ABSTRACT
The Chessé family of New Orleans experienced an abrupt dissolution of their persona mask in 1928 when Yvonne Chessé’s fiancé received a postcard depicting her as the mother of a Black pickaninny child. The shadow that Alexandre Laurent Chessé had attempted to dispel in 1920 when he persuaded a census taker to shift the family’s racial classification from Black to white by claiming that his father was born in Cuba rather than the United States abruptly clouded the whole family’s social standing. In the wake of a revelation that radically disrupted their lives, the Chessé family chose to don the minstrel masks associated with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in their marionette production of this classic story in order to collapse the distance between the mask and their own humanity. This chapter develops a reading of African American performance with minstrel puppets based on Jung’s theory of the shadow self to unpack the stories people tell themselves about themselves.
