Now, though, he’s trying to stay away from hustling, hoping to live an honest life in his brother’s apartment until he can get back on his feet. Before working at the arcade, Lincoln used to be a virtuosic hustler who played Three-Card Monte on the streets and conned people out of their money. At the arcade, he sits with his back turned to customers, who come up behind him and shoot him with cap guns in a reenactment of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of the president at the end of the Civil War. Because he is a black man, he has to go to work in “whiteface,” smearing white paint over his skin in order to look more convincingly like Abraham Lincoln. An intelligent man who likes to drink, he works at an arcade as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, dressing in an old overcoat, a top hat, and a fake beard.
One of only two characters seen onstage during the play, Lincoln is living with his brother, Booth, because Lincoln’s wife, Cookie, has left him.
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