[Earlier this year, I shared with Vaughn one of my favorite TV shows and cultural works of all time, Deadwood. Watching and talking about it with her made me realize how many AmericanStudies layers it features, so this week I’ll blog about a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post where I’ll develop my overarching reading of the show’s American ideas!]
On AmericanStudies contexts for a pair of Season 3 characters, and (again, because it’s Deadwood) another vital layer.
I’ll have a lot more to say about Season 3’s (and the show’s) Big Bad George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) in the weekend post, but one of the more interesting things he brings to the show in that final season comes in the form of another new character: Lucretia “Aunt Lou” Marshbanks (Cleo King). To any AmericanStudier worthy of the name, her nickname suggests her relationship to Hearst—this African American woman helped take care of Hearst during his childhood in his home state of Missouri, serving in the role of “Mammy” that was a part of so many white Southerners’ lives in the 19th and early 20th centuries and became part of American cultural iconography far more broadly and enduringly than that. The episode in which Marshbanks is introduced does a phenomenal job highlighting the contradictory layers to this type—we first see Aunt Lou fully occupying that stereotypical role, doting over Hearst, promising to clean his dirty boots and cook him his favorite foods and the like; but later in the episode we find Lucretia playing mahjong with Chinese American workers, smoking a cigar and talking trash about not only them but also Hearst himself. As in all of the most thoughtful depictions of such stereotypes, Marshbanks is clearly aware of and taking advantage of this role, despite the unquestionable limits it imposes on her.
That pattern plays out for a couple episodes, until the arrival of another new character who reminds both the audience and Marshbanks that such personal limits are not the only downside of her stereotypical relationship with Hearst. That character is her adult son Odell, whom Lucretia had sent away to Liberia to try to keep him from being affected by the racism of post-Civil War America, but who has returned to the United States and come to Deadwood in hopes of making his fortune through a relationship with his mother’s very wealthy and powerful white employer. Hearst is indeed willing to entertain the idea, as for him the promise of gold (which Odell brought with him, supposedly from mines in Liberia) is both more important than race (although he calls gold “the color,” so the dynamic is clearly more complicated than that) and (as Hearst argues it to Odell) an equalizing force in society. But Lucretia was right to try to keep Odell away, as he is killed off-screen while undertaking a mission for Hearst. This brief and tragic arc echoes those of a number of ambitious African American characters from late 19th century cultural works, as well as the stories of countless real-life figures such as too many of the era’s groundbreaking Black officeholders. This period isn’t known as the “nadir” of African American life for nothing.
That Milch is able to connect this pair of Black characters to so many historical and cultural contexts in such a small amount of screentime is a tribute to the show’s AmericanStudies layers that have been the impetus for this weeklong series. But I love Deadwood most—maybe; it’s a competitive list, but this is high on it anyway—because at the end of the day every character is a beautifully constructed human being, with layers beyond (or at least alongside) any such contexts. We can see that with particular clarity in the relationship between Aunt Lou and Richardson (Ralph Richeson), the sweet but simple-minded hotel cook who starts as pure comic relief but who by Season 3 has evolved into a delightful character in his own right, and in whom Aunt Lou finds a genuinely kindred spirit who reveals new depths as he helps her navigate the most painful moment of her life, Odell’s death. In reading about Ralph Richeson, Vaughn learned that he was initially cast on Deadwood as an extra with a single line, but when Milch saw what he had in this actor he expanded the character into the multilayered, magical part of the show that he became. If that story doesn’t sum up the greatness of this show, I don’t know what does.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on Deadwood you’d share?
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