’s a label that could equally be applied to the handful of other
westerns featuring Reeves, or other gallant but flawed attempts to put black
cowboys centre-stage, such as Mario Van Peebles’ Posse (1993) and the TV film Buffalo
Soldiers (1997).
[The first black deputy west of the Mississippi
River ... David Gyasi, left, as Bass Reeves and Ron Perlman in
Hell on the Border (2019). Photograph: Lionsgate UK]
After the American civil war, a life in the saddle offered
unprecedented freedom to former slaves, while the teamwork required for cattle
drives provided a measure of equality on the trail. When cattle drives were
phased out by the use of the railroad, black cowboys, as well as white ones,
found employment in travelling rodeos and wild west shows. In the old west, one
in four cowboys was black, but you’d never guess it to look at Hollywood westerns. While the anti-woke brigade is quick
to froth at the mouth when David Oyelowo is cast as Javert in Les Misérables, Zendaya
as Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man or Dev Patel as David Copperfield, those same
cries of “Stop all the tampering with truth, history and literature!” have been
strangely silent about the way that, for the past century, Hollywood has
already been practising a form of “colour-blind casting” by reassigning the
exploits of black characters to white ones, and reframing the history of the
wild west as an illustration of “manifest destiny”, a white triumphalist agenda
from which non-white people have been erased.
According to historian Art T Burton, Reeves was the
inspiration for The Lone Ranger, but that’s not the only instance of black
history being whitewashed by popular culture. Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers
was reportedly inspired by African American cowboy Britt Johnson, who tracked down
his wife and daughters after they were kidnapped by Comanches. John Ford’s 1956
film of the same name starred John Wayne as the protagonist. Everyone knows The
Searchers; few have seen Black Fox, a pretty good 1995 TV movie in which
Johnson is played by Tony Todd. Intrepid trailblazing ex-slave Nat Love, author
of a flamboyant autobiography, was one of a number of historical figures
claiming to have been the inspiration for Deadwood Dick – inevitably played by
white actors in a series of silent shorts and a 1940 feature. Celebrated black
bulldogger Bill Pickett invented the technique (now banned) of wrestling cattle
to the ground by biting the cow’s lip, but it was his one-time colleagues Tom
Mix and the part-Cherokee Will Rogers who went on to find fame in early
westerns.
[Equal billing ... from left, Danny Glover, Kevin Costner,
Scott Glenn and Kevin Kline in Silverado (1985). Photograph: Everett/Rex
Shutterstock]
Bose Ikard, an ex-slave who became a cattle drive pioneer
alongside Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, was allegedly the model for the
character of Joshua Deets in Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove. In the
excellent 1989 TV adaptation, he was played by Danny Glover, but relegated to
second fiddle to top-billed Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. Glover had been
more of an equal partner to Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner in
Lawrence Kasdan’s enjoyable 1985 pastiche western Silverado.
And so it goes: black western history repeatedly erased, or,
at best, marginalised. But black cowboys weren’t entirely absent from Hollywood in the 1930s.
Among the era’s “race movies” – films with all-black casts aimed at segregated
audiences – were westerns starring Herb Jeffries (1913-2014), known as The
Sepia Singing Cowboy or The Bronze Buckaroo. Jeffries was born Umberto
Alexander Valentino to an Irish mother and a father of mixed
Sicilian-French-Italian-Moorish roots, sang with the Earl Hines and Duke
Ellington Orchestras, and later married legendary burlesque artist Tempest
Storm. To play the black cowboy hero of films such as Harlem
on the Prairie (1937), the first “all-coloured” western musical, he had to
darken his skin with makeup, but he identified himself as African American. “We
had nobody representing us, least of all in the cowboy pictures,” Jeffries told
the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “All we had was Stepin Fetchit. I felt that we
could do better, that we could provide heroes for youngsters.”
[Played for laughs ... Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little in
Blazing Saddles (1974). Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto
Ltd/Allstar]
At a Bafta lecture in 2018, Spike Lee said: “Fuck John Wayne
and John Ford!” Yet Ford was the first director to cast a black actor – former
UCLA football star Woody Strode – in a leading role in a mainstream western,
Sergeant Rutledge (1960). “John Ford put classic words in my mouth,” Strode
later told the New York Times. “You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like
John Wayne before.” In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), Strode
received equal screen time, if not equal billing, to Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin
and Robert Ryan. But he also made a mark in spaghetti westerns, notably Sergio
Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), in which he plays one of the trio
of gunmen loitering at the railway station to greet Charles Bronson.
In the 1960s, black actors began to appear in more westerns,
if only as barmen, such as Yaphet Kotto holding his own against Dean Martin and
Robert Mitchum in Henry Hathaway’s 5 Card Stud (1968), or in oddly peripheral
roles, such as Sidney Poitier in his first oater, Ralph Nelson’s unexpectedly
gruesome Duel at Diablo (1966). Poitier made up for it when he took over the
directing reins of Buck and the Preacher (1972), in which he plays the
uncontested lead: a wagonmaster leading emancipated slaves (known as
“Exodusters”) from Louisiana to Kansas to escape white raiders hired by
plantation owners. En route he forms a Butch and Sundance-style relationship
with a bogus preacher played by Harry Belafonte.
Buck and the Preacher did only lukewarm business; mainstream
audiences preferred their black cowboys played for laughs in Blazing Saddles
(1974), though it’s arguably the white folks’ prejudices that are sent up more
than the reluctant black sheriff. Richard Pryor, one of Mel Brooks’s
co-scripters, was originally supposed to play the role, but the studio deemed
him uninsurable and Cleavon Little was cast instead. A year later, Pryor
co-starred in another comedy western, Adiós Amigo (1975), written, directed by
and co-starring blaxploitation superstar Fred Williamson, but the results were
disappointing.
[Uncontested lead ... Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier in
Buck and the Preacher (1972). Photograph: Allstar/Columbia]
Williamson was one of the ex-NFL footballers following
Strode into film roles, including in blaxploitation westerns such as The Legend
of Nigger Charley (1972), the first of three films defiantly using the N-word
in the title; “Controversy is what sells,” said Williamson. In the enjoyable
but lightweight Take a Hard Ride (1975), he co-starred with fellow
footballer-turned-actor Jim Brown; black martial arts artist Jim Kelly, who had
co-starred with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, also shows up as a mute Native
American.
It wasn’t until the second sequel, Guns of the Magnificent
Seven (1969), that the seven included a black actor (the great Bernie Casey in
his film debut) in their ranks. So perhaps it’s a sign of improvement that,
while westerns are thin on the ground these days, in the 2016 remake The
Magnificent Seven are led by Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx and Samuel L
Jackson get top billing in, respectively, Django Unchained (2012) and The
Hateful Eight (2015).
But will Hollywood
ever restore the real black cowboy to his rightful role in the western lore
from which he has been ousted? There’s no shortage of action-packed subject
matter; screenwriters could do worse than take their pick of the larger than
life characters in Tricia Martineau Wagner’s book Black Cowboys of the Old
West. How about lovable rogue Isom Dart, whose cattle-rustling career was cut
short when he was shot dead by ruthless bounty hunter Tom Horn? Or Robert
Lemmons, who successfully tamed herds of wild mustangs by pretending to be a
horse?
Perhaps Bass Reeves’s hour has finally come. There’s a HBO
miniseries in development, as well as an Amazon Studios biopic, to be directed
by Chloé Zhao. Keep your fingers crossed for him.
Hell on the Border is on Digital Download now and on DVD
16 March
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