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Benjamin
Rucker was born in Amherst, Virginia in 1892. He met a traveling
magician, Prince Herman, who taught him magic and eventually
took him on as a partner. Rucker learned how to make the "health
tonic" they sold as part of the show and how to put on
a successful show. When Prince Herman died in 1909, Rucker
continued the show and took the name Black Herman, eventually
settling in Harlem, New York.
Using
a combination of medicine show techniques, references to a
fictional childhood in a Zulu tribe in Africa, and a taste
for quoting scripture, Black Herman found the performance
style that worked for him. He produced rabbits and made the
amount of cornmeal in a bowl double. He let audience members
tie him up so he could demonstrate how "If the slave
traders tried to take any of my people captive, we would release
ourselves using our secret knowledge."
Black
Herman's show was very successful. His audiences included
African-American and white people, which was unusual for a
period when African-American performers were expected to do
separate shows for black and white audiences. He used his
success to help his community, hosting black businessmen and
other professionals for roundtable discussions on various
subjects.
By
1923, Black Herman had added "Buried Alive" to his
act. At first, he would "hypnotize" a woman and
then bury her six feet under for almost six hours as a publicity
stunt or part of a carnival. Eventually, he himself was "Buried
Alive." A few days before a major performance, Black
Herman would sell tickets for the public to come to a plot
of ground near the theater he called "Black Herman's
Private Graveyard". They could view his lifeless body
and even check for a pulse—nothing. The audience would
then see Black Herman's body placed in a coffin and into
the grave. The night of the show, another audience was invited
to attend as the body was exhumed. They saw the coffin get
dug up, opened, and Black Herman would emerge, alive and well.
He would then walk to the theater, and the audience usually
followed.
In
April, 1934, Black Herman was performing in Louisville, Kentucky.
He collapsed suddenly in the middle of his show and was declared
dead of "acute indigestion." The audience didn't
believe it. Herman had risen from the dead so many times before.
The crowd refused to believe that the show was over and stayed
in the theater.
Eventually
Black Herman's body was moved to a funeral home. The crowds
followed. Finally, Black Herman's assistant, Washington
Reeves, decided "Let's charge admission. That's
what he would have done." And they did, to thousands
of people. Some people even brought pins to stick in the corpse
to prove he was dead. When he was buried, "his death
made front page news in black newspapers all over the country."
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