Topdog/Underdog

When Lincoln talks about reenacting the Abraham Lincoln assassination, he says:

People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming” (57). 

Abraham Lincoln has become a mythic figure in American history as the emancipator of the slaves, and his assassination framed him as a martyr and a saint. But the assassination itself was messy and brutal. John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. He hurt—possibly broke—his ankle while escaping. Lincoln lived, comatose, for nine hours before dying. Lincoln’s bloody coat and the pillow he bled and died on have toured museums as grisly relics of the event. After his death, Abraham Lincoln’s body toured the country, allowing mourners to express their profound grief and sorrow. Booth died shortly after the assassination, tracked and shot in a burning barn.

In Topdog/Underdog, Lincoln reenacts the assassination, living it over and over. He describes this situation in these terms: “And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real. Me looking at him upside down and him looking at me looking like Lincoln. Then he shoots” (54). This reenactment allows spectators to “kill” Lincoln, embodying an act of vengeance that cannot actually be taken against a man who is already dead. The popularity of the attraction suggests a widespread aggression against Lincoln for abolishing slavery. Lincoln also notes the small touches of historical inaccuracy: the use of a variety of guns, the fuse box that allows him to see a distorted reflection of the “assassins,” and the utterances by those who “kill” him. But for a moment, it feels real so that it is real. They are actually shooting him, but with blanks. When Booth shoots Lincoln at the end of the play, he performs the final reenactment with a real bullet. A history between two white men reverberates through the bodies of two black men who are meant to have benefited from Lincoln’s martyrdom.

Booth criticizes Lincoln for performing a job that requires him to go “way back then when folks was slaves and shit” (27). Rather than reenacting an empowering moment, such as the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln is embodying a moment represents an act fueled in part by antiblack racism. But the way Lincoln withstands this punishment over and over comments on the way the victims of racism are repeatedly scapegoated. Abraham Lincoln died, but his death made him iconic and immortal. But those who are in the United States because they are descended from people who were forcibly taken from their homeland are punished for not subscribing to American nationalism and expressing unquestioning gratitude. In The America Play, Parks refers to “the great hole of history,” or the abyss into which subjugated black histories have been lost and forgotten. And certainly, the history of the Lincoln assassination overshadows black-centered histories such as Nat Turner’s slave rebellion (1861) or black soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Topdog/Underdog places this most famous history into black bodies.