“All Bert and George ever did was wander in the desert. An endless wandering, sandblasted peregrinations to nowhere, a tubercular odyssey with no point. They wandered, kept each other company, drove each other nuts, got into and out of scrapes and follies. The desert, in all its starkness and death-resin, might not seem like an ideal breeding ground for vaudeville, but these two men showed otherwise. They showed that comedy’s scoliotic backbone originated in a sturdier more epic spine.”
Excerpt from my novel, The Last Furies.
The two men in the photo, Bert Williams and George Walker were a pioneering vaudeville duo (Williams-and-Walker), who were the first Black recording artists in 1901 and the first Black performers to write, produce, and star in a full-length Broadway musical in 1902. About Bert Williams, W.C. Fields said: “He was the funniest man I ever met, and the saddest man I ever knew.”
Two characters, “Bert” and “George,” inspired by Williams and Walker, are forlorn wanderers in the endless desert, which cuts across the mutable geography and timelines of The Last Furies, and the duo’s exploits are recorded as part of a surreal radio program whose bandwidth covers eternity.
John Biscello 