The Wonderfully Complex Whitman Sisters

Vaudeville is generally thought of as entertainment for the broad middle class, a turn-of-the-century explosion in theatrical variety shows in parallel and in succession to the like of dime museums and circuses. Per historian Michelle R. Scott, “aesthetically or culturally, it was not considered ‘high art’ but rather an open stage for the masses to enjoy at considerably lower prices than ‘legitimate’ dramatic theater performances.”

Vaudeville depended on the sort of entertainment that could read well from the cheap seats, which meant there was a fair amount of stereotype and caricature put onstage, but it was nonetheless an age of opportunity for Black performers and entrepreneurs. Critic Harry Kraton, writing in the December 14, 1907, issue of Variety magazine, noted that a few years earlier there were scant few Black acts on the circuit, but “now there are at least 100 in this country and Europe. It is undisputed that [Black] artists prefer vaudeville, if they can secure good bookings to any other theatrical work.” In the first decades of the twentieth century, theatrical infrastructure also arose to support Black audiences and talent. According to William Howland Kenney III, more than eighty Black-focused venues in the American South and Midwest organized as the Theater Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA) by 1920. Black vaudeville was an incubator for entrepreneurship, music, and dance talent.

Among the most successful and socially complicated acts in Black vaudeville was the Whitman Sisters: a troupe composed of Mabel, Essie, Alberta, and Alice Whitman. The girls’ father, Reverend Albery Allson Whitman, was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and well-known poet, writes Joan R. Sherman. Together with his wife, Caddie, a white woman, he “spent fourteen years establishing and leading AME churches in the Midwest,” notes theater scholar Michael Dinwiddie, drawing on Sherman’s research. The sisters originally learned music and dance to support church events and touring. In 1899, under their mother’s supervision, the older sisters, Mabel and Essie, still teenagers, began touring as “The Danzette Sisters.” Soon Alberta signed up, and the sisters quickly came into their own, forming first the Whitman Sisters’ Novelty Act Company and then the Whitman Sisters’ New Orleans Troubadours. By 1909, Alice had joined the act, and their fame, which persisted for decades on both Black and white vaudeville theater circuits, was second to none.

Biographers Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns write that, in their time, “the Whitman Sisters were the royalty of [Black] vaudeville, the highest paid act on TOBA.” Their regular show combined dance, live jazz, sketch comedy, quasi-sideshow acts, and large production numbers in a fast hour and fifteen minutes. In one 1937 newspaper, they were marketed alongside the Marx Brothers. In the above-mentioned issue of Variety, they were lauded as a “recognized vaudeville feature and should be. Will make good on any bill in any company. Always meeting with distinct approval wherever appearing.”

The sisters each brought distinct talents to the table. Essie was a low alto who was said to rival singer and actress Sophie Tucker. Alice was a gifted dancer renowned as the “Queen of Taps.” Alberta, a.k.a. “Bert,” cut her hair short, wore men’s clothing, and did a dance act with “baby doll” Alice. Writing about the long history of “women in pants” (on and off stage) for the March 18, 1933, issue of Afro-American, Ralph Matthews called her a “a pioneer in this field.” In the Depression Era, it was called male impersonation, but it might today be considered a drag king act. As Stearns and Stearns write, Essie related that the renowned impersonator Vesta Tilley was once supposed to follow Bert onstage, “but when she saw Sister’s act, she ran out of the theater and wouldn’t come back. Sister Bert was the best in the business.”

Mabel, who went by May, managed the troupe, which employed a host of musicians, chorus girls, and other performers and was known as an incubator for Black talent. Stearns and Stearns write that Catherine Basie (née Morgan), wife of jazz great Count Basie, considered May’s the last word on any given issue. “Sister May hired and fired everybody,” she confirmed. May was known as a firm manager, which meant that audiences trusted the Whitmans to deliver a moral and appropriate show, while parents trusted them to give young performers careful care. According to Stearns and Stearns, Basie joined the troupe as a teenager, and her mother trusted the Whitmans to keep her safe.

“Sister May telegraphed my mother,” Basie reported, “and got her consent to take care of me; we couldn’t drink or smoke, and each of the young girls had to travel by car with one of the sisters—they wouldn’t let us ride in the bus.”

Dinwiddie uses Nadine George-Graves’s research to discuss Mabel’s work against segregation as an important legacy and offer evidence of the troupe’s pull in the industry. “In 1904,” he writes, Mabel “insisted that [B]lack patrons be allowed to sit in the dress circle and parquet sections of the Jefferson Theater in Birmingham, Alabama.”

The Whitman Sisters were successful not only because of their visible moral signaling but because of their ability to code-switch. As Dinwiddie shares, George-Graves credits the Whitmans for their ability to “create shows that pleased a multitude of possible spectators across society’s subsections—white and black, male and female, rich and poor—without betraying loyalty to any particular group.” The sisters were all light skinned and could pass well enough to perform on white theatrical circuits.

According to theater historian Gay Smith, who, like Dinwiddie, was also responding to the research of George-Graves, the Whitman Sisters performed in blackface for minstrel acts, “then later in the same show appeared as white women in blond pompadours.” Smith argues that

[b]y performing what looked like white women with black men, the Sisters may have provoked anxiety from their integrated audience….whites especially would have become anxious with their aversion to any representation of miscegenation. Then when the women revealed themselves to be the light-skinned African American Whitman Sisters, the audience would experience relief and amusement, giving cathartic relief to the representation of a potentially dangerous situation.

In his pivotal history of American entertainment, LeRoy Ashby explains that the Whitmans implicitly asked and answered challenging questions. Most audience members would consider identifying a Black woman “simple enough,” he writes,

but the sisters complicated it by performing in black-haired wigs and blackface, then returning to the stage with blonde wigs and without burned cork. Because they were light skinned, the audience could wonder: “Who are those white women?” Subtly, the Whitman Sisters simultaneously suggested that reality was what the performers intended, not simply what the spectators saw.

The Whitman Sisters were talented, moral, and capable—and famous across the nation in Black as well as white-centered venues. But they were nonetheless disruptive, posing stark questions about race and gender in America.

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