STUPID, LAZY, CONNIVING, superstitious, cowardly, dishonest, sexually rampant buffoons who prey on innocent white women — this was the image of black men perpetrated by the blackface minstrelsy, one of America’s most popular entertainments for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Other than blacking-up and painting on exaggerated white lips, essential items in the travelling minstrels’ suitcase were a woolly wig, ragged clothes and, as an optional extra, a detachable tail. These figures were demeaning caricatures who created powerful and enduring racist stereotypes.

A shocking aspect of this phenomenon is that some African-American performers also blacked up, the most famous of whom was the legendary Bert Williams, for many years America’s foremost black entertainer. In Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips provides a compassionate portrait of this enigmatic figure who is shown to be a divided self: on the one hand pandering to the appalling theatrical tastes of his era, and on the other struggling to maintain his dignity.

Born in the Bahamas in the mid-1870s, Egbert Austin Williams arrived in America with his parents as a young boy, leaving behind the sun-drenched beaches. Throughout the novel the Bahamas embody a yearning for what he has lost, while America subsumes his identity and turns him into an American Negro, that “most despised of home-grown sons”. True to the place and period, the story is peppered with racism. At

16 Williams is a talented performer who takes to the stage, eventually teaming up with George Walker with whom he forms a successful double act, Williams and Walker. They tour the country playing Southern “plantation darkies”, Northern “zip coons” and at one stage “real savages” from Africa, so-called “anthropological specimens” caged in a pen for the 1894 Mid-Winter Exposition in San Francisco.

The partnership on and off stage is complementary. While Williams is tall, introspective, erudite, sexually reserved and dapper, Walker is short, flash, gregarious, fiery and a womaniser. Both have dysfunctional marriages to women who suffer in silence. Ambitious to find fame, Williams succumbs to the lure of blackface and in their new act, “Two Real Coons”, he plays a shuffling dumb-wit in a battered top hat. Audiences love it , leading to the first negro show on Broadway, In Dahomey, as well as a tour of England, culminating in a command performance at Buckingham Palace in 1904.

Written with Phillips’s trademark understated elegance, the novel presents Williams as a psychologically complex character whose sense of isolation increases in direct correlation to his career success. The stronger the blackface mask, the weaker the man. How does Williams reconcile the idiot he plays on stage with the man he really is, one who reads widely on science, philosophy and history? He doesn’t. Instead he turns to the numbing properties of alcohol and by the time he dies in 1922, he is a broken man. This beautifully wrought novel is a fine and captivating read.

Bernardine Evaristo’s new novel Soul Tourists is published by Hamish Hamilton

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