It is quite possible to be famous and yet unknown. Florence Hines is one such.
Hines, an African American, became known as a male impersonator at the beginning of the 1890s, and therefore was probably born in the late 1860s. Her stated home town of Salem, Oregon had not been in a slave state, but it was the only state with a black exclusion law – one that stated that black people who did not leave were to be publicly whipped. This was not repealed until 1925, although it was apparently often not enforced.
In the 1870s and 1880 several white male impersonators came to fame in New York and touring across country. Two of the biggest names were Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner. Black male impersonators attracted less attention, but Florence Hines was beginning to get noticed.
Until 1890, all-black minstrel shows lacked representational freedom, the stereotypes of black people The Creole Show which ran 1890-7. The show was produced by Sam T Jack, a white man, but he accepted the ideas put forward by his lead performer Sam Lucas. The show featured multi-talented black women noted for their beauty, and shifted the focus from the plantation past to the urban present. And notably the interlocutor, the master of ceremonies, a role usually performed by a white male, was performed by Florence Hines who was already known as a male impersonator. Hines’ act mocked the Dandy, flashy young men who drank and dated openly and wore the latest clothes. Hines was not simply copying the white male impersonators who had preceded her: the Dandy was a way to resist the degraded images of black men and over-sexualized images of black women that were popular with white audiences. had been established by the white actors in blackface who performed Zip Coon and Jim Crow. These roles dominated into the twentieth century. The major breakthrough that took black performance in another direction was
The New York Age reported in 1891:
“Miss Florence Hines impersonated a male character in a manner that would do credit to any variety actor on the stage. … The grand Amazonian March, under the direction of Miss Florence Hines, with a superb tableau, concluded the performance.”Hines’ Dandy was a long way from the old plantation stereotypes. Abbott and Sheroff comment: “Hines’s male impersonations provided the standard against which African American comediennes were compared for decades.”
In 1892, while performing in Cincinnati, Hines was in a fight with singer Marie Roberts with whom she performed a duet. The Cincinnati Enquirer, journalist wrote that
“the utmost intimacy has existed between the two women for the past year, their marked devotion being not only noticeable but a subject of comment among their associates on the stage.”
Despite this Hines continued working, performing not only to black audiences but also to both white working-class and well-off white audiences.
By 1904 the Indianapolis Freeman reported that Hines
“commanded the largest salary paid to a colored female performer.”
There are two rumors about her later years: that she became an invalid in 1906; that in 1920, the first year of Prohibition, she had returned to Salem, Oregon to become a preacher.
Hines’ death was reported to the Chicago Defender in 1924 by a Nunnie Williams in Santa Clara, California who said that Hines was her mother – although no-one has found any mention of the death in any California or Oregon newspaper.
- WLM Chaise. “Gossip of the Stage”. The New York Age, June 6, 1891.
- “Two Beautiful Creoles Pull Hair,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 2, 1892.
- “Miss Florence Hines,” Indianapolis Freeman, September 10, 1904.
- “Florence Hines Dead”, Chicago Defender, March 22, 1924
- Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff. Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music 1889-1895. University Press of Mississippi, 2002: 154-6, 159-160, 167, 308, 339, 371, 388, 473.
- Kathleen Bridget Casey. “Cross-dressers and race-crossers : intersections of gender and race in American vaudeville, 1900-1930”. University of Rochester, PhD Thesis, 2010: 174n452, 195-6, 199. Online.
- Marvin McAllister. Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African American Performance. The University of North Caroline Press, 2011: 78, 275n15.
- Hugh Ryan. “This Black Drag King Was Once Known As the Greatest Male Impersonator of All Time”. Them, June 1, 2018. Online.
- Hugh Ryan. When Brooklyn was Queer. St Martin’s Press, 2019: 55-8, 116.
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