Collect Day #23, RICHARD POTTER
Loving father, who has delighted in creating a world of wonder for your children: we thank you for the witness of Richard Potter, who used his gifts as entertainer to bring joy throughout his life. Help us to follow in his example, doing our best to use our own God given talents to bring true pleasure to others; through Christ our Lord. Amen.
DAY #23, March 12, 2018
Andover
RICHARD POTTER
(1783–1835)
J. Dennis Robinson
Legend says that Richard Potter, America’s first native-born stage magician, could climb into one end of a solid log and exit from the other end. He once made a rooster pull a heavy load of hay up a steep hill. According to a man from Andover, NH, where Potter once owned a farm, dozens of witnesses standing in an open field saw Potter toss a ball of yarn into the air, then he and his wife, Sally, climbed up the dangling string into the sky and disappeared.
Those miraculous events never happened, of course. Nor was Potter the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin and his African servant. Potter was born in Hopkinton, Mass., to an enslaved woman from Guinea who had been sold at auction on a Boston pier. His father was a White man, repeatedly in trouble, who was banned from his church for “making attempts on the chastity” of at least six women.
Richard Potter traveled to Europe as a teenager and there was likely apprenticed to a famous Italian acrobat and tightrope artist or “wire dancer.” By 1803 Potter was working as a “polite waiter” at the Portsmouth Hotel near present day Prescott Park in New Hampshire. He likely performed “a number of feats on the rope, with the balance pole.” After touring with a pair of Scottish-born magicians and ventriloquists, Potter struck out on his own. He married Sally Harris, a petite young singer who, despite most reports, was not a full-blooded Penobscot Indian.
We can hardly imagine the hard life of an itinerant African American performer in an age before trains and electricity, before emancipation, and largely without formal theaters to perform in. Yet Potter’s celebrity exploded. A master of misdirection, his singular goal was to distract audiences from their toilsome lives. His advertising handbills offered “to give an evening’s brush to sweep away care.”
He could make a playing card vanish and reappear across the room, catch a bullet on the point of a sword, or break and recreate a gold ring. His balancing skills involved long-stemmed clay pipes, plates, swords, glasses, keys, tables and chairs, plus a variety of silverware. Witnesses claimed he could step into a blazing oven with a joint of raw meat and emerge with it fully cooked. But it was Potter’s ability to throw his voice that drew the greatest praise. His ventriloquism filled the hall with invisible birds, animals, beckoning children, and crying babies.
All but forgotten by history, Richard Potter, America’s first native-born magician and first Black celebrity, is the subject of a rich new biography by scholar John A. Hodgson. Potter’s final years turned tragic as racism raged in America. His once expansive farm at Potter’s Place near Andover, NH, is gone, but his grave, a roadside plaque and now a stirring new biography keep his magical story alive.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
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