Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers 9780810317161, 0810317168

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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

Dictionary of Literary Biography • Volume Thirty-eight

Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers

Dictionary of Literary Biography 1: The American Renaissance in New England, edited by Joel Mverson (1978) 7J 7

27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, edited by Vincent B. Sherry, Jr. (1984)

2: American Novelists Since World War II, edited by leffrey Helterman and Richard Layman (1978)

28: Twentieth-Century American-]ewish Fiction Writers, edited by Daniel Walden (1984)

3: Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, edited by Joel Myerson

29: American Newspaper Journalists, 1926-1950, edited by Perry I. Ashley (1984) 7

4: American Writers in Pans, 1920-1939, edited by Karen Lane Rood (1980)

30: American Historians, 1607-1865, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (1984) 31: American Colonial Writers, 1735-1781, edited by Emory Elliott (1984) 7 7

5: American Poets Since World War II, 2 parts, edited by Donald T. Greiner (1980) 6: American Novelists Since World War II, Second Series, edited by James E. Kibler, Jr. (1980) 7 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 2 parts, edited by [ohn MacNicholas (1981) 8: Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers, 2 parts, edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer (1981) 9: American Novelists, 1910-1945, 3 parts, edited by James J. Marline 10: Modern British Dramatists, 1900-1945, 2 parts, edited by Stanley Weintraub (1982) 7 7 11: American Humorists, 1800-1950, 2 parts, edited by Stanley Trach¬ tenberg (1982) 7 12. American Realists and Naturalists, edited by Donald Pizer and Earl N Harbert (1982) 13: British Dramatists Since World War II, 2 parts, edited bv Stanley Weintraub (1982) 7 14: British Novelists Since 1960, 2 parts, edited by Jay L. Halio (1983) 15: British Novelists, 1930-1959, 2 parts, edited by Bernard Oldsey 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 2 parts, edited bv Ann Charters (1983) 7 17: Twentieth-Century American Historians, edited by Clyde N. Wilson 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885, edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E Fredeman (1983) 19: British Poets, 1880-1914, edited by Donald E. Stanford (1983) 20: British Poets, 1914-1945, edited by Donald E. Stanford (1983) 21: Victorian Novelists Before 1885, edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E Fredeman (1983) 22: American Writers for Children, 1900-1960, edited by John Cech 23: American Newspaper Journalists, 1873-1900, edited by Perry 1 Ashley (1983) 7 J‘ 24: American Colonial Writers, 1606-1734, edited by Emory Elliott

32: Victorian Poets Before 1850, edited by William E. Fredeman and Ira B. Nadel (1984) 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris (1984) 34: British Novelists, 1890-1929: Traditionalists, edited by Thomas F. Staley (1985) 35: Victorian Poets After 1850, edited by William E. Fredeman and Ira B Nadel (1985) 36: British Novelists, 1890-1929: Modernists, edited by Thomas F. Staley (1985) 37: American Writers of the Early Republic, edited by Emory Elliott (1985) 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris (1985)

Documentary Series 1: Sherwood Anderson, Willa Gather, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp (1982) 2: James Gould Cozzens, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, John O'Hara, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp (1982) 3: Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Mary Bruccoli (1983) 4: Tennessee Williams, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp and Sally Johns(1984) P 7

Yearbooks 198°, edned by Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld 1981, edUed by Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld

25: American Newspaper Journalists, 1901-1925, edited by Perry I Ashley (1984) 7 7 J'

1982, edited by Richard Ziegfeld; associate editors: lean W. Ross and

26: American Screenwriters, edited by Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark (1984)

1983, edited by Mary Bruccoli and Jean W. Ross; associate editor’

Lynne C. Zeigler (1983) Richard Ziegfeld (1984)

Dictionary of Literary Biography • Volume Thirty-eight

Afro-American Writers After 1955 Dramatists and Prose Writers

Edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A Bruccoli Clark Book Gale Research Company • Book Tower • Detroit, Michigan 48226

Advisory Board for DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Louis S. Auchincloss John Baker D. Philip Baker A. Walton Litz, Jr. Peter S. Prescott Lola L. Szladits William Targ

P5»5i

1

•A5/?3

11X6

Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, Editorial Directors C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., Managing Editor

Manufactured by Edwards Brothers, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan Printed in the United States of America

Copyright ® 1985 GALE RESEARCH COMPANY

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Afro-American writers after 1955. (Dictionary of literary biography; v. 38) “A Bruccoli Clark book.” Includes index. 1. Afro-American authors—Biography—Dictionaries. 2. Authors, American — 2()th century—Biography—Dic¬ tionaries. 3. American literature—20th century—His¬ tory and criticism. 4. American literature—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 5. American literature —20th century—Bio-bibliography. 6. American literature —Afro-American authors—Bio-bibliography. I. Davis, Thadious M., 1944- II. Harris, Trudier. III. Series. PS153.N5A39 1985 ISBN 0-8103-1716-8

810’.9’896

85-1673

For

For

Unareed Harris

Richard K. Barksdale

Contents

Plan of the Series.ix

Adrienne Kennedy (1931-

).162

Margaret B. Wilkerson

Foreword.xi

Woodie King, Jr. (1937-

Acknowledgments.xv

).170

Stephen M. Vallillo

Maya Angelou (1928-

).3 William Wellington Mackey (1937-

Lynn Z. Bloom

).175

Linda E. Scott

Toni Cade Bambara (1939-

).12 Marvin X (Marvin E. Jackmon, Nazzam A1 Fitnah Muhajir, El Muhajir) (1944- ).177

Alice A. Deck

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934-

).22

Floyd Gaffney

Lorenzo Thomas

Ed Bullins (1935-

).43

James Alan McPherson (1943-

Leslie Sanders

Ben Caldwell (1937-

).61

Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1920-

Robbie Jean Walker

Alice Childress (1920-

).195

Virginia Whatley Smith

)..66

Ron Milner (1938-

Trudier Harris

).201

Beunyce Rayford Cunningham

Ossie Davis (1917-

).80

Loften Mitchell (1919-

Michael E. Greene

Tom Dent (1932-

).208

Ja A. Jahannes

).86

Albert L. Murray (1916-

Lorenzo Thomas

).214

Elizabeth Schultz

Alexis Deveaux (1948-

).92

Larry Neal (1937-1981).225

Priscilla R. Ramsey

Lonne Elder III (1931-

Norman Harris

).97 Kalamu ya Salaam (Vallery Ferdinand III) (1947- ).231

Wilsonia E. D. Cherry

Charles H. Fuller, Jr. (1939-

).104

Arthenia J. Bates Millican

Ethel W. Githii

Bill Gunn (1934-

).185

Patsy B. Perry

).109

Ntozake Shange (1948-

Ilona Leki

Alex Haley (1921-

Elizabeth Brown

).115

Ted Shine (1931-

Marilyn Kern-Foxworth

).250

Winona L. Fletcher

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965).120

Joseph A. Walker (1935-

Steven R. Carter

).260

Grace Cooper

Paul Carter Harrison (1936-

).134

Douglas Turner Ward (1930-

Steven R. Carter

).264

Stephen M. Vallillo

Calvin C. Hernton (1932-

).139

Richard Wesley (1945-

Anthony S. Magistrale

June Jordan (1936-

).240

).271

Steven R. Carter

).146

Edgar B. White (1947-

Peter B. Erickson

Steven R. Carter

vii

).278

Contents

Samm-Art Williams (1946-

DLB 38 ).283

Trudier Harris

A Slender Thread of Hope: The Kennedy Center Black Theatre Project.323 Winona L. Fletcher

Appendix The Black Arts Movement.293

Black I heaters and Theater Organizations In America, 1961-1982: A Research List.329

Larry Neal

Andrzej Ceynowa

Community and Commentators: Black Theatre and Its Critics.301

Supplementary Reading List.355

Rhett S. Jones

Black Theatre: A Forum.311

Contributors.357

A Look at the Contemporary Black Theatre Movement.319

Cumulative Index.361

A. Peter Bailey

viii

Plan of the Series . . . Almost the most prodigious asset of a country, and perhaps its most precious possession, is its native literary product-when that product is fine and noble and endur¬ ing.

placement and treatment of authors who might properly be included in two or three volumes. In some instances a major figure will be included in separate volumes, but with different entries empha¬ sizing the aspect of his career appropriate to each volume. Ernest Hemingway, for example, is repre¬ sented in American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939 by an entry focusing on his expatriate apprenticeship; he is also in American Novelists, 1910-1943 with an entry surveying his entire career. Each volume includes a cumulative index of subject authors. The final DLB volume will be a comprehensive index to the entire series.

Mark Twain*

The advisory board, the editors, and the pub¬ lisher of the Dictionary of Literary Biography are joined in endorsing Mark Twain’s declaration. The literature of a nation provides an inexhaustible re¬ source of permanent worth. It is our expectation that this endeavor will make literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and the literate public, while satisfying the standards of teachers and scholars.

With volume ten in 1982 it was decided to enlarge the scope ol DLB beyond the literature of the United States. By the end of 1983 twelve vol¬ umes treating British literature had been pub¬ lished, and volumes for Commonwealth and Mod¬ ern European literature were in progress. The series has been further augmented by the DLB Year¬ books (since 1981) which update published entries and add new entries to keep the DLB current with contemporary activity. There have also been occa¬ sional DLB Documentary Series volumes which pro¬ vide biographical and critical background source materials for figures whose work is judged to have particular interest for students. One of these com¬ panion volumes is entirely devoted to Tennessee Williams.

To meet these requirements, literary biography has been construed in terms of the author’s achieve¬ ment. The most important thing about a writer is his writing. Accordingly, the entries in DIB are career biographies, tracing the development of the author s canon and the evolution of his reputation. The publication plan for DLB resulted from two years of preparation. The project was proposed to Bruccoli Clark by Frederick G. Ruffner, presi¬ dent of the Gale Research Company, in November 1975. After specimen entries were prepared and typeset, an advisory board was formed to refine the entry format and develop the series rationale. In meetings held during 1976, the publishe r, series editors, and advisory board approved the scheme for a comprehensive biographical dictionary of per¬ sons who contributed to North American literature. Editorial work on the first volume began in January 1977, and it was published in 1978. In order to make DLB more than a reference tool and to compile volumes that individually have claim to status as literary history, it was decided to organize volumes by topic or period or genre. Each of these freestanding volumes provides a bio¬ graphical-bibliographical guide and overview for a particular area of literature. We are convinced that this organization — as opposed to a single alphabet method—constitutes a valuable innovation in the presentation of reference material. The volume plan necessarily requires many decisions for the

The purpose of DLB is not only to provide reliable information in a convenient format but also to place the figures in the larger perspective of literary history and to offer appraisals of their accomplishments by qualified scholars. We define literature as the intellectual commerce of a nation-, not merely as belles lettres, but as that ample and complex process by which ideas are generated, shaped, and transmitted. DLB entries are not limited to “creative writers” but extend to other figures who in this time and in this way influ¬ enced the mind of a people. Thus the series en¬ compasses historians, journalists, publishers, and screenwriters. By this means readers of DLB may be aided to perceive literature not as cult scripture in the keeping of cultural high priests, but as at the center of a nation’s life. DLB includes the major writers appropriate to each volume and those standing in the ranks im¬ mediately behind them. Scholarly and critical coun-

*trom an unpublished section of Mark Twain’s autobiography, copyright © by the Mark Twain Company.

IX

DLB 38

Plan of the Series

modern authors. The dust jackets are a special fea¬ ture of DLB because they often document better than anything else the way in which an author’s work was launched in its own time. Specimens of the writers’ manuscripts are included when feasible. A supplement to DLB — tentatively titled A Guide, Chronology, and Glossary for American Litera¬ ture— will outline the history of literature in North America and trace the influences that shaped it. This volume will provide a framework for the study of American literature by means of chronological tables, literary affiliation charts, glossarial entries, and concise surveys of the major movements. It has been planned to stand on its own as a vade mecum, providing a ready-reference guide to the study of American literature as well as a companion to the DLB volumes for American literature.

sel has been sought in deciding which minor figures to include and how full their entries should be. Wherever possible, useful references will be made to figures who do not warrant separate entries. Each DLB volume has a volume editor re¬ sponsible for planning the volume, selecting the figures for inclusion, and assigning the entries. Volume editors are also responsible for preparing, where appropriate, appendices surveying the ma¬ jor periodicals and literary and intellectual move¬ ments for their volumes, as well as lists of further readings. Work on the series as a whole is coordi¬ nated at the Bruccoli Clark editorial center in Co¬ lumbia, South Carolina, where the editorial staff is responsible for the accuracy of the published volumes. One f eature that distinguishes DLB is the illus¬ tration policy—its concern with the iconography of literature. Just as an author is influenced by his surroundings, so is the reader’s understanding of the author enhanced by a knowledge of his environ¬ ment. Therefore DLB volumes include not only drawings, paintings, and photographs of authors, often depicting them at various stages in their careers, but also illustrations of their families and places where they lived. Title pages are regularly reproduced in facsimile along with dust jackets for

Samuel Johnson rightly decreed that “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” The purpose of the Dictionary of Literary Biography is to compile literary history in the surest way avail¬ able to us—by accurate and comprehensive treat¬ ment of the lives and work of those who contributed to it. The DLB Advisory Board

x

Foreword Nineteen fifty-four ushered in a memorable period in Afro-American life. Brown v. The Board of Education paved the way not only for improve¬ ment in sociopolitical conditions, but also for a re¬ newed cultural consciousness among blacks. Within the next decade, the Montgomery bus boycott, stu¬ dent sit-ins, and the March on Washington would inspire a general climate of change and activism in American society that would affect Afro-American arts and letters. The surge of cultural spirit accom¬ panying political activity invigorated the creative writings of Afro-Americans and redefined the liter¬ ary work of black writers. In the post-1950s struggle for civil rights, opportunity, and equality, the liter¬ ature of modern Afro-Americans came of age. The writers included in this volume, whether they were born before or after World War II, all share in the redirected aesthetics of black recognition. They represent both a continuity with Afro-American artistic traditions and a forging ahead to new crea¬ tive territories. Mindful of the past, particularly the legacies of the New Negro Renaissance and its antecedents, these writers seized the immediate reality of their own times and in the process trans¬ formed the landscape of Afro-American writing. Afro-American poets and novelists, from the turn of the century on, have had their voices raised in the literary arena. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lang¬ ston Hughes, and Richard Wright were household names long before reading or viewing audiences became aware of works by playwrights Theodore Ward and Louis Peterson in the 1940s and 1950s. Throughout the fifties Langston Hughes con¬ tinued to bring his dramas to the stage, but Peter¬ son’s Take a Giant Step in 1953 helped to focus se¬ rious attention on plays by Afro-Americans. Play¬ wright Alice Childress’s voice became synonymous with the efforts to bring black plays to black people and to integrate theater unions. The mid-1950s successes of Childress and Peterson gave way to Lorraine Hansberry’s phenomenal A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Rightly considered a forerunner to black American drama, Hansberry stood at the pivotal point of the unprecedented changes that would soon occur in black representation on Amer¬ ican stages. When Hansberry’s play opened on Broadway to critical acclaim, it not only revitalized interest in plays about the experiences of blacks, but

also ended the decade with a promise of greater visibility for Afro-American playwrights. Drama evolved alongside poetry as a major genre for black writers. The stage world presented the opportunity for portable works with messages designed to engage audiences whose history in¬ volved a theater heritage ranging from early min¬ strel shows, musical revues, and church pageants to drama departments in black colleges, repertory companies, and community theater groups. Taking literature to the people, a main objective of poets coming to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, also influenced the thinking of dramatists about their work. New black community theaters and profes¬ sional companies, such as the Free Southern Thea¬ ter in New Orleans, Black House in San Francisco, the New Federal Theatre and the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, evolved from the models of writing workshops, such as the Harlem Writers Guild, and public poetry readings, as well as from the traditions established by the Federal Theatre, Lafayette Theatre, Rose McClarendon Players, and the Harlem Suitcase Theater. Owen Dodson, Loften Mitchell, and Ted Shine are representative wri¬ ters who bridged the professional and collegiate drama communities, while Marvin X, Tom Dent, and Sonia Sanchez are indicative of playwrights who envisioned a particular kind of community theater. Fhe flood of creative outpourings in the 1960s that led to the black arts movement brought in its wake a new generation of dramatists who, together with prose writers and poets, provided some of the most influential voices in American literature. Dramatists Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins joined poets of the stature of Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) in bringing to their audiences works that were de¬ signed for popular more often than critical appeal. Their direct, confrontational messages led to radi¬ cally revised staging techniques. Fhe early sixties introduced, in number and variety, new dramatic forms to larger audiences. Ossie Davis’s comedy Pur lie Victorious and Adrienne Kennedy’s surrealistic Funnyhouse of a Negro, though distinctly different in concept and execu¬ tion, are examples of the theatrical productions that carried messages of a reality rarely seen outside

xi

DLB 38

Foreword

partly responsible for their limited economic opportunities. While some other playwrights, such as Alice Childress, Charles Fuller, and N. R. David¬ son, Jr., created realistic dramas that drew upon the historical conditions of black American life, they too, like the more innovative dramatists of the 1960s and 1970s, invented on a level of sophisti¬ cated political thought and language. Although many of the playwrights of the 1960s and early 1970s were concerned with creat¬ ing theater for the people and with what Bullins called “street-corner theatre,” which took plays directly to ordinary working-class blacks, other playwrights in the seventies and eighties have com¬ bined this concern with an interest in reaching larg¬ er audiences through writing scripts for movies and television. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun perhaps started the trend. It was followed by filmings of Baraka’s Dutchman, Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and, more recently, Shange’s For Colored Girls. Maya Angelou, Charlie Russell, Bill Gunn, and Lonne Elder are a few of the writers who have contracted to write film scripts, Elder having also written episodes for popular television shows. Still other writers have, since the mid-seventies, worked primarily in the established New York literary com¬ munity. Shange’s searching drama of black women’s lives, for instance, has enjoyed major Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Writers who take advantage of such opportunities consis¬ tently suggest that an audience must be sought beyond those who read the texts. Their actions are a continuation of part of the philosophy espoused by the black arts movement that more than traditional means of expression should be used in taking the word to the people. What is apparent is that since the premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, black writers have had more diverse opportu¬ nities for disseminating their works, even though many of them, including Shine and Childress, have not yet achieved widespread recognition from the major productions of their works. Nurtured by a belief in the positive value of blackness, writers since the 1960s have directed their message to and about black people. Thus the drive toward integration and assimilation, which remained evident, gave way to a more prominent nationalistic, Pan-Africanist orientation among writers, who, in rejecting a western world view, sought a less oppressive and less decadent vision of the role of the artist and the function of art. Their themes address not only self-knowledge and group survival, but also love and celebration. In affirming self-worth and achievement, exponents of a black

black communities.

However, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie and LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman, Slave, and The Toilet announced the penetrating artistic explorations of black life that would capture the imaginations of other black writers. Jones (Amiri Baraka) sets the tone for the decade with his exploration in Dutchman of the many, hidden psychosexual relationships between blacks and whites in America. His work throughout the sixties and seventies addressed the redefinition of blacks, of social roles, and of cultural institutions. The drama of black revolution, connected with Baraka, William Wellington Mackey, Jr., Ben Caldwell, and Ron Milner, emphasized a cultural nationalism that was part of the black arts move¬ ment of the 1960s. It assumed both a black audience and the necessity of the artist’s relationship to the black community; it advocated a cultural revolution in spirit, ideas, and art, which confronted and ex¬ pressed the needs and aspirations of black people. As Baraka was to observe in 1968, “The Revolu¬ tionary Theatre should force change, it should be change. If the beautiful see themselves, they will know themselves.” Of primary importance were nationhood and self-determination. The drama of black experience, or the theater of reality, associ¬ ated with Ed Bullins, Paul Carter Harrison, Melvin Van Peebles, and Ted Shine similarly involved an emphasis on character and theme, on black people and their concerns. Many playwrights sought to break down the barriers between the illusion of the stage and the reality of existence beyond the theater by allowing their characters to interact directly with members of the audience. Constructed more often than not to make whites in the audience uncomfortable, such techniques also illustrated the political dimension that so many of the writers of the 1960s considered crucial to their art. When Ted Shine’s Grand¬ mother Love steps to the apron of the stage in this 1969 production and asks who in the audience will be next in her scheme to poison racists and thereby make her “contribution” to the civil rights struggle, she effectively closes the gap between art and life. For some of the playwrights who continued in fairly traditional veins of staging, such as Douglas Turner Ward, Ossie Davis, and Lonne Elder III, marked changes in approach to subject matter de¬ fined their work. Ward and Davis border on the farce in their depictions of Southern race relations; outrageous and discomforting portrayals of whites evoked broad laughter in the blacks viewing the shows. Elder dared to suggest that black men, by the perversity of the moral choices they make, might be xii

DLB 38

Foreword

Alex Haley, continue the oldest literary tradition among black American writers — that of recording personal and communal biography. For Angelou, shaping a self in the tradition of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington is the force that has sustained her through four installments of her autobiography. Murray and Haley draw upon their personal and family histories to make Gasoline Point, Alabama, and Henning, Tennessee, memo¬ rable places in the history of Afro-American litera¬ ture. Others such as Ntozake Shange have used autobiography as one basis for their creative works, while still others, such as June Jordan and Alexis Deveaux, have used biography as a means of celebrating their forebears or of asserting the place of black ancestors in history and insuring that their stories will not be forgotten, that the meaning of their achievements and their defeats will not be lost. Perhaps the most significant contributor to preserving the past of Afro-Americans is Alex Haley, whose Roots inspired a generation of w7hite and black Americans to discover family history, to value the oral tradition, and to tell the little known stories of ordinary, yet heroic people. Haley suc¬ ceeded in giving new life to the idea of heritage and roots; his saga published in 1976 is in many ways a culmination of some of the ideas of the black arts movement, such as the emphasis on the need for black pride and using history as one of the bases for that pride. Based on long and arduous research, Haley’s family history also relies on the conventions of fiction; it gives evidence of a tendency since the 1960s to combine genres and to create new forms, as Shange does with her choreopoems, For Colored

aesthetic have refused adherence to white stan¬ dards of beauty or language. As Larry Neal stressed in 1968, they proposed “a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology,” which empha¬ sized the cultural heritage and traditions of black Americans, particularly African survivals, blues and jazz rhythms, oral folk culture, and spiritual sensibilities. As a result, a number of modern writ¬ ers have turned to prose essays in order to explain their objectives and to iterate the theories defining their work. Neal, Kalamu ya Salaam, Baraka, Woodie King, and others have written essays assert¬ ing connections between the historical contribu¬ tions and value systems of blacks and the creative possibilities in black life. Albert Murray has investi¬ gated folk culture, and like Neal and Baraka, has written about the primacy of musical forms in crea¬ tive works by Afro-Americans. Other waiters such as Toni Cade Bambara, Arthenia Bates Millican, and James Alan McPher¬ son have worked mainly in short fiction, but they, like the majority of Afro-American writers since the sixties, have been influenced by the language and culture of blacks and have extended their short stories to encompass added possibilities for perceiv¬ ing and portraying the reality and truth of AfroAmerican life and history. Bambara adopts the folk speech of black Americans in Gorilla, My Love and consciously writes in “black English.” She is con¬ cerned with relationships between children and parents as wrell as with the effect of the environment upon adolescent development. Like Bambara, Mil¬ lican and McPherson provide unique glimpses into Afro-American life by dwelling on the insides of black communities w'ithin the United States, on black people interacting with each other in loving and protecting, as well as in shaping futures for themselves. Within the short fictional form, howev¬ er, Bambara in particular is as successful as the playwrights in bringing activism to the page, in closing the gap between politics and art. Prose writings proliferated in the decades since the 1950s, and just as dramatists were in¬ terested in creating a theater in their own image, so w7ere the writers of prose interested in literary crea¬ tions, relevant to black Americans. Autobiography and biography have become increasingly important as modes for expressing conceptions of sell and of the meaning of Afro-American history. Prose writ¬ ers, such as Maya Angelou, Albert Murray, and

Girls and Spell #7.

The writers included here have made signifi¬ cant contributions to modern literature, but with a few notable exceptions (Baraka, Angelou, Bullins, McPherson) they have remained largely unknown to general readers and specialists alike. Their phe¬ nomenal output, frequently published by small presses and little magazines, deserves greater atten¬ tion from students of literature, and the writers themselves merit further acknowledgment from literary scholars. This volume, then, represents an initial effort to make these post-1955 writers and bibliographies of their works more accessible for further research and study. — Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris

xiii

Acknowledgments This book was produced by BC Research. Karen L. Rood is senior editor for the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Ellen Rosenberg Kovner was the in-house editor. Art supervisor is Claudia Ericson. Copyedit¬ ing supervisor is Joycelyn R. Smith. Typesetting supervisor is Laura Ingram. The production staff includes Rowena Betts, Kimberly Casey, Patricia Coate, Kathleen M. Flanagan, Joyce Fowler, Pam Haynes, Judith K. Ingle, Victoria Jakes, Vickie Lowers, Judith McCray, Jane McPherson, Alice Parsons, and Kerry Pound. Jean W. Ross is permis¬ sions editor. Joseph Caldwell, photography editor, did photographic copy work for the volume. Walter W. Ross did the research with the

assistance of the staff at the Thomas Cooper Li¬ brary of the University of South Carolina: Lynn Barron, Daniel Boice, Sue Collins, Michael Free¬ man, Gary Geer, Alexander M. Gilchrist, David L. Haggard, Jens Holley, David Lincove, Marcia Mar¬ tin, Roger Mortimer, Jean Rhyne, Karen Rissling, Paula Swope, and Ellen Tillett. We would like to acknowledge the invaluable help given by Tom Dent, James V. Hatch, Portia Howard, E. Ethelbert Miller, Vivian Robinson, Les¬ lie Sanders, and Jerry Ward, who all shared in¬ formation and materials. Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California, and University Book Place in New York City assisted in providing illustrations.

xv

Dictionary of Literary Biography • Volume Thirty-eight

Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers

Dictionary of Literary Biography

Maya Angelou (4 April 1928-

)

Lynn Z. Bloom Virginia Commonwealth University

BOOKS: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Random House, 1970); Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (New Y'ork: Random House, 1971); Gather Together in My Name (New York: Random House, 1974); Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (New York: Random House, 1975);

RECORDINGS: Miss Calypso, Liberty Records, 1957; The Poetry of Maya Angelou, GWP Records, 1969; An Evening With Maya Angelou, Pacific Tape Library (BC 2660), 1975; Women in Business, University of Wisconsin, 1981. PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul,” Redhook, 136 (Novem¬ ber 1970): 77, 132-134; “Cicely Tyson: Reflections on a Lone Black Rose,” Ladies’ Home Journal, 94 (February 1977): 4041, 44, 46; “Why I Moved Back to the South,” Ebony, 37 (February 1982): 130-134.

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

(New York: Random House, 1976); And Still I Rise (New York: Random House, 1978); The Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House,

1981); Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (New York: Random

House, 1983). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Cabaret for Freedom,, by Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge, New York, Village Gate Theatre, 1960; The Least of These, Los Angeles, 1966; Ajax, adapted Sophocles’ play, Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum, 1974; And I Still Rise, Oakland, Cal., Ensemble Theatre, 1976.

Maya Angelou’s literary significance rests upon her exceptional ability to tell her life story as both a human being and a black American woman in the twentieth century. Four serial autobiographi¬ cal volumes have been published to date (in 1970, 1974, 1976, and 1981), covering the period from 1928 to the mid-1960s; more may be expected. She asserts in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970): “The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.” And yet, Angelou’s own autobiographies and vivid lectures about her¬ self, ranging in tone from warmly humorous to bitterly satiric, have won a popular and critical fol¬ lowing that is both respectful and enthusiastic. As she adds successive volumes to her life

SCREENPLAYS: Georgia, Georgia, IndependentCinerama, 1972; All Day Long, American Film Institute, 1974. TELEVISION: Black, Blues, Black [series], National Educational Television, 1968; Assignment America [series], 1975; “The Legacy,” 1976; “The Inheritors,” 1976; “Sister, Sister,” NBC, 7 June 1982. 3

DLB 38

Maya Angelou story, she is performing for contemporary black American women — and men, too—many of the same functions that escaped slave Frederick Doug¬ lass performed for his nineteenth-century peers through his autobiographical writings and lectures. Both become articulators of the nature and validity of a collective heritage as they interpret the particu¬ lars of a culture for a wide audience of whites as well as blacks; as one critic said, Angelou illuminates “with the intensity of lightning the tragedy that was once this nation’s two-track culture.” As people who have lived varied and vigorous lives, they embody the quintessential experiences of their race and cul¬ ture. An account of the life and major writings of Maya Angelou is of necessity based largely on in¬ formation that she herself has supplied in her auto¬ biographies; where lacunae exist, they do so be¬ cause Angelou herself has chosen not to discuss certain periods of time, events, or people. “I will say how old I am [53], I will say how tall I am [six feet], but I will not say how many times I have been married,” she told an interviewer in 1981; “It might frighten them off.” Angelou’s odyssey — psychological, spiritual, literary, as well as geographical — begins with / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, generally acceded to be the best of her four autobiographical volumes and the exclusive focus, to date, of serious critical attention. Marguerite Johnson (she did not become Maya Angelou until her debut as a dancer at the Purple Onion cabaret in her early twenties) was born in St. Louis on 4 April 1928 to Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson. When she was three and her brother Bailey was four, they were sent by their divorced parents to live in Stamps, Arkansas, which was, she said, the same as “Chitlin’ Switch, Georgia; Hang ’Em High, Alabama; Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi.” “High spots in Stamps were usually negative,” she observes, “droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths.” There Angelou remained for a decade, reared by her maternal grandmother, Annie (“Momma”) Henderson, who kept a country store and ruled her grandchildren with the same sense of “work, duty, religion,” and morality with which she ruled her own life. Observes Angelou, “I don’t think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched.” In Stamps Angelou learned what it was like to be a black girl in a world whose boundaries were set by whites. She learned what it meant to wear for Easter a “plain ugly cut-down [dress] from a white woman’s once-was-purple throwaway,” her skinny

legs “greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and pow¬ dered with the Arkansas red clay.” As a young child she expected at any minute to wake from “my black ugly dream” and find her “Nappy black hair” meta¬ morphosed to a long, blonde bob. She thought, then, that “God was white,” but wondered whether He would “allow His only Son to mix with this crowd of cotton pickers and maids, washerwomen and handymen.” She learned the humiliation of being refused treatment by a white dentist who would “ ‘rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s.’ ” But she learned, also, that blacks would not only endure, but prevail. Momma, head of one of the few black families “not on relief” during the Depression, was an honest but shrewd business¬ woman who could turn aside the taunts of the “powhitetrash” and beat the bigoted dentist at his own game. From her Angelou learned common sense, practicality, and the ability to control one’s own destiny that comes from constant hard work and 4

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Maya Angelou

courage, “grace under pressure.” She learned, sometimes forcibly, the literature of black writers: “Bailey and I decided to memorize a scene from The Merchant of Venice, but we realized that Momma would question us about the author and that we’d have to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and it wouldn’t matter to her whether he was dead or not. So we chose ‘The Creation’ by James Weldon John¬ son instead.”

Labor School. Her informal schooling, in the “fourteen-room typical San Franciscan post-Earthquake” rooming house her mother ran in the Fillmore Dis¬ trict, was much more extensive. From her mother she learned “proper posture, table manners, good restaurants”; from her stepfather, how to play “poker, blackjack, tonk and high, low, Jick, Jack and the Game”; from the household, the ways of ship¬ yard workers, “much-powdered prostitutes,” and “the most colorful characters in the Black under¬ ground.” These people she accepted as honest in their own way. But she fled the hypocrisy of a summer vacation with her failed father and his nouveau bourgeois girl friend in their tacky trailer in south¬ ern California. Unable to return to her mother for a month, she lived in a graveyard of wrecked cars, many inhabited by homeless children whose own natural brotherhood “set a tone of tolerance for my life.” The book ends with her determined rush to¬ ward maturity. With the perseverance that fore¬ shadowed later civil rights work, she finally obtained a job, while still in high school, as the first black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco. With equal determination to prove that she was a woman, she became pregnant and at sixteen was delivered of a son one month after graduation from Mission High School’s summer school in 1945. She has since been awarded honorary degrees by Smith College, Mills College, and Lawrence University, among others. The next installment of Angelou’s auto¬ biography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), seems much less satisfactory than the first. This may be in large part because here Angelou is less admirable as a central character than she was in / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here, in instance after instance, she abandons or jeopardizes the maturity, honesty, and intuitive good judgment toward which she had been moving in Caged Bird. Her bold, headstrong temperament leads her to bluff her way into situa¬ tions dangerous to herself and her infant son, Guy; when she cannot learn enough quickly enough to escape she becomes dependent on others who too often exploit her naivete and good will—when she is not exploiting theirs. As Angelou anatomizes her exploits, it is hard to tell whether she intends this segment of her life story to be emblematic of the lives of all other unwed, undereducated black teen¬ age mothers, or for her misadventures to serve as a warning to others, or to demonstrate as she did in Caged Bird the survival and staying power of black women in adverse circumstances. The wit and

But the pride in herself this new knowledge engendered took a devastating fall when she was eight, during a brief stay in St. Louis with her beautiful mother, Vivian Baxter, “light-skinned with straight hair.” She was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, a taciturn “big brown bear” who was found “dropped . . . [or] kicked to death” shortly afterward. In court she had not revealed that she had permitted him to fondle her on two earlier occasions. Therefore she felt responsible for his murder (committed by her uncles), and she decided that “I had to stop talking.” Back in Stamps, where she was sent perhaps because “the St. Louis family just got fed up with my grim presence,” her bourgeoning pride dis¬ appeared for nearly five years, along with her speech. Both were restored by delicious afternoons, “sweet-milk fresh” in memory, of reading and recit¬ ing the world’s great literature with Mrs. Flowers, the educated “aristocrat of Black Stamps” who “acted just as refined as whitefolks in the movies and books and . . . was more beautiful”; “she made me proud to be a Negro, just by being herself.” She learned during this time the importance of self-expression, as well as communication, for “the wonderful, beautiful Negro race” survives “in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians and blues singers).” She explained to an interviewer in 1981 that “there isn’t one day since I was raped that I haven’t thought about it... I have gotten beyond hate and fear, but there is something beyond that.” Her mul¬ tiple careers in the arts—singing, dancing, and writing—have become ways of transcending her personal hates and fears, as well as of proclaiming her black identity and pride. In 1940, after Angelou’s graduation at the top of her eighth grade, her fun-loving mother, now a professional gambler, moved the children from Stamps to San Francisco, imposing experience on innocence, disorder upon order. Maya’s subse¬ quent formal education consisted of attending George Washington High School in San Francisco throughout World War II, while concurrently tak¬ ing dance and drama lessons at the California

5

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Maya Angelou

Praise for Maya Angelou s

1 know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw- every day, have I found myself so moved."

-James Baldwin

.full of laughter and tears, love and hate, failures and triumphs, and above all. understanding.”

-John O. Killens

dome of the inc idents she depicts are wonderfully funny. But .

inonary of the incidents cannot do this book justice; one has i end it to appreciate its sensitivity and life.” — Robert A. Gross. Newsweek ■.mb menus]y touching and comic.” i" n a heroic .and beautiful book.”

' 'lore - ICKNN'ETM P. &«'( KN

—The New York Times

Random House

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

394-48692-7

Dust jacket for Angelou s second autobiographical volume, in which, according to Shana Alexander, “the ‘caged bird’ soars”

met a pair of lesbian lovers and, fearing seduction, conned them into letting her become their manag¬ er. At eighteen she had “managed in a few tense years to become a snob at all levels, racial, cultural and intellectual. I was a madam and thought myself morally superior to the whores. I was a waitress and believed myself cleverer than the customers I served. I was a lonely unmarried mother and held myself to be freer than the married women I met.” Seeking sanctuary in Stamps when her tenweek-old empire crashed brought no solace. She talked back to a “slack-butted” store clerk, and the threat of a reprisal by the Ku Klux Klan caused Momma Henderson to send Angelou back to San Francisco for safety. Then, rejected on the eve of her induction into the army because she lied on her application, she escaped into marijuana and sought solace in the dream that is an ironic leitmotif of Gather Together: “I was going to have it made—and no doubt through the good offices of a handsome man who would love me to distraction.” Her artificial high was replaced by a natural

panache with which she narrates her picaresque tale prevent it from being a confessional; the writing of this volume itself may be the final exorcism of the flaws. Angelou is determined to leave her mother’s household, “take a job and show the whole world (my son’s father) that I was equal to my pride and greater than my pretensions.” As soon as she dis¬ covered that the Creole Cafe would pay $75 a week for a cook, “I knew I could cook Creole, whatever that was.” She learned quickly, and with equal haste fell in love with a customer: “When he opened the steamy door to the restaurant, surely it was the second coming of Christ.” When the affair ended after two months (he was engaged to another woman) Angelou decided to make a new life in San Diego, buttressed by $200 and her mother’s advice, unwittingly prophetic: “ ‘Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it’s your life. Be a damn good one.’ ” Angelou’s gradual initiation into prostitution began with a job as a nightclub waitress. There she

t

6

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Maya Angelou

one as she became part of a nightclub dancing act, with R. L. Poole as her partner, manager, mentor, and intermittent lover: “As a dancer, my instru¬ ment was my body. I couldn’t just allow . . . anyone to screw my instrument.” The emergence of Poole’s drug dependent “old lady” ended their liaison, and Angelou fled again into a restaurant kitchen and daydreams of the perfect husband. Her romantic imagination, inspired by a naivete that never ripened into wisdom during the three-year span of Gather Together, endowed the dapper L. D. Tolbrook, “an established gambler who had Southern manners and big city class,” with the means for her salvation. Prepared to be “an old man’s darling,” deluded by her wish to marry, she too willingly rationalized the virtues of life as a prostitute earning money for him: “ ‘Prostitution is like beauty. It is in the eye of the beholder. There are married women who are more whorish than a street prostitute because they have sold their bodies for marriage licenses, and there are some women who sleep with men for money who have great integrity because they are doing it for a purpose.’ ” It took threats of violence from her brother, himself on the verge of drug addiction, to keep her from returning to the whorehouse after a week’s dismal stint. She tried a few more legitimate jobs, but survival “didn’t take hold.” She rejected the traditional options for black women: hustling (“I obviously had little aptitude for that”), working as a housemaid (“I would keep my negative Southern exposures to whites before me like a defensive hand”), or “wrestling with old lady Welfare (my neck wouldn’t bend for that).” Prepared to turn to hard drugs again because of an unrealistic romantic love, she was dragged from the edge of addiction’s abyss by her lover, who forced her to watch him shoot up in a sewerlike “hit joint for addicts.” She concludes her account of this sordid segment of her life with a plea for forgiveness which is devoid of moral reflection. She was seemingly neither sadder nor wiser: “As I watched the wretched nod and scratch, I felt my own innocence as real as a grain of sand between my teeth. I was pure as moonlight and had only begun to live. My escapades were the fumblings of youth and to be forgiven as such.” In the third volume of Angelou’s saga, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Cellin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), her actions finally began to match her aspirations for maturity, though intermittently, as she lurched and ultimately strode through the years from 19501955. At about twenty-two (Angelou is usually vague about dates) she married Tosh Angelos, an

ex-sailor “intelligent, kind and reliable.” And white. Her mother exploded in rage, anticipating “A hell of a wedding gift—the contempt of his people and the distrust of your own.” Although she experienced little of either, the fortress of bourgeois respectability for which she had longed soon became a prison, restrictive of her independence. Too free a spirit to remain fettered for long, she was divorced within three years and resumed her career as a dancer, entertaining cus¬ tomers as the first black dancer at a local bar with “a little rhumba, tango, jitterbug, Susy-Q, trucking, snake hips, conga, Charleston and cha-cha-cha.” Before long she attracted the notice of the much more skilled performers at the chic Purple Onion and was soon, to her amazement, offered a job there: “There whites were treating me as an equal, as if I could do whatever they could do. They did not consider that race, height, or gender or lack of education might have crippled me and that I should be regarded as someone invalided.” Stripped of these excuses for failure, Angelou had to succeed on her own. And she did. She turned down one of the lead roles in the Broadway produc¬ tion of House of Flowers to join the European touring cast of Porgy and Bess. She devotes over half the book to describing the tour—from Montreal to Paris, Zagreb, and Belgrade, from Greece to Egypt, Israel, and Italy: “Dancing and singing every night with sixty people was more like a party than a chore.” She loved the ambience of the tightly knit, black professional community; she loved the free¬ dom as well as the work, freedom from housework, “freedom from the constant nuisance of a small child’s chatter,” freedom from the mores of the bourgeois world she had only recently walked out on. But duty to her child, nine and miserable with¬ out her, drove her home. Guilt over her neglect of him nearly drove her to suicide, but love of life and of motherhood and of dancing drove her instead to resume her career. In The Heart of a Woman (1981) Angelou in¬ tertwines an account of seven years of her own coming of age (1957-1963) with the coming of age of the civil rights movement and the beginning of the women’s movement. Her enlarged focus and clear vision transcend the particulars and give this book a fascinating universality of perspective and psychological depth that almost matches the quality of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (in contrast to the shallower and more limited intervening volumes). Its motifs are commitment and betrayal.

7

DLB 38

Maya Angelou

progress and racial integration,” excoriating “white men, white women, white children and white his¬ tory, particularly as is applied to black people.” Through Killens and others she learned to ac¬ knowledge her kinship with blacks nationwide: “ ‘Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you’re black in this country you’re on a planta¬

By the time she was thirty, Angelou had made a commitment to become a writer. Inspired by her friendship with the distinguished social activist au¬ thor John Killens, she moved to Brooklyn to be near him and to learn her craft. Through weekly meet¬ ings of the Harlem Writers Guild she learned to treat her writing seriously: “If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.” And, although it was difficult, she learned to toler¬ ate criticism, however harsh, and was accepted as a practicing member of a group of established writers that included John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, and James Baldwin. Recognizing that “trying to overcome was black people’s honorable tradition,” Angelou resolved to overcome the problems in her writing until it met the exacting standards of her literary mentors. At the same time Angelou made a commit¬ ment to promote black civil rights. Her widening circle of black intellectual friends was “persistently examining the nature of racial oppression, racial

tion.’ ” So when she met Martin Luther King she was prepared to accept his challenge: “We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country.” With comedian Godfrey Cambridge she organized a benefit, “Cabaret of Freedom,” for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was starring “on the stage of life,” a “general in the army” of fighters against legal discrimination, and as a consequence was soon appointed by the veteran civil rights activist, Bayard Rustin, to suc¬ ceed him as the SCLC’s northern coordinator. Dur¬ ing her six months in office she was grateful for the interracial cooperation that was “new and old and

Dust jackets for the third and fourth volumes of what has been called “one of the more significant and important personal narratives of our time”

8

DLB 38

Maya Angelou

dynamic,” from children to adults alike, not only in Harlem but throughout the nation. The same dynamism pervaded the black support of commu¬ nists, from Castro’s Cuba to Russia. Angelou vividly captures the mood of the era with snatches of song, dialogue, and slogans that dynamically punctuate this book: “Castro never had called himself white, so he was O.K. from the git. . . and as black people often said . . . ‘Wasn’t no Communist lynched my poppa or raped my mamma.’ ‘Hey, Khruschev. Go on, with your bad self.’ ” Despite her increasing maturity as a writer and her effective advocacy of black civil rights, Angelou, in her early thirties, still retained the romantic notion of quiet suburban domesticity that had betrayed her repeatedly in her teens and early twenties and was to do so again. She, who by this time had performed with Odetta, and the revolu¬ tionary Clancy Brothers (“ ‘the shamrock Is forbid by law/to grow on Irish ground’ ”), and had gotten half of Harlem to demonstrate at the United Na¬ tions to protest Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, proposed marriage to a laconic bail bondsman she had met in a bar. As he plied her with engagement presents of stolen goods he had confiscated, she was preparing to “cook, clean house . . . and join some local women’s volunteer organizations.” In betraying her active, creative life, she could only betray her fiance. Indeed, she left him quickly for the bulky, impeccably suave Vusumzi Make, a South African freedom fighter who proposed to her instantly, claiming that their marriage would be “ ‘the joining of Africa and Africa-America!’ ” Although despite their good intentions they were never legally wed, Make’s initial adoration helped Maya, ever romantic, to feel exactly the way she wanted to, like “a young African virgin, made beautiful for her chief.” Make convinced her to accept a major theatrical role, as the White Queen in Jean Genet’s The Blacks, effectively countering her objection, “ ‘The play says given the chance, black people will act as cruel as whites,’ ” with, “ ‘Dear Wife, that is a reverse racism. Black people are human. No more, no less.’ ” They left New York in the same flutter of unpaid bills that pursued them to Egypt. While Make stumped the world for South African free¬ dom and shamelessly womanized on the side, Ange¬ lou violated an African prohibition against women working and got a job to help pay the bills. Make met her announcement that she was associate editor of the English language Arab Observer (another type of work she, typically, had to learn on the job) with a tirade that vilified her “insolence, independence,

lack of respect, arrogance, ignorance, defiance, cal¬ lousness, cheekiness and lack of breeding.” “He was right,” Angelou concluded. But this marked the beginning of the end of their liaison, as he con¬ tinued to betray her sexually and she persisted in remaining true to her black American culture that ultimately could not bend to his African world view. Before a tribunal of the African diplomatic community she defended, “with openness and sass,” her decision to leave Make. The “African palaver” vindicated her and assured her an inde¬ pendent welcome in the African community. The Heart of a Woman, which has received consistent critical acclaim, ends with her arrival in Kwarne Nkrumah’s Ghana to enroll her son in the Universi¬ ty of Ghana, her commitment to black freedom—as well as her own—intact. From 1973 to 1981 she was married to Paul du Feu. In describing her development in her auto¬ biographies, Angelou gives generous credit to the influences of dominant women during her child¬ hood. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings focuses on three impressive female role models: “Momma” Henderson, her powerful, enterprising, righteous, religious grandmother; Mrs. Flowers, beautiful, cultivated, and pridefully black; and her mother, the sexy, sassy, and savvy embodiment of black mores. The combined characteristics of these women became leitmotifs throughout the volumes of Angelou’s autobiography. Men, however, get little credit for who she is and how she got that way. During Angelou’s child¬ hood, adult black men were either absent (her father), weak (her crippled uncle), subservient to women (her uncle and her mother’s boyfriends), sexually abusive (the man who raped her), or lazy and hedonistic (her father when she met him again in her teenage years). Of the men she has romantic relationships with as an adult (to the point at which Heart of a Woman ends), the blacks are either stodgy (her bail bondsman fiance) or unwilling to make a long-term commitment (Make). The man who treats her with greatest respect and affection is white (Angelos, her first husband). But the primary disruptive factor in all these relationships is Angelou’s quest for self-identity, manifested through self-assertiveness and the selfexpression that come not only from her careers as a dancer, a singer, and a writer, but from being very good at these endeavors. As she matures, she be¬ comes more and more her own person. Through her own efforts and innate talent, which she mini¬ mizes in concentrating on the results, she succeeds early and spectacularly in these highly competitive

9

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Maya Angelou

Dust jacket for Angelou s 1978 book. In the title poem she ivrites, “You may trod me in the very dirt!but still, like dust, I'll rise.”

fields in which many fail. Her enjoyment of the freedom, mobility, independence, and acclaim that success makes possible is evident from the zestful assurance with which she writes her autobiog¬ raphies. Angelou’s three slim volumes of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water fore I Diiie (1971, which incorporates many of the lyrics from the 1969 re¬ cording of The Poetry of Maya Angelou), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), and And Still l Rise (1978), are of lesser stature than her autobio¬ graphical writing. Much of Angelou’s poetry, almost entirely short lyrics, expresses in strong, often jazzy rhythms, themes common to the life experiences of many American blacks—discrimination, exploita¬ tion, being on welfare. Some of her poems extol the survivors, those whose black pride enables them to prevail over the otherwise demeaning circum¬ stances of their existence. Thus in “When I Think

About Myself” she adopts the persona of an aging domestic to comment ironically about the phe¬ nomenon of black survival in a world dominated by whites: “Sixty years in these folks’ world/The child I works for calls me girl/I say ‘Yes ma’am’ for work¬ ings’ sake./Too proud to bend/Too poor to break.” In “Times-Square-Shoeshine Composition,” the feisty black shoeshine boy defends, in dialect, his thirty-five-cent price against the customer who tries to cheat him out of a dime, his slangy remarks punctuated by the aggressive “pow pow” of the shoeshine rag. Other poems deal with social issues and prob¬ lems which, though not unique to blacks, are ex¬ plored from a black perspective. In “Letter to an Aspiring Junkie,” a street-smart cat cautions the prospective junkie to beware, “Climb into the streets, man, like you climb/into the ass end of a lion.” Angelou sympathizes with the plight of aban¬ doned black children, embodied in “John J,” whose

10

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Maya Angelou

“momma didn’t want him,” and who ends up gam¬ bling in a bar with a “flinging singing lady.” Her superficial look at “Prisoners” shows them predict¬ ably experiencing “the horror/of gray guard men” — “It’s jail/and bail/then rails to run.” At her most irritating, Angelou preaches. In language and hortatory tone reminiscent of popular turn-of-thecentury poetry, she advises readers to “Take Time Out” to “show some kindness/for the folks/'who thought that blindness/was an illness that/affected eyes alone.” When Angelou’s lyrics deal with the common experiences of licit and illicit love, and of youth and aging, she writes from various female perspectives similar to those Dorothy Parker often used, and with Parker’s self-consciousness, but without her wit. For example, in “Communication I” the love¬ lorn damsel, impervious to her wooer’s quotations from Pope, Shaw, and Salinger, “frankly told her mother/‘Of all he said I understood,/he said he loved another.’ ” In mundane imagery (“The day hangs heavy/loose and grey/when you’re away”) a

comparable persona laments her lover’s evasiveness (“Won’t you pull yourself together/For/Me/ ONCE”). And she screams at the silent “Tele¬ phone,” “Ring. Damn you!” Her occasional vivid black dialect,(“But forty years of age . . . /stomps/ no-knocking/into the script/bumps a funky grind on the/shabby curtain of youth. . . . ”) enlivens ex¬ pressions that seldom rise above the banal. Her poems' seem particularly derivative and cloying when expressed in conventional language: “My pencil halts/and will not go/along that quiet path /1 need to write/of lovers false. ...” Angelou’s poetry becomes far more interest¬ ing when she dramatizes it in her characteristically dynamic stage performances. Angelou’s statuesque figure, dressed in bright colors (and sometimes, African designs), moves exuberantly, vigorously to reinforce the rhythm of the lines, the tone of the words. Her singing and dancing and electrifying stage presence transcend the predictable words and rhymes. In the early 1970s Angelou wrote a screenplay

taya Angelou Dust jacket for Angelou’s 1983 poetry collection. Her poems are as much a part of her life story as her autobiographical prose.

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Maya Angelou

References: Liliane K. Arensberg, “Death as a Metaphor of Self in / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” College Language Association Journal, 20 (December 1976): 273-291;

and score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and a tenpart television series on African traditions in Amer¬ ican life. Because she continues to write, a final critical assessment of her work would at this point be premature. Yet it is clear from the four-volume serial autobiography that Angelou is in the process of becoming a self-created Everywoman. In a litera¬ ture and a culture where there are many fewer exemplary lives of women than of men, black or white, Angelou’s autobiographical self, as it ma¬ tures through successive volumes, is gradually assuming that exemplary stature. / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins with the words from a spiritual:

“The Black Scholar Interviews Maya Angelou,” Black Scholar, 8 (January-February 1977): 44-53; Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, “The Metaphysics of Matrilinearism in Women’s Autobiogra¬ phy,” in Womens Autobiography: Essays in Criti¬ cism, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek (Blooming¬ ton: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 180205; George E. Kent, “Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Black Autobiographical Tradition,” Kansas Quarterly, 7 (Summer 1975): 72-78;

What you lookin at me for? I didn’t come to stay . . .

Angelou’s autobiographical volumes explain both why she is worth being looked at and why, like many blacks, both real and fictional, she “didn’t come to stay” but is always moving on. For she is forever impelled by the restlessness for change and new realms to conquer that is the essence of the creative artist, and of exemplary American lives, white and black.

Myra K. McMurry, “Role Playing as Art in Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 41 (May 1976): 106-111; Sidonie A. Smith, “The Song of A Caged Bird: Maya Angelou’s Quest after Self-Acceptance,” Southern Humanities Review, 7 (Fall 1973): 365375; R. B. Stepto, “The Phenomenal Woman and the Severed Daughter,” review of And Still I Rise and Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, Parnas¬ sus: Poetry in Review, 8 (Fall/Winter 1979): 312-320.

Bibliography: Dee Birch Cameron, “A Maya Angelou Bibliogra¬ phy,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 36 (JanuaryMarch 1979): 50-52.

Toni Cade Bambara (25 March 1939-

)

Alice A. Deck University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

BOOKS: Gorilla, My Love: Short Stories (New York: Random House, 1972); The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories (New York: Random House, 1977); The Salt Eaters (New York: Random House, 1980; London: Women’s Press, 1982).

OTHER: “Black Theater,” in Black Expression: Essays by and About Black Americans in the Crea¬ tive Arts, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1969), pp. 134143; The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited, with con¬ tributions, by Toni Cade (New York: New American Library, 1970); Tales and Stories for Black Folks, edited, with con¬ tributions, by Toni Cade Bambara (Garden City: Zenith Books/Doubleday, 1971);

TELEVISION: Zora, WGBH, 1971; “The Johnson Girls,” Soul Show, National Educa¬ tional Television, 1972; The Long Night, ABC, 1981. 12

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Toni Cade Bambara

Southern Exposure 3 (Spring/Surnmer 1976), edited by Toni Cade Bambara; Cracks, by Cecelia Smith, preface by Toni Cade Bambara (Atlanta: Select Press, 1980); “What It is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” in The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg (New York: Norton, 1980); “Beauty is Just Care . . . Like Ugly is Carelessness” and “Thinking About My Mother,” in On Essays: A Reader for Writers, edited by Paul H. Connolly (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Women of Color, foreword by Toni Cade Bambara (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); The Sanctified Church: Collected Essays by Zora Neale Hurston, foreword by Toni Cade Bambara (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1982); “Salvation is the Issue,” in Black Women Writers (Nineteen Fifty to Nineteen Eighty): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans (Garden City: Doubleday /Anchor, 1984), pp. 41-71.

Toni Cade was born in New York City to Helen Brent Henderson Cade, who also had one son, Walter Cade. Toni and her brother grew up with their mother in New York City (Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Queens) and Jersey City, New Jersey. She attended various public and private schools in New York State, New Jersey, and the southern United States. She adopted the name Bambara in 1970 when she discovered it as a part of a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great¬ grandmother’s trunk. Reticent in most of her essays and interviews about specific biographical details of her life, Bambara chooses instead to give enlarged impressions of a few individuals and events from her early life which she feels most influenced her. In September 1973, at age 34, Bambara published an essay in Redbook explaining what she most appreciated about her mother, Helen. Typical of her tendency to enlarge reality as a means of em¬ phasizing an important point, Bambara began the essay with an anecdote narrated, in a distinctly Afro-American dialect, by a young girl who remem¬ bers the numerous occasions on which her mother visited her public school classroom to set the teacher straight on a few facts about Afro-American history and people. The mother would march in, plant herself firmly in front of the teacher, speak her mind loudly enough for the entire class to hear, and then march out. The scene mesmerized the chil¬ dren and terrified the apologetic teacher. The young narrator recalls the enormous pride which would well up in her own breast whenever her mother made her appearance. She could then walk home triumphantly, as her schoolmates expressed their awe and gratitude for her mother’s having fought their battle with the teacher. As the narrator says, “She was my mother, but she was everybody’s champion.” The anecdote, replete with humor which does not belie the seriousness of the point Bambara is making, leads into a discussion of those less dramatic but equally heroic stances, to Bambara’s way of thinking, that Helen Cade took in the course of raising her two children alone. Bambara remembers her mother as one who understood and respected her children’s need to get in touch with their private selves. Thus in the face of criticism from neighbors and friends who said she was over¬ indulging her two children, Helen Cade allowed them to feel they had the right “to be cozy with ourselves” and “to dialogue and poet with the me.” Bambara thanks her mother in this essay for nur¬ turing, rather than thwarting, her habit of taking private inventory, of examining her feelings: “ . . . she knew, I suspect, the value of the inner

In many ways Toni Cade Bambara is one of the best representatives of the group of AfroAmerican writers who, during the 1960s, became directly involved in the cultural and sociopolitical activities in urban communities across the country. Like James Baldwin, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Sonia San¬ chez, and Alice Walker, she immersed herself in civil rights issues by lecturing to and helping to organize rallies within the black community, while at the same time using these experiences as the nucleus for her essays and creative writing. Like others of that era, Bambara wrote from a stance of near defiance—pushing the cultural assumptions of the larger American society aside to show her audience what she believed to be the distinguishing characteristics of Afro-American culture. Her fic¬ tion reflects the Afro-American idiomatic expres¬ sions, habits of interpersonal relationships, and, most important, its myths, music, and history. While some who rode the tide of enormous popu¬ larity during the 1960s passed on to virtual obscuri¬ ty in the 1970s, Bambara is one of the few who continued to work within the black urban com¬ munities (filming, lecturing, organizing, and read¬ ing from her works at rallies and conferences), pro¬ ducing imaginative reenactments of these experi¬ ences in her fiction. In addition, Bambara estab¬ lished herself over the years as an educator, teaching in colleges and in independent community schools in various cities on the East Coast. 13

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anced by as many if not more persons who have a genuine concern for other people. Her short stories and her novel dramatize this view to such an extent that even her toughest characters (as in “Playing with Punjab” in Gorilla, My Love) betray an under¬ lying sensitivity to life, and to their fellow blacks. Bambara published her first short story, “Sweet Town,” in Vendome magazine (as Toni Cade in January 1959). That same year she received her B.A. in Theater Arts/English and the John Golden Award for Fiction from Queens College. The Long Island Star awarded her its Pauper Press Award for nonfiction that same year. While enrolled as a graduate student of modern American fiction at the City College of New York, Bambara worked as a social worker for the Harlem Welfare Center for the year 1959-1960. She published her second story, “Mississippi Ham Rider,” in the Summer 1960 Massachusetts Review. In 1961 she studied at the Commedia del’Arte in Milan, Italy, and worked there as a free-lance writer. Between 1962 and 1965 she completed her master’s degree and worked as program director at Colony House in Brooklyn and as the recreational and occupational therapist for Metropolitan Hospital’s psychiatric division. Dur¬ ing those years she also took on various positions as either coordinator or director of local neighbor¬ hood programs, such as the Equivalency Program, the Veteran Reentry Program, the 8th Street Play Program sponsored by the Lower Eastside Tenants Association, and the Tutorial Program at the Hous¬ ton Street Public Library. After receiving her mas¬ ter’s degree Bambara taught at the City College of New York from 1965 to 1969 and served as direc¬ tor/adviser for the Theater of the Black Experience and as an adviser for various types of publications sponsored by the City College SEEK program, such as Obsidian, Onyx, and The Paper. It was during this same four-year period that more of her stories be¬ gan to appear in various journals and magazines, such as The Liberator, Prairie Schooner, and Redbook; however, Bambara insists that, for her, writing was at that time “rather frivolous ... it was something you did because you didn’t feel like doing any work.” Work in this sense meant teaching and advising at City College, coordinating programs at community centers, and participating in the numerous workshops and study groups focusing on the sociopolitical issues of the day—both the black liberation and women’s movements. Bambara was involved in them all during the 1960s, the decade when she says she came of age, and in 1970 she edited and published an anthology entitled The Black Woman, which was designed to show what

life.” The essay shows a daughter who in retrospect realizes how much inner resolve it took for her mother to defend her children’s right to be differ¬ ent and to be self-confident in following their inner urges. In a 1979 interview Bambara explained that in her mother’s household both she and her brother were expected to be self-sufficient, competent, and “to be rather nonchalant about expertise in a num¬ ber of areas.” No distinction was made, Bambara insists, between how a girl should think and behave and how a boy should think and behave — both of the Cade children were expected to be sensitive, caring people who took responsibility for them¬ selves and their own personal growth beyond the guidance which a working mother could provide. The family moved frequently, and as a child Bambara’s inquisitive nature led her out to explore each new neighborhood in which her family lived. “As a kid with an enormous appetite for knowledge and a gift for imagining myself anywhere in the universe, I always seemed to be drawn to the library or to some music spot or to 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, Speaker’s Corner, to listen to Garveyites, Father Diviners, Rastafarians, Muslims, trade unionists, communists, Pan-Africanists.” In reflecting on the types of persons she considered most fascinating at that time she says there were two types of women, other than her mother, in the various neighborhoods: the Miss Naomi types were those women who led a very exciting night life and who had “lots of clothes in the closet” and a shrewd method of dealing with men; the Miss Gladys types were the women who lived on the first floor of the tenement building, took part in the local gambling, and who, like the Miss Naomi types, were ready, willing, and able to give free advice on everything from “how to get your homework done” to which number you should play. These women, as Bam¬ bara describes them, cared about the young girls in the neighborhood and therefore took it upon them¬ selves to advise them on how to avoid those things which could be harmful, such as “those cruising cars that moved through the neighborhood patrolling little girls.” In Bambara’s view the Miss Naomis and the Miss Gladyses can be used in her fiction to “teach us valuable lessons of life” and to give a dimension to the stereotypes of black women which only another Afro-American could understand and depict. The basic implication of all of Toni Gade Bambara’s stories is that there is an undercurrent of caring for one’s neighbors that sustains black Amer¬ icans. In her view the presence of those individuals who intend to do harm to people is counterbal¬ 14

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Toni Cade Bambara

various black women were thinking and doing about both the civil rights and the women’s move¬ ments.

interact with the male characters. Bambara found the production to be accurate historically, but also relevant to the social situation of the 1960s when much attention was placed on black prize fighters and their relationships with black and white women. In editing The Black Woman, Bambara cut across age, class, and occupational barriers to show that black women shared some of the same con¬ cerns about black men, social issues (such as educa¬ tion and housing), and their personal development as women. At the same time, however, the readings in the anthology show that black women were sharply divided along political lines with some arguing for a radical departure from every known form of black female behavior and others lament¬ ing that too many changes would jeopardize a woman’s emotional security. The main point though is that Bambara’s anthology provided an arena for black women’s opinions to be voiced en masse at a time when it was assumed that all blacks were preoccupied with racial equality. For Bam¬ bara, the struggle for black equality in America was important but not to be obtained at the price of neglecting any one member of the Afro-American community. In 1969 Bambara began teaching in the En¬ glish Department at Livingston College in New Jersey where she was to remain until 1974. During that time she became an associate professor at Livingston and in addition to her teaching duties, functioned as speaker of the faculty chamber, served on the Livingston Black Faculty Organiza¬ tion, and worked as the coadviser for the Harambee dancers, the Malcolm Players, and Sisters in Con¬ sciousness. In 1974, she received a plaque from the Livingston College black community for service. In 1971 Bambara edited her second antholo¬ gy entitled Tales and Stories for Black Folks. The col¬ lection had broad appeal in the black community, but Bambara had had an audience of high school and college students in mind. As she explains in her introduction, the major intention of the volume was to teach young blacks the historical value of one of their daily activities—telling stories. Bambara calls it “Our Great Kitchen Tradition” or the common experience most Afro-Americans have of hearing various family members tell stories about “the old times” or about the various experiences of indi¬ viduals within the family. She urges her readers to take these folktales seriously as valuable lessons on human behavior and as examples of living history. The first section of the collection consists of stories which Bambara said, “I wish I had read

Essentially a collection of poetry, short stories, and essays by well-known writers (Nikki Giovanni, Kay Lindsey, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall) and women students in the City College SEEK program, The Black Woman was a first of its kind in the United States, and Bambara, still writing under the name Cade, envisioned it as a response to all the male “experts” both black and white who had been publishing articles and con¬ ducting sociological studies on black women. Even the leading white feminists of the 1960s, Bambara felt, were not equipped to understand, much less to explain, the feelings and the situation of the black female. Hence, as editor Bambara selected items which she felt best reflected the thoughts and feel¬ ings of the many black women she had met while attending and participating in discussion clubs, work-study group meetings, and workshops both on college campuses and in local black communi¬ ties. While some of the poems and short stories aim to defuse and reject the popular myths and stereotypes of black women, other essays angrily challenge the traditional roles assigned to women by males within both the black community and the larger American society. In fact, one of the three essays Bambara contributed to the anthology, “On the Issue of Roles,” focuses on the fact that in many cases women working in black political action groups had not been allowed to participate on an equal footing with male workers in decision mak¬ ing. They had instead been relegated to “the unreal role of mute servant,” which was causing needless tension between black men and women who pre¬ sumably believed in the need to work toward social equality. She argued that the solution was to “let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and con¬ centrate on Blackhood.” Another of Bambara’s contributions to the anthology, “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation?,” outlines her opinion that birth control is not black genocide, but that it offers black women a means of becoming less vulnerable to black males’ idealistic notions of producing “warriors for the revolution.” The pill could help black women maintain control of their bodies and the peace of mind needed to take on new, social responsibilities. Bambara’s third contribution to the anthology was a reprint from Obsidian (October 1968). “Thinking About the Play ‘The Great White Hope’ ” evaluates the production in terms of its positive portrayal of black women and how they 15

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Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara’s fable “The Toad and the Donkey,” also in Tales and Stories, parallels Aesop’s “The Tor¬ toise and the Hare,” but Bambara’s version states that as a result of having lost the race to the slower toad, the donkey decided that he would never run a race again and “donkeys have been kind of stub¬ born about running ever since.” The obvious differ¬ ence between “The Three Little Panthers” and “The Toad and the Donkey” is that the latter does not contain a political message. It can be read for entertainment and as the type of folktale intended to explain the reasons why humans and animals behave as they do. Other stories Bambara included in this section of the anthology also avoid making political statements. The collection, therefore, offers a balance between readings which are enter¬ taining and those which are didactic. Most of the stories Bambara wrote as Toni Cade between 1959 and 1970, except for two tales in Tales and Stories for Black Folks, were published in October 1972 in what was to become her most wide¬ ly read collection: Gorilla, My Love. The stories in the collection focus on the relationships among Afro-Americans in both the urban North and the rural South. Eight of the fifteen stories in the collec¬ tion center on young children and adolescents as they move through their neighborhood learning about themselves while in the process of responding to their environment. Much of Bambara’s fiction is set outside of the home, on a sidewalk, in a movie theater, in a park or on an athletic field, in a local bar, or in a community center. Bambara’s charac¬ ters are rarely at odds with their geographical en¬ vironment, especially those described in the stories in Gorilla, My Love. They move through their im¬ mediate neighborhood comfortably familiar with the people and each building, street lamp, and fire hydrant they pass. Each of the characters in Gorilla, My Love exudes a street-wise sophistication, a confi¬ dence in “mother wit,” that helps him or her to intimidate immediate rivals. The most appealing story in Gorilla, My Love, and the best representative of Bambara’s style and technique, is the title story. Narrated in the first person by Hazel, a young girl who is completely fed up with “grown-ups messin over kids just cause they little and can’t take ’em to court,” the story describes the carelessness of adults who say things to Hazel and her brothers without realizing the effect of their words. The children are disappointed time and again because they expect adults to follow through on promises, no matter how long ago they were made. In each instance it is Hazel who shrewd¬ ly argues with adults, making them see just how

growing up,” short stories by professional AfroAmerican writers such as Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Pearl Crayton, and Ernest Gaines. Bam¬ bara included one of her own stories, “Raymond’s Run,” in this section also. The second half of the collection begins with Bambara’s “Rapping About Story Forms” which introduces her readers to the origins and characteristics of Afro-American fables. This section includes an English translation of a fable by the Senegalese Birago Diop and one by the Ghanaian James Aggrey, as well as several selec¬ tions written by students in a freshman composition course Bambara was teaching at Livingston College. Some of the students had been working with chil¬ dren in an independent community school, and Bambara had asked them to produce term papers that were useful to someone. As she explains it: “A great many of them took traditional European tales and changed them so as to promote critical think¬ ing, critical reading for the young people they were working with outside of the class.” As was the case with her first anthology, Bambara’s decision to in¬ clude student writings with those by older profes¬ sional writers shows her desire to give young writers a chance to make their talents known to a large audience. In addition, such a mixture in Tales and Stories for Black Folks would have helped her inspire young adults to read, to think critically, and to write. In following her own directives to her stu¬ dents, Bambara teamed with Geneva Powell, a black community worker from Newark, New Jersey, to write “The Three Little Panthers,” which she in¬ cluded in Tales and Stories for Black Folks. The story concerns three urban panthers who, having been sent on a survival mission in “the forest called the suburbs,” were continually harassed by antagonistic locals such as a rat, a vulture, a rabbit, an ostrich, an owl, and a fox. Refusing to conform to a suburban life-style, the only way they could have peacefully resided there, the panthers chose to return to their own neighborhood where they could work to sus¬ tain their own culture. While the obvious parallels to the original “Three Little Pigs” make the story predictable in terms of plot and dialogue, a cross burning, a bombing, and the panthers’ brandishing of guns when antagonists approach their house in¬ dicate the two authors’ preoccupation with the so¬ cial violence many blacks contended with during the 1960s and early 1970s. The story also obliquely criticizes those blacks who chose to be assimilated in order to live in American suburbs. Bambara and Powell imply that inner-city experience and en¬ vironment are potentially more fulfilling for blacks.

16

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much they are responsible for the chaos their words create. Hazel is resolved to defend herself and her brothers from the carelessness of the adult world, but she is nonetheless a very loving and lovable character. Her fiesty nature enables her to triumph over her personal disappointments and to take on new challenges.

she has already made up her mind about what she will do and will not share her decision with her friends. The narrator is a much younger girl who sits on the sidelines listening to each woman state her philosophy of how to deal with men. She listens in the hope that when she “jumps into her woman stride,” she will not “have all this torture and crap to go through.” In this story Bambara focuses on a particular feature of the friendship among women: namely, the way in which intimate conversation with close friends (replete with confessions of past mistakes, hopes for future relationships, and les¬ sons learned) can help one to get over a personal crisis. This is what Bambara has termed “drawing the wagons in a circle,” a phrase she used to describe the protectiveness and sense of revitalization which can occur from such an encounter. Hence we see in this story that the inner resolve, the resiliency, and determination of her younger protagonists in Goril¬ la, My Love must be supplemented with the support of friends and family. When Gorilla, My Love was published, it re¬ ceived enthusiastic reviews. Lucille Clifton, herself a writer, said: “She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are; and done it with both love and respect.” Poet Mari Evans claimed that the stor¬ ies were “shavings off our Black experience—like chocolate. Bittersweet that is. . . .” And in a review published in the July 1973 edition of Black World June Jordan said in part that Bambara allowed her readers to turn away momentarily from issues of genocide, poverty, and other “alien factors” to “con¬ centrate on what we love and who loves us and how the family is and how the folks be managing, by our hilarious/sorrowing own self.” During the five-year span between 1972 and the publication in 1977 of her second collection of stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, major events took place in Toni Cade Bambara’s life which were to have an effect on her writing. She visited Cuba in 1973 where she met with the Federation of Cuban Women as well as with women working in factories, on farms, in markets, and in parks. She was im¬ pressed, she said in an interview, with how Cuban women were able to resolve many class conflicts as well as color conflicts and to coordinate a mass organization. Their success at this, Bambara felt, “says a great deal about the possibilities here.” Another benefit she derived from her trip to Cuba was being made aware of how effective a creative writer can be in a political movement: “People made me look at what I already knew about the power of the word. ... I think it was in 1973 when I really began to realize that [writing] was a perfectly legiti-

While the majority of the stories in Gorilla, My Love focus on the experiences of black women, many of the lessons they teach are universal. In one story, “Talkin ’Bout Sonny,” Bambara focuses on two males who struggle to cope with some very real but invisible force which threatens their mental sta¬ bility. The narrator, Betty Butler, is a social worker who is dating Delauney, a divorced father of two girls. The story is set in a local bar where Betty and Delauney are discussing their friend Sonny’s recent emotional collapse (“Something just came over me”) and stabbing of his wife. The narrator cannot understand the casualness with which Delauney is able to discuss the incident. As she reflects on her past observations of Sonny and Delauney, she real¬ izes that they are trying to contain a periodic rage, directed at no particular person, which they cannot fully explain. Delauney is at least able to describe the effect that the rage has on his and on Sonny’s behavior: “I can wake up not thinking anything in particular and all of a sudden it’s on me. A cloud of evil. A fit of nastiness takes over . . . that cloud of evil zooms in on you. . . . Fifty some odd days of pure shit jammed into one mad moment and boom — you plant a razor in your wife’s throat.” In short, Delauney knows he cannot help Sonny until he can help himself. Bambara seems to suggest that it is the overall pressure of living in modern society which triggers Sonny’s fits and Delauney’s evil moods, but there are questions raised in the story which are left unanswered; for example, now that Betty sees how precarious Delauney’s grip on his emotional state is, will she continue to be involved with him? Will she be able to live with the fear of what he might do to her or to his own daughters one day? “Talkin ’Bout Sonny” is one of Bambara’s more sobering stories in Gorilla, My Love as it is unrelieved by her usual moments of comic relief. Another important story in Gorilla, My Love is “The Johnson Girls.” Unlike the situation in “Talk¬ in ’Bout Sonny,” a character who is going through an emotional crisis (her boyfriend has left town without indicating that he is coming back) is sur¬ rounded by a group of her closest female friends, each of whom offers a plan of action to bring him back. While Inez obviously needs to have her friends around her and is listening to their advice,

17

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Toni Cade Bambara

same community who opposed his power. The story focuses on Graham’s wife, Virginia, who, with their infant son in her arms, is on the way to visit her husband in jail. Flashbacks explain how she first met Graham and fell in love with him and his ideals. Basically a very quiet but hardworking and devoted woman, Virginia took on large responsibilities in community projects. After Graham’s arrest she realizes that her personal strength and the strength of their relationship is being put to a test, especially when she sees that much of what they had worked for has gone to ruin. By the end of the story Virgin¬ ia has paid a visit to the minister and vented her rage against what he had done, so that when she walks into the jail to see her husband, she is all the more determined that their work will continue and their marriage will endure. While the message Bambara wants to deliver is very clear, her tech¬ nique of juxtaposing time past with the present moment strains one’s patience in following the plot. Too many unexplained passing references are made to people and past incidents. Bambara received mixed reactions to “The Organizer’s Wife.” There were women who felt that the title was an insult, and other readers who said they would have liked to see Virginia leave town and her child die to show that she could not live or raise a child under a system which had separated her from Graham. In response to these suggestions Bambara argued, “What kind of a message would that have been? ‘The Organizer’s Wife,’ written in 1975 and set in 1975, is a love story, layer after layer. Lovers and combatants are not defeated. That is the message of that story, the theme of the entire collection, the wisdom that gets me up in the morning, honored to be here. It is a usable truth.” The title story of the collection, “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,” is noteworthy because it fo¬ cuses on the people of Southeast Asia and allows us to see how Bambara portrays an ethnic group other than her own. The story is set aboard a boat which is transporting people caught up in the war to a larger city. As the narrator moves along the deck of the boat we see a country peasant, an old school¬ teacher, two women on their way to market their crafts, a soldier, refugees, and several foreigners (a female French news correspondent and an Amer¬ ican businessman), all of whom are thinking about the effect of war on their lives. The central charac¬ ters are a young girl and her mother who have been tortured by the imperialist forces, but who had been able to resist by chanting to themselves: “Nothing, I’ll tell you nothing. You’ll never break our spirits. We cannot be defeated.” Once in the city, the little

mate way to participate in struggle.” Bambara visited Vietnam in the summer of 1975 as a guest of the Women’s Union. On this trip, she says she was impressed by “the women’s ability to break through traditional roles, traditional ex¬ pectations . . . and come together again in a mass organization that is programmatic and takes on a great deal of responsibility for the running of the nation.” She summed up her Vietnam experience by saying: “I got a certain amount of miseducation behind me and got a more serious kind of selfeducation. I got more deeply into community orga¬ nizing.” Hence, after having relocated with her daughter, Karma, to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1974, Bambara became more involved in those communi¬ ty activities which she had begun there before her trip to Southeast Asia. Concurrent with her teaching duties as writer-in-residence at Spelman College from 1974 to 1977, Bambara became a founding member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers, and the Neighborhood Cultural Arts Center, Inc. She was also Director of the Pomoja Writers Guild, a founding member and officer of the Conference Committee on Black South Literature and Art, and an associate/aide of the Institute of the Black World. She was also the Designer and Program Coordinator of the Arts-inthe-Schools Project sponsored by CETA. The effect of Bambara’s travels abroad, her relocation to Atlanta, and her work in so many community art groups can be seen in the stories published in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977). One notices that at least five of the stories are set outside of an urban center; the title story is in Southeast Asia. The characters in many of these stories move across greater geographical distances than did those in her first collection, and their immediate concerns are not so much with their personal rela¬ tionships as with their involvement in art groups, community centers, or sociopolitical organizations. “The Organizer’s Wife,” “The Apprentice,” “Bro¬ ken Field Running,” “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,” and “The Long Night” all focus on the need for people in a community to organize and keep a spiritual faith in their efforts even during periods of major setbacks and “low consciousness.” In line with her belief in the inherent resiliency of a people involved in social struggles, all of the central charac¬ ters in these stories are combatants who have the strength not only to resist, but to inspire others in their circle to continue the fight. In “The Organizer’s Wife,” Graham, the com¬ munity leader, has been arrested by local author¬ ities after being reported by a minister from the

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girl will be put to work, but she, like some of the little girls in Gorilla, My Love, has shown throughout the story a capability to survive, despite her size. The emphasis in the story is on resistance rather than on despair, and it dramatizes Bambara’s belief in “the power of words, of utterances” to nourish one through trying situations.

thermore, the reader seldom can determine where he is in time or place. The tale from whence the title comes is perhaps most frustrating in this regard.” Mary Helen Washington extolled two of Bambara’s stories, “Medley” and “Witchbird,” as excellent dra¬ matizations of the contemporary black American woman; however, she criticized all of the other stor¬ ies for displaying too much political ideology: “The trouble with deliberately creating models is that they slip all too easily out of character (who they are) into being mouthpieces for the writer’s ideology (who the writer would like them to be). It’s not that politics does not belong in the realm of art, but that some of the models Bambara offers are too predict¬ able (e.g. Naomi in ‘The Apprentice’).” Bambara herself commented to an interview¬ er that she felt that the stories in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive were too long: “To my mind, the six-page story is the gem. If it takes more than six pages to say it, something is the matter. So I’m not too pleased with the new collection, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Most of these stories are too sprawling and hairy for my taste, although I’m very pleased, feel perfectly fine about them as pieces. But as stories they’re too damn long and dense.” In several interviews and in an essay (“What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow”), Bambara empha¬ sizes her preference for the short story as both a convenient tool for use in the classroom and in lecture engagements (she refers to them as “port¬ able”), and as an easier art form to produce than the novel. The brevity, and its “modest appeal for

The remaining five stories in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive focus on the relationships between AfroAmerican men and women (“Medley,” “A Tender Man,” “Witchbird”), the fear and complete confu¬ sion a young girl feels when she first begins her menstrual cycle (“A Girl’s Story”), and the loneli¬ ness a teenage daughter feels when she realizes that her father, now that he has remarried following his divorce from her mother, will not be coming to spend Christmas with her (“Christmas Eve at John¬ son Drugs and Goods”). One notices that while de¬ feat and despair are not the focus of these stories, there is less high-spirited humor than in Gorilla, My Love. The various neighborhoods described in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive do not offer the same sort of comfort or sense of belonging as in Gorilla, My Love. In “Broken Field Running,” for example, the char¬ acters live in housing projects which are ridden with black-on-black crime and walk along sidewalks with broken pavements and glass bottles. In “A Girl’s Story” we sense the wide emotional and physical distance among those living in a crowded apart¬ ment. Even those stories which focus on the person¬ al love between two individuals present a strained or exploitative situation. The passengers on the boat in “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive” are crowded next to one another, yet they are emotionally iso¬ lated from one another. Reviews of The Sea Birds Are Still Alive were mixed. Ruby Dee, the actress and social activist, highly praised the collection saying that Bambara “writes like a fine poet who makes every word count because there’s so much to say.” On the other hand, Robie Macauley, in reviewing the book for the New York Times, saw Bambara’s verbal dexterity as a flaw: “Some of the stories fail just because there is too much verbal energy, too much restless pursuit of random anecdote.” He did, however, have much praise for the title story and for “Witchbird” whose central character he assessed as “shrewd, cat-smart, and at the same time both sentimental and humane.” The reviewer for Choice felt the first two stories in the collection, “The Organizer’s Wife” and “The Apprentice,” did not fulfill their promise of good character development: “Instead, the stor¬ ies become tiresome with the excessive and heavyhanded effort to reproduce the black idiom. Fur¬

attention,” is what she finds most effective about the short story, but in Bambara’s own figurative style of explaining it, she says, “Temperamentally, I move toward the short story because I’m a sprinter rather than a long-distance runner.” Nevertheless in 1978 Bambara began working on her first novel. Prompted by what she saw as a split in the Afro-American community between the “spiritual, political, and psychic forces” during the 1970s, she began working on a story which would reveal these splits and propose a fusion which could help get the community back in touch with its own “healing powers.” The Salt Eaters (1980) grew out of this story and tries to specify the potential links or bridges not only between the various entities within the black community but also between the black community and other ethnic communities in the United States. To this end, the novel includes Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, NativeAmericans, and Americans of West Indian descent. Set in Claybourne, Georgia, during a spring carnival, The Salt Eaters focuses on Velma Henry, an

19

DLB 38

Toni Cade Bambara

Dust jacket for Bambara's 1980 novel, dedicated to her mother, “who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me”

heretofore indefatigable community organizer who is experiencing such a severe mental and emotional crisis that she has attempted suicide. She has been rushed to Southwest Community Infirmary where the staff combines traditional folk remedies with modern medical techniques as part of its standard method of treatment. In the opening scene, Velma Henry is perched on a stool facing Minnie Ransom, a faith healer, whose reputation for curing her pa¬ tients is impeccable. Velma and Minnie are in turn surrounded by a circle of twelve senior citizens known collectively as The Master’s Mind. Each member of the Mind represents a sign of the

the community to a point of reconciliation — a point at which they recognize and build on the items of commonality in their individual agendas. While the major cultural focus of the novel is Afro-American, the introduction of other ethnic groups under¬ scores Bambara’s conviction that Third World peo¬ ple should overlook artificial barriers, such as lan¬ guage, and strive to link with one another on the basis of a common cosmology and the fact that they are all victims of the same threats to human exis¬ tence. At various points in the novel, for example, these characters discuss the threat which the local nuclear power plant and chemical corporation pose to all of their lives and the need for all of them to join the antinuclear movement. Minnie Ransom asks Velma in the beginning of the novel: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?,” and she continues to ask this question throughout the story until Velma is able to respond. Minnie tries to tell Velma that in order to be well she must “. . . give it up, the pain, the hurt, the anger, and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full. Nature abhors a so-called

Zodiac, and their presence and continuous chant¬ ing and humming “in long meter” help create the proper atmosphere Minnie Ransom needs in order to effect her cure. Velma’s spiritual crisis symbolizes the chaos and confusion of the entire community, for she and her husband, Obie, have over the years been work¬ ing through the Academy of the Seven Arts (in effect, a community center in Claybourne) to bring all the various conservative and radical factions of

20

DLB 38

Toni Cade Bambara

vacuum, don’t you know?” In order to “give it up” Velma relives her life through flashbacks, recalling all the physical and emotional pains she has been through during her life with Obie as a community worker. The overriding question of The Salt Eaters is whether Velma Henry and her community desire to be healed, and if so, whether they can bear the weight of remaining well. Velma Henry’s narrative is interlaced with those of several other characters: Fred Holt, a bus driver nearing retirement; Julius Matthews, a mulatto medical doctor at the Infirmary; a former street hustler, pimp, and gambler now known as Doc Serge, who is also on staff at the Infirmary; Sophie Heywood, Velma’s godmother and a mem¬ ber of The Master’s Mind; and Velma’s husband, Obie. The Salt Eaters is a “fugue-like interweaving of voices” all of which express the same sense of malaise plaguing Velma. Bambara’s point is that a post-1960s spiritual renewal is possible for the 1980s and for the remainder of the “Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century.” She suggests that the characters can be healed by looking inward, center¬ ing themselves in their own cultural traditions, and then by moving forward in a joint coalition to save humanity. The implied question in all of the reviews of The Salt Eaters was whether or not a writer who had been such an artistic and commercial success with two collections of short stories could succeed at producing a novel. While most reviewers followed the basic story line, there was considerable criticism of the structure, the dialogue, and the general ex¬ pansiveness of The Salt Eaters. The numerous breaks in the story line required to accommodate the various narrative strains became the sticking point for most who reviewed the novel. As one critic said in First World, “ . . . the very act of reading The Salt Eaters through requires transformative agility.”

the New York Times Book Review he said that Bamba¬ ra’s narrator “shuttles backward and forward in time, plunges the reader into the middle of con¬ versations, thoughts, and dreams ... to accommo¬ date her complex vision” which he understood to be comparable to concentric circles and the concept of “sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion.” Toni Morrison, Bambara’s editor and person¬ al friend at Random House, explained that while she and all the sales persons at the company were very enthusiastic about The Salt Eaters, as both AfroAmerican and what they saw as experimental fic¬ tion, “we had a very difficult time getting that book into the stores.” First novels suffer, Morrison ex¬ plained, as do minority novelists. Nevertheless, The Salt Eaters and Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love were pub¬ lished in paperback editions in September 1981. Since relocating to Atlanta, Georgia, Bambara has worked in the medium of film. She has pro¬ duced numerous scripts for television and is cur¬ rently at work on a film script about a nineteenthcentury black woman named Mammy Pleasant, whom some believe provided the funds necessary to stage many of the slave rebellions. Three of Bam¬ bara’s short stories, “Gorilla, My Love,” “Medley,” and “Witchbird,” have been adapted to film. The hallmark of Toni Cade Bambara’s fiction is her keen ear and ability to transcribe the AfroAmerican dialect accurately. She writes as one who has had a long personal relationship with the black working class and has said that she is very much interested in continuing to write all of her fiction in this idiom. Writing and teaching others to write effectively has become a tool, a means of working within the community. Hence, her art and her pro¬ fession have merged.

Reviewing the novel for the Washington Post, Anne Tyler commented that “too many people swarm by too quickly. Too much is described too elliptically, as if cutting through to the heart of the matter might be considered crude, lacking in gracefulness, not sufficiently artistic.” Judith Wilson, in another re¬ view, noted that while the novel contained much food for thought on all of the sociopolitical issues raised by the characters, “Bambara’s facility for dia¬ logue sometimes leads her astray. Too many snatch¬ es of conversation, though clever and convincing, repeat previously stated themes or offer trivial observations that disrupt the narrative.” John Wideman was one of the few reviewers who sym¬ pathized with what Bambara was trying to do. In

Interviews: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Vi¬ sions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Bell Parker and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1979); Kalamu ya Salaam, “Searching for the Mother Tongue: An Interview,” First World, 2, no. 4 (1980): 48-52; Kay Bonetti, “The Organizer’s Wife: A Reading By and Interview with Toni Cade Bambara,” American Audio Prose Library, 1982; Deborah Jackson, “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara,” Drum Magazine (Spring 1982); Claudia Tate, “Toni Cade Bambara,” in Black

21

DLB 38

Toni Cade Bambara

ra’s Gorilla, My Love,” in Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (Jackson: University Press of Mis¬

Women Writers at Work, edited by Tate (New York: Continuum, 1983), pp. 12-38.

sissippi, 1984), pp. 215-232.

Reference: Nancy D. Hargrove, “Youth in Toni Cade Bamba-

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (7 October 1934-

)

Floyd Gaffney University of California, La Jolla

See also the Baraka entries in DLB 5, American Poets Since World War II; DLB 7, Twentieth-Century Amer¬ ican Dramatists; and DLB 16, The Beats: Literary Bohe¬ mians in Postwar America. BOOKS: Cuba Libre, as LeRoi Jones (New York: Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 1961); Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . . , as LeRoi Jones (New York: Totem Press/ Corinth Books, 1961); Blues People. . . . Negro Music in White America, as LeRoiJones (New York: Morrow, 1963; Lon¬ don: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965); Dutchman and The Slave, as LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1964; London: Faber & Faber, 1965) ; The Dead Lecturer, as LeRoi Jones (New York: Grove, 1964); The System of Dante's Hell, as LeRoiJones (New York: Grove, 1965; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966) ; Home: Social Essays, as LeRoiJones (New York: Mor¬ row, 1966; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968); Black Art, as LeRoi Jones (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1967) ; Slave Ship, as LeRoi Jones (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1967); The Baptism and The Toilet, as LeRoi Jones (New York: Grove, 1967); Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself! A One Act Play, as LeRoiJones (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1967); Tales, as LeRoiJones (New York: Grove, 1967; Lon¬ don: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969); Black Music, as LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow,

Amiri Baraka (® 1982 Layle Silbert)

1967; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969); Black Magic: Sabotage; Target Study; Black Art; Col¬ lected Poetry 1961-1967, as LeRoiJones (Indi¬ anapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969;

22

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

London: Calder & Boyars, 1971) — includes Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), and Madhearf, Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1969); A Black Value System (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1970); J-E-L-L-0 (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970); It’s Nation Time) Chicago: Third World Press, 1970); In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in black Style), by Baraka and Fundi (Billy Aber¬ nathy) (Indianapolis & New York: BobbsMerrill, 1970); Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971); Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1971); Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972); Spirit Reach (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1972); Crisis in Boston (Newark, N.J.: VitaWa Watu — Peo¬ ple’s War Publishing, 1974); Hard Facts (Newark, NJ.: People’s War Publishing, 1975); The Motion of History and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1978)—includes The Motion of His¬ tory, Slave Ship, and S-l; The Sidney Poet Heroical (Berkeley: Reed & Cannon, 1979); Selected Plays and Prose of Amin Baraka/LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1979); Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka!LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1979); Reggae or Not (New York: Contact Two, 1981); Daggers and Javelins, Essays, 1974-1979 (New York: Morrow, 1984); The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984).

Playhouse, 1 March 1965; A Black Mass, Newark, N.J., Proctor’s Theatre, May 1966; Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant, Newark, N.J., Spirit House, March 1967; Madheart, San Francisco, San Francisco State Col¬ lege, May 1967; Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself!, Newark, N.J., Spirit House, 1967; Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), Newark, N.J., Spirit House, November 1967; Home on the Range, New Jersey, Spirit House, March 1968; Resurrection in Life, Harlem, N.Y., 24 August 1969; Junkies Are Full of (SHH. . .) and Bloodrites, New York, New Federal Theatre, 21 November 1970; Columbia The Gem of the Ocean, Washington, D.C., Howard University Spirit House Movers, 1973; A Recent Killing, New York, New Federal Theatre, 26 January 1973; The New Ark’s a Moverin, Newark, N.J., Spirit House, February 1974; Sidnee Poet Heroical or If in Danger of Suit, The Kid Poet Heroical, New York, New Federal Theatre, 15 May 1975; S-l, New York, Afro-American Studios, 23 July 1976; The Motion of History, New York, New York City Theatre Ensemble, 27 May 1977; What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production1?, New York, Ladies Fort, May 1979; Dim’Crackr Party Convention, New York, Columbia University, July 1980; Boy & Tarzan Appear in a Clearing, New York, New Federal Theatre, October 1981; Money, New York, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, January 1982.

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: A Good Girl Is Hard To Find, Montclair, N.J., Sterington House, 28 August 1958; Dante, New York, Off Bowery Theatre, October 1961; produced again as The Eighth Ditch, New York, New Bowery Theatre, 1964; Dutchman, New York, Village South Theatre, 12 January 1964; New York, Cherry Lane Theatre, 24 March 1964; The Baptism, New York, Writers’ Stage Theatre, 1 May 1964; The Slave and The Toilet, New York, St. Marks Play¬ house, 16 December 1964; J-E-L-L-O, New York, Black Arts Repertory

SCREENPLAYS: Dutchman, Gene Persson Enter¬ prises, February 1967; Black Spring, Jihad Productions, Spring 1967; A Fable, based on Jones’s play The Slave, MFR Pro¬ ductions, 1971. OTHER: Four Young Lady Poets, edited by Jones (New York: Corinth Books, 1962); The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, edited with an introduction by Jones (New York: Corinth Books, 1963); David Henderson, Felix of the Silent Forest, introduc¬ tion by Jones (New York: Poets Press, 1967);

Theatre, 1965; Experimental Death Unit #1, New York, St. Marks

23

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

Jones transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C. His two-year tenure as an English major and philosophy minor at Howard, from 1952 to 1954, was formative in providing a philosophical and aesthetic foundation for his developing politi¬ cal and cultural ideology. Courses in philosophy, religion, German language, and literature, taught by such eminent scholars as E. Franklin Frazier and Sterling A. Brown, made this experience invalu¬ able. His dissatisfaction with prevailing attitudes among many Howard students toward developing black nationalist concepts influenced Jones’s deci¬ sion to join the U.S. Air Force. He spent three years in the service of his country as a weatherman/gun¬ ner on a B-36 and was stationed in Puerto Rico from 1954 to 1957. He revealed, in a 1954 interview with Judy Stone, that “the Howard thing let me under¬ stand the Negro sickness. They teach you how to pretend to be white. But the Air Force made me understand the white sickness. It shocked me into realizing what was happening to me and others.” Returning to New York City’s Lower East Side and bohemian community in 1957, Jones worked for the Record Changer Magazine and at the Phoenix bookstore. It was at the Record Changer in October 1958 that he met Hettie Roberta Cohen, of JewishAmerican ancestry, with whom he later founded and coedited the offbeat literary magazine Yugen, meaning “elegance, beauty and grace.” Eight issues, appearing irregularly between 1958 and 1962, in¬ cluded works by white New York Beat writers, such as Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara, Diane di Prima, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as black poet A. B. Spellman. During this period of his de¬ veloping career, Jones took graduate courses in comparative literature at Columbia University, and he was absorbed into the bohemian life-style of the predominantly white countercultural community in the East Village section of Manhattan. His early poetry was influenced in style and content by twentieth-century modern writers, such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot. But the countercultural voices of the anti¬ bourgeois Beat poets attracted Jones. He found in their work a commonality of strength, purpose, and style of poetic expression. For example, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson offered contemporary theories, such as open poetry, and typographical techniques which reflected their Black Mountain School; the New York group, especially Allen Gins¬ berg, was influential in providing Jones with useful social attitudes and political strategies that became a part of his later nationalist writings. During a 1960 radio interview with Davis Ossman, Jones revealed

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited with contributions by Jones and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1968); Larry Neal, Black Boogaloo (Notes On Black Libera¬ tion), preface by Jones (San Francisco: Journal of Black Poetry Press, 1969); African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, edited with an introduc¬ tion by Baraka (New York: Morrow, 1972); Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka (New York: Morrow, 1983). Contemporary Afro-American literature, cul¬ ture, and philosophy of the past two decades has been profoundly influenced by Amiri Baraka’s so¬ cial, political, and aesthetic principles. For those Americans who regard black arts as the aesthetic arm of the black revolutionary concept, no black writer has done more to articulate the relationship between art and politics. He succeeds W. E. B. DuBois and Richard Wright as one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and persistent social and moral critics of black experience in America. “Black awareness” is evident throughout his published body of literary works. Elements of racial conscious¬ ness reflect not only social and psychological truths; but, metaphysically, they encompass the totality of racial reality in Western thought. Perhaps more than any other artist in American theater and let¬ ters he has persisted in discovering and revealing the truth of being black. Almost single-handedly during the late 1950s, guided by a strong concept of cultural nationalism, Baraka demonstrated to black people the potential power of theater and literature as ideological weapons, providing alternative solu¬ tions to the sociopolitical, economic, and historical suppression imposed by the dominant culture. Baptized Everett LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka was born on 7 October 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, to Coyette LeRoy Jones, a postal worker, and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker and graduate of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His family back¬ ground is strong in religion and education, a descendency vividly reflected through the life of his grandfather Thomas Everett Russ, a man active in trade, politics, and church activities. At an early age Jones had great interest in religion and expressed aspirations of becoming a minister. Young LeRoi was a student at Newark’s Central Avenue School and the predominantly white Barringer High School from which he graduated in 1951. After spending one year on the Newark campus at Rut¬ gers University (1951) on a science scholarship,

24

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

that William Carlos Williams had taught him “how to write the way I speak rather than the way I think a poem ought to look like . . . how to get it in my own language.” In a 1959 poem entitled “How you Sound??” he analyzes his personal voice of experi¬ ence: “My poetry is whatever I think I am. ... I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives. What I see, as touched by (CAN HEAR). . . .” Beginning in the late 1950sjones experienced a series of artistic and political changes that reflect the painful and groping stages in his literary de¬ velopment. His writings stand as a testament to his radical social philosophy, new cultural values, and an uncompromising, innovative literature. In 1958 Jones married Hettie Cohen in a New York City Buddhist temple. Out of this union were born two daughters, Kellie Elizabeth and Lisa Vic¬ toria Chapman Jones. It was a productive period in which he wrote poems, essays, books, movies, and play reviews for magazines such as Naked Ear, Epos, Quick Silver, Odyssey, Jazz Review, Evergreen Review, and Kulcher. In 1959 he began his own publishing company, called Totem Press, specializing in liter¬ ary broadsides. It published his first collection of poems, Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . . (1961). The poems in Suicide Note were created be¬ tween 1957 and 1961. William C. Fischer notes that “the title suggests a posture common to much of the new poetry: that people are pressed to the brink of suicide by the internalization of popular myths and symbols that the poet must exorcise by a deter¬ mined artistic individualism.” Ironically, Jones was later to become disillusioned with the new, van¬ guard poetry, finding it an ineffective medium through which to assert his moral, ethical integrity. The full sense of “being black,” so vital to the poetry of Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks, is sel¬ dom present in Jones’s poetry of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The developing consciousness of being black appears effectively in his works only after he disassociates himself from the strong influence of the Beat poets. The slow and penetrating assess¬ ment of self by which he achieved a black identifica¬ tion is strongly expressed in the poetry of Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . ., The Dead Lecturer (1964), and Black Magic (1969). A Totem Press publication of Jones’s poem “January 1, 1959: Fidel Castro” was instrumental in his receiving an invitation from the New York chap¬ ter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to visit Cuba in 1960. This year was pivotal in the develop¬ ment of his political and social ideology. He visited

Cuba, in the company of other black American writers, to attend a celebration of Fidel Castro’s 1953 revolution which had resulted in the over¬ throw of President Fulgencio Batista. This visit marked Jones’s first direct contact with Marxism, but his personal conversion would not occur for another decade. In an article entitled Cuba Libre (published as a pamphlet in 1961), Jones recounts this journey and describes his encounter with Senora Betancourt, a Mexican delegate to the Cuban celebration and an active communist, who had referred to him as a “cowardly bourgeois indi¬ vidualist” when he attempted to defend his posture of political neutrality on artistic grounds. Under¬ standably, he was greatly disturbed by the attack and began to question the significance of third world politics in relation to his noncommittal stance. Cuba Libre later appears as the first of a series of sociopolitical essays included in Home: Social Essays (1966). Social and political change through force is the message that permeates these essays; and, perhaps, the strongest nationalist statement in this collection is “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation.” Black people are called upon to take control of their lives, defeat the enemy, and actively support the new revolution. Jones rejects his previous poetic work which he felt was creatively detached from the actuality of black experience. “If one has nothing TO SAY but, ‘I can feel,’ or ‘I am intelligent,’ there is really no need saying it. . . . Unless a man will tell you some¬ thing, pass on some piece of information about the world he moves in, there is little value in what he is saying.” The poem “Betancourt,” written in Cuba on 30 July 1960, delineates his rejection of the avant-garde poetry and indicates a new, though uncharted direction; (I mean I think I Know now what a poem is) A Turning away . . . from what it was had moved us . . . A madness.

At this juncture in his creative development Jones began coediting, with Diane di Prima, a small literary journal called the Floating Bear. In response to the alleged obscenity of selected materials found

25

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

foreshadow the explosive dramatizations soon to emerge in Jones’s nationalist plays of the 1960s. “A Poem For Willie Best,” a lengthy poem that is divided into eight sections, demonstrates the style

in the Floating Bear, the U.S. government charged Jones and brought him to trial. All charges were subsequently dismissed, but the publication never gained momentum and eventually ceased being dis¬ tributed. In another direction, Blues People. . . . Negro Music in White America (1963), Jones’s first book published by an established press (William Morrow & Co.), presents an enlightened history of black music in America. It is an important document of African and Afro-American culture and is possibly the best analysis of the American tradition of jazz in both its artistic and sociological content. The central theme of Blues People is echoed in the statement “the most expressive Negro music of any given period will be an exact reflection of what the Negro himself is. It will be a portrait of the Negro in America at that particular time.” The historical function of African polyrhythms, complex tonal and pitch quality, improvisational expression of voice and body, and ritual patterns of African communal par¬ ticipation are identified in Blues People. The survival of these African traits in America is analyzed rela¬ tive to their aesthetic, generic, and social forms. And the function of Afro-American music, its cultural growth and historical change, is identified in hollers, work songs, spirituals, blues, early jazz, swing, bebop, and rhythm and blues. Jones’s second volume of poems, The Dead Lecturer, appeared in 1964. The struggle to rid him¬ self of Western literary formalizing, so implicit in Blues People, is spelled out in the poems of The Dead Lecturer. The poet resolves much of his earlier inde¬ cisiveness and more fully articulates that which he believes black people must do to achieve style and form to express their collective black reality. He partially achieves this by discrediting the tradition of Western art and attacking the individualism of the lyric form, which he regards as useless in serv¬ ing any positive social function. His poem “A School of Prayer in Black Arts” (1966) calls black people to action:

and content that earned Jones a reputation as racist, revolutionary, and terrorist. Willie Best, a comic Hollywood character actor of the 1920s and 1930s, symbolizes to Jones all black men in America’s racially biased environment, which distorts, maligns, and destroys from “A point, the dimen¬ sionless line. The top/of a head, seen from Christ’s/ heaven, stripped of history/or desire.” Best repre¬ sents the black man as the minstrel — bizarre, fun¬ ny, grotesque. He is a victim who ultimately must recognize the full reality of his situation in order to change it. This new poetic voice is strongly echoed in the agitation-propaganda play scripts which gained Jones national press and audience attention. His new notoriety provided opportunities which had previously been closed; he was invited to give read¬ ings and lectures and to participate in panel discus¬ sions. In addition to poetry and writing courses he had been teaching at the New School for Social Research since 1961, he accepted teaching positions in poetry and drama at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. An examination of Jones’s plays illuminates his political and artistic evolution. His early plays were not written exclusively for black audiences; he seemingly felt compelled to warn whites of the se¬ rious meaning of black rebellion in America. The Toilet, The Slave, and Dutchman (all produced in 1964) reflect this consciousness. When his dramatic social parable Dutchman was produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City on 24 March 1964, a new epoch in the history of black theater and re-evaluation of the black playwright within the American theater began. This production earned Jones a coveted Obie Award in 1964 for the best off-Broadway play of the year. Dutchman breaks down many traditional bar¬ riers of mainstream theater which had consistently prevented the black playwright from recreating the full truth of his existence. In fact, it achieves some of the basic goals of the black arts movement articu¬ lated during the early 1960s. Dutchman dramatizes the psychological, political, and spiritual revolt of an oppressed people through the actions of its pro¬ tagonist, Clay, a young black man easily identified by his speech and manner of dress as middle class. As a passenger on a New York subway, Clay en¬ counters a white woman who offers him sexual favors which appeal to his healthy male ego and

O black people full of illusions and weird power. O my loves and my heart pumping black blood screaming through my thickened veins. Do not obey their laws which are against God believe brother, do not ever think any of that shit they say is true. . .

Several of the poems contained in The Dead Lecturer

26

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

groups across the country. Critic C. W. E. Bigsby considers it “a barely stageable homosexual fantasy in which the setting is a urinal and the theme the sexual nature of violence and the degradation of the white world.” Baraka would probably respond by insisting upon the political character of theater and the moral responsibility of the playwright to externalize sadistic and masochistic impulses in hu¬ man nature. The Toilet is an appropriate metaphor for the sort of urban life-style which has crippled the minds and smothered the sensitivities of many young peo¬ ple. Ray Foots is depicted as an intelligent and socially conscious young man. As a black gang lead¬ er, he finds himself in a dilemma between the de¬ mands of his cult members, who subscribe to a code of racial separation, and the pressures of his white friend, Karolis, who embraces an ideology of social integration. As spectators we witness the destruc¬ tion of a developing friendship between Ray and Karolis, who is characterized as a homosexual. The strict code of subcultural ethics forbids Ray from expressing the instinctual sensitivity of his personal¬ ity. He is forced into a position of assuming a role. His dilemma is that of the integrationist who must

DUTCHMAN

Dust jacket for the 1964 book publication of the plays that prompted one reviewer to call their author “an original and dangerous young playwright”

sensual appetite. However, a conflict arises when he refuses to accept her negative vision of the black man as a “hip field-nigga.” The antagonism be¬ tween these two people, the only characters in the play, is revealed through dramatic action which lays bare their subliminal racial bias and hatred for each other. This abrupt and chilling drama ends with the stabbing death of Clay at the hands of Lula. The sociopolitical implications of the play suggest that the survival of the American black male is predi¬ cated upon his ability to dissemble his covert thoughts and feelings. For once his true feelings are revealed, he renders himself vulnerable, and sym¬ bolically he becomes yet another black victim of integration. The Toilet follows a pattern of ritualistic vio¬ lence, as does Dutchman, and illustrates the power of theater advocated by Jones. It was originally pro¬ duced in 1964 in New York and, subsequently, has been widely performed among black theater

Robert Hooks and Jennifer West in the 1964 Cheny Lane Theatre production of Dutchman (photograph by Alix Jeffrey)

27

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Amiri Baraka

Negro audiences it is far from clear if this is indica¬ tive of their clear perception of his meaning or rather of their conscious participation in a public purgative rite.” This accusation was answered in¬ directly in a 1965 essay entitled “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in which Jones delineated his nationalist position and predicted the responses to it by critics such as Bigsby. Another theme of racial conflict is the subject of The Slave, first presented at the St. Marks Play¬ house in New York in 1964 and described by its author as a fable. It predicts the inevitability of racial warfare and signals the destruction of the white man. The action is set in the future and is limited to a philosophical discourse on racial injus¬ tice and intellectual dogma between Walker Ves¬ sels, the forty-year-old black racist and leader of the rebellion; Easley, the white liberal and university professor; and Walker’s white ex-wife, Grace, now married to Easley. Warning and vision activate this parable. It cautions each individual to re-examine his position in the inevitable revolutionary war be¬ tween blacks and whites. The background of war¬ fare between blacks and whites for control of the

eventually decide where his allegiance lies; Jones was apparently dramatizing the corrosive influence of integration as a social philosophy. He further suggests that Karolis, as a homosexual, is a degener¬ ate representative of white manhood who, there¬ fore, deserves to be ostracized, humiliated, and bru¬ talized. During the black movement of the turbulent 1960s, Jones’s cultural nationalism was attacked by the more militant faction of the Black Panther party as being chauvinistic and bourgeois. His religious, metaphysical brand of nationalism was in conflict with their more utilitarian notions. His form of radical theater has also caused sharp disagreement among critics in the Western world concerning its literary and aesthetic value. Perhaps the most per¬ sistent critic of Baraka’s ideology is C. W. E. Bigsby. In an overview of American drama from 1956 to 1966, Bigsby dismisses Baraka as an artistic prag¬ matist of the didactic school wherein “value and effectiveness tend to be associated in his mind, and emotional responses become confused with intellec¬ tual assent. Thus while his disturbing revenge fan¬ tasies provoke a predictably ecstatic response from

Artist Larry Rivers designed the set for the first production of The Toilet (photograph by Bert Andrews)

28

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Amiri Baraka

city serves as a counterpoint to the internal and external battle among these three characters. Sometimes Vessels functions as a mouthpiece for the author’s personal invectives and advocates a doctrine of violence. Both Vessels and Easley are equally ineffective as men of constructive action. They are victims of their own ignorance and bias. Walker readily admits that he and his followers, like their white counterparts, are “still enslaved by cer¬ tain ideas and forces they do not understand.” There is no significant question of morality at stake in this play; Jones merely suggests a reversal of the

During the 1960s Jones used theater as a weapon through which to attack and reject Western ideas and ethics which conflicted with his black nationalist concepts. He felt that it was easier for some people to respond to the illusion of nonviolence than to accept the reality of violence that lurks within each of us. His theater movement can truly be called a black renaissance because it strongly expresses the political, social, and psychological tenor of the work of a significant number of other black Americans. Dramatists such as Ed Bullins, Ronald Milner, Wil¬ liam Wellington Mackey, to name only a few, are disciples of Jones; but his most consistent support has come from new', black, young audiences who identify with the honesty of his creations and the validity of his ideas. ..Dutchman and The Toilet examine in detail what Jones thought of as the fallacy of w'hite liberal¬ ism and the vulnerability of black integration. Other plays which followed w?ere primarily de¬ signed to be interpreted by black actors for pre¬ dominantly black audiences through w'hich social, political, and aesthetic phenomena were examined

exploiter and the exploited. Vessels is unable to fathom his subjective existence in order to question the ultimate meaning of life in an absurd universe. The black revolutionary leader in The Slave seems to echo the author’s indifference toward any Western humanistic philosophy of love and forgive¬ ness: Is that what the Western ofay thought while he was ruling. . . rule somehow brought more love and beauty into the world? Oh, he might have thought that con¬ comitantly, while sipping a gin rickey, and scratching his ass . . . but that was not even the point. Not even on the Crusades. The point is that you had your chance, darling, now these other folks have theirs.

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Jones believes that existing racial conflicts cannot be solved through acts of redeeming love. Since man is basically violent, cruel, and sensuous, he responds instinctively when emotionally and physically threatened. In this sense, there appears to be no essential difference between the responses of black and white characters to moments of crisis. Tyranny and American culture are synony¬ mous for Jones because they represent suppression of black creativity and genius. Black victims in Jones’s plays often acquire freedom through tri¬ umph of knowledge, reflected through their ritual¬ ized suffering and revolt. He advocates theater that is positive in its expression of black pride, black identity, and black nationhood. These ideas were expanded upon by the late poet/essayist Larry Neal, who also believed: The Black Arts and the Black Power con¬ cept both relate broadly to the AfroAmerican’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship be¬ tween art and politics; the other with the art of politics.

EVERGREEN PLAYSCRtPT

Front cover for the 1967 book publication for two of Baraka’s earliest and angriest plays

29

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Amiri Baraka

scribes is “Hell in the head, the torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed sub¬ ject.” Quasi-autobiographical elements of Jones’s life are present, primarily, in a narrative of his emotional and spiritual life through which black audiences can experience the hell to which the au¬ thor refers. William C. Fischer describes this “psychic hell of invisibility” as a condition “im¬ pounded by white myopia and dangerously inter¬ nalized by the black victim. . . .” The dramatic theme of The System reflects this fictive hell which most blacks in America experience. Two events influenced the political and cul¬ tural change Jones experienced in 1965: the assas¬ sination of Malcolm X and the Los Angeles Watts riot. He completely abandoned the literary avantgarde to which he had contributed so much. Leav¬ ing his family and journeying uptown, Jones estab¬ lished the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem in 1965. Federal money distributed through the Haryou Act and the Office of Econom¬ ic Opportunity financed this operation. It was short-lived amid a controversy in which the New York police claimed that politically subversive activ¬ ities, supported by an arsenal of weapons, were

from a black perspective. The Baptism (produced in 1964) presents an absurd, pop-art assault on the hypocrisies of religion and sex manifested in Amer¬ ican life.J-E-L-L-0 (produced in 1965) and Home on the Range (produced in 1968), through parody and ridicule, examine the American public’s addiction to radio and television. The ancient art of roleplaying is embodied in Ratfester, the major charac¬ ter in J-E-L-L-O, an obvious parody of the old Jack Benny radio program. We discover that Ratfester, assuming one of his many disguises as Uncle Tom, is actually an underground nationalist. Indeed if there is a moral to this play it is that beneath the surface of docile servility often lurks a soul full of hate, cunning, and violence. The racial anger which was ignited in the early lyrical and self-searching poetry and exploited in his subsequent body of dramatic writings was more fully explored as Jones’s political consciousness underwent change. The novel The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) is indicative of Jones’s movement toward a fuller de¬ velopment of black character. Jones’s symbolic perceptions of hell are dramatized through a series of circles and ditches, inhabited by heathens, seduc¬ ers, heretics, and falsifiers. The hell that he de¬

Dust jacket for Barakas 1965 book, a quasi-autobiographical narrative structured according to the themes of Dante’s Inferno

30

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Amiri Baraka

being propagated by Jones and his followers. While living in Harlem during the mid-1960s Jones be¬ came influenced by the Yoruba and Islam religions. This was a contemplative phase of his development that had been foreshadowed by an earlier period, during the 1950s, in which Jones was a serious student of Buddhism and Zen as religious philoso¬ phies.

velopment Organization (1969-1975), which was greatly influenced by the Nation of Islam and orthodox Islam. He became chairman of the Con¬ gress of Afrikan People (1972-1975), a movement based on the Kawaida Cultural tenets articulated by Maulana Ron Karenga of the US Organization; and he helped to organize the Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union (1965). Other activities included a pub¬ lishing house, Jihad Productions; the New Ark Afri¬ kan Free School; and finally, a cooperative book and record store called Nyumba Ya Ujama. Jones’s marriage to Sylvia Robinson in August 1966 was an act which signaled his complete com¬ mitment to the black cause. His ultimate gesture of total acceptance of a revolutionary black conscious¬ ness would be reflected in 1968 through his name change to Ameer (later Amiri), “prince,” Baraka, “the blessed one.” He also assumed the title Imamu, “spiritual leader,” which he would drop in 1974. Sylvia Robinson would later assume the name Ami¬ na and become director of the Afrikan Free School. Five children were born of this union: Obalaji Malik Ali, Ras Jua A1 Aziz, Shani Isis Makeda, Amiri Seku Musa, and Ahi Mwenge. A full schedule of political and civic activities would not diminish Baraka’s artistically productive career. Changes in the style and form of his writing would be affected by his nationalist stance and expressed in several publica¬ tions, including a collection of Four Black Revolution¬ ary Plays (1969), many poems in Black Magic: Sabo¬

Only after his return to Newark in 1967 did he embrace the spiritual aspects of Islam in the ex¬ plication of contemporary conflicts. During this period as a nationalist, Jones recognized the poten¬ tial of Islam to bring people together, a concept best described by the playwright himself: The closeness of man with natural evidence of divinity is what art was about in the begin¬ ning— to reveal, to manifest Divinity that man can understand; to make marks, to make symbols, to make signs, to make sounds, to make images that reanimate everything. Morally, the force he damned as attempting to de¬ stroy the natural state of things at the individual, societal, and ultimately, cosmic levels of existence is identified as the “white man,” that small and elite class of individuals who control the material wealth and legal machinery in North America. Politically, he condemned capitalism as a viable form of evil created to permanently suppress the institutions and orthodoxies of black victims in particular and the proletariat masses in general. Artistically, he envisioned a theater that “looks to the sky with the victim’s eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies.” In fact from that time, the whole thrust of Jones’s work provides a pattern of moral responsibility through the conscious and continual use of victims as dra¬ matic metaphors. A similarity exists between his ritual theater of violence and the actual arena of cruelty. Spectators are shown black victims in physical, mental, and psychological states of oppression; and through these images the play¬ wright is able to evoke empathetic responses. A succession of affiliations reflects Jones’s sociopolitical and philosophical progression over the years. He was founding director of Black Arts Repertory Theatre, Harlem, New York, from 1964 to 1966 and founding director of Spirit House Mov¬ ers and Players (1966), which served as a base for local politics. Jones belonged to such groups as United Brothers, a cultural-nationalist and quasi¬ religious group (1967), and the Committee for Uni¬ fied Newark: Black Community Defense and De¬

tage; Target Study; Black Art; Collected Poetry 19611967 (1969), and In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in black Style) (1970). In the 1967 riot in

Newark, New Jersey, during which Jones was in¬ jured, he was arrested by the police and indicted for carrying a rifle unlawfully. He was sentenced to a two-and-one-half year prison term but was later acquitted on appeal. During this same year Jones aided in establishing a National Black Power con¬ ference in Newark which ultimately influenced the subsequent political changes in city government that allowed Kenneth Gibson to become Newark’s first black mayor. As a playwright Jones attempted to shock black spectators into recognizing the “sickness unto death” of the white man by exposing his public and private sins. This is the main theme of A Black Mass (produced in 1966), a mythical play that dramatizes the subjugation of blacks by “anti-spiritual forces.” As a social essay it suggests that individual action, without collective consent, jeopardizes the future of the black race, and that integration dehumanizes and demoralizes black identity. Jones accomplishes that which he ultimately proposes: to caution black

31

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Amiri Baraka

LeRoi Jones Four Black Revolutionary Plays

AM'O'f© «Y BAM ilc

LeRoi Jones

50672

Covers for Baraka’s 1969 book. In his introductory poem Baraka predicts “the cities of the continent will change hands I the power on the continent will change hands. ”

niques of sound, light, projection, and color as media of expression. Great Goodness of Life is prob¬ ably his most expressionistic play in which all these elements achieve cohesion. Subtitled A Coon Show, this play parodies the nineteenth-century American “black” minstrel show which was created by whites to satirize, exaggerate, and in most cases, to ridicule black life-styles through the use of stereotypes and exaggerated myth. Jones’s use of this minstrel form is structural; it allows him to explore the moral crisis confronting Court Royal, the black bourgeois pro¬ tagonist, who is on trial for “shielding a wanted criminal, a murderer.” The action, apparently tak¬ ing place in Royal’s mind, revolves around a single, static situation in which he is confronted with the harsh reality of his existence. The other characters are general types rather than individuals. They are described in stage directions that are calculated to establish stereotypical patterns of behavior. The au¬ thor’s intent is clear in that he sees no significant

people against the antihumanist nature of the white man who is bestial in his drive to control, oppress, and annihilate. After dramatizing the problem Jones offers a solution: death for the devil. Unlike most contemporary American play¬ wrights, Baraka does not merely pose questions and identify crises in our democratic society. The raison d’etre of his revolutionary plays, which reveal con¬ flicts between distinct and opposing systems of value and philosophy, is to offer advice, if not de¬ finitive solutions, which are calculated to activate change. Jones’s dramatic vision becomes progressively denser, more complex, and increasingly symbolic in his later works. Plays such as Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) (produced in 1967),Madheart (produced in 1967), and Police (produced in 1968) are dramat¬ ic configurations of his sociopolitical consciousness. Ancient forms of dance, mime, character, thought, language, and spectacle combine with modern tech¬

32

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Amiri Baraka

difference between white forces of suppression, whether it be the old Southern guard or urban America.

Paul Sartre, who has remarked that a feature “of white culture, as it has existed since the Greeks, is to make victims, and then, to top that, to convince or try to convince these victims that they are better off shackled on the white man’s notions of what the world is even though those notions justify their existence as victims.” Royal is the victim of such a dilemma; and at the close of the play he fulfills this concept so forcefully dramatized throughout the play. The stage lights change and Royal is discov¬ ered to be automated and dehumanized; he monot¬ onously repeats the phrase “my soul is as white as snow.” And the full tragedy of his existence is found in the closing dialogue: “Hey, Loise, have you seen my bowling bag? I’m going down to the alley for a minute.” Plays that were written, produced, or pub¬ lished by Jones prior to 1966 contain stylistic ele-

The antagonist of the play is the character Breck, a middle-aged black man whose dehumani¬ zation Jones symbolizes with a robot. Breck is a “house nigga,” a black who is mentally and spiritual¬ ly controlled by powerful white factions. He has become what he is out of fear or greed, and he is synonymous with everything that is base, cowardly, and contemptible. He lacks moral courage and is, therefore, a betrayer of trust. The irony implicit in the title, Great Goodness of Life, is mirrored in the triumph of evil over good, the oppressor over the oppressed. Jones prophesies the psychological and spiritual death of middleclass, black Americans. Elsewhere he has cited the French existentialist playwright-philosopher Jean-

Joan Bailey, Barbara Landers, and Marilyn Berry in a 1972 production of Madheart (photograph by Bill Doll)

33

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Amiri Baraka

movement, nonverbal sounds, and vocal intona¬ tion. The theme of Slave Ship is expressed in the 1967 essay “The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites 8c Bpower Mooments,” which was published in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971). During this period Jones was of the opinion that black art and black power were synonymous terms. He articulated the position that “no movement shaped or contained by Western culture will ever benefit Black people. Black power must be the actual force and beauty and wisdom of Blackness . . . reordering the world.” Slave Ship is, in part, an attempt to theatricalize these nationalist concepts. It is a historical pageant that is structured to drama¬ tize the shifting patterns of black life which resulted from the institution of slavery. Jones creates a series of fictive scenes which reflect the psychological, emotional, and spiritual changes black people ex¬ perienced from the life on the shores of Africa, through the middle passage, to the plantation, and, ultimately, to the contemporary life. The emotional intensity that is essential to communicating the horrors of the middle passage in Slave Ship is partially achieved through the com¬ bination of African drums, horrifying screams, foul smells, and tortured movement. The first section of script is rendered in total darkness. Explicit stage directions provide some indication of the play’s im¬ pact:

Poem posters * books

*

Rocking of the slave ship, in darkness, without sound. But smells. Then Sound. Now slowly, out of blackness with smells and drums staccato, the hideous screams. All the wom¬ en together scream, AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE.

ajlBuMs a FILMS

SEUO FOR. OUR FR.EE CATA.UOC • • A • • A • A A. A.ml

JIH ADhfl PRODUCTIONS box 663 Newark A 1971 advertisement for Baraka’s publishing house, which appeared in Black Theatre, number 5

The ritual of sound provides cohesion through which the slaves appeal to and abandon their Afri¬ can deities. Humming and the singing of spirituals occur as the pageant shifts to slavery in America. Victims are seen accepting or rejecting the degrada¬ tions of white masters. The contemporary phase of the ritual juxtaposes the voice of the integrationist preacher against that of the nationalist fighter, which is metaphorically extended into the “new voice of freedom” heard through the wailing of a saxophone. The final moments of the drama bring mem¬ bers of the cast together in a communion of singing “When We Gonna Rise” and dancing “a new-old dance, Boogalooyoruba line.” The celebration moves beyond the footlights into the theater, in¬ volving black spectators in this gesture of unified

ments and nonverbal features that later became more pronounced and are currently considered typical of his work. For example, Experimental Death Unit #1 (produced in 1965) and Junkies Are Full of (SHH. . .) (produced in 1970) function to literally “teach” black audiences about existing sociopolitical problems. A mixture of history and fantasy found in A Black Mass and Madheart are intensified in The Death of Malcolm X (1969). The wordless ritual play Resurrection in Life (produced in 1969) echoes, in dramatic method, many of the ritualistic segments and pantomimic gestures in Slave Ship (produced in 1967), which in turn bears many similarities to Home on the Range in its minimal use of words, extended

34

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Amiri Baraka

From

RAISE by IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA "Why Brother Malcolm said we must seek to internationalize our situation. Why we must go to the United Nations and charge genocide and call for intervention by the world body. It is stupid to seek justice from the unjust, from the murderer. As long as we are contained in the lie of a 'domestic issue' we will be dealt with by these crackers in ways that they see fit. Tanks rolling up our streets to preserve white rule, white economic exploitation, to keep the money flowing out of our cities, our cities where our children cannot even spell their own names, our cities with torn down shacks, full of vermin and disease, these cities that we now must take control of, in order to live. These tanks rolling, and these mad gunmen from the suburbs here to maintain white rule in yet an¬ other of their colonies. And they can sit in those shadowy suburbs and justify the roaches, and rats, the 13-story projects, the unemployment, the huge pro¬ portion of Black soldiers in Viet-Nam, Slavery, the misery of the rest of the world's peoples, then send: actuof murderers to maintain their diseased hold on the world."

LE KOI JONES

394-46222-X

Dust jacket for the collection of Baraka’s essays written in the years 1965-1970, a period during which he believed that black art and black power were synonymous

consciousness. The severed head of the preacher is thrown onto the dance floor, abruptly reminding audience members that the struggle continues in the community, the nation, and, ultimately, in the world. It is significant that Jones’s linguistic style, cre¬ ated in an attempt to reach the collective conscious¬ ness of black people, is grounded in idiomatic rather than poetic expression. Ethnic dialect is the most direct means of communicating to a black audience because its intricacies and complexities, different from the language of mainstream Amer¬ ican society, best reflects the way in which blacks see themselves, the world, and the universe. Very often the dialogue of his characters is calculated to shock and abuse white and middle-class black spectators in order for them to comprehend his messages at an emotional level. In the spirit of Hegel, he interprets language as the primary instrument of conscious¬ ness. For example, Home on the Range establishes a linguistic pattern that relies almost entirely upon intonation, timbre, and fragmentation; it is calcu¬

lated to destroy any logical semblance of conceptual language. This expressionist technique serves to disintegrate individual personality and destroy col¬ lective identity. Using parody in Home on the Range, Jones indi¬ cates the triviality of language and the senselessness of action. There is no dramatic conflict to engage an audience. What does exist, however, is confusion between idea and symbol as created by the play¬ wright. The black criminal who invades the white home turns to the audience near the play’s end and remarks: My country ’tis of thee. He shoots out over the audience. This is the scene of the Fall. The demise of the ungodly. He shoots once. Then quickly twice. This is the cool takeover in the French poodles; Razor Cuts, Filthy. Assas¬ sination of Gods. This is the end. He shoots. Run. Bastards. Run.

In its use of aggression Home on the Range symbol35

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka izes Jones’s advocacy of violent reaction and physi¬

antiwhite liberal, and anti-Western culture. But other poems express predictable, positive themes which identify black people as the saviors and survi¬

cal resistance to the racist practices of white Amer¬ icans. However, this advocacy of violence and resis¬ tance as tactics for social change over nonviolence and passivity is not always consistent. That is, the nature of his social and political commitments are documented through his adherence to elements which are both violent and nonviolent in concep¬ tion. As the critic Theodore R. Hudson observes, “perhaps the question of violence or non-violence is in Jones’s eyes a matter of tactical expediency or rhetoric rather than a matter of philosophy. Or, perhaps it is a matter of aggression as defense.” He sees the black man as victim and slave in America. Since art is considered by Jones to be a positive, active force in the lives of black people, it follows that it must function in a manner short of literal violence. Baraka’s evolution as a poet reflects a radical change in his works following Black Magic. Maulana Ron Karenga’s 1967 Kawaida doctrine greatly in¬ fluenced Baraka’s focus on spiritual matters and African origins. The poems in It’s Nation Time (1970) and In Our Terribleness articulate Karenga’s seven-point African value system, outlined by Bara¬ ka in Raise Race Rays Raze: unity, selfdetermination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Baraka sanctioned the organizational struc¬ ture of Kawaida as superior to the unstructured teachings of Malcolm X. These precepts are fully articulated in It’s Nation Time, a three-part treatise outlining the formula necessary to achieve black nationhood. The first section, “The Nation Is Like Ourselves,” is a plea for integrationists to embrace their blackness; the middle section, “Sermon for Our Maturity,” praises those individuals who have found meaning and being in a total black en¬ vironment; and the final section, entitled “It’s Na¬ tion Time,” urges black people to take their newly acquired black ideology of art and life and translate it into a positive active force. Baraka refers to Karenga as “the master teacher” in In Our Terribleness and prophesies the bright future of black Americans through adher¬ ence to his seven principles. The poetry in this volume is illustrated by forty-three photographs by Fundi (Billy Abernathy). They are not all repre¬ sentative of specific content in the poetry; rather, they comment on black life-styles in general. Poems included in this collection, such as “The Nation Is Like Ourselves,” “Prayer For Saving,” and “Sermon for Our Maturity” and others, are thematically negative; they are anti-middle-class black, anti-Jew,

vors of the future. Much of the rhetoric of the 1960s, which was expressive of the civil rights movement of that de¬ cade, became regressive and reactionary in the 1970s and in the 1980s has come to be regarded as merely “petit bourgeoisie” clatter by many disillu¬ sioned black nationalist writers. But Baraka has abandoned cultural nationalism as an important agent affecting change. Hard Facts (1975), a collec¬ tion of poetry written between 1973 and 1975, re¬ flects Baraka’s ideological shift. In the introduction to this volume, Baraka equates black cultural nationalism with reverse racism. He simply regards it as a means through which the “newly emerging Black bureaucratic elite” is served in their identi¬ fication of the white working class as the cause of black oppression, rather than leveling their accusa¬ tions against the system of monopoly capitalism. However, most of the poems in Hard Facts are directed to black people rather than to a multiracial, proletariat audience. Such poems as “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” “Class Struggle,” “Today,” and “A Poem For Deep Thinkers” probe the sensibilities and consciousness of black people and urge them to accept revolutionary Marxism as the way to change society. The closing lines of the volume’s last poem, “For the Revolutionary Outburst of Black People,” echo prophetically: “We are poised in gradual ascendence to that rising . . . the violent birth process of Socialism.” Embracing the cultural ideas of Marxism in the early 1970s was neither an abrupt nor unpre¬ dictable change in Baraka’s evolution. Primary changes had occurred in his personal identification, such as the discarding of religious trappings im¬ plied in the title Imamu. In an interview Baraka stated, “I dropped Imamu from my name, because when I went to Africa people would say this is Imamu Baraka and people wanted me to bless them because they thought I was a real priest.” He ex¬ panded his revolutionary consciousness to include all oppressed people in the world. He also dis¬ carded the system of Kawaida for the “science of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-tung thought.” Passing years and a myriad of experiences have convinced Baraka that the artist’s function is not to limit crea¬ tive talents to a single ethnic expression but to raise the collective consciousness of the working class. His sociopolitical posture is international in scope and socialistic in ideology. The concept of “US,” articulated by Karenga to reflect the tenets of black

36

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Amiri Baraka

$150

IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA. Master pool and playwright. Founder fJr>d Spiritual Leader of the Committee for Unified NewArK, co-convenor of the histone National Black Political' Convention, and new elected Chairman of the Congress of African People Innovative sage and guiding, light of the New Nationalism. Kawa/da. Whose pro¬ found words, of magnificence turn immediately into deeds of divmp significance.

Covers for one of Jihad’s 1972 publications, thirteen poems by Baraka

cultural nationalism, has been shifted by Baraka to emphasize the socialist aspects of “Ujamaa,” the black value system. His ideological change to social¬ ist concepts has apparently been prompted by his disillusionment with black politicians and middleclass politics. “Instead of black power, we have seen black faces animated by white desires. We have seen obscure blacks become influential negroes rise to prominence on the backs of the black community only to become apologists for racism and capital¬ ism.” With African Marxists, such as Leon Damas, Nicolas Guillen, and Sekou Toure, Baraka has joined the international struggle against capitalism and imperialism as a worker among the masses. As a champion of the proletariat, it was inevitable that the mantle of priesthood be replaced by the jacket of the artist-worker. Beginning with his poem “Afrika Revolution,” his postnationalist poetry and drama emphasize Marxist slogans to unite and overthrow all forms of oppression. When ques¬ tioned about his intentions as a Marxist, Baraka

responded, “fundamentally my intentions are simi¬ lar to those I held as a Nationalist. ... I see art as a weapon and a weapon of revolution. ... I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoreti¬ cally and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned. . . .” He found in Marxist ideology an organized political platform through which to acti¬ vate his revolutionary views and touch the lives of different people, not merely those who were black. In commenting on his creative work accom¬ plished during the past decade, Baraka believes “in all this work there is an opposition, an open strug¬ gle, waged against the enemies of humanity. And we have tried to move from petty bourgeois radical¬ ism, nationalism ... on through to finally grasping the science of revolution, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought.” Some examples of his recent thinking are found in anticapitalist, prosocialist plays, such as The New Ark’s a Moverin (produced in 1974), S-l (produced in 1976), The Motion of History (produced

37

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

masses. Protest against legislative support of this bill is dealt a blow when the Supreme Court upholds the bill’s legality. A campaign of repression is im¬ mediately activated, and “Red,” the black Commu¬ nist, is arrested because of his multinational agita¬ tion and black nationalist sympathies. Resistance stiffens and the Communist ranks swell as more workers join the party with the pas¬ sage of the S-l bill. Crisis after crisis occurs interna¬ tionally among ideological enemies and NATO members. This lengthy agitation-propaganda play closes on an optimistic note that the people will rise up and overthrow capitalism when pushed to the brink. The often-quoted slogan “the only solution is revolution” states the theme and summarizes the play’s action. S-l is Baraka’s pseudohistorical attempt to dramatize the complexity of oppressive and rebellious situations which most reflect the realities of the American nightmare, democratic inequity, and capitalistic decadence. Motion of History analyzes conflicts which are between black and white workers consciously orchestrated by a common enemy bent on exploita¬ tion. The action of the play is semihistorical in its focus upon elements of treachery and dishonesty which have activated rebellions in America. A Recent Killing is a lengthy discourse about the horrors of the military mind and the technology of war over which one has no control or compre¬ hension. This full-length script about the U.S. Air Force has never been fully produced. In 1971 it was showcased by Woodie King, the black producer, at New York City’s New Federal Theatre. To quote Baraka on his conceptualization of this creation, “it tried to sum up my own burdensome trek to this ‘intelligentsia,’ and at the same time raise the main issue that should concern us, the liberation of humanity from the rule of injustice. But it was essentially petty bourgeois radicalism, even rebel¬ lion, but not clear and firm enough as to revolu¬ tion.” Baraka was obviously dissatisfied with this piece as strong socialistic propaganda. The other little-discussed piece, Sidnee Poet Heroical, is topical, contemporary, and potentially libelous. Because of the possibility of being sued by a noted black celebrity, no publisher would touch it for a number of years. Again, Baraka is the best source to quote on its sociopolitical meaning: “the essence of it points to the death imperialism plans for everyone, even petit bourgeois celebrities living in Hollywood or the Bahamas (finally! or again, only higher up on the Hawg), far away from Watts or Harlem or Newark.” The inevitable revolution, which is the primary objective of these plays, is

Front cover for the play that, according to Baraka, “points to the death imperialism plans for everyone, even petit bourgeois celeb¬ rities living in Hollywood or the Bahamas (finally! or again, only higher up on the Hawg), far away from Watts or Harlem or Newark”

in 1977), and two plays which have been seldom mentioned, A Recent Killing (produced in 1973) and Sidnee Poet Heroical or If in Danger of Suit, The Kid Poet Heroical (produced in 1975).

The play S-l expounds Marxist rhetoric pri¬ marily through the actions of a revolutionary pro¬ letariat. Twenty-six brief scenes, which take place in New York City and Washington, D.C., establish the shifting sociopolitical environment of this play. Approximately fifty characters are indicated in the script, and they play a variety of roles easily identi¬ fied, yet slightly disguised, as such prominent black leaders as Justice Thurman Marsh, black Supreme Court Justice, and Barnston Rayfield, civil rights activist. American capitalism and the American Com¬ munist party are the central conflicting forces in the play. The action centers around the passage of the S-l bill which will control the civil liberties of the 38

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

Amina and Amiri Baraka during the auditions for the first production of The Motion of History (photograph by Bill May)

interpreted by Baraka as “socialist.” Baraka met with a group of artists and cultural workers in 1976 to form an organization around the rallying cry of “Artists Unite to Serve the Peo¬ ple!” It was from these beginnings that the AntiImperialist Cultural Union (AICU) was formed. Baraka and his followers envisioned creating a mass organization reflecting a body of multicultural and multiracial people. This was attempted through the creation of the Yenan Theatre Workshop (YTW) which functioned as the creative arm of the AICU. The name of the group was derived from Mao Tse-tung’s ideological treatise, Yenan Forum on Art and Literature. The group originated and per¬ formed such agitation-propaganda scripts as Images

Christian and Muslim religions as systems of super¬ stition. The lyric and dramatic strength present in his earlier works seems to be dissipated in his post¬ nationalist period. The propaganda of MarxismLeninism permeates all his current writing. His last collection of poems, Poetry for the Advanced, was writ¬ ten between 1976 and 1978 and published in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka!LeRoi Jones (1979). The Marxist theme which permeates the poetry is echoed through the introductory words of Lenin describing the worker-artist as a model of the “working-class” intelligentsia. Baraka, as workerartist, has shaped the poetry with an expressive style that is strong, yet void of political selfconsciousness. Happily, he has achieved success in finding a common denominator between Marxist aesthetic ideology, his intellectual acuity, and his emotional consciousness. Another change for Baraka is his interest in the spoken word. In a 1980 interview he said, “The whole wave of the future is definitely not literary in a sense of books and is tending toward the spoken and the visual arts.” Poems such as “Reprise,” “Afro-American Lyric,” and “All Reaction is Doomed” are written to be read aloud. A musical motif underlies the poetic structure of the majority

of Struggle and Revolution, What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (pro¬

duced in 1979), and dramatized twentieth-century revolutionary poetry. Baraka’s poetry and drama, created over the past several years, reflect a diminished lyricism, that highly personal statement so familiar in the earlier works. He tends to focus attention and energy on the critical realities of politics, rather than on the illusions of literature. Since he supports Marxist party-line rhetoric, it is no surprise that he regards

39

Amiri Baraka

DLB 38

symbolic of decadent white rule, and Boy attempts to bring him into the 1980s to learn “Woogie lan¬ guage” so that Tarzan can play the native game in order to maintain power. The third primary char¬ acter is Stan Stoop, a suave black man who survives as a hypocrite by fawning, fetching, and towing. He comically keeps an eye on the prime minister’s posi¬ tion and his Mercedes. Baraka is presently living in Newark, New Jersey, with his wife Amina and their five children. Since 1980 he has been teaching at the State Uni¬ versity of New York at Stony Brook as an Assistant Professor of African Studies and spending weekends incarcerated on Rikers Island for “resist¬ ing arrest” in a June 1979 domestic incident in Greenwich Village involving a dispute with his wife. In spite of this full schedule, Baraka has, nonethe¬ less, continued to write, publish, and be actively involved in causes to which he is committed. He refers to himself as “Fundamentally a poet and ... a political activist,” who regards the dramatic form of writing as a challenge. “I think it’s a much more

IN THE TRADITION (for Black Arthur Blythe) by Amiri Baraka

*

Front cover for Baraka’s 1980 poem about “the tradition of gorgeous africa blackness,” which “says to us fight, its all right,

ESSAYS

you beautiful/as night”

of these poems. For example, “Like, This Is What I Meant!” expounds upon Marxist doctrine through the songlike verse of the lyrics. It concludes with the understanding that poetry must be oriented toward building a Marxist-Communist party in America. Although Baraka has abandoned nationalist ideology to embrace communism, his continued allegiance to black culture is evident in his output of creative work. During the last few years Baraka has extended his use of technology in his plays to include video cassettes, film clips, and slides. These and other audiovisual techniques are utilized in his social sat¬ ire Boy & Tarzan Appear in a Clearing. This play premiered in October 1981 at the New Federal Theatre with music composed by Hugh Masakela. The character of Tarzan is an over-the-hill, middleaged man, running around wearing a loincloth. Boy, known to the servile black middle class as Mr. Boy, is a jive-talking hipster of the jungle. Tarzan is

'?? f ff ft f t

Dust jacket for Baraka’s 1984 collection of essays, in which he reasserts his commitment to revolutions, saying “Our art—litera¬ ture—must ... be as hot as fire and as relentless as history”

40

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

Dust jacket for Baraka’s autobiography of himself as LeRoi Jones

ambitious thing to try and put people on the stage and make believe it’s the real world or some real world, anyway.” One relationship that exists between the the¬ ater of Baraka and history is that through each of his works he attempts to draw a defined body of experi¬ ences not isolated to the past but meaningful to the present. The racial tenor of American society dur¬ ing these turbulent times does not suggest that the black and white masses will ever unite to accomplish anything. Yet as a political activist, social critic, and aesthetic philosopher, Baraka has earned the re¬ spect accorded him. He is recognized by many as a catalyst for a people engaged in a continuous strug¬ gle for freedom and equality.

African-American Studies, c. 1971.

Interviews: David Ossman, “LeRoi Jones,” in his The Sullen Art: Interviews With Modern American Poets (New York: Corinth Books, 1963), pp. 77-81; “Black Revolution and White Backlash,” National Guardian, 4 July 1964, pp. 5-9; “The Roots of Violence: Harlem Reconsidered,” Negro Digest, 13 (August 1964): 16-26; Saul Gottlieb, “They Think You’re An Airplane And You’re Really A Bird! An Interview With LeRoi Jones,” Evergreen Review, 12 (December 1967): 51-53, 96-97; Marvin X, Faruk, and Askia Muhammad Toure, “Islam and Black Art: An Interview With Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones),” Journal of Black Poetry, 1 (Fall 1968): 2-14; Michael Coleman, “What is Black Theatre? Michael Coleman Questions Imamu Amiri Baraka,” Black World, 20 (April 1971): 32-36; “Interview: Imamu Amiri Baraka,” Black Collegian, 3 (March-April 1973): 30-33;

Bibliography: Letitia Dace, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): A Checklist of Works By and About Him (London: Nether Press, 1971); Deborah Smith Fouch, Everett LeRoi Jones (Imamu Ameer Baraka), CAAS Bibliography No. 2, Atlanta University Center for African and

41

DLB 38

Amiri Baraka

ness,” College Language Association Journal, 17 (September 1973): 35-56; Kathryn Jackson, “LeRoiJones and the New Black Writers of the Sixties,” Freedomways, 9 (Sum¬ mer 1969): 232-248; Lee Jacobus, “Baraka and the Quest for Moral Order,” in Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Benston (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978); Stanley Kauffmann, “LeRoiJones and the Tradi¬ tion of the Fake,” Dissent, 12 (Spring 1965):

Kimberly W. Benston, “Amiri Baraka: An Inter¬ view,” Boundary 2, 6 (Winter 1978): 303-316. References: Houston A. Baker, Jr., “These Are The Songs If You Have the Music: An Essay on Imamu Baraka,” Minority Voices, 1 (Spring 1977): 118; Kimberly W. Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Benston, ed., Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978); Paul Blackburn, “The Grinding Down,” Kulchur, no. 10 (Summer 1963): 9-18; Leonard Bloom, “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love LeRoi Jones,"Realist, 59 (May 1965): 24; Lloyd W. Brown, “Comic-Strip Heroes, LeRoi Jones and the Myth of American Innocence,” Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (Lall 1969): 191204; Donald P. Costello, “LeRoiJones—I: Black Man as Victim,” Commonweal, 88 (28 June 1968): 436440; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); George Dennison, “The Demagogy of LeRoi Jones,” Commentary, 39 (Lebruary 1965): 6770; Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. 241-250; William C. Lischer, “The Pre-Revolutionary Writ¬ ings of Imamu Amiri Baraka,” Massachusetts Review, 14 (Spring 1973): 259-305; Donald B. Gibson, Five Black Writers: Essays On Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes, LeRoi Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 193-221; Theodore Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Bara¬ ka: The Literary Works (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973); Langston Hughes, “That Boy LeRoi,” New York Post, 15 January 1965, p. 38; Esther M. Jackson, “LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): Form and Progression of Conscious¬

207-212; David Llorens, “Ameer (LeRoi Jones) Baraka,” Ebony, 24 (August 1969): 75-78, 80-83; Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review, 12 (Summer 1968): 31-37; Neal, “Development of LeRoi Jones,” Liberator, 6 (January 1966): 4-5; 6 (February 1966): 1819; Michael Popkin, ed., Modern Black Writers (New York: Ungar, 1978), pp. 69-79; Daphne S. Reed, “LeRoiJones: High Priest of the Black Arts Movement,” Educational Theatre Journal, 23 (March 1970): 53-59; Jack Richardson, “Blues for Mr. Jones,” Esquire, 65 (June 1966): 106-108, 138; Werner Sobers, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest For A “Populist Modernism” (New York: Colum¬ bia University Press, 1978).

Papers: The Dr. Marvin Sukov Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Universi¬ ty, holds the largest collection of materials by and about Jones. The Lilly Library at Indiana Universi¬ ty holds a significant collection of correspondence to and from Baraka/Jones, as well as the manu¬ scripts for Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . . , The Eighth Ditch, The Baptism, and Dutch¬ man. The George Arents Research Library at Syra¬ cuse University has a large collection of materials, including the manuscript of The System of Dante’s Hell and four play manuscripts. The letters of Jones to Charles Olson are deposited at the Special Collec¬ tions Library of the University of Connecticut.

42

Ed Bullins (2 July 1935-

)

Leslie Sanders York University, Atkinson College

See also the Bullins entry in DLB 7, TwentiethCentury American Dramatists. BOOKS: How Do You Do: A Nonsense Drama (Mill Valley, Cal.: Illuminations Press, 1967); Five Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); re¬ vised as The Electronic Nigger and Other Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1970); The Duplex: A Black Love Fable in Four Movements (New York: Morrow, 1971); The Hungered One: Early Writings (New York: Mor¬ row, 1971); Four Dynamite Plays (New York: Morrow, 1972); The Theme Is Blackness: The Corner and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1973); The Reluctant Rapist (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: How Do You Do?, Dialect Determinism (or The Rally), and Clara's Ole Man, San Francisco, Firehouse Repertory Theatre, 5 August 1965; It Has No Choice and A Minor Scene, San Francisco, Black Arts/West Repertory Theatre /School, Spring 1966; The Game of Adam and Eve, by Bullins and Shirley Tarbell, Los Angeles, Playwrights’ Theatre, Spring 1966; The Theme Is Blackness, San Francisco, San Francisco State College, 1966; The Electronic Nigger and Others (includes Claras Ole Man and A Son, Come Home), New York, Amer¬ ican Place Theatre, 21 February 1968; Coin A Buffalo, New York, American Place Theatre, 6 June 1968; In the Wine Time, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, 10 December 1968; The Corner, Boston, Theatre Company of Boston,

Ed Bullins

Great Goodness of Life, Ron Milner’s The Warn¬ ing—A Theme for Linda), Brooklyn, Chelsea Theatre Center, 25 April 1969; A Ritual to Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, February 1970; The Pig Pen, New York, American PlaceTheatre, 20 May 1970; The Duplex, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, 22 May 1970; The Helper, New York, New Dramatists’ Workshop, 1 June 1970; The Man Who Dug Fish, Boston, Theatre Company of Boston, 1 June 1970; It Bees Dat Way, London, Ambiance Lunch-Hour

1968; We Righteous Bombers, as Kingsley B. Bass, Jr. (attrib¬ uted to Bullins) adapted from Albert Camus’s The Just Assassins, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, April 1969; The Gentleman Caller, in A Black Quartet (includes Ben Caldwell’s Prayer Meeting, Amiri Baraka’s

43

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

edited by Bullins, 12 (Summer 1968); Black Theatre, edited by Bullins, 6 issues (1969-

Theatre Club, 21 September 1970; Death List, New York, Theatre Black, 3 October 1970; Street Sounds, New York, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, 14 October 1970; The Devil Catchers, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, 27 November 1970; In New England Winter, New York, New Federal Theatre, 26 January 1971; The Fabulous Miss Marie, New York, New Lafayette Theatre, 9 March 1971; Short Bullins (includes How Do You Do?, A Minor Scene, Dialect Determinism, and It Has No Choice), New York, La Mama Experimental Club, 25 February 1972; Next Time, in City Stops, New York, Bronx Commu¬ nity College, 8 May 1972; Ya Gonna Let Me Take You Out Tonight, Baby?, New York, Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, 17 May 1972; The Psychic Pretenders (A Black Magic Show), New York, New Lafayette Theatre, 24 December 1972; House Party, a Soul Happening, music by Pat Patrick, lyrics by Bullins, New York, American Place Theatre, 29 October 1973; The Taking of Miss Janie, New York, New Federal Theatre, 4 May 1975; The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley, New York, New Federal Theatre, 4 February 1976; I Am Lucy Terry, New York, American Place Theatre, 11 February 1976; Home Boy, music by Aaron Bel, lyrics by Bullins, New York, Perry Street Theatre, 26 Septem¬ ber 1976; Jo Anne!, New York, Theatre of the Riverside Church, 7 October 1976; Storyville, book by Bullins, music and lyrics by Mil¬ dred Kayden, La Jolla, Mandeville Theatre, University of California, May 1977; DADDY!, New York, New Federal Theatre, 9 June 1977; Sepia Star, book by Bullins, music and lyrics by Kayden, New York, Stage 73,20 August 1977; Michael, New York, New Heritage Repertory Theatre, May 1978; C’mon Back to Heavenly House, Amherst, Mas¬ sachusetts, Amherst College Theatre, 1978; Leavings and How Do You Do?, New York, Syncopa¬ tion, August 1980; Steve and Velma, Boston, New African Company, August 1980. OTHER:

Drama Review,

Black Theatre

1972); Ya Gonna Let Me Take You Out Tonight, Baby?, in Black Arts, edited by Ahmad Alhamisi and Harun Wangala (Detroit: Black Arts Pub¬ lishing, 1969); New Plays from The Black Theatre, edited, with con¬ tributions, by Bullins (New York: Bantam, 1969); The Gentleman Caller, in A Black Quartet: Four New Black Plays, introduction by Clayton Riley (New York: New American Library, 1970); The New Lafayette Theatre Presents the Complete Plays and Aesthetic Comments by Six Black Playwrights, edited, with contributions, by Bullins (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974); The Taking of Miss Janie, in Famous American Plays of the 1970s, edited by Ted Hoffman (New York: Dell, 1981). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: Drama

“Malcolm: ’71, or Publishing Blackness,” Black Scholar, 6 (June 1975): 84-86. Nonfiction

“The Polished Protest: Aesthetics and the Black Writer,” Contact, 4 (July 1963): 67-68; “Ed Bullins,” in “The Task of the Negro Writer as Artist: A Symposium,” Negro Digest, 14 (April 1965): 54-83; “Theatre of Reality,” Negro Digest, 15 (April 1966): 60-66; “The So-Called Western Avant-Garde Drama,” Liberator, 7 (December 1967): 16-17; “Black Theatre Groups: A Directory,” Drama Re¬ view, 12 (Summer 1968): 172-175; “Black Theatre Notes,” Black Theatre, no. 1 (1968): 4-7; “Short Statements on Street Theatre,” Drama Re¬ view, 12 (Summer 1968): 93; “What Lies Ahead for Black Americans,” Negro Digest, 19 (November 1968): 8; “Next Time,” Spirit, The Magazine of Black Culture, 1 (Spring 1975). Poetry

Journal of Black Poetry (Spring 1969), includes con¬ tributions by Bullins; Negro Digest (December 1969), includes contribu¬ tions by Bullins; Black World (September 1970), includes contribu¬ tions by Bullins; Journal of Black Poetry (Fall-Winter, 1971), includes contributions by Bullins.

Issue,

44

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

Ed Bullins is one of the most gifted and cer¬ tainly the most prolific of the dramatists who emerged from the black arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He rapidly gained promi¬ nence both because of the power and elegance of his plays and because of his central role in the period’s most exciting and influential theater, the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem; its principles and practice shaped his own work, while he helped develop the theater’s distinctive quality and style. Nurtured by the black arts movement, Bullins understood its aims perfectly and while his plays occasionally criticize the movement’s rhetoric, they also embody and extend its precepts. Now the au¬ thor of well over fifty plays, at least twenty-nine of which are published and at least forty of which have been professionally produced, Bullins has become one of America’s most important playwrights. Bullins’s influence on black theater is not con¬ fined to his plays. His early success as a playwright led to several invitations to edit anthologies of the new black drama: Drama Review, Black Theatre Issue (Summer 1968), which became a manifesto for the black arts movement; Bantam’s New Plays from the Black Theatre (1969); and The New Lafayette Theatre Presents the Complete Plays and Aesthetic Com¬ ments by Six Black Playwrights (1974). All three antho¬ logies served to define the forms and sensibility of the new black theater. Bullins is reticent about his past and about his private life. Certain details are, however, well known. He was born in Philadelphia on 2 July 1935, to Bertha Marie Queen and Edward Bullins. Raised in north Philadelphia’s black ghetto, Bullins lived the street life which is the subject of so many of his plays. While Bullins frequently warns against turn¬ ing to his writing for factual details of his life and against identifying him with any single one of his characters, he has never denied the autobiographi¬ cal quality of his writing. Thus, the tenor, if not the exact substance, of his early years emerges from several of his plays, as well as from his short stories, collected in The Hungered One: Early Writings (1971), and from his novel The Reluctant Rapist (1973). Raised by his mother, who seems to have en¬ couraged his schooling as well as the reflective and critical aspects of his nature, the adolescent Bullins fought his way through school and neighborhood life. An episode which appears in The Reluctant Rap¬ ist, and to which Bullins often alludes, is his near¬ death as a result of being stabbed in a fight; Bullins considers his survival as having marked hirn with a

Bullins joined the navy. Of that period in his life, two details are known: he won the lightweight box¬ ing championship on one of the ships of the Mediterranean fleet and, feeling himself poorly equipped for the world, began reading. In 1955, he returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in night school. Bullins keeps the details of his next three years particularly well hidden, but The Reluctant Rapist suggests he was deeply enmeshed in what he himself has characterized as “life in the jungle.” He has commented that his 1958 departure for Los Angeles quite literally saved his life. When he left Philadelphia, he left behind an unsuccessful mar¬ riage and several children. In Los Angeles, Bullins enrolled at Los Angeles City College. While his formal participa¬ tion in classes seems to have been erratic, he read extensively and began writing short stories and poetry, briefly editing Citadel, a magazine he started for campus writers. In his fiction, Bullins records that in Los Angeles he first came into contact with a segment of black society he had rarely encountered : intellectuals committed to the study of black culture and history and engaged in various forms of cultur¬ al and political activity. In The Reluctant Rapist, the narrator, Steve Benson, reflects that with this group, he finally felt at home and that this feeling of belonging placed into perspective his earlier aliena¬ tion. In Philadelphia, the narrator recalls, he had encountered and rejected the black middle class, finding them pretentious and vacuous, but the street people he preferred became suspicious of him when he displayed insights gained from his reading and travels. His new friends in Los Angeles encouraged his intellectual curiosity and artistic pursuits. Bullins often says that he began writing be¬ cause it was the only thing he could do well and that he began writing plays because they came most easily. A disingenuous self-portrait perhaps, but the voice that emerges from Bullins’s autobiographical fiction bespeaks probing, detached, and penetrat¬ ing intelligence, one not adequately challenged by the pragmatic and unreflective test of wits that his street life had demanded. Bullins continues to char¬ acterize himself as a “street nigger” and to value, even on occasion to romanticize, the fundamental concreteness of street life. There is much of the aggression of the “street nigger” in his writing as well; while he has spoken of his plays as vehicles for starting discussions with his audiences, they are more likely to provoke fights—what he has called a “play in the real world” — from which, as author, he can remove himself.

task and a destiny. In 1952, shortly after quitting high school,

45

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

type. However, less extreme but clearly absurdist treatments of human situations frequently punctu¬ ate his later work; for example, The Electronic Nigger (1968), in which a writing class devolves into a cacophony of crowlike cawing; The Pig Pen (1970), in which a policeman dressed as a pig drifts across the stage; Dialect Determinism (1965), in which Mal¬ colm X’s ghost makes a startling appearance. Dialect Determinism is a pointed satire leveled at those who indulge in empty political rhetoric. It depicts a rally during which the “leader,” Boss Brother, whips his audience into a frenzy, claiming to be a series of messiahs and glorying in the kind of illogic to which rhetoric without substance easily drifts. When the ghost of Malcolm X rises to con¬ front him, it is brutally attacked and ejected from the meeting, but immediately afterwards, the crowd, requiring a martyr, turns on Boss Brother with equal ferocity. Dialect Determinism signals what will become a Bullins theme: his vehement antipathy to any rheto¬ ric, particularly political rhetoric, that becomes a self-indulgent substitute for action and conceals an unwillingness to effect meaningful personal or so¬ cial change. With this play, Bullins first exhibits his willingness to take on those figures within the black movement who exploit or use its rhetoric thought¬ lessly. Among the black playwrights of the move¬ ment, a movement whose shrill rhetoric he himself employed on occasion, Bullins stands alone as a critic of its excesses. That this aspect of his work received so little attention is a tribute both to his canniness and to the movement’s essential health and resilience. Clara’s Ole Man, the first of Bullins’s plays writ¬ ten in a realistic mode and the first depicting the street people and tenement dwellers who became the subject of so many of his later plays still remains one of his finest. The play depicts a family consist¬ ing of three women: Big Girl, large and of “indeter¬ minate age,” is loud, aggressive and quick-tongued; Clara, eighteen, attractive, insecure and selfdeprecating, seems lonely and intimidated by Big Girl; Baby Girl, Big Girl’s retarded sister, is an arrested, inarticulate version of Clara. Having taken a day off work, Big Girl sits at her kitchen table drinking wine, needling Clara, and pouring out their life stories to Jack, a young man who has come to call on Clara. When they are joined by neighborhood toughs escaping the police, the in¬ teraction between Jack and the others acquires an increasingly aggressive and dangerous edge. The denouement comes quickly: when Jack reveals he has come because Clara indicated her “ole man”

Not until Bullins went to San Francisco in 1964, where he enrolled in the creative writing program at San Francisco State College (now Uni¬ versity), did he begin writing plays. His first, a short piece appropriately entitled How Do You Do? (1965), reflects his deep interest in absurdist literature, par¬ ticularly the work of Franz Kafka, Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. In How Do You Do?, Doris and Roger, both preten¬ tious and aspiring to whiteness, speak at each other in rhythms clearly reminiscent of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, while Paul, the down-and-out park bench onlooker, who calls himself an “image-maker,” comments critically on their self-betrayal in tones themselves not entirely free from cliche. Along with How Do You Do?, Bullins wrote two more plays in rapid succession, planning them as an evening’s bill: Dialect Determinism (or The Rally) and Clara’s Ole Man (both 1965). Each of these early plays foreshadows a direction his later work will take. The overt and self-conscious absurdist aspects of How Do You Do? rarely are central to other Bullins’s plays; The Gen¬ tleman Caller (1969) is his only other play of this

Front cover for Bullins’s first play, written while he was studying creative writing at San Francisco State College

46

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

would be at work, he learns Clara’s ole man is Big Girl and, at Big Girl’s command, the neighborhood toughs brutally punish Jack for his ignorance. In Clara’s Ole Man, Bullins’s greatest work is foreshadowed. Its characters, like those in many of his later plays, emerge from brutal life experiences with tenacity and grace. While their language is

ricide it involved, left Bullins bitter. Again he was at loose ends, until a young black director, Robert Macbeth, who had read some of Bullins’s plays, invited him to join the newly established New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Bullins agreed, and in 1967 he left California for New York. Robert Macbeth had been struggling since the early 1960s to establish a community-based theater in Harlem. In 1967, he finally gathered together a group of actors and actresses with whom he had been working over the years and formed the New Lafayette Theatre. Its first production, Ron Mil¬ ner’s Who’s Got His Own, opened 13 October 1967 in the company’s original headquarters at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue; its second — and also successful production, Athol Lugard’s Blood Knot, opened a month later. However, in January 1968, fire destroyed the theater and the New Lafayette’s third production was mounted downtown at the American Place Theatre. It consisted of three plays by Ed Bullins.

often crude, it eloquently expresses their pain and anger, as well as the humor that sustains them. Until he becomes drunk, Jack, the outsider originally from the neighborhood, speaks more formally than the others. His educated vocabulary and inflection are ridiculed by the others as the mark of his igno¬ rance as well as of his innocence. Clara, the other innocent , has not yet developed Big Girl’s crudity or her defenses; she, like many later Bullins women, yearns for a gentler life, for love and security. Baby Girl is emblematic of the deformity that threatens those who lack the inner strength to endure unmiti¬ gated hardship. But none of the characters invites pity, and it is clear that the home Big Girl has established for Clara and Baby Girl has saved their lives. Bullins regards his people unflinchingly, re¬ vealing their deformities, and their beauty, as well as their strength. Unable to find anyone in San Francisco willing to produce these early plays, Bullins formed several companies and produced them himself in lofts, bars, and coffeehouses. Although the themes of these plays are clear, he felt himself without artistic bearings until he saw a 1965 San Francisco produc¬ tion of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Toilet. Bullins sensed immediately that Baraka’s artistic purpose validated his own. The Baraka production galvanized him and a substantial group of other political revolutionaries and writers (among them Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Mar¬ vin X, Sonia Sanchez, and Baraka himself) into setting up Black House, an organization dedicated to both political and cultural activity. The Black Panther party used this group as its San Francisco base; Bullins served briefly as its Minister of Cul¬ ture. However, Black House dissolved over severe disagreements between those activists who saw art only as a weapon and supported coalition with radical whites to gain political ends and the artists who defined their task as cultural nationalism and eschewed any coalition with whites. Bullins sided with the second group, writing later in The Theme Is Blackness (1973) that the artists were “the single body able to maintain a community institution . . . dedicated to positive community education and cultural-political organization.” The project’s de¬ mise, particularly what he characterized as the frat¬

The production was called The Electronic Nig¬ ger and Others', later in the run the title was changed to the less audience-inhibiting Three Plays by Ed Bul¬ lins. Well received, the plays introduced New York audiences to the full range of Bullins’s talent. In the opening piece, The Electronic Nigger, a pretentious older black student reduces a creative writing class to mayhem, interrupting both its young black in¬ structor and his fellow students with streams of jargon. The play’s point is the danger of rhetoric of any kind. In particular Bullins lampoons both the pseudo-objective rhetoric of the social sciences and the conventional, unexamined rhetoric of the humanities. Neither deal adequately with the prob¬ lems posed by being black in a predominantly white culture. The second play, A Son, Come Home, shows Bullins at his most lyrical. It is a gentle and painful conversation between a fanatically religious mother and her estranged son; the characters are shadowed by dancers who express what mother and son are unable to say. Several times they approach a recon¬ ciliation; each time the characters retreat into their own suffering and loneliness. The third play was Clara’s Ole Man. The plays won Bullins the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award for 1968. Bullins remained central to the New Lafayette Company from the time he arrived in New York until its demise for lack of funds in late 1972. He served first as its playwright-in-residence and later as associate director. When the company moved into its new theater on 137th Street, it opened with Bullins’s first full-length play, In the Wine Time (pro¬ duced in 1968), and later premiered Coin A Buffalo

47

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

/i scene from the first New York production of Clara’s Ole Man (photograph by Martha Holmes)

the play to Bullins, who denies the play is his. Char¬ acteristically, Bullins absented himself from the

(produced in 1968), The Duplex (produced in 1970), and The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced in 1971). Bullins also lists himself as author of the company’s more communally developed rituals. The Devil Catchers (produced in 1970) and The Psychic Pretend¬ ers (produced in 1972). In the spring of 1969, they offered their most controversial play, credited to Kingsley Bass, Jr. (“a twenty-four-year-old Black¬ man killed by Detroit police during the uprising of 1967”), We Righteous Bombers. A reworking of Camus’s Les Justes, the play questions whether any form of revolutionary activity that results in blacks killing blacks accomplishes more than to further the wishes of the oppressor. We Righteous Bombers pro¬ voked bitter attack; it was the subject of a heated symposium held at the theater on 11 May 1969, the transcription of which was published in Black Theatre, issue number 4, the magazine Bullins edited for the New Lafayette. The problem was whether black writers should challenge revolution¬ ary activity without providing alternative directions and resolutions within their work. Notable among those who defended the play were Amiri Baraka and the critic and poet Larry Neal, while those attacking the play were represented by Askia Muhammad Toure and Ernie Mkalimoto. Marvin X explicitly and other speakers implicitly attributed

symposium. While the New Lafayette provided Bullins with brilliant productions of his work, it was not unique, for many theaters in New York eagerly sought the opportunity to produce his plays. Be¬ tween 1968 and 1980, at least twenty-five of Bullins’s plays were produced in New York, fifteen before 1973. Ten were at or produced by the New Lafayette; the rest were at an impressive array of theaters all over the city, including: La Mama Ex¬ perimental Theatre Club, the New Federal Theatre of Henry Street Settlement House, the Public Theatre, American Place Theatre, the Workshop of the Players Art, and Lincoln Center. In 1971, Bul¬ lins received a Black Arts Alliance Award for In New England Winter and an Obie for The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced in 1971); in 1975, The Taking of Miss Janie brought him the New York Drama Crit¬ ics’ Circle Award. Reviewers gave his work careful and often perceptive attention, particularly Mel Gussow and Clive Barnes of the New York Times and Edith Oliver of the New Yorker. Bullins also received institutional support from various sources: an American Place Theatre grant (1967); two Gug¬ genheim fellowships (1971, 1976); three Rockefel-

48

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Ed Bullins

ler grants (1968, 1970, 1972); a Creative Artists’ Public Service Program Award (1973), and an hon¬ orary Doctor of Letters from Columbia College in Chicago (1976). Perhaps the best known, or, at least, most notorious production of a Bullins play outside of the New Lafayette is the Lincoln Center’s 1972 pro¬ duction of The Duplex (originally produced 22 May 1970 at the New Lafayette Theatre). Bullins dis¬ owned the production, claiming the Center’s direc¬ tor, Jules Irving, had turned the play into a “coon show.” Both Irving and the show’s black director, Gilbert Moses, who later directed The Taking of Miss Janie (produced in 1975), denied the allegations, and Bullins was accused of indulging his penchant for creating a play in the real world. Bullins was never specific about what so disturbed him in the production, but it is conceivable that misplaced emphasis on any of a number of themes would seriously distort the play’s intent. The play poses a special difficulty because it demands a delicate bal¬ ance between the boisterous and often comic crudi¬ ty with which most of its characters’ love affairs are conducted, the horrifying sadomasochism of the main female character Velma’s relationship with her husband, and the painful and tentative tender¬ ness of her developing love affair with the central male character, Steve Benson. Bullins, accustomed to working in the tight-knit and single-minded atmosphere of the New Lafayette, and with a differ¬ ent audience in mind, had not attended rehearsals. While his rhetoric and the public forum he chose for his battle raised hackles, he may truly have been horrified at how so intimate and vulnerable a story appeared under a harsher spotlight than the one he had envisioned. He may not, as he was charged, simply have been seeking publicity. With the New Lafayette Bullins developed his style and purpose. The company’s dedication to serving its community, to presenting a theater vi¬ able to those living outside its doors, created the perfect setting for Bullins’s plays, which themselves suggest a very particular audience. Robert Macbeth defined the New Lafayette’s sense of audience: “there is no audience, and no actors . . . the separa¬ tion is very slim, all the people who come to ‘the Room’ come to be in the ‘play’ because their being there is part of the play.” The intimacy implied by Macbeth’s definition characterizes much of Bul¬ lins’s work of this period, which requires, even assumes, an audience willing not only to recognize themselves in the activities of the play, but to be challenged by and to respond to them. While some of Bullins’s plays also invite response from white

49

members of an audience, most of them concern themselves with defining the world of and for a black audience. As several reviews of New Lafayette productions noted, white members of an audience felt themselves interlopers, not because his plays attack whites but because they ignore them. Many of Bullins’s plays not only invite dia¬ logue with the actors and identification with their characters, but they challenge the audience to use the occasion of the play to extend its own sense of community to the world beyond the theater. And further, many of his plays build their themes by alluding to and introducing characters from other plays that have gone before them. Since the early 1970s, Bullins has been engaged in writing what he calls his Twentieth-Century Cycle, a proposed series of twenty plays (six of which have been writ¬ ten) whose purpose Bullins says is “to recreate real¬ ity in a new atmosphere—[give] ... a fresh illu¬ mination, a fresh view of things . . . extend your vision. ... It will just tell the stories it tells, in the hope that the stories will touch the audience in an individual way, with some fresh insight into their own lives—help them to consider the weight of their experiences.” For Bullins, the test of a play is, to a large measure, what it provokes in his audi¬ ences. With the demise of the New Lafayette Theatre came a gradual shift in his writing, in part due, perhaps, to his sense of having a wider audi¬ ence, not only one racially mixed but a black audi¬ ence varied in background and interests. Not all of Bullins’s plays were part of the Cycle and only two Cycle plays, Home Boy (produced in 1976) and DAD¬ DY! (produced in 1977), have appeared in the last eight years. After the dissolution of the New Lafayette, Bullins remained in New York, living in the Bronx with his third wife, Trixie Warner Bullins, and their children. In 1973, he was playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre, and from 1975 to 1983 he was on the staff at the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theatre Writers’ Unit, where he coordinated the play writing work¬ shops and served as press assistant. Bullins lectured and taught at various colleges and universities around the country. He also wrote two children’s plays, I Am Lucy Terry (produced in 1976) and The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley (produced in 1976), and the books for two musicals, Sepia Star (produced in 1977) and Storyville (produced in 1977), the music for which was composed by Mildred Kayden. He even ventured onto the stage as an actor. Since 1983, he has been living in the San Francisco area, teaching and writing.

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

logues through which the mosaic of the black com¬

Bullins writes in many styles and has directed his attention to various issues. However, several characteristics are constant in his work, whether his plays are deliberately didactic, agitprop, or what he calls plays of black experience. Bullins is always a moralist; he probes and questions cliches, accepted values, stereotypes, and romantic illusions to test what is of value in them. His basic concern is with black people, their values, aspirations, dreams. Constant in his work is a questioning of the mean¬ ing of the idea of a people, a community, and its various definitions: the ideological definitions generated by the black nationalist movement of the 1960s and early 1970s; the traditional definitions of family and kinship networks; street definitions evolved from the partnerships and loyalties of neighborhood and street life; the looser definition suggested simply by the phrase with which he often concludes his list of characters: “the people in this play are Black.” A wanderer himself, Bullins sets his plays all over the United States: Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, and the eastern shore of Maryland. However, geography in Bullins’s plays is superceded by a more important location, the black nation which exists wherever black people are. They, and Bullins, create an imaginative and sub¬ jective sense of place through their music, lan¬ guage, and perceptions of the world. They trans¬ form geographic place into their own territory. Bul¬ lins frequently asserts he does not write realistic plays, regardless of the style in which they are writ¬ ten. For example, his characters frequently drift freely between time frames, or even step out of the play to address the audience; Bullins knows it is on such imaginative realities that not only a culture but also a political and social identity can be built. Intrinsic to the imaginative world of a Bullins play is black music: it is always either coming from a radio or from an actual combo which sits on the stage and even takes part in the action. Jazz, blues (for which he often writes the lyrics), and gospel music become the context for his characters’ activi¬ ties, providing another dimension to their meaning. Language, too, provides more than realistic detail; it defines the sensibility of his people. In Bullins’s plays, black street argot becomes lyrical without losing any of its energy and edge. Moreover, his plays are often punctuated by long monologues through which characters define themselves with a precision made possible by Bullins’s perfect ear. In fact, two of his plays, Street Sounds (produced in 1970) and its spin-off House Party, a Soul Happen¬ ing (produced in 1973), consist entirely of mono¬

munity emerges. Early in his career Bullins was criticized for concentrating on black street characters. He replied that they held no romantic fascination for him but were simply the people he knew best. He now deals with characters from all walks of life, and yet many of his best plays are those about street life because within that setting Bullins finds some of his most basic questions articulated. Principally, Bullins questions the possibility of freedom, and he ex¬ plores it by examining situations in which charac¬ ters are bound by illusory chains of their own mak¬ ing, in a position to free themselves if they can become conscious of their illusions. For Bullins, the great dangers are two: illusion and the betrayal of community (the latter possible only because of peo¬ ple’s tendency to cling to the former). “The world prepares a black man for a single skill: treachery to his brothers,” Bullins writes in The Reluctant Rapist. It is of this treachery, this internecine warfare, that Bullins is most critical. Conversely, the measure of his characters is their capacity for loyalty to others, and their downfall often occurs because their loyal¬ ty is misplaced. Such issues emerge with radical concreteness in the world of the streets; moreover, the thwarted ambitions of the dispossessed—ambitions material in their form, but so far from realization that they take on spiritual significance—come to signify the restless yearnings of all Bullins’s characters, whether they are poets and musicians, pimps and petty criminals, whores, or wives, and girl friends who seek only love and security from men unwilling or unable to provide either. Whether his characters vent their frustrations through wine, drugs, roman¬ tic illusions, or violence, they find neither satisfac¬ tion nor safety. In Bullins’s plays the sense of dan¬ ger, of impending violence that comes from within the characters and that often erupts, but never cleanses the air, defines the existential condition of his people. The converse of such violence is community. Parties frequently occur in Bullins’s plays; in fact, the basis for several plays is a party where Bullins studies the possibilities of people coming together and how they themselves destroy the potential fruit¬ fulness of their gathering. Bullins never suggests how human aspiration can be made concrete, how ambitions can be realized, in part because he ques¬ tions whether yet in America anyone, black or white, has managed to construct a society in which human longings are fulfilled. This failure to answer the question is not simply a manifestation of his

50

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Ed Bullins

undeniable romanticism; it also arises from his in¬ sistence on asking the even harder questions: have the dreams of black Americans yet been articulated concretely? How can the existing values of the com¬ munity be sustained, either in the face of economic hardship or, in his later plays, as members of their community move into a more materially comfort¬ able way of life? Never an ideologue, and certainly not intent on challenging the social and economic forms American life has taken, Bullins still queries how its realities, as perceived by black Americans, can sustain crucial human desires and the needs for love, security, and freedom.

in 1970) forces a black audience to rethink its plea¬ sure over dramatic attacks on whites; and Death List (produced in 1970), perhaps his most brilliant play in this mode, is a chilling and futile confrontation between a black revolutionary killer and his woman. She begs him to reconsider his planned assassina¬ tion of sixty-two black leaders who signed an adver¬ tisement in the New York Times supporting the state of Israel. While the gunman’s cold litany condemn¬ ing their actions and their lives so shocked audi¬ ences that many never got beyond this aspect of the play, the woman’s accusation—“Are you a poem of death my Blackman? . . . Are you not the true enemy of Black People? . . . Are you not the white-created demon that we were all warned about?”—counterpoints the play’s awesome central image. Death List does not denigrate the revolution¬ ary play; rather, perhaps more powerfully than any other play of its type, it creates both the image and its antithesis, forcing its audience to absorb and move beyond the emotions such plays typically pro¬ voke. As Bullins points out in It Bees Dat Way—in relation to most whites, and in many of his plays in relation to blacks, none of the violence depicted actually affects those responsible for the vicious racism that characterizes American life. Bullins’s work tends to fall into general groups that share characteristics and, sometimes, charac¬ ters. He has written ten full-length plays to date, six of which are part of his Twentieth-Century Cycle and seven of which (with the exception of DADDY!) have been published. The Cycle plays only allude to race relations, if they mention them at all. Rather, in consonance with his central artistic purpose, they

When Bullins edited Drama Review’s, black theater issue, he divided the plays into two groups: “Black Revolutionary Theatre,” under which head¬ ing he placed plays depicting racial conflict, often literal racial warfare, and “Theatre of Black Experi¬ ence,” in which group he placed his own Clara’s Ole Man. Bullins himself has written in both modes; however, his plays differ radically from the work of Baraka, Ben Caldwell, Marvin X, Sonia Sanchez, Herbert Stokes, and Jimmie Garrett, whose work he chose for the “Black Revolutionary Theatre” sec¬ tion of the volume. Bullins’s plays challenge the very metaphors these playwrights employed to de¬ pict the battle raging within their characters’ con¬ sciousnesses, as well as in the streets. His Dialect Determinism, for example, questions the rhetoric of many of the plays; We Righteous Bombers (even if he did not write it, he certainly championed it and included it in his New Plays from the Black Theatre) examines the entire imaginative scenario in which such plays indulged; his It Bees Dat Way (produced

Helen Ellis, George Miles, and Crystal Field in the first production of Coin’ A Buffalo (photograph by Martha Holmes)

51

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Ed Bullins

cal objective suggests the fruitlessness of their quest for a better life. Mamma is a heroin addict and, despite the legitimacy of their union, Curt and Pan¬ dora deny that their relationship mirrors Shakey’s and Mamma’s more blatant one, thus challenging the basis of their marriage. Into this group steps Art Garrison, admitted because he saved Curt’s life in a prison brawl. The women and Rich instinctively mistrust Art’s coldness and his refusal to smoke dope with them, but Curt identifies with him as a rebel and an outsider and insists on including him in their plans. Art moves in quickly, getting close to the women by preying on Mamma’s need for love and by challenging Curt outright for Pandora. When Curt seriously injures Pandora’s boss in a fight and the men attempt a drug sale for getaway money, Art coolly turns them in and takes posses¬ sion of the women. Goin’ A Buffalo contains all of the themes Bul¬ lins later developed more fully. The play questions the meaning of love and loyalty; it examines the viability of the dreams of people enmeshed in vari¬ ous illusions and traps of their own making: drugs, sex, the need for love, a romantic sense of masculin¬ ity expressed through domination and violence. Violence punctuates the action of the play; almost every conversation stops just short of a fight or ends in one. The characters are vulnerable because they deliberately blind themselves to the implications of their actions: Pandora denies she is a prostitute; Mamma insists Shakey loves her; when Art himself warns Curt that an outsider has no bonds or loyal¬ ties, Curt ignores the warning, thus precipitating the play’s shocking conclusion. Mamma-Too-Tight, the gutsy, proud little whore from Biloxi, Mississippi, is white. While the others make reference to her color, challenging her when she calls the men “boys,” commenting on her insistence on using the front door, they have accepted her fully into their community, teaching her street survival and, as Pandora reminds her, how to speak. Although delineated with care and sympathy, Mamma also reverses the traditional role held by the stage black, for she is the source of most of the play’s comedy. Finally, although nothing about her elicits pity, she is the character least capa¬ ble of freeing herself. While the community of Goin’ A Buffalo is forged by the aspirations of the characters, the com¬ munity observed in the first play of the TwentiethCentury Cycle, In the Wine Time (produced in 1968), is one of actual kinship. Set in the Philadelphia ghetto, In the Wine Time also explores the meaning of manhood, this time through its positive man-

(and an early full-length play, Coin’ A Buffalo, pro¬ duced in 1968) focus upon a group of characters who are linked either by blood or childhood associa¬ tion, and whose development the audience can fol¬ low through the plays. Home Boy, the fifth play in the Cycle, is an exception; it is only obliquely con¬ nected to the other plays (from Bullins’s fiction one connects it to a place in the Maryland countryside at which he spent some summers as a child). For his detailed treatment of race relations, Bullins re¬ serves another group of characters, the college crowd and their hangers-on, for example, Len and Sharon from The Pig Pen (produced in 1970) and The Taking of Miss Janie, who are modeled on the people he met in Los Angeles. Only the character poet Ray Crawford, from In the Wine Time, in¬ tersects the two fictional communities (he also appears in The Pig Pen). One play which is anoma¬ lous in Bullins’s canon is Jo Anne! (produced in 1976), his study of the celebrated case of Joanne Little, the black woman who killed her jailer when he raped her. The play, showcased at the Riverside Church theater in New York, employs both realistic vignettes and nonrealistic techniques, playing and replaying the rape both from Joanne’s point of view and that of her jailer, whom it treats with a measure of sympathy. Firmly on the side of Joanne Little, the play lashes out at the various factions who made her case a cause celebre, compounding her ordeal in their eagerness to turn it to their various purposes. Bullins’s use of white characters in his fulllength plays marks a departure from the usual practice of black dramatists. His white characters, present in the black community either by choice or by proximity, signal the presence of the larger white world; but they represent more than racism and oppression. Through these characters, Bullins carefully delineates the way in which race is always an issue and a presence, always burdened by its historical and social meanings. However, while his white characters are often targets of his satire, they are no more so than his black characters and, ulti¬ mately, with perhaps the exception of two charac¬ ters in The Taking of Miss Janie, Bullins is gentle with them, suggesting they are as trapped in their illu¬ sions, self-deceptions, and naivete as are the black characters. An early full-length play, not in the Cycle, Coin A Buffalo, depicts a community of street peo¬ ple whose hopes are brutally destroyed when they introduce into their midst a treacherous outsider, Art Garrison. Curt and his wife Pandora, MammaToo-Tight, and her pimp Shakey plan to leave Los Angeles to start afresh in Buffalo. Their geographi¬

52

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

Bette Howard, Gary Bolling, and. Sonny Jim in the first production of In the Wine Time

ifestation. In the play, an evening of drinking and talking on the front stoop of Cliff and Lou Dawson is the occasion of Lou’s nephew Ray Crawford’s initiation into manhood. The play’s motif is sound¬ ed in its prologue, which takes the form of a short story by the same name, about a semimythical woman with whom the young narrator is fascinated and who promises him fulfillment when he is ready. She and sixteen-year-old Ray’s desire to join the navy are the topics of conversation. Cliff encourages Ray in his ambition to leave Derby Street and admonishes him that his love for this woman will prevent him from entering the world that is rightfully his, much as according to Cliff, his love for Lou has kept him tied to Derby Street and failure. Lou wants Ray to wait and attacks Cliff for his own failure to realize his ambi¬ tions. The fight is clearly a repetition of a constant

theme in their marriage, and only in Lou’s absence can Cliff admit to Ray how deeply he values his wife. Cliff and Lou shift rapidly from comic affection and heartfelt sentiments of devotion to each other, to despair and bitter wrangling over the limited horizons they see for themselves. In the back¬ ground, other groups play out the same themes; particularly, the men of the neighborhood assert themselves over the women with a violence born not out of frustrated love, but simply out of a desire for mastery. Finally all the characters gather at the Daw¬ sons, and Red, the shallow and cruel neighborhood tough who has just claimed Ray’s old girl friend Bunny, offers a toast to Ray’s new love, giving Ray urine to drink instead of wine. In the ensuing battle, hidden from view, Red is killed and Cliff, who has rushed to Ray’s defense, emerges holding the knife.

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Ed Bullins Although the next play in the Cycle, In New England Winter (produced in 1971), assumes Cliff’s guilt, In the Wine Time leaves the question ambiguous, sug¬ gesting rather that Cliff not only saves Ray but also frees him to pursue the freedom that has eluded Cliff. Cliff’s action eloquently responds to Lou’s earlier charge that Cliff is not fit to act as Ray’s guardian; saving Ray marks Cliff’s maturation as well as provides a model for Ray. Finally, in In the Wine Time, the attainment of manhood depends upon a readiness to act, not only for oneself but on behalf of others. Cliff’s action is the converse of Art’s treachery. In New England Winter, actually written in 1967 and the second play of Bullins’s Cycle, takes up after Cliff’s release from jail. Like In the Wine Time, In New England Winter moves out from a short story of the same name which serves as its prologue. Its central characters are Cliff and his half brother Steve Benson, the man whose goal is to return to the woman he loved “in New England Winter.” The play alternates between two settings and two points in time: an unspecified Southwestern city in 1960 where the brothers and their two companions are rehearsing the robbery described in the short story, which will provide Steve the money to head North; and New England of 1955, where Steve had spent a month AWOL from the navy completely immersed in his relations with his woman Liz. The actions and concerns of the two settings extend and comment upon one another. In the summery heat, Steve and Cliff confront their tormented filial relationship, made compli¬ cated by Steve’s having moved into Cliff’s home while Cliff was in jail, presumably for killing Red. Cliff, easygoing and without malice, although bitter over Lou’s leaving him, loves his brother; Steve, taciturn, precise, and driven, rejects Cliff’s over¬ tures. When Cliff accuses Steve of resenting the simple fact that Cliff was their mother’s first child, Steve has no response, later confessing, “You love me so much . . . while I hate both of us.” The tensions between the brothers is ampli¬ fied by their companions, Chuckie and Bummie, whose mutual antagonism ends in blows. But an older conflict between Steve and Bummie proves most explosive: when Bummie, in a bid for power, reveals to Cliff that Steve has fathered a child with Lou, Steve abruptly kills him. It is Cliff’s admission that he had known about the child all along from Lou that results in Steve’s bitter acknowledgment of his brother’s love and his own self-hatred. Behind Steve’s callous exterior lies his own guilt over be¬ traying Cliff and his fear of being betrayed.

Dust jacket for the Bullins plays produced in New York by the New Lafayette Theatre company in 1968. Bullins was a major force in this black theater group during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At Liz’s place in New England, several of these themes are echoed. Steve may resent his mother’s other children, but he has chosen in Liz a painfully tormented young woman who can barely distin¬ guish one man from another, who seeks from any man only his love and a child. When a competitor, Crook, jealous of the relationship between Steve and Liz, turns him in to the shore patrol, Liz moves further into her private nightmare. She confuses Crook, who moves in on her, with Steve—who has just been taken away—and a former lover with whom, she fantasizes, she has had a blond baby. As in In the Wine Time, a woman embodies the dreams and deepest longing of the hero, but Liz is very different from the nameless mythical woman of the earlier play. Deeply unhappy, Liz is infantile in her need for care and security, and her intensity match¬ es Steve’s poorly concealed desperation. Liz’s char¬ acter, the winter setting, and Steve’s intense long-

54

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Ed Bullins

ings suggest what he seeks with Liz is an emotional regression from which both he and his woman can be reborn together.

reads Velma one of his stories; it is In the Wine Time, and its image of the graceful, almost ethereal woman who embodies the young narrator’s dreams contrasts sharply with the unhappy woman who lies

Steve Benson is also a central character in the Cycle’s third play, The Duplex (produced in 1970). Although the third of the series, it was produced before In New England Winter. In this play, set in a Los Angeles rooming house, Steve courts his land¬ lady Velma, whose husband O.D. lives with another woman but regularly returns to rape his wife and take whatever cash she has. Observing Steve’s affair are his roommate Marco Polo Henderson and vari¬ ous friends and neighbors who gather for cards and parties and whose relationships amplify and com¬ ment upon the play’s exploration of its theme. Sub¬ titled A Black Love Fable in Four Movements, The Du¬ plex observes Steve’s growing love for Velma and his gradual assumption of responsibility for that love. The Duplex elaborates on its theme by present¬ ing a range of male-female relationships, most char¬ acterized by some degree of physical and emotional abuse. However, Steve seeks a healthier love, at first only in an idealized form, but gradually in a more concrete one. About halfway through the play, in a rare peaceful moment, Steve, in this play a writer,

beside Steve. In response to the moment of intima¬ cy the story creates, Velma tells Steve she is preg¬ nant by him. Steve refuses to abandon her, as Marco advises, and thus challenges the conventional atti¬ tudes of his male companions. Later in the play, Steve’s romantic story is balanced by a long speech in which he castigates himself and his friends for refusing to provide women with the love and secur¬ ity they need. Men perceive women’s desire for these things, he says, as preventing them from pur¬ suing some inarticulate but obsessive ambition “for greater things, [to be] something we ain’t now or will never be. . . .” His words serve as an unheeded rebuke to Marco, who blatantly uses his girl friend Wanda as a convenience. However, not all the women in the play are victims, nor are all the men exploitive. Marie Hor¬ ton, who will become the central character of the Cycle’s next play, is a good-time woman, wanting from men only what pleasures are of mutual bene¬ fit. The men tease Tootsie Franklin, her former

News essays reviews interviews plays and poems

^THEATRE 2

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A PERIOOSCAL Of THE BLACK THEATRE MOVEMENT

JOHN O'NEAL ROBERT MACBETH BEN CALDWELL WOOD! EKING ED BULLINS SUBSCRIBE NOW.

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AFTERWORD

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Covers for the second issue of the New Lafayette Theatre magazine that Bullins edited from 1969 to the group’s demise in 1972

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DLB 38

Ed Bullins

Dust jacket for the 1971 collection of Bullins’s early short fiction. Bullins’s medallion is the emblem for the New Lafayette Theatre.

ney, a new character, is a Bullins type: a black mili¬ tant, in love with his rhetoric, he is resented by the older generation but considered too militant by some of his peers; and he is challenged as a sham by the con man, Art. An array of other characters— Bud, Toni, and Ruth, the women, childhood friends of Marie—complete Bullins’s portrait of the middle class. A powerful, willful, and domineering woman, Marie is lusty and pleasure seeking. Men who choose to tangle with her must give her what she demands. She certainly is a match for Art, who thinks he has successfully exploited her by exchang¬ ing room and board for sex, but Marie is not in the least deceived, and she unceremoniously throws him out when she discovers his attentions to Toni. The generosity and vulnerability beneath Marie’s tough exterior only emerge slowly. Child¬ less because of a bungled abortion for which she still blames her husband, Marie is deeply wounded by her childlessness, as she is by Bill’s philandering— not because of his infidelity, but because he has fathered a child by his latest woman, who is white.

husband, because Marie, still his good friend, had demanded and received his entire weekly paycheck. Steve’s resolve to remain with Velma symbol¬ izes his desire to confront reality rather than to content himself with romantic illusions. However, he fails to keep his resolve because O.D., who re¬ turns to claim his wife, is the stronger man and almost kills Steve in their battle over Velma. Steve fails also because Velma is too tied to her abusive husband to accept the love Steve offers her. As a love story, The Duplex sounds a plaintive, almost despairing note. In the fourth play of his Cycle, The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced in 1971), Bullins first turns his attention to the black middle class. His setting is Marie and Bill Horton’s Christmas party. The ac¬ tion is interspersed with monologues through which the characters reveal themselves and their pasts. The guests include some familiar faces: Mar¬ co Polo Henderson and his girl friend, Wanda, Marie’s niece; Art Garrison, identified as Steve Ben¬ son’s cousin; and Steve himself, who ultimately re¬ places Art as Marie’s lover and “house boy.” Gaf-

56

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Ed Bullins

However, when Bill’s employer of many years fires him for his personal conduct, Marie is outraged, and she loyally intervenes by calling the employer’s wife, for whom she has worked as a maid. Infideli¬ ties and recriminations seem to fill the Horton mar¬ riage, but ultimately both are completely satisfied with the life they have built together, one solidly based on a bond of mutual respect and affection. Bud and Toni have less substance; Bud, a high school math teacher in what, he prides himself, is not a ghetto school, is puzzled by his students, and Toni, a social worker, is completely self-centered, insensible to the world of social and political reali¬ ties. Ruth, independent and loyal, is a more likeable character, but her ambitions are also personal, her sense of life confined to immediate relationships and maintaining her financial independence. All the women are childless, a detail Bullins uses to suggest that while Marie’s class and generation were not without genuine vitality, they have little to pass on. This idea is made vivid in his treatment of Wanda, who has none of Marie’s characteristics and whom Marie resents. Dependent, vulnerable, and easily abused, Wanda is ready prey for almost every man at the party, including her uncle Bill with whom she has been having an affair for some time. At the play’s conclusion, pregnant by either Bill or Marco, Wanda leaves to live with Marco although she knows he does not love her.

ters participate in the party: Mackman, who is white and trying to be cool; his black girl friend Margie; a group of musicians who double as a combo for the play; and Ernie, militant and hostile, but most eager of all the guests to participate in the central feature of Len’s parties—his sharing Sharon with whoever wants her. The apparently random events of the evening suddenly fall into focus with the play’s abrupt end¬ ing. Mackman, who has gone out for more wine, hears of Malcolm X’s assassination. When he announces it, Sharon registers delight; Len re¬ marks that his end is appropriate to his philosophy; and only Mackman, Margie, and Ray truly mourn his death. The others are too drunk or stoned to care. Mackman, however, must bear his grief alone, for Margie turns on him and leaves with Ray. The play’s title ostensibly refers to a white policeman who occasionally drifts across the stage blowing his whistle, a pointed reference to Amer¬ ican attitudes. However, a passage in The Reluctant

Toughness is valued in The Fabulous Miss Marie, and there is little excuse for naivete, although those who exploit innocence are neither admirable norjustified. If there is ajudgment in the play, it is of the characters’ self-centeredness. Marie’s liberality and generosity, both material and emotional, are what make her “fabulous.” Her generosity, however, stops short of her niece, who really needs her, and the toughness that allows her to deal with Art arises from her own ability as an exploiter; neither her generosity nor her resilience is the stuff on which the future can be built. Before continuing the Cycle, Bullins turned his attention directly to the matter of race relations in The Pig Pen (produced in 1970) and The Taking of Miss Janie (produced in 1975). The former play, also constructed around a party, centers on a racial¬ ly mixed couple, Len and Sharon. Bullins leaves no one unscathed in this play. Len, knowledgeable about Afro-American history and culture, has been instrumental in awakening his black friends to their own history and Ray to his talents as a poet. But Len is married to Sharon, a spoiled, irrationally demanding, youngjewish woman who is insensitive to the nuances of her situation. A range of charac¬

OBIE Award winner as a distinguished American playwright and author of THE HUNGERED ONE.

Dust jacket forfour of the plays that prompted one reviewer to call Bullins “an emerging theatre poet in the tradition of Tennessee Williams, inspired and gorgeous”

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Ed Bullins

He invites her to his party, meaning from the very beginning to have her, but biding his time, for she, for the next thirteen years, insists on keeping the relationship platonic. Her resistance does not indi¬ cate sexual innocence by any means; at one point in their relationship, Monty helps her obtain an abor¬ tion and nurses her through it, and she confesses to having had many lovers, both black and white. Rather, her resistance is a curious blend of canni¬ ness, power, and idealism: both a perverse way of prolonging the friendship and a genuine desire to keep it free of exploitation. The party includes various familiar Bullins characters: Rich, a strident black nationalist who berates Monty for inviting Janie and continuously insults her; Janie’s boyfriend Lonnie, a cool thirdrate musician who ultimately is condescending to “spades”; Len and Sharon, whose marriage has weathered the decade; and two women in Monty’s life, Peggy and Flossie. Len’s rhetoric has not

Rapist further elaborates the title. The narrator observes pigs feeding and notes that they are so voracious, were a man to fall into their trough, he would be devoured alive. A deadly and mutual ex¬ ploitation pervades the party in The Pig Pen; Bullins neither condemns nor advocates interracial re¬ lationships; he simply points out the sickness that permeates them. If The Pig Pen observes the beginning of the decade of black militancy, The Taking of Miss Janie marks its end. A pointed, often comic, but essential¬ ly mournful, and even bitter reflection on the 1960s, The Taking of Miss Janie relates the thirteenyear relationship between its black hero, Monty, and the blond Janie, whose rape forms the play’s prologue and epilogue. Again Bullins’s medium is the party and the monologues through which the characters and their pasts are revealed. Janie is attracted to Monty by the poetry he reads in their creative writing class.

BLACK PLAYS FOR BLACK THEATRE MARVIN X BEN CALDWELL SHARON STOCKARD RICHARD WESLEY

ED BULLINS SONIA SANCHEZ ROBERT MACBETH MARTIE CHARLES J. E. GAINES

SALIMU

KINGSLEY B. BASS JR. CHINA CLARK OYAMO

THE DEVIL CATCHERS • THE BRONX IS NEXT • FIRST MILITANT PREACHER • THE ELECTRONIC NIGGER • GO IN' A BUFFALO • WE RIGHTEOUS BOMBERS IN NEW ENGLAND WINTER • IN THE WINE TIME • DON'T LET IT GO TO YOUR HEAD • JAMIMMA • BLACK TERROR • HOW DO YOU DO • DIALECT DETERMINISM • IT HAS NO CHOICE • A MINOR SCENE • THE GENTLEMAN CALLER • THE HELPER • THE MAN WHO DUG FISH • THE CORNER • THE THEME IS BLACKNESS • THE DUPLEX • RECOGNITION • THE FANATIC • UN-PRESIDENTED • THE WALL • HYPNOTISM • RIOT SALE or DOLLAR PSYCHE FAKE OUT • THE JOB • TOP SECRET or FEW MILLION AFTER B.C. • MISSION ACCOMPLISHED • BLACK CYCLE • ACE BOON COON • IT'S CULLID IT'S NEGRO, IT'S BLACK MAN • IT BEES THAT WAY • CLARA'S OLE MAN • DEATH LIST • THE DEVIL & OTIS REDDING • TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS • THE TRIAL • A RITUAL • GETTIN' IT TOGETHER • THE STREETCORNER • SOMETIMES A HARD HEAD MAKES A SOFT BEHIND • WHAT IF IT HAD TURNED UP HEADS • WHERE WE AT? • JOB SECURITY • MALCOM/ MAN/DON'T LIVE HERE NO MO • SISTER SON/JI • GROWIN' INTO BLACKNESS • PERFECTION IN BLACK • FREE AT LAST • PIGPEN • BOSONS BOX TRUTH • THE ADVANTAGES OF DOPE • THE THIEVES All inquiries concerning production rights lo these ploys should he addressed to: THE NEW LAFAYETTE THEATRE PLAY SERVICE 2'M9 SEVENTH AVENUE NEW YORK, N-Y. 10030 ATTN Whitman Mayo

One of the aims of the New Lafayette Theatre company was to encourage other blacks to produce plays by black playwrights. This advertisement appeared on the back cover of several issues of Black Theatre.

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Ed Buliins

changed; he still considers himself the great teacher, but from Sharon we learn he has turned capitalist, excusing himself as an intellectual. Peggy, now a lesbian, had married Monty and supported him through school while he conducted a passion¬ ate affair with her friend Flossie and a platonic one with Janie. Finally, Mort Silberstein, an unkempt and impoverished drug dealer, is a composite por¬ trait of leftist radical, Beat poet, and 1960s hippie. He engages Monty in an epic battle during which he accuses Monty of loving not white women, but rather Freud, Marx, Einstein, and Jesus, to which Monty retorts that Mao, Fanon, and Voodoo are the sources of his inspirations. The play concludes with the prologue to the rape with which it opened. A comment on the 1960s, the period of powerful awakening of black consciousness and creativity and of apparent mitigation of the worst of white racism, The Taking of Miss Janie sees little of lasting value. “We all failed. ... We failed in the test of the times. . . . We blew it. Blew it completely,” one character tells both those on stage and in the audience. Not completely—Leri and Sharon have endured, although Sharon has matured, while Len has rigidified and compromised, rather than come to a richer understanding of himself. Between Monty and Jane are traces of real friendship and intimacy, but the effect of the play’s structure is to suggest that the entire decade was little more than a stalking and a tease, for at its end, in spite of every¬ thing that occurred, all Monty really wanted was Miss Janie. What saves the play from despair is the brilliance of its comedy; Bullins’s quarrel is with what people did, not with what people essentially

friend Candy move to New York and a posh Central Park West apartment. His sudden rise to fame and affluence, which brings him back to New York from Los Angeles, also threatens his relationship with Candy and forces him to confront his former wife and four children, still without money and living in the poor Newark neighborhood where he left them twelve years before. The play is a delicate study of Michael’s painful reexamination of his marriage, his relationship with Candy, and his responsibilities to his children. “This makes a man: his world, his nation, his family, his circle, but seldom himself alone,” Michael muses in a monologue. Never hav¬ ing had a daddy, he finds it difficult to take respon¬ sibility for those he loves or to allow others to make what he himself acknowledges are legitimate claims on him. A clumsy attempt to take responsibility for his children by bringing his two sons to New York to live with him and Candy nearly results in disaster. Michael finally learns about a different kind of manhood from Carter, the patient and steadfast man who has been living with his former wife, Jack¬ ie, caring for her in spite of her alcoholism and finally fathering her twelfth child. The scene is remarkable: Michael arrives with a gun in his pock¬ et, ready to kill Carter for striking Michael’s daugh¬ ter during a quarrel. Carter, too, conceals a gun and calmly finishes the dishes while he relates to Michael what the past twelve years have been for him and Jackie. By the time the dishes are finished, Michael has acknowledged that Carter has become the real father of his children. While he continues his contact with and financial support of his family, Michael resolves to marry Candy, who is pregnant, and to begin anew, hoping this time to learn that aspect of manhood which is expressed as “Daddy.” Many familiar Buliins themes are sounded in DADDY! and many familiar questions raised. However, the play moves closer than did earlier plays to delineating the nature of the communal bond and its effect on personal and social identity, or, more accurately, how that bond is expressed or denied through love, loyalty, responsibility, and sexual identity. Michael, like many earlier Buliins characters, feels conflict between a sense of himself and, inextricably, his manhood as best expressed in solitude, without bonds, without ties to place or material possessions, and his sense of guilt and per¬ sonal failure for abandoning the family his love for a woman has produced. Likewise with Candy, he feels her demand as a social expectation that he is obligated to fulfill in order to be a man, but that his inner sense of himself compels him to resist. DAD¬ DY! attempts to resolve that conflict, in part by

are, and his criticism, while savage, remains humane. Buliins returned to his Cycle with Home Boy, an episodic series of encounters between two young Southern blacks, Jody and Dude, who plan to go North. Neither one’s ambition really extends beyond placing himself in a Northern setting, sit¬ ting on a street corner drinking wine. Dude actually makes it, while Jody’s trip remains fantasy. At the end, Jody asks a question the play does not answer, “Are we the victims, the survivors or the casualties?” A subdued piece, laced with blues songs for which Buliins wrote the lyrics, Home Boy meanders, like its characters, going nowhere. The next play in the Cycle, DADDY!, returns to the urban setting where Bullins’s imagination is most at home and to a character, Michael Brown, to whom he has not attended since A Son, Come Home. When, after a life of poverty and struggle, Michael’s record hits the top of the charts, he and his girl 59

DLB 38

Ed Bullins

Dust jacket for Bullins’s 1973 novel. According to Bullins, “The original idea came from the image of a Black outcast, outlaw of society moving through the social I cultural and political climate of the day.”

stituting rhetoric for art, for the actual creation of new cultural and social realities. Moreover, if one must label Bullins, the most accurate one is that of cultural nationalist, for the effect of his work is to give substance to the theory, to make possible a definition of cultural nationalism that has not yet been proposed. A national culture exists when the artists of a nation have created a world of the imagi¬ nation, have succeeded in giving the people of the nation an extended artistic reference point, a mir¬ ror as well as a picture of their possibilities, creative means for extending their personal, social, and political sense of themselves. Black music has always performed this service for black Americans; black writers and visual artists have only recently begun to do so. Both in the sheer volume of his work as well as through what he depicts and explores, Bul¬ lins consciously and carefully seeks to create a coun¬ terpart to black music: a world his audience can visit and revisit, in which they can see themselves, from which they can draw sustenance, through which they are challenged to create themselves anew.

revealing that the bonds of responsibility and freely given love ultimately supercede those of kinship and, certainly, those of passion. Formal critical response to Bullins’s work is as yet sparse: theater reviews—most of them enthu¬ siastic— still constitute almost all of the commen¬ tary on his plays. He is most frequently praised for his language, power of observation, humor, and veracity. The structural techniques of Bullins’s plays most frequently disturb critics who feel his episodic vignettes, central use of party, and the monologues in particular leave the plays unfo¬ cused. But all agree that, in Clive Barnes’s words, he “writes like an angel.” A central figure for the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Bullins, however, avoided making theoretical statements to which other lead¬ ing figures of the movement turned in seeking a rationale for the new writing and daring theater that the movement produced. Although hard on his characters who are cultural nationalists, Bullins does not criticize their beliefs, but rather their sub¬

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Ben Caldwell

Black music is not merely the ground, the setting, and the structure of Bullins’s work: it provides its most telling analogue.

Blues Drama of Ed Bullins,” Southwest Review, 65 (Spring 1980): pp. 178-190; Samuel J. Bernstein, “The Taking of Miss Janie,” in his The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1980), pp. 61-86; Don Evans, “The Theatre of Confrontation: Ed Bullins, Up Against the Wall,” Black World, 23 (April 1974): 14-18; Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, translated by Melvin Dixon (Cambridge: Harvard Uni¬ versity Press, 1983), pp. 168-189; Samuel A. Hay, “ ‘What Shape Shapes Shapeless¬ ness?’: Structural Elements in Ed Bullins’ Plays,” Black World, 23 (April 1974): 20-26; Richard G. Scharine, “Ed Bullins was Steve Benson (But Who Is He Now?),” Black American Litera¬ ture Forum, 13 (Fall 1979): 103-109; Geneva Smitherman, “Ed Bullins/Stage One: Eve¬ rybody Wants to Know Why I Sing the Blues,” Black World, 23 (April 1974): 4-13; Robert L. Tener, “Pandora’s Box—A Study of Ed Bullins’s Dramas,” CLA Journal, 19 (June 1976): 533-544.

Interviews: Marvin X, “Interview with Ed Bullins: Black Theatre,’’Negro Digest, 18 (April 1969): 9-16; Mel Gussow, “Bullins, the Artist and the Activist, Speaks,” New York Times, 22 September 1971, p. 54; Erika Munk, “Up From Politics—An Interview with Ed Bullins,” Performance, 2 (July/August 1972): 52-60; Richard Wesley, “An Interview with Playwright Ed Bullins,” Black Creation, 4 (Winter 1973): 8-10; Charles M. Young, “Is Rape a Symbol of Race Rela¬ tions?,” New York Times, 18 May 1975, II: 5; Patricia O’Haire, “Bullins—a Philadelphia Story,” New York Daily News, 7 June 1975, p. 25. Biography: Jervis Anderson, “Profiles — Dramatist,” New York¬ er, 49 (16 June 1973): 40-79. References: W. D. E. Andrews, “Theatre of Black Reality: The

Ben Caldwell (24 September 1937-

)

Robbie Jean Walker Auburn University at Montgomery

BOOKS: Prayer Meeting; or, the First Militant Minister (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1968); Juju (Magic Songs for the Black Nation), by Caldwell and Askia Muhammad Toure (Chicago: Third World, 1970).

Top Secret, or a Few Million After B.C., Los Angeles, Performing Arts Society, early 1969; Run Around, New York, Third World House, June 1970; What is Going On (includes All White Caste: After the Separation. A Slow Paced One Act Play; Family Portrait [Or My Son The Black Nationalist\; Rights and Reasons; The Job; and Top Secret, or a Few Million After B.C.), New York, New Federal Theatre, 23 November 1973; World of Ben Caldwell, New York, New Federal Theatre, April 1982.

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Militant Preacher, New¬ ark, Spirit House Theatre, April 1967; reti¬ tled and produced as Prayer Meeting; or, the First Militant Minister, in A Black Quartet: Four New Plays (includes Amiri Baraka’s Great Good¬ ness of Fife [A Coon Show\, Ed Bullins’s The Gentleman Caller; Ron Milner’s The Warning-A Theme for Finda), Brooklyn, Chelsea Theatre Center, 25 April 1969;

OTHER: Hypnotism, in Afro-Arts Anthology (Newark, N.J.: Jihad, 1969);

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Ben Caldwell

Ben Caldwell (photograph by D. Dawson)

among black literary artists. His talent was recog¬ nized in the theater community, and he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for playwrit¬ ing in 1970. Caldwell, the seventh of nine children, was born in Harlem on 24 September 1937, his parents having migrated there from the South two years before his birth. Although he attempted to write a Civil War novel when he was only eleven years old, and notwithstanding his natural artistic ability, Caldwell was cautious about both writing and paint¬ ing as economically viable careers because, he observes, “there were few blacks, that I knew of, successfully earning a living either writing or paint¬ ing.” Encouraged by a junior high school guidance counselor, Caldwell enrolled in the School of In¬ dustrial Arts in New York City, planning to major in commercial illustration and industrial design. The death of his father during Caldwell’s first year of high school forced him to abandon temporarily his dreams of an art career, and he left school in 1954 to seek employment to supplement the family’s in¬ come. He continued to paint and draw, sharpening his skills and supplementing his income. He also continued to write plays and essays—more with a view toward explaining things to himself than with aspirations to publish. It was not until the 1960s, when some of his plays were read by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) that the probability of writing seriously for publication occurred to him. Caldwell’s plays, described variously as “agit prop cartoons” or “parodic vignettes,” are primarily one-act dramas with few characters and minimal production requirements, characteristics probably

Family Portrait (Or My Son The Black Nationalist), The King of Soul or The Devil and Otis Redding, in New Plays From The Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins (New York: Bantam, 1969); All White Caste: After the Separation. A Slow Paced One Act Play, in Black Drama Anthology, edited by Woodie King, Jr., and Ronald Milner (New York: New American Library, 1971). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Four Plays” (includes The Job; Riot Sale, or Dollar Psyche Fake-Out; Top Secret, or a Few Million After B.C.; Mission Accomplished), Drama Review, 12 (Sum¬ mer 1968): 40-52; An Obscene Play (for Adults Only), Alafia, 1 (Winter 1971): 14-15; The Wall, Scripts, 1 (May 1972): 91-93. Ben Caldwell, Harlem-born dramatist, artist, and, currently, essayist, was an active participant in the black arts movement of the 1960s, the most clearly defined period in black American letters since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The black arts movement produced a group of artists who believed efforts to effect social change by appealing to the conscience of white America were futile. Deeming it more appropriate to make black Americans aware of their unwitting acquiescence in securing their own subordination, the writers of the movement sought to shame their black audience for failing to exert more control over the direction of their lives. Caldwell was one of the most prolific playwrights of this period, and his short satirical plays reflect the nationalistic spirit that prevailed

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Ben Caldwell

dictated by Caldwell’s limited resources during his formative years as a playwright. Most of the plays have subtitles which, according to Caldwell, serve to “enhance the satirical aspect or quality of the plays’ content. Often the meaning or significance of the subtitle is not apparent until the play is read or witnessed in production.” Charles Peavy’s assertion that “the object of Caldwell’s satire is certain traits in Negroes, such as materialism, gullibility, and the desire to imitate the white man,” is undeniably accu¬ rate and perceptive, for Caldwell attacks relentless¬ ly those foibles of blacks that he perceives to be impediments to attainment of racial dignity. For approximately eighteen months during 1965 and 1966, Caldwell lived in Newark with a group of artists and writers that included Amiri Baraka. He refers to this as the “Newark Period,” and Hypnotism (1969) was written during that time. This short dramatic satire is about the entrapment of unwary blacks by the white power structure. Hyp¬ notism reflects the responsibility assumed by Cald¬ well and the other satirists in the black arts move¬ ment to free the minds of blacks from what Peavy terms their “psychological enslavement.” The char¬ acters in Hypnotism include a black woman and man, a white policeman, and a magician. The magician hypnotizes the blacks by erasing their memories of the injustice, oppression, and exploitation that in¬ spire militance. He then ensures their “psychologi¬ cal enslavement” by implanting in their minds the words “nonviolence” and “integration,” pacifying them for the moment. As the blacks snap back to consciousness, the policeman physically and verbal¬ ly abuses them. At the end of the play the magician abruptly shifts functions, speaking as a teacher rather than an enslaver, and issues the admonition: “You can stop it from ending this way.” Prayer Meeting; or, the First Militant Minister (produced in 1967), the most popular and highly acclaimed Caldwell play, was also written during the Newark Period. It was first performed as the Mili¬ tant Preacher in 1967 at the Spirit House Theatre in Newark, and later retitled and performed in A Black Quartet: Four New Plays (produced in 1969 and pub¬ lished in 1970), which also featured plays by Bara¬ ka, Ed Bullins, and Ron Milner. Prayer Meeting is a comedy with only two characters, a minister and a burglar. The burglar, surprised but undetected in the minister’s home by the latter’s unexpected re¬ turn, initially listens as the reverend prays for God’s guidance in helping him to avert an imminent up¬ rising among blacks incensed by the police killing of a black teenager. Becoming impatient with what he believes to be the useless prayer, the burglar speaks

to the minister, who mistakes the burglar’s voice for God’s. The burglar takes advantage of the minis¬ ter’s mistake and commands him to disavow nonvio¬ lence and to substitute the philosophy of “an eye for an eye.” While nonviolent policy is attacked in this drama, Caldwell’s full invective power is unleashed upon the black whose need for material comforts has distorted his perception of himself. The reality, he suggests, is that the successful, “comfortable” black is as much a victim as less fortunate blacks and shares with them all the liabilities of subordination. Well written and provocative, Prayer Meeting has always played to enthusiastic audiences. In one review John Simon considered Caldwell’s promise as a playwright to be the “overwhelming highlight” of A Black Quartet. Regretting that Caldwell’s play lacked a punch line, Simon nonetheless described Prayer Meeting as “terse, funny, cutting,” a play that “puts outrageousness to relevant social use and, having made its point . . . subsides without re¬ course to padding and self inflation.” Two other plays written during the Newark Period dramatize a recognizable tendency among certain blacks: the taking on of a distorted value system that emphasizes materialistic gain and relies on the imitation of whites for validation of worth. Riot Sale, or Dollar Psyche Fake-Out (1968), set in Harlem in the 1960s, depicts the sell-out of a group of black “revolutionaries” and satirizes their inclina¬ tion to sacrifice long-term goals and to compromise principles for immediate gratification. Caldwell dramatizes the white power structure’s strategy to subdue an angry black mob gathered to avenge the death of a young black male killed by policemen. The firing of an antipoverty cannon filled with money is sufficient to extinguish noble purposes and commitments as the blacks fight each other for the money and ultimately spend it at the business establishments of their oppressors. Riot Sale, as well as several other Caldwell plays, offers social com¬ mentary on the buy-offs characteristic of antipover¬ ty programs designed to avert or dissipate black mob violence. Family Portrait (Or My Son The Black Nationalist) (1969) similarly attacks the emphasis on material¬ ism as the son in the drama renounces the social trappings treasured by his parents: his father’s job security bought at the expense of manhood and self-respect; a big Cadillac; a luxurious home; and his mother’s wig. The father and mother, named Farthest From Truth and Nowhere Near The Truth, respectively, share the belief articulated by the father: “We’ve got to show the white man that we are ready and good enough to live with him.”

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Ben Caldwell

without the fear of pregnancy is the meaning of the B.C. (birth control) in the subtitle made clear. The theme, though obviously not original—since the implications of birth control have been explored by sociologists and other professionals—is handled rather adeptly by Caldwell. The play offers a sharp depiction of the alternatives explored by the strategists in their efforts to hold the black popula¬ tion at manageable levels and yet preserve a suffi¬ cient number of blacks for the traditional subser¬ vient tasks commonly awarded them. A prominent target of this satire is the myopic black caught up in the convenience of the moment without adequately examining the ultimate consequences of current pleasures. Mission Accomplished, also written in New York and published in 1968, is a historical satire set in late-nineteenth-century Africa. It dramatizes the introduction of Christianity to an African village. A priest and two nuns confront a black king and his men with the message of Christianity. Two mis¬ taken assumptions inform the actions of the mis¬ sionaries: first, they assume need and interest on the part of the Africans; second, they believe the villagers are savages, a notion that seems unfound¬ ed and vigorously denied by the African king. Communicating through an interpreter, the king informs the missionaries of the villagers’ satis¬ faction with religion as it is practiced in Africa, and he describes the Africans’ skepticism of a religion whose disciples are so much at variance with the originator’s presumed qualities: goodness and strength. Ultimately the missionaries physically subdue the Africans, baptize them by force, and rob them of costly jewelry which they forward to the Pope in Rome. Features of Mission Accomplished seem to indi¬ cate a shift in the target of Caldwell’s satire. His emphasis moves from consciousness-raising—de¬ signed to shame black Americans into examining their materialism, gullibility, and desire to imitate whites—to a satirization of corruption in religion and the imposition upon others of a religion deemed superior by its representatives. The bra¬ zenness of the nuns as they dance obscenely in an effort to tempt the villagers and the physical force used to subdue the king are harshly and explicitly depicted; the action tends to jar and offend the audience into knowledge, rather than to persuade them.

The son, Sunshine on Truth, utterly repudiates this philosophy. There is little substantive exchange in the drama; the father quotes his platitudes as if speaking from a prepared script, and the son en¬ gages in lengthy monologues. All in all, the drama deals adequately with the conflicting value systems of the parents and their son and dramatizes the dues exacted from those who rely too heavily on imitating the value system of whites. During his residency in Newark Caldwell be¬ came acquainted with the realities of unemploy¬ ment, and The Job (1968) exposes some of the indig¬ nities endured by blacks seeking employment. Sub¬ stantially more oblique than the other satires, The Job highlights the insensitivity of white personnel workers as they interview black job applicants. Ex¬ panding a favorite theme, the exploitation of blacks and loss of control over their lives experienced by people who take government assistance, the play¬ wright criticizes Project Negro Opportunity as “just another way of keeping them in line.” Also criti¬ cized here are the attitudes that lead to stereotyping blacks and reserving jobs for them in certain cate¬ gories, as illustrated in the case of a black woman who does indeed like to cook and sew but aspires to higher goals, the attitude of her white interviewer notwithstanding. Despite these strong themes, the ambiguous satire in The Job renders it less effective than most of the other plays. Toward the end of 1966 Caldwell returned to New York, and since that time he has written more than fifty plays. Gerald T. Goodman observes that the later plays have a maturity lacking in the earlier ones. Citing as examples The King of Soul or The Devil and Otis Redding, A One Act Musical Tragedy (1969) and All White Caste: After the Separation. A Slow Paced One Act Play (performed as part of What is Going On in 1973), Goodman notes that Caldwell “moved beyond the simplistic exhortations of the agit prop forms to explore a more ambiguous and complex world.” Top Secret, or A Few Million After B.C. (per¬ formed as part of What is Going On in 1973) points out the gullibility of blacks who accept schemes designed to increase the control of the power struc¬ ture over them. In this drama, top government officials—the President of the United States, three cabinet members, and generals representing the Army and the Air Force—devise a secret plot to reduce the number of blacks in the country in order to facilitate control over them. Only after reading that the top secret involves the development of a contraceptive pill that will keep blacks happy be¬ cause they can make love as often as they wish

Based on the untimely death of Otis Redding, The King of Soul or The Devil and Otis Redding (1969) dramatizes the manipulation and exploitation of talented blacks. Employing the Faustian theme of

64

DLB 38

Ben Caldwell scores the inference that the exploitation of blacks by agents and representatives is rather common¬ place. The fate of white sympathizers who assisted blacks or endorsed their cause in the Third World War is dramatized in All White Caste: After the Separa¬ tion, set in Harlem during the 1990s. The characters are two guards, one black and one white, and a white prisoner, who sympathized with blacks dur¬ ing the war. Because of the relocation of blacks to Africa, the sympathizers must now assume the blacks’ former set of conditions, complete with me¬ nial tasks, limited ambitions, narrow job opportuni¬ ties, and all the economic restraints that hinder mobility and development. In All White Caste, an artistically mature play, Caldwell also satirizes black moderates Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young: Wil¬ kins for his attempts at integration even after others had discovered that it would not work; and Whitney Young for his ideologically “white” stance. Three of Caldwell’s New York plays either treat religious themes directly or have settings in church-related contexts. The earliest of these plays is “The Fanatic or Testifying,” an unpublished oneact play written in 1968. “The Fanatic” is again based on Caldwell’s theme of the gullibility of blacks. This time blacks are mildly castigated for their hasty willingness to accept token acts by whites as signs of genuine goodwill. Only moderately suc¬ cessful, the play depicts the minister of a small Bap¬ tist church in the South who naively believes that the presence of a white couple at the services is a true indication of progress in race relations, until the white man’s testimony reveals that he is guilty of participating in some of the most heinous crimes imaginable against blacks. “Recognition” (unpub¬ lished, written in 1968) has a strong nationalistic emphasis and dramatizes the plight of those who have forgotten that God is black and have so long pursued the white God that their own true God, Allah, no longer recognizes them. Recognition from Allah is achieved only after the blacks begin to complain about the intolerable nature of their con¬ dition and reject the white God. This excursion into black Islamic theology requires more development than Caldwell gives in this play, inasmuch as the separatist character of a black theology has never been universally appealing to blacks. The other religious play, Reverend Mac or God and Company, satirizes the gullibility of Reverend Mac’s disciples who fail to question why the abun¬ dant life is more appropriate for and accessible to their handsome, wealthy minister than to them. The drama works well in that it reveals an all too

Th e r i rst

mummmmmm. by ben ccxlciwelt

Front cover for Caldwell’s best-known play, written while he was living in Newark in 1965-1966 and published there by Amiri Baraka’s publishing house, Jihad Productions

selling one’s soul to the devil, Caldwell depicts the ultimate tragedy of the popular soul singer. The Devil in the drama assumes numerous identities as he manipulates the singer through a series of events, beginning with the suggestion that the sing¬ er give up gospel singing in his father’s church for the more lucrative alternative of popular singing, and ending with persuading him to purchase the private plane in which he lost his life. Otis Redding’s death, according to inferences drawn from the play itself, was orchestrated by the white power structure that resented his intention to assume control of his own destiny. After the plane crash killed Redding, two men in a bar sit discussing the case, one man raising rhetorical questions illustrative of the mys¬ tery surrounding the singer’s death: “What in¬ creases the value of a product more than a great demand for it? What creates more of a demand for a great singer’s records than his death?” An allusion to Sam Cooke, another famous singer who died under mysterious conditions, effectively under¬

65

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Ben Caldwell

to clarify his own thinking and are not intended for publication. Some of the essays, however, that he perceives to have cultural relevance will be included in a volume of plays and monologues currently in preparation. He is now writing monologues and completing a series of portraits of great black American men and women. Caldwell’s works dem¬ onstrate an ongoing commitment to “reject and resist the imposition of an oppressive and/or ex¬ ploitative social-political order.” The very nature of that resistance, expressed uncompromisingly in his work, calls for a particular type of audience—one unafraid to look at itself. If Caldwell’s audiences have been slow to see themselves, it is no reflection on his writing talents. His perception and incisive¬ ness deserve a forum other than the genre of the limited one-act drama. Perhaps he will find the essay to be the genre through which he can most effectively communicate his message.

common phenomenon: the inconsistency and in¬ equity apparent in situations involving wealthy ministers whose supporters frequently live in ab¬ ject poverty. Another unpublished play, “UnPresidented or What Needs To Be Done” (written in 1968), attacks the nonviolent philosophy as it depicts an unpredictable aggressiveness on the part of a fallen leader’s disciple, the leader having strongly endorsed nonviolence. The drama success¬ fully reflects the dissatisfaction of many blacks with the strategy of nonviolence as a vehicle for social reform. After Prayer Meeting, the production which received the greatest critical attention was a series of skits and monologues called World of Ben Caldwell (produced in 1982). The production only ran for twelve days in New York at the New Federal Theatre. According to Lionel Mitchell of the New York Amsterdam News, “There was definitely a cut¬ ting edge in all of the skits forcing his audience to be more aware and look at things different¬ ly. ... Judgement on the whole is favorable, though I refrain from giving ‘The World of Ben Caldwell’ anything near a rave.” Stanley Crouch, in one of the more favorable reviews, considers Cald¬ well’s linguistic sophistication as “a great ability to stitch together fabrics of rhetoric ranging from bureaucratic to black bottom barbershop.” Ben Caldwell continues to write plays and essays, though many of the essays are designed only

References: Stanley Crouch, “Satireprop,” Voice (27 April 1982): 104; Lionel Mitchell, “Ben Caldwell’s Crazy World Un¬ settles Audience,” New York Amsterdam News, 24 April 1982, p. 33; Charles D. Peavy, “Satire and Contemporary Black Drama,” Satire Newsletter, 7 (Fall 1969): 40-49; John Simon, “Quartet-Three-Quarters Jarring,” New York (11 April 1969): 56.

Alice Childress (12 October 1920-

)

Trudier Harris University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

See also the Childress entry in DLB 7, TwentiethCentury American Dramatists.

Wedding Band: A Love I Hate Story in Black and White (New York: French, 1973); When the Rattlesnake Sounds (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975); Let’s Hear It for the Queen (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976); A Short Walk (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); Rainbow Jordan (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981).

BOOKS: Like One of the Family . . . Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Indepen¬ dence Publishers, 1956); Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1969); Mojo and String: Two Plays (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1971); A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (New York: Cow¬ ard, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973);

PLAY

66

PRODUCTIONS:

Florence,

New

York,

DLB 38

Alice Childress Wedding Band, ABC, 1973; String, for Vision (series), PBS, 1979. OTHER: The World on a Hill, in Plays to Remember, Literary Heritage Series (New York: Macmil¬ lan, 1968); Black Scenes, edited by Childress (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971)—includes a scene from Childress’s The African Garden, pp. 137-145; Trouble in Mind, in Black Theatre, edited by Lindsay Patterson (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 135-174; “Knowing the Human Condition,” in Black Amer¬ ican Literature and Humanism, edited by R. Bax¬ ter Miller (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981), pp. 8-10.

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: DRAMA

Florence, A One Act Drama, in Masses and Mainstream, 3 (October 1950): 34-47.

Alice Childress (photograph by Willard Moore)

NONFICTION

“For a Negro Theatre,” Masses and Mainstream, 4 (February 1951): 61-64; “The Negro Woman in American Literature,” Freedomways, 6 (Winter 1966): 14-19; re¬ printed as “A Woman Playwright Speaks Her Mind,” in Anthology of the Afro-American in the Theatre: A Critical Approach, edited by Lindsay Patterson (Cornwells Heights, Pa.: Publishers Agency, 1978), pp. 75-79; “ ‘Why Talk About That?,’ ” Negro Digest, 16 (April 1967): 17-21; “Black Writers’ Views on Literary Lions and Values,” Negro Digest, 17 (January 1968): 36, 85-87; “ ‘But I Do My Thing,’ ” in “Can Black and White Artists Still Work Together?,” New York Times, 2 February 1969, II: 1, 9; “The Soul Man,” Essence (May 1971): 68-69, 94; “Tributes — to Paul Robeson,” Freedomways, 11 (First Quarter 1971): 14-15.

American Negro Theatre, 1949; Just a Little Simple, adapted from Langston Hughes’s collection Simple Speaks His Mind, New York, Club Baron Theatre, September 1950; Gold Through the Trees, New York, Club Baron Theatre, 1952; Trouble in Mind, New York, Greenwich Mews Theatre, 4 November 1955; Wedding Band: A Love I Hate Story in Black and White, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, Decem¬ ber 1966; String, adapted from Guy de Maupassant’s story “A Piece of String,” New York, St. Marks Play¬ house, 25 March 1969; The Freedom Drum, retitled YoungMartin Luther King, Performing Arts Repertory Theatre, on tour 1969-1972; Mojo: A Black Love Story, New York, New Heritage Theatre, November 1970; Sea Island Song, Charleston, South Carolina, Staere South, 1977; Gullah, Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1984.

In Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family . . . Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956), Mildred, the main character, is a sassy, defiant day worker who fights for civil rights and human dignity, and who refuses to be degraded because her work is what others would consider menial. Childress says the character of Mildred was based on her Aunt Lorraine, who worked as a domestic for many years and who consistently “refused to exchange dignity for pay.” Childress’s life and the thematic philoso-

SCREENPLAY: A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sandwich, adapted from Childress’s novel of the same title, New World Pictures, 1977. TELEVISION: Wine in the Wilderness, in “On Being Black,” Boston, WGBH, 4 March 1969;

67

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Alice Childress

with the publication of Like One of the Family, Lang¬ ston Hughes’s Simple stories still outstripped Mil¬ dred’s popularity. (In fact, Mildred may have been inspired by Simple.) When Childress treated in¬ terracial love in Wedding Band: A Love!Hate Story in Black and White (produced in 1966), the topic, even to the Southern setting, perhaps received more ex¬ posure from Hughes in Mulatto, and it definitely ran more against the grain of the Black is Beautiful decade than Childress’s detractors would have wished. Childress’s politics, even when not clearly known by her critics, may also have contributed to her critical obscurity. Her Mildred sketches were originally written in the 1950s for Paul Robeson’s Freedom, which a few critics in later years would judge to have been an unfortunate publication be¬ cause of Robeson’s connections with the Commu¬ nist party and his ensuing difficulties with the U.S. government. Still, Childress would not, did not, has not compromised in her determination to choose her own path. Choosing her own path began as early as 1943, when Childress started what would turn into an •eleven-year association with the original American Negro Theatre in Harlem. She appeared in On Strivers Row (1940) and Natural Man (1941). It was with this group that Childress appeared in the opening cast of the American version of Anna Lucasta (1944). Among the famous black actors who appeared at some time in the show were Hilda Simms, Frederick O’Neal, Alvin Childress, Earle Hyman, Herbert Henry, Canada Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Isabelle Cooley, Sidney Poitier, Maxwell Glanville, Duke Williams, Frank Silvera, John Proc¬ tor, Doris Block, and Monte Hawley. Sidney Poitier, who was with the show between 1946 and 1949, remembers Childress: “I developed a very special relationship with a woman named Alice Childress, an actress and a writer. I learned more from her than I did from any other person I knew during that period of my life — things about life that no one else ever took the time to explain. She opened me up to positive new ways of looking at myself and others, and she encouraged me to explore the his¬ tory of black people (as opposed to ‘colored’ peo¬ ple). She was also instrumental in my meeting and getting to know the remarkable Paul Robeson, and for that alone I shall always be grateful.” Childress also wrote for the American Negro Theatre; her one-act play, Florence, which treats an encounter between a black woman and a white woman in ajim Crow train station waiting room, was produced by the group in 1949. Childress studied for eight years

phy which guides her writings may also be summed up as a refusal to exchange dignity for pay. Chil¬ dress has always spoken out for accurate portrayals of black life and characters in the theater, and she has continued to write of black life and issues in her fiction when others would have perhaps preferred that she be quiet. Like Cora James Anderson Green in A Short Walk (1979), she will not allow the slaveholders to claim any more pay from her black soul; she belongs to herself. Alice Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1920. She was taken to New York at the age of five and grew up in Harlem. She is “mostly self-educated,” although she attended grade school and three years of high school in Harlem; she attended Public School 81, The Julia Ward Howe Junior High School, and Wadleigh High School. On 17 July 1957, Childress married Nathan Woodard, a musician with whom she has collabo¬ rated on creative projects. The marriage was her second; she has a daughter, Jean, from a first mar¬ riage. Childress’s life has been a busy one of play¬ writing, fiction writing, acting (in television, radio, film, and stage productions), directing, writing for scholarly and popular mediums, and lecturing. Childress has written plays for children as well as for adult audiences. She lja4 also written screen¬ plays, which is part of her bid to make sure black characters are portrayed realistically in the media. Ever busy and ever refusing to compromise her creative principles, Childress’s reputation as a writ¬ er has been somewhat obscured; she calls herself “one of the best known of unknown persons.” She has not received much critical attention despite her consistent productivity in a wide variety of genres. Theater histories make only passing mention of her, even though she was in the forefront of impor¬ tant developments in that medium. Literary critics have virtually ignored her short fiction, children’s books, and novels. Perhaps, as with Zora Neale Hurston, Chil¬ dress was overshadowed by other trends and writ¬ ers during her groundbreaking years. When her Trouble in Mind (produced in 1955) won the first Obie Award in 1956 for best original, off-Broadway play, there was more interest in integration thgn in the stance of affirmation of blackness that the major character takes. And Childress’s play was a mere three years before the most integrationist of plays, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (produced in 1959), dissolved memory of others not in that vein. Back in 1956, too, when Childress culminated her newspaper serialization of Mildred’s exploits

68

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Alice Childress

under ANT instructors, served as drama coach to the group, directed for one year, was a member of the board of directors, and served as personnel director for a while in the absence of Frederick O’Neal. While Childress worked to establish herself as writer and actress, she also worked to support her¬ self and her young daughter, Jean. She sometimes carried the child with her to the numerous jobs she held, which included assistant machinist, photo re¬ toucher, domestic worker, saleslady, and insurance agent. The variety of experience and the constant contact with working-class people undoubtedly in¬ fluenced Childress’s approach to the development of characters and her overall writing philosophy. Her characters in fiction and drama include domes¬ tic workers, washerwomen, seamstresses, and the unemployed, as well as dancers, artists, and teachers. She used Florence, a play which deals themati¬ cally with maids, as a part of her adaptation of Hughes’s Simple Speaks His Mind for the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Called Just a Little Simple, the play had veteran actor Kenneth Mannigault in the leading role and opened at Club Baron in September 1950. Loften Mitchell says of Childress’s work that “in a highly skillful manner she used Jess Semple as the master-of-ceremonies in a Harlem variety show. She wove several of Hughes’ sketches into her adaptation and she included her play, Flor¬ ence. . . .” The show was a hit, but the producers refused to allow it to be moved to a Broadway house. “They said the purpose of doing the show uptown was to build a Negro theatre, not to hold a series of tryouts for Broadway.” Childress, like James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), was not particularly in¬ terested in presenting work that was “palatable to white audiences.” Florence is about rejecting stereotyped roles, like that of maid, in favor of more forbidden and challenging roles, like that of dra¬ matic actress. Childress continued the theme of not compromising the goal of artistic pursuit in Trouble in Mind, which was first presented at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York on 4 November 1955. Of the play, Mitchell writes: “This was a charming comedy about a group of Negro actors going into rehearsal for a forthcoming production, and it made some acidic comments about white attitudes toward the Negro in the theatre. When a young Negro is applying for a job, he admits to an elderly actress that he has no experience. The elderly ac¬ tress promptly replies: ‘Just tell the Man you were in The Green Pastures or Anna Lucasta. All Negro actors

Alice Childress, circa 1973. Childress calls herself a “chame¬ leon, ” explaining that she looks like a different person in every photograph (Joseph Abeles and Sy Friedman).

were in those shows.’ ” The play is much more sub¬ stantive and serious than Mitchell’s comment would suggest, and it reflects more of the blues theme on which its title is based. Wiletta Mayer, the aging, insecure black character in the play who tries to hold on to a semblance of dignity in the face of playing many menial roles, loses again when her fellow actors opt for work instead of principle. It is a matter of saving dignity or paying the rent, and Wiletta is one of many casualties from the years when black performers were trying to make head¬ way in the theater. The play “was subsequently optioned for Broadway, but the demands for changes to meet the taste of an expense-account audience forced Miss Childress to withdraw her play.” Childress says: “ ‘Trouble In Mind’ was optioned by Edward Eliscu for Broadway produc¬ tion. It was held for two years and then abandoned as a poor risk for commercial theatre. The British Broadcasting Corporation did it for one air per¬ formance in October of 1964 and repeated it in November.” The play was to miss Broadway pro¬ duction several times, as did Wedding Band. Trouble

69

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Alice Childress

man and a woman who, but for circumstances of nature, might have been happy. The action takes place in backyards and back rooms of three houses where children and peddlers share the stage with the plagued lovers. Dialogue is replete with racial and ethnic insults and uglinesses, and the backdrop provided is war and influenza. Characters go about their lives under impossible circumstances at worst, and trying ones at best. Wedding Band, like most of Childress’s plays, contains more dialogue and quiet action than star¬ tling movement. Julia moves into a new neighbor¬ hood, meets the neighbors, is visited by Herman who is taken sick, taken away, and returns to die. Childress is interested in raising issues and making her audience think; there are no grand solutions in the play. Herman’s mother and sister are perhaps still as untouched as they were before, and the black characters are perhaps just as quietly exploitative and insensitive, but the issue of miscegenation has been raised and the audience is left to ponder it. Childress has also called attention to the peculiar plight of black women under laws such as those in South Carolina. Julia and Herman cannot marry because of race; another woman whose husband deserted her is caught because she wants to remar¬ ry, but the state did not permit divorce. Conse¬ quently, she cannot receive military benefits from the man with whom she has spent over eleven years of her life and by whom she has a child. Inhumane laws combine with inhumanity to make life much more of a struggle than it needs to be. The play was performed at the University of Michigan in December 1966 with a cast headed by Ruby Dee, Abbey Lincoln, and Moses Gunn. Re¬ views were “glowing,” but, although a Broadway opening was discussed for the spring of 1967, it was never presented there. Options for Broadway pro¬ duction had been held on the play over a three-year period earlier in the 1960s, but it took until 1972 for the play to get a major production by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Rosemary Curb comments on this phenomenon: “Exactly why it took so long for Wedding Band to reach large American audiences can only be guessed. Childress herself guesses that the content was unpopular. However, no producer told her directly: ‘We just don’t do serious plays featuring middle aged black women,’ or ‘We’ll only consider an interracial love story if it’s scandalous, violent, and terribly roman¬ tic.’ Nobody refused to produce it because the his¬ torical period play was out of vogue. Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that a play such as Wedding Band was doomed to be passed over in the sensational

in Mind, however, was highly touted in offBroadway circles. Also in 1956, Childress published Like One of the Family . . . Conversations from a Domestic’s Life, sketches which had appeared in Freedom and would continue in the Baltimore Afro-American in a column entitled “Here’s Mildred.” The sassiness shown by the maid Mildred perhaps reflected the sassiness in Childress’s own attitudes and philosophies. Mildred is a day worker who talks back to her white em¬ ployers when she disapproves of their attitudes. She also tells them how to raise their children, what work she will and won’t do, and what the bound¬ aries of their social interactions should be. Mildred is witty, tolerant, angry, caring, forgiving, defiant and occasionally disgusted, mixed emotions with which her newspaper audience could easily identify from their own domestic situations. Mildred, who talks to her audience and Marge in pithy five-toseven-hundred-word sketches, showed the many ways in which black people in confining job situa¬ tions did not have to be confined psychologically. Two superbly executed conversations, “The Pocketbook Game” and “The Health Card,” have been frequently anthologized. With the publication of Like One of the Family in 1956 and the end of the column, “Here’s Mildred,” in 1958, Childress focused on writing plays in the 1960s. The controversial nature of her subject mat¬ ter made easy production impossible. Wedding Band is subtitled A Love!Hate Story in Black and White', it deals with the love affair of a black woman and a white man in South Carolina in 1918, set against the backdrop of World War I. The affair has been going on for ten years against the wishes of both blacks and whites, but the blacks are more tolerant than the whites. Although the couple wishes to mar¬ ry, South Carolina law prevented intermarriage be¬ tween blacks and whites. Herman celebrates the tenth anniversary of their affair by bringing Julia a wedding band, which she must wear on a chain around her neck, and from his bakery a cake, which no one else can share with them. The couple’s fanta¬ sies of escape are hampered by the fact that Her¬ man is not rich and his meager bakery earnings must first go to repay a loan to his mother. Julia is a seamstress, the other realistic element that makes the story defy the usual sentimentality of highflung, glittering, romantic interracial love stories. The play culminates in Herman’s death, not in escape to New York, and Herman has died from influenza, not in any highfalutin defense of honor. Wedding Band is not a sensational play. It is a down-to-earth presentation of the love between a

70

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Alice Childress

sixties and early seventies because it offers an un¬ bloody plot with unglamorous characters, in an un¬ fashionable setting, in an unflinchingly realistic style.”

bon” is “Black girlhood.” The second is of a beauti¬ ful woman “draped in startling colors of African material,” the “Mother Africa” part of the depic¬ tion. The third part is incomplete because Bill, the artist, has not yet found the black woman unattrac¬ tive enough to serve as his model. “She’s not painted yet. . . . She’s gonna be the kinda chick that is grass roots, . . . no, not grass roots. ... I mean she’s underneath the grass roots. The lost woman, . . . what the society has made out of our women. She’s as far from my African queen as a woman can get and still be female, she’s as close to the bottom as you can get without crackin’ up ... . she’s ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude . . . vulgar ... a poor, dumb chick that’s had her behind kicked until it’s numb . . . and the sad part is . . . she ain’t together, you know, . . . there’s no hope for her.” The unset¬ tling circumstances of a riot lead Bill’s middle-class friends to bring such a woman to his apartment to pose for him; she is wig-wearing, loud, incorrect. As the play unfolds, though, ugly Tommy becomes the beautiful wine in the wilderness about which Bill and his friends know so little. She is not romance, innocence, or perfection. She is the true art of life. They have allowed white evaluations of black womanhood and their own aspirations to middleclass values to separate them from the Tommys of the world, but she is indeed the essence of black womanhood and the hope for the future (her full name is Tomorrow Marie). Wine in the Wilderness, like Childress’s other plays, is designed to be in¬ structive; those who do not know the meaning of true revolution are informed, and they grow to understand the true meaning of black history and black beauty. It was also in the 1960s that Childress was able to spend time in communities of writers and schol¬ ars. She spent the month of June 1965 at the MacDowell Colony, and it was also in 1965 that she appeared on a BBC panel discussion on “The Ne¬ gro in the American Theatre.” She appeared with James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, Langston Hughes, and Geoffrey Bridson of BBC. A similar panel dis¬ cussion, “What Negro Playwrights Are Saying,” presented at the New School for Social Research in 1965, featured Childress, Lonne Elder, Loften Mitchell, William Branch, LeRoi Jones, Douglas Turner Ward, and critics Richard Gilman and Gor¬ don Rogoff of Newsweek and the Tulane Drama Re¬ view, respectively. Yet another such conference was presented at Fisk University in June 1966 with Chil¬ dress and Mitchell the featured guests. Childress also spent two years in the 1960s on a Harvard appointment to the Radcliffe Institute for Indepen-

In 1969, Childress completed String (1971), an instructive tale about appearances and belief which is “a very free adaptation” of Guy de Maupassant’s “A Piece of String.” An old man, obviously lower class and shabby, picks up a piece of string at a picnic about the same time a successful business¬ man loses a wallet. The other picnickers will later assume that the inarticulate old man, who is sensi¬ tive about his habit of picking up useless things, has also picked up the wallet. His physical appearance makes his innocence hard to prove to the people who view themselves above him socially, and his inarticulateness solidifies his guilt. He is convicted by circumstances and by the inability of human beings to believe in one another when even the slightest opportunity is presented for them to be¬ lieve the contrary. Mojo (produced in 1970), which appears in the same volume with String, is subtitled A Black Love Story; it spans many years and other involvements. Teddy and Irene remain friends af¬ ter a failed marriage and share a bond which pre¬ cludes other relationships. When Irene returns af¬ ter a long absence and shortly before she is to undergo a major operation, she and Teddy relive their years together, and he discovers the ultimate sacrifice she has made for him. She dissolved their marriage when she sensed he desperately needed his freedom, and she went off to have their child alone (Teddy never knew of the pregnancy); she gave the child up for adoption to a “professional” family. Reunited physically as they have always been spiritually, the lovers await what may be a fatal operation for Irene. Both plays highlight Chil¬ dress’s aspiration to bring forth the best in human beings, especially under less than desirable condi¬ tions. People seldom confront others in a trusting way, and both plays advocate that kind of openness and trust. Childress says that both plays have been performed in colleges “a great deal.” Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama (1969) has also had “plenty of performances in schools and community groups.” The play, a timely one for the 1960s, had been commissioned by WGBH in Bos¬ ton, Massachusetts, for its series “On Being Black” (and later ironically banned from TV in Alabama). It takes place during a riot, at the home of a painter who is intent upon capturing the essence of black womanhood in a triptych of paintings which he calls “Wine in the Wilderness.” One painting of a “charming little girl in Sunday dress and hair rib¬

71

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Alice Childress

trait of a thirteen-year-old drug addict who early graduated from smoking marijuana to “mainlin¬ ing.” Benjie Johnson, the young addict, shares the telling of his story with ten other people in the novel. Structured in twenty-three short narratives comparable to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying {1930) and Ernest J. Gaines’s “Just Like A Tree” (in Bloodline, 1968), the novel allows a look at attitudes held by principals, teachers, pushers, parents, and peers toward a young drug addict. At school, Benjie tests the loyalty of black Nigeria Greene against the prac¬ tical concerns of white Bernard Cohen, and at home he tests the love and loyalty of his mother and grandmother as well as the faithfulness of his com¬ mon-law stepfather. The ghetto environment forces Benjie to see himself as a man, not as a thirteen-year-old, because, he maintains, you have to start being responsible for yourself after about age eight. The existential environment of the ghet¬ to demands that one be responsible for one’s self. In the portion of the story revealed to us, Benjie is caught “nodding” in school, is expelled to a hospital for “detoxification,” and is let out on a probationary basis. Benjie had stolen money from his grandmother to support his habit before going into the hospital, and he steals his stepfather’s best suit and coat to sell for drug money once he is out of the hospital. This theft supports Benjie’s one last fling with drugs, for indeed he seems to be on his way to recovery by the end of the novel. The story reveals the helplessness of parents to rescue their children from forces outside the home, and it illustrates how political and personal goals of those in the school system intensify the detrimental effects of those forces. Greene must put Benjie’s addiction in the context of his national¬ ism, and Cohen must put it in the context of his status as a martyr going against the odds to teach children in the ghetto. The principal sees the bust as an embarrassment to his career, coming just three years before retirement. None of them really cares for Benjie as Benjie. And he feels that. His cry throughout the novel is for someone to believe in him, even on those occasions when he presents him¬ self as a little scoundrel who would test Job’s ability to believe in him. Yet Butler Craig, the stepfather, takes on the challenge. He saves Benjie from falling from a rooftop when he is trying to escape after having stolen a neighbor’s toaster. That act of com¬ mitment to save Benjie’s life, when even Benjie does not believe it deserves to be saved, puts Butler on a new level of respect for Benjie. At the end of the novel, it is Butler who stands waiting for Benjie to keep his appointment at the rehabilitation center.

dent Study (now the Mary Ingraham Bunting Insti¬ tute). She was playwright-scholar in residence in Cambridge between 1966 and 1968 and worked on The African Garden (1971) during that time. The 1970s saw Childress traveling widely out¬ side the United States before returning to her writ¬ ing. She visited the Soviet Union in 1971 to study their culture and art, and she visited Mainland Chi¬ na in 1973 to observe the theater arts in Peking and Shanghai. In 1974, she visited Ghana, West Africa, for the summer drama festival at the University of Ghana. The 1970s also saw her exploring other mediums. She wrote an adolescent novel—as well as the screenplay when it was made into a movie— two plays for children, and a novel for adults. She also received a number of recognitions and awards during this period. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sand¬ wich, designed to appeal to an adolescent audience, was published in 1973. It is an impressionistic por-

Alice Childress Author of RAINBOW

JORDAN

Benjie is young, black, and well on his way to being hooked on heroin. Brilliant exciting entertaining The New York Times

Front cover for the 1982 paperback edition of Childress’s extraordinarily popular novel for young adults

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Benjie does not show during the course of Butler’s narrative, but we are led to believe that enough good faith has been instilled in the boy through Butler’s actions so that maybe Benjie will show up. What we see of Benjie’s mother, Rose, shows that she is like many black women in the city. Before Butler’s arrival, she tried to support her son and her mother, an almost impossible situation for anyone to give guidance to a growing boy. Benjie is there¬ fore left to explore the streets while his mother works, to experiment with marijuana at the home of a friend whose mother is also absent, and to begin using hard drugs, a habit he must support by steal¬ ing.

related to a Black-ass nigga on this earth. All them that wanta die let em put a five in my pocket, and I’ll help em to slowly make it on outta here, with a smile on their face . . . and one on mine. Less of them makes more room for me! The hell with the junkie, the wino, the capitalist, the welfare, the world . . . yeah, and fuck you, too!” Replete with the pusher and other characters, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich was made into a movie for which Childress wrote the screenplay. Using the same title as the novel, the movie starred Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, Larry Scott, and Glynn Turman. The novel and the movie brought several awards to Childress. In 1974, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich won the Jane Addams Honor Award for a young adult novel. In 1975, it received the Achievement Award from the New York Club of The National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. Also in 1975, it won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award from the University of Wisconsin. The Virgin Islands Film Festival Award was presented to Childress in 1977 for the best screenplay of the year. When, in 1977, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame established a new category of award, it also went to Childress for Hero: appropriately, the new category was called the Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts. Hero was to be the first book banned in a Savannah, Georgia, school library since Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was also one of nine books banned in the mid-1970s by the school board of Island Trees, Long Island, New York. It was reinstated in the school libraries there by the order of the Supreme Court in 1983. The mid-1970s saw the publication of two children’s plays by Childress, When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975) and Let’s Hear It for the Queen (1976). The first is about a summer Harriet Tubman spent washing clothes in a hotel in New Jersey in order to earn more money for her Underground Railroad. The second play, which Childress wrote in celebra¬ tion of the birthday of Marilyn Alice Lee, her granddaughter, is a retelling of the story of the queen of hearts and the stolen tarts. Designed for easy community or backyard presentation, the play also focuses on togetherness and the understanding of human needs. Although she was writing new plays, her older ones were still being produced. Wedding Band opened in Atlanta in 1975, and Childress was made Honorary Citizen of Atlanta in celebration of that opening. The play was also performed on ABC in 1973. In the New York area, eight of the 168 local stations would not carry it, and others did so only

As the attitude of Walter the pusher makes clear, Benjie’s predicament is not a childish pastime that can be ignored. Benjie is merely considered a consumer for a product which Walter has no guilt about selling. Such a set of circumstances can only be combated by a combination of forces which must include the Greenes, the Cohens, the principals, the friends, and the parents. To be alone is to be lost, and sadly, Benjie sees aloneness as the state re¬ sponsible for his habit. Certainly he has friends, but it is precisely because of a challenge from a friend, a challenge which emphasizes his aloneness, that he decides to get the first hit of hard drugs. Childress’s novel is realistic without being brutal and instructive without being simply didac¬ tic. Childress succeeds well in capturing the person¬ alities and concerns of the many characters in the very short sketches in which they present them¬ selves. Verisimilitude is created not only by adher¬ ence to the reality of the drug scene but also in the language used. Childress uses an urban black di¬ alect which fits well the characters she has created. The novel opens with Benjie telling us about him¬ self: “Now I am thirteen, but when I was a chile, it was hard to be a chile because my block is a tough block and my school is a tough school. I’m not trying to cop out on what I do or don’t do cause man is man and chile is chile, but I ain’t a chile no more. Don’t nobody wanta be no chile cause, for some reason, it just hold you back in a lotta ways. . . . My block ain’t no place to be a chile in peace.” The voice and the language are perfectly suited to a young black boy who is far beyond his years in experience, but who belies his assumed manhood by the very protest he uses to assert it. The pusher’s defensive protest against the job he has and his defiant, don’t-give-adamn attitude are also captured in the dialect Chil¬ dress uses: “Me, I say screw the weak and screw the power. If it’s call free enterprise, then let it be free. Nother thing, if I had my way about it, I wouldn’t be

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Dust jacket for Childress’s childrens play about one summer in the life of Harriet Tubman

with eight dollars in back pay; she dies of a fever contracted during childbirth, and the child is given to the family which seems most able financially to take care of her and which seems to want her most. Cora grows more with Bill than with Etta; she fol¬ lows him to minstrel shows (a performing life-style Cora will later choose), and early on during her excursions with him she learns the meaning of ra¬ cial oppression and denial. Upon Bill’s death, when Cora is in her teens, Etta returns to Edisto Island and gives Cora in marriage to Kojie Anderson, a young man who seems to have everything going for him.

after midnight. Still, such reluctance did not affect substantially the overall reception of the drama. A Short Walk (1979), Childress’s second novel and her first one for adults, culminates her work for the 1970s. By following the character of Cora, who is born in South Carolina and migrates to New York and Harlem, Childress manages to chronicle sever¬ al historical events which affected black lives in the first half of the twentieth century, including the Garvey movement, lynchings and racism in general, and the Harlem riots of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Taking her adoptive father’s advice that life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, Cora sets out to make sure that her short walk will not be sacrificed to boredom and acquiescence; she sets out to live life as fully and as intensely as she can. When she collapses to her death on a sidewalk in New York in the mid-1940s, she has few regrets about choices she had made in her life. Cora was given to Bill and Etta James a few weeks after her birth and on the day of her mother’s funeral. The child was the product of the union of a sixteen-year-old black girl and the young white man for whose family she worked. The family quickly sent the young man away and sent the girl home

When life with Kojie becomes impossible for Cora because of his militarily organized house, his sexual idiosyncrasies, and finally his wife-beating, she escapes to New York and the apartment of a distant cousin. She learns to deal cards for house parties and sets the pattern which will help her cousins and neighbors survive during the Depres¬ sion. She meets up with her teenage love, Cecil Green, and joins him on the first cruise of the Frederick Douglass, a ship Marcus Garvey has bought for the Black Star Line. Lack of business acumen turns the two-month voyage into a disaster, but

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Cecil refuses to relinquish his vision of what Garvey and the line can mean to black people. They return to New York with a multitude of debts, but are romantically celebrated as heroes. Even when Cecil knows everything has fallen apart, that Garvey will be tried and deported, he continues to preach black nationalism from the street corners of Harlem. Cora is tied to him through love, and through the child to which she will shortly give birth. Over the next eighteen years, Cecil continues to be a romantic do-nothing and Cora continues to travel with her vaudeville show, or to give house parties to support herself and her child as well as their extended family. In later years, she secures a white patron and sets up a profitable gambling establishment which she runs until her death. The part ol the novel which deals with the trip of the Frederick Douglass to South America and Jamaica is the longest sustained stretch in the novel. After that, the novel revolves around four-to-fivepage vignettes taken from Cora’s short walk. She is on the road traveling at one point, but it is never made clear how that came about or exactly what it is she does on the road; Childress is more interested in the cumulative effect of various racial, economic,

and cultural events upon Cora. In another short sketch, she returns to Edisto Island for Etta’s funer¬ al when Delta, her daughter, is eight years old. The years in between are not mentioned. Later, Delta is off to college and trying to quit to join the navy. And Cecil is forever in and out of the picture as the idealistic father who cannot support his wife and child, but who loves them nonetheless. The vi¬ gnettes add up to a life lived daringly, with convic¬ tion, and with an acute instinct for survival. Childress often alternates her omniscient narration of the novel with Cora’s first-person narration. Since Cora’s first narration comes after she starts seeing Cecil as a teenager and around the time that Cecil is assaulted by three white boys, the shift in narration might be intended to suggest Cora’s maturing awareness of racial cruelty, that she is no longer the little girl protected by her father’s cognizance of the limitations put on black people. She must now confront those problems her¬ self and determine her own methods for dealing with them. The novel is broad in what it attempts to accomplish in the panorama of black life and yet personal enough to keep Cora’s life before us.

AM WALK COWARD, McCANM GEOGHEGAN

ALICE CHILDRESS

Dust jacket for Childress’s first novel for adults, which takes her heroine from her birth in South Carolina during the early 1900s to Harlem, where she dies in the mid-1940s

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staying involved with those groups which support

James P. Sloan, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called A Short Walk “a stately achievement.” Charles R. Larson admired the fast pace of Chil¬ dress’s dialog and “the vividness of her evocation of historic events and periods—especially black cultu¬ ral movements during the early part of this cen¬ tury.” He suspected that “the primary reason ‘A Short Walk’ will be read by subsequent generations lies in the novel’s wider theme—the black woman’s struggle for independence.” A reviewer in the New Yorker said of Cora that “despite the multiple frus¬ trations that she has endured as a black woman, she has had good times in good company and has never disguised her contempt for tyrants and idolaters. Alice Childress is in full command of her material, and her way of shifting, from chapter to chapter, between the third and first persons (and from there into dialect when Cora becomes excited) keeps the story spirited and fresh.” Critics of Childress’s dramas are equally prais¬ ing of her works. They generally agree that Chil¬ dress is an excellent playwright whose works have been underproduced. In “Three Writers and A Dream,” Loften Mitchell lamented the fact that Wedding Band, which he considers an “exceptionally well-written, humorous” and “positive” play, had not to that point received a “first-rate production.” Donald Evans expressed a similar lament about Trouble in Mind. Ruby Dee, who appeared in the University of Michigan production of Wedding Band as well as in the New York Shakespeare Festival production several years later, also has an insightful comment on Childress’s misfortunes in the theater; commenting on the lapse of years before Childress could get a major production for Wedding Band, she said: “There is a tragedy involved here that cannot be underestimated. Alice Childress is a splendid playwright, a veteran — indeed, a pioneer. She has won awards, acclaim, and everything but consistent productions. It is difficult to think of a play by a white writer earning the reviews that Wedding Band earned in 1965 and having to wait until 1973 to reach the New York stage. It proves one thing: We may salute and savor the glory of the black theatri¬ cal pioneer, but in a land where materialism is allimportant, the real salutes take longer.” For all the pioneering, groundbreaking, excellent work, worthy critical laurels have not yet fallen upon Chil¬ dress. And the greatest testament to her tal¬ ent—consistent production of her plays—has not yet been forthcoming. Yet Childress perseveres, staying visible to other writers and a small public, and some recognitions have been bestowed upon her. Also, she has continued her commitment by

the kind of work she does. Late in 1981, Alice Childress repeated the narrative style she had used in A Hero Ain t Nothin but a Sandwich in Rainbow Jordan, an¬ other adolescent novel. Structured in seventeen narrative sections delivered by fourteen-year-old Rainbow, her mother, Katherine (Kathie), and her foster parent, Josephine Lamont, the novel paints a picture of the young black female in an urban en¬ vironment who is frequently left to her own devices as a result of her mother’s absences. Rainbow, born to Kathie and Leroy when they are fifteen and sixteen, respectively, grows up more as her mother’s sister than as her daughter. She is some¬ times a liability to the young mother who wishes to establish other liaisons after Leroy’s early depar¬ ture, but who is prevented from doing so by her daughter’s presence and by her own tendency to instability. A go-go dancer in an environment where that genre is slowly becoming anachronistic, Kathie goes further and further away from her home base in New York to get “gigs.” Often depart¬ ing without notice to Rainbow, the woman wavers between her love for her child and her own desire for flashly clothes, men, and economic indepen¬ dence. Her disappearances mean that Rainbow, once again, will be picked up by the social worker and delivered to Josephine Lamont, whose middleclass home offers “interim” security for Rainbow. One such incident provides the central movement for the novel; the history of Kathie, Rainbow, and Josephine is provided as the background for this particular episode. Rainbow, who is equally as mature but much more in control of herself than Benjie in A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sandwich, tries to maneuver with dignity in a world which has determined from the beginning that she should be a loser. She makes B pluses and Bs on writing assignments, reads exten¬ sively, understands the psychology of the youth with whom she grows up, and knows beyond com¬ promise the pitfalls that await her in this environ¬ ment. She refuses to “put out” sexually for her boyfriend Eljay and is ready to confront the school¬ mates who will call her square. She hates visiting with “Miss Josie” but finds it easier to talk with her about some things than with Kathie. Proud and independent almost to a fault, unsure at times if she is taking the right course, Rainbow nevertheless has a kind of presence of mind which rescues her even when she almost decides to sleep with Eljay. Through Harold Lamont leaving his wife and Kathie deserting Rainbow for almost a month,

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Childress with her husband Nathan Woodard, who composed the music for Sea Island Song (courtesy of Leonard Peters).

Throughout the many years and various pub¬ lications and productions, Childress has been a member of several professional organizations and groups, and she has received diverse honors. She is a member of the Authors League of the Dramatists Guild, and she was instrumental in the early 1950s in initiating advanced, guaranteed pay for union off-Broadway contracts in New York. Just a Little Simple and Gold Through the Trees (produced in 1952) were all-union shows. She is also a member of American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Society of Choreographers and Stage Directors, P.E.N., the Harlem Writers’ Guild, and she has been a member and served on the executive councils of the Dramatists Guild and Writers East. Her lecturing activities and her community work, such as serving on the Advisory Board of Frances Delafield Community City Hospital and being in¬ volved with the Radcliffe Club of New York, are legion. On a Rockefeller grant administered through The New Dramatists, she was a writ¬ er-observer with the original companies of The Sound of Music and A Thousand Clowns. She received

Josephine and Rainbow come to a new understand¬ ing of their positions as rejected females in the world. They decide that they share a bond which will justify Rainbow staying on for six more months to allow Kathie time “to get her head together.” In the final scene in the book, Josephine accompanies Rainbow to school to meet with two teachers who need a guardian’s permission for Rainbow to take sex education classes. In Rainbow Jordan, Childress is as acutely aware of the problems of the urban poor as she was in A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, and she gives us a brief glance at the urban black middle class. Whatever their economic status, the characters make hard choices and try to find a way to live in a world which would squeeze most of the life out of them. Middle- and working-class blacks are brought together on the basis of human needs, and genera¬ tions close the gaps between themselves for similar reasons. While not as provocative as Hero, Rainbow Jordan nevertheless is a sensitive, readable book which entertains quietly and teaches without being overly didactic.

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Alice Childress

Scenes from Sea Island Song: (top) Learie J ones (with hat) and Stephen Bodmer; (bottom,front row) Thelathia Barnes, Martha Regina, Deborah Weathers, Denise Gray; (back row) Learie Jones, Stephen Bodner, and Guy Dennis (courtesy of Leonard Peters)

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a grant from the John Golden Fund for Playwrights in 1957. In 1979, Alice Childress Week was official¬ ly observed in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, for the opening of Sea Island Song; Chil¬ dress had completed the play in 1977. She had been selected by the South Carolina Arts Commission to write about the Gullah-speaking people of the Georgia Sea Islands.

Bowker, 1977), pp. 46-47; James A. Page, Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), pp. 41-42; Arata, More Black American Playwrights: A Bibliogra¬ phy (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978), pp. 57-59.

The few recognitions are still a long way from what a talented person like Childress deserves. Her insistence on dignity has been costly, inasmuch as she has sometimes had to refuse lucrative offers; nonetheless, what has not been received in material goods and critical acclaim has been balanced by the thoroughness of the support she has received from her small public. She continues to read her works to community and church groups and in the homes of close friends. Some of her writings have deliberate¬ ly not been submitted for consideration for publica¬ tion. Even so, her characters representing the gen¬ teel poor continue to have their select audience, and Childress continues in her creation of them. In the early 1980s Childress collaborated with her hus¬ band Nathan Woodard on a musical entitled Gullah. The show was produced at the University of Mas¬ sachusetts, Amherst, in the spring of 1984.

References: Doris E. Abramson, The Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (New York: Co¬ lumbia University Press, 1969), pp. 188-204, 258-259; Janet Brown, Feminist Drama: Definitions and Critical Analysis (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979), pp. 56-70; Rosemary Curb, “An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress’ Wedding Bandf MELUS, 7 (Winter 1980): 57-68; Ruby Dee section, in Voices of the Black Theatre, edited by Loften Mitchell (Clifton, N.J.: J. F. White, 1975), pp. 221-222; Donald Evans, “Bring It All Back Home,” Black World, 20 (February 1971): 41-45; Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Harris, “ ‘I wish I was a poet’: The Character as Artist in Alice Childress’s Like One of the Fami¬ ly,” Black American Literature Forum, 14 (Spring 1980): 24-30, Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Enter¬ tainment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1967); Jeanne-Marie A. Miller, “Images of Black Women in Plays by Black Playwrights,” College Lan¬ guage Association Journal, 20 (June 1977): 494507; Loften Mitchell, Black Drama: The Story of the Amer¬ ican Negro in the Theatre (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967); Mitchell, “Three Writers and A Dream,” Crisis, 72 (April 1965): 219-223.

Bibliographies: James V. Hatch, Black Image on the American Stage: A Bibliography of Plays and Musicals, 1770-1970 (New York: DBS Publications, 1970), pp. 74, 89; Ann Allen Shockley and Sue P. Chandler, Living Black American Authors: A Biographical Directory (New York: Bowker, 1973), p. 27; Theressa Gunnels Rush, Carol Fairbanks, and Esther Spring Arata, Black American Writers Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliograph¬ ical Dictionary, volume 1 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1975), pp. 149-151; Esther Spring Arata and Nicholas John Rotoli, Black American Playwrights: 1800 to the Present: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NT: Scarecrow, 1976), pp. 46-49; Hatch, Black Playwrights, 1823-1977 (New York:

79

Ossie Davis (18 December 1917-

)

Michael E. Greene North Carolina A & T State University

See also the Davis entry in DLB 7, Twentieth-Century Dramatists. BOOKS: Purlie Victorious (New York: French, 1961); Purlie (New York: French, 1971); Escape to Freedom: A Play About Young Frederick Doug¬ lass (New York: Viking, 1978); Fangston: A Play (New York: Delacorte, 1982). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Goldbnckers of 1944, Liberia, 1944; Alice in Wonder, New York, Elks Community Theatre, 15 September 1952; revised as The Big Deal, New York, New Playwrights Theatre, 7 March 1953; Purlie Victorious, New York, Cort Theatre, 7 March 1953; adapted as Purlie by Davis, Philip Rose, Peter Udell, and Gary Geld, New York, Broadway Theatre, 15 March 1970; Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir, Santa Barbara, Uni¬ versity of California, Summer 1968; Escape to Freedom, New York, Town Flail, 8 March 1976.

f Ossie Davis (Gale International Portrait Gallery)

SCREENPLAYS: Gone are the Days, adapted from Davis’s Purlie Victorious, Hammer Brothers, 1963; Cotton Comes to Harlem, by Davis and Arnold Perl, United Artists, 1970.

domways, 5 (Summer 1965): 396-402; “Why I Eulogized Malcolm X,” Negro Digest, 15 (February 1966): 64-66; “f light from Broadway,” Negro Digest, 15 (April 1966): 14-19; “The English Language is My Enemy!,” Negro His¬ tory Bulletin, 30 (April 1967): 18; “Nat Turner: Hero Reclaimed,” Freedomways, 8 (Summer 1968): 230-232.

OTHER: “The Wonderful World of Law and Order,” in Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, edited by Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 154180; Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir, in The Black Teacher and the Dramatic Arts, A Dialogue, Bibliography, and Anthology, edited by William R. Reardon and Thomas D. Pawley (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970).

Ossie Davis is best known as an actor, but his accomplishments extend well beyond the stage. In the theater, in motion pictures, and in television he has won praise both for his individual perform¬ ances and those he has given with his wife, Ruby Dee. He has, however, also been a writer, director, producer, social activist, and community leader. His

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Purlie Told Me!,” Freedomways, 2 (Spring 1962): 155-159; “The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry,” Free-

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Ossie Davis

reputation as a playwright rests primarily on his play Purlie Victorious (produced in 1953), which ran on Broadway for over seven months (and in which he played the title role), and on his adaptation of that play for the musical Purlie in 1970. Davis has also written a number of other plays for theater and screen, as well as several critical essays which reflect his social activism and his ideas on the function of art in society.

time he presented his first play, an army entertain¬ ment called Goldbrickers of 1944). After the service he returned to Georgia but was called back to New York in 1946 to play the title role in Jeb on Broad¬ way (his costar was Ruby Dee, whom he married in 1948). The acting roles came quickly after the criti¬ cal attention he gained for his performance in Jeb. Among his roles were Jacques in The Wisteria Trees (1950), the part of Gabriel in Green Pastures (1951), and Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (opposite Ruby Dee, after Sidney Poitier left the cast) in 1959. In addition, he began to get roles in movies and television, including the leading role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1955), and Teacher, Teacher, for which he won an Emmy in 1969. By this time he had also begun to direct and write films and was the author of the scripts of Cotton Comes to Harlem (produced in 1970) and Countdown at Kusini (produced in 1975). Davis’s career as a playwright grew partly from his early concern with finding ways to express the black experience. His first important work was Alice in Wonder, first staged in 1952 as a one-act play and then expanded in 1953 as The Big Deal for an off-Broadway theater. The play centers around the moral dilemma of a woman who recognizes that her husband, a singer, has compromised his principles by accepting a position in public relations for a broadcasting firm, and then, in order to keep the position, has worked to undermine black activism by testifying in Washington on the political activities of another black singer. One critic called The Big Deal “more of a tract than a play,” but it did bring Davis public recognition and intensified his concern with the development of a theater embodying black issues. Purlie Victorious, Davis’s best-known play, is, in effect, a Southern fable of right against wrong, with Purlie’s faith in the cause of equality triumphing over the bigotry of Of Cap’n Cotchipee, the local redneck aristocrat. As the play opens, Purlie Victo¬ rious Judson returns home to Waycross, Georgia, full of enthusiasm in his new calling of preacher and bound to buy and restore Big Bethel, a dilapi¬ dated barn of a church. He has with him Lutiebelle Gussiemae Jenkins, a naive, pretty girl who worships “Reb’n Purlie.” Big Bethel belongs to Of Cap’n, and Purlie needs five hundred dollars to buy it. Of Cap’n is also holding five hundred dollars, money that had been left to Purlie’s Aunt Henrietta by an elderly white woman. In order to get the money, Purlie plans to pass Lutiebelle off as his dead Cousin Bee, who would have inherited the money from Aunt Henrietta. The plot revolves

Davis was born in Cogdell, Georgia, in 1917, the son of a railway foreman. With his parents, Kince Charles and Laura Cooper Davis, he spent his childhood traveling through rural Georgia, un¬ til they settled in the town of Waycross. He attended Center High School, where he first began to act in and write plays. After graduation he left Waycross for Washington, D.C., and attended Howard Uni¬ versity where his interest in drama was encouraged by Dr. Alain Locke, the philosopher and drama critic. Davis left Howard in 1938 after his junior year and, hitchhiking with thirty dollars in his pock¬ et, arrived in New York City. He became a member of the Rose McLendon Players in Harlem in 1941 until he went into the U.S. Army as a surgical tech¬ nician in Liberia during World War II (at which

Since they first met in the 1940s, Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee, have played opposite one another in numerous dramatic productions (Gale International Portrait Gallery).

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Ossie Davis

Davis was one of many black actors and writers who strongly objected to William Styrons depiction of Nat Turner. This public statement appeared in Black Theatre, no. 2 (1969).

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in Gone Are the Days, the 1964 movie version of Purlie Victorious (Memory Shop)

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Ossie Davis

around the many things that go wrong with the scheme. In the play Davis also presents a spectrum of different ways blacks respond to poverty and oppression. Each character is, to some extent, a stereotype. Purlie’s brother Gitlow, an “Uncle Tom” type, is praised by Of Cap’n for being one of the old-fashioned “Good, honest, hard-working cotton choppers.” Gitlow’s wife Missy is a motherly type whose underlying strength reinforces Purlie. Lutiebelle is an ignorant innocent who progresses from hardly being able to speak without referring to the wisdom of Miz Emmylou, her white em¬ ployer, to being able to stand up to Of Cap’n’s advances: “I’m clean; I’m honest, and I work hard,” she exclaims, “but one thing: I don’t stand for no stuff from them white folks.” Although Of Cap’n sees through the scheme—despite all Purlie’s coaching, Lutiebelle signs her own name on Of Cap’n’s receipt instead of Cousin Bee’s—Purlie gets his church anyway. Charlie, Of Cap’n’s son, who is as naively liberal as his father is a knee-jerk bigot, registers the deed for Big Bethel in Purlie’s

name instead of Of Cap’n’s. The resulting shock kills Of Cap’n (“The first man I ever seen in all this world to drop dead standing up!”), and the play closes with a short epilogue, Purlie preaching the funeral in Big Bethel and telling the congregation to “Accept in full the sweetness of your blackness . . . keep freedom in the family, do what you can for the white folks, and write me in care of the post office.” Many critics praised Purlie Victorious. Howard Taubman of the New York Times called it a “miracle of uninhibited and jovial speaking out,” and recog¬ nized that “While ‘Purlie Victorious’ keeps you chuckling and guffawing, it unrelentingly forces you to feel how it is to inhabit a dark skin in a hostile or, at best, grudgingly benevolent world.” In the Nation, Robert Hatch said that Davis “has written his play in a style of hallucinated grandiloquence and himself plays the title role with a selfintoxicated extravagance that lends a fantastic levity to his perfectly sober social point.” There were, however, other critics who were unamused. Robert Brustein, in thc New Republic, said that the play “has

Ossie Davis on the set for the 1973film Black Girl. Davis explained that he took the director’s job because “There are a lot of Black girls . . . including two of my own, who need something nice said about them.’’

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Ossie Davis

Davis’s vision is more hopeful. Purlie himself is the key to the positive aura: while not forgetting being horsewhipped years earlier by Of Cap’n, he keeps his eye on the constructive rather than the destruc¬ tive, and even though he plans for a moment to “call that buzzardly of bastard out” and beat him, he ends up winning out without the violence. The play also lacks bitterness because Davis makes each char¬ acter, white or black, a satirical object to some ex¬ tent. OF Cap’n is so much a grotesque parody of the excesses of Southern bigotry that the audience nev¬ er takes him as a serious threat, even though he represents centuries of oppression. Even Purlie, who postures with his “Africanic” nationalism too much, is an object of the satire. Another element in the play’s appeal is its mythic quality. What some critics saw as oversimpli¬ fication of the racial problem is, rather, a mythic treatment that first diagnoses and then heals racial wounds. The audience finds itself involved in a confrontation between a caricature of the worst aspects of old-South bigotry and a hero who brings a messianic message of faith in the beauty of black-

set back inter-racial harmony, by my calculations, about fourteen years. ... I must say that the hate and violence seething under the shut-my-mouf be¬ nevolence of these cardboard caricatures really gave me a start.” In the New Yorker, Edith Oliver believed that Davis was “playing it safe” and “used humor to distort the truth rather than to point it up.” One capsule review, in Theatre Arts, simply dismisses the play because it was “based on the assumption that there is a humorous side to the racial problem. Maybe there is, but Mr. Davis hasn’t found it.” Despite these negative voices, the bulk of the reviews were positive (albeit occasionally pa¬ tronizing), and one critic noted that he thought the play was in danger of being “overpraised.” Some of the critical comments were, of course, dictated by the particular critic’s response to its racial content: some white critics liked the play because it seemed more accommodating than inflammatory, while others disliked it because they were uncomfortable with the implications of its statement. While another playwright might have taken the same characters and plot and made a bitter play,

LANG5TON

DELACGRTE PRESS/NEW YORK

* A Play by Ossie Davis *

Dust jacket for Davis’s play about his friend Langston Hughes. Davis calls his character Purlie “a country cousin of] esse B. Simple, one of Langston Hughes’s best-known literary creations. ”

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Ossie Davis

ness. Purlie’s energetic determination to defy Of Cap’n by building, rather than destroying, domi¬ nates the play and defines its ambience. When Of Cap’n is buried standing, with his bullwhip, Con¬ federate flag, and pistol draped on his coffin, the racism of the Old South is symbolically buried. Purlie Victorious would probably have been written and received considerably differently had it been written ten years earlier or later. Davis himself recognized that his handling of stereotypes, black and white, would have been offensive had a white writer created them, and addressed the problem in a 1964 talk, “The Wonderful World of Law and Order.” He admits to using stereotypes but defends their usefulness, and says that the play is “satire, farce, slapstick, but underneath it all, a true appre¬ ciation of some more important aspects of life.” He also argues that one of his purposes in the play was to present justice as an ideal, as something that is not always the same as traditional law-and-order, which allows the Of Cap’ns of American society to win too often. Davis also says that black literature must “write protest,” and that the protest must be “loud, bitter and haranguing.” Yet Purlie Victorious lacks stridency. Masking genuine social commen¬ tary, camouflaging it with laughter to make it more palatable to 1961 white audiences, made the play successful. Though cautious in its courage, Purlie Victorious was a breakthrough, distancing its treat¬ ment of potentially explosive issues by developing those issues within a comically fabulistic context. Davis adapted Purlie Victorious for the screen as Gone are the Days, in 1963, and again played Pur¬ lie. He also collaborated with Peter Udell and Gary Geld in the Broadway musical version, Purlie, in 1970. The musical’s success was largely due to the Tony award-winning performances of Melba Moore and Cleavon Little, to the lilt of musical numbers like “I Got Love,” and to the moving spir¬ itual energy of “Walk Him Up the Stairs.” Most important, however, was the fact that Davis’s book kept the integrity of the original play, and many of the most effectively epigrammatic lines were left intact. “The music is only adequate,” said New York Times critic Clive Barnes, “but the book is so strong, the performance so magnificent, that this musical should have you calling out ‘Hallelujah.’ ” Davis’s two most recently published dramas, although not major works, demonstrate his skill as a writer and his concern with drama as a vehicle for defining the black experience. In 1970, Davis published Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir, a dramatic reading for five actors at lecterns. The reading presents a condensed biogra¬

phy of Ira Aldridge, the nineteenth-century black man who forged an extraordinary career in Europe as a Shakespearian actor. The ingenuity with which Davis has four of the actors float from role to role and the easy transitions between the phases of Aldridge’s struggle for acceptance make what could have been a dull academic exercise engrossing the¬ ater. At the end of the reading, Aldridge attributes his skill as an actor to the empathy his blackness has given him with all men and exclaims, “I consider it the glory of the art of acting that it can embody the brotherhood of all suffering humanity, not only in the idea, but in the flesh!” In 1978, Davis published Escape to Freedom (produced in 1976), the story of Frederick Doug¬ lass’s youth. Adapting material from Douglass’s autobiography, Davis traces the period from Doug¬ lass’s childhood in the 1820s in Maryland, to his escape to New York in 1838. The play is a series of scenes, in which all the players, except the one por¬ traying Douglass, act several parts. The scenes slide

Escape to Freedom THE STORY OF YOUNG FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A Play For Young People

by Ossie Davis

Samuel French, Inc. PRICE, $2.00

Davis adapted part of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography for this play about the young slave’s childhood in Maryland during the 1820s and his escape to New York in 1838.

85

Ossie Davis

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quickly from one place or time to another. Despite the fluidity of the play’s framework, the focus re¬ mains constant: Douglass’s recognition that free¬ dom lies in knowledge, and his persistence in learn¬ ing to read and write, despite laws against slaves reading and despite white masters suspicious of any slave who might think himself too human. Early in the play, before he knows the alphabet, Frederick “understood something that had been the greatest puzzle of all to me: the white man’s power to enslave the black man. Keep the black man away from the books, keep us ignorant, and we would always be his slaves! From that moment on I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Near the end, Frederick fights a white overseer and recognizes finally that “I ain’t scared now, and that makes me free!” The play concludes with his flight, using a free man’s pass, on a train for New York. Escape to Freedom is not a major work—its design is too sin¬ gle-planed, its purpose too clearly inspirational — but it is nevertheless effective, innovative drama. In recent years, Davis has spent much of his time lecturing, giving readings, and acting. The reputation he and Ruby Dee have earned as a hus¬ band-wife team comparable to the Lunt-Fontanne partnership has placed them in demand, particular¬ ly on college campuses. One of Davis’s most recent ventures has been a television anthology, “With Ossie and Ruby,” produced on public television in 1981; Arthur Young described it as a “kind of intel¬ lectual vaudeville show,” presenting many facets of

the black experience and offering outlets for many performers, “full of creative surprises.” Davis has also been involved in furthering dis¬ cussion of the proper role of the arts in the cause of black Americans. His interest in encouraging the careers of black artists led to his founding of the Institute of Cinema Artists in 1973, to train young blacks for media careers. In several essays and speeches in recent years, Davis has spoken of the need of the theater to address social issues, particu¬ larly those of the black community. The theater, he said in the keynote speech of the American Theater Association convention in 1982, needs to deal with “economic and social issues in a more forthright manner than we do now, without sacrificing the need to be artistic rather than merely polemical.” This balance between preserving the integrity of the theater and making it a means for exploring the social and racial issues of our times stands at the center of Davis’s career, not only as an actor but also as a writer. Biography: Lewis Funke, The Curtain Rises: The Story of Ossie Davis (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971).

Reference: Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre 1925-1959 (New York & London: Co¬ lumbia University Press, 1969).

Tom Dent (20 March 1932-

)

Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston!Downtown College

BOOKS: Magnolia Street (New Orleans: Privately printed, 1976); Blue Lights and River Songs (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1982).

Ritual Murder, New Orleans, Ethiopian Theater,

1976.

TELEVISION: “The Ghetto of Desire,” Look Up and Live, CBS, 17 August 1966.

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Negro Study No. 34A, New Orleans, Free Southern Theater, 1969; Riot Duty, New Orleans, Free Southern Theater, 1969;

OTHER: The Free Southern Theater by the Free South¬ ern Theater, edited by Dent, Gilbert Moses, and Richard Schechner (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1969).

Feathers and Stuff, New Orleans, Free Southern

Theater, 1970;

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Tom Dent

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Octave Lilly, Jr.: In Memoriam,” Black River Journal (Summer 1977): 11; “Interviews with Civil Rights Activists,” review of My Soul Is Rested by Howell Raines, Freedomways, 18 (Third Quarter 1978): 164-169; “Alternative Literatures of Afro-Americans,” re¬ views of The Third World Writer by Peter Nazareth, Revolutionary Love by Kalamu ya Salaam, and Born into a Felony, edited by Stew¬ art Brisby and Walt Sheppard, Freedomways, 19 (Second Quarter 1979): 103-106; “A Voice from a Tumultuous Time,” review of Medicine Man by Calvin Hernton, Obsidian, 6 (Spring/Summer 1980): 244-250; “Umbra Days,” Black American Literature Forum, 14 (Fall 1980): 105-108; “A Critical Look at Mardi Gras,” Jackson Advocate, 44 (18-24 February 1982): IB, 8B; “Annie Devine, Canton and a Quality of Committ¬ ment [sic],” Jackson Advocate, 44 (25 February 3 March 1982): 1-2B, 7B. Thomas Covington Dent was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a prominent and socially ac¬ tive family. His father, Dr. Albert Dent, was a for¬ mer president of Dillard University, and his mother, Jessie Covington Dent, was a former teacher and concert pianist, the first black musician honored with ajuilliard scholarship. Tom Dent’s grandparents were Dr. Jesse Covington, a leader in Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League and one of the founders of Riverside General Hospital, the first medical facility for blacks in Houston, and Belle Covington, an early leader in Texas interracial movements and a founder of the Blue Triangle YWCA. They exerted significant in¬ fluence on him during the early 1950s when he first began writing as a reporter, during his summers off from college, for the Houston Informer, the oldest continuing black newspaper published in the state of Texas. Educated at both public and private schools in New Orleans, Dent holds a bachelors degree in political science (1952) from Morehouse College and a masters in poetry (1974) from Goddard Col¬ lege. He served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1959 and has taught at the University of New Orleans, Loyola University, and elsewhere. He considers his stints as editor of Morehouse’s Maroon Tiger and as a cub reporter for the Houston Informer the begin¬ nings of his literary career. “Certainly,” Dent has written, “I had no con¬ cept of what it meant to be a black writer. I was brought up under an educational system (in the

Tom Dent (photograph by Walter Dent)

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: DRAMA Snapshot, Nkombo, 2 (December 1969): 85-90; Inner Blk Blues (A poem/play for black bros.

sisters),

Nkombo, 8 (August. 1972): 26-42; Ritual Murder, Callaloo, 4 (February 1978): 67-81. FICTION

“Inner Peace,” Pacific Moana Quarterly, 4, no. 2 (1979); “The Subway,” Pacific Moana Quarterly, 5, no. 2 (1980); “Sun Story,” Callaloo, no. 8 (1982). NONFICTION

“The Free Southern Theater: An Evaluation,” Freedomways, 6 (1966): 26-30; “Black Theater in the South; Report and Reflec¬ tions,” Freedomways, 14, no. 3 (1974): 247-254; “Arts Organizations in the Deep South: A Report,” Black Creation, 6 (1974-1975): 77-78; “New Orleans, Atlanta & Politics: Some Thoughts,” Black River Journal (Summer 1977): 5; “Sam Cook & Academic Excellence at Dillard,” Black River Journal (Summer 1977): 9; “Design for Claiborne Avenue,” Black River Journal (Summer 1977): 10-11;

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Tom Dent

South) which not only ignored black literature but lacked a concept of blackness period.” “We were taught and prepared to belong— that is, to become whites in brown skins by master¬ ing white standards. Literature meant the world of Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner. So coming to New York in 1959 I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know what that meant. We had been taught that race as a subject was limiting, something to escape from if possible, and the fur¬ ther one escaped the more successful one became.” Once he did get to New York, working as a reporter for the black paper the New York Age with Calvin Hicks, Tom Feelings, and Chuck Stone (later to become Congressman Adam Clayton Powell’s press secretary and a best-selling novelist) pre¬ sented Dent with new options. So did friendly asso¬ ciations with young writers such as Raymond Pat¬ terson, Lloyd Addison, Calvin C. Hernton, David Henderson, and generous encouragement from Langston Hughes. With Hicks and others, Dent became involved in publishing a political newspaper called On Guard For Freedom, but he and his associates were more precisely a discussion group than a publication com¬ pany. During the summer of 1962, Dent, Calvin Hernton, and David Henderson organized the Umbra Workshop which embraced political con¬ cern, social activism, literature, and the business of publishing the poetry magazine Umbra. Dent got many other young black writers— such as N. H. Pritchard, Joe Johnson, Ishmael Reed, Askia Muhammad Toure—involved in Umbra. The Umbra writers, continuing a trend popularized by the “beat generation” poets of the 1950s, presented public poetry recitations which challenged their audiences’ cultural preconcep¬ tions. “Just the idea of black poets reading,” Dent recalled, “and using the language black people speak, was unique—no other group had done that. Whenever the Umbra poets read, it sounded like a well-orchestrated chorus of deeply intimate revela¬ tions . . . the rich and varied impact of verbal black music.” “Umbra was my introduction,” Tom Dent wrote, “to the Black Arts Movement; it turned me into viewing reality through a black lens. Not that I didn’t already know I was black, but the way a writer perceives reality is a trained response and carries with it a certain degree of consciousness and self¬ recognition.” Umbra Workshop meetings were often heat¬ ed political or aesthetic debates. Certainly it was not a “literary salon” of quaint poesy. The young writ¬

ers approached their discussions with vital serious¬ ness, and the atmosphere was more like a jazz jam session than anything else. As Tom Dent recalled in his poem “Ten Years After Umbra”: we stripped our souls easy as the sun rose and what went on in that tenement prison was something in us bursting free like a flash fire

New York City’s Umbra Workshop had ana¬ logs all over the country. The Free Southern The¬ ater was originally founded in 1964 by Doris Derby, John O’Neal, and Gil Moses, all of them young intellectuals involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) struggle for black voting rights in rural Mississippi. The FST’s origi¬ nal prospectus stated that as a result of segregation and racist control of the media, the Mississippi Ne¬ gro “has been unable to develop naturally because he has found himself in a society which excludes him from its public consciousness, which is—by necessity—his own public consciousness.” This perception—and the notion that a cultural project might effectively remedy that situation—was a vir¬ tual restatement of the founding principles of the Umbra Workshop. It is not surprising that when Tom Dent left New York for New Orleans (where FST was then primarily based) in 1965 he “looked up Free Southern Theater immediately” and be¬ came an associate director in 1966. Barnstorming through murderously hostile territory with a diverse band of theater profession¬ als and enthusiastic political activists, Free Southern Theater was a hectic experience that wore down the bodies, lifted the souls, and sharpened the political sensibilities of everyone connected with it. Dent directed the energies of the FST ably and thought¬ fully. In a letter to actress Denise Nicholas, written in June 1966 as all manner of personal and organi¬ zational problems assailed the Free Southern The¬ ater, Dent attempted to express his aesthetic ideolo¬ gy. He wrote, “communities do not do theater, indi¬ viduals do. Some individual must first write the play, which means subjecting an idea to the distilla¬ tion of form, and that play represents his own vi¬ sion.” “There is no such thing as community vision or group dynamic vision,” he added, perhaps re¬ flecting on his experiences with Umbra in New York. “And for the writer or artist to have vision

88

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Tom Dent

The Free Southern Theater building in New Orleans

means that he sees and states the unconscious truths of a community, he focuses his spotlight on what the community lives by but does not say it lives by. This means that the artist with vision is always ahead, of the community, therefore controversial because he has exposed the conflict between subliminal truth and surface reality.” Dent’s analysis was verified within a matter of days when the municipal Housing Authority at¬ tacked Free Southern Theater for the content of a program of poetry readings entitled “The Ghetto of Desire” which had been taped for a segment of the CBS television program Look Up and Live. The city officials objected strenuously to the poets’ descrip¬ tion of the dismal quality of black life in New Orleans and went as far as asking the program’s sponsor—the National Council of Churches—to prevent its airing. Dent stood his ground against censorship, backed by the NCC, and the program was broadcast intact on the CBS network on 17 August 1966 nationwide—but “whited out” on WWL-TV in New Orleans and in a few other South¬ ern stations.

with his personal notion of the essential office of the poet, which closely resembles the role of the West African griot: “in the African tradition it was the role of the poet to record and interpret events. His place in the tribal community was an honored one more basic and functional than the literary career of twentieth century european america.” For Dent, the poet’s recording centers on “the terms of our existence in these times—the little sacrifices, the small births & the small deaths.” His political orientation toward this end can be discerned in the many articles and essays he has published concerning issues of education and local government. First, because he sees “African reten¬ tions” among black people (without always clearly identifying what these are) as an enormous benefit, he opposes the idea that economic and political advancement of the black American depends upon a middle class that can achieve integration into the larger society because it is “very satisfied to emulate the whites.” The problem, he says, is that “it is not only an emulation in the style of [economic] acquisi¬ tion, but in values, lifestyles, even speech.” Dent agrees with sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s criti¬ cism of the “black bourgeoise” and complains, “In this system there is the same valuation of African

Dent’s decision to apply most of his energies to organization and the distribution of ideas of other artists capable of pursuing them is quite consistent

89

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Tom Dent

ferently in several essays. “The black man,” Dent wrote, “stands in critical posture to the culture & beliefs of western european civilization—he has every right to exist in his fullest powers whether western european culture has a place for him or not.” This most reasonable declaration of the black American’s right to life—in bondage or freedom— clearly is based on Dent’s idea that only a persistent exercise of each individual’s critical capacity will preserve that right and, in fact, defend his life. This critical stance might also suggest why Dent’s poetry avoids experiment with classic European forms but tends toward spontaneous-sounding improvisation reminiscent of jazz music. In Dent’s work—perhaps in his way of think¬ ing—everything casts a shadow backward and ahead, as when one walks through city streets under bright moonlight and streetlight (when one is con¬ scious of both sources of light), into other dimen¬ sions of history. The time of the poems is always this moment, though snippets of ancient and recent history constantly appear; and the landscape is urban. Though he might concern himself, in his role as a community activist, with mundane details of a city redevelopment project for a black neigh¬ borhood, Dent will also understand that revitaliza¬ tion depends as much upon attractive green espla¬ nades (his pastoral) as on recognition and com¬ memoration of black historical landmarks, because any genuine community needs both sorts of space and cannot survive without both ideas of order. Such attention has eloquently informed Dent’s poems. In “Ships Horns Sound,” the tragic sinking of a local ferry and a young man’s vigil while he awaits word about a friend’s survival begin to evoke the slave trade’s “middle passage.” Dent’s images resonate like foghorns of ships clouded from sight. Anxious youth becomes a symbol of those who survived in bondage; the undetermined number of ferry casualties are representative of the many thousands of souls lost in a barbarous transit. Though much detail is spent on the business of the rescue/reclamation authorities in both frantic activ¬ ity and posturing office and no single word in the poem seems to describe anything beyond the con¬ temporary local disaster, the dimensions of a more profound historical tragedy are sounded. As the poem unfolds, the broad river at the heart of America imperceptibly becomes the “great river” of three continents’ oral traditions—the Atlantic Ocean that simultaneously links and sepa¬ rates “New World” Africans and their ancestral homeland. Dent’s precise choice of words suggests yearning, a sense of separation, sadness:

heritage as the valuation of a long-suppressed fami¬ ly illegitimacy.” Dent’s alternative depends upon race pride and a collective solidarity, in opposition to narrow self-interest. “If there is to be any meaningful change,” he wrote in 1977, “we may have to arrive at a politics not of profit or extraordinary power, but of survival.” The social changes Dent demands, therefore, depend less upon a system of govern¬ ment than upon the presence and activity of ex¬ traordinary individuals. “We are not talking about a new, more radical ideology,” he explained, “but a new breed of community political activist, one who does not conceive of himself as a political ‘profes¬ sional,’ who has the luxury of not needing to con¬ vert political efforts into immediate cash reward jobs. . . .” However, Dent provided no explanation of what source of material support such individuals might rely on while organizing these activities. Dent’s poetic and dramatic works, however, show that his political quixoticism is not a reflection of either unfamiliarity or disillusion with grubby realities; it is, rather, a stance of determined opti¬ mist vision. His major themes represent a war against the loss of identity, both self-identity and racial identity. Poems collected in Magnolia Street (1976) and Blue Lights and River Songs (1982) affirm a belief that personal identity is found within com¬ munity; that because of white America’s exclusion of black people from the “community” of the Unit¬ ed States, black people can only find their true identities within a community founded on recogni¬ tion of their African heritage and common histori¬ cal experience. In a poem dedicated to jazz musi¬ cian Louis Armstrong (“For Lil Louis”), Dent writes: Louis i’m trying to understand what you were here how you left this place how you gave the people bravura music how you could survive it all even bucket-a-blood where the frustration of our people boiled into daily slaughter

The theme of desperation through loss of identity is more deeply explored in Dent’s excellent play Ritual Murder (produced in 1976), which focuses on the frustrations of young black men who, having no sensible grasp of their own potential and denied avenues to self-esteem, foolishly kill each other to vent their pent-up anger. The same theme has been expressed dif¬

90

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Tom Dent

TOM DENT

MAGNOLIA STREET

CARUSO'S

Covers for Dent s first book, a collection of poems on black identity

the boy on the levee, his hair done in braids.

driver,” “Secret Messages,” “Return to English Turn, and others, seem to aspire to insights and revelations of truth that are akin to “flash fires,” smiles in tense situations, the sudden mutual under¬ standing of basic agreement by friends involved in heated argument. The power of such poems is in the communicative play of well-chosen images rather than the muted music of his language. Besides his own considerable achievement as a poet, it is pertinent to view Tom Dent’s first twenty years of literary activity as an attempt to design viable models of collective work (which the activists of the 1960s called ujamaa). Urging his community to attend the writer’s personal vision, forcing artists’ collectives to confront their members’ individual¬ ism, Dent has attempted to solve philosophical and practical problems of organization he encountered in Umbra Workshop and the Free Southern The¬ ater. fhese efforts, of course, simultaneously address the larger question of survival for an AfroAmerican minority facing persistently hostile social

something his sister might have done last night, his eyes are water as he stares.

Dent’s curtly observed detail of the braided hair— the African style of plaits called “cornrows”—deft¬ ly ties the centuries and experiences together. The style of plaiting is itself an unself-conscious African retention long known in the rural South; the wear¬ ing of those plaits by urbanized young black men and women in the 1970s was a most conscious, sometime defiant, expression of black cultural iden¬ tification. Thus, Dent’s images carrying their “se¬ cret messages” of subliminal association, the drownings of those on the doomed ferry become “terror of the centuries we romance/back to haunt us in ours.” Dent is not the only one who has seen such visions, but few have expressed them more subtly. His poems, such as “Roberts The New Orleans Bus-

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Tom Dent

he recognized in the 1950s and 1960s merits serious consideration from those who would understand the reawakening of an African cultural conscious¬ ness in the waning years of Henry Luce’s homoge¬

realities in the United States. Dent’s energies have continued to be applied through university teaching, nationwide lecturing, establishment of the literary journal Callaloo (with Jerry Ward and Charles H. Rowell), and another literary group known as the Congo Square writers workshop of New Orleans. With Andrew Young Dent is currently writing an autobiography of Young that focuses on his days with Martin Luther King, Jr. The necessity of Tom Dent’s enterprise should be obvious; his foresight in offering intelli¬ gent models for the eventual resolution of problems

nized “American Century.” Reference: Lorenzo Thomas, “The Shadow World: New York’s Umbra Workshop and Origins of the Black Arts Movement,” Callaloo, 4 (1978): 5376.

Alexis Deveaux (24 September 1948-

)

Priscilla R. Ramsey Howard University

“Sister Love,” Essence 14 (October 1983): 83-84,

BOOKS: Na-ni (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Spirits in the Streets (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973); Li Chen/Second Daughter First Son (Ba Tone Press,

150, 155; “Poems,” Sunbury Magazine (Fall 1984).

1975); In her poetry, drama, political journalism, and fiction, written in the supple rhetoric of non¬ standard Black English, Alexis Deveaux has ex¬ plored the political, economic, and psychological contradictions facing black Americans and Third World peoples. Like Richard Wright, her aesthetic grandfather, Deveaux does not believe literature functions as an abstraction. Instead she feels that art should confront head-on the racial and econom¬ ic inequities in American life. While she paints a painfully mimetic portrait of class oppression, it is not one which is tinted by defeat. If anything, her characters ultimately triumph by virtue of their courage and collectivist human values. By placing lower-class black people at the center of her artistic world and by forcing her readers to examine not only the characters’ anguish but their victories, she creates an art infused with her own version of a black aesthetic, embracing the realities of hope and despair, beauty and pain. Deveaux projects a sensi¬ tive understanding of drug-infested communities, crime, and overcrowding; she does not lapse into labored didacticism. Ms. Deveaux is, herself, familiar with the urban experience. Born to Richard Hill and Mae

Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (New York:

Harper & Row, 1980). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Circles, New York, Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, March 1973; A Season To Unravel, New York, St. Marks Play¬

house, 25 January 1979. TELEVISION: “The Tapestry,” KCET-TV (PBSNew York), 1976. PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Remember Him a Outlaw,” Black Creation, 4 (Fall 1972): 4-7; “The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone,” Essence, 9 (Au¬ gust 1978): 64-65; 96, 98; “Poems,” Hoo-Doo Magazine (Spring 1980); “Zimbabwe: Woman Fire,”Essence, 12 (July 1981): 72-73, 111-112; “Southern Africa: Listening for the News,” Essence, 12 (March 1982): 168; “Blood Ties,” Essence, 13 (January 1983): 62-64,

121; 92

DLB 38

Alexis Deveaux

Alexis Deveaux (copyright ® 1982 by Layle Silbert)

Deveaux in New York City in 1948, she spent most of her maturing years there. She became involved in community work early. In 1969, at the age of twenty-one, she began working as an assistant in¬ structor in English for the WIN program adminis¬ tered by the New York Urban League. In 1971, she became an instructor in creative writing for the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York. In 1972, she accepted a position as a com¬ munity worker for the Bronx Office of Probations. The next year she joined Project Create in New York City as an instructor in reading and creative writing. In 1975 she served as cultural coordinator of the Black Expo for the Black Coalition of Greater New Haven. The same year, she cofounded the

in January 1979. Na-ni (1973), a juvenile book; Spir¬ its in the Streets (1973), a novel; Li Chen/Second Daughter First Son (1975), a prose poem; and Don’t Explain: A Story oj Billie Holiday (1980), a biography,

constitute her book-length publications. Her interest in the issues confronting black women appears not only in her fiction but in her political journalism and the essays on black women writers she has written for Essence magazine, for which she presently serves as poetry editor. In a revealing prose poem she wrote for Essence in 1983, called “Sister Love,” she outlines her feminist credo and, at the same time, appeals for an openmindedness toward her own lesbian preferences:

Coeur cle l’Unicorne Gallery, which exhibited her own paintings. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the Empire State College at the State University of New York, and since then she has worked as a free-lance writer. Deveaux’s poetry has appeared in many nationally known magazines and scholarly journals. Her plays include: “Circles,” performed by the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center at the Westchester Community College Drama Festival in May 1973; “The Tapestry,” aired on PBS in 1976; A Season to Unravel, performed at St. Marks Playhouse

... So I stumble forward and with caution, in search of new worlds/a new path/new context for living and working together, Equally. Whole. Black women and Black men. Not as homosexuals and heterosexuals but as sexual beings. Free from the domination of race, sex and class. This is my naked stance: These are my feminist priorities.

Like Deveaux’s children’s book Na-ni, Spirits in the Streets is set in Harlem. In this poetic prose narra¬ tive illustrated with Deveaux’s drawings, she cap-

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Alexis Deveaux

Deveaux’s illustrations from her first book, a harsh childrens story about a girl in Harlem. “Na-ni lives as she does because she has to, ” Deveaux commented. “I hope after this book she never has to live this way again. ”

caseworkers dole out the very little money they give the poor. The poor can no longer endure their conditions and only a vigilant police force prevents a major eruption of violence. Elaborating these perspectives on violence, Deveaux incorporates into her text a portrayal of the 1970s rebellion at Attica Prison in New York, during which thirty-three inmates and ten guards were killed. To recount these events, Deveaux alter¬ nates a Harlem resident’s description of the events with a radio commentator’s “objective” account of the situation. The resident’s remarks are highly subjective and interpretative, articulating a compas¬ sionate and understanding position. Her destiny is entwined with the destinies of the men in the pris¬ on, because the prison population is composed of men from her community. Deveaux’s characters endure multiple forms of exploitation, but their abiding strengths and collective caring for each other help them survive an otherwise intolerable situation. Although sparsely reviewed, Spirits in the

tures the substance of the Harlem experience. Us¬ ing rhetorical strategies such as unexpected syntac¬ tical constructions and unusual typography, her narration describes a community where candystore owners sell heroin to children and Buick Electras “float” down the middle of 114th Street to collect the “candy” sales money. She portrays physical vio¬ lence erupting between parents of a little boy who dies of rat poisoning through the narratives of different neighbors explaining the event. Each per¬ son has his or her rendition of why the husband beats his wife after the child’s death. No one knows any more than the others of the facts of the tragedy, and they can only guess about the guilt, anguish, and hate that result from the child’s death. Each speaker provides an interpretative narrative about the meaning of the parents’ behavior. Following these cameo portraits, Deveaux de¬ scribes the rioters who threaten social workers in the neighborhood welfare office. These poor, un¬ employed people resent the begrudging way the

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Alexis Deveaux

Streets received respectful reviews. It was recom¬ mended by Choice, and Alvin Aubert in Library Jour¬ nal called it an “organic integration of text, illustra¬ tions, and typography” that is highly effective. Deveaux’s story “The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone” (1978) seems to be a warm-up for her biography of Billie Holiday. Egypt Brownstone lives with her mother. She sees her father annually on her birthday, when he buys her a present. Egypt’s story is dominated by two sexual encoun¬ ters. The first involves her mother’s boyfriend Prince, who fondles Egypt’s breasts at the back of his grocery store when she goes shopping for her mother. Prince had caught Egypt stealing cookies, and he insists on her sexual favor in return for keeping the theft a secret. The shopping trips stop when Mrs. Brownstone senses the lust in Prince’s eyes when he leers at Egypt while courting her mother. The second sexual encounter occurs while Egypt is attending college. Her French teacher propositions her to enter a lesbian affair, offering a luxurious apartment as a quiet place to study. As in her encounter with Prince, Egypt is vulnerable be¬

cause she does not have the wherewithal to deter¬ mine the contours of her own life. Despite the fact that Egypt denies both lovers, she is clearly ex¬ ploited. Her vulnerability derives not only from their predatory nature but from the fact that Egypt wants from them something they have, and she can get it only by giving them sexual favors. The story ends with the death of Egypt’s father, leaving her profoundly lonely in a harsh world. Deveaux’s fourth book, an admiring fictional biography of jazz singer Billie Holiday, reveals her feminist preoccupation. In a 1981 essay Deveaux explains, “In all of the work I’ve done, there is a certain and deliberate care I’ve taken with laying out the image of the black woman as I have seen or experienced her, which indicates that there is a clear and conscious desire to address myself to her.” In Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980), Deveaux portrays a courageous, outspoken, and assertive black woman who overcame adversity. Bil¬ lie Holiday was raped at ten, sent to Catholic reform school, and rejected by her father. Her singing career was destroyed by drugs and a destructive lover. She repeatedly endured voluntary and in-

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Alexis Deveaux Drawings bg the Author

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Alexis Deveaux

Dust jacket for Deveaux’s 1973 prose poem about life in Harlem

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Alexis Deveaux

Fire,” describes the contributions women made to the war of independence in Zimbabwe in order to help establish President Mugabe’s leadership of the country. She recalls the dead bodies piled high and bloated in the dry heat, women carrying bazookas, exploding strongholds, fighting alongside men as guerrilla fighters, women watching other women die in a fight to limit the atrocities of the war. The essay takes an optimistic turn as it describes a new set of circumstances in a more liberated country where women go daily into Salisbury to work and freely speak their native dialects. Ironically, though, these women who fought alongside men during the war, challenging male authority both physically and psychologically, find that after the war is won they must resume life in a social order that renders them inferior to men. Deveaux ends the essay with a parallel between the situation of these African women and that of black women in America. Both have been called upon throughout their lives to be strong and competent partners in the effort to gain freedom for their people; yet, at the same time, they are subjugated to black men. In “Southern Africa: Listening for the News,” Deveaux rails against the treachery of apartheid and white rule in South Africa. She attacks the ruthless upheaval of indigenous cultural groups by whites in South Africa and praises the South Afri¬ can People’s party—a black political party, the only one recognized as a legitimate representative of Namibia by the United Nations. She attacks the American government for strong military ties with the South African regime and warns that Namibia will become the setting for a resistance movement that will free black people from a white racist South African rule. In a third political essay, Deveaux turns to Haiti, which she views from the standpoint of the Haitian refugees to America — the boat people and those who were left behind and who never had the opportunity to emigrate. She expresses contempt for both “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc,” who now rules Haiti. The Haitian govern¬ ment spends less than one dollar per year on its citizens’ education, and the average annual income is $258. Deveaux pleads with black Americans to develop an active political consciousness toward the plight of these people. Though Deveaux is young she has already shown an uncommon maturity in her fiction and in her essays. Her goal is to change the attitudes of her audience, deepening her readers’ structural per¬ ceptions of the ways in which America’s underlying

voluntary confinements in drug rehabilitation cen¬ ters. She died in 1949 in New York’s Metropolitan Hospital under the watch of government narcotics agents. Yet Deveaux does not pity her subject. In¬ stead she portrays Billie Holiday as a sensitive, in¬ novative, and self-assured artist who had a lasting influence because she persisted in developing her talent according to her own lights, despite the dis¬ couragement of the white establishment. June Jor¬ dan reviewing Don’t Explain in Ms. magazine praised Deveaux for “gracefully manipulating an exhaus¬ tive quantity of biographical and sociohistorical facts, developing new narrative modes that inter¬ play dramatic dialogue with poem and with a con¬ sistently terse, inspired momentum to the linear story elements.” Deveaux has written a series of political essays for Essence from 1981 through 1983 which take an international perspective on current events and re¬ flect her strong feminist interests and adamant sup¬ port for the political and social liberation of black and Third World women. “Zimbabwe: Woman

Drawing by Deveaux from Spirits in the Streets

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Lonne Elder III

economic patterns and economic meanings work for those who function on the periphery of a social hegemony. She has made remarkable strides to¬ ward that end.

Reference: “Alexis Deveaux,” in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate (New York: Con¬ tinuum Press).

Lonne Elder III (26 December 1931-

)

Wilsonia E. D. Cherry University of North Carolina at Asheville

See also the Elder entry in DLB 7, Twentieth-Century American Dramatists. BOOK: Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Staten Island, New York, Wagner Col¬ lege, July 1965; New York, Saint Marks Play¬ house (transferred 28 April 1969 to Pocket Theatre), 4 February 1969; Charades on East Fourth Street, Montreal, Expo ’67, 1967. SCREENPLAYS: Sounder, adapted from William H. Armstrong’s novel, 20th Century-Fox, 1972; Melinda, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1972; Part 2, Sounder, ABC, 1976; Bustin’ Loose, adaptation, Universal Pictures, 1981. TELEVISION: The Terrible Veil, NBC, 1963; N.Y.P.D., several scripts by Elder, ABC, 1967-1968; McCloud, several scripts by Elder, NBC, 1970-1971; Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, ABC, 1975; A Woman Called Moses, NBC, 1978. OTHER: Charades on East Fourth Street, in Black Drama Anthology, edited by Woodie King and Ron Milner (New York: New American Li¬ brary, 1971). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Comment: Rambled Thoughts,” Black Creation, 4 (Sum¬ mer 1973): 48;

Lonne Elder (photograph by Bert Andrews)

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Lonne Elder III

himself. By the time he was a young adult, personal experimentation had given way to public expres¬ sion. Elder’s formal education did not follow a clas¬ sic pattern. He had begun reading at age six and had a thirst for learning and an awareness of black history that had been cultivated by his mother. Although learning new things—especially things about his black heritage—excited him, he was a rather restless student. In 1949 he entered New Jersey State Teachers College (now Trenton State Teachers College), but left before the end of his first year. At nineteen, he moved to New York. There, he took nonmatriculate courses at the Jef¬ ferson School and the New School for Social Re¬ search. Elder’s education broadened in other, nonformal ways as well; he became involved in the intensifying movement for black equality, and in 1952, he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. After his discharge he came back to Harlem to live. During his early New York years, Elder met many successful black artisans, musicians, writers— artists who were to help shape Elder’s nascent creativity. Among these artists, many of whom were associated with the Harlem Writers Guild that Elder had joined, was Dr. Robert Hayden, who wrote Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940). Hayden encouraged Elder to continue his writing and helped him with the architectonics of the poems and short stories he wrote. John Oliver Killens also encouraged him to take himself seriously as a writer. However, Elder’s encounters with dramatist and actor Douglas Tur¬ ner Ward moved him away from short stories and poetry and in the direction of playwriting. Having met Ward during the early part of his Harlem stay, Elder even shared an apartment with him between 1953 and 1956. Reading Ward’s work, Elder be¬ came convinced that drama allowed for greater artistic density, intensity, immediacy, and flexibility than did poetry and short stories. He decided to write for the theater. During his early New York City years, Elder held various jobs to support himself while he wrote. He worked as a waiter, political activist, professional gambler, and poker dealer in an after-hours club; he unloaded trucks and worked on the clocks. His job as an actor reinforced his positive feelings about writing for the stage. During this period, he studied acting under Mary Welch and worked in summer stock with Alice Childress, who was also a member of the Har¬ lem Writers Guild. In the late 1950s, Elder also worked with Brett Warren’s Actors’ Mobile The¬ atre. Finally, on 11 March 1959, Elder made his Broadway debut at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in

“Lorraine Hansberry: Social Consciousness and The Will,” Freedomways, 19 (Fourth Quarter 1979): 213-218. Like other black dramatists of the last three decades — a period marked by an upsurge of plays by, about, and for black people — Lonne Elder ar¬ ticulates the sorrows, angers, and joys that charac¬ terize black life in America. Acknowledging that the frustrations of being denied full rights and privi¬ leges as citizens create strife—at times within the black community itself—Elder’s work also shows that both individual fortitude and the group spirit always resurface in time to combat the internal and external forces which, if allowed to persist, would deaden the vitality of the black community. An actor and an occasional critic, Elder has a small dramatic canon; however, the plays that he has written strongly emphasize his belief in the sur¬ vival of a people traumatized both from without and from within. Elder began writing short stories and poetry early in his life, but gradually moved to writing plays and film scripts as his literary career solidified. This progression demonstrates both his versatility and his attempt to find a suitable mode for portraying the prismatic quality of black experi¬ ence—a motif that also pervades his work. Elder’s ongoing commitment to meaningful and humanis¬ tic portrayals of black life on the stage and in the electronic media doubtless had its beginnings in his early involvement with civil rights groups; it cer¬ tainly visibly continued when he formed — with other figures from the dramatic arts profession — an organization pledged to positive presentations of blacks in film and television. His commitment also surfaces with his deliberate choice of subject and his much-lauded, sensitive handling of his material. Lonne Elder III was born in Americus, Geor¬ gia, on 26 December 1931, to Lonne Elder II and Quincy Elder. He has two brothers and twin sisters. Although born in Georgia, Elder spent most of his life in New Jersey and New York, for he moved North with his family when he was still a baby. When Elder was ten, his father died; his mother perished not long afterward in a car accident. Orphaned, Elder then went to live on a relative’s New Jersey farm. Dissatisfied with rural life, Elder ran away so frequently he was finally sent to Jersey City to live with an aunt and uncle. His uncle ran numbers, and Elder served an apprenticeship by carrying the slips for him. Like many authors, Elder began writing at a young age, but, as a child, he wrote basically for

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Lonne Elder III

New York City as Bobo, in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, having been asked by the play¬ wright to take the part. In addition, he performed the role when the company made its national tour from 1960 to 1961. Able to write a fair amount during this period, Elder developed his craft to the point that he was able to w'rite his first significant play.

absurd as a turtle running in a race against rabbits. The first-class citizenship due all blacks, he points out, cannot be totally achieved through social climb¬ ing, joining advancement organizations, or obtain¬ ing education. Occasionally, one person may suc¬ ceed, but too many others remain behind — frus¬ trated and “hysterical” — since the rabbits are run¬ ning a very different kind of race. The play, replete with kept and revealed se¬ crets, light banter, heated arguments, psychological blackmail, stolen kisses, and broken dreams, ends rather optimistically, as Anna, who had physically and emotionally retreated from her family when her plans miscarried and when she discovered her son’s failure, finally realizes the absurdity of being an hysterical turtle in a rabbit race. As Frank eulo¬ gizes the failed undertaking, Anna and Joe realize the importance of their love for one another. Such a love among family members, Elder’s message seems to be, is sometimes the only thing that keeps Amer¬ ican blacks sane. The laughter of recognition, con¬ ciliation, and exaltation doses the play. The convoluted plot, the underdeveloped characters, and the stilted dialogue suggest that, as a playwright, Elder was still apprenticing. Yet, the emergence of the idea of the tensile strength of the black American family indicates the artistic direc¬ tion in which Elder was headed. Elder’s personal life also took a familial turn during this period; in 1963, Elder married Betty Gross. They became par¬ ents of a son, David DuBois, in 1964, but the mar¬ riage was not a long-lasting one. The couple di¬ vorced in 1967.

“A Hysterical Turtle in a Rabbit Race,” Elder’s first play of note, is as yet unpublished (it remains in typescript in the Hatch-Billops Archives in New York City) and unperformed publicly. It contains several themes that came to figure importantly in his later works, notably the theme of familial crisis that is finally resolved by familial togetherness. In the play, black social climber Anna Marie Evans Baxter, married to a district sales manager of a liquor distributor in a New Jersey metropolitan sub¬ urb, strives to solidify her husband’s possible pro¬ motion to a vice-presidency in Chicago by pulling social strings and by cultivating her eldest son’s potential to be a minister in the town. Her attempts at manipulation are thwarted because Calder Evans really does not possess the credentials of which his mother plans to make use. Joseph Baxter, who knows of his stepson’s failure, forces the young man to continue the charade, while at the same time, he keeps the truth from Anna Marie. Throughout the proceedings, caustic, sometimes cynical, commen¬ tary on the action is made by Anna’s second son, Frank Evans, a writer. Elder’s sometimes spokes¬ man, Frank, articulates the meaning of the title of the play: that progress for blacks in America is as

Scenes from the ABC production of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by the Negro Ensemble Company

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Lonne Elder III

Parker, work becomes the primary means by which one establishes and maintains a sense of identity as a black and as a human being. For her brothers, Theopolis and Bobby, and her father, Russell, self¬ determinism has little to do with having dead-end jobs downtown. Although the three men recognize that money is necessary for subsistence, the way one earns that money also figures in the way one thinks about oneself. Thus, although Blue Haven’s illegal numbers game is morally questionable, they agree to run numbers from their shop and to sell Black Lightning. Throughout the drama, the various characters debate—directly and obliquely — the ways through which black survival may be assured: belief in traditional religion, membership in black rights organizations, memories of deceased loved ones and of more carefree times, schemes of easy money, dreams of prosperity. While no one answer gains total acceptance or total validity, the play’s conclusion suggests that part of the resolution lies in familial togetherness. The Parkers protect each other and support each other, after changing affili¬ ations at a moment’s notice, but the love among them abides. Unlike “Hysterical Turtle,” which concludes with laughter, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men ends with irony and intriguing ambiguity but essentially also with tragic reaffirmation. In the last moments of the drama, we discover that Bobby, the most accom¬ plished shoplifter in Harlem, has been killed in a robbery. Adele and Theo, having now made peace with one another and having decided to close down the illegal operations, are stunned by the news. Russell Parker, whose young woman friend has spurned him, returns to the shop to strike a peace¬ able chord with his remaining children. Although the play closes without Parker’s having discovered that Bobby is dead, the audience knows that he, like the others, will survive—somehow. Death is part of life, as Parker realizes. Love makes death bearable; it also makes life liveable, even when the future quality of that life remains unclear. I he critical response to Ceremonies was over¬ whelmingly positive. Although a few critics saw the play as inept, formulaic, and dated, the majority found it well wrought, rich, powerful, and merito¬ rious. And rewarded it was. Elder, who had pre¬ viously received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in Playwriting for 1965-1966, the ABC Television Writing Fellowship for 1965-1966, the John Golden Fellowship for 1966 to 1967, the Joseph E. Levine Fellowship in Filmmaking at the Yale School of Drama (1966-1967), and the Stanley Drama Award in Playwriting for 1965, was showered with several

Although Elder’s energies during this period focused on developing his craft as a playwright, he was also acting. On 15 November 1965, Elder per¬ formed with other members of the Negro Ensemble Company at the St. Marks Playhouse. He played the role of Clem in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Ab¬ sence, a satiric look at the way whites in a small Southern town respond when all its blacks mysteri¬ ously disappear. Ward’s thoroughgoing, ironic, dramatic perspective would not be employed by Elder in his next, and most famous play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, but Ward, also the author of Happy Ending and the cofounder of the longest-standing black theater company, would play the main role in his friend’s most celebrated play. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), originally performed at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, in July 1965, again points toward the resil¬ ience of the American black family. The play, first given a reading at the New Dramatist’s Committee in June 1965, heralded Elder’s professional debut as a playwright. It was later also produced at the St. Marks Playhouse on 4 February 1969 by the Negro Ensemble Company, an organization for which Elder had served as coordinator of the PlaywrightsDirectors Unit from 1967 to 1969. The play was transferred to the Pocket Theatre on 28 April 1969 and has been revived several times since. The St. Marks Playhouse production featured Douglas Turner Ward as Russell B. Parker, the unemployed patriarch of the somewhat misdirected black family which is the focus of the play; Arthur French played William Jenkins, Parker’s checker-playing friend; William Jay and David Downing acted as Theopolis and Bobby Parker, Russell’s unemployed sons, who try to escape the poverty-stricken treadmill of their Harlem home by selling illegally made corn liquor, called Black Lightning, and by stealing from white Harlem store owners; Rosalind Cash played Adele Eloise Parker, Russell’s daughter, who attempts to hold the f amily together financially with her down¬ town secretarial job; Blue Haven, played by Samuel Blue, Jr., brings a seeming hope to the Parker fami¬ ly by allowing his Harlem De-Colonization Associa¬ tion to run an illegal numbers game from the Par¬ kers’ failing barbershop. Judith Ann Johnson (Judiann Jonsson), who, on 14 February 1969, mar¬ ried Ceremonies’ author Elder, played the young girl with whom the fifty-four-year-old Parker attempts to regain his youth. The production was directed by Edmund Cambridge. The principal conflict of the play, like that of the “Hysterical Turtle,” concerns determining the proper values on which to base one’s life. For Adele

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Lonne Elder III

other awards for this play: the Outer Drama Critics Circle Award, the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award, the Stella Holt Memorial Playwrights Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award. Having presented such a meaningful portrait of a black family, Ceremonies was subsequently broadcast on ABC television in 1975; Elder wrote the teleplay which won him the Christopher’s Tele¬ vision Award. Prior to the writing of Ceremonies, in 1961 through 1962, Elder had shared a New York apartment with Robert Hooks, cofounder of the Negro Ensemble Company. This friendship was to prove meaningful as Hooks recreated the role of Blue Haven in the television version of Ceremonies, and with Elder, in 1969, founded a filmmaking company, Banneker Productions. A play which does little preaching to or accus¬ ing of whites, but rather, which speaks directly to black audiences about black life, Ceremonies was also included in Lindsay Patterson’s Black Theater: A

black youth from New York’s Lower East Side — Manuel, Jake, Richie, Cliff, and Adam, the gang’s leader. In a movie house basement, the gang holds the white policeman captive on the charge that he has brutalized members of the community and that he has raped and impregnated the teenaged Anna, sister to a member of the group. During the play, the policeman suffers such harassment he “confesses” to the assigned “crimes.” This tables-turned approach not only creates irony but also presents a kind of hostility which is missing from both “Hysterical Turtle” and Ceremonies. Cer¬ tainly, while the specific police officer himself proves to have been innocent of the charges laid against him, he remains for many the symbol of an invasive corruptive force in the black community. Yet, as Elder suggests through his climactic ending, destruction can also come from within: Adam, who had engineered the movie house basement torture, but who had previously prevented his comrades from physically harming the policeman, loses con¬ trol and breaks both of the officer’s arms. The policeman is sent reeling into unconsciousness;

20th-Century Collection of the Works of the Best Play¬ wrights (1971), alongside such works as Alice Chil¬

dress’s Trouble in Mind, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, and Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody. Realistically portraying a segment of American life, Ceremonies was included also in Best American Plays, Seventh Series, 1967-1973, edited by Clive Barnes (1975). Following the completion of Ceremonies, Elder wrote two still unpublished and unproduced oneact plays as companion pieces: “Kissing Rattle¬ snakes Can Be Fun” (1966), a complex tragicome¬ dy; and “Seven Comes Up and Seven Comes Down” (1966), a comedy that employs the motif of the double con game and recalls the game playing in “Hysterical Turtle.” Interestingly, the con game also foreshadows the sleight-of-hand ending of Charades on East Fourth Street.

Elder’s next major thesis drama, Charades on East Fourth Street, was commissioned by the New

York City Mobilization for Youth, Inc. Presented at Expo ’67 in Montreal, Canada, the play was later included in Woodie King and Ron Milner’s Black Drama Anthology (1971), a collection of old and mod¬ ern drama about, by, and for black people. Charades marks Elder’s venture into the more revolutionary type of drama, well represented in the King and Milner volume. In Charades, the theme of family that figured importantly in “Hysterical Turtle” and Ceremonies again surfaces. Yet, family now has been expanded to embrace the idea of black community as extended family. The characters include a white policeman and members of a band of Hispanic and

Lonne Elder, circa 1969

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Lonne Elder III

Morgan (Kevin Hooks), unsuccessfully attempts to find his father in a work camp; however, he does encounter an all-black school with a black teacher (Janet McLaughlin). Inspired to learn more about black history and culture, David returns home. With the joyful but unexpected return of the father, the Morgans are thrust into another crisis: David must decide between remaining at home— where he attends a predominantly white school — and attending the black school. Elder poignantly focused on the theme of growth through seeming loss. In an especially sensitively written scene, the father convinces the son of the far-reachingness of the family’s love; David sets off for the school. In juxtaposition to the numerous black exploitation films which had sprung up in Hollywood, Sounder, emphasizing the strength of the black woman and the responsibility and compassion of the black fami¬ ly man, elicited widespread positive critical re¬ sponse. Because of his skillful handling of the film script, Elder was nominated for an Academy Award for writing the best screenplay based on material from another medium. Elder did not win the award, but the nomination was significant. Also nominated for the Writer’s Guild of America Award, Sounder won the 1972 Christopher’s Award, the Atlanta Film Festival Silver Award (1972), and for that year an Image Award. Elder expressed his commitment to quality and to positive portrayals of blacks in the media through his instrumental role in the development of the Black Artists Alliance. Formed in Los Angeles during the summer of 1972, the Alliance membership also included such notable talents as Ossie Davis, Gilbert Moses, and Denise Nicholas. They hoped to combat the increasing number of black exploitation films coming out of Hollywood. The organization pledged itself to promoting the presentation of positive and meaningful views of black life by the media. Unfortunately, the B.A.A. dissolved after about a year of existence. Ironically, despite Elder’s association with the Alliance, he, too, has been accused of succumbing to the lures of the marketplace with his next major screenplay, Melinda. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer pic¬ ture, Melinda was produced in 1972 by Pervis Atkins and directed by Hugh A. Robertson, both black. It was based on a story by Raymond Cistheri. Starring Calvin Lockhart as Frankie Parker, a black Los Angeles disc jockey bent on solving the killing of his girl friend, Melinda, Rosalind Cash as Terry Davis, who aids Parker in his destruction of the murderer, and Vonetta McGee as Melinda, the film also featured Elder as Police Lieutenant Daniels.

ironically, a meeting to create goodwill between police and local citizens is underway upstairs. The nightmarish quality of the action symbolically rein¬ forces the frequently nightmarish reality of life for this segment of society. Yet, even as Cliff ascends the stairs of the movie house to join the party which was to close the meeting, knowing that recrimina¬ tions await him for his part in the harassment, Elder reaffirms the sense of survival that exists among blacks: sometimes, it matters little what tomorrow holds, for one must live for today. Like Parker in Ceremonies, Cliff realizes that life’s dance must go on. During the time that Elder was writing these plays, he was also writing for television: scripts for Camera Three in the early 1960s; The Terrible Veil in 1963; the N.Y.P.D. series from 1967 to 1968; and a number of McCloud episodes from 1970 to 1971. And although successful with legitimate theater and television, Elder chose, in 1970, to move to the West Coast with his wife and son to pursue a career in filmwriting. The playwright felt that New York was no longer a positive place to live. California, Elder believed, might be more conducive to his creating the kind of life he wanted for his family. Shortly after the relocation, the Elder family grew to include a second son, Christian, born in Septem¬ ber 1970. In addition to the personal motives for the move, Elder also felt that as a black writer, he might be able to counter or correct some of the misinformation about blacks that had been dissemi¬ nated from West Coast-based media centers. Such a goal seems to have been achieved, at least partially, with Elder’s first film script, Sounder (produced in 1972). Sounder, adapted for film by Elder from the Newbery Award-winning novel by William H. Arm¬ strong, again focuses on the black family. Produced by Robert B. Radnitz and directed by Martin Ritt, the film was released by 20th Century-Fox (1972). Depicting the survival of a Depression-era black family through abiding familial love, Sounder echoes the positive concluding undertones of Cere¬ monies and “Hysterical Turtle.” When the Morgan family patriarch, Nathan (Paul Winfield), is forced to take desperate mea¬ sures to feed his family, he is arrested for having stolen a smokehouse ham, and since this incident has occurred in the Deep South, he is sentenced to a year of hard labor in a work camp. Rebecca Morgan (Cicely Tyson), who sustains the family emotionally during the father’s absence, also ensures their con¬ tinued physical survival by working hard on the farm where they sharecrop. Eldest son, David Lee

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Lonne Elder III

Nathan Morgan, Ebony Wright as Rebecca Mor¬ gan, Darryl Young as David Lee Morgan, and Annazette Chase as Miss Camille Johnson, the teacher. Part 2, Sounder, certainly quite different in affect and effect from Melinda, ostensibly marked a revitalization of Elder’s mission to write responsibly and sensitively about black life as he intuitively and experientially knows it. Part 2, Sounder also won the Christopher’s Award (1976). Since the 1970 move to California, Elder has oscillated between free-lance writing (which in¬ cluded some critical pieces) and working under con¬ tract with major television and film companies. He wrote the script for A Woman Called Moses, a net¬ work mini-series on the life of Harriet Tubman, a black conductor of the Underground Railroad. The program, which starred Cicely Tyson of Sounder, aired in 1978. Elder also did the adaptation for Bustin’ Loose, a feature film conceived by and star¬ ring Richard Pryor. Released by Universal Pictures, the 1981 film was directed by Oz Scott. Most recently, Elder has been a writer and producer, holding an exclusive development con¬ tract with Columbia Pictures Television Division. He is also working on a play, tentatively entitled “After the Band Goes Home.” He lives in Sherman Oaks, California, with his wife Judiann, his sons David and Christian, and his daughter, Loni.

Ceremonies

in Dark Old Men APLWBY

Lonne Elder III

Dust jacket for Elder’s award-winning play about what he called “the racism at the center of all things”

Interviews: Richard F. Sheperd, “Lonne Elder Talks of Theatre in Black and White,” New York Times, 8 Febru¬ ary 1969, I: 22; Liz Gant, “An Interview With Lonne Elder,” Black World, 22 (April 1973): 38-48; Dan Sullivan, “What’s a Nice Black Playwright Doing in a Place Like This?,” New York Times, 5 January 1975, II: 23.

Although some critics were somewhat favorably dis¬ posed to Melinda, most panned it. Elder had hoped to develop a crime melodrama, yet unhappily, the script was steeped in senseless violence, as critics noted. The film employed a considerable number of blacks from the filmmaking profession, but it seemed to reinforce negative stereotypes of Amer¬ ican blacks. Despite the lack of overall success of the film, Elder maintains that the humanness of his characters came through in his screenplay. In 1976, Part 2, Sounder, the sequel to the 1972 film, was released. Elder again wrote the screenplay for this second look at the Morgan family. Original¬ ly conceived as a made-for-television movie, Part 2, Sounder met with mixed critical reception: one posi¬ tion held that the plot—the struggles of the Mor¬ gans to secure an education for their children and other black children in the area—was strained and thin; the more positive position held that the sequel had merit in its conception and its execution as it again illustrated the unity of the poor, but deter¬ mined, family of sharecroppers. Directed by Wil¬ liam Graham and produced by Robert Radnitz and Terry Nelson, the film starred Harold Sylvester as

References: Kimberly W. Benston, “Cities in Bezique: Adrienne Kennedy’s Expressionistic Vision,” CLA Jour¬ nal, 20 (December 1976): 235-244; Patricia Bosworth, “Life Is Dangerous But Beauti¬ ful, Too,” New York Times, 16 February 1969, II: 3; George Eckstein, “Softened Voices in The Black Theatre,” Dissent, 23 (Summer 1976): 306308; Lewis H. Fenderson, “The New Breed of Black Writers and their Jaundiced View of Tradi¬ tion,” CLA Journal, 15 (September 1971): 1824; Chester Fontenot, “Mythic Patterns in River Niger

103

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Lonne Elder III

Militant,” Black Creation, 4 (Winter 1973): 40-

and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” MELUS, 7 (Spring 1980): 41-49; Samuel A. Hay, “African-American Drama, 19501970,” Negro History Bulletin, 36 (January 1973): 5-8; Lance Jeffers, “Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama,” CLA Journal, 16 (September 1972): 32-48; Michael Mattox, “The Day Black Movie Stars Got

42; Vilma R. Potter, “New Politics, New Mothers,” CLA Journal, 16 (December 1972): 247-255.

Papers: Transcripts of Elder’s one-act plays are at the Hatch-Billops Archives in New York.

Charles H. Fuller, Jr. (5 March 1939-

)

Ethel W. Githii

BOOKS: Zooman and the Sign (New York: Samuel French, 1982); A Soldier’s Play (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: The Village: A Party, Princeton, N.J., McCarter Theater, Novem¬ ber 1968; produced as “The Perfect Party,” New York, Tambellini’s Gate Theater, 20 March 1969; An Untitled Play, Philadelphia, Pa., Afro-American Arts Theatre, 1970; In My Many Names and Days (six one-acts), New York, New Federal Theatre, September 1972; The Candidate, New Federal Theatre, New York, April 1974; In the Deepest Part of Sleep, New York, St. Marks Playhouse, 4 June 1974; First Love, Brooklyn, New York, Billie Holiday Theatre, June 1974; The Lay Out Letter, Philadelphia, Freedom Theatre, Spring 1975; The Brownsville Raid, New York, Theater DeLys, 5 December 1976; Sparrow in Flight, New York, AMAS Repertory Theatre, 2 November 1978; Zooman and the Sign, New York, Theater Four, De¬ cember 1980; A Soldier’s Play, Theater Four, 20 November 1981.

Charles Fuller

SCREENPLAY: A Soldier’s Story, adapted from A Soldier’s Play, Columbia Pictures, 1984.

“Mitchell,” Philadelphia, WCAU, 1968; Black America, Philadelphia, WKYW, 1970-1971; “The Sky is Gray,” American Short Story Series, PBS, 1980.

TELEVISION: Roots, Resistance, and Renaissance (series), Philadelphia, WHYY, 1967;

OTHER: The Rise. A Play in Four Acts, in New Plays From the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins

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Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

(New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 247-304.

some twenty foster children, two of whom his par¬ ents adopted. Fuller said in a 1982 interview with Jean Ross, “Life was simply not frought with the difficulties most people associate with black people. They worked hard, they saved — all those unassum¬ ing simple things that all people do. And there is a sense of completion in their lives.” Fuller’s interest in writing began when his father turned over the proofreading of his work to his son. Although his parents did not know any writers, they were very supportive. From his father, who died in 1981, he learned that he “could do anything I set my mind to,” and his mother, Lillian, his “biggest booster,” agreed. “They told me, ‘if that’s what you want to do, just be the best at it,’ ” Fuller told Ross. He attended Roman Catholic High School and with a friend, Larry Neal, who also became a playwright, raced to see who would be the first to read every book in the library. Fuller and Neal turned to writing, since neither was involved in athletics or extracurricular activities. Neal opened a whole new world of experience to the quiet, soft-spoken young man. He introduced Ful¬ ler to great writers, black and white; they fre¬ quented the library, voraciously reading literature and the classics, while Fuller dreamed of becoming a great writer. From 1956 to 1958, he attended Villanova University, and spent the following four years as an Army petroleum laboratory technician in Japan and Korea. Although he has publicly not discussed his army experiences, he does reveal that part of his life on stage. He continued to write after he re¬ turned to civilian life, and attended LaSalle College from 1965 to 1968. He is married, and the father of two teenaged sons, Charles III, and David. His wife, Miriam, a registered nurse and high school teacher, understands his “obsession” for writing plays. Fol¬ lowing his marriage and the birth of his sons, Fuller quickened the pace and output of his writing, and produced more. He began to write little skits and simple, short, one-act plays for a small theater group which eventually became the Afro-American Theatre of Philadelphia, which he helped found. In 1970 he decided to devote his energies to playwrit¬ ing full-time and moved to New York, where he was supported by a number of prestigious grants. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in 1975; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in 1976; and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1977-1978. A theme running through Fuller’s major works is his belief that “deeply rooted stereotypes abound among Blacks and Whites, and everyone will be better off when the preconceptions are up-

PERIODICAL PUBLICATION: “Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art,” Liberator, 7 (April 1967):

8. Charles H. Fuller, Jr., called by Walter Kerr of the New York Times, “one of the contemporary theatre’s most forceful and original voices,” has come a long way from the first theatrical produc¬ tion he ever saw. It was in a Yiddish theater in Philadelphia, and he attributes his joy in the theater to that first experience—even though he did not understand a word of Yiddish! His substantial tal¬ ent as a playwright was first recognized as early as 1968, with the Princeton McCarter Theater’s pro¬ duction of The Village: A Party. Since that time, he has written an impressive number of stirring dra¬ mas, including Zooman and the Sign (produced in 1980), for which he received two Obie Awards in 1980, and A Soldier’s Play (produced in 1981), for which he received rave notices from Manhattan theater critics, the New York Drama Critic’s Award for Best American Play, the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a movie contract from Columbia Pic¬ tures. Fuller has been writing since age fourteen or fifteen, but he began his formal career in Philadel¬ phia during the 1960s, writing poetry, short stories, and essays at night, while working various jobs such as a bank-loan collector, a counselor at Temple University, and a housing inspector for the city of Philadelphia. As Fuller revealed to Kerr, “Theatre came after—a long time after I began to write. . . . as an extension of the short story. I found that my short stories were. . . . mostly dialogue, so I thought I should try dialogue in the play form for a while.” His plays explore in a powerful and deeply disturb¬ ing way the complexities of human relationships, particularly between blacks and whites, in what many critics believe are “realistic, unbiased, and poignant terms.” Kerr continued, “Mr. Fuller isn’t really interested in special pleading, but in simply and directly—and cuttingly—observing what real¬ ly does go on in this world of ours after you’ve brushed the stereotypes away.” A brilliant artist, concerned with social reform, Fuller is an original, and his talent is unquestionable. Charles H. Fuller, Jr., was born 5 March 1939, in Philadelphia, the oldest child of Charles H. Ful¬ ler, Sr., a printer, and Lillian Anderson Fuller. He grew up in “comfortable circumstances” in North Philadelphia, surrounded by a large extended fami¬ ly which included two younger sisters, his grand¬ father (a brickmason), and over a period of years,

105

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Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

American experience and that, in itself, breeds complexity far beyond anyone’s stereotypes. . . .” It is no accident that three of Fuller’s most widely acclaimed works, The Brownsville Raid (pro¬ duced in 1976), Zooman and the Sign, and A Soldier’s Play, are murder investigations and in two of the three, The Brownsville Raid, and A Soldier’s Play, the murders occur in army camps. He wanted to con¬ struct a “well-made mystery,” and he uses the army and its military structure to underscore the dilem¬ ma of black leaders and to bring parity to black males. In a 1983 interview with Frank White, Fuller commented, “Traditionally, in no other place has it been possible for men to confront men. You can’t call a man a fool whose principal function is to defend this country.” Fuller acknowledges his debt to Herman Mel¬ ville’s Billy Budd, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, to the writers of the English and American literature stu¬ died in most college survey courses, and to many other writers. His interests are eclectic and, as he told Ross, “the list is endless. I’ve honestly been influenced by everything I’ve read. Right now I’m getting through John Gardner’s work, Malraux, I think, is a special influence, Ellison a major one; Albert Murray, Larry Neal.” He acknowledges further that the great playwrights of the American theater, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, are all favorites. He is not pleased at the direction that the contemporary theater seems to be headed, but of contemporary playwrights, he does like Richard Wesley, Phil Dean, and Lanford Wilson. According to Ross, Fuller believes that con¬ temporary theater is following the path of the con¬ temporary novel just now—experimenting with language and leaving out the spirit and body of the people: “I find more verbose nonsense than spirit, than decent storytelling and serious dramatic intent or involvement on the part of the actors or the audience.” He believes that the theater may be undergoing a significant period of stress, and will emerge the stronger because of it: “I just don’t think there is a lot of substance in what’s going on in the theatre at the moment. The plays I’ve read over the years that have remained with me and are fine examples of American Literature have all had more substance, more grit. Even though some things were extremely experimental. . . . more happened in the spirit of the American people then. American theater may be a reflection of American life at the moment. But I don’t expect a great deal of art that is excellent. I think it is unreasonable to tax the thea¬ ter that much. There haven’t been many great plays in the history of the theater, going back to the

Zooman and the Sign By Charles Fuller

Samuel French, Inc.

Front cover for Fuller’s Obie Award-winning play based on the accidental killing of a little girl in Philadelphia

rooted.” Intolerant of on- and off-stage acting that reinforces stereotypes, Fuller wants to rectify the common literary and stage portrayals that distort blacks. In a 1982 interview he told Stanley Crouch, “I feel my job is to get away from all the old images. My development, and the development of black theater, is an attempt to send an arrow into the literature of America, to make a hole large enough for our humanity to move through. . . . most of the things that have been produced about us are com¬ binations of ideas, one part admirable simplicity, one part oppressed—never fully human.” Fuller’s purpose is to broaden the scope of his viewers, to show that black people “do everything . . . and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public.” If he is critical of black hatred of other blacks—“Vio¬ lence in the Black community is a fact of life” — he is more critical of the way white theater and movie producers have shaped the image of the black male as ineffective, inarticulate and emotional. “After all, we’ve lived through and been part of the entire

106

DLB 38

Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

Charles Brown, Peter Friedman, Stephen Zetler, and Cottel Smith in the Negro Ensemble Company production of A Soldier’s Play (photograph by Bert Andrews, courtesy of the Negro Ensemble Company)

Greeks. When one considers the number of years a theatre has existed, that’s not a lot to look back on; so I’m not terribly troubled that it is what it is. Theatre, like everything else undergoes periods of stagnation and growth.”

that occurred in 1906, when an entire Army regi¬ ment was dishonorably discharged because the onehundred and sixty-seven black soldiers in the 25th Infantry unit refused to confess which of their number was guilty of inciting a riot in the small Southern town of Brownsville, Texas. Conflicting accounts were given by witnesses, and no firm evi¬ dence was supplied to indict the men, but they were all discharged. Sixty-six years later, the army cleared the men’s records and called it a “gross miscarriage of justice.” Martin Gottfried, writing in the New York Post, praised Fuller’s restraint in han¬ dling the sensitive content of the play, and in his treatment of the men as products of their era. “Treatment of them as inferiors was the American way and, in fact, they are proud to be soldiers, proud of the Army. Such keeping of faith with social history was disciplined of Fuller and the disci¬ pline paid off. The power of his play lies in the realization of his characters that they have placed

The Village: A Party was the first of Fuller’s major works to bring him to the attention of critics. Lawrence Gelder applauded Fuller’s “smooth, natural dialogue and deft characterization,” and Dan Sullivan wrote, “His dialogue can crackle— and he knows how to make a point without words. . . .” The “Village” is a community of racially mixed couples who live in a peaceful, protected, and seemingly perfect, integrated society, until its black leader falls in love with a black woman and threatens to destroy the racial mix. The communi¬ ty’s image and the perpetuation of the dream is at stake if their leader is allowed to defect. Conse¬ quently, the group destroys him. The Brownsville Raid is based on a true incident

107

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Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

their faith in an Army, an America that would be¬ tray them the first chance it got. By staying his anger until it could pay off dramatically, Fuller reaped a more telling harvest of theatrical and thematic power.” With the play, Zooman and the Sign, for which Fuller won two Obie Awards in 1980, Gerald Weales, writing in the Georgia Review, wrote: Fuller is “an obviously talented playwright, ambitious in his attempt to deal with difficult and complex themes.” Zooman is based on an accidental killing of a little girl that occurred in Philadelphia, and shows the disintegration and decline of the killer, the dead girl’s grieving family, the neighborhood, and the society at large. The play is imaginative and rare, and although Weales says that the “play never quite succeeds in the ambitious terms in which it is conceived ... its aspirations and its incidental strengths make it far more fascinating than many a neater, smaller play.” In 1981, Fuller was devastated by the sudden death after a heart attack of Larry Neal, his child¬ hood friend and fellow playwright. He resolved to pay homage to Neal, and the result, A Soldier’s Play, has been an overwhelming success—first as an off-

A Soldier’s Play A DRAMA

by Charles Fuller

Winner of the 1982 PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA

Samuel French, Inc.

Broadway hit, which played to packed houses for more than a year, with turnaway crowds every night, and then as the film A Soldier’s Story (1984). Fuller told Julia M. Klein: “I wanted to do some¬ thing Larry would be delighted by. I’m sure Larry’s karma is out there somewhere, smiling.” Theater critic Frank Rich, a member of the Pulitzer jury raved, “It refracts the effects of racism through people, without having us watch a fire-breathing White racist slap someone around.” Set at an army base in Louisiana during World War II, A Soldier’s Play focuses upon the conflicts which hide behind race, the color bar, and class distinctions, and that impede social and economic progress, as well as the attainment of aspirations. The story concerns the murder of a black sergeant, Vernon Waters, who might have been murdered by any one of several suspects, black or white. The damaging effects of racism on the complex character of Waters are re¬ vealed, as the identity of the victim becomes almost more important than the identity of the murderer. Fuller has a firm, sure, and sensitive hand. Fuller is very proud of A Soldier’s Play, because, as he told Klein, “I was finally able to say some things about power and color in this country and how they ex¬ hibit themselves in human terms, complex human terms.” When he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, his mother, Lillian, cried for hours. Fuller, a tall, dark, and handsome man, is very much aware

Front cover for the acting version of the play Fuller wrote in homage to Larry Neal

of the differences between blacks based on skin color. When he won the Pulitzer, a friend tele¬ phoned his mother to say that she was surprised — “I never expected that dark-skinned boy to amount to anything.” His mother knew how to handle such a call. Fuller has demonstrated his gift and strength as a writer in a provocative, sometimes shocking, always illuminating way. Critics and theatergoers await his next effort.

References: Stanley Crouch, “Talent, luck and the sleeping YoYo of American social progress—A conversa¬ tion with Charles Fuller,” Vogue, 172 (October 1982): 186; Julia M. Klein, “Charles Fuller Sat Down To Write A Black Billy Budd and Wound Up With A Pulitzer,” People, 17 (28 June 1982): 85-86; Jean W. Ross, Telephone interview with Charles

108

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Bill Gunn

Fuller, Contemporary Authors, 112 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), pp. 189-190; Leo Sauvage, “On State, Plays That Got Away,” New Leader (12-26 July 1982): 21;

Frank White III, “Pushing Beyond the Pulitzer,” Ebony, 38 (March 1983): 116-118; White, Review of A Soldier’s Play, Ebony, 38 (August 1983): 180-181.

Bill Gunn (15 July 1934-

)

Ilona Leki University of Tennessee

BOOKS: All the Rest Have Died (New York: Delacorte Press, 1964; London: Joseph, 1965); Black Picture Show (Berkeley, Cal.: Reed, Cannon & Johnson, 1975); Rhinestone Sharecropping (New York: I. Reed Books, 1981). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Marcus in the High Grass, Connecticut, Westport Theatre, 1958; Johnnas, Brooklyn, New York, Chelsea Theatre, 1968; Black Picture Show, New York, Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, 6 January 1975; Rhinestone Sharecropping (a play with music), Richard Allen Centre, October 1982. SCREENPLAYS: Fame Game, Columbia Pictures, 1968; Friends, Universal Studios, 1968; Stop, Warner Brothers, 1969 (never released); Angel Levine, adapted by Gunn and Ronald Ribman from Bernard Malamud’s story “The Angel Levine,” United Artists, 1970; Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome, Chuck Barris Produc¬ tions, 1970; The Landlord, adapted from a Kristin Hunter novel, United Artists, 1970; Ganja and Hess, Kelly-Jordan, 1973; re-edited as Blood Couple, Heritage Enterprises, 1973; The Greatest, The Muhammed Ali Story, Columbia Pic¬

Review, 12 (Summer 1968): 126-138. William Harrison Gunn’s career in the per¬ forming arts and in American letters began in the mid-1950s, and since that time, although his work is not familiar to mass audiences, he has gained the respect and admiration of critics, writers, and other artists in a wide range of creative fields. As early as 1954, when he was twenty Gunn won critical acclaim for his portrayal of the young boy in The New Theatre Company revival at the Jan Hus Au¬ ditorium of Take a Giant Step. Throughout the

tures, 1976. TELEVISION: Johnnas, NBC, Washington, D.C., 1972; “The Alberta Hunter Story,” Southern Pictures/ BBC, London, 1982. PERIODICAL PUBLICATION: Johnnas, in Drama

109

Bill Gunn

DLB 38 in his own screenplays beginning in 1970 with his movie Stop. He also wrote for commercial and edu¬ cational television. During his career the talent he has shown in a wide variety of domains has won him an Emmy, two Audelco Awards, and recognition at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Gunn was born to William Harrison and Louise Alexander Gunn on 15 July 1934 in Phila¬ delphia, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a mid¬ dle-class neighborhood in which the Gunns were one of several black families who owned their own homes. He was educated at well-integrated public schools in Philadelphia, and he was further en¬ riched by the model of his parents’ creativity. His father, also known as Bill Gunn, starting in the 1920s, was a songwriter (“Ball and the Jack”), musi¬ cian, comedian, and unpublished poet. Gunn’s mother, a beauty contest winner and actress, was a founder, with the Reverend Leon Sullivan, of OICA (Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America), a network of community development programs and services based upon a philosophy of self-help. She later ran her own theater group, where Gunn got an early taste for drama. After

1950s and 1960s, he continued to act in plays on and off Broadway, including The Immoralist with James Dean, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, as well as productions of Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and Troilus and Cressida. By the early 1960s, he was also performing for television and regularly had minor or secondary roles in many of the popu¬ lar television series, such as Dr. Kildare and The Interns. During this time, he had begun a parallel career as a playwright, producing his first stage play, Marcus in the High Grass, in 1958 with the Theatre Guild at the Westport Theatre in Connecti¬ cut. Ironically, this production of Marcus was con¬ sidered more saleable as a “white” play than as a “black” one. Because Marcus was a story about peo¬ ple in general, and since there was no overt racial issue, the management cast David Wayne and Eliza¬ beth Ashley in the leading roles. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, thinking Gunn was white, hailed him as Tennessee Williams’s superior. By 1964 Gunn had written his first novel, All the Rest Have Died, and he was accumulating enough money from his acting career to finance his new career as a writer. Gunn wrote, directed, and acted

ALL THE Ri$T HAVE DIED

BILL GUNN

ALL THE REST HAVE DIED BILL GUNN

'itlilioti to being a novelist, Bill Gunn is also a playwright and an b . His first play was presented at the Westport Playhouse in the ». r i i of 1958, his latest will be produced on Broadway this season. •■n at tor he- has appeared on Broadway, in films and on television.

delocooe press

Dust jacket from Gunn’s first novel. The title is taken from the Emily Dickinson poem in which a Foe “chose the best—Neglecting me—till/All the rest have died.’’

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Bill Gunn

serving in the U.S. Navy, Gunn moved, in the 1950s, to the East Village in New York intending to become an actor. He struggled to survive financially and has said of this period in his life that he had recurring nightmares of being put onto the streets in Philadelphia and being made into a drug addict. But his acting career eventually earned him enough to allow him to study art, to buy an elegant twohundred-year-old house in New York State, and to furnish it with objects reflecting his taste for Euro¬ pean art.

come to terms with the direction his life is taking, however, until he is forced to witness the suicide of Bernard, one of his new friends, a wealthy, white, tormented, and somewhat obnoxious writer. At this point Barney is shocked into the realization that he alone is responsible for his life, and he is responsible only to himself, not to the memory of Taylor. The roots of this novel are in the existential philosophies of French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose influences were being strongly felt in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Barney’s problem is how to explain to him¬ self his place in the world; the novel is a kind of Bildungsroman, a young man’s search for himself and for a successful, satisfying life. The issues Gunn addresses are not issues of the black in a white world, but of a human being in the world, with its absurdities, frustrations, and unexpected joys. Gunn has a black writer in the novel comment, “My preoccupation is not with, as the critics would have it, the various shades and complexions of the bas¬ tards I write about, but what they do to each other, and the ingenuity and finesse with which they carry out games of love, hate, graft, etcetera.” Comment¬ ing on the book himself, Gunn says it is “a book about a young man who cannot accept the pacifier of false involvement. He has no choice but to be committed to the strong relationships that knock him about in life. He is an American Negro and has suffered his share of American ‘Negroism’ from black and white alike. But he is not so foolish as to deceive himself that this is his paramount source of pain.. . . The story of his racial struggle would have been an easier and less honest book to write, since it would have been an easier and less honest struggle for my character to make. A voice in chorus is far less available for scrutiny than one which speaks out alone.”

It was because many of the roles he played proved not to be challenging or stimulating enough for him that Gunn decided to develop his second career as a writer. Nearly all of his writing has a strong current of autobiography; the main charac¬ ter, for example, is often an artist from Philadel¬ phia living in New York. In general, Gunn writes about the problems of the black middle class as well as the problems an artist must confront as he tries to survive while remaining true to his art; and the difficulties a black artist, in particular, faces in a world structured and managed by whites. Gunn’s writing has become increasingly infused with black consciousness, although the issue of race surfaced even in his earliest works. Gunn once said, “There is something about my Blackness that I don’t under¬ stand,” and his work as a writer reflects his commit¬ ment to finding that part of himself through art. His sensitivity to the special position of the black artist in the white world is typified by his initial concern over the great amount of admiration and attention he received when his film Ganja and Hess (produced in 1973) was selected for showing during Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Gunn feared his success merely reflected the in¬ terest generated by the exoticism of a movie writ¬ ten, directed, and acted in by blacks. He was reas¬ sured, however, that it was the quality of the film and not the personal characteristics of its author which excited enthusiasm. Like much of his work, Gunn’s first novel, All the Rest Have Died (1964), has autobiographical ele¬ ments. The young protagonist Barney Gifford leaves his hometown, Philadelphia, to pursue an acting career in New York. He is at least partially

Gunn’s early insistence on dealing with a man’s existential crisis, rather than with a black man’s racial crisis, has been variously interpreted. In his review of the award-winning Black Picture Show (produced in 1975), a work more oriented toward racial issues, Jack Kroll of Newsweek looks back to All the Rest Have Died as a remnant of Gunn’s past before he joined “the ranks of anti-white black writers.” Noel Schraufnagel, in his From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel (1973), puts All the Rest Have Died into the category of “nonprotest or accommodation fiction,” in which racial problems are merely accepted as a part of life, as individuals adjust themselves to the realities of white society while searching for “a meaningful identity that will serve as a compensatory stratagem.”

inspired by his cousin Taylor, who had also hoped to become an actor, but whose life was cut short by an absurd accident. Barney experiences some diffi¬ culties separating his own life and aspirations from his memories of and admiration for Taylor. In New York he soon establishes himself within a bohe¬ mian, artistic community and finds love with a white model and artist, Maggie. Barney does not really Ill

DLB 38

Bill Gunn

appealing films got funding and that “studios have no interest whatsoever in depicting Black culture or Black life.” As a result a serious filmmaker like Gunn has been forced “to begin on a commercial premise and go where you want with it.” Such realities must make all the more frus¬ trating Gunn’s experience with his movie Ganja and Hess. The only one of three hundred American film entrants selected for showing during Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, Ganja and Hess ran in New York for a mere week. It closed just as word of mouth was spreading about the film. The script which Gunn had eventually turned into Ganja and Hess was originally called “The Vampires of Harlem” and was meant merely to be a black vam¬ pire film. But as film authority James Monaco says, “Like the greatest films of the horror genre, Ganja and Hess taps hidden reservoirs in our collective unconscious for its power.” Hess is a cultured, wealthy vampire whose thirst for blood is quenched at blood banks. His assistant (played by Gunn) com¬ mits suicide and leaves behind his beautiful wife Ganja, who falls in love with Hess. Hess eventually commits suicide himself, but not before initiating Ganja into the world of the undead. Ganja and Hess

The progression from what is received as “accommodationism” to so-called “anti-white” writ¬ ing is not merely a result of suddenly raised con¬ sciousness, since throughout his acting career Gunn had experienced frustration arising from subtle forms of racism in the performing arts, a field which has actually been more progressive and open to blacks than have many other professions. In 1964, for example, the year All the Rest Have Died was published, Gunn is quoted in Variety as com¬ plaining about casting practices in the movie indus¬ try. Few good roles for black actors existed; during the 1930s and part of the 1940s, when issue plays were being performed in the theater, blacks had been able to count on some interesting roles, but by the 1950s blacks were only being given minor parts, often as servants. Worse yet, by the 1960s, “When a good part for a Negro actor does come along, they always offer it to Sidney Poitier. If he turns it down, they rewrite it for a white actor.” The impact that blacks had made on the film industry by the early 1970s was confined to ex¬ ploitation movies, like Super Fly, or children’s stories released as cinema for black adults, like Sounder. Gunn complained that only such commercially

In his critically acclaimed film Ganja and Hess, Bill Gunn plays George Meda (in the background), the assistant to Green (played by Duane Jones) (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art).

112

DLB 38

Bill Gunn

has been called “the most introspective of Black films,” and Gunn has said that it was “really about the many addictions I’ve had in my life,” alluding to “Black fundamentalist Christianity, African myth¬ ology and philosophy, drugs, sex, and the moneyed life.” Not only was the film shown in Cannes for Critics’ Week, but it was a great popular success there, inspiring enthusiastic applause from the nor¬ mally extremely reserved audiences. It was later chosen as one of the ten best films of the 1970s. The film’s producer in America, oddly unaware of the film’s success in France, had previously sold the film to Heritage Films. Heritage sent a representative to Cannes, but inexplicably disturbed by the film’s artistic success, the firm had Ganja and Hess reedited, and reshot and retitled several times. It bore little resemblance to Gunn’s original and quieting cinematic art. Despite this unjust fate, in 1973 Ganja and Hess was given a showing at the Museum of Modern Art (where it is now part of the permanent collection). This landmark event, and subsequent screenings at museums and festivals around the country, has allowed the film to develop an excellent reputation and a small but enthusiastic following in the world of the underground film. Fortunately a copy of the original film now exists, and Gunn has toured America, showing the film and talking to college audiences. Once called the black cinema’s Invisible Man and “the most complicated, intriguing, subtle, sophisticated, and passionate Black film of the seventies,” Ganja and Hess is slowly finally becoming

and writer, Alexander, whose son, JD, also an artist, has succumbed to the temptation of commercialism in art and has become a writer of screenplays for commercially successful but exploitative films. The play moves back and forth in time, and around in space from a Bronx mental hospital, where Alexan¬ der eventually ends up, to the living room where Alexander and his pragmatic second wife, Rita, en¬ tertain a boorish white producer and his cocainesniffing wife in hopes of securing work. Alexander humiliates himself and his art for the sake of money, but then succumbs to insanity as a result of the tensions this sellout creates in him. JD is Alexan¬ der’s alter ego, an artist of talent who finds his father overly idealistic about racial and artistic ques¬ tions and who calls himself a counterrevolutionary whose interest lies not in freedom, but; whose free¬ dom lies in indifference toward the types of moral questions which drive his father insane and even¬ tually kill him. The play ran for forty performances on Broadway and received mixed reviews. Many of the most influential theater critics found the play to be full of flaws, yet they admired Gunn’s obvious gift for writing and directing. Critics commented in particular upon Gunn’s brilliant depiction of the British director and his wife. But other critics had problems with the mixture of biting and effective street language with occasional, less successful, bursts of verse and with the central issue of idealism and art versus money. Gunn received the Audelco Award for Best Playwright, and Black Picture Show won for Best Play of the Year of 1975. The question of the role of the artist in a crass world had also been the central theme of Gunn’s 1968 one-act play, Johnnas, performed offBroadway at the Chelsea Theatre for the first time, subsequently in a number of other theaters, and finally as a teleplay in Washington, D.C., for which it won the 1972 Emmy Award for best teleplay. A story told by Johnnas of how his father made his break from the life of the tobacco fields in North Carolina by winning a singing and cakewalking (a kind of stepping dance) contest is one that resur¬ faces in several of Gunn’s works. It is the artist in the black man which at once helps him survive and yet forces him to confront the real world. Johnnas, himself a writer, was born in Philadelphia on 14 July 1933, one year and one day before Gunn’s own birthday. He is harassed by his classmates for writ¬ ing poems, an activity that implies to them he may

known to more than just a handful of people. The fate of Gunn’s other films has been equal¬ ly problematic. His first film, Stop, shot in Puerto Rico in 1970, was viewed by executives at Warner Brothers, who avowed enthusiasm for the film and promised to release it at the right moment, which apparently never came. In 1970 Gunn collaborated with Ronald Ribman on the screenplay for Angel Levine, an adaptation of a story by Bernard Malamud. He also wrote and directed The Landlord (1970), based on a novel by Kristin Hunter, which was filmed by Hal Ashby and is considered “a generally underrated crossover film.” Gunn also wrote the film script for Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome (1970), adapted from a novel by Don Asher. The theme of the commercial exploitation and degradation of the artist reemerges as the cen¬ tral issue in Gunn’s play Black Picture Show, pro¬ duced on Broadway in January 1975 by Joseph Papp at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as a part of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Black Picture Show deals with the moral dilemma of a black poet

be trying to pretend he is white. Later, humiliated again for his blackness, fourteen-year-old Johnnas commits suicide by jumping off a building into a taunting crowd. Treating the complex question of 113

DLB 38

Bill Gunn race and the role of the artist in a materialistic and pitiless world, this short piece is nonetheless the simplest and most moving of Gunn’s works. The events in the life of the hero of Rhinestone Sharecropping (1981) seem to parallel some of Gunn’s experiences, and several of the characters in this novel have their roots in Gunn’s earlier works. The protagonist, Sam Dodd, writes screenplays and is forced to deal with exploitive producers and film studios which repeatedly make and break promises to him about his screenplays. Bernard, from All the Rest Have Died, reappears here as the producer Cubby Steinbeck, and Sam Dodd may be a develop¬ ment of JD, the cinematographer son in Black Pic¬ ture Show who has taken a pragmatic stance and accommodated himself to the unpleasant business side of art. Once again at issue is the place of the artist with integrity in the world of art for money and of studio politics in filmmaking. Unlike his first novel, written almost twenty years earlier, this one is full of bitterness at the injustices and humiliations which artists suffer at the hands of the mercenaries who surround them. Cleola, Sam Dodd’s wife, calls

BLACK PICTURE SHOW

by BILL GUNN

black Hollywood’s activity “rhinestone sharecrop¬ ping.” Dodd, however, at first has some hope of succeeding in his dealings with the vulgar repre¬ sentatives of the film studio. He says, “I was not Uncle Tom, but I was indeed Thomas the cat strok¬ ing the master’s pant leg for a little of the cream from which I would make cheese to catch a rat.” But by the end of the novel he can only quote James Baldwin: “When you finish crying, then what you gonna do? Get up. Get up.” At present Gunn is preparing to play the lead in his own play, “Family Employment,” which is expected to open the 1985 season at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York. The middle-class characters, some of whom are based upon Gunn’s own relatives, seem to embody the goals of the upwardly mobile black; they have money, power, and one character even passes temporarily for white. But in fact, the material wealth that has come largely from gambling is made upon the backs of the black community. A microcosm of the larger social dynamic, the play’s family is, in Gunn’s words, “a family that self-destructs from within.” The characters in Gunn’s work have matured in their determination to continue to strive despite setbacks and defeats. Much of this development, no doubt, parallels Gunn’s own experience. One of the problems Gunn confronted as a black playwright in the 1950s and 1960s was the lack of a black theater¬ going audience who would have supported plays by black artists and allowed them some needed expo¬ sure and experience. A similar problem also exists today in the film industry. If a picture is not pro¬ moted, its chance of commercial success is dimin¬ ished; distributors are reluctant to handle films by new filmmakers who do not have a history of com¬ mercial success. Perhaps Gunn’s 1981 return to the novel, a medium requiring far less immediate pub¬ lic approval than a movie, was a result of the diffi¬ culties involved in building a following among movie and theater audiences. Nevertheless, Gunn’s talent and his contribution to theater, television, cinema, and literature remain undisputed, and crit¬ ics who have seen him act or who have seen his movies or plays fully expect to hear more from him. References: James Monaco, American Film Now (New York: Ox¬ ford University Press, 1979), pp. 205-207; Maurice Peterson, “Interview with Bill Gunn,” Es¬ sence, 4 (October 1973): 27, 96; Noel Schraufnagel, From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel (De Land, Fla.: Everett/Ed¬ wards, 1973), pp. 123-135.

1

Reed Cannon & Johnson il

Front cover for Gunns play which won the 1975 Audelco Award for Best Play of the Year

114

Alex Haley (11 August 1921-

)

Marilyn Kern-Foxworth University of Tennessee

BOOKS: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976; London: Hutchinson, 1977). TELEVISION: Roots, ABC, January 1977, script consultant; Roots: The Next Generation, ABC, February 1979, script consultant; Palmerstown, U.S.A., CBS, 20 March 1980. RECORDING: “Alex Haley Speaks,” Kinte Cor¬ poration, circa 1980. SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “My Search for Roots,” Reader’s Digest, 104 (May 1974): 73-78; “In Search of the African,” American History Illus¬ trated, 8 (Fall 1974): 21-26; “Alex Haley on Kids in Search of Their Roots,” Parents Magazine, 52 (Spring 1977): 60-61; “What Roots Mean to Me,” Reader’s Digest, 110 (May 1977): 73-76; “Sea Islanders, Strong-Willed Survivors Face Their Uncertain Future Together,” Smithsonian, 13 (October 1982): 88-97.

A lex Haley (Gale International Portrait Gallery)

Alex Haley’s reputation in the literary world rests upon his much-acclaimed historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). Haley’s tracing of his Afro-American ancestry back to a tiny village in Gambia, West Africa, spawned one of the most ambitious television productions ever under¬ taken, and it inspired a generation of ancestor¬ seeking Americans. Eleven years before the appear¬ ance of Roots, Haley had also gained fame for writ¬ ing Malcolm X’s “as told to” autobiography. In addition to the two books, Haley has written many articles for popular magazines, appeared on count¬ less television shows, and lectured throughout the country. Alex Murray Palmer Haley was born 11 Au-

gust 1921 in Ithaca, New York, and reared in the small town of Henning, Tennessee. He was the oldest of three sons born to Bertha George Palmer and Simon Alexander Haley. When he was born, both parents were in their first year of graduate school, Bertha at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, and Simon at Cornell University. They took the young Alex to Henning, where he grew up under the influence of women who inspired his search for his past. He remembers listening for hours as his family reminisced about an African ancestor who refused to respond to the slave name ‘“Toby.” “They said anytime any of the other slaves called him that, he would strenuously rebuff them, declar¬ ing that his name was ‘Kin-tay.’ ” These initial sto115

DLB 38

Alex Haley

This small reward fell short of the recognition he desired, but it did presage the beginning of assign¬ ments from more and more magazines, one of which was Reader’s Digest, where he later published the first excerpts from Roots. Eventually, Haley’s commitment to writing paid off in two significant ways. First, he received an assignment from Playboy in 1962 to interview jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, which led to the establish¬ ment of the “Playboy Interview,” a new series for the magazine. Second, he was asked to write a fea¬ ture about Black Muslim leader Malcolm X. This interview was the impetus for Haley’s writing the best-selling The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which sold 50,000 hardcover copies and about five million copies in paperback. The Autobiography of Malcolm X traces Malcolm Little’s transformation into Malcolm X, signifying his belief that black people in America had been denied their true identities. The book depicts the poverty in which Malcolm grew up, his early bouts with authorities in social service agencies after his father was killed and his mother was slowly losing her sanity, and his wild life on the streets of Detroit following his mother’s institutionalization and the separation of his family. The street life led to his imprisonment, during which he was converted to the Muslim faith. He quickly became a respected leader in the Muslim community until his disagree¬ ments with Elijah Muhammad, head of the Black Muslims. The book ends shortly after he makes a trip to Mecca and begins to redefine his conception of whites as “devils.” The book was very well received and became required reading for many courses in colleges. It also had popular appeal; it was not uncommon to find young black men on street corners, in subways, or walking along the streets with copies of the book in their hands. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 contributed to the popularity of the book. Two weeks after he completed the manuscript for the book on Malcolm X, Haley wandered into the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., to begin researching his own genealogy. At the time, Haley did not know that this initial search would eventually lead him to “50 or more archives, libraries and research repositories on three conti¬ nents,” before his curiosity would be satisfied, and that his efforts would culminate with the writing of Roots, published twelve years later on 1 October 1976.

ries would serve as the basis from which the Roots saga grew. Not a stellar student in high school, Haley graduated with a C average at the age of fifteen. He then entered Alcorn A & M College in Lorman, Mississippi. After a short period, he transferred to Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina, from which he withdrew at age seventeen. His experiences after college contributed directly to his growth as a writer. In 1939 he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard as a messboy. To alleviate the boredom he experienced while cruising in the southwestern Pacific aboard an ammunition ship, he began writing. His first venture included writing love letters for his shipmates. He expanded his range with articles that he submitted to several American magazines. A series of rejection slips fol¬ lowed before his first article was accepted for pub¬ lication by This Week, a syndicated Sunday newspa¬ per supplement. When Haley retired from the coast guard at the age of thirty-seven, he had attained the position of chief journalist. Although he had dutifully served twenty years in the coast guard, he was not permitted to collect his pension checks—those were given as child support to Nannie Branch, whom he had married in 1941. They had two chil¬ dren, William Alexander and Lydia Ann. They were separated for several years before getting di¬ vorced in 1964, the year he married Juliette Collins, whom he subsequently divorced; they had one child, Cynthia Gertrude. Determined to continue his avid interest in writing, Haley moved into a basement apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village where, as a free-lance writer, he lived a penurious existence. He was in debt and saw no brightness in his immedi¬ ate future: “I owed everyone. One day a friend called with a Civil Service job that paid $6000 per year. I turned it down. I wanted to make it writing. My friend banged the phone down. I owed him too. I took psychic inventory. I looked in the cupboard, and there were two cans of sardines, marked two for 21 cents. I had 18 cents in a sack and I said to myself that I’d keep them.” As a reminder of what he had to endure to get to where he is today, Haley framed the coins and cans and displays them in his private library; he calls them a symbol of his “deter¬ mination to be independent,” and vows that they will always be on the wall. Haley’s life soon took a turn for the better. The day after taking inventory of his circumstances, Haley received a check for an article he had written.

Roots is the story of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinkan from the small village of Juffure Gambia in West

116

DLB 38

Alex Haley

Africa, and his American descendants; he was “the African” about whom Haley’s grandmother and other relatives told stories. Haley imaginatively re¬ created his ancestor’s life in Africa, his capture into slavery, and his experiences in the new world. Haley had been fascinated and intrigued by the story from childhood, because Kunta Kinte, he was told, refused to accept the ways and customs of his white masters and never forgot his African heri¬ tage.

himself continued the tradition of his family by sharing the stories with his own children, William, Lydia Ann, and Cindy. Although it took Haley twelve years to re¬ search and write Roots, it did not take nearly that long for it to reach the pinnacle of success. Two years following its publication, the book had won two hundred seventy-one awards, including a cita¬ tion from the judges of the 1977 National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Within this short time, eight and one-half million copies of the book had been printed in twenty-six languages. Much of the success of Roots can be attributed to the airing of two television mini-series which dramatically portrayed the saga outlined in the book. As a result of the television hit, Roots was one of the nonfiction best-sellers in 1977; it penetrated domestic, foreign, societal, cultural, geographical, racial, gender, age, and socioeconomic barriers with a laser effect. Of that effect, Paul Zimmerman wrote: “Instead of writing a scholarly monograph of little social impact, Haley has written a blockbust¬ er in the best sense—a book that is bold in concept and ardent in execution, one that will reach millions of people and alter the way we see ourselves.” Another testament to the phenomenon that Roots became is the fact that prior to the release of the book in paperback, it was used in two hundred seventy-six college courses. The book was so broadly popular that a chil¬ dren’s edition was published, as was a $75 special edition with gold trim. Vernon Jordan, former director of the National Urban League, remarked in a Time magazine article that the televised version of Roots was “the single most spectacular education¬ al experience in race relations in America.” This reaction was a surprise to the producers. Produced by David L. Wolper for ABC, Roots was originally planned to be televised over a much long¬ er period of time, but was shown on eight consecu¬ tive nights due to an increased fear that it would be a monumental embarrassment. When the first part of the mini-series aired on 23 January 1977, it was universally acclaimed. Some one hundred thirty million Americans watched at least one of the epi¬ sodes. Seven of the eight episodes ranked among the top ten shows in all TV ratings. At the end of its run, Roots had attained an average of 66 percent of the audience shares which had been projected at 31 percent; it was nominated for thirty-seven Emmy awards. Roots was such a phenomenal success that ABC produced a sequel, Roots: The Next Generation.

Haley’s relatives also spoke of how Kunta cherished his freedom and would not relinquish the thought of escaping until, upon his fourth attempt, he was caught, and his foot was severed. Eventually Kunta married the cook, Bell, in the big house, and they had a child named Kizzy. Kunta spent many hours telling Kizzy about her African ancestry. “When Kizzy became four or five . . . her father would point out to her various objects and name them in his native tongue. For example, he would point to a guitar and make a single-syllable sound, ko.” Kizzy gave birth to a son, George, who was fathered by her master. She, in turn, began teaching him African sounds and telling him folk¬ tales when he was four or five. Perhaps the most famous of Haley’s ancestors after Kunta, George became a well-known gamecock trainer and ac¬ quired the pseudonym “Chicken George.” George married Mathilda and fathered eight children. His fourth son, Tom, became a blacksmith, and when he reached adulthood and married, he was sold to the owner of a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina. There, he met and mar¬ ried a half-Indian girl named Irene, and she bore him eight children. Tom carried on the oral tradi¬ tion of his family. One of Tom’s children, Cynthia (Alex Haley’s grandmother), was the most immediate influence upon the writing of Roots. When Cynthia was two years old, she was taken to Henning, Tennessee, on a wagon train of freed slaves. It was in Henning that she married Will Palmer and had a daughter named Bertha who married Simon Haley; these were Haley’s parents. Haley’s grandmother, along with his aunts Viney, Mathilda, and Liz, perpetuated the tradi¬ tional stories concerning the trials, tribulations, and successes of Kunta Kinte’s family. Their front porch became their forum. Hundreds of thousands of Americans identi¬ fied vicariously with the story of Roots both in its book form and in the television adaptation. Haley

117

Alex Haley

DLB 38

ALEX HALEY

Dust jacket for Haley’s best-selling book, the result of twelve years of genealogical research

“Roots II,” as it was called, cost $16.6 million to make and ran for fourteen hours. The first episode was aired on 18 February 1979. The story line be¬ gan in 1882, twelve years after the end of “Roots I,” and it ended in 1967.

to the success of Roots, Haley has become a mil¬ lionaire. Haley’s success has been marked by relentless hours of autographing tours and press interviews on radio and television, as well as in newspapers. Although he has also been on the lecture tour con¬ stantly, he has managed to Find time to pursue other writing projects. He is presently at work on “Search,” which will provide a detailed account of how he traced his ancestry, and “Henning,” which will portray his hometown during the 1930s. In 1980, he teamed with Norman Lear to develop a limited television series, Palmerstown, U.S.A., about the friendship of two young boys—one black and one white — who grew up in the rural South in the 1930s.

During the eighty-five-year span of “Roots II” Haley’s family was dramatized against the backdrop of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, world wars, race riots, and the Great Depression. As one author notes, “Roots II” was also able to dramatize normal black middle-class life—at home, work, and col¬ lege—and to show some of the heartbreaks, ambi¬ tions, and conflicts that blacks had in common with whites. The Roots phenomenon turned Haley into an entrepreneur. He formed the Kinte Corporation in California and has become involved in the produc¬ tion of films and records. One of Haley’s first pro¬ ductions was a record titled “Alex Haley Speaks”; it features tips from Haley on how to research one’s genealogy. Through such ventures, and others tied

Despite fame and fortune, Haley is rather re¬ strained about his success. He commented: “The funny thing is that all that money has almost no meaning to me. I was broke so long that I got used to being without money. The few things I do want, 118

DLB 38

Alex Haley

including a decent stereo set, don’t cost more than $5,000. All I’m concerned with is just being com¬ fortable, being able to pay my debts, and having a little to buy something or make a gift to somebody.” Haley’s success brought some conflicts in addition to the fortune. Amid his newly acquired wealth, he found himself involved in two plagiarism suits. The first was brought by Margaret Walker Alexander, author of Jubilee (1966), which had won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award; she charged Haley with copyright infringement on 20 April 1977. Eventually the charges were dropped, but not before Haley had incurred $100,000 in lawyers’ fees. The second accusation of plagiarism was brought by Harold Courlander, au¬ thor of The African (1968). Courlander claimed that certain passages in his book were plagiarized in Roots. On 14 December 1977, Haley conceded that the charge was accurate and paid $500,000 in outof-court settlement fees; Courlander had sued for half the profits of Roots. According to Haley, “there were three paragraphs from [The African] that appeared verbatim in my notes.” He explained that during the course of writing his book he often accepted undocumented notes and information from other people and (that some of what he used) “turned out to be extracted from Courlander’s book.” Haley attempted to authenticate as much of the material in Roots as possible. He was so obsessed with authenticity, especially from the emotional perspective, that he went to extremes to validate his recreation of the emotional anguish that Kunta and others must have experienced on the middle pas¬ sage. An Ebony interviewer recounted some of Haley’s efforts: “He somehow scrounged up some money and flew to Liberia where he booked pas¬ sage on the first U.S. bound ship. Once at sea, he spent the night lying on a board in the hold of the ship, stripped to his underwear to get a rough idea of what his African ancestor might have experi¬ enced. . . . That same night, he says, he went back into the hold. ‘Lying again on that board, it was if some kind of catharsis had occurred. I felt for the first time that I was Kunta Kinte. From that mo¬ ment on, I had no problem with writing what his senses had registered as he was crossing the

great civil rights advocate. Flaley bridged a part of the gap between the historical liaisons of Africans and Afro-Americans, and his name has become synonymous with the desire to know about heritage and roots. The book itself has been judged to be “an epic work destined to become a classic of American literature.” References: Katrine Ames and Ronald Henkoff, “Uprooted,” Newsweek, 93 (22 January 1979): 10; H. Boyd, “Plagiarism and the Roots Suits,” First World, 2, no. 3 (1979): 31-33; Jeffrey Elliot, “Alex Haley Talks to Jeffrey Elliot,” Negro History Bulletin, 41 (January 1978): 782785; Cheryl Forbes, “From These Roots: The Real Sig¬ nificance of Haley’s Phenomenon,” Christian¬ ity Today, 21 (6 May 1977): 19-22; M. Granfield, “Uncle Tom’s Roots,” Newsweek, 89 (4 February 1977): 100; W. Marmon, “Haley’s RX: Talk, Write, Reunite,” Time, 109 (14 February 1977): 72; HansJ. Massaquoi, “Alex Haley in Juffure,” Ebony, 32 (July 1977): 31-33; Massaquoi, “Alex Haley: The Man Behind Roots,” Ebony, 32 (April 1977): 33-36; W. McGuire and M. S. Clayton, “Interview with Alex Haley,” Today’s Educator, 66 (September 1977): 45-47; Martin Rein and Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Roots,” Negro History Bulletin, 40 (January 1977): 664-667; Madalynne Reuter, “Doubleday Answers Haley: Denies All Charges,” Publishers Weekly, 211 (25 April 1977): 34-35; Reuter, “Haley Settles Plagiarism Suit, Concedes Passages,” Publishers Weekly, 214 (25 Decem¬ ber 1978): 22; Reuter, “Why Alex Haley Is Suing Doubleday: An Outline of the Complaint,” Publishers Weekly, 211 (4 April 1977): 25; “A Super Sequel to Haley’s Comet,” Time, 113 (19 February 1979): 85-88; “View from the Whirlpool,” Time, 113(19 February 1979): 88; Harry F. Waters, “After Haley’s Comet,” Newsweek, 89 (14 February 1977): 97-98; Waters and V. E. Smith, “One Man’s Family,” News¬ week, 87 (21 June 1976): 73; Kenneth L. Woodward and Anthony Collings, “Limits of Faction,” Newsweek, 89 (25 April 1977): 87; Paul D. Zimmerman, “In Search of a Heritage,” Newsweek, 88 (27 September 1976): 94-96.

ocean.’ ” Through such meticulous attention to detail, Haley emerged as the first black American to trace his ancestry back to Africa, as documented by Roots. He is also admired by many for helping to foster better race relations. Hence, his indelible mark on history will not only be as a creative writer but as a 119

Lorraine Hansberry (19 May 1930-12 January 1965)

Steven R. Carter University of Puerto Rico

See also the Hansberry entry in DLB 7, TwentiethCentury American Dramatists. BOOKS: A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1959; London: Methuen, 1960); The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964); retitled A Matter of Colour: Documentary of the Struggles for Racial Equality in the USA (London: Pen¬ guin, 1965); The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window (New York: Random House, 1965); in Three Negro Plays, (London: Penguin, 1969); To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hans¬ berry, edited by Robert Nemiroff (New York: Random House, 1972) — includes Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers ? PLAY PRODUCTIONS: A Raisin in the Sun, New York, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 11 March 1959; The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window, New York, Longacre Theatre, 15 October 1964; To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted by Robert Nemiroff, New York, Cherry Lane Theatre, 2 January 1969; Les Blancs, adapted by Nemiroff, New York, Longacre Theatre, 15 November 1970. SCREENPLAY: A Raisin in the Sun, Columbia Pic¬ tures, 1961. Lorraine Hansberry (photo by David Attie, courtesy of Robert Nemiroff)

TELEVISION: To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted from Nemiroff’s play based on Hansberry’s writings by Robert M. Fresco, NET, January 1972.

OTHER: “A Challenge to Artists,” in Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in The United States 1797-1971, edited by Philip S. Foner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), pp. 954959.

RECORDING: Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and Black Revolution, selected and edited by Nemiroff, Caedmon Records (TC 1352), 1972. 120

DLB 38

Lorraine Hansberry

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “Willy Loman, Walter Lee Younger and He Who Must Live,” Village Voice, 4 (12 August 1959): 7, 8; “On Summer,” Playbill (27 June 1960): 3, 25-27; “This Complex of Womanhood,"Ebony, 15 (August 1960) : 40;

brilliant, probing, ever-curious mind to the cultural ghetto of emotional protest against black social con¬ ditions (though never denying the necessity and usefulness of such protest), she depicted a Green¬ wich Village Jewish intellectual in the full complex¬ ity of his personality and cultural knowledge, allow¬ ing him to refer pointedly and accurately to Walden, Lord of the Flies, Rashomon, and other works un¬ known to many in her audience. In spite of its difficulty, it should be considered a major work for its fascinating characters, witty dialogue, and su¬ perb portrayal of the social and intellectual currents of its time. That she never intended to overlook black concerns is shown by her third major drama, Les Blancs (produced in 1970), which painfully and forcefully set forth the African struggle against European colonialism, and her fine television script, The Drinking Gourd (1972), which stingingly, yet objectively, analyzed how the system of slavery made the Civil War necessary.

“Images and Essences: 1961 Dialogue with an Un¬ colored Egghead Containing Wholesome In¬ tentions and Some Sass,” Urbanite, 1 (May 1961) : 10, 11, 36; “Genet, Mailer and the New Paternalism,” Village Voice, 1 (1 June 1961): 10, 15; “A Challenge to Artists,” Freedomways, 3 (Winter 1963): 33-35; “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash (Transcript of Town Hall Lorum),” National Guardian (4 July 1964): 5-9; “The Nation Needs Your Gifts,” Negro Digest, 13 (August 1964)f26-29; 1 he Legacy of W. E. B. DuBois,” Freedomways, 5 (Winter 1965): 19-20;

Her last published play, What Use Are Flowers? (1972), revealed again the range of her awareness since it dealt with the meaning of civilization in the context of its capacity for self-destruction through nuclear warfare. This range was further demon¬ strated by the two versions of To Be Young, Gifted and Black, the play (produced in 1969), and the much more extensive informal biography (published in 1969) her former husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, put together after her death from segments of her plays, essays, speeches, and poems. In addition to this wide range of work, the semiknown portion of her legacy, she left two splendid screenplays for A Raisin in the Sun which boldly reimagined the characters and situations of the play in cinematic terms, but which were never used be¬ cause Columbia Pictures considered them too racially controversial. She also left fragments of several plays and a novel, as well as a finely crafted screenplay based on the Afro-Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, and a playlet entitled The Arrival of Mr. Todog which gleefully and mercilessly satirized Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama Waiting for Godot. None of these has yet been published, though Robert Nemiroff is preparing for publication the novel, “All the Dark and Beauti¬ ful Warriors,” a study of the developing social com¬ mitment of a young black man and woman. In addition, she was a master prose stylist and finished a wealth of published and unpublished essays on black history, black art, black feminism, the Cuban missile crisis, the House Un-American Activities Committee, existentialism, the Civil Rights Move¬ ment, world literature, her own work, and the many

“Original Prospectus for the John Brown Memorial Theatre of Harlem,” Black Scholar, 10 (July/ August 1979): 14-15; “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,” Black Scholar, 12 (March/April 1981): 2-12; “All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors,” Village Voice, 28 (16 August 1983): 1, 11-16, 18-19. Although her life was brutally curtailed by cancer at only thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry’s contribution to Afro-American culture was con¬ siderable, much richer and more varied than most people realize. Her first staged drama, A Raisin in the Sun (produced in 1959), remains her best known work, and its popular appeal has long been ac¬ knowledged. Through it, Hansberry gained histor¬ ical importance as the first black woman to have a play on Broadway, the first black and youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and a trailblazer whose success enabled other blacks to get their plays produced. Having exhilarated audiences for over twenty-five years by its profound affirmation of black life in all its di¬ versity and creativity and of black strength through generations of struggle, this play seems assured of becoming a classic. Her second drama, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (produced in 1964), achieved far less commercial success, possibly be¬ cause it had to be seen twice to be justly appreciated, possibly because it challenged too many preconcep¬ tions about what subjects were appropriate for Afro-American writers. Refusing to confine her 121

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covenants continued in Chicago, though the law no

other topics that interested her. As dramatist, film and television scriptwriter, novelist, poet, and essayist, she was among the greatest celebrators of the black spirit as well as one of the sharpest intel¬ lects and keenest observers of her time. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chica¬ go, Illinois, in 1930, to Carl A. Hansberry and Nan¬ ny Perry Hansberry and was the youngest of four children. Throughout her childhood, thanks to her family’s deep involvement in the black community, she was surrounded by black politics, culture, and economics. Her father, a realtor, was very active in the NAACP and Urban League and donated large amounts of money to various causes. In addition, he served as a U.S. Marshall and ran for Congress as a Republican since it was the party of Lincoln. Her mother, a former schoolteacher, was a ward committeewoman and was also dedicated to striving for social and political change. Her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, a professor at Howard University, was so noted a scholar of African history that a college was named in his honor at the University of Nigeria, and on his visits to Chicago he frequently brought along African students and exiles, many of whom were trying to oust their colonial governments and some of whom became leaders in the liberated countries. Also into her Chicago home came such important and representative figures of the black community as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Wal¬ ter White, Joe Louis, and Jesse Owens. Partly be¬ cause of her parents’ attitudes, partly because of these visitors, Hansberry never felt in awe of the famous and, while in high school, wrote letters to congressmen, senators, and even the president con¬ cerning civic issues of importance to her. Later, she could stand her ground against Otto Preminger and Robert Kennedy. Hansberry learned another lesson in pride and resistance in 1938 when her father, risking jail, challenged Chicago’s real estate covenants, which legally upheld housing discrimination, by moving his own family into a white neighborhood. While her father was in court, a mob gathered in front of the house and began shouting and throwing bricks. A bodyguard broke it up by showing a loaded gun, but not before a large concrete slab just barely passed by the eight-year-old Hansberry’s head. In spite of this reception, she and her family remained in the house until a lower court ordered them to leave. With the help of the NAACP, her father fought the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court which struck down the restrictive covenants in the famous Hansberry vs. Lee decision in 1940. Unfortunately, the practice of restrictive

longer supported them. In addition to his disillusionment over the out¬ come of this legal battle, Carl Hansberry was soon disturbed by the segregation of blacks in the U.S. Army during World War II. One of his sons, Carl, Jr., served in a segregated unit and the other, Perry, contested his draft because he refused to serve in an army that discriminated against blacks. Carl Hans¬ berry’s embitterment over continuing American ra¬ cial injustice eventually led him to purchase a house in Mexico City where he planned to permanently relocate his family. However, he died on 17 March 1946, before he could complete preparations for the move, and the family remained in Chicago. In 1948, violating a family tradition of attend¬ ing Howard University, Hansberry chose to go to the University of Wisconsin. There she saw a pro¬ duction of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock which eventually sparked in her the desire to write “the melody as I knew it—in a different key,” a desire that she fulfilled in A Raisin in the Sun. Un¬ happy with many of her courses, Hansberry left the university in 1950 “to seek an education of a differ¬ ent kind” in New York. As part of this new educa¬ tion, she started to work for Paul Robeson’s radical black newspaper, Freedom, for which she wrote such articles as “Cry for Colonial Freedom Jolts Phony Youth Meet,” “Noted Lawyer Goes to Jail: Says Negroes’ Fight for Rights Menaced,” “Harlem Chil¬ dren Face Mass Ignorance in Old, Overcrowded, Understaffed Schools,” “Women Voice Demands in Capital Sojourn,” and “Songs of Clarence Williams Inspire Today’s Musicians.” She also reviewed books and dramas by blacks, and, in 1952, she be¬ came an associate editor. Another part of her education came through her involvement in peace and freedom movements which led to her marching on picket lines, speaking on Harlem street corners, and taking part in dele¬ gations to try to save persons whom she considered to be unjustly convicted of crimes. Moreover, when Paul Robeson was unable to travel to the Intercon¬ tinental Peace Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1952 because the State Department denied him a passport, she went as his representative. To get there, Hansberry had to pass unnoticed by officials and take a flight so bumpy and perilous that her plane barely made it to the airport, and the plane ahead of hers crashed. Even though she was so shaken by this experience in the air that she refused to fly again, she was excited by the Congress which covered a large number of inter-American prob¬ lems, including the arms race, poverty, dicta122

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Lorraine Hansberry tant in a theatrical firm, a staff member of Sing Out magazine, and a recreation leader at the Federation for the Handicapped. She thought being a recrea¬ tion leader was “a rewarding experience,” but the job as production assistant disappointed both her feminist sensibility and theatrical aspirations since her primary duty was to serve coffee, and she soon quit. During this time, her husband was also doing part-time work as a typist and copywriter while continuing his studies, and after his graduation he became promotions director for Avon Books. Then in 1956 he and Burt D’Lugoff wrote the hit song “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” and shortly afterwards he went to work running a music publishing firm for their friend, Philip Rose. Their financial situation im¬ proved enough that Hansberry could concentrate full-time on her writing. For a while, she worked simultaneously on a novel, several plays, and an opera, but she turned increasingly to one play which she originally called “ The Crystal Stair” from a line in Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” In this poem, a black mother, asserting that “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” described her struggle to provide a better life for her family and encouraged her son to continue the struggle. Although this title remained apt, since the play involved a similar mother-son relationship and a similar message, Hansberry later changed it to A Raisin in the Sun from a line in Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which warned that a dream deferred might “dry up/like a raisin in the sun”—or explode. This new title pointed up the bitterness of the social conditions that forcibly and continuously deferred the aspirations of the black family in the play.

i

1

J Self-portrait by Hansberry (courtesy of Robert Nemiroff)

torship, torture, and U.S. interference in Latin America. It also gave her the invaluable opportuni¬ ty to meet a large number of women from other countries and to compare notes on the circum¬ stances of their lives. She later commented on what she learned from these women in her unpublished essay “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary, 1957.” In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, an aspiring writer and graduate student in English and history at New York University. Given her interests, it was appropriate that she became acquainted with him in a picket line protesting discrimination. The strength of their mutual commitment to social jus¬ tice was shown by the fact that on the night before their wedding they took part in a demonstration to save the Rosenbergs from execution for treason. This commitment never lessened, although Hans¬ berry came to believe that the best contribution she could make to the causes she believed in was through writing. For this reason, she resigned from full-time work at Freedom in 1953 to concentrate on her creative efforts. From 1953 to 1956, she had three plays in progress while holding down a series of jobs—as a “tag-putter-inner-and-outer” in the garment fur industry, a typist, a production assis¬

Hansberry completed the play in 1957 and, after an enthusiastic response from her husband, read it to their friends Burt D’Lugoff and Philip Rose. To her astonishment, Rose announced the next morning that he would like to produce it on Broadway. Although he had never produced a play before, Rose had many contacts in the theater who could give him information and advice. He hoped that some well-known Broadway producers might join him in the production, but everyone he approached turned him down on the grounds that the play was too unlike the typical Broadway play and that theater audiences would have little interest in a black family. It was, therefore, ironic that sever¬ al critics later argued that the play was a guaranteed money-maker because it resembled so many other Broadway successes with only the blackness of the characters to give it the necessary spice of the new. Undiscouraged by the producers’ refusals, Rose 123 i

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Lorraine Hansberry

as much opposition as he did, the play received an enthusiastic response from the Chicago critics and Hansberry was welcomed as a hometown girl who

found a large number of people willing to invest small sums in the play and sent a copy of the script to Sidney Poitier, who had appeared in several films and seemed right for the important role of the son, Walter Lee Younger. Poitier agreed to take the part and suggested his former teacher, Lloyd Richards, as director. Richards too accepted, thereby becom¬ ing the first black director on Broadway. Then, Rose assembled the rest of the cast, opening a door for such outstanding yet hitherto little-known black performers and writers as Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett, Ivan Dixon, Glynn Turman, Douglas Turner Ward, Lonnie Elder III, and later, as Poitier’s replacement, Ossie Davis. Because he had trouble booking a theater on Broadway, Rose decided to take the show out of town for tryouts, first in New Haven, Connecticut, and then in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This gam¬ ble paid off since the out-of-town reviews were posi¬ tive enough to encourage the Shubert chain of thea¬ ters to offer him a Broadway theater that would become empty in March. Since that left more than a month after the tryout in Philadelphia, Rose opted to put on the play in Chicago during the interim. Despite the fears of Hansberry’s two brothers and her sister Mamie who were running the family real estate business in their father’s tradition and facing

had made good. When it finally opened at the Ethel Barry¬ more Theatre on 11 March 1959, Hansberry’s dra¬ ma drew favorable reviews from all seven of the crucially influential New York newspaper critics and began a highly successful run of 538 perfor¬ mances. Its critical success was confirmed in May when the New York Drama Critics Circle voted it Best Play of the Year over Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Archibald MacLeish’s JB, and Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. Not all the critics, then or now, agreed with the generally positive assessment. Tom F. Driver of the New Republic argued that A Raisin in the Sun “is old-fashioned,” adhering to the “over-worked for¬ mulas ... of the ‘domestic play.’ ” He also con¬ tended that “much of its success is due to our sen¬ timentality over the ‘Negro question’ ” and that “it may have been Miss Hansberry’s objective to show that the stage stereotypes will fit Negroes as well as white people.” The novelist Nelson Algren claimed that “Raisin does not assert the hardbought values the Negro has won, but expresses only an eagerness to have a sports car in order to get to the psycho-

Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Glynn Turman, and Diana Sands in a scene from A Raisin in the Sun (courtesy of Robert Nemiroff)

124

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analyst as fast as white folks do. Dramatically, Raisin does for the Negro people what hair straightener and skin-lightener have done for the Negro cosmet¬ ics trade.” And social critic Harold Cruse termed it “the most cleverly written piece of glorified soap opera I, personally, have ever seen on a stage.” One of the most contested points is whether A Raisin in the Sun is truly a black play. Henry Hewes

of the Saturday Review, reflecting the view of many critics, felt that the fact that the central characters “are colored people, with all the special problems of their race, seems less important than that they are people with exactly the same problems everyone else has.” Taking this positive (though miscon¬ ceived) interpretation and turning it on its head, Harold Cruse declared that “if this play—which is so ‘American’ that many whites did not consider it a Negro play’ — had ever been staged by white actors it would be judged second-rate.” In contrast, Doris Abramson, author of Negro Playwrights in the Amer¬ ican Theatre: 1925-1959, observed that “members of the Negro community supported this Broadway production of a Negro play as they had supported no other,” adding that “this particular Broadway play, then, was not performed for the usual white middle-class audience.” Like Abramson, James Baldwin noted at the Philadelphia tryout “that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater” and concluded that the reason for this “was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.” Julius Lester similarly affirmed that “it goes right to the core of practically every black family in the ghettos of Chi¬ cago, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.” However, the best indication of its meaning for blacks came in 1975 when Woodie King, Jr., began to prepare a documentary on the black theater. He decided to call his film “The Black Theater Move¬ ment: A Raisin in the Sun to the Present” because he found that of the more than sixty people he inter¬ viewed “over forty . . . said that, at one time or another, they had been influenced or aided, or both, by Lorraine Hansberry and her work.” Hansberry herself felt “it’s definitely a Negro play before it’s anything else.” She never made the well-known quotation that Nan Robertson erroneously attributed to her in a New York Times interview: “I told them this wasn’t a ‘Negro play.’ It was a play about honest-to-God, believable, manysided people who happened to be Negroes.” This “quotation” so distorted her true views that it infuri¬ ated her, yet in spite of her many attempts to correct the record, the quotation followed her around for 125

the rest of her life, as did a subsequent false attribu¬ tion derived from it: “I’m not a Negro writer—but a writer who happens to be a Negro.” Her real views were expressed in a 1959 inter¬ view with Eleanor Fisher in which she acknowl¬ edged that “it is impossible to divorce the racial fact from any American Negro” since “part of his daily experience is that of being a unique person in American culture who is a Negro.” Concerning the protagonists of A Raisin in the Sun, the Youngers, she further observed to Fisher: From the moment the first curtain goes up until they make their decision at the end, the fact of racial oppression, unspoken and un¬ alluded to, other than the fact of how they live, is through the play. It’s inescapable. The reason these people are in a ghetto in Amer¬ ica is because they are Negroes. They are discriminated against brutally and horribly, so that in that sense it’s always there, and the basis of many things that they feel—and which they feel are just perfectly ordinary human things between members of a fami¬ ly—are always predicated, are always resting on the fact that they live ghettoized lives. . . . but overtly it isn’t introduced until they are asked by the author to act on the problem which is the decision to move or not to move out of this area.

At the beginning of A Raisin in the Sun, the head of the Younger household, Big Walter, has just died from overwork and strain, prompted in part by his grief over the death of his third child given up “to poverty” years before. This points up the high infant mortality rate in the ghet¬ to and its devastating effects on families. Knowing that he was pushing himself dangerously hard and always placing his children first, he had taken out a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy, his only means of providing his family with hope for the future. The drama centers on the conflicts among family members about the best use to make of Big Walter’s legacy—or, rather, how best to overcome the most restrictive and humiliating pressures that white society has placed on each of them. His son, Walter Lee, wants to use all the money to buy a liquor store, both to free himself from his degrad¬ ing position as chauffeur, a reflection of the limited job opportunities for blacks, and to provide a rich, secure, and satisfying life for the rest of his family, which he wildly imagines may eventually include pearls for his wife, Ruth, and the best university in the country for his son, Travis. Ruth, realizing that

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Lorraine Hansberry

her Uncle Leo, is totally dedicated to driving out the colonial government in his country and is drawn to Beneatha by her similar idealism. His presence and his social observations give the play a subtheme of Pan-Africanism that was extraordinary for the American stage in its time, though it may have been influenced by both her uncle’s thinking and her training under W. E. B. DuBois at the Jefferson School for Social Science in 1953. Clearly, Hansberry’s emphasis on black social conditions, black strength, black struggle, and PanAfricanism make A Raisin in the Sun a drama first and foremost about the black experience. This does not rule out universal dimensions to the play, however. As Hansberry herself noted in a 1959 interview with Studs Terkel:

she has no right to even a penny of the money, tries to stifle any expression of her wishes, but it is clear that she would like to free herself and her son from the overcrowded, rat and cockroach infested apart¬ ment where they live. Walter Lee’s sister, Beneatha, challenging both racist and male chauvinist assumptions, wants to use the money to put herself through medical school. And Walter Lee’s mother, Lena (often called Mama), would like to balance all their demands, but finds that they far exceed the amount of the insurance, just as the damage done to blacks in America virtually defies reparation. Having been left control over the money, Lena makes two decisions that precipitate the cli¬ max. First, she makes a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, having discovered that simi¬ lar houses in black neighborhoods cost twice as much. Second, seeing her son start drinking heavily out of bitter frustration, she gives him the remain¬ der of the money, asking only that he put some of it in the bank for Beneatha’s education. When Walter Lee then loses all of this money to the con man who encouraged him to invest in a liquor store, he forces the family to face the most crucial choice in the play—whether to accept the money offered by a white group intent on keeping them from moving into the house Lena bought or to retain their digni¬ ty at the cost of confronting white hostility and violence. Upbeat as the ending may seem when Walter Lee chooses racial and familial pride over the insulting offer of money, Hansberry was well aware of what would happen to the family in the new neighborhood and had originally written another act in which the family was attacked by whites and Lena was forced to prowl the house at night with a loaded shotgun, just as her own mother had. At the same time, the ending reflected Hansberry’s conviction that black people were too strong to be kept down forever, that all the generations of blacks in America had demonstrated an incredible measure of endurance and heroism as well as an intense drive toward change. She was not worried about the ultimate fate of the Youngers since she agreed with their refusal to accept social conditions not of their own making, even if this refusal led to all of their deaths. Like the later Roots, A Raisin in the Sun is finally less a work of protest than a celebra¬ tion of the multigenerational black struggle for

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that, in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. In other words. I’ve told peo¬ ple that not only is this a Negro family, or a Southern Negro family. It is specifically about the South Side of Chicago, that kind of care, that kind of attention to the detail of reference, and so forth. In other words, I think people, to the extent they accept them and believe them as who they’re supposed to be, to that extent they can become every¬ body’s.

Her play does indeed contain many generally ac¬ knowledged universal themes—that is, themes that critics have claimed are universal because they occur in many works by white writers. Among these themes are marital and generational discord, con¬ formity versus respect for diversity, the struggle for women’s rights, idealism versus cynicism, the dan¬ gers of misdirected ambition, and religion versus atheistic humanism. However, these themes are also inextricably linked to a black perspective. Take, for example, the conflict between conformity and respect for diversity. The representative for the white neighborhood, Karl Lindner, is the one who urges conformity, arguing that people get along better “when they share a common background.” This is his excuse for excluding the Youngers from his community, allowing him to assert hypocritically that racism has nothing to do with his desire to keep them out. In contrast, the differences among the members of the Younger family imply the extent of diversity among Afro-Americans; all cultures have the need to accept and even foster a range of approaches to living since this is the only way that progress can be made without excessive pain. Lena,

progress. Hansberry carefully tied the Afro-American fight for self-determination to the black African liberation movement through Beneatha’s African suitor, Joseph Asagai. Asagai, who was inspired by the many African students Hansberry met through 126

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like Big Walter, is a devout member of a black church and, as such, has believed in striving for change while leaning on God for support in her struggles; Beneatha is an atheistic humanist, believ¬ ing that men and women alone can bring about progress and should give themselves full credit for their achievements. Walter Lee finds jazz comfort¬ ing, his mother leans on the spirituals, Ruth likes a good blues, and Beneatha dismisses all of these as “assimilationist junk,” preferring—at least for the moment since she flits from one mode of expres¬ sion to another—African drum music. Walter Lee believes in black capitalism; Beneatha wants to be¬ come a self-sacrificing doctor in Africa. Yet, at the end of the play, the Youngers remain united as a family and as opponents of white oppression, while continuing to argue with each other over their vari¬ ous differences. They thus offer an example of respect for diversity that many whites can appreci¬ ate and even identify with, but they offer it in black terms, thereby demanding a new, complex concep¬ tion of universality.

sor” and contended that the primary guilt for the violence from both black revolutionaries and white colonialists in Kenya lay with the whites. She sold the movie rights to A Raisin in the Sun to Columbia Pictures in 1959 and in 1960 wrote two screenplays that greatly differed from the stage version, adding new dimensions to her characters and seeking to provide a panoramic—and devas¬ tating— view of the ghetto they live in and the city that surrounds it. In the first of the new scenes, Lena explains to her reluctantly comprehending white ex-employer that she is pleased to be leaving this job since Lena’s work as a servant began when she was only a girl and lasted too long, ending now only because Big Walter’s insurance has freed her. She also describes how she and Big Walter tried to become riveters during World War II, her sadness at her failure in this, and her pride at his success. In another scene, Lena expresses outrage at being ripped-off at a ghetto market and tells the white clerk that she will never return, even though this means that she will be forced to take a long bus ride to another part of the city to do her shopping. A subsequent scene shows Lena in the bus, literally and symbolically being driven past the house of her dreams. This scene is juxtaposed with one of Walter Lee in another bus moving past the liquor store of his dreams.

Hansberry’s masterful orchestration of a vari¬ ety of complex themes, her skillful portrayal of black American—and African — life-styles and pat¬ terns of speech, her wit, wisdom, and powerful dramatic flare all help to place A Raisin in the Sun among the finest dramas of this century and make it the cornerstone of the black theater movement. Though Hansberry’s characterization occasionally falters in credibility, especially in relation to Beneatha’s outrageously irresponsible spending of money given to her by Walter and Ruth, and Ruth’s equally outrageous tolerance of this, Hansberry’s first work is an extraordinarily well-crafted and insightful accomplishment, continually offering new psychological, social, and philosophical perceptions to readers and audiences who return to it with open eyes.

Following this, Walter Lee seeks advice about running a business from a white liquor store owner named Herman and is outraged when Herman tells hirn to forget it, insisting that a man with a nine-tofive job is better off than a small-time proprietor. According to Hansberry’s commentary, Herman is only expressing a typical store owner’s complaint, lamenting his long hours, high overhead, and high taxes, but Walter mistakenly takes his remarks as racist, reflecting a belief that blacks are unfit for business. It is clear, however, that Herman is totally insensitive to Walter’s needs; he is only talking about himself and cannot see what Walter wants. In the most provocative of the new scenes, a black nationalist speaker on a ladder harangues a street crowd that includes Walter Lee and Asagai, though the two men are unaware of each other since they have never met. After describing the typical fate of the black from the South coming to the “Promised Land” of Chicago, for example being handed a broom when he asks for meaningful work, the speaker lauds the insurgency of African blacks and demands to know when American blacks are going to follow their example. Asagai’s presence in the crowd, of course, adds potency to this point. The speaker then concludes by denouncing the

When her play’s success made Hansberry an overnight sensation, she found that she loved being a celebrity. She appeared on an almost endless stream of radio and television talk shows and tried to answer every letter that people from all over the country wrote to her. These activities appealed not only to her pride but also to the fun-loving side of her character, the side that led her to collect clown knickknacks, play the guitar, tussle with her dog, and write rollickingly humorous scenes. However, although she frequently responded whimsically to questions, she never ducked a serious issue and often discomforted even hardened interviewers such -as Mike Wallace to whom she said that one should not “equalize the oppressed with the oppres¬ 127

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entire series was eventually canceled. Fortunately, Hansberry completed the play which she called The Drinking Gourd and it wras published in 1972, after her death, though it has yet to be produced in its entirety on television. Scenes taken from it w?ere included in the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black and have generally received a warm response from audiences, including television audiences. The Drinking Gourd may have been inspired in part by stories which her mother and grandmother told Hansberry about the slavery period, including how her grandfather ran away from his master and hid in the Kentucky hills and how his mother man¬ aged to bring food for him. It wras certainly influ¬ enced by the immense amount of reading w'hich she did on slavery both before and after being asked to write the play. Yet it stands finally neither as fleshed out memory nor patched together history, but as a carefully conceived, strongly unified, and deeply disturbing drama about sympathetic, believable characters at three social levels—slave owner, poor white, black slave—caught in a dehumanizing so¬ cial system that has maimed and threatens to de¬ stroy all of them. The most obvious victims of the system, of course, are the slaves — Hannibal, his mother Rissa, and his sweetheart Sarah. All of them have been deliberately kept in a state of ignorance by their master, Hiram Sweet, and have been compelled to

disinheritance of blacks and asking where the black man’s lands are and where his businesses are, the very queries that are the source of Walter’s agony. Columbia Pictures allowed none of these scenes or other new material to appear and pro¬ duced a film that was basically a shortened version of the play. Given the prevailing tendency of film companies to ignore blacks or, on the rare occasions they paid attention, to present an exotic and dis¬ torted image of them, even this was a considerable triumph and Hansberry was grateful for it. The final product was good enough to earn a nomina¬ tion for Best Screenplay of the Year from the Screenwriters Guild and a special award at the Cannes Film Festival, both in 1961. Nevertheless, as Hansberry knew well, the film was far less than it might have been. Although it retained much of the force of the original story and characterizations, many of her philosophical statements were taken out, the direction was often static and unimagina¬ tive, performances perfectly suited for the stage occasionally seemed overblown on the screen, and an uninspired musical score helped to create a sense of melodrama. It is hard to know how much better the other two screenplays might have worked, par¬ ticularly if they had been given to the same neophyte director on the same low budget, but they do convey a more direct sense of an entire commu¬ nity being pushed to the edge of a precipice and ready to flail back rather than fall off. However, they are not only readable but fascinating, and hopefully they will be published in the near future so that people may gain some idea of their quality and imagine the films that could have been made. Though they are only drafts and somewhat flawed — the first screenplay contains many refer¬ ences that can only be understood by referring to the play since the connections were left out—they are, in their own different ways, almost as complex and satisfying as the play. The year 1960 also brought Hansberry into another bout with censorship. Producer-director Dore Schary commissioned her to write a drama on slavery for NBC to be the first of a series of five television dramas by leading playwrights to com¬ memorate the centennial of the Civil War. When asked how frank it could be, Schary responded, “As frank as it needs to be.” However, when Schary told the top brass at NBC that he had asked a black playwright to create the drama on slavery, he was stunned since one of them obtusely queried w'hat her attitude was toward it. Upon learning that this question was not a joke, he felt certain that the project had no chance to survive, and in fact the

Linoleum cut of the Black Madonna by Hansberry (courtesy of Robert Nemiroff)

128

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Lorraine Hansberry

do hard, totally unrewarded labor. Under such con¬ ditions, Hannibal, who is far from being lazy by inclination, believes that the only way he can take pride in his manhood is by malingering, doing no more than half the work his master wishes from him in the cotton fields. He also defiantly coaxes his master’s younger son, Tommy, a child yet to be schooled in the prohibitions of his society, to teach him to read. Rissa, who has been with Hiram Sweet since he was just starting the plantation, wants to use her position as cook and quasi-confidante to pressure Sweet into taking her son out of the fields since she fears not only the effects of hard labor on him but also the potentially fatal consequences of his continuing defiance. However, she knows too well that the life of a house slave is also no joy. Both she and Sarah are always weary from the long hours and menial tasks at the house, and Sarah lives in perpetual terror of authority and punishment. Their situation then worsens to the point that all three—Hannibal, Rissa, and even Sarah—come to recognize the intolerability of the system and the necessity of flight at whatever risk. The situation of the poor white, Zeb Dudley, is little better. With only a small farm and no slaves, he cannot compete with the large plantations and must decide either to leave the South and take a chance on the rugged and perilous West or seek a job as an overseer to keep his children from dying of starva¬ tion. After becoming an overseer for the Sweets, though, he finds that to keep his new position he must do things that horrify and brutalize him, such as putting out the eyes of Hannibal for having learned to read. Hiram Sweet too finds that, even though he has achieved a place at the top, his participation in the slavery system forces him to do things that he would prefer not to do and that are severely damag¬ ing to him, both spiritually and physically. He has thought of himself as a “humane” master because he has made his slaves work only nine and a half hours in the fields every day, but declining market prices and a diminishing yield necessitate that he consider working them longer and harder—over¬ work that will probably kill some of the slaves — or else he risks losing his plantation. He has also seen that competition between the North and the South is leading inevitably toward a war that Southerners cannot win since they cannot simultaneously attack Northerners and keep the horde of discontented slaves from fleeing and then returning as soldiers to fight against them. In addition, these worries have so worsened his health that he can no longer run his plantation and must turn over control to his ruth¬

less elder son, Everett, whom he rightly expects to undermine everything he has done. It is Everett who makes the decision to blind Hannibal, but it is his father who pays for this act since, as Rissa’s “master,” a man who claims to have total control, Hiram is held accountable by her and she refuses her desperately needed help when he collapses from tension. Clearly, he is not the master over people and life that he thought he was. The drama is effectively framed by the speeches on economy and history of a narrator who could be from any part of the country, but who reveals at the end that he has decided to fight for the North since, although “it is possible that slavery might destroy itself... it is more possible that it would destroy these United States first” and “it has already cost us, as a nation, too much of our soul.” The events of the play leave no doubt about the correctness of his decision and imply that any sys¬ tem so harmful must be changed at any price. Making a similar judgment on the America of her time, Hansberry argued in a later speech that “the basic fabric of our society . . . is the thing which must be changed to really solve the problem” of black oppression—and other problems. To this end, she devoted considerable time to interviews, lectures, speeches at demonstrations, and essays on issues that she felt must be addressed to move her country toward its vitally needed transformation. However, she also wanted time and isolation to continue her creative efforts which she regarded as her most important contribution to the struggle for change. Therefore, in 1961 she and her husband moved from the Greenwich Village apartment, where they had been living since their marriage, to a house in a tranquil, wooded area in Croton-onHudson, New York, which was within commuting distance of New York City. From this peaceful and secluded place, she maintained the necessary bal¬ ance between her public and private commitments. In 1962 she mobilized support for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in its struggle against Southern segregation; she spoke out against the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cuban “missile crisis” that near¬ ly precipitated a nuclear war; and she wrote her postatomic war play, What Use Are Flowers? (1972). At the end of the play some of the few children who survive a nuclear holocaust have learned the mean¬ ing of beauty from a dying hermit, and one of them is patiently reconstructing his newly invented wheel that another had broken; Hansberry remained hopeful about man’s durability and potential for slow, painful, hard-won progress, despite her full 129

Lorraine Hansberry

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awareness of man’s all-too-frequent folly and viciousness. In 1963 she was hospitalized for tests, with the results suggesting cancer. Nevertheless, she per¬ sisted in her various commitments. A scene from her work-in-progress, Les Blancs, was staged at the Actors Studio Writers Workshop with Roscoe Lee Browne and Arthur Hill in the major roles. Then, on 24 May, at the request of James Baldwin, she joined a meeting of several prominent blacks and a few whites with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to discuss the racial crisis. The meeting was charged with emotion since Kennedy at that time seemed unable to comprehend or respond to the urgency of the blacks and was outraged when a young civil rights activist, Jerome Smith, told him there that he would never take up arms to defend America. Hansberry hotly defended Smith and disturbed Kennedy further by informing him that she was not worried about the fate of brutally beleagured black people “who have done splendidly ... all things considered,” but about “the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birming-

ham.” On 19 June, she chaired a meeting in Crotonon-Hudson to raise money for SNCC. Only five days later she was operated on unsuccessfully in New York. After a second operation in Boston on 2 August, she recovered her strength for a while, but from this point on she would be in and out of the hospital until her death from cancer a year and a half later. Nineteen sixty-four saw the publication of The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a book prepared by SNCC with distressing and even horrifying photos of lynchings, sagging and de¬ pleted buildings, savagely beaten demonstrators, and other distressing aspects of the black experi¬ ence coupled with a sharply worded text by Hans¬ berry. It also saw Hansberry’s marriage end in di¬ vorce on 10 March, but her creative collaboration with Nemiroff continued, and the two of them con¬ tinued to see each other daily until her death. From April to October, she underwent an extensive series of radiation treatments and chemotherapy at a hos¬ pital while continuing work on a variety of projects, including Les Blancs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and a play about the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft for which she was doing research. On 1 May, she was released from the hospital to deliver a speech to winners of the United Negro College Fund writing contest for which she coined the phrase “To be young, gifted and Black,” and on 15 June, she again left her sickbed to participate in the well-publicized Town Hall debate between militant black artists and white liberals on “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” In early October, Hansberry moved to the Hotel Victoria in New York to be near rehearsals of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which was being produced by Nemiroff and Burton D’Lugoff, and she attended its opening at the Longacre Theatre on 15 October. The play received mixed reviews, ranging from British novelist John Braine’s acclamation of it as “a great play” to Newsweek critic Richard Gilman’s denunciation of its “borrowed bitchery” and its distortion of “taste, intelligence, craft.” Normally, mixed reviews would have meant the instant death of a play on Broadway, but a large number of people, deeply respectful of both the author and the work, contributed time, money, and publicity to keep it running for 101 performances, an extraordinary number under the circumstances. The play’s run ended with the author’s death on 12 January 1965.

Dust jacket for the posthumous collection of Hansberry’s plays edited by her former husband

Many critics were dismayed that Hansberry chose to center her second Broadway play around a

130

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Lorraine Hansberry

l-f

Jj3

SlONEY (Cont.) And I would rather listen to what they have to talk about than theatre talk ninety-two hours a day. Yip, yip, yip', "Sweetiel" (IRIS has noticed the lay-out on the coffee table for the first time) IRIS (Picking it up) So now whet? You're going to be an artist? This is aw-ful. SIDNEY rit down. It's not supposed to be a drawing. It's p lay-out for

Put

(He halts, not having meant to get tnto it just this way) vFor

IRIS (Already expecting almost anything) what, Sidney.

SIDNEY (He exhale^.heavily and sits) Harvey Wyatt met scmfe-chick-

IRIS Yes, andSIDNEY SIDNEY ' r J-1 -he decided to go live,in Majorca. I mean forget the whole swene andjxuv< ^go live in Majorca...

It

IRIS (Sitting taoxjaJl, one hand over her Iips) Oh , my God, no...Sidney - no, SIDNEY (Shrugging) So he had to unload the paper. IRIS No. God, don't l^t it be true. Unload it on - whom - Sidney Brustein? Oh, Sidney, you haven't.

I

SlONEY know It's hard for you. Iris. To understand what I'm all about-

IRIS (ftadkfool SIumping where she is) I don’t believe this. I don't believe that you could have come out of -of that-

' (Jeituring to the glasses) -and get'Into, Into something else. Aside frcm anything else at the moment, what did you conceivably tell Harvey that you were going to pay him? SIDNEY We made an arrangement. Don't worry about it. IRIS What kind of arrangement, Sidney? SIDNEY An arrangement. That's all. I know what 1 arranged. I tell you don't worry about it, that's all. IRIS pay for *Where in the name of God are you going to get the money^Hxf4 a newspaper? SIDNEY It's a smal I newspaper. A weekly. CAN'T Jif ‘ iaT

’-*

IRIS if'--- to buy a yearly leaflet,

Sidney Brustein.

Page from Hansberry'a revised typescript for The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (courtesy of Robert Nemiroff)

131

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Lorraine Hansberry

who, like most of the white characters in the play, is simultaneously a victim and an oppressor. Though acutely aware of the irrationality of white hostility toward blacks, he fails to observe the equal illogical¬ ity and viciousness of his own attitude toward homosexuals. Also, at the same time that he is ex¬ plaining to his friend, Sidney Brustein, about the psychological wounds that society inflicted on his father for being black, hens planning to inflict as deep a wound on a formerly beloved woman whose past as a prostitute is unforgivable for him solely because she is white. These scenes with Alton fur¬ ther the play’s general warning against making facile and fashionable judgments on groups and individuals and its imperative to root out the in¬ humanity in all of us. As in many of the other scenes, and nearly all of Hansberry’s other works, they also point up the necessity for totally overhaul¬ ing the system that fosters so many forms of in¬ humanity. During the last year and a half of her life, Hansberry spent considerable time working on her African play, Les Blancs, both in the hospital and out. She completed several drafts, but none of them satisfied her, so she made copious notes and held long discussions about it with Robert Nemiroff to enable him to continue her work if she could not. Though the basic plotting, characterization, the¬ matic development, and the majority of the speeches were Hansberry’s, much work remained for Nemiroff, and the final product should be con¬ sidered a collaborative effort. Though some of the shifts between scenes are abrupt and the ending a bit foreshortened, its pub¬ lished and produced form is a finished, clearly fo¬ cused, and profoundly thoughtful and moving de¬ piction of the radicalizing of a white reporter, Char¬ lie Morris, and a black intellectual, Tshembe Matoseh. Charlie Morris has come to the mythical, but representative, African country of Zatembe to meet the Albert Schweitzer-like figure, Reverend Torvald Neilsen. However, witnessing the repres¬ siveness of the white colonial government and its refusal to negotiate, and learning that Reverend

Front cover for the 1964 picture book Hansberry prepared in cooperation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

group of white characters living in Greenwich Vil¬ lage, even though she had lived in the area for ten years and was well acquainted with the types of intellectuals, artists, would-be actresses, and others that she created for it. They were also surprised that the primary topics in the play were ones that they wrongly associated only with whites, such as existen¬ tialism, the theater of the absurd, male chauvinism, homosexuality, abstract art, bohemianism, middleclass values, and so on. However, Hansberry, like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Edgar White, and other black writers, refused to accept arbitrary and irrational limits on her intellect and interests. Among the projects she had already planned, re¬ searched, or begun working on were an opera about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint l’Ouverture; a musical based on Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge’s novel about the Navajos; and a drama about the ancient Egyptian ruler Akhnaton. Nevertheless, she did not leave out explicitly black concerns in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Win¬ dow, though they were clearly secondary. A minor character, Alton Scales, is a black ex-communist

Neilsen’s benevolence is that of a Great White Father caring for what he regards as irresponsible black children, Morris comes to see that nothing less than a violent revolution destroying many innocent whites and blacks, including babies, can alter the appalling degradation and stripping of an entire people. Matoseh, who returns to Zatembe for his father’s funeral, would like to go back to his white wife and their son in London, but finds that he is called by the spirit of a woman warrior representing 132

Lorraine Hansberry

DLB 38

A scene from Hansberry''s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Sidney (Gabriel Dell), a Jewish intellectual, is flanked by his half-Greek, half Irish-Cherokee wife (Rita Moreno), and banjo-playing Alton Scales (Ben Aliza).

Bibliography:

his people to follow the lead of his father who had organized the resistance to colonial exploitation. He discovers the pain of revolution through being forced to kill his own brother, Abioseh, who had placed himself on the side of the oppressors, and through inadvertently causing the death of Madame Neilsen, the Reverend’s wife, a white woman who had been like a second mother to him. However, it is clear that he will persist in the strug¬ gle to liberate his country. Les Blancs opened at the Longacre Theatre on 15 November 1970, and, having received violently mixed reviews, closed after forty-seven perfor¬ mances, but it is an immensely powerful drama both for readers and audiences. Although Hans¬ berry, of course, could not see this production, her spirit lived in it and will continue to live. Both for the artistry and intelligence of her major plays, screenplays, and essays and for her example of a deeply committed life, Hansberry is sure to be re¬ membered by future generations as one of the most important Afro-American writers.

Ernest Kaiser and Robert Nemiroff, “A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography,” Freedomways, 19 (Fourth Quarter 1979): 285-304.

Biography: Catherine Scheader, They Found a Way: Lorraine Hansberry (Chicago: Children’s Press, 1978).

References: Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925-1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); C. W. E. Bigsby, Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 19591966 (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967; Co¬ lumbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968); Lloyd W. Brown, “Lorraine Hansberry as Ironist,” Journal of Black Studies, 4 (March 1974): 237247; Steven R. Carter, “Commitment Amid Complexity: 133

DLB 38

Lorraine Hansberry Lorraine Hansberry’s Life-in-Action,” MELUS, 7 (Fall 1980): 39-53; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967); Freedomways, Lorraine Hansberry Issue, 19 (Fourth Quarter 1979); Loyle Hairston, “Lorraine Hansberry: Portrait of an Angry Young Writer,” Crisis, 86 (April 1979): 123-124, 126, 128; Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: John Day, 1963); David E. Ness, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window:

A Black Playwright Looks at White America,” Freedomways, 11 (Fourth Quarter 1971): 359366; Studs Terkel, “An Interview With Lorraine Hans¬ berry,” WFMT Chicago Five Arts Guide, 10 (April 1961): 8-14.

Papers:

The Hansberry papers are all held by Robert B. Nemiroff as literary executor, but they will even¬ tually be placed at a major library or university.

Paul Carter Harrison (1936-

)

Steven R. Carter University of Puerto Rico

BOOKS: The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972); Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, adapted from Melvin Van Peebles’s poems and monologues (New York: Bantam Books, 1973). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Pavane for a Dead-Pan Minstrel, Actors Studio, 1963; Top Hat, Buffalo, Buffalo University, Summer 1965; revised, Negro Ensemble Company, 1972; Tabernacle, Howard University, March 1969; Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Sacramento, Sacramento State College, 1970; The Great MacDaddy, Sacramento, Sacramento State College, 12 May 1972; New York, St. Marks Playhouse, 12 February 1974; Abercrombie Apocalypse: An American Tragedy, New York, Westside Arts Theatre, 22 June 1982. SCREENPLAY: Youngblood, Aion, 4 May 1978. OTHER: Tabernacle, in New Black Playwrights, edited by William Couch, Jr. (New York: Avon, 1970); The Great MacDaddy, in Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum, edited, with an introduc¬ tion, by Harrison (New York: Grove, 1974). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: The Experimental

Paul Carter Harrison (® 1984 by Layle Silbert)

134

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Paul Carter Harrison

Leader, Podium Magazine (Amsterdam, Hol¬ land, 1965): 126-152; Pavane for a Dead-Pan Minstrel, Podium Magazine (Amsterdam, Holland, 1966): 30-56; “Black Theater and the African Continuum,” Black World, 21 (August 1972): 42-48.

technique. His first play, “The Postclerks,” written in 1961, is an existential drama about three mail sorters longing for liberation from their mechanical work lives. It was followed by Top Hat (written in 1962, produced in 1965), “a dramatic tone-poem with,” in Harrison’s words, “a female vocalist who had all the lines, and an itinerant speechless male”; “Pawns,” written in 1963, an expressionistic drama involving an old German Jew awaiting the Gestapo, a black soldier and a white general in Vietnam, and a destiny-laden game of chess; and “Folly 4 Two,” an expressionistic drama about a destiny-laden game of folly between an African and a colonial Englishman. Two of his one-act plays, Pavane for a DeadPan Minstrel (produced in 1963) and The Ex¬ perimental Leader (1965), were published in the Dutch periodical Podium Magazine. The former pre¬ sents a seduction contest between a white man, Mr. Smith, and a black man, Mr. Brown, with intervals during which the two joke and dance as in a min¬ strel show. To break a fourteen-day tie, they ex¬ change racial identities by painting each other’s faces and, in this minstrel guise, attempt to seduce a white girl, Polly. Smith “wins” the contest with “black” dance techniques, but Brown makes the traditional “white” response to “defilement” of white womanhood by killing Smith. Although a white director interpreted this ending as the “slaying of the ‘stud’ image,” Harrison argued that it was a “manifestation of covert hate” since “that crafty nigguh,” alert to all the implications of role and reality, remains alive to initiate this contest with another white. The Experimental Leader portrays a confrontation between a homosexual black leader, who apparently owes his position to the white estab¬ lishment and who uses whitening creams, and a couple composed of a black man, T. S. Johnson, and a white woman, Samantha Peabody, whose sex¬ ual “experiment” in integration has robbed the black of his rage and put the white in charge. While the Deader and Sam wrangle over T. S.’s body, the black masses, weary of waiting for meaningful lead¬ ership, begin to riot. Both of these plays are minor, containing some silly dialogue and sophomoric humor, especially The Experimental Leader which is also muddled and poorly developed. However, Pavane for a Dead-Pan Minstrel, with its dancing, sexual force, and strong basic conception, retains an ability to entertain and instruct. In 1964 Harrison came to the United States for a visit and saw the Harlem riots. Upon returning to Europe, he began writing his first full-length play, Tabernacle, which he based loosely on the

As critic, editor, director, teacher, and play¬ wright, Paul Carter Harrison has stressed the Afri¬ canisms in black American culture. His study The Drama of Nommo (1972) not only established many correlations between the African world view and life-styles and those of “African/Americans” but also cogently argued that awareness and application of these correlations crucially aid artistic practice and critical judgments in black theater. His seminal collection, Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Con¬ tinuum (1974), demonstrated the long-reaching effect of African traditions in the works of such playwrights as Jean Toomer, Amiri Baraka, and the Afro-Caribbean Aime Cesaire. But his best argu¬ ments for this continuum are his plays Tabernacle (produced in 1969), and The Great MacDaddy (pro¬ duced in 1972). The latter is one of the most effec¬ tive and brilliant dramas embodying African sensi¬ bilities in an American context and ensures his place in Afro-American literary history. Harrison was born into a lower-middle-class family in New York where his mother worked as an administrative assistant in government. His father died before Harrison had a chance to know him well. A key influence in his Harlem childhood was his uncle, Ezra Carter, whose extensive library in¬ troduced Harrison to European philosophy, his¬ tory, and poetry. Perhaps his intellectualism de¬ veloped as a means of coping with solitude and pain, but it has given him great power. During his adolescence, Harrison was drawn to Greenwich Vil¬ lage bohemians who furthered his early interests in the European philosophies of Freudianism and Marxism. However, his attraction to black music eventually exerted a greater influence on him. In 1953 he entered New York University, but left shortly afterward to spend two years at Indiana University where he became involved in black music groups—and the theater. In 1958 he studied phe¬ nomenology and gestalt psychology at the New School for Social Research, and in 1960 he went to Amsterdam, Holland, where he remained until 1967. In Amsterdam he produced and directed a series of black poetry readings and other shows for television. During the same period, he wrote several one-act plays reflecting an eclectic approach toward 135

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Paul Carter Harrison

was to reveal the “forces of oppression” at work in it and “the devastating toll that it has on black life.” However, when the play titled Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death came to Broadway with a different director in 1971, it became a more commercial pro¬ duction with a somewhat romanticized version of street life, and little credit was given to Harrison, though much of his conception remained. In 1972, now a Professor of Theater Arts and Afro-American Studies and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Pan-African Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Harrison published The Drama of Nommo. As Kimberly Benston asserted, this book constitutes “the most articulate dissertation on Black drama yet recorded.” It is the culmination of Harrison’s youthful interest in philosophy, although it rejects European viewpoints (with the partial exceptions of phenomenology and gestalt psychology) in favor of the Bantu cosmology, as elucidated by Jahnheinz Jahn in Muntu (1958). At the base of the Bantu system are the four, allinclusive categories of being: 1. Muntu—all beings with creative intelligence, including humans, ances¬ tors (spirits who can counsel their descendants),

events that led to the riots. This play, completed in 1965, is set in a church service that ritualistically examines both the brutal arrest of two black youths, Adam and Hamm, who have been wrongfully ac¬ cused of a murder, and the shooting by Officer Whitey of a black youth demonstrating for their release. The Reverend, who combines the attributes of Christian minister and African ritual priest, com¬ ments on the events and exhorts his congregation (the audience) to act on what they have seen. A Chorus of Mothers, portrayed by tall black men wearing masks, suggests both the reactions of the community, as did the Greek Chorus, and the Afri¬ can conception of Motherhood as a spiritual force. The play also employs music and a number of de¬ vices to break down the distinction between actor and audience, two traits Harrison deems essential to plays of African sensibility. As Yemi Ogunbiyi observed, Tabernacle suffers from “badly contrived and poor poems” and overly ambitious intentions. Harrison himself admitted that it is “over-zealous in many areas, particularly as far as its political state¬ ments go.” Nevertheless, it is effective and impor¬ tant because of the skillful integration of African music and jazz with the action, the powerful rheto¬ ric of the Reverend’s exhortations, the careful blending of African traditions with American ex¬ perience, and the unsentimental concern for these youths — and all others lost to the black community through similar injustice. Unlike previous plays which he produced and directed in Europe, Harrison felt that Tabernacle should only be performed by Afro-Americans, and he waited until 1969 to direct his vision of it at Howard University. He had come to Howard to teach playwriting after his permanent return to the United States. In 1970 he accepted a similar posi¬ tion at Sacramento State College and soon after¬ ward began another directorial task, the adaptation into a play of Melvin Van Peebles’s poems and monologues on the records Brer Soul and Ain’t Sup¬ posed to Die a Natural Death. Harrison decided that the connecting theme between these pieces was street life, and he created a highly improvisatory theatrical event around it, with actors and actresses assuming the roles of pimps, drunks, and other street people and, fully in character, interacting with members of the audience. Since audience reac¬ tions varied considerably, no two performances at Harrison’s November 1970 Sacramento State pro¬ duction were the same, although some parts of the event, particularly Van Peebles’s pieces, were struc¬ tured. As Harrison explained in The Drama of Nommo, the purpose of this “ritual of corner life-style”

orishas (ancestors whose efficacy for generations has made them recognized as gods) and God; 2. Kintu — things without creative intelligence, in-' eluding animals; 3. Hantu — time and place inter¬ twined; and 4. Kuntu — the mode or context in which an image originates. According to Jahn, Kuntu refers to co¬ existing realities, such as the physical reality of a sleeping man and the mental reality of his dreams. This conception of Kuntu underlies Harrison’s re¬ jection of social realism, which he believes would display only the physical attributes of the sleeper and miss the psychological essence of his experi¬ ence. Harrison is primarily concerned with spiritual reality and seeks a ritualized drama of images that reveal the meaning of oppression, rather than its often observed surface effects, and the African values still present in Afro-American life. To fur¬ ther this aim, he adds the African “civilizing forces” of “Song, Dance and Drum.” For Harrison, as for the Bantu, man is one force in a “force-field” and this force may increase or decrease. Ideally, each man must learn to harmonize the forces around him through the principled use of Nommo (wordforce) so that he may pass on the benefits of his increased force to his group. On 12 February 1974, The Great MacDaddy, Harrison’s masterpiece and prime exemplar of Kuntu drama, began a run of seventy-two perfor¬ mances off-Broadway at the St. Marks Playhouse. 136

DLB 38

Paul Carter Harrison

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P-3U! Carter Harrison, playwnghf. .director, and- educator, is the author of The Modern Drams Footnote and A Re bet’s Dialogue, both published by De Bezige Bi,> in Holland Among his plays are The Experimental Leader a"d P.-.sane tor a Dead-r^an Minstrel, published hy Podium in Ho'-and. H*s play Tabernacle was published by Avon and the Louisiana $taT

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rhi-fsea 1heater Center in Brooklyn. He was Literary Advisor :ulf. Center Repertory Company tor the 1972-73 season 0-394-48275-1

GROVE PRESS

Dust jacket for Harrisons seminal work on black drama

According to Ellen Foreman, it was the Negro En¬

instead a magic egg that helps the Drinkard save his people from a famine caused by a dispute between Earth and Heaven. In Harrison’s play, MacDaddy, the arrogant and immature son of a wealthy boot¬ legger, must search for the spirit of his servant, Wine, who died before giving him the formula for palm-wine on which his dead father’s business was based. Along the way, he gains force by encounter¬ ing manifestations of the oppression and spiritual resistance of blacks throughout American history. At the end, instead of the formula for palm-wine, Wine gives MacDaddy a formula that unites the earth (“cornbread square out the ground”) and heaven (“pie, round as a world kissed by the sky”) and that enables him to feed his people’s spirits. Just as Tutuola transformed bits of folklore into a coherent and fascinating narrative based on his protagonist’s development, Harrison trans¬ formed Tutuola’s novel into a brilliant spiritual odyssey through Afro-American life. Perhaps Har¬ rison’s best invention is Scag, an inimical force which MacDaddy combats in many forms and

semble Company’s “last ‘big’ ” production, “com¬ plete with original music, dancing, elaborate cos¬ tume and set” and was a “box-office success” that “saved the season.” The music was by Coleridge Taylor Perkinson, and the cast included David Downing, A1 Freeman, Jr., Hattie Winston, and Graham Brown. The reviews were generally favor¬ able, and even though Douglas Watt—and several other critics—argued that it was “ambitious but incoherent” and “undramatic,” it received a 1973 Obie Award for Distinguished Play. The Great MacDaddy is imaginatively based on Amos Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard. In Tutuola’s book, the Drinkard, a wealthy young man who has spent all his days drinking palm-wine, must search for his recently deceased palm-wine tapster in Dead’s Town to recover his life of ease. Along the way, he meets various personifications of the dan¬ gers of the Bush and increases his Muntu force and sense of responsibility toward others. The tapster, however, refuses to return with him, giving him 137

Paul Carter Harrison

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which represents heroin, death — and dependency. Scag is the ultimate symbol of white subjugation of blacks, since any black too attached to white drugs, money, culture, and so on, becomes dead to the needs of the black community. Two painfully com¬ mon examples of this are the black policeman who serves white interests and the black critic who ap¬ plies white standards to black drama. For Africans, the ancestors’ souls survive as forces to aid their descendants, but the souls of blacks who surrender to oppression or spiritually join the oppressor have nothing to give to their community. MacDaddy’s triumph is that by freeing his generation of blacks from Scaggy Western values and bringing them home to the African “source,” he literally conquers death and enables their spirits to live and counsel future generations. Thus interpreted, Harrison’s play is highly coherent, provocative—and philo¬ sophically exciting. Moreover, his humor is now wholly mature, and his language on every level soars; even his verse is good. Like MacDaddy’s, Harrison’s Muntu force has greatly increased. After The Great MacDaddy, Harrison directed much of his energy to filmwriting, producing scripts for “Lord Shango” in 1976 (unreleased) and Youngblood (released in 1978). Yemi Ogunbiyi described “Lord Shango” as dealing with “a con¬ frontation between Southern Christianity and tra¬ ditional African religion” and being “a direct oppo¬ site of the recent spate of Black exploitation movies.” In contrast, Harrison’s script for Young¬ blood seems, outwardly, more in the mode of black exploitation and youth gang films, but it remains true to his black nationalist concerns since it depicts a black gang acting against the threat to the black community from drug suppliers, the chief of whom is a white named Corelli. Corelli’s black partner, Reggae, is the brother of the title character, Young¬ blood, who has joined the antidrug war because his girl friend has become addicted to heroin. At the end, Reggae must choose between his love of money from a white-run business and his love for his black brother, and the tension remains taut about what he will do. As the Variety reviewer observed (10 May 1978), the “finale just manages to avoid the pre-ordained tragedy,” and he called it effective on all levels. Harrison’s script also heavily emphasizes Afro-American dress, speech, and music and could serve to illustrate the sections in The Drama of Nommo on Afro-American sensibility. Harrison’s most recent play, Abercrombie Apoc¬ alypse: An American Tragedy, was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company at the Westside Arts Theatre on 22 June 1982 for a run of thirty-two

performances. Judging from John Corry’s review in the 27 June 1982 New York Times, Abercrombie Apocalypse seems to be a regression to the type of early drama Harrison wrote in Europe, especially The Experimental Leader (1965). Once again, white evil and black submission to it are represented by sexual degeneracy. In this case, Culpepper, the black caretaker of a white estate, allows himself to be whipped in the bedroom by Jude, the black leather garter belt-wearing son of his former mas¬ ter. Jude’s black woman friend, Bethesda, who seems the only genuinely decent person in the play, observes with disgust that “this was supposed to be a day trip to see how decent people live.” Corry con¬ cluded that “Mr. Harrison has written a play about the dark side of American life, but it doesn’t add much to what other authors have said more gracefully before.” One can only hope that Harrison will now return to the project described by Yemi Ogunbiyi in his 1976 dissertation, “New Black Playwrights in

PUSSOFTHE AFRICAN CONTINUUM

mm DRAMA EDITED BY PAUL CARTER HARRISON Imamu Amiri Baraka * Great Goodness of Life Lennox Brown * Devil Mas' AimeCesaire * A Season in the Congo Clay Goss * Mars Paul Carter Harrison * The Great MacDaddy Adrienne Kennedy + The Owl Answers & A Beast Story JeanToomer * Kabnis

Dust jacket for Harrison’s important collection of plays by black writers, which illustrates the far-reaching influence of African traditions

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Calvin C. Hernton

America, 1960-1975.” This project, “The Death of the Boogie,” is a ritual spectacle which, according to Ogunbiyi, “will be about the death of the spiritual core of the Black man” and which “promises to be even more ambitious and monumental than MacDaddy.” But no matter what happens in the future, the greatness of MacDaddy and the brilliant theoriz¬ ing of The Drama of Nommo have secured a position of eminence for Harrison in the history of AfroAmerican drama.

Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 61-78; Lehman Engel, The Critics (New York: Macmillan, 1976); Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphors. Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, translated by Melvin Dixon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Ellen Foreman, “The Negro Ensemble Company: A Transcendent Vision,” in The Theater of Black Americans (Volume II): The Presenters/ The Participators, edited by Errol Hill (Engle¬ wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 72-84;

References: Esther Spring Arata, More Black American Play¬ wrights (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978); Kimberly W. Benston, “The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama: From Mimesis to Methexis,” in The Theater of Black Americans (Volume I): Roots and Rituals I The Black Image Makers, edited by Errol Hill (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

James V. Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theater,” in The Theater of Black Americans (Volume I), pp. 13-29; Yemi Ogunbiyi, “New Black Playwrights in Amer¬ ica, 1960-1975,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1976.

Calvin C. Hernton (28 April 1932-

)

Anthony S. Magistrale University of Vermont

“Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1969), pp. 78-104; “Social Struggle and Sexual Conflict,” in Sexuality: A Search for Perspective, edited by D. L. Grummon and A. M. Barclay (New York: Van Nos¬ trand Reinhold, 1971).

BOOKS: The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong: An Epical Narrative of the South (New York: Interim, 1964); Sex and Racism in America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965; London: Deutsch, 1969); White Papers for White Americans (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966; London: Greenwood, 1982); Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sex¬ ual Hang-ups (New York: Random House, 1971); The Cannabis Experience: The Study of the Effects of Marijuana and Hashish, by Hernton and Joseph Berke (London: Owen, 1974); Scarecrow (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974); Medicine Man: Collected Poems (New York: Reed, Cannon & Johnson, 1976).

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “IsThere Really a Negro Revolution,” Negro Digest, 12 (Octo¬ ber 1963); “White Liberals and Black Muslims,” Negro Digest, 12 (October 1963): 3-10; “Symposium: The Task of the Negro Writer as Artist,” Negro Digest, 14 (April 1965): 67, 74; “Racism and the Sexual Under Currents,” Penthouse (London), 4, no. 4 (1969).

OTHER: Rosey E. Pool, ed., Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes, includes contribu¬ tions by Hernton (Lympne, Kent: Hand & Flowers Press, 1962);

Calvin Hernton’s fiction and nonfiction are inspired by a radical black consciousness that is an appropriate reflection of his place as an American 139

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contemporary social illness in America. However, his style of writing is seldom jargonistic or academic sounding; instead, it is often passionate and highly personal. Hernton’s fiction and nonfiction thus represent an interesting blend of his roles as poet and social scientist. Sex and Racism in America, Hernton’s first sociological treatise, advances the theory that rac¬ ism is inextricably related to sex and that the two have served to polarize America for generations. This concept is important not only to an under¬ standing of Sex and Racism itself, but also insofar as it extends beyond this book and into Hernton’s later work. Hernton’s other nonfiction writing, his novel Scarecrow (1974), and the majority of his poetic canon develop and extend this same thesis; it re¬ mains the ascendant concept unifying his literary and scholarly activities. During the years 1956 to 1957 and 1961 to 1962 Hernton worked as a welfare counselor for the city of New York. His exposure to the urban North, coupled with his daily interracial employ¬ ment contacts, lent substance to many of the argu¬ ments in Sex and Racism. For example, much of the book’s first chapter, “The White Woman,” is a fear¬ less dissection of the concept of the chaste white Southern belle. Hernton’s critique of the South emerges from a personal contact extending back to his birth. But the author’s treatment of interracial sex is not simply limited to a Southern scope; living in the North provided him personal observations of and insights into sexual relationships between whites and blacks, and the text is richer for these points of regional comparison. Sex and Racism is divided into four major sec¬ tions dealing with the white woman, the black male, the white man, and the black woman, respectively. For each of these categories, Hernton posits theories interfaced with personal reflections and excerpts from research interviews. The sections are unified by Hernton’s contention that both blacks and whites base fundamental responses to one another upon a complicated set of dimly under¬ stood sexual motivations. A major reason for social breakdown between the races, Hernton argues, stems from our general inability to confront and overcome the sexual stereotypes we use to identify ourselves and others. The white woman, victimized by a white male patriarchy, takes out her anger at being suppressed on “the socially accepted scapegoat, the Negro.” The black male, taught to idealize white feminine beauty, is at once attracted and repulsed, aroused and afraid at the thought of interracial sexual contact. In contrast to the gener-

Calvin Hernton (® 1984 by Layle Silbert)

writer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The central themes of his books—sexuality, drug experimenta¬ tion, black-white racial contacts, and the interrela¬ tionship of these aspects within a capitalist society— compose a list of the predominant issues of the era. Until his work began appearing in print from major publishing houses in the mid-to-late 1960s, Hernton was employed at a series of one-year in¬ structor-level faculty appointments at a variety of Southern universities: Benedict College in South Carolina from 1957 to 1958; Edward Waters Col¬ lege in Florida from 1958 to 1959; the University of Alabama from 1959 to 1960; Louisiana’s Southern University from 1960 to 1961. In each of these appointments, before settling into his current ten¬ ured position as professor of Black Studies and Creative Writing, Oberlin College, Hernton was hired to teach classes in sociology and history. Although he has written drama, poetry, and fiction¬ al prose, Hernton’s academic training is in the social sciences; he holds an M.A. in sociology from Fisk University. His two most important nonfiction books, Sex and Racism in America (1965) and White Papers for White Americans (1966), are both studies of 140

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Calvin C. Hernton

ally accepted taboo surrounding relations between white women and black men, the white male feels no compunction in viewing the black female as a source for his illicit sexual excitement and abuse. And finally, the black female, because she has been and is judged according to Caucasian standards of beauty and femininity, has developed a deprecia¬ tory concept of herself that is even lower than that of her male counterpart. At its very best moments, Sex and Racism dem¬ onstrates an honesty and racial objectivity that are both admirable and insightful, especially since it was written in an era not particularly noted for any degree of critical balance. Hernton laments the fact, for example, that too many black men fail to “prog¬ ress beyond the state of ‘getting back at the white world’ through sadistic treatment of white women. And to my mind, this seems as sick and disgusting as the sadistic treatment of Negro women in the South by white racists.” Perhaps the most disconcerting element in the book is an occasional tendency to generalize and overstate its quasi-Freudian case. The study is, by its very intentions, restricted; its arguments appear circular and self-enclosed. When Hernton informs us, “The Negro man is secretly tormented every second of his wakeful life by the presence of white women in his midst,” we ought to question the universal validity of such an allembracing statement. On the other hand, Sex and Racism is an extremely important contribution to the sociology of race relationships. It remains an original and well-written book that lays the critical groundwork for Hernton’s fiction and much of his poetry. Hernton’s other major nonfiction text, White Papers for White Americans, is a collection of articles unified by the common theme of black struggle in white America. Within the individual essays Hern¬ ton analyzes some of the most important events to occur in the 1960s: Sidney Poitier’s rise as the first realistic “black” actor, Malcolm X’s impact on the black masses, James Baldwin’s appeal to white audi¬ ences, and the limitations of the civil rights move¬ ment. The first chapter, “The Debt I Owe,” sets the tone for the entire book: it is a blend of sociological theory and personal narrative. As is also the case in Sex and Racism, the prose is informal, and while this factor occasionally leaves the reader yearning for documentation and statistical evidence in support of the author’s observations, it also makes for a more intimate and passionate approach to describ¬ ing black life in the modern South. Hernton offers several valuable perceptions

on the displaced Southern black: “The fact that many ex-southern and southern Negroes are ashamed of the South or some of its aspects reveals that they love it so much; it is home, the only home they will ever know.” The first chapter is a continua¬ tion of many of the issues raised in Sex and Racism; it chronicles the author’s struggle to understand him¬ self, other blacks, and their relationship to South¬ ern culture. However, while Hernton initially fo¬ cuses upon himself and his own attitude toward the South, this approach is gradually abandoned in favor of generalizations about Southern blacks. Consequently, the issue of Hernton’s own perspec¬ tive on the South is never adequately described nor confronted, and since the reader lacks a concrete sense of the writer in the opening chapter, the book’s biographical conclusion rings hollow and re¬ mains ineffectively documented: “I came away [from the South] with tears in my eyes, because, as I have stated, despite the changes for the better, I saw things for the first time that caused me to worry and fear. And I severed the cords, all of them, with the South. I am at last free!” Perhaps the single most engaging—and cer¬ tainly the most contemporary—aspect of White Papers is Hernton’s discussion in chapter three, “Grammar of the Negro Revolution,” regarding the political implications of the civil rights movement. Hernton’s sense of American politics and history is often astute, and his pessimistic stance on the possi¬ bility of the black movement in the 1960s ever be¬ coming “revolutionary” has proved to be prophetic: “There is no revolutionary mentality in America. America, white and black, because of its historical development, does not have the kind of imagina¬ tion that creates revolution. ... I believe that the majority of Negroes want to throw off oppression within the context of the American establishment.” Hernton’s explanation that the black move¬ ment will never coalesce into a revolution is based on his condemnation of passive leadership, general black acquiescence, and the sophisticated ability of the white society to convince blacks to accept com¬ promises under the pretense that they are under¬ taking radical solutions. Hernton understands that “Negro oppression is a logically functioning part of the sociopolitical-capitalistic machinery that pro¬ pels this nation in the way it has been going, is going, and will go.” This interpretation may be correct, but the author never outlines exactly how it works, or more important, why racism is so impor¬ tant to the smooth functioning of “the sociopoliti¬ cal-capitalistic machinery.” His analysis is restricted by virtue of explaining black servitude wholly in 141

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Calvin C. Hernton

What kind of sexual roles, concepts and practices have black people come to have in regards to each other as a consequence of living in a world of white hatred for four hundred years?" What has been the relationship between the situation of black people as sexual beings and their struggle for free¬ dom down through the years?"

Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-Ups

What is the outlook for the future in terms of the sexual relations within the black race as well as between blacks and whites as these relations are related to or are affected by the contemporary struggle for Black Power?"

RANDOM

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Dust jacket for Hernton’s 1971 book, in which he contends that “America is the Madhouse of the Western World”

acters of the book. Heading this list of psychological cripples is the main protagonist, Scarecrow. After killing his white wife, dismembering her body, and feeding various organs to the sharks outside his cabin door, Scarecrow hopes to begin a new life in Europe with a black woman, Maria, who is also struggling to recover an identity apart from white America. Unfortunately, neither Maria nor Scarecrow are in enough control of their own lives to help one another. Like the other characters on this voyage, all of whom suffer in varying degrees from psychoneurotic disorders, Scarecrow and Maria descend into deepening layers of porno¬ graphic depravity and animal violence. At the con¬ clusion of the book, in a grisly amalgamation of lust and violence, Scarecrow and Maria destroy one another. Unable to give purpose to their respective suffering, they at least succeed in providing each other the final release from it. As is also the case in Hernton’s poetry, the psychosexual problems encountered in this novel are not limited to simple racial explanations. It is not merely blacks who are psychologically warped; the whites in Scarecrow appear just as inept at main-

terms of symptomatic failings (e.g., black willing¬ ness to compromise, unwillingness to resort to vio¬ lence, and so on), rather than in light of the sophisti¬ cated methodologies capitalism employs in order to undermine racial unity and enflame racial tensions. In other words, Hernton places the blame for a limited radical consciousness squarely within the civil rights movement itself, while the issue is more appropriately understood by examining the institu¬ tions of democratic capitalism which exist to subvert the evolution of progressive alternatives. From 1965 to 1969 Calvin Hernton lived in Europe and was a research fellow at the London Institute of Phenomenological Studies under the tutelage of R. D. Laing. His career-long interest in psychological aberration and the actual voyage to Europe itself provide the backdrop for Hernton’s 1974 novel, Scarecrow. The individuals on board the Castel Felice are living a Freudian nightmare. Incest-haunted daughters, gender-disoriented sons, psychopathic, impotent men, neurotic women, and an assorted group of malcontents participating in drug and occult experimentation constitute the central char¬ 142

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Calvin C. Hernton

taining any semblance of a healthy human rela¬ tionship. Thus, the issues Hernton describes in this novel are far-reaching, and larger than the oppres¬ sion of race or sex: everyone in this book is a scarecrow. Each of the protagonists, regardless of race or sex, is a victim of an intricate and unseen system of social, biological, economic, and moral evils that makes it virtually impossible for any hu¬ man being—black or white — to develop a psycho¬ logically balanced personality. Moreover, as a result of this perverse network, each of the characters fails to face his or her personal reality and to impose some meaning upon a meaningless universe. It is highly appropriate that all the individuals in this book are on board a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, “lost” between civilizations, devoid of any workable—much less ennobling—rituals and traditions. Hernton’s men and women are morally afloat, suffering the anguish of beings re¬ duced to the basest level of human conduct. Hernton’s best poetry, much like his novel Scarecrow, views racism as yet another onus to be¬ leaguer further an already confused and fright¬ ened humanity. A reading of Medicine Man: Col¬ lected Poems (1976) reveals a poet who appears to have as much in common with Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsburg as he does with other black poets of the 1960s such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, or Amiri Baraka. This is not to say that Hernton does not write poems about black experience or fails to possess an acute awareness of American history. In “Jitterbugging in the Streets,” for example, black and white worlds are clearly separated by economic and cul¬ tural distinctions; they come together only to perpe¬ trate acts of violence and humiliation:

the racial issues which appear in Hernton’s indi¬ vidual poems usually highlight the more universal themes of his poetic canon: a stark, existential awareness of the general separation of human beings from one another, the loss of connective tissue between God and humanity, and an over¬ whelming atmosphere of despair pervading all so¬ cial interaction. The portrait of black culture in the majority of his poems poses no satisfying alternative to white sterility; the ghetto, as well as Madison Avenue, contains only “the rage of hopeless peo¬ ple.” Unlike his nonfiction, Hernton’s best poems seem less concerned with the specific difficulties of race relations in America than with the cosmic alienation of individual men. The disenfranchised narrators and characters who populate his poetry appear to wander aimlessly amid the ruins of empty and unfulfilled lives that are adumbrated not only as the result of racial prejudice and the oppressive nature of society, but also because the characters are mortal beings, subject to universal limitations. Hernton’s two long, frequently anthologized poems, “The Patient: Rockland County Sanitar¬ ium” and “Elements of Grammar,” both reflect the social and cosmic isolation that the poet feels is representative of the human condition. “Elements of Grammar” is a poem similar to Eliot’s The Waste Land, describing in lurid detail humankind’s inabil¬ ity to communicate on any level of existence — sex¬ ual, political, personal, and racial. It is a portrait of modern life that is both raw and callous: There is much semen on the ground And punctured prophylactics decaying In the summer heat . . .

As Eliot uses the recurring phrase “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo” to illustrate the banal and superficial level of modern experience in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Hernton’s “Man is a lonely animal” operates as a similar somber refrain in “Elements of Gram¬ mar.” The line is used by Hernton to punctuate descriptions of civilization in the process of break¬ ing down; it becomes a final lament over human¬ kind’s eternal barrier of separateness from itself and its ultimate inability to rise above the bestial world. An analogous sense of human futility and waste is represented in “The Patient: Rockland County Sanitarium.” Although the poem begins with a concrete distinction between the two worlds inside and outside the asylum walls — “From which to view flowers and view fruit/And view those who

Black men crawl the pavement as if they were snakes, and snakes turn to bully sticks that beat the heads of those who try to stand up— A Genocide so blatant Every third child will do the junky-nod in the whorescented night before semen leaps from his loins— And Fourth of July comes with the blasting bullet in the belly of a teenager Against which no Holyman, no Christian housewife In Edsel automobile Will cry out this year.

Racial polidcs in “Jitterbugging” notwith¬ standing, the dominant theme of the poem under¬ scores concerns related to, but ultimately larger than, the contemporary civil rights conflict. Indeed, 143

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Calvin C. Hernton

come bearing them,” by the third section the reader is aware that the image of the sanitarium has en¬ larged into a bleak metaphor that envelops the whole world. Trapped biologically as well as social¬ ly, there exists no escape from mental illness: it is the inherited condition of modern man. The walls of the asylum are all around us: Trapped now here and trapped there everywhere And nowhere in wellsfargoland, ambushed at the hour Of birth and before and after, set upon by rats and roaches The whole world is our patient, dear ones.

The fourth section of the poem speaks direct¬ ly to those incarcerated in sanitariums, specifically to a woman named Portia, to whom the poem is dedicated and who has “Passed beyond the strug¬ gle, beyond the motives that lead/To madness.” Hernton offers her neither pity nor blame; her perceptiveness has fueled her illness. In a conspir¬ atorial voice, the poet himself identifies with her, because it is the poet who both judges and is judged

according to the mental condition of his culture. Thus, the poem restates the central theme of Scarecrow: sensitive people are driven insane by societal pressure; mental illness is not an aberrant state of being in American society. Moreover, be¬ cause these individuals also understand the “awful truth” — that madness regulates the very society that has labeled them insane—the inmates, along with the poet, are in a position to see the futility of struggle, and therefore “sit here resigned, dumb as dead soldiers.” The sanitarium provides no real escape from the “terrors” of daily living, merely the opportunity to observe them from a more detached point of view. Still lodged in a larger world without hope, the asylum perversely mirrors that world, where the powerless become ever more dependent, and the already terrified ever more out of control. In commenting on his own poetry, Hernton has said: “I have noticed that one thing runs through all of my poems no matter what the subject, style or poetic level: and this is an almost too human concern for humanity.” It is his “almost too human concern for humanity,” so evident in a poem such as “The Patient,” that produces a Whitmanesque qual¬ ity to Hernton’s verse. His major poetic tech-

Dust jacket for Hernton’s 1974 novel, influenced by his research under R. D. Laing at the Institute of Phenomenological Studies in London

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niques—free verse, long sentences, various cata¬ logues of human action—owe much to Whitman’s inspiration. But it is Whitman’s lonely voice in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” or The Drum Taps collection that Hernton’s voice seems most to echo. “A Being Exit in the World” is at once a poem about the anguish of a half-human Christ, the role of the poet in a materialistic culture, and the black in white society. What ties all of these dimly identi¬ fied figures together is the theme most common to Hernton’s poetry: the failure of human love. Long¬ ing to possess a sense of place and identity in the world, the poem’s disembodied voice is filled with an abstract tenderness toward humanity. Like Whitman, Hernton identifies and touches vicar¬ iously the lives around him:

scribe as painfully inadequate the individual’s posi¬ tion in both society and the universe. The fact that the message imparted to us by these poems is so often despairing or pessimistic does not lessen Hernton as a poet; actually quite the opposite, for these observations about modern America must have been as painful to write as they are to read. Hernton’s work, nonfiction and fiction alike, is concerned with the issues of racial relationships, drug experience, and the philosophical status of twentieth-century man. The fact that he seldom views these themes separately, but is constantly probing the interrelationship among them, is the dominant element that characterizes his writing career. Lurthermore, this appears to be the direc¬ tion of his future work as well. As of this writing, for

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My essence visits naked rooms, Pulsing, I lie and die with lovers, I choose them all into being . . .

Yet this poem, like many others in the canon, con¬ cludes in the futility of transcending the poetic ab¬ straction to achieve a level of self-identification and purpose: Like syrup Being exit in the world sticks between My fingers and webs them. . . . I abandon none, yet abandoned I am.

Hernton does not possess Whitman’s ultimate faith in cosmic harmonies; his most successful poems are rooted in a darkness where there exist few cracks to reveal Whitman’s vision of optimism and light. On the other hand, within Hernton’s poetry we find his most powerfully expressed senti¬ ments about life, and they are powerful precisely because of his Sophoclean refusal to avoid con¬ fronting the darkness of existential reality. His verse is filled with the desire for communication and love despite the undeniable obstructions to these goals in human prejudice, greed, and the myriad of individual differences which continue to separate us. Medicine Man is haunted by loneliness and exclusion. These are poems in which every human contact seems subverted by a madman’s illu¬ sion or shattered by the reality of violence. Loneli¬ ness and exclusion are the birthrights of the twen¬ tieth-century poet—especially the black poet— who feels himself divorced from the great unifying traditions of past centuries and cultures. Hernton’s poetic contribution is his ability to identify and de¬

Calvin Hernton

Front cover for Hernton’s collected poems, in which he explains, “because I feel I am being I outraged by life. I am alone, every¬ body. I am God.”

145

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example, Hernton is expecting the publication of a new article, “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers.”

ture in Review, 6 (Spring/Summer 1980): 244250; Huel D. Perkins, Review of Scarecrow, Black World (June 1975): 91-93.

References: Tom Dent, “A Voice from a Tumultuous Time,” review of Medicine Man, Obsidian: Black Litera¬

Papers: The Calvin Hernton Collection was established in 1981 at the Ohio University Library.

June Jordan (9 July 1936-

)

Peter B. Erickson Wesleyan University

BOOKS: Who Look at Me (New York: Crowell, 1969); Some Changes (New York: Dutton, 1971); His Own Where (New York: Crowell, 1971); Dry Victories (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972); Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Crowell, 1972); New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (New York: Emerson Hall, 1974); New Life: New Room (New York: Crowell, 1975); Things that I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (New York: Random House, 1977); Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980); Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); Kimako’s Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). June Jordan (courtesy of Lordly & Dame)

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, New York, Public Theatre, May 1979; For the Arrow that Flies by Day [staged reading], New York, Shakespeare Festival, April 1981.

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: “The Black Poet Speaks of Poetry” [column], American Poetry Review, 1974-1977; “South Africa: Bringing It All Back Home,” New York Times, 26 September 1981, p. 23.

RECORDINGS: Things that I do in the Dark, Spoken Arts, 1978; For Somebody to Start Singing, Black Box/Watershed Foundation, 1980.

June Jordan’s is an extraordinarily powerful voice. Power as a central theme in Jordan’s work is accentuated by her speaking voice, which is forth¬ right, resolute, searing, at times explosive and frightening. From the outset Jordan has been fas¬ cinated with language and with the search for an appropriate literary expression of strength. Of her original attraction to words, Jordan remarks: “Early

OTHER: Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, edited, with an introduction, by Jordan (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970); The Voice of the Children, edited by Jordan and Terri Bush, with an afterword by Jordan (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970). 146

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June Jordan

on, the scriptural concept that ‘in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ — the idea that the word could rep¬ resent and then deliver into reality what the word symbolized — this possibility of language, of writ¬ ing, seemed to me magical and basic and irresistible. I really do mean ‘early on’: my mother carried me to the Universal Truth Center on 125th Street, every Sunday, before we moved from Manhattan. I must have been two years old, or three, when the distinc¬ tive belief of that congregation began to make sense to me: that ‘by declaring the truth, you create the truth.’ ” What prevents Jordan’s poetic self from becoming solipsistic or escapist is that she regards her own identity as intimately bound to the destiny of black people as a whole. Her efforts to create free space for her personal liberation serve as a micro¬ cosm and model for a general ideal of black com¬ munity. The reader coming to June Jordan’s work for the first time can be overwhelmed by the breadth and diversity of her concern, and by the wide varie¬ ty of literary forms in which she expresses them. But the unifying element in all her activities is her fervent dedication to the survival of black people, which she expresses in powerful terms such as “Tife: the freedom to live, the freedom to stay alive, the freedom to make life, the freedom to bring new life into and among our lives, the freedom to choose and possess life and again life. . . . Our lives are not debatable. We are, we have survived, we will be as we will choose for ourselves. We will continue to struggle for our survival and for the freedom of our children who will survive us by every means we choose to use.” Given her total commitment to writ¬ ing about a life beset on all sides, Jordan is forced to address the whole of experience in all its facets and can afford to settle for nothing less. Jordan accepts, rises to, the challenge. The tension in her work between despair and optimism gradually shifts, af¬ ter painful struggle, toward optimism. June Jor¬ dan’s art is distinguished not only by the intensity of her conviction about the value of poetry and its capacity to make a political statement, but also by her ability to act on this conviction. The most important source of biographical information is Jordan’s collection of essays, Civil Wars (1981), a book that functions in part as a rec¬ ord of the genesis and development of the writer, as a selective autobiographical portrait of the artist. Jordan’s own account can be usefully supplemented by that of her friend Alexis Deveaux in an article in the April 1981 issue of Essence. ( Deveaux, inciden¬ tally, is the subject of one of the poems in Jordan’s

1980 book, Passion.) The daughter of Granville I. and Mildred M. Jordan, who came to New York City from the island of Jamaica, June Jordan, their only child, was born in Harlem on 9 July 1936. When Jordan was five years old, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, where she grew up in the brownstone her parents owned on Hancock Street (the location to which her poem “Clock on Hancock Street” alludes). Her father worked at night as a post-office clerk; her mother, a nurse, also eventually worked a night shift. Tor one year, Jordan endured an hour-and-twenty-minute commute to be the only black in a student body of three thousand at Midwood High School. Then, for the next three years, she was “com¬ pletely immersed in a white universe” at the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, a prep school now merged with Mount Hermon. There her interest in writing poetry was encouraged, but she was exposed to only white male poets. Jordan’s observation in a retrospective assessment of her poetic career must in part apply to this period: “their remoteness from my world and my language, coupled with their redoubtable acclaim, crippled my trust in my own sensibilities, coerced me into eclectic compulsions I had to struggle against, later, and generally delayed my creative embracing of my own, known life as the very stuff of my art.” Her own family was equally an obstacle not only because her parents opposed her desire to become a poet but also because her sense of identity had been placed in even greater jeopardy by her father’s beatings and by her mother’s complicity in this violence: “There was this heavy reliance on the precept of honoring thy mother and thy father, so that all the violent conflict I had with my parents really caused me a lot of anguish. It didn’t mean that I didn’t resist and defend myself, but it did mean I was concerned about my goodness as a person because my attitude was not one of honor at all. . . . These were not people you were theoretical¬ ly supposed to be fighting—your mother and father.” In September 1953 Jordan entered Barnard College, where she met Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia whom she married in 1955. Jordan’s education was interrupted by and sub¬ ordinated to her husband’s graduate study in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She attended the same university in 1955-1956 before returning to Barnard to study from September 1956 to February 1957. Civil Wars offers a vivid glimpse of the structure of their relationship and its eventual unraveling, and Deveaux’s article provides 147

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June Jordan

a view of the external pressure and suffering: “In¬ terracial marriage was a felony in 43 states, includ¬ ing the ones they drove through on their way west. In Chicago, white people shouted ‘nigger’ and ‘nig¬ ger bitch’ at her when she and Michael walked the streets together.” Prior to their divorce in 1965, Jordan had already taken on the full responsibility for supporting her son, Christopher David Meyer, born in 1958. As she says in Civil Wars, her emer¬ gence as a working mother began in 1964: “At about the zenith of my preoccupation with [Buck¬ minster] Fuller’s ideas on the one hand, my involve¬ ment with Harlem on the other, and the ongoing, central concerns of raising my son, keeping the house, fathoming my husband, from whom I would be, shortly, divorced, working at my poetry, fight¬ ing with my parents, developing my skills as a poli¬ tical journalist, and the overwhelming assault of the daily news, my friend Huck arrived with another brainstorm.” This “brainstorm” led to her work as an assistant to the producer for Frederick Wise¬ man’s film on Harlem, The Cool World. Before the publication in 1969 of Who Look at Me, her first book, Jordan also worked as a research associate and writer for the Technical Housing Department of Mobilization for Youth in New York City and, in the fall of 1967, began a college teaching career at City College, the first in a series of assignments that led to her present position as a tenured professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The primary significance of Jordan’s biogra¬ phy lies in the use to which she puts it within her writing, which contains a strong autobiographical dimension. Two strands can be singled out as strik¬ ing examples: references to her parents and refer¬ ences to her son. Throughout her career, Jordan has written poems about her father and mother. The changes that occur over time in her poetic responses to parental images is one of the principal dramas in Jordan’s work. Family origins overlap with literary origins, as Jordan recounts how her father introduced her to poetry and specifically to “the poets of the Scriptures, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, along with the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Even though she subsequently concluded that “these four founts were dead,” she nonetheless had learned in childhood that “it was normal to be involved in a regular family way with something called poetry.” The inspiration of her mother stems from her example as a nurse and, more generally, as one who “was always willing to be helpful to other people in the community. People always came to her for

By JUNE JORDAN

Illustrated with twenty-seven paintings

Dust jacket for Jordan’s first book, a poem of black selfidentification illustrated with paintings that depict black life in America

advice, a cup of soup, some company.” In the Har¬ lem Riot of 1964 the daughter’s affinity for this nurturing role came to the fore when Jordan momentarily assumed the role of nurse. At CORE headquarters, which had been converted into a first aid station, “I began helping a white doctor. . . . He and Bostic and I began running out to answer street emergency calls from teams scouting Harlem mak¬ ing 15 minute reports.” More generally, Jordan assimilates her mother’s identity by defining her poetic vocation in terms of maternal nurturing: “What has been called ‘women’s work’ traditionally includes the nurturing of young people, maintain¬ ing a house, providing the wherewithal so that peo¬ ple can keep going. . . . My work is closely related in purpose to the traditional work. It just takes a dif¬ ferent form.” The difference is of course crucial, but Jordan’s incorporation of her mother’s values remains important. The identification with her mother was especially apparent when June Jordan recorded her mother’s frustrated artistic impulses and celebrated her life as a hidden artist in the Reid Lecture at Barnard College in 1975. Overall, Jordan has tended to gravitate more toward the mother while the father’s presence is diminished. Nevertheless, her father is not forgot¬ ten (as “Poem for Granville Ivanhoe Jordan,” writ-

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ten after his death in 1974, testifies), and her mother is not idealized. Jordan’s honesty, as she probes her parents’ formative influences in order to establish an identity of her own that she can trust, is impressive. She manages to keep a fine, difficult balance between gratitude and criticism, love and anger. Jordan never simply renounces her parents but maintains her connection to them and acknowl¬ edges the sustenance she received from them, while at the same time fully confronting the negative side of this connection and vigorously condemning it. The second major biographical element in Jordan’s poetry concerns her relationship to her son, Christopher, who graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1981. This bond provides a touchstone to which Jordan frequently returns. An early poem, “For Christopher,” cherishes the growing “man in¬ side the boy.” A later poem, “July 4, 1974 (Washing¬ ton, D.C.),” opens with the arresting line “At least it helps me to think about my son,” and, remember¬ ing his birth “some/sixteen years ago,” concludes with a strong lyrical evocation of his emerging identity. Jordan’s first book is dedicated to her son, as is her recent collection, Civil Wars: “Thanks be to Christopher David Meyer, my friend, and my son, whose very life is much of the reason why 1 am trying to win this one.” Not only did she give life to him, he also gives life to her. His influence is ac¬ knowledged in the last pages of the final essay of Civil Wars: “My son called me from Cambridge, the Sunday of the Miami uprising. I told him some of my ideas. He said, ‘Have you Frances’ book?’ He meant Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward. No, I hadn’t. ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘You have to.’ ... I read Poor Peoples’ Movements, sometimes with¬ out stopping to sleep. Here it was: Documented historical proof that we are not powerless, that no one is powerless.” In Civil Wars, Jordan also gives a poignant picture of her early experience as a mother: “In Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, I had read that the first three years of your life are the most impor¬ tant: they determined your capacity to trust, and to love. This capacity hinged, he said, entirely on mother-child bonding. So my son, Christopher, occupied the absolute center of my days and my mind, throughout this period.” Despite the neglect of her own work to which this focus led, Jordan sees this primary nurturance as a strength whose ap¬ plication can be generalized to nonbiological chil¬ dren and, by extension, to an entire community. The mother-son relation is not, in Jordan’s imagi¬

nation, a limiting but rather an expanding expe¬ rience; accordingly she hopes “That my son, who is a Black man, and that I, a Black woman, may keep faith with each other, and with those others whom we may have the privilege to serve, and to join.” And she sharply questions a feminist approach that would disown or insufficiently stress nurturing ex¬ perience: “Nowhere did I see an espousal of the struggles to end the predicament of children every¬ where— a cause that seemed natural to me as a woman. . . . Will we liberate ourselves so that the caring for children, the teaching, the loving, heal¬ ing, person-oriented values that have always dis¬ tinguished us will be revered and honored at least commensurate to the honors accorded bank man¬ agers, lieutenant colonels, and the executive corpo¬ rate elite? Or will we liberate ourselves so that we can militantly abandon those attributes and func¬ tions, so that we can despise our own warmth and generosity even as men have done, for ages?” Final¬ ly, in a 1981 interview with Sharon Bray, Jordan depicts child-rearing as a political act: “I think one of the most revolutionary things you can do is to try and raise a child in a system that doesn’t value children. . . .” Jordan simultaneously recovers and rethinks her childhood and becomes a parent who has the chance to be different from her own parents. With characteristic candor Jordan expresses the difficul¬ ty of achieving change, given the force of gener¬ ational continuity: “I wanted to grow so that I could take my revenge or so that I could decide things for myself, so that I could be different from my mother and my father. What I never realized was that, the longer I lived, the more similar I would become. . . . And the only way I could change into somebody powerful was this: I had to imitate the powerful people around me. It was a circular dilemma that left me, thinking about it, grim to the point of blank staring at the ground or, as adults saw me, day¬ dreaming, again.” Yet Jordan persisted, and her art traces a way out of the “circular dilemma,” a triumph that begins to account for the tremendous psychological power of her literary enterprise: “Can we not learn from our children because we cannot believe that we are capable of having created a new life that may save our own? . . . To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.” She speaks here both as a mother to her son and, after the fact, as a child to her parents. WhoLookatMe, which appeared in 1969, origi-

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June Jordan

that negates the existence of the black person: A white stare splits obliterates the nerve-wrung wrist from work the breaking ankle or the turning glory of a spine

Jordan records the visceral imprint of the obliterat¬ ing stare on blacks whose bodies are already worn by labor, but even at this early point in the poem she presents, as the line turns, “the turning glory/of a spine,” a detail of physical splendor that remains untouched (as well as unrecognized) by the white view. Such a detail contributes to the poem’s even¬ tual counterassertion: “black face black body and black mind/beyond obliterating.” Overall, the poem records a progression from victimization to resistance, from pain to anger, as it gathers the energy ultimately to refuse degrada¬ tion: Although the world forgets me I will say yes AND NO

Jordan and her son, Christopher (photograph by Jay Hoops)

Jordan fights back by changing the terms of the interaction, by becoming the active subject instead of the passive object of sentences. A major shift occurs when the poet announces: “I am black alive and looking back at you.” In turning from the defi¬ nition of the black self as it is reflected in white stares, Jordan seeks to locate a self-definition within black historical and artistic traditions. A separate space is discovered, beyond the reach of white perception, where blacks are freed from the im¬ perative to look back at whites and can instead look at one another: “my family/I looked for you/I looked for you.” Slavery has made such a search necessary, but the poem insists that slavery, though devastating, has not succeeded totally in destroying the black family as a source of identity. Jordan’s Whitmanesque voice firmly asserts, “I found my father/. . . I found my mother.” Slavery is con¬ verted from a story of victimization to a metaphor of strength because survival gives positive testimony to black life:

nated in a publisher’s request that June Jordan take over a project on which Langston Hughes was working at the time of his death in 1967. “That first book was the most important; it started me,” Jordan has observed. This long poem is also the first poem in her volume of selected poems (1954-1977) enti¬ tled Things that I Do in the Dark (1977); the third line of Who Look at Me provides the name for the entire first section of the volume, “For my own” — a phrase which suggests the continuity of Jordan’s concerns — For my own self, For my own parents, For my own son, For my own people. Who Look at Me is not only chronologically first but also logically first. The poem is a crucial starting point because its effort to contend with black-white relations is a necessary first step in self-definition for a black person and poet in a white society. Jordan uses the moment of eye contact as the central image of interaction between the races. Cautiously she threads her way through the pain surrounding this moment and tries to make sense of it. She assesses the damaging effect of white perceptions of black people; she imagines what the white person (“who look at me”) actually sees and does not see. The white look is simultaneously a violation and a refusal of contact—it is an intrusion

New energies of darkness we disturbed a continent like seeds and life grows slowly so we grew

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June Jordan

We became a burly womb an evening harvest kept by prayers a hallelujah little room

marily on the basis of secondhand informa¬ tion and much worse. This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone be understood. He has never been listened to.

We grew despite the crazy killing scorn that broke the brightness to be born.

The triumph of growth is enabled by a vital black culture:

The second essay stresses the need for blacks to formulate their own self-image: “Here we began like objects chosen by the blind. And it is here we see fit to continue as subjects of human community. . . .

In part we grew as we were meant to grow ourselves with kings and queens no white man knew

As Franz Fanon has written, the colonized man does not say he knows the truth, he is the truth. Likewise, we do not say we know the truth, We are the Truth: We are the living Black experience, and therefore, we are the primary sources of informa¬ tion.” To perceive the continuity between the essays and the poem is to become aware of the consistency in Jordan’s writing. In the impassioned, argu¬ mentative, caustic eloquence and the incisive logic of the essays is the same moral force that drives Who Look at Me. It is this fierce moral force that charac¬ terizes June Jordan’s voice and gives her work its unity. In 1970 two anthologies edited by Jordan appeared: Soulscript, a collection of Afro-Amer¬ ican poetry, and The Voice of the Children, a collection

Readers who encounter Who Look at Me in Things that I Do in the Dark should be aware that the original edition of the poem is accompanied by a series of paintings and that many passages in the poem allude directly to paintings on the opposite pages. In calling attention to the act of looking, the paintings enhance the poem’s general visual motif. Furthermore, in moving from painting to poetic language, we see that the poem’s function is to give a voice to what was previously silent. The paintings become apt metaphors for all the fragmentary im¬ ages of black life that have to be collected, pieced together, reconstructed, made to speak. The poet’s role is, in the words of Who Look at Me, “to carry life/to start the song.” From the outset, Jordan’s poetry is at once lyrical and political. “Political” here refers not only to specific content, such as the pas¬ sage in the poem about the Amistad Revolt led by Cinque, who “from slavery forced/a victory he/ killed the captain.” It refers more generally to any effort to recover and render black experience imag¬ inatively, to go against the white stare and speak for a black version. In this first work, Jordan fashions a poetic identity whose fundamental goal is to assert, nurture, and expand the quality of black life, whose survival can never be taken for granted, is always endangered, and has always to be defended tena¬

of children’s poetry from a workshop taught by Jordan and Terri Bush. Both volumes contribute to an understanding of Jordan’s early development as a writer. Soulscript, which contains four of Jordan’s poems that were later included in Some Changes (1971), provides in its introduction an early state¬ ment of her poetic ideals. Her approach can be summarized as New Criticism with a difference. To describe poetry, Jordan uses the metaphor of dra¬ ma, which in turn leads to the idea of a speaking voice. The two concepts of drama and of voice fit in with the New Critical practice of treating a poem as dramatic utterance, as dramatic performance. The difference is that Jordan connects the individual voice to its social context. The key sentence which makes the link reads: “This struggle to determine and then preserve a particular, human voice is closely related to the historic struggling of black life in America.” Jordan’s vision of the poetic medium makes the literary-critical notion of voice inescap¬ ably political for the black poet. Voice can never be confined exclusively to a narrow aesthetic or per¬ sonal realm, and for this very reason poetry is, refreshingly, not a superfluous luxury. It becomes

ciously. This struggle June Jordan wages in prose as well as in poetry. The essays “On Listening: A Good Way to Hear (1967)” and “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person (1969),” collected in Civil Wars as chapters 5 and 6, enact the same movement as Who Look at Me. The first essay addresses the flaw in white interpretations of black life:

There lives a man who is spoken for, imag¬ ined, feared, criticized, pitied, misrepre¬ sented, fought against, reviled, and loved, pri¬

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June Jordan

precious as an indispensable instrument of social change: “Slavery meant that certain men comfort¬ ably destroyed other real people as individuals. . . . Just as Malcolm Little redefined his self into Malcolm X, Afro-America, for its integrity and sur¬ vival, pursues this history into pride and poem. We must redefine the words, the names, of our uni¬ verse and the values attached to every written tag. . . .’’Jordan goes on to challenge the principles upon which a seemingly unalterable “great tradi¬ tion” is based. She argues for the transformation of literary tradition that would follow from the recog¬ nition of black writers and of “the artistic validity of world literature characterized by social conscience.” Jordan’s all-out attack on the prejudices involved in the formation of the accepted literary canon in the preface to Passion (1980) can be traced back to this effort a decade before. Soulscript and The Voice of the Children may be considered companion anthologies because the first section of Soulscript, “tomorrow words today,” con¬ tains poems by some of the children whose writing appears in The Voice of the Children, hence providing a point of intersection. Moreover, writing her own poetry and encouraging children to write poetry are parallel, linked activities for Jordan. Her con¬ tribution to the literary development of the chil¬ dren in the workshop is clear; the question is: how did the children, in turn, influence Jordan’s writ¬ ing? An answer can be found by reading The Voice of the Children along with the essay of the same name (chapter 4 in Civil Wars), both of which give impor¬ tant evidence, early in her career, that children are an essential rather than incidental part of her vi¬ sion. The introduction to Soulscript makes the con¬ nection between children and poetry in a way that sounds familiarly romantic: “Reaction, memory and dream: these are the springs of poetry. And a four-year-old flows among them as fully as any adult.” Yet Jordan’s insistence on the capacity of black children comes from a tough-minded appre¬ ciation that poetry can offer an alternative to de¬ structive public school education. Turning, with the children, to poetry as a vehicle for hope, Jordan stresses the vital words “voice” and “survival.” Through her commitment to children as “the peo¬ ple of new life,” she finds a self-image as a nurturer whose interest includes, but is not confined to her own son, who contributed five poems, written when he was nine and ten, to the anthology. In the after¬ word to The Voice of the Children, Jordan tells about the difficulty of locating a place for the writing workshop to meet: “But finally, The Church of the 152

Open Door gave us a room of our own.” The plural pronouns contrast with Virginia Woolf’s formula¬ tion in A Room of One’s Own, providing two different images of the artist as a member of the community and as an isolated individual. The room which Jor¬ dan seeks is a shared space where a new generation can form itself. More generally, the room is a key image in Jordan’s work because it raises the issue of literal, physical space; of the right to shelter as a basic necessity of life; of living space as a place for “new life,” or as a later title will put it, New Life: New Room. Jordan’s dedication to children remains a constant element in her world view. Her assertion in the afterword to The Voice of the Children that “Children are the only people nobody can blame” is sounded again and again: “Or suppose you consider chil¬ dren, as I do, the only blameless people alive. And suppose you possess all the eyeball evidence, all the statistics, that indicate a majority of Black young¬ sters doomed to semi-illiteracy. . . . Or suppose you love children and you cannot forget that there are entire countries, even in this same hemisphere, where four- and five-year-olds, where nine- and ten-year-olds, have been abandoned. . . . where socalled packs of these little people must scavenge the garbage cans and the very streets for something to eat before they finally lie down to sleep in gutters and doorways, under the soiled newspapers that consistently fail to report the degrading fact that the children will probably not survive.” It is not surprising that Jordan was invited to address a con¬ ference convened by the Child Welfare League of America. Her speech there, “Old Stories: New Lives (1978),” chapter 16 in Civil Wars, is her most ex¬ tended and powerful statement about children. Some Changes (1971), Jordan’s first collection of poetry, draws on this concern for children. One short poem effectively makes its simple declaration of faith: In the times of my heart the children tell the clock a hallelujah listen people listen.

Another poem, “The New Pieta: For the Mothers and Children of Detroit,” uses a traditional icon to bear witness to maternal grieving, but does so in a manner that, instead of renewing the tradition, be¬ gins to reject it and calls attention to the unaccept¬ able death for which it offers poor consolation: “he moves no more,” the final line repeats.

DLB 38

June Jordan f t) I'l

About June Jordan and her poetry SOME CHANGES is one of the most important single books of poetry ever published in America. The justified rage it expresses should not be allowed to obscure its tenderness and love, searching everywhere to defend, protect, and unite "the living.” In America’s battle within, it is a voice of warning, to be listened to while there is still time. — Milieu Brand, author of Savage Sleep

Her poems are human herds of love, sorrow, anguish, authentic struggle . .. These poems are poems that you and I can walk around in. go through changes in, make progress in, sit, stand, make love in, lieve in.

suffer,

weep, hope, give birth, live in, and be¬ — Calvin Hernton

She has lost not an iota of tftat fragile sensitivity of which life is born and of which most life is early robbed. — R. Buckminster Fuller

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ii

It is indeed the skill of her control that is at a first reading most impressive about this volume ... At tne same time, the temper of the volume is tough-minded. . . , There is in this poet a sense of continuity, a sense of history, and a sense of hope.

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— Louis Martz, Yale Review

Her verse dealing with injustice is cool and deeply felt. In her more personal poems Miss Jordan employs a long, lithe line and an inventive conceit.. . She is a poet of integrity for whom poetry is not a placard but an energetic involvement with the variety and thrust of language, idiom and image. — Kirkus Reviews

Jkcket detign by Ginger Gilet Jacket photograph t>y Lloyd Tear wood

*2.95 0-525-04460-4

Covers for Jordan’s first collection of poetry, dedicated to R. Buckminster Fuller, who influenced her ideas about urban redesign

one of these days

In the first poem in Some Changes Jordan finds her poetic voice in relation to, and in reaction against, her parents. As Jordan had put it in defin¬ ing the category of “home poetry” in Soulscript: “Before anywhere else,/we exist inside the family/ terrain, the family circumstance/of shelter.” Yet as Jordan runs through the poem’s three sections — “for my mother,” “for my father,” “for my only love,” the momentum shifts sharply away from the parents in favor of youthful sexuality. The poet’s verbal fantasies for each of her parents create

won’t come too soon when the blank familias blank will fold away a highly inflammable balloon eclipsed by seminal and nubile loving.

obligations that seem impossible to fulfill: “for my mother/1 would write a list/of promises so solid . . her father she would “regenerate.” The poet finds it easier to invest herself in an “only love” that can blot out the problematic love of the old family romance:

Yet Jordan returns to her parents in the final sec¬ tion of Some Changes when, in “Clock on Hancock Street,” she carefully itemizes the pieces of furni¬ ture her father has given away to make an empti¬ ness that, the last two lines reveal, suggest his inner bereftness after the loss of his wife from “where my 153

June Jordan

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Saw a Negro Lady.” The poet’s compassionate nota¬ tion of the woman’s “years of bending over floors” and her desire to join in celebration of the woman’s fortieth birthday are evident. But these feelings are thoroughly undermined by the poetic imperative of gentle mockery of the “lady’s” social pretensions: “little finger broad and stiff/in heavy emulation of a cockney/mannerism.” Jordan could not achieve a more direct contact with the working woman until she broke out of this constricting aesthetic mode. Emily Dickinson’s is another voice Jordan tries out in Some Changes in such poems as “I Live in Subtraction” and “My Sadness Sits Around Me.” This influence is salutary because it gives Jordan access to areas of inner pain, and because it leads to a style that is less jaunty and self-satisfied and more spare, subdued, and haunting. But Jordan’s most impressive engagement with literary tradition occurs in “Let Me Live with Marriage,” whose first and final lines echo Shakespeare’s sonnet 116. Jor¬ dan touches the Shakespearean base in order to revise it: against Shakespeare’s ideal of love as “ever-fixed mark,” she somberly records the dis¬ solution of her marriage. Her voice is no longer derivative but authentic and authoritative, though under the circumstances necessarily plaintive: “I sing of stillborn lyrics almost sung.” Midway through the poem, the “I” has declared her poetic

mother used to walk/and talk to him.” In the volume as a whole, however, the precise status of Jordan’s particular family remains in doubt. “Poem for My Family: Hazel Griffin and Victor Hernan¬ dez Cruz” evokes the idea of family in the most extended sense. The poet’s voice becomes the col¬ lective cry of black people, “the human sound that never reached your ears.” As if to anticipate the reaction of the decorous literary critics who would pronounce her voice too shrill and strident, Jordan says plainly, “I am screaming,” then makes the scream a trope for labor pains: “whiteman/do you hear the loud/the blood, the real hysteria of birth/ my life is being born.” The title Some Changes refers not only to politi¬ cal change but also to another kind of change in relation to literary forbears, described in a tone that is more “quietly explosive.” In poems such as “The Reception,” “Uncle Bullboy,” and “If You Saw a Negro Lady,” Jordan demonstrates the influence of T. S. Eliot, adapting his brittle comedy of manners to slices of black social life. But Jordan seems to know more about Doretha, Uncle Bullboy, or the Negro Lady than she can tell within a style that keeps the poet in the role of external, witty observ¬ er. The distancing effect which short-circuits emo¬ tional involvement and prevents Jordan from fully embracing her subject is most apparent in “If You

Dust jacket for Jordan’s 1975 children’s book, which demonstrates the centrality of her desire to create urban environmental conditions conducive to black family life

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June Jordan

identity as a black writer: “I am black within/as is this skin. . . It is as if the so-called “dark lady” has been given a chance to speak; the Shakespearean sonnets depend upon her silence. Jordan uses tradi¬ tion here in a way that transforms, subverts, and transcends it. The novel His Own Where (1971) demonstrates that two aspects of Jordan’s work which might otherwise seem ancillary, even anomalous—her ex¬ periment with urban planning and her commit¬ ment to Black English—are central to her fiction. The significance of these two areas for Jordan is made clear in chapters 3 and 7 in Civil Wars. In the foreword Jordan tells an incredible story about her project to collaborate with R. Buck¬ minster Fuller on the “architectural redesign” of Harlem — incredible because it shows her desper¬ ate effort to reach out for a reason to hope and to avoid the “hatred for everything and everyone white” with which the Harlem Riot of 1964 had left her, because it shows how basic is her attempt to create environmental conditions that can foster black life. For this “gamble,” Jordan says, “I put my whole life on the line.” Though the plan was never enacted, it helped to save Jordan’s spirit: “Forward from that evening in Fuller’s room, at the St. Regis Hotel, my sometime optimism born of necessity hardened into a faithful confidence carried by dreams: detailed explorations of the alternatives to whatever stultifies and debases our lives.” Jordan’s description of urban redesign can be transferred to His Own Where. What cannot be realized in environ¬ mental planning can be fulfilled in fiction. This process of translation is already potential in chapter 3, the “Letter to R. Buckminster Fuller (1964),” when Jordan speaks of “a poetry of form” and of “the comprehensive impact of every Where,” a phrase which points forward to the novel’s title. In particular, the actions of the novel’s hero, Buddy, are a wonderfully apt assimilation of Jordan’s architectural impulse into the medium of fiction. During his walk with Angela at the beginning of the novel, his visit to Angela’s house, and his later drive in the car Buddy surveys the claustrophobic urban environment—“the brokenland of Brooklyn smallscale brokenland.” Against this background he attempts literally to rebuild his world. First with his father and then by himself, he remodels the house: “The house become a house of men strip to the basic structure truth of it,” “House be like a work¬ shop where men live creating how they live.” Final¬ ly, he and Angela start over by making a new home in an abandoned brick house near the secluded urban reservoir and cemetery.

Another important dimension of the novel is its lyrical use of Black English, which derives from Jordan’s writing group for children: “my first novel, His Own Where, which was written entirely in Black English, was based upon two ‘regulars’ of our workshop, and, of course, upon my own, personal life as a child growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant.” Here is proof that Jordan’s involvement with chil¬ dren affects the form as well as the content of her work. “White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation (1972),” written specifically in de¬ fense of the language of His Own Where, provides valuable perspective on the aesthetic aspirations of the novel. Educational and artistic principles con¬ verge: “As a Black poet and writer, I am proud of our Black, verbally bonding system born of our struggle to avoid annihilation. . . . And so I work, as a poet and writer, against the eradication of this system, this language, the carrier of Black-survivor consciousness.” Jordan’s interests in architecture and urban design and in Black English represent the two fun¬ damental issues of space and language that she weaves together in His Own Where. As two crucial means by which environment is aesthetically shaped, space and language bear directly on “men¬ tal health” and can be used for good or for ill. Both space and language, as the novel insists, are poten¬ tial “human means to human community.” It is particularly at this level that His Own Where is a novel of political protest. But the questions for most readers will be: how are we to respond to the novel’s ending? What is the final and future status of their new lives? Buddy and Angela do achieve a new beginning, including the prospect of a new baby, as the last sentence proclaims: “And so begins a new day of the new life in the cemetery.” To what extent or in what way can we believe in this tentative new life? Much of the novel’s affirmation is carried by the poetry in the book: Jordan’s “first page,” a fourparagraph prose poem which is repeated toward the end of the novel, defines the cemetery as “His own where, own place for loving,” but also insists on the critical distinction — “You be different from the dead” — that validates rather than ironically under¬ cuts the love. The novel itself prompts the reader to ask how great the gap is between fiction and reality, to reevaluate “realism” from the perspective of poe¬ tic vision. Finally His Own Where should be seen as an indirect contribution to Jordan’s ongoing explora¬ tion of her relation to her parents. Angela’s parents present the negative side of Jordan’s own parents. We can speculate that the father’s violence toward

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cated to my mother,” and that the collective voice sparkles because of the specific personal force moti¬ vating it. The poem moves, pushes forward, at a brisk pace created by its incantatory form—what Jordan calls “rhythm as a vertical event.” But the poem is made by its closure:

Angela and the parents’ hostility to her sexuality are tangentially related to Jordan’s autobiography. Opposed to this image is the positive figure of Bud¬ dy’s father, whose seed catalogues, symbolizing the desire to make life possible, also connect him to Jordan’s father (evoked in a subsequent poem as “omnivorous consumer of thick/kitchen table cata¬ logs /of seeds for sale”). Furthermore, the brief por¬ trait of Buddy’s mother, who despairs and suddenly disappears, suggests a vulnerable aspect of Jordan’s mother which emerges in later writing. Having completed five books by 1970, Jordan traveled to Rome with the support of the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, for which R. Buck¬ minster Fuller had nominated her. But the United States is not left behind: “It was while I stayed on that cold white island [of Mykonos]. . . that the idea of land reform in Mississippi came to me.” The subtitle of Jordan’s second collection of poetry, New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1974), refers to the Rome/Mississippi axis. The final section, “Poems of Return,” begins with “No Poem”: “blood stains Un¬ ion Street in Mississippi.” The blood is Joetha Col¬ lier’s, “the young Black girl shot down by white beer-drinking teenagers on the afternoon of her graduation from high school. When her body was found, Joetha’s hand still held her diploma.” The principal meaning of exile is not Jordan’s tempo¬ rary sojourn in Rome but her continuing alienation within America. Nonetheless, Jordan creates a com¬ pelling evocation of “new days” by overcoming exile in relation to the mother. This rediscovery of the mother can in part be attributed to Jordan’s finding a second mother in Mrs. Fannie Fou Hamer on her two trips to Mississippi in 1969 and 1971. As Jordan reflects in Civil Wars, “She was, in many way, a mother to me: protective, earthy, fearless, and blessed by an hilarious and deadpan sense of humor.” It is also in Mississippi that Jordan met Alice Walker, with whom she would share, six years later, the Reid Fectureship at Barnard College. The most important poem in New Days, “Get¬ ting Down to Get Over,” is preceded by a slighter but essential poem, “On the Spirit of Mildred Jor¬ dan,” which, tenderly scrutinizing her mother as she recovers from sickness, concludes: “she was strong." It is this strength that Jordan summons and sings as she starts “Getting Down to Get Over,” “MOMMA MOMMA MOMMA.” In “Thinking about My Poetry (1977),” chapter 15 in Civil Wars, Jordan explains that in writing “Getting Down to Get Over” for a Black Women’s Conference in 1973 she aimed for “the achievement of a collective voice.” But it is worth noting that the poem is “Dedi¬

teach me to survive my momma teach me how to hold a new life momma help me turn the face of history to your face.

The restless survey stops; a definite, still point of intense concentration is reached; the blessing sought is received; the image of the mother’s face crystallizes. The poet’s action creates the face and gives it for the first time its rightful historical signifi¬ cance, but the mother’s face enables the daughter’s language. The connection, or reconnection, with the mother offers an enormously potent focus for ending exile. Like Carolyn Rodgers’s “It Is Deep,” Jordan’s “Getting Down to Get Over” sees the mother as “a sturdy Black bridge that I/crossed over, on.” Unlike Rodgers, however, Jordan por¬ trays this moment as in process rather than com¬ pleted, as her final appeals—“teach me . . . teach me . . . help me” — suggest. In this sense, “Getting Down to Get Over” is, like the last poem in New Days, a “Poem Against A Conclusion.” Jordan’s three books for children written dur¬ ing the 1970s sketch a rough progression from bit¬ ter indictment to joyful coping. J udged by ordinary standards, Jordan brings unusually high expecta¬ tions to children’s literature and, as a result, makes a special contribution to enlarging the sense of what is possible within this genre. She never patronizes children by assuming that they cannot deal with harsh social realities. Not only does she point out that “There were a whole lot of things wrong,” she also specifies exactly what these things were and what can be done about them by determined indi¬ viduals. In Dry Victories (1972), in which Jordan also has five photo credits, two black boys analyze the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. A crucial issue is the use of violence by whites to suppress the freedom of blacks. In her afterword, Jordan com¬ ments: “I’m angry, and you should be too.” “His¬ tory don’t stop to let nobody out of it” — not even children. The biography Fannie Lou Hamer (1972) gives a more positive heroic view of the Civil Rights 156

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June Jordan

This is a bosk we moke betai-se we think thore wo? two times. Reconstruction and tile Civit Rights era, [hot ifiii be hanging Vs op, bad. "We" is poor and fired of poverty. Block and here, in America. "We*' is poor papers don't hardly mean nothing. want to change the paper into lo that, no delay. We hop

whit#, fifite

the troth behind them

Dust jacket for Jordan’s 1972 book, an illustrated dialogue between two black boys who discuss the Reconstruction and Cavil Rights eras

tion is to make an accommodation by rearranging and redesigning the limited space so as to give a genuine sense of control as well as to allow a good deal of honest exuberance. Jordan’s major collection of poetry, Things that I Do in the Dark, appeared under the editorship of Toni Morrison in 1977. It is useful to think of these poems as “selected and new” so as to be alert to the distinction between poems which appeared in the two previous volumes, Some Changes and New Days, and poems appearing for the first time. Those col¬ lected for the first time include two poems from 1954 and one from 1967; and, more especially, some from 1973 and poems dated 1974 through 1976. A new poem that is particularly striking is “One Minus One Minus One”:

period but is equally clear about the fact of violence. The category of children’s literature does not speak to the seriousness of these two books, [ordan’s pres¬ sure on the boundary that separates literature for children and for adults is exemplified by the con¬ tinuity between her children’s biography of Hamer and “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer” in Passion. The quotation from Fannie Lou Hamer that Jordan uses in the book intended for chil¬ dren— “Ain’ no such a thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face” — is the same message Jordan gives herself in the foreword to Civil Wars. The third children’s book, New Life: New Room (1975), picks up the architectural and spatial motif of His Own Where. The book earns its happy ending by confronting difficulties within the limits dictated by circumstance. As Jordan puts it in a book-jacket comment: “I hope this story will show how a real, ordinary problem can become a terrific, exciting opportunity to make good news come into the life of a family.” New Life refers literally to a new baby, the Robinsons’ fourth child. But, literally, there is no New Room: they can’t move to a bigger place, and the present apartment will be crowded. The solu¬

My mother murdering me to have a life of her own What would I say (if I could speak about, it?)

157

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June Jordan

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“These poems are fierce and rentier, public and intimate, musical and violent. Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions for survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart." —Adrienne Rich “I regard her work as a major contribution. Passionate and witty, it speaks to all oppression with love, its most relentless foe.” —David Ignatow “June Jordan is as courageous, as rebellious, as compassionate as she is original. It is her originality that makes shine the beautiful moral power of her poetry. June Jordan is an inhab¬ itant of the entire universe, and in these poems she reveals the range of her concerns: the range is vast, the interpreta¬ tions, deep." —Alice Walker

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Dust jacket for Jordan’s 1977 collection of poems written between 1954 and 1976

chapter 12 in Civil Wars. But readers are urged to experience the full impact of that excerpt by approaching it in the original context of the entire speech, and by feeling the way the prose sets off— modulates into—the penultimate lyrical invoca¬ tion. In this speech Jordan begins to “turn the face of history” toward her mother as she had earlier advocated, and to fill in the details of her mother’s “face.” The mother’s life is split between the kitchen and “the little room,” a secret, suppressed space where “once, in there, you told me, whispering, that once, you wanted to become an artist.” But “the little room” is associated with “the rhythms of your sacrifice” because the mother is never able to pur¬ sue art as a possibility: “What had happened to you, and your wish?” In that private space, Jordan re¬ ceives the wish to be an artist as a maternal inheri¬ tance: “it was there that I came, humbly, into an angry, an absolute determination that I would, one day, prove myself to be, in fact, your daughter.” Instead of stopping here, Jordan concludes with the poignant outburst: “Ah, Momma, I am still trying.” Only five years later can we understand the reso¬ nance of that final line and the burden Jordan has

My father raising me to be a life that he owns What can I say (in this loneliness).

This poem names an agenda that Jordan describes as “a first map of territory I will have to explore as poems, again and again” and that looks forward to the key poem in Passion, “Poem about My Rights”: “I do not consent/to my mother to my father.” Yet it also is a compact, retrospective summary of Jor¬ dan’s treatment of the family motif up to this point. It is entirely characteristic that the criticism of her parents registered in “One Minus One Minus One” is balanced by the loving acknowledgment in the dedication of Things that I Do in the Dark as a whole: “to the memory of Granville I. Jordan who fathered many dreams and to the memory of Mildred M. Jordan whose sacrifice I hope to vindicate.” The mother’s “sacrifice” is addressed in the excerpt “Ah, Momma” taken from the end of Jor¬ dan’s speech “Notes of a Barnard Dropout (1975),” 158

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June Jordan

Poetry/ Black Literature

PASSION New Poems, 1977-1980 JUNE JORDAN And who will join this standing up and the ones v.-ho stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea ice are the ones we have been waitin'' for from “Poem in Honor of South African Women” June Jordan—poet, activist, teacher—was born in Harlem and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where she began writing poetry at the age of seven. Now the author of several award-winning books, she travels widely to read her poems and to speak on the themes of her writing: politics in the street, Black women, Black literature, child welfare, White Power/Black People, and education in America. The energy of the impassioned and committed activist comes through in these poems. Dynamic, rebellious, and courageous, June Jordan is a lyrical catalyst for change.

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BEACON PRESS ■

60S

BOSTON Beacon Paperback fill ISBN 0—8070—3219—0

Covers for Jordan’s 1980 book, poems that continue her exploration of the issue of violence

assumed in relation to her mother when, at the beginning of Civil Wars, she indicates that her mother’s “sacrifice” included suicide (in 1966), an absolute loss that in one sense can never be re¬ deemed. This passage from Civil Wars must be read as an addendum to the Barnard speech: “If my mother had held such a [Bauhaus] spoon, if I could have given her such a useful piece of beauty, even once, perhaps everything would have been differ¬ ent for her. . . .” And she goes on to speak of the kitchen’s ugly decor and the “resignation” it engen¬ dered. Jordan expresses a moving faith in the pow¬ er of art to give sustenance, a belief from which professional literary critics too easily lapse. Things that I Do in the Dark opens up new terri¬ tory in three areas. “From The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # One” signals the emergence of a black feminist perspective. “Metarhetoric,” whose last three lines Adrienne Rich chooses as one of the epigraphs for her essay “Disloyal to Civiliza¬

tion: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia (1978),” moves beyond the label “Homophobia’’ given in the opening line and begins to explore the “bisexuality” Jordan makes explicit in the final essay of Civil Wars. Finally, several new poems undertake a re¬ consideration of violence as a permissible means of black struggle. Partly because she sees that struggle within an international framework in which mili¬ tary revolution has produced results, and partly because she judges nonviolence to have been in¬ effectual in the American context, Jordan adopts violence as a legitimate method of self-defense and retaliation. The argument is conducted in the final, title essay of Civil Wars, in a 1981 interview with Sharon Bray, and in poems such as “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.” The continuity and change in Jordan’s work as a whole can be briefly suggested by juxtaposing Who Look at Me (1969) with this later poem (1976), which begins with a revised version of the eye con159

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June Jordan

tact exchanged between black and white:

to Meridian’s at the end of the novel by Alice Walk¬ er). In the next poem, identifying with the African

I will no longer lightly walk behind a one of you who fear me: Be afraid. I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore and this is dedicated in particular to those who hear my footsteps or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery cart then turn around see me

liberation fighter, Jordan yokes together nurturing and violence in the effort to symbolize a violence that does not destroy the capacity for love but in¬ stead makes it possible: She straps the baby to her back and she carries her rifle like she means means to kill

and hurry on away from this impressive terror I must be: I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon surrounded by my comrades singing terrible revenge in merciless accelerating rhythms

for the love for the life of us all The tension between love and violence is played out in the volume as a whole because the

The role of song has shifted from “to start a song” in

repeated assertion “I must become a menace to my

Who Look at Me to the more aggressively t hreatening

enemies” is balanced by the open approach to

“singing/terrible revenge” (a poetic stance similar

“strangers” in the poem, originally the last poem in

“A very extraordinary record of a truly articulate living Black voice.” —Buckminster Fuller

CIVIL WARS JUNE JORDAN

From total immersion in the events of our time, June Jordan writes with fiery certainty. See the Miami riots of 1980, the oppression of children, police brutality, love and pas¬ sion from the perspective of commitment to change. Her words-Scisive, honest, compassionate—will touch you deeply as they challenge your assumptions. "A major and indispensable reading experience. In this book we see at work the committed, passionate, revolution¬ ary creative mind that will, when embodied in the collective consciousness of us all, help deliver us from the deceptions if not the violence of American life." —Alice Walker “These essays prod us to think of the politics of our time in a different way, not as the cool intellectual calculation of complex chains of means and ends, but as intensely felt and outraged experience. This is the deep and unyielding dimension of politics, and June Jordan's moving essays force us to slime it” —Frances Fox Piven

BEACON PRESS

BOSTON

ISBN 0-8970-3202-8

Dust jacket for Jordan’s 1981 collection of essays, letters, and speeches -a book which Tom Cade B ambara compared toW.E.B.DuBois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940)

160

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June Jordan

New Days, whose first sentence gives Things that I Do in the Dark its name. The “things” are poems: These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love. I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are whoever I may become.

The vision of an inclusive human love thus remains. The exploration of violence continues as the central, gripping issue in Passion: New Poems, 19771980, which contains poems on police violence and rape. “Poem about My Rights” gathers up the sepa¬ rate strands of other poems in the volume to pre¬ sent a comprehensive statement of “self-determina¬ tion”:

whether it’s about walking out at night or whether it’s about the love that I feel or whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or the sanctity of my national boundaries or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity of each and every desire that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic and indisputably single and singular heart June Jordan (photograph by Layle Silbert)

Deveaux’s article includes two quotations from Jor¬ dan that can serve as useful glosses on the psycho¬ logical process this poem traces: “If somebody is trying to hurt you, to oppress you, then you should be angry, and you should put that anger where it belongs—outside yourself” and, “I had been raped . . . and I was trying to treat with the experience in a lot of different ways, once the shock subsided. I wrote ‘Poem about My Rights’ several months later. I tried to show as clearly as I could that the differ¬ ence between South Africa and rape and my mother trying to change my face and my father wanting me to be a boy was not an important differ¬ ence to me. It all violates self-determination. I was in such a rage writing that poem. When it was all over, I read it to a friend of mine, but I wasn’t able to finish it. I just broke down and cried. I would say that was a watershed poem for me, emotionally and psychologically.” Part of the poem’s value is its pre¬ cipitating this conjunction of fury and crying. Civil Wars has been cited throughout this en¬ try in order to illustrate, in a concrete, practical way,

its crucial importance. Toni Cade Bambara empha¬ sizes the significance of Jordan’s achievement by comparing it with W. E. B. DuBois’s Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. As well as providing significant autobiographical information Civil Wars makes a valuable contribu¬ tion to both feminist literary criticism and feminist social criticism, especially in chapter 10, “Notes To¬ ward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred” — a comparison of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston; chapter 14, “Declaration of an Indepen¬ dence I Would Just as Soon Not Have”—a consid¬ eration of the women’s movement from a black perspective (originally published in Ms.)', chapter 17, “Where Is the Love?”—an address presented at a seminar on “Feminism and the Black Woman Writer”; chapter 18, “Against the Wall” — a state¬ ment about rape; and chapter 20, “Black History as Myth” — a critique of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michelle Wallace. Jordan develops 161

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June Jordan

emergence that culminated in the two acts of con¬ solidation represented by Things that I Do in the Dark and Civil Wars. At age forty-eight, June Jordan continues to work in all modes: poetry (Passion); novel (a work in progress, “On Time”); essays (for example, “Many Rivers to Cross,” a paper on women and work presented at Barnard College on 11 December 1981); children’s literature (Kimako’s Story). In addition, she has turned to drama, having written In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth (produced in 1979) and For the Arrow that Flies by Day (produced in 1981). Hers is a promising future whose unfolding we shall be privileged to witness.

an invigorating feminist voice that is complex and critical. Notable, for example, are her unwillingness to make any sexual orientation the basis for a phi¬ losophy and her refusal to exclude men from her life and her work. Kimako’s Story (1981), a children’s book dedi¬ cated to Alice Walker’s daughter, focuses on a black girl whose mother is a single parent and works. The story involves a realistic awareness of danger and the need for protection (provided by a dog) yet simultaneously affirms the need to venture out to explore the urban environment. Kimako’s absorp¬ tion in “poetry puzzles” recalls the connection be¬ tween children and poetry in The Voice of the Children and alludes to Jordan’s own commitment to poetry as a child. In the short time from the publication of her first book in 1969 Jordan has produced a substan¬ tial, rich, vibrant body of work. Though it is prema¬ ture to delineate stages in her artistic development, it is possible to speak with confidence about the completion of a first phase in which she emerged and established herself as a significant voice, an

References: Toni Cade Bambara, “Chosen Weapons,” review of Civil Wars, Ms., 10 (April 1981): 40-42; Alexis Deveaux, “Creating Soul Food: June Jor¬ dan,” Essence, 11 (April 1981): 82, 138-150; Sara Miles, “This Wheel’s On Fire,” in Woman Poet: The East, edited by Elaine Dallman and others (Reno: Women-in-Literature, 1982), pp. 8789.

Adrienne Kennedy (13 September 1931-

)

Margaret B. Wilkerson University of California, Berkeley

perimental Theatre Club, October 1969; The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, London, Nation¬ al Theatre Workshop, December 1967; Albany, N.Y., Arena Summer Theatre, Au¬ gust 1969; A Lesson in A Dead Language, London, Royal Court Theatre, 28 April 1968; New York, Theatre Genesis, 1970; Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder, London, Royal Court Theatre, 1968; New York, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, 1970; A Beast Story, New York, Public Theatre, 12 January 1969; Boats, Los Angeles, The Forum, 1969; An Evening with Dead Essex, New York, American Place Theatre Workshop, 1973; A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, New York, Public Theatre Workshop, 1976;

BOOKS: Cities in Bezique (New York: Samuel French, 1969) — includes The Owl Answers and A Beast Story, Funnyhouse of A Negro (New York: Samuel French, 1969); The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, written by Ken¬ nedy with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti, adapted from Lennon’s books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Funnyhouse of A Negro, New York, Circle-in-the-Square Theatre, 1962; The Owl Answers, Westport, Conn., White Barn Theatre, 1963; New York, Public Theatre, 12 January 1969; A Rat’s Mass, Boston, Mass., Theatre Company of Boston, April 1966; New York, La Mama Ex¬

162

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Adrienne Kennedy ferent going but even their symbolism is straight¬ forward stuff—Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry,” observed New York Times critic Clive Barnes in a 1969 review. Kennedy’s plays have been produced in major the¬ aters in the United States and Europe, including the Royal Court Theatre and the National Theatre in London, the Petit Odeon in Paris, the Yale Reper¬ tory, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, and Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York. Several of her scripts have been translated into French, Danish, German, and Portuguese and broadcast by Radio Denmark and the BBC. Kennedy’s audience amounts to a cult following and includes many of the leading theater artists in the world. Her plotless, richly symbolic plays are evocative and appeal to a racially diverse audience. Employing figures from the mythical and historical past as well as images from her dreams and memory, she brings unusual insights to the human and, particularly, the Amer¬ ican experience. During her career, she has re¬ ceived numerous fellowships and has taught in some of the major colleges and universities in the country. Of the fifteen plays that she has authored, most have been produced professionally and pub¬ lished. When growing up in a comfortable, middleclass community of Cleveland, Ohio, Adrienne Kennedy gave little indication of the intense, violent images which would later characterize her plays. One of two children and the only daughter of Cor¬ nell Wallace Hawkins and Etta Haugabook Haw¬ kins, she was born Adrienne Lita on 13 September 1931 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, four years later. She was an imaginative and gifted child who learned to read at the age of three. Adrienne grew up in an inte¬ grated neighborhood rich with the ethnic cultures of Italians, blacks, Jews, Poles, and others. She en¬ joyed activities such as the social clubs and Latin clubs that were characteristic of middle-class fami¬ lies of the time. Both parents had graduated from historically black colleges in Atlanta. Her father, an alumnus of Morehouse College, was executive secretary of the YMCA and a prominent community leader. Her mother was a teacher and a graduate of Spelman College. Like other parents, they had high expecta¬ tions for their daughter and urged Adrienne to be competitive and to aspire to professional work. The supportive atmosphere gave Adrienne confidence in herself and nurtured her belief that people of diverse cultural backgrounds could live together harmoniously. An avid reader, she encountered the

Adrienne Kennedy (photograph by Jim Goodman, courtesy of Beth Turner and Black Masks)

A Lancashire Lad, Albany, N.Y., Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Performing Center, May 1980; Orestes and Electra, New York, Juilliard School of Music, 1980; Black Childrens Day, Providence, R.I., Brown Uni¬ versity, November 1980. OTHER: A Rat’s Mass, in New Black Playwrights, edited by William Couch (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968); A Lesson in A Dead Language, in Collision Course, edited by Edward Parone (New York: Ran¬ dom House, 1968); Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder, in Spontaneous Combustion, edited by Rochelle Owens (New York: Winter House, 1972); A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, in Word¬ play 3 (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984). Adrienne Kennedy is one of the few accom¬ plished black playwrights who employs surrealism in her drama. Funnyhouse of A Negro (pr oduced in 1962), her first produced work, earned an Obie Award in 1964 and established hers as a unique voice in the avant-garde theater of the 1960s. “While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism — LeRoi Jones and Ed Bullins at times have something dif¬ 163

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Adrienne Kennedy

rich with the stuff of cultural as well as personal conflict. The individual’s struggle with self and in¬ ternalized social and cultural forces is the focal point of most of her plays. Writing from the inside out, as it were, Kennedy’s works are autobiographi¬ cal and surrealistic and project onto the stage an interior reality. She uses her family and personal experiences as metaphor rather than literal exam¬ ples. The name of a person in her family, for exam¬ ple, may be assigned to a character who is in fact a composite of historical and mythical as well as living figures. The shocking nature of her images emanates from her insistence on honestly portraying material from the subconscious: “Your intellect is always working against you to censor. . . . One must always fight against that imitation of oneself.” Thus, her plays are controversial and intense. She will create a character like Sarah in Funnyhouse of A Negro in whose confused mind Patrice Lumumba, a hero of African liberation movements, becomes a raping father and husband. Kennedy’s characters reveal the disjunction between the public and private selves as well as the terrifying world of the subcon¬ scious. The multiple levels of consciousness make her plays both personally and politically significant. A poet of the theater, Kennedy’s language is imagistic, rhythmic, and condensed (her longest dramatic work has a forty-five-minute playing time). Metaphor, image, and symbol are the major elements in her work.The repetition and seeming irrationality of the dream world is characteristic of her dialogue. Plot, event, and character in the tradi¬ tional sense are absent from her plays. A character may represent the several selves of the central fig¬ ure or may have several names to designate the various parts of his or her personality. In recent years, Kennedy has been commis¬ sioned to write plays using assigned subject matter. Despite the arrangement, she still explores the material in terms of her own relationship to it and ferrets out the personal and inner conflict embed¬ ded in characters to be portrayed. Her plays con¬ tinue to offer a unique, intense, theatrical experi¬ ence. In 1960-1961, Kennedy took an extended trip through Europe and Africa; it was a turning point in her life. Because her husband was away much of the time conducting a research project, and her son was very young, Kennedy had a lot of time to reflect and to write. For several years she had tried to capture in dramatic form the theme closest to her heart: the individual at war with inner forces and struggling with conflicting sides of personality. She

classics early and devoured new books in her local library as quickly as they arrived on the shelf. Revel¬ ing in the many stories that she read and in her own active imagination, she began writing fiction at an early age. The culturally diverse and receptive com¬ munity of Cleveland did not prepare her for the hostile atmosphere of Ohio State University, where she matriculated. There she found overt racism and discrimination more characteristic of Southern cities of the 1950s. Many of the restaurants were segregated, and the white students on campus did not socialize or interact in any fashion with black students. This experience made an indelible mark on her sensibility and engendered an anger and hatred for prejudice and racism which would later find compelling expression in her plays. Adrienne graduated from Ohio State Uni¬ versity with a degree in education and, two weeks later, married Joseph C. Kennedy on 15 May 1953. In six months she found herself pregnant and back home with her parents, waiting for her husband to return from Korea, where he had been sent by the U.S. Army. Lonely and with time on her hands, she turned to creative pursuits and made her initial attempts at play writing: a piece based on Elmer Rice’s Street Scene; and “Pale Blue Flowers,” based on Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. When her husband returned from Korea, he decided to continue his graduate studies at Colum¬ bia Teachers’ College, and he moved Adrienne and their son, Joseph C., Jr., into Columbia University’s married-student apartments. Adrienne decided to develop her writing skills and studied creative writ¬ ing at Columbia University from 1954 to 1956, American Theatre Wing in 1958, and later at the Circle-in-the-Square School in 1962. Her best-known and longest dramatic play, Funnyhouse of A Negro, was begun in 1961 while she was traveling in Africa. This work, which she later submitted to Edward Albee’s workshop at Circle-inthe-Square, was the first of her plays to be produced professionally. It established her reputation as a highly imaginative playwright who adeptly used poetic language and surrealistic fantasy to express aspects of the black and American experience. Adrienne Kennedy’s plays are an expression of her “self.” A sensitive woman, she views writing as “an outlet for inner, psychological confusion and questions stemming from childhood” and a creative way to figure out “the ‘why’ of things.” Because of her experiences as a black woman, her knowledge of the classics, and her extensive travels in Europe and Africa, the material lodged in her memory is

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Adrienne Kennedy Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of the Republic of the Congo, was murdered. She began writing Funnyhouse of A Negro in West Africa and completed it in Rome, while car¬ rying her second son, Adam. In this play she found her own, potent voice. The title derives from an amusement park in Cleveland which featured a “funnyhouse” with two huge white figures perched on either side, bobbing back and forth and laughing hysterically at the confused patrons within. The play, set in a nightmare world, features Sarah, a sensitive young Negro woman, who is tormented by personifications of her various selves: a balding Queen Victoria and Duchess of Hapsburg, mother figures dressed in cheap satin, who fear the return of the black father/husband; Patrice Lumumba/ father/husband who surrounds himself with white friends in order to forget his calling to save his people; an impotent Jesus Christ who is haunted by his inability to escape his blackness. Unable to bear the ambiguities and burdens of being black, Sarah commits suicide at the end of the play. Her landlady and Raymond, her Jewish boyfriend, who parallel the laughing figures of the Cleveland funnyhouse, deliver the eulogy: “The poor bitch has hung herself. . . . She was a funny little liar.” While truth is utterly subjective in this play, the violence and power of the images lend a stark reality to the de¬ structive confusion in Sarah’s mind. The contrapuntal, repetitious dialogue of the characters combine with the many symbols — white doves, black ravens, falling hair—to reinforce Sarah’s struggle with identity, love, and God. There is no plot in the traditional sense. As one character explains in the first pages of the text:

Funnyhouse of A Negro A PLAY IN ONE ACT

By Adrienne Kennedy

Samuel French, Inc. PRICE, 75 CENTS

Front cover for Kennedy’s Obie Award-winning play, which established her as a potent voice in the black theater

had used the works of favorite playwrights, Tennes¬ see Williams and Garcia Lorca as models, but the results had lacked power and the confidence of her own style. However, new images from the strange, yet familiar places that she visited crowded into her consciousness and combined with memories from her earlier life to create the material for Funnyhouse of A Negro and several subsequent plays. She saw, for example, the mammoth statue of Queen Victo¬ ria in front of Buckingham Palace in London, and later used it prominently in this play. She remem¬ bered Ghana as a place of immense beauty with white horses running on the beach and Ethiopian princesses drinking tea on the terrace of the Ambassador Hotel. Long drives through the bush revealed a verdant countryside and brilliant colors of the people’s dress. The ambiguities of the twen¬ tieth-century world were present, as she noted that the Ghanaians were beautifully dressed in cloth imported from Holland bearing the face of their premier, Kwame Nkrumah. While she was there,

There is no theme. No statements, I might borrow a statement, struggle to fabricate a theme, borrow one from my contemporaries, renew one from the master, hawkishly scan other stories searching for statements, con¬ sider the theme then deceive myself that I held such a statement within me, refusing to accept the fact that a statement has to come from an ordered force. I might try to join horizontal elements such as dots on a hori¬ zontal line, or create a centrifugal force, or create causes and effects so that they would equal a quantity but it would be a lie. For the statement is the characters and the characters are myself.

Despite this seeming disclaimer, Kennedy creates a highly coherent piece. Kennedy drew on close relatives and family

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Adrienne Kennedy

doubt that in her intensity she reflects what it is to be a sensitive Negro.” The reviewer in the Village Voice, Michael Smith, admitted that he did not know how to evaluate the play as art or craft, “but as an obses¬ sive, cruelly honest statement of self it is extraordi¬ nary and devastating. . . . The play has its existence on a level to which criticism is nearly irrelevant.” Funnyhouse of A Negro was the turning point in Kennedy’s writing, the buildup of an idea she had been working on for more than five years. “Finally that idea just suddenly exploded,” she explains. “The subsequent plays were ideas that I had been trying to work on in my twenties, but then they just suddenly came at the same time. ...” Six addition¬ al plays were completed in less than one year from the time this first work was produced. In Funnyhouse of A Negro, she found the technique that she would employ for the rest of her dramatic works. Hailed as a new and distinctive voice, an im¬ pressive departure from the realistic style of profes¬ sional theater, Kennedy began a rich period of writ¬ ing and production work which lasted for the next several years; between 1963 and 1969, seven of her plays were professionally produced. Kennedy’s next play, The Owl Answers, is her favorite. First produced in 1963 at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut, it captured many elements that she had been trying to achieve for fifteen years. In this play, she reconciled the theatrical problem of multiple selves by creating composite characters who change slowly back and forth into and out of themselves, “leaving some garment from their previous selves upon them al¬ ways” to remind the audience of the complete na¬ ture of the character. The central figure is “SHE who is CLARA PASSMORE who is the VIRGIN MARY who is the BASTARD who is the OWL.” An older version of Sarah from Funnyhouse of A Negro, SHE, too, seeks her identity. Unlike Sarah, SHE believes that she can only find herself by finding her real father. The illegitimate child of a black cook and the wealthiest white man in town, SHE is adopted by the Reverend Passmore, a black Baptist minister, and his frigid wife. CLARA is told that she comes from the owls and is forbidden to attend her father’s funeral when he dies some years later. Her odyssey is set in the subway in England, the land of her white father. In this bastion of white culture, she encounters her mythical forebears: William Shakespeare, William the Conqueror, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Anne Boleyn. Through the use of historical figures and powerful animal symbols, Clara’s desperate attempts to resolve her love/hate for black and white and to cope with the tug and

stories to use as metaphors for particular forces at work on Sarah. Thus while Sarah’s conflict is in¬ tensely personal and emanates from Kennedy’s own explorations of her consciousness, it is also metaphorical and symptomatic of the ambiguous state of a people who were created out of the clash of African and European cultures. Kennedy decided to submit the manuscript to Edward Albee, after she read an article describing him as the most brilliant young playwright in Amer¬ ica and saw an announcement of his Circle-in-theSquare play-writing course. Studying with Albee was a major breakthrough for Kennedy, who was now thirty-one years old and had yet to see her work produced or published. Funnyhouse of A Negro was presented in the workshop with some of the best actors of the time: Diana Sands, Andre Gregory, Yaphet Kotto, and others. The play proved to be very controversial. It was 1962 and not popular among liberals to dwell on the negative aspects of blackness. While many in the workshop disliked the play, the actor and director, Michael Kahn (later head of Stratford), argued strongly for its value. Albee loved the language, rhythms, and mono¬ logues, and praised the play highly. It was difficult enough for Kennedy to see her first play, an intense revelation of her personal sensibilities, onstage; being the only black playwright in the group, she was already self-conscious. When a discouraged Adrienne spoke of leaving the workshop, Albee gently chastised her: “A playwright is someone who lets his guts out on stage and that’s what you’ve done in this play.” His candor and belief encouraged her to continue writing. The next week the play was taken to Actors Studio where it again stirred up a great deal of controversy. Nevertheless, Albee optioned the play and, in 1964, two years later, opened the show at the East End Theatre in New York’s off-Broadway season. The play was very successful and became the sea¬ son’s cult play for theatrical circles until LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman opened. It ran for forty-six per¬ formances and won a 1964 Obie for distinguished plays along with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Jack Richardson’s The Prodigal, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, and Rosalyn Drexler’s Home Movies. Criti¬ cal response to the drama was very favorable. How¬ ard Taubman of the New York Times noted that Kennedy explored “relatively unknown territory” and dug “unsparingly into Sarah’s aching psyche — and by extension into the tortured mind of a Negro who cannot bear the burden of being a Negro and who is too proud to accept the patronage of the white world.” He added further that “one cannot

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pull of purity and carnality are powerfully pre¬ sented. As in Kennedy’s first play, the “real” story is never certain; the power of the text lies in its stage metaphor, its lasting visual impressions and poetic language. CLARA is a composite of Adrienne, her mother, and her aunt, a beautiful and brilliant woman who felt that she did not belong anywhere. Always fascinated by major figures who influenced their times, Kennedy represented different per¬ spectives through her historical characters. In 1969, Joseph Papp produced The Oiul Answers along with A Beast Story under the title Cities in Bezique. It ran for sixty-seven performances at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Papp told Kennedy it was the best-written play he had pro¬ duced. The New York Times critics, Walter Kerr and Clive Barnes, disagreed on the merit of the scripts and the production. Kerr argued that the plays did not work “because we are always left just outside them, counting fragments that never quite fuse.” He conceded that “This is a kind of theater . . . that by simply immersing ourselves in it without asking rational questions of it or try ing to force it into some other shape, we might find ourselves clothed by the rain of images,” but concluded that “nothing is drawn to a center, distilled, condensed to leave a residue . . . and we finally go away feeling rather as though we’d spent our evening studying the sound track of a film.” Despite his criticism, he did not dismiss Kennedy’s writing talents: “There is a spare, unsentimental intensity about her that promises to drive a dagger home some day.” Clive Barnes was more receptive to the form, noting that the details of plot did not matter, but that the torment of the “intellectual rape” suffered by Clara Passmore, whether real or imagined, is what is most compel¬ ling about the play. He adds that “the language is not all good — but it is certainly worth listening to.” The Owl Answers shared the bill with A Beast Story, a play which is generally described as more elaborate, hallucinatory, and obscure than the for¬ mer work. Steve Tennen in Show Business wrote that it drew analogies between “inhuman beings and man’s bestial tendencies.” The play depicts a young bride, a virgin, who awakens to self-realization after her wedding night. She murders her child, or is it her lover, or her husband who raped her on her wedding night, or her father? Again the setting and the text are dreamlike; the images move back and forth repetitively, described by Walter Kerr “as in a dream that won’t move forward because the dream¬ er is about to wake up.” According to Clive Barnes, sexual repression was the theme, “offered in theat¬ rical terms of the most compelling forcefulness.”

Cities In Bezique TWO ONE-ACT PLAYS THE OWE ANSWERS A BEAST STORY

By Adrienne Kennedy

Samuel French, Inc. PRICE. SISO

Front cover for two plays that showcase Kennedy’s surrealistic techniques of character development

Most critics focused on the major work of that eve¬ ning, The Owl Answers. Still benefiting from the success of her first play, Kennedy adapted a short play, The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (produced in 1967), from two books of poems and nonsense stories by John Len¬ non of Beatles fame, In His Own Write and A Span¬ iard in the Works. The play was given a full produc¬ tion in London at Sir Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre on a triple bill with John Arden’s and Margaretta d’Arcy’s Harold Muggins Is A Martyr and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound in 1968. Martin Esslin dubbed the triple bill “Two Trifles and a Failure,” with Kennedy’s play as one of the trifles. Giving Lennon and coauthor Victor Spinetti most of the credit and claiming that Kennedy’s adaptation had been “extensively revised,” Esslin noted that “It is not strictly speaking a play, but rather an anthology” of items from Lennon’s books. Although he found it ingenious and skillful, ulti¬ mately he found it less than satisfying.

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Adrienne Kennedy

viewers again admitted that they did not fully com¬ prehend the play. Barnes felt that it was not “a play of clarity. It has a heart where its mind ought to be—and that heart, while pumping, is too dim with blood to be articulate.” This work, while no less complicated than her earlier plays, uses a combina¬ tion of the single-dimension character of Funnyhouse of A Negro and the multiple characters found in The Owl Answers. In the year of this production, Kennedy re¬ ceived her first fellowship, beginning a period of major grants which would sustain her for several years. She received Rockefeller Fellowships in 1969, 1973, and 1976, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, a National Endowment grant in 1973, and the Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1974. By this time she had divorced her husband, although their relationship remained cordial through the years. In retrospect, she credits his moral and financial sup¬ port during her formative years as the critical factor which allowed her the time and space to develop as a writer. Kennedy has continued to write and to have her plays produced, though not with the frequency of that early period. Most noteworthy are Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder, first pro¬ duced in the West End of London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1968, and Orestes and Electra, an adaptation commissioned in 1980 by the Juilliard Conservatory of Music. In 1980 she branched out into children’s theater with a very successful musi¬ cal, A Lancashire Lad, a fictionalized version of Charles Chaplin’s childhood. Commissioned by the Empire State Youth Theatre Institute, the play has

Comparing the language to that of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, he found The Lennon Play bewildering rather than illuminating. It portrays a working-class provincial boy, born during the Second World War, subsequently raised in the most orthodox of British settings, who rejects his up¬ bringing as absurd and destructive. Speaking of the London production in the New York Times, Irving Wardle stated that the play was workable onstage as a boy’s struggle between his fantasies and his en¬ vironment. However, he concluded that “Mr. Len¬ non’s text is no rich harvesting of childhood memories: he scores occasional derisive points and barbed puns, but mostly he deals out mindless wordplay of a kind that makes little contact and no lasting impression.” Wardle, too, credits Lennon with major authorship or influence over the final version. Despite the question of authorship sur¬ rounding the produced text, clearly Lennon’s per¬ sonal struggle with the values and memories of his childhood is a typical Kennedy subject. A Rat’s Mass, produced off-Broadway in 1969 at the La Mama Experimental Theatre, was based on a dream Kennedy had while on a train from Paris to Rome. In the dream she was pursued by red, bloodied rats. She awoke from this powerful dream when the train stopped in the Alps and re¬ members the experience as a crucial night in her life. She was haunted by that image for years before she successfully captured it in a play. In a 1977 interview, Kennedy explained how the image found its place in her creative work: Then I try to take these images and try to find what the sources for them are. All this is unconscious, all this takes a long time. I’m not in that much control of it. In the case of A Rat’s Mass, there was a connection to my brother. At that time my brother was in an automobile accident, from which he subse¬ quently died. This evoked an almost unreal memory of when we were children we used to play in the attic and there used to be a closet in the floor of the attic. I didn’t like to go up there by myself because I would imagine that there would be something in that closet.

been described as a beautiful work of great poetry and feeling. While artist in residence at Brown Uni¬ versity, Kennedy was also commissioned to write a children’s play for Rites and Reason, the universi¬ ty’s Afro-American theater program. The play was loosely based on the experiences of blacks in Rhode Island and was presented during the reopening of the Walker-Smith House, a historical ruin in Rhode Island. Over the past several years, she has also taught creative writing as a visiting faculty member at Yale University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Cali¬ fornia at Davis. Drawing from her own working style, she uses various techniques to free young writers from their intellectual constraints in an effort to help them tap their emotional and imagi¬ native resources. This exposure to college students has brought her work to the attention of a new generation. In 1981, for example, Antioch College

The action of the play is very simply Brother and Sister Rat equating their love for each other with their former adoration for Rosemary—the white and beautiful “descendant of the Pope and Julius Caesar and the Virgin Mary.” Replete with Catholic symbols, it carries overtones of a parodied mass. Blood is ever present as an ambivalent symbol of religious sacrament and guilt. The New York re¬

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Adrienne Kennedy

in Ohio produced Funnyhouse of A Negro and The Owl Answers on a double bill. Kennedy’s son, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., a graduate of Antioch in theater and music, wrote the musical score. Now, at the age of fifty-three, Kennedy has completed a retrospective, “Recollections of Writ¬ ers and Theater People,” a fascinating collection of vignettes of famous people whom she has met. She focuses on that special moment in time when their paths crossed. It is as yet unpublished. Excerpts from this manuscript appeared in City Arts, a San Francisco journal. Kennedy is also collaborating with Dr. Margaret B. Wilkerson of the University of California at Berkeley on her biography. In recent years, Kennedy’s plays have been included in numerous anthologies and have drawn the attention of traditional literary critics as well as the new school of feminist critics. Feminist critic Rosemary Curb focuses on the imprisonment, powerlessness, sensuality, and death experienced by Kennedy’s female characters. All feel suffocated and imprisoned both by their families and their culture. Robert Tener notes that Kennedy makes a “bitter and satirical comment on the American Black female trapped by the conflict of cultures and sexual roles in twentieth-century America.” While the poetic language and symbolism lend themselves to literary criticism, the visual and auditory dimen¬ sion provided by a stage production is critical to a full appreciation of her plays. Reviewers have had difficulty rendering full judgment on her work because it defies traditional criticism. Working outside the familiar realistic style, she ventures into uncharted territory of the theater as well as the mind. Thus her work may be intensely loved or ignored, depending on the sensi¬ bilities of the viewer. As a black woman writing out

of her interior reality, she unearths repressed fears, anger, and desires which lie hidden temporarily beneath the pretenses of a racially harmonious soci¬ ety. That she nevertheless has achieved fame in American theater with such disturbing work is testi¬ mony to her mastery of the craft. Kennedy is cur¬ rently pursuing some film-writing possibilities which may bring her once again to the forefront of drama. Despite her many accomplishments, she counts her main achievement in life her two sons, Adam and Joseph, Jr.

Interviews: “A Growth of Images,” Drama Review, 21 (Decem¬ ber 1977): 41-48; Adrienne Kennedy and Margaret B. Wilkerson, “Adrienne Kennedy: Reflections,” City Arts Monthly (February 1982): 39.

References: Kimberly W. Benston, “Cities in Bezique: Adrienne Kennedy’s Expressionistic Vision,” CLA Jour¬ nal, 20 (December 1976): 235-244; Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists: 1960-1980 (New York: Grove, 1982), pp. 95, 108-115; Paul Carter Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972), pp. 216-220; Foften Mitchell, Black Drama (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), pp. 198-199, 216; Clinton Oliver and Stephanie Sills, Contemporary Black Drama (New York: Scribners, 1971), pp. 189-205; Robert F. Tener, “Theatre of Identity: Adrienne Kennedy’s Portrait of the Black Woman,” Studies in Black Literature, 6 (Summer 1975): 1-5.

169

Woodie King, Jr. (27 July 1937-

)

Stephen M. Vallillo

BOOK: Black Theatre Present Condition (New York: National Black Theatre Touring Circuit, 1981). PLAY PRODUCTION: The Weary Blues, adapted from the book by Langston Hughes, New York, Lincoln Center Library, 31 October 1966. SCREENPLAYS: The Long Night, Woodie King Associates, 1976; The Black Theatre Movement: “A Raisin in the Sun” to the Present, National Black Theatre Touring Circuit, 1978; The Torture of Mothers, Woodie King Associates, 1980; Death, of a Prophet, NBT'C, 1982. TELEVISION: Episode for Sanford and Son, NBC, 1974; Episode for Hot l Baltimore, ABC, 1975. OTHER: “Beautiful Light and Black Our Dreams,” in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 438-447; Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, and Ron Milner, A Black Quartet, edited by King (New York: New American Library, 1970); Black Drama Anthology, edited by King and Milner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Black Poets and Prophets: The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revolution, edited by King and Earl Anthony (New York: New American Library, 1972); “The Game,” in Black Short Story Anthology, edited by King (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) , pp. 301-310; Black Spirits: New Black Poets in America, edited by King (New York: Random House, 1972); “Listen to the Wind Blow,” in We Be Word Sorcerers, edited by Sonia Sanchez (New York: Bantam, 1973) ; The Forerunners: Black Poets in America, edited by

Woodie King, Jr. (photograph by Bert Andrews)

King (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1975). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: FICTION

“Ghetto,” Negro Digest, 11 (August 1962): 15-18; “Listen to the Wind Blow,” Negro Digest, 17 (June 1968): 90-98; “Border Line,” Black Creation, 3 (Winter 1972): 4-5; “Emancipation,” Black Scholar, 6 (June 1975): 8183. NONFICTION

“Ghetto Art and Energy,” Rockefeller Foundation

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Woodie King, Jr.

Quarterly, no. 3 (1968): 18-31; “The Politics of Black Arts,” Black American Litera¬ ture Forum, 17 (Spring 1983): 30.

appeared in magazines and journals, were pub¬ lished in his book Black Theatre Present Condition. He has also written several short stories, and in recent years he has been writing and producing screenplays. In the stories and films he explores contemporary urban life, often concentrating on the black family. However, King’s major contribu¬ tion to black literature is in his support for other black writers. In addition to his play productions, he has edited six anthologies of black writing, in¬ cluding volumes of drama, poetry, and short stories. Born in Mobile, Alabama, to Woodie and Ruby Johnson King, he moved to Detroit with his family when he was five. His mother supported them by doing housework, but when he was eleven or twelve, King himself was able to contribute by working as a model. He later described his career: “I was on the black church fans and on all the black calendars of the early ’50’s.” During his last year in high school, after he became interested in theater, he received a scholar¬ ship to the Will-O-Way School of the Theatre, from which he graduated in 1961. In addition to attend¬ ing classes, the students acted as apprentices, work¬ ing at the school’s stock theater. He learned by doing and participated in every phase of theater production. He also studied performance with the professionals who taught at Will-O-Way or who appeared at the theater, including George C. Scott, Vincent Price, Harold Clurman, and Guthrie McClintock. At the same time, King was reading everything he could about the theater and about black literature. No black writers had been taught in his high-school classes, and he started to discover what he was missing with the help of a teacher at Will-O-Way School who encouraged him. As he remembered it, “She moved me through the whole thing, got me to read the right books.” He attended Wayne State University for two years of postgraduate study in the department of theater. Although he had appeared in two universi¬ ty productions before he entered college, he had trouble being cast in the classics that the professors so often staged. Finally, King and a group of other black students founded their own theater, ConceptEast, in a Detroit bar. With King as director, Con¬ cept-East staged plays by both blacks and whites, including Ed Bullins, Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, King’s friend Ron Milner, and Reverend Malcolm Boyd, a white chaplain from Wayne State Universi¬ ty. One of Boyd’s plays, Study in Color, in which a black and a white use masks to change social roles,

Woodie King, Jr., has been called the renais¬ sance man of black theater. An essayist and shortstory writer, he has also acted in, directed, pro¬ duced, and written plays for the stage and screen. As a producer, he has presented the work of many important black playwrights and has been in¬ strumental in making black theater available to black audiences. In King’s essays and articles on black theater, perhaps his most important writings, he speaks of a black theater that addresses and embraces its com¬ munity and ignores the European and American traditions of the white commercial stage. He has written about black plays and authors, training for black actors, producing for the black theater, and the state of the black theater movement in general. In 1981 most of these pieces, which originally

Front cover for King’s 1981 collection of essays, which articulate his black theater aesthetic and experiences

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Woodie King, Jr.

In 1964 King went to New York with a touring production of Study in Color, which played at Union Theological Seminary and the American Place Theatre. He kept working at the American Place, and in 1965 he won ajohn Hay Whitney Fellowship to study directing with Lloyd Richards, director of the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun (and now head of the Yale Drama School), and theater administration under Wynn Handman, director of the American Place. King staged five plays there, including a workshop reading of Who’s Got His Own by Milner. In 1961 King met Langston Hughes, most of whose work he had read and greatly admired dur¬ ing the 1950s. Hughes had encouraged King, and in New York they became friends. Finding in Hughes’s writing many of the things he wanted to see in the theater, in particular the way Hughes used poetry and music, especially the blues, in 1966 King adapted Hughes’s book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926) for the stage, with Hughes’s sugges¬ tions and corrections. King’s stage version, which was presented at the Lincoln Center Library by Equity Library Theatre on 31 October 1966, was well received, and Hughes was pleased. The follow¬ ing year he suggested that King adapt his writings about his fictional character Jesse B. Semple and the result was King’s play Simple’s Blues. In 1965 King also became Cultural Arts Direc¬ tor of Mobilization for Youth, an antipoverty pro¬ gram, which gave him a chance to put his ideas on arts training for minorities into practice. As cultural arts director, he designed the arts-training pro¬ grams and hired professionals, including Rod Rod¬ gers for dance and Lonne Elder for playwriting, to teach the black and Puerto Rican children in the project. The program produced plays, dances, and films, and many of the students went on to profes¬ sional careers. By this time, King was becoming well-known for his theater work. His essays on black theater were printed in several publications, including Ne¬ gro Digest and the Drama Review. He constantly wrote about the need of black theater to serve the black community, to be located in Harlem and in other centers of the black population. Wanting plays by black writers, produced and directed by blacks, to be presented for a black audience, he was not interested in continuing the traditions that he saw in the white educational and commercial the¬ aters of the time, but wanted blacks to address their theater to their needs.

King’s 1956 picture from Cass Technical High School yearbook

was highly praised, and would eventually provide the way for King to reach New York. During his years with Concept-East, in addition to learning about management and production, he also began to formulate his ideas on black theater and its rela¬ tionship to the community. He later wrote that when, after several years, the company stopped trying to attract the middle class and began to deal with the people in the neighborhood, the theater came to life. Some of King’s first articles deal with the problems of black actors and the failure of educa¬ tional theater to train black performers. While he advises blacks to study at drama schools, where they can get experience performing, he tells them to start their own companies, since opportunities to perform at white theaters are few. Between 1960 and 1963 King also wrote dramatic criticism, which was published in the Detroit Tribune, and short stories. His first story, “Ghetto,” published in Negro Digest in August 1962, was soon followed by “Beautiful Light and Black Our Dreams” in June 1963. His stories usually center on contemporary urban life, depicting blacks in city ghettos, and they concentrate on characterization rather than action. Some of his characters are lively street people, who use idiom and slang to communicate. Other stories deal with the family or the failure of families to stay together.

In 1969, he produced A Black Quartet, four one-act plays by Ben Caldwell, Ron Milner, Ed Bul-

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Woodie King, Jr.

In 1969 King produced A Black Quartet, which included Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) by Amin Baraka. Anna Horosford and Leonard Jackson are shown in a scene from that play (photograph by Bert Andrews).

King continually tried to find new black writ¬ ers, and among the playwrights whose work he produced were Ron Milner, Ed Bullins, Owen Dod¬ son, Amiri Baraka, Feslie Lee, and Ntozake Shange. King coproduced Lee’s The First Breeze of Summer with the Negro Ensemble Company because he felt that company would give the best production of the play. First having seen Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf at a downtown bar, he decided to present it at the New Federal Theatre, and after its success there, Joseph Papp produced it, first at his Public Theatre and then on Broadway. King also made an arrangement with Papp, and several plays have moved from Henry Street under Papp’s aegis, in¬ cluding Ed Bullins’s The Taking of Miss Janie, Mil¬ ner’s What the Wine Sellers Buy, and David Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad.

lins, and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). In 1970 he founded his own theater. When the city took over Mobilization for Youth, the program was centered at the Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Low¬ er East Side. King took charge of the theater which had a long history, first as a Yiddish theater, and later as the Neighborhood Playhouse. He named it the New Federal Theatre, partly in honor of the W.P.A. Federal Theatre Project, which he felt was for all minorities. That was what he wanted the New Federal Theatre to be: in a varied ethnic community he started black, Hispan¬ ic, and Chinese theater workshops. To meet the needs of the community, the theater gave free per¬ formances, and it encouraged its audience to move about, leave when bored, and arrive whenever it wanted. Only in the late 1970s did the New Federal Theatre start charging admission.

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Woodie King, Jr.

Films Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. In 1978 King wrote and directed another film, which shows his deep interest in and commit¬ ment to the black theater. The Black Theatre Move¬ ment: “A Raisin in the Sun” to the Present traces the rise of black theater through interviews with actors, directors, writers, and producers, and film footage of past and current black-theater productions. Re¬ leased in 1978, the film was shown on public televi¬ sion in 1979. The Torture of Mothers (1980), also a factual film, dramatizes a 1964 Harlem incident that ballooned from children’s mischief to the im¬ prisonment of six innocent youths. King based the film on tape recordings of the children’s mothers and filmed it in a documentary style. King has also produced black plays commer¬ cially. He presented J. E. Franklin’s Black Girl (1971) and Prodigal Sister (1974) and Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag (1976) at Greenwich Village’s Theatre DeLys and in 1980, King was the executive producer of Reggae, a Broadway musical at the Biltmore Theatre. In 1980, King started the National Black Theatre Touring Circuit. With the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and others, the group presented plays in Washington, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Ntozake Shange’s/loogic Woogie Landscapes was the first production. Although Woodie King, Jr., has written plays and stories, his real importance to black literature is bis support for black theater. Through his essays and his productions, he has tried to bring about a vital theater for black audiences. He has helped train black actors and directors who can stage the work of black playwrights. Without Woodie King’s efforts on both the commercial and nonprofit stage, the black theater in America would be poorer.

Founder of the New Federal Theatre, King poses with production coordinator Mayme Mitchum (photograph by Bert Andrews).

King’s support of black writers is also evident in the drama, poetry, and fiction anthologies he edited in the early 1970s. As he wrote in the dedica¬ tion of Black Short Story Anthology (1972), he wanted to do what he could to change the misconception that black writers did not exist. He felt the exclusion of stories by blacks from literary magazines and anthologies was responsible for the literary estab¬ lishment thinking that there were no black writers. During the 1970s, King became interested in another medium: film. He had produced short films with Mobilization for Youth, and in 1970 pro¬ duced a documentary on Harlem’s Last Poets, Right On. In 1975 he wrote, produced, and directed The Long Night, based on Julian Mayfield’s novel about an adolescent boy in Harlem (played by King’s son W. Geoffrey King), whose father has disappeared. Throughout one night, the boy tries to recover $27 which he owes to his mother and which has been stolen from him. At the same time, in flashbacks, he recalls the events that led to his father’s departure. The film was shown at the New Directors/New

References: Peter Bailey, “Woodie King, Jr.: Renaissance Man of Black Theatre,” Black World, 26 (April 1975): 4-10; Eleanor Blau, “Something for Everyone at Henry Street,” New York Times, 16 October 1981, III: 19; Mel Cussow, “Striking Sparks on Henry Street,” New York Times, 31 October 1976, III: 3, 15; Jerry Tallmer, “Daily Closeup: Drama on Henry Street,” New York Post, 24 April 1972.

174

William Wellington Mackey (28 May 1937-

)

Linda E. Scott

BOOK: Behold: Cometh the Vanderkellans! (Denver: Azazel Books, 1966). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Behold: Cometh the Vanderkellans!, Denver, Colo., Eden Workshop, 12 November 1965; New York, Theatre DeLys, 31 March 1971; A Requiem for Brother X, Chicago, Chicago Hull House Parkway Theatre, 1968; New York, Players Workshop, 5 January 1973; Billy Noname, New York, Truck and Warehouse Theatre, 2 March 1970; Family Meeting, New York, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, 28 January 1972; Saga (musical), Miami, Cultural Arts Center of the Model Cities Program, 1976; Love Me, Love Me Daddy, or I Swear I’m Gonna Kill You, New York, American Folk Theatre, 1982. OTHER: Family Meeting, in New Black Playwrights, edited by William Couch, Jr. (New York: Avon, 1970), pp. 247-285; A Requiem for Brother X, in Black Drama Anthology, edited by Woodie King and Ron Milner (New York: New American Library, 1972), pp. 325347.

William Wellington Mackey

ational therapist at Colorado State Hospital while completing his first play. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Playwright’s Grant (1972) to begin work on Love Me, Love Me Daddy, or I Swear I’m Gonna Kill You (produced in 1982). The themes which preoccupy Mackey are in¬ troduced in his earliest work, Behold: Cometh the Vanderkellans!, which is set against the historical backdrop of the early civil-rights protests. The play was originally performed in Denver, Colorado, in 1965. Published in 1966, it was produced again in New York City in March 1971. In this dramatiza¬ tion of the inner lives of the members of an upperclass black family, the characters savagely strip one another of their secure, cultured veneer. The Vanderkellan family is representative of the black bourgeoisie, having produced generations of col¬ lege presidents. As the youngest generation revolts against their elders’ values and aspirations, they illustrate a new racial perspective which will trans¬ form personal and political history.

William Wellington Mackey’s plays address the questions and debates raised by the black nationalism movements of the 1960s. Mackey fo¬ cuses his attacks on the black middle class and ex¬ plores the ways in which the various generations, sexes, and interests which make up a family unit respond to an increasingly radical and violent vision of American life. Information about Mackey’s life is not widely available. He was born in Miami, Florida, and graduated from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1958. Returning to Miami, he taught high school, but spent his summers working as a waiter and bellhop in the New York Catskill mountains. He earned a master’s degree in re¬ creational and drama therapy from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and later worked as a recre-

175

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William Wellington Mackey

one to do so consistently through actual depiction. In A Requiem for Brother X, Mackey begins to attack the black middle class in a manner more akin to his peers. Written in 1966, the play was first produced in 1968. The influence of the black lead¬ er’s life and death is evidenced in Mackey’s drama¬ tic concern for America’s black victims. In the intro¬ duction, he describes the work as, “a shout, a cry of mercy, a lamentation for understanding. It is a spit at the black middle class for turning their backs on the black masses still in bondage.” Thus Mackey asserts that his plays are meant to convey a distinct message. Thematically, A Requiem for Brother X marks a shift in Mackey’s emphasis. His subjects are not the spiritually vacuous black middle class, but the ghet¬ to residents left behind. These are the people his other characters strive to avoid and escape. While his middle-class characters are destined to destroy themselves, the poorer characters are trapped — and doomed — by external circumstances. As in his previous work, A Requiem for Brother X is centered on a family gathering and occurs in a

Family Meeting (produced in 1972) is a similar story in which familial interaction reveals a simul¬ taneous transformation of sociopolitical values and the breakdown of black middle-class families. This play is thematically and stylistically similar to Behold: Cometh the Vanderkellans!, relying less on plot than on expressionistic, surrealistic dialogue. Family Meeting incorporates a play within a play and in¬ cludes a cast of characters who are particularly dis¬ tanced from any accurate perception of reality. Us¬ ing extreme irony, Mackey’s young male protagon¬ ist tells his mother’s wealthy friends a violent story about a boy questioning traditional concepts. Im¬ ages of madness and death pervade his mono¬ logue— which he relates through his black self and white self. This dualistic characterization reveals a fundamental and terrifying personal confusion which intensifies the horrific vision of the debilitat¬ ing effects of forcing white values on black people. Critics such as Hoyt Fuller noted a distinction between Mackey and his contemporaries Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. Although each playwright attacks the black middle class, Mackey is the only

Graham Brown and Frances Foster in a scene from the 1971 production of Mackey’s Behold: Cometh the Vanderkellans! (photograph by Bert Andrews)

176

Marvin X

DLB 38

er, his interpretation of that experience is different from hers, conveying a profoundly radical, militant message. Genevieve Fabre describes Mackey’s ex¬ posure of the farce and fantasy of black bourgeoisie values as “theatre of cruelty.” In the end, Mackey’s works provoke and inspire more than they enter¬ tain.

generic setting. Mackey’s style remains the same. Dialogue is disjointed and violent. Its significance lies in the fact that it is the only “weapon” available to the characters. As the characters alternately ex¬ press their grief, frustration, and rage, they chant the old spiritual “I’ve been ’buked and I’ve been scorned/There is trouble all over this world.” Strains of this spiritual resound in Mackey’s other works, acknowledging that victimization has been one constant in black American life. Although Mackey’s work has not been widely reviewed, it has been well reviewed. Critics fre¬ quently compare his work to that of his contempo¬ raries, noting similarities with the experimental style of Adrienne Kennedy and the thematic de¬ velopments of Baraka and Bullins. His plays might also be considered responses to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, as they focus on the family and invert the aspirations of Hansberry’s Younger family. Like Hansberry, Mackey uses real and ac¬ cessible experience for his dramatic themes; howev¬

References: Kimberley W. Benston, “Cities in Bezique: Adrienne Kennedy’s Expressionistic Vision,” CLA Jour¬ nal, 20 (December 1976): 241; “Bicentennial Assignment,” Black World, 24 (April 1975): 49; Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor, translated by Melvin Dixon (Cambridge: Har¬ vard University Press, 1983); Hoyt Fuller, Negro Digest, 16 (April 1967): 51-52; Kushauri Kupa, “Closeup: The New York Scene — Black Theatre in New York, 1970-1971,” Black Theatre, 6 (1972): 44-45.

Marvin X (Marvin E. Jackmon, Nazzam A1 Fitnah Muhajir, El Muhajir) (29 May 1944-

)

Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston!Downtown College

1969); Black Man Listen: Poems and Proverbs (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969); Woman-Man’s Best Friend (San Francisco: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing, 1973); Confession of a Wife Beater and Other Poems (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing, 1981); Liberation Poems for North American Africans (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing, 1982).

San Francisco, San Francisco State College, 1965; musical version produced as Take Care of Business, Fresno, Your Black Educational Theatre, 1971; Come Next Summer, San Francisco Black Arts/West, 1966; The Trial, New York, Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech, 1970; Resurrection of the Dead, San Francisco, Your Black Educational Theatre, 1972; Woman—Man’s Best Friend, Oakland, Mills College, 1973; Hoio I Met Isa, Masters thesis production, San Fran¬ cisco State University, 1975; In the Name of Love, Oakland, Laney College Theatre, 1981.

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Flowers for the Trashman,

OTHER: Floivers for the Trashman: A One Act Drama,

BOOKS: Sudan Rajuli Sarnia (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing, 1967); Black Dialectics (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing, 1967); Fly to Allah: Poems (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Pub¬ lishing, 1969); The Son of Man (Fresno: A1 Kitab Sudan Publishing,

177

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Marvin X

Marvin X

“Palestine,” Black Scholar, 10 (November-December 1978): 47.

in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1968), pp. 541558; The Blackbird (Al tair aswad): A One-Act Play, in New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins (New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 109-118; “Islam & Black Art: An Interview with Amiri Ba¬ raka” and afterword, in Black Arts: An Antholo¬ gy of Black Creations, edited by Ahmed Alhamisi and Haroun Kofi Wangara (Detroit: Black Arts Publications, 1969); “Black Justice Must Be Done,” in Vietnam and Black

One of the important but lesser-known poets and playwrights who set the tone for the socially committed black arts movement of the 1960s, Mar¬ vin X is highly respected as a poet, performer, and organizer and has had his work (much of which has also been anthologized) published in important journals such as Journal of Black Poetry, Negro Digest, Soulbook, and Black Scholar. His play Flowers for the Trashman (also known as Take Care of Business) was enormously popular and frequently performed by the network of black arts community theaters across the country from the late 1960s and into the mid1970s. He has taught black studies at California State University in Fresno (1969) and later at the University of California, Berkeley (1972). Also in 1972 he received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Marvin X was born Marvin Ellis Jackmon, the son of Owendell and Marian Jackmon, on 29 May

America: An Anthology of Protest and Resistance,

edited by Clyde Taylor (Garden City: Double¬ day/Anchor, 1973), pp. 280-284. PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: Resurrection of the Dead, Black Theatre, no. 3 (1969); “Manifesto: The Black Educational Theater of San Francisco,” Black Theatre, no. 6 (Spring 1972): 34;

178

Marvin X

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1944 in Fowler, California. A rural area devoted to the cultivation of raisin grapes, Fowler has a very small black population. Marvin X attended Edison High School in Fresno, received an A.A. degree from Oakland City College (now Merritt College) in 1964, and also attended San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), receiving a bachelors degree in English in 1974 and a masters in 1975. At that time, Marvin X became very active in the dramatic arts and was cofounder of the Black Arts/West community theater group in San Fran¬ cisco’s delapidated Fillmore district. He joined with Ed Bullins, Hillery X Broadus, and Duncan Barber, Jr., to open a storefront theater intended to follow the model of Harlem’s pioneering and controver¬ sial Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. As Bul¬ lins later said in New Plays from the Black Theatre (1969), “There was no Black theatre to do your plays in then [in 1965]. If you were in San Francisco, as we were, you knew there was nobody to do Flow¬ ers for the Trashman. Black people had to come together and create our own theatre.” Early on, Marvin X determined that his liter¬ ary activity was not “for art’s sake” but should be in the service of the social and spiritual betterment of blacks. Like the Free Southern Theater in New Orleans, which was established in 1964 to provide “a cultural dynamic” for the civil rights movement, Black Arts/West (and its successor Black House, founded in 1967) served as support to the Bay Area’s Black Panther party through liaison with writer-activist Eldridge Cleaver. “It was conceded by all,” says a report in the Drama Review (1968), “that the Black political, economic, and social revo¬ lution must have a Black cultural revolution as its foundation.” Marvin X’s commitment to this broad principle resulted in his active embrace of the Mus¬ lim religion taught by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and a personal confrontation in 1967 with issues of racial politics, pacifism, and the Vietnam

which they returned had existed before most of them went overseas; they had grown up with the pain that parents of the civil rights “freedom riders” suffered in the early 1960s, the pain that mothers of black schoolchildren had borne in the violent deseg¬ regation battles of the late 1950s. Such realities not only informed the black nationalist “separatist aes¬ thetics of Black Arts/West but also supported a long-standing minority position in the black com¬ munity of noninvolvement or conscientious objec¬ tion to “patriotic” participation in the military adventures of the United States. A notable and articulate advocacy of black conscientious objection came from the Nation of Islam. In 1942 Elijah Muhammad was arrested in Chicago and convicted of “sedition, conspiracy, and violation of the draft laws.” After serving time in a federal penitentiary until 1946, Muhammad con¬ tinued in his belief s. Two decades later he vigorous¬ ly urged his followers to refuse participation in the Vietnam War. Among those who listened were world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali and Marvin X. Refusing induction, Marvin X was tried and convicted, and while awaiting sentence in 1967, he fled to Canada. “I departed from the United States,” he wrote later, “to preserve my life and liberty, and to pursue happiness.” He traveled from Canada to Honduras, where he was arrested and returned to the United States. For his court appear¬ ance (at which he was sentenced to five months at Terminal Island Federal prison) he prepared an angry and eloquent statement, which was later pub¬ lished in Black Scholar (April-May 1971). “There comes a time,” Marvin X wrote, “when a man’s conscience will no longer allow him to participate in the absurd!” He recalled with disgust the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which pro¬ nounced that “a black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect,” and in ringing tones he challenged the court’s authority to contravene his religious and philosophical principles. “But there you sit,” he charged, “with the blood of my ancestors dripping from your hands! And you seek to judge me for failing to appear in a court for sentencing on a charge of refusing induction, of refusing to go 10,000 miles to kill my brothers in order to insure the perpetuation of White Power in Southeast Asia and throughout the world.” The charge echoed Marvin X’s Flowers for the Trashman (produced in 1965), which hurled fiery and profane invective at the white oppressors of black people. The play presents a confrontation between Joe Simmons, a young black college stu-

War. The Fillmore district of San Francisco was, in the late 1960s, not only a seedbed of black national¬ ism but also of the white collegiate counterculture movement, a headquarters of antiwar and anti¬ establishment activity. Black Panther agitation in Oakland’s ghettoes, student demonstrations at Berkeley, and the growing national public displea¬ sure with the government’s policies in Southeast Asia all contributed to the tension. Black Vietnam veterans, grandsons of the much-decorated black regiments that served in World War I, returned without fanfare and found little changed in society’s treatment of them as black men. The despair to

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Marvin X

Whu am I You don'1 know roe Whai are you looking at Your self, your self Wlio are you Where did y ou come from What is your name Do you know who I am Do you know where I came from Do you know my father's name Do vou know my brother Whirl is my ylMvr's name Doyou know where I came from What Is your mother's name Toll her you know me I hove lived In her house Where were you 1 have eaten her bread Where were you Do not fear me. 1 am you Do not fear your self Who Is the leader Of your nation How much land do you own Do you know the time at day Now la the lime for you and me Why do you sport and play Judgment Day Is here And Judgment Is mine I am the beginning and the end. MARVIN X

Covers for Marvin X’s 1969 book of proverbs

Publishing Company, which has published most of his books. His early collection of poems, Fly to Allah (1969), does not merely offer protest; it also attempts to express a sane alternative to the horror and despair that he saw in American life. As such the poems represented the first solid literary ex¬ pression of the Black Muslim ideology that had become more and more prominent in the black community since the establishment of the Nation of Islam in 1930 and its “discovery” by the national media in 1959. The poems are headed with quota¬ tions from nineteenth-century black nationalist Ed¬ ward Wilmot Blyden, the Bible, the Holy Quran, and the traditional Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). The entire work was dedicated in praise of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Mes¬ senger of the Nation of Islam. “One is a Muslim, i.e., he who submits totally to the will of Allah, 24 hours a day,” Marvin X wrote in 1969; “one must practice Jihad (strive hard against ignorance) all day long.” And he has made it clear that his notion of literature is not an impressionistic “mirroring” of either na¬ ture or society, but an attempt to banish ignorance and falsehood. “We must understand,” he wrote, “that art is celebration of Allah — we create to cele¬ brate the Creator, to acknowledge His power and glory, which is our own. To celebrate Allah is to celebrate ourselves, to put ourselves in harmony with eternity, with the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. The artist is the pen. Allah is the ink!” While such statements suggest that the author is both moralistic and didactic, the writings gleam with brilliant imagery and a stunning grasp of both

dent, and a middle-aged white man with whom he shares a detention cell that could be in any county jail in the country. The play pointedly depicts the blossoming of radical nationalism among blacks in the early 1960s. Joe Simmons does not know any¬ thing about “taking low,” and, though the white man insists that he personally has “done nothing” to him, Joe verbally assaults the man and accuses him of having committed “slavery, murder, castration, starvation, frustration, humiliation.” Joe’s friend Wes, also in the tank, can only suggest: “Man, you the craziest nigger in the world. You been readin’ too many books.” Among the “too many books” that focused Joe’s rage, Wes cites the works of James Baldwin. Indeed Baldwin’s stridently eloquent anger had a great deal to do with forming the sensibilities of young blacks in the 1950s and 1960s; but the direct source of Joe’s rhetoric (though not his profanity) can only be the widely disseminated and popular teachings of Malcolm X and his fellow ministers of the Nation of Islam. Joe’s rhyming indictment is similar to Muslim street orators’ favorite catalogues of the white man’s evils. While Flowers for the Trashman achieved nationwide popularity, undoubtedly due to its function as a cathartic “pep rally” for the growingly politicized audiences in the black com¬ munity, it is not really the best ( or most characteris¬ tic) of Marvin X’s work. The author usually seems most effective when he is speaking directly to black people—without reference to those outside the group. In 1967 Marvin X founded A1 Kitab Sudan

180

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Afro-American vernacular and classical techniques of Islamic poetics. The title poem, “Fly to Allah,” begins with hagiographic praises of Elijah Muham¬ mad and contains English adaptations of traditional Arabic poetic forms such as tadmin (interpolated quotations of Quranic suras, or verses) and mulaama (the balanced repetition or parallel phrasing used in the verses of the Bible and Quran). At the same time, the poem encompasses the diction of folk proverbs and common sense, ending with precise pseudo-Haiku emblems of the Nation of Islam’s tenets of Freedom, Justice, and Equality; it is also written in concentrated verses reminiscent of the projective verse style of the 1950s developed by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and others in their study of the prosody of William Carlos Williams. “Fly to Allah” not only exhibited Marvin X’s complete dedication to the ideas and beliefs of the Black Muslim movement, it also made obvious (even to those who possessed neither in¬ terest in nor knowledge of Islam) that a poet so adept with his words could not be ignored. The best poems in Fly to Allah expressed a personal tenderness and care that was at the heart of the Muslim ideology but could never be expressed in political rhetoric or sermonizing. “The Comforter” illuminates some of the poet’s search¬ ing concern. “Who is this woman,” he asks:

I taught her another tongue: Alif, ba, ta, tha, jim, ha, kha . . . But she wouldn’t speak it She wasn’t ready yet Everything by degrees.

A section of “Fly to Allah” also touches on the same theme: Do not beat your woman Love her! She will leave you If you beat her She will leave you If you do not beat her Guard against her She is weak By nature Protect her Elevate her Fly with her to Allah.

These poems play upon the notion that in a tradi¬ tional Muslim value system a woman is bound to her man by proper behavior (obedience), as the man is bound to submit to Allah. But the tone is one of deep disappointment in the beloved woman, a metaphoric representation of all black people who have not accepted Muslim teachings. The poet, as a believer, as a willing instructor and comforter, is saddened by their continued ignorance. There are no echoes here of folk blues (as in the poems of Langston Hughes) nor of spirituals (as in the poems of James Weldon Johnson). Marvin X rejects Christianity and the heritage of slavery in favor of Islam; and he avoids the vernacular of the blues primarily because he wants to reject the En¬ glish language in favor of Arabic. If the woman of “Harlem Queen” is his poetic muse, one under¬ stands his despair in that even after he has taught her Arabic, he must still write his verses in English because she will not use the other language. Marvin X’s linguistic dilemma is ironic; he writes in a hated tongue tainted by slavery only because his intended audience cannot understand the language he prefers, which he insists is their real and original language. In a 1972 manifesto for the Black Educational Theatre of San Francisco, he declared, “no man is free who speaks the language of his oppressor—language is logic—if you speak a man’s language, to a large extent you think like him, especially if you do not speak another language.

Who comes to me Out of darkness Crying in the Name of Allah For me to comfort her.

He imagines her origin in his own dreams, set against a backdrop of a hellish fire, and the only comfort he can offer her that is pleasing to Allah is instruction in the true knowledge of self-identity through proper Muslim behavior: I saw you in the fog Were you man or woman You did not know Now you know But do not act!

Even the moon submits To the morning sun.

“The Comforter” is complemented by “Harlem Queen,” a poem which particularizes these ideas in a more specifically domestic manner. Here the woman is convincingly real—rather than an ob¬ vious archetype—and she is less willing to learn.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that in the new world you will not even be able to speak the English language. The speaking of the English

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Marvin X language, by us, will be stopped. No language of the wicked should be spoken by the Righteous. . . .” Marvin X, therefore, should not be considered a “black poet” in the over popularized and widely misunderstood 1960s notion of one who speaks of people’s everyday problems in their everyday lan¬ guage. He is exactly the opposite. He is an excellent and communicative writer, to be sure, but he writes from an entirely different system. Though he was among the most quotable poets of the black arts movement, his poetry is more religious than politi¬ cal in its concerns; and each of his works — particu¬ larly the popular short play The Blackbird (Al lair aswad) — expresses a poignant sadness of the poet’s distance from his audience. The Blackbird (1969) is transparently propagandistic but quite effective when staged, and it is particularly instructive concerning Marvin X’s ideology, aesthetic, and relationship to his audi¬ ence. The play begins with the writer busily at work in his room. After two little girls from a neighboring apartment interrupt him, he tells them a didactic fable based on the ancient Islamic literary archetype of the parliament of fowls. The tale is designed to illustrate black Muslim ideas, and there is a certain warmth and paternal concern in the protagonist’s interaction with the children. Yet, the drama be¬ comes somewhat sad when it is recognized that the writer is telling this story to the children because their parents, locked into the “real” world of racist America, will not listen. A similar sense of isolation pervades the poem “Exile” in the collection Black Man Listen (1969), which was the first of Marvin X’s books to achieve wide circulation because it was published and dis¬ tributed by Dudley Randall’s respected Detroitbased Broadside Press. The opening lines of “Exile” refer to the poet’s flight to Canada to escape the draft. The government’s disapproval is not, howev¬ er, the point of the poem; nor is homesickness its theme. The poem presents, instead, a nagging feel¬ ing that the author’s own absence from the United States—even as a conscientious objector to an un¬ just war—has removed him from the field of his most important struggle:

That I picked In California

The whiteness of snow and of cotton resonates as an image of the coldness and exploitativeness of “white” people, as the poet sees them, and also as an emblem of his own guilt. In the end Marvin X decides that even the personal sacrifice of his exile is not effort enough for his people. In a reference to the media’s catch phrase for the racial disturbances of the 1960s, “the long hot summer,” he closes the poem with a tentative new resolution: I never been To Harlem Neither Mississippi I might go there When the weather’s hot.

“Exile,” its closing lines beautifully reminiscent of Hughes at his laconic best, presents a unity of per¬ sonal lyric expression and political engagement that is remarkable. It is a skillful tour de force of color, texture, and temperature—the classical fire and ice motif brought into such sudden presence—com¬ municating more than its simple message of Marvin X’s decision that he could not remain an exile in Canada if he wanted to work for the betterment of his people’s condition. His pilgrimage, or hajj, must be to Harlem—or wherever his people were suffer¬ ing— to join with them and strive for a better day. In a 1978 poem, “Palestine,” speaking of yet another distant war, Marvin X summed up his feel¬ ings about Vietnam: No man can take the house of another and expect to live in peace There is no peace for thieves.

These lines accurately present the idealism and in¬ tense moralism that permeate the poet’s work. Among Marvin X’s poems that do not specifically confront Black Muslim themes, “Exile” is by far the most successful. Still, the painful mood of estrange¬ ment and quiet defiance is not much different from the feeling engendered by the Muslim poems, some of which are thought out in both Arabic and English and only reluctantly, it seems, offered in English for the benefit of those (to paraphrase a formula of the Muslim street-corner colporteurs and preachers) deaf, dumb, and blind to the truth of the poet’s belief.

I have run From my people To the snow A long way From California And the snow White Like cotton

What Marvin X has done to soothe the pain is to structure his English as if it were Arabic and to open his poems to a sense of both languages —

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Marvin X ~i

I

TinillirT—HM—IU1WHI—>1

It IIliliim

m

“For the Men,” and “For the Nigguhs Only”) is prefaced by a Quranic sura, the poems do not have the Muslim focus of earlier works. Perhaps influ¬ enced by the poet’s concern with the problem of literacy, these poems are simple in language and presented as direct first-person allocutions. There is very little abstraction; names are named and ev¬ eryday issues are discussed quite directly—some¬ times in street slang. Poems such as “Palestine,” “Black History Is World History ” (which turns Hughes’s lyrical “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” into a catechism), or “Poor People” are powerful because what Marvin X has to say about the social predica¬ ment of black people in the United States is often sadly true. The simplified vocabulary of Liberation Poems does not diminish the poet’s technique, nor does the book alter the general tone of his pub¬ lished work. “The Living Dead” closes the collection on a somber note; two decades after the strenuous civil rights struggle, Marvin X writes:

I

other work* by MARVIN

X

BLACK MAM LISTEN! (Poems & Proverbs)

$1

also

I look into my peoples’ eyes I see the hollowness within I wonder where their spirit went the hope of yesterday

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There is irony in the fact that his plays, often produced as part of the black art movement’s farflung underground network (usually without bene¬ fit of royalties), are — along with a few poems— familiar to a large black audience that never saw his several limited edition collections such as Sudan Rajuli Sarnia (1967), or even Fly to Allah; ironic that his work did not receive substantial critical comment even in the journals of the black arts movement, yet continues to be highly praised by word of mouth; ironic that a poet who began with the concept of taking his art “directly to the people” writes so often and so touchingly of his estrangement from his audience. Finally, it is interesting that Marvin X’s work stands as a devoted expression of his participation in Islam and achieves great literary accomplish¬ ment— even if the poet himself sometimes views the language he writes in as merely transitional in terms of his political and philosophical agenda. The skillful tension between the everyday and the sub¬ lime, an echo of the conflict of languages and cultu¬ ral allegiance, is one of the poet’s strengths and adds to the accessibility of his work. He writes of the male-female relationship as an exemplar of the sub¬ tle estrangement of man and Allah in a world made terrible through man’s disobedience, yet the poems

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sometimes actually producing bilingual poems which function as Arabic primers for his readers. In the late 1970s, Marvin X chose to explore more direct methods of community action. In the Bay area, Fresno, and Reno, Nevada, he lectured widely on male/female relations, advocated literacy programs, and organized political rallies and sup¬ port groups dealing with family problems and vio¬ lent crime. A major project was organizing the Black Men’s Conference held at Oakland Auditori¬ um Arena in November 1980. The conference was steered by Marvin X’s ecumenical Statement of Pur¬ pose. “If your ideology or religion doesn’t allow you room to lift up the lowest Black man, the most wretched Black man,” he wrote, “then your ideolo¬ gy isn’t worth a damn, not to dead flies.” Liberation Poems for North American Africans (1982) collects works that reflect the direct activism of this period. Though each of the book’s four sections (“For the Warriors,” “For the Women,” 183

DLB 38

Marvin X

CONFESSION OF A WIFE BEATER

AND OTHER POEMS

By MARVIN X

HEAR MARVIN X READING CONFESSION OF A WIFE BEATER ON CASSETTE TAPE Send S4.95 to: A1 KIT AB SUDAN PRESS PO. Bov 12583 I resno. C*. 93778

Covers for- Marvin X’s 1981 collection of poems. Amiri Baraka has called Marvin X “one of the innovators and founders of the new revolutionary school of African writings. ”

also seem to speak of personal struggles and joys much more mundane. Although Marvin X emerged from an ex¬ tremely politicized era and enthusiastically con¬ fronted the issues of the day, his work is basically

personal and religious and remains most effective on that level. It should remain relevant long after issues are resolved, if ever, and long after slogans and polemics are forgotten.

i

184

James Alan McPherson (16 September 1943-

)

Patsy B. Perry North Carolina Central University

BOOKS: Hue and Cry: Short Stories (Boston & Toronto: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1969; Lon¬ don: Macmillan, 1970); Elbow Room: Stories (Boston & Toronto: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1977). OTHER: Railroad: Trains and Train People in Amer¬ ican Culture, edited by McPherson and Miller Williams (New York: Random House, 1976); “One in the Sun, Joe,” in Book for Boston, edited by Llewellyn Howland and Isabelle Storey (Bos¬ ton: Godine, 1980); Breece D J Pancake, The Stories of BreeceDJ Pancake, foreword by McPherson (Boston & Toronto: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1983); One Hundred Years After Huck: Fiction by Men in Amer¬ ica, special issue of Iowa Review, edited by McPherson, 14 (Winter 1984). PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: FICTION

“There Was Once a State Called Franklin,” Callaloo, 2 (May 1979): 1-15. NONFICTION

“Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers,” Atlantic Monthly, 223 (May 1969): 74-84; “Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, Part II,” Atlantic Monthly, 223 (June 1969): 92-98, 100; “The Black Law Student: A Problem of Fidelities,” Atlantic Monthly, 225 (April 1970): 93-100; “Indivisible Man,” by McPherson and Ralph Elli¬ son, Atlantic Monthly, 226 (December 1970): 45-60; “In My Father’s House There Are Many Man¬ sions— And I’m Going to Get Me Some of Them Too: The Story of the Contract Buyers League,” Atlantic Monthly, 229 (April 1972):

James Alan McPherson (Information Services, University of South Carolina)

Times Magazine, 27 April 1975, pp. 20-22, 26, 32, 34, 40-43; “On Becoming an American Writer,” Atlantic Monthly, 242 (December 1978): 53-57; “Southern Exiles,” Esquire, 101 (January 1984): 91, 92.

51-82; “Going to Chicago in Style,” Reader’s Digest, 103 (August 1973): 49-54; “Ghost Story,” letter to the editor, Playboy, 20 (De¬ cember 1973): 14; “The View from the Chinaberry Tree,” Atlantic Monthly, 234 (December 1974): 118, 120-123; “The New Comic Style of Richard Pryor,” New York

Among black American short-story writers who came into prominence during the 1960s and 1970s, James Alan McPherson is one of the most gifted. Appearing in numerous “year’s best” or

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and color. Referring to Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, in which Mann presents the idea of a “bottomless well” as the historical background of things, McPherson speaks about his precollege years in Savannah, Georgia, during the 1940s and 1950s. Though the city was segregated, he observed his father—“atone time . . . the only licensed black master electrician in the state of Georgia—[operat¬ ing] as if there were no color line.” He saw his mother, a domestic in the John F. McGowan home, serving “as a line of communication, or a forum of exchange, between the white home and the black home.” He received gifts, jobs, and opportunities to learn through his father’s and mother’s white friends. He remembers that it was his mother’s em¬ ployer who interceded for him in getting a job at M & M Supermarket, employment through which he learned to judge human nature, to identify with traditions outside his own, to exercise discipline, and to ward off boredom by keeping his imagina¬ tion alive. In fact, McPherson recalls his instinctive skill in bagging five or ten pounds of potatoes with¬ out the use of the scale and believes that his regular¬ ly putting “things together in just the right com¬ bination” was tantamount to “an education in liter¬ ary form.” McPherson draws upon his experiences as a grocery boy in “A Matter of Vocabulary.” In addition, his experiences as a dining-car waiter, law student, janitor, newsboy, and community organiz¬ er for a settlement house lend authenticity to his fictional accounts of these activities. McPherson also remembers that the black community taught him values, lessons in “love and hate, loyalty and betray¬ al, honor and cruelty, life and many, many deaths.” He singles out for praise Dr. E. J. Smith, the black physician who delivered him, his brother, and his sisters and who continued a nurturing relationship with them; and his black teachers, extraordinarily dedicated and well-educated individuals who pro¬ ceeded as though no aspiration were beyond the capabilities of their students. He affirms the im¬ portance of both white and black communities in his development as an individual and as a writer of humanistic ideas. McPherson speaks of being further influ¬ enced by his birthplace, Savannah, Georgia, the historic, multicultural city in which components of the Indian, French, Spanish, African, and English cultures were all blended. Having been socialized in such a place, he is certain that he developed a heightened imagination allowing him to transcend black and white classifications and to benefit from Savannah’s rich historical and spiritual continuum. He benefited also from the life and works of Ralph

“prize” story collections, anthologies, and periodi¬ cals, McPherson’s works have won many awards, including the Atlantic Monthly “Firsts” Award in 1968, the Atlantic Monthly grant in 1969, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant for Hue and Cry in 1970, a Rockefeller grant that same year, a Gug¬ genheim Fellowship in 1972 to 1973, the Pulitzer Prize for Elbow Room in 1978, and a MacArthur Foundation Award in 1981. McPherson has also received generally positive critical notices from British, American, and Japanese reviewers, all of whom cite his keen perception of human nature, his understanding of the insensitivities and betrayals of which all men are guilty, his powerful themes, his technical skill, and his artistic integrity. McPherson’s artistic integrity, admirable for its own sake, is also important in its representation of a position opposite that of a major movement among black writers of the 1960s—the black aes¬ thetic or system of assessing black contributions according to whether or not they embody distinc¬ tive qualities of the black experience. Announcing a far different position in a 1969 advertisement for Hue and Cry, McPherson makes his focus clear: “It is my hope that this collection of stories can be read as a book about people, all kinds of people: old, young, lonely, homosexual, confused, used, dis¬ carded, wronged. As a matter of fact, certain of these people happen to be black, and certain of them happen to be white; but I have tried to keep the color part of most of them far in the back¬ ground, where these things should rightly be kept.”In those days of revolutionary zeal following the civil rights marches, the sit-ins, and the assas¬ sinations which conditioned a generation of black writers, such comments were sure to draw criticism. There was mainly praise, however, both for McPherson’s conscious intent and for his rare abil¬ ity to write above and beyond the color line. Ralph Ellison hailed him as “a writer of insight, sympathy and humour and one of the most gifted young Americans I’ve had the privilege to read.” The dialectic of the 1960s which pitted the black arts movement and the American identity against each other is only now beginning to approach a synthesis of the kind upon which McPherson bases his stories about “all kinds of peo¬ ple.” In fact, throughout the maelstrom of conflict between the black aesthetic and the mainly white Euro-American, humanist traditions, McPherson’s vision has remained clear, resulting in stories of lasting significance. McPherson credits several sources for his transcendent view which goes beyond race, class,

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Ellison, a champion of American culture. McPher¬ son is truly a man of humane letters. His integrative imagination can be seen in his journalistic writing, in his editorial work, and in his short story collec¬ tions.

the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Barten¬ ders Union. Hired as a temporary worker for the Great Northern Railway, McPherson experienced two shaping influences—the miniature universe of life on the train, and the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a panoramic view of nearly every nation on earth. Stirred by all he had seen, McPherson re¬ turned to college in the midst of civil rights activities in the South. It was there that he saw an announce¬ ment of a creative writing contest sponsored by the United Negro College Fund and the Readers Digest—enough inducement in that time of great expectancy for him to learn both to write and to type. He entered his first story in the competition, but recalls that the story was lost. After studying during 1963 and 1964 at Mor¬ gan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, McPher¬ son returned to Morris Brown, graduating in 1965 with a B.A. degree. Also during 1965, two other important events occurred in his life: he was re¬ cruited by the Harvard Law School, and “Gold Coast,” his second short story, “was awarded first prize by Edward Weeks and his staff at The Atlantic Monthly.” Perhaps it was providential that two New England institutions, Harvard and the Atlantic Monthly, beckoned to McPherson almost simul¬ taneously. Certainly worth noting during this period is the interconnectedness of his dual in¬ terests in law and literary composition. In recalling his years at Harvard, McPherson notes that he was offered a job as a janitor in a Cambridge apartment building where, he reports, “I had the solitude, and the encouragement, to begin writing seriously. Offering my services in that building was probably the best contract I ever made.” McPherson earned an LL.B. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1968. Meanwhile, he continued to create stories and saw his prizewinning “Gold Coast” published in the November 1968 Atlantic Monthly. During 1968 and 1969 McPherson studied and taught in Iowa City, Iowa. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and served as a writing in¬ structor in its Law School. Nineteen sixty-nine also marks the deepening relationship between McPherson and the Atlantic Monthly, an important relationship which can be followed in its pages. The January 1969 issue reports his having been selected for the 1968 Atlantic “Firsts” distinction and a cash award of $750 for “Gold Coast.” The February issue announces his Atlantic grant for the forth¬ coming collection Hue and Cry to “be published this Spring by Little, Brown and Company in associa¬ tion with the Atlantic Monthly Press.” In March

James Alan McPherson, son of James Allen and Mabel Smalls McPherson, was born on 16 September 1943 in Savannah, Georgia. According to McPherson’s own account, he grew up in Savan¬ nah “in a lower-class black community” where he “attended segregated public schools.” Keenly aware of class and color distinctions, he learned early to reject artificially imposed limitations. In fact, his life and writings might serve as a metaphor of both the varied opportunities and the need to effect an emancipation of the human spirit. Born neither too soon nor too late for this role, McPherson grew up during the height of the civil rights and other liberation movements, a time of significant change in America. He experienced the shift from segregation to integration in public schools, public accommodations, and housing. Dur¬ ing four successive summers of employment on the railroad, he absorbed the culture of train people, noting two separate hierarchies imposed variously by the givers and the consumers of “good service.” And he records in vivid details the many stories growing out of the metamorphosis in American life, the resistances to change, the tensions surrounding change, and the often reluctant personal and insti¬ tutional accommodations to change which charac¬ terize the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. McPherson cites several opportunities for change which resulted in his being released from the stranglehold of a small, segregated, Southern community. First, and perhaps most important, was the optimism which pervaded the black communi¬ ty—an optimism and a belief in progress which caused the older people to keep silent about racial and societal conflicts. It was their silence, according to McPherson, which allowed him and others of his generation to remain “free enough of the influence of negative stories to take chances, be ridiculous, perhaps even try to form our own positive stories out of whatever our own experiences provided.” Second, describing himself as a “product of a contractual process,” McPherson feels he benefited from several “contracts” between the federal gov¬ ernment and society’s institutions: He received a National Defense Student Loan and was enrolled at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1961 to 1963, and, during the summer of 1962, he became the beneficiary of a contractual dispute be¬ tween the Great Northern Railway Company and

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eyes,” Judge Bloom announces, “This case isn’t for my court. . . . Send it upstairs to Cabot.” It is clear that the powerful Judge Bloom of the Willie Smith case has been intimidated by a different kind of power in the Irving Williams case. Sadly ironic is the fact that there is no effort to rulejustly in either one. While Judge Bloom is guilty of handing down decisions based on principals rather than principles in two cases, attorneys in a third case are guilty of an even greater abuse of power. They maneuver to gain a lighter sentence for a car thief, described by his lawyer as a “nice I-talian boy,” at the expense of a prostitute described by the same lawyer as “Latso Philomena Brown” who is “good for a laugh. That’s all.” In further disregard of individual and civil rights, he adds, “Besides, she’s married to a nigger, anyway.” These and other similar exchanges aid in altering the reader’s awareness and understanding of a system in which there are varying measures of power producing varying degrees of prostitution. This view of institutionalized tyranny has its counterpart of personal tyranny in “Of Cabbages and Kings,” whose main character, Claude Sheats, is immersed in a hate-love relationship with himself, white people, and America. Howard, who shares an apartment with Sheats, describes him as one who “Sometimes . . . would seethe hate.” This half-mad, former member of Black Brotherhood attempts to rule everyone while searching in vain for meaning in his life. With Howard, he pontificates in regular instruction sessions when he is not making un¬ founded accusations against him. With all the girls whom he parades in and out of his bedroom, he demonstrates “the same mechanical treatment,” but believes that each one is “a physical affirmation of a psychological victory over all he hated in the little world of his room.” He even claims supernatural powers which allow him to predict future world rule by blacks. This story is both engaging and effective because McPherson maintains artistic con¬ trol, gently nudging readers into his character’s frustrated life and never reducing him to rhetoric. Another character who searches for answers is Thomas Brown, the thirteen-year-old grocery boy in “A Matter of Vocabulary.” In his hauntingly painful initiation into what it means to be black, Tommy agonizes over many unanswered questions, including why whites do not speak to him and why the Barefoot Lady screams her terrible night cries to the locked door of a funeral parlor. The mean¬ ing, or word, eludes him for some time during which he has several harsh, but instructive, experi¬ ences with the produce manager and the grocery

1969, the Atlantic Monthly proudly advertises his exclusive on “The Blackstone Rangers and the Chi¬ cago Police.” Prominently displaying a fourparagraph excerpt from this “first inside report,” the Atlantic Monthly generously promotes McPher¬ son’s work. In fact, the cover of the May 1969 issue lists his “Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers” along with articles by such luminaries as John Kenneth Gal¬ braith, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elizabeth Drew, and David Kahn. The June 1969 issue names McPherson as a contributing editor, a position which he still holds; and in the same issue was the advertisement for “Hue and Cry /by James Alan McPherson/$5.95 at your bookstore/LITTLE, BROWN.” Writing eloquently about personal inade¬ quacies, and about age, sex, race, and class discrimi¬ nation, McPherson opens Hue and Cry with a pas¬ sage from Pollock and Maitland’s History of English Law: “When a felony is committed, the hue and cry (,hutesium et clamor) should be raised. If, for example, a man comes upon a dead body and omits to raise the hue, he commits an amerciable offense, besides laying himself open to ugly suspicions. Possibly the proper cry is ‘out! out!’ ” Rarely has there been an epigraph so aptly chosen, for in each of the ten stories in the collection, McPherson presents mindand-body bruising situations against which the cry “out! out!” must be raised. Perhaps “An Act of Prostitution” is the story which may be viewed as most effective in its indict¬ ment against injustice. Lor even though it is set in a courtroom with a judge and attorneys sworn to uphold the law, it is a prime example of several orchestrated miscarriages of justice. During his Monday court session, Judge Bloom sentences the obsequious, foot-shuffling Willie Smith to five days for public drunkenness, acknowledging Smith’s de¬ sire to be free in time for yet another weekend of drinking and anticipating his regular Monday morning court appearance. Judge Bloom’s easy banter quickly evaporates, however, when he con¬ fronts Vietnam veteran Irving Williams and his contingent of “twenty-five or so stern-faced, coldeyed black men.” Hiding his nervousness behind court formality and feigning impatience with the slightest delay, Judge Bloom insists, “There’sjustice to be done here.” He is interested, however, not in justice but in saving himself from any possibility of a “wrong” decision in the case of Williams who is charged with “assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on a police officer.” Surveying the black men’s faces and “catching what was in all their

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store owner. Meanwhile, he discovers in the door of the produce section where he works a protective, one-way window through which he can observe the shoppers without having “to nod his head or move his mouth or eyes, or make any indication of a greeting to them. That way he would never have to feel bad when they did not speak back.” Then he discovers the word, “a big word, that made good sense of [the Barefoot Lady’s] sound and the burn¬ ing feeling thing he felt inside himself. . . . She came always in the night to scream because she, like himself, was in misery, and did not know what else to do.” The fact that these characters—Claude Sheats, the Barefoot Lady, and Thomas Brown— know nothing else to do except to sink slowly into madness, scream unintelligibly, or seek refuge be¬ hind a one-way window provides reason enough for McPherson’s hue and cry. Catholic in his sympathies, however, McPher¬ son understands and regrets the misery not just of black people but of mankind. He brilliantly cap¬ tures in “Gold Coast” the desperate isolation of James and Meg Sullivan who are old, sick, and defenseless against the American Medical Associa¬ tion, the Medicare Program, hippies, and the prop¬ erty manager’s removal of their one remaining mutually loved possession, their dog. The story is narrated by Robert, a young black writer and “apprentice janitor” who listens, somewhat reluc¬ tantly, to Sullivan’s predawn complaints and observations while glorying in the fact that he has possessions, “a story that was going well, a girl . . . and a tomorrow morning with younger people.” On the other hand, James Sullivan, who has hauled garbage for thirty years, has only “a berserk dog, a wife almost as mad as the dog, three cats, bursitis, acute myopia, and a drinking prob¬ lem.” Lonely and alcoholic, the Sullivans languish in their dirty apartment, drawing only criticism from their neighbors, one of whom states, “the best thing would be to get rid of those old boozers along with the dog.” No longer able to haul garbage or to keep their surroundings clean, the Sullivans are viewed as just so much human garbage. McPherson uses powerful visual, auditory, and olfactory images sug¬ gesting the disease and decay of the Sullivans, of the once magnificent “Gold Coast” building where they live, and of the larger community whose “Social Forces” actively precipitate the dissolution of Robert’s interracial love affair, but fail to act in preventing the varied and increasingly aberrant activities of the “sad-eyed middle-aged men” who haunt the Charles River banks.

Clearly one of McPherson’s best stories, “Gold Coast” is sincere, but not narrowly sentimental. James Sullivan suffers from age discrimination, but he himself is guilty of racism against Jews though Robert feels that he “did not really hate Jews.” Morever, Sullivan demonstrates some intolerance of interracial dating. In fact, he did not like Robert’s girl friend “because he saw that she was not a hippie and could not be dismissed.” Nor is Robert wholly selfless in his relationship with Sullivan. His under¬ standable impatience with Sullivan’s nocturnal dis¬ cussions is complicated by his ear for a story, a fact which causes him to “laugh with [Sullivan] over the hundred or so colorful, insignificant little details which made up a whole lifetime of living in the basement of Harvard.” Realizing that Sullivan “could be a story,” Robert revels in the old man’s reflections which were “being sold . . . cheap, for as little time and interest as I wanted to spend. It was a buyer’s market.” McPherson gains even greater credibility for his characters in Robert’s insistence upon keeping some distance from Sullivan who is, after all, a “filthy old man.” Only in slow stages does Robert bring himself to drink with Sullivan and, at first, only from his own glass. Finally, however, after several reversals — his broken love affair, and the fact that he “wrote very little,” and the new feeling that he “was really a janitor for the first time” — Robert confesses that “we both drank from [Sullivan’s] bottle of sherry and it did not matter at all that I did not provide my own glass.” Near the end of the story, Robert accepts Sulli¬ van as a fellow sufferer for a while, but Robert’s despair is only temporary. Unwilling to face the fact of Sullivan’s permanent despair and even less will¬ ing to contemplate that pitiable condition as his own future state, Robert studiously avoids Sullivan. He resists, as all men do, the painful truth which he discovered—“that nothing really matters except not being old and being alive and having potential to dream about, and not being alone.” In still another treatment of loneliness and rejection, McPherson portrays a homosexual, Alfred; a womanizer, Gerald; and a latent homosexual, Dennis. In their story, “All the Lonely People,” Dennis knows that the human jungle has “only the hunters and the hunted,” the hunters being desperate individuals (like Alfred), and the hunted the all-confident lions (like Gerald) certain to capture their prey and followed for the “scraps” they leave. What Dennis does not know, however, is his own place in the jungle, a fact which makes him the loneliest “weak cat” of all. Using harsh language

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At the same time, his annoyance, disgust, and “tight” feelings are understandable, especially when he is with Charlie Pratt, a white acquaintance who “had well over two thousand records”and who “knew the language and was proud to use the vo¬ cabulary Rodney had been trying to forget all his life.” “Private Domain” reveals Rodney’s anger over the appropriation by whites of the cultural interests and styles of blacks, an appropriation to which he reacts as if it were a kind of emasculation. Following a tense dinner party with the Pratts, Rodney decides to drive Lynn directly home and not make love to her “no matter how dark and safe and inviting her room would be.” Further, as open-ended as many of McPherson’s stories are, “Private Domain” also suggests a blending of cultural elements. Music is indeed the universal language, and jazz, so impor¬ tant in the story, is a major example of the coalesc¬ ing of Euro-American and Afro-American cultural styles. While there is movement, through music, to¬ ward cultural synthesis in “Private Domain,” Rod¬ ney and Charlie Pratt participate only partially by learning about or buying music. Neither man has

and beautifully appropriate animal images, McPherson characterizes the world in which a man may not be successful in passing “through the hunt¬ er stages before something stops him from becom¬ ing a lion.” With only a slight shift in emphasis from animal to philosophical jungle, McPherson re¬ examines homosexual and heterosexual rela¬ tionships in “A New Place,” and he introduces black and white relationships vis-a-vis the cultural identi¬ ty of blacks in “Private Domain.” In “A New Place,” Jack, a troubled philosophy major dropout, is de¬ scribed by his roommate as one whose “mind must have beat him out of the straight life.” When consid¬ ered together with “All the Lonely People,” this story provides rich ideas in the age-old debate over the basis of homosexuality. Perhaps next in impor¬ tance to one’s sexual orientation as a barometer of identification is one’s cultural heritage. In “Private Domain,” true assimilation of elements of black culture is doubtful for Rodney, who only lately has become interested in “soul” language, memo¬ rizing the “clever” sayings of black children and practicing popular expressions in the shower.

} "Elbow Room is the most rewarding collection of short stories to come my way in quite some time. In them James Alan McPherson reveals a maturing ability to convert the ironies, the contradictions of American experience into sophisticated works of literature. To my mind McPherson ranks with the most talented and original of our younger writers. The title story alone reveals more about the spiritual condition of Americans during the 1960s than is to be found in most novels.” — Ralph Ellison

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AtlanticLittle, Brown

Dust jacket for McPherson’s 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories

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James Alan McPherson

the rhythms in his blood and bones, a point rein¬ forced in descriptions of Charlie Pratt’s “unnatural shuffle” and Rodney’s “off the beat” rhythms. In contrast, there are “fine moves” and rhythms which are equated with men’s lives in McPherson’s excel¬ lent train stories “Solo Song: For Doc” and “On Trains.”

suffer silently, it is also clear that her persistent pleas gain only unsatisfactory answers. In five question-and-answer dialogues with prophetic Voices, Margot learns of all the unhappy people who nei¬ ther gain nor feel. She, too, has been unhappy. In school, she is resented because of her intellectual superiority. In her teenage relationships, she is ex¬ ploited unintentionally by Ray and intentionally by Hank. In her young adulthood, she experiences three dead-end relationships: with Eric Carney, a white liberal who, in his Quaker upbringing, “had been taught... to look for causes”; with Charles Wright, a black Housing Office employee who is a “desperate and searching” plodder; and with Jerry Howard, a mulatto who fears that he is becoming bored with girls and that he is moving toward homosexuality. Margot’s many disappointments, especially those stemming from prejudicial treat¬ ment because of her race, sex, and intellect, cause her to begin and end her quest for fulfillment with virtually the same desperate question: “But if that is all there is, what is left of life and why are we alive?” Here, as in other stories in the collection, McPher¬ son has created a bleak world in which individuals search for, but do not find, love and harmony. Frustrated by societal and cultural realities, Margot continues her quest, but whether she establishes high goals or settles for easy options, she will not fulfill her desire for wholeness and self-realization until the Voices, the god-like Presences, pronounce different, more favorable decisions. Frustrated ambition, obstructed justice, bro¬ ken contracts, loneliness and isolation, near mad¬ ness, and approaching death mark the stories in Hue and Cry. Offering no happy marriages or family life, no stability of home or friendships, no reward following meaningful work or commitment to a cause, and very few lighthearted scenes, McPherson creates a fictional world in which his characters are suffocated by outside forces or by their own weak¬ ness and fear. Perhaps some explanation for such a world lies in his description of the 1960s as “a crazy time,” a time when there were “idealists and oppor¬ tunists, people who seemed to want to be exploited and people who delighted in exploiting them.” He characterizes that period further as one of contra¬ dictions, conflicts in values, and loss of old identi¬ ties. What he sought, of course, was a new, positive identity.

These two stories, vividly recording life on the railroad during the days of dining-car waiters and Pullman porters, underscore the difference be¬ tween learned rules and instinctive behavior while pointing up various degrees of racial intolerance and exploitation. I he Waiters’ Waiter who narrates “Solo Song: For Doc” explains to the young sum¬ mer recruit: “I know all the moves, all the pretty fine moves that big book will never teach you. I built this railroad with my moves; and so did Sheik Beas¬ ley and Uncle T. Boone and Danny Jackson, and so did Doc Craft. That book they made you learn came from our moves and from our heads.” And in re¬ counting Doc Craft’s story, the narrator makes it clear that those “moves” so important to the rail¬ road’s operation were life-sustaining for Doc. The railroad was in Doc’s blood; he felt “the rhythm of the wheels in him,” and “was never at home on the ground.” Doc himself said, “Going out is my whole life.” It is not surprising, then, that only five months after being forced into retirement, “beaten . . . not by the service but by a book,” he freezes to death in the Chicago yards. The passing of Doc Craft and others of the old school marks the end of a grand era of passenger service on trains; their “moves” could not be re¬ duced to print, codified, and transferred to the “youngbloods.” Sadly, therefore, the narrator re¬ flects, “the big men, the big trains, are dying every day. . . . And nobody but us who are dying with them gives a damn.” Similarly, “On Trains” pre¬ sents the Pullman porter of forty-three years’ ser¬ vice who is still performing the “necessary” job of making passengers comfortable. He sits up all night “in the back of the car with his eyes closed and his mind awake . . . and his ear next to the buzzer in case someone should ring.” His lowly position is challenged, however, by the Southern woman who returns to a day coach rather than sleep in the Pullman car where the old black porter waits to serve. Her mindless racial prejudice causes the por¬ ter’s eyes “to dull and turn inward as only those who have learned to suffer silently can turn their eyes inward.” While it is clear that Margot Payne, heroine of the final and title story, Hue and Cry, belongs to a generation of black youth who never learned to

During his second year of law school, McPher¬ son had discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a model to aid him in transcending “a provisional or racial identity.” But it was many years later when he read Albion Tourgee’s brief prepared for the

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retaining or rejecting ideas without insight. Similar¬ ly, he uses racial cliches in “I am an American” and unquestioned generalizations about race and reli¬ gion in “Just Enough for the City,” challenging readers to look beyond words for reality. “Problems of Art” provides an excellent dem¬ onstration of the individual who defies the stereotype. Using a combination of mother wit and elementary psychology, Mrs. Mary Farragot, who has been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, successfully masterminds her own de¬ fense. It is only after Corliss Milford, her inept white lawyer, has congratulated himself for having “taken command of a chaotic situation and forced it to a logical outcome” that he learns what the reader has suspected for some time—that Mrs. Farragot is in fact guilty of the charges brought against her. It is against people guilty of assigning convenient labels, however, that the greater charge is brought. Corliss Milford, described as one “restless for easy details” and “trained to focus on those areas where random facts formed a confluence of palatable reality,” is the perfect foil for Mrs. Farragot. Based on a note regarding his client’s “grass widow” status and his examination of a faded photograph signed “Sweet Willie,” Milford labels Willie Farragot, and possibly all the men Mrs. Farragot knew, as irresponsible— justification enough for her frustration if she were guilty of the drunk driving charge. But he has already decided that Mrs. Farragot’s face, reflecting “strength” and “motherly concern,” is not the face of an alcoholic. He carries his absurd position even further by seeing the irresponsibility of his client’s male acquaintances (not her guilt or even the possi¬ bility of her guilt) as the reason for her difficulty in securing a witness who would uphold her fabricated testimony.

famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that he saw both the true meaning of the amendment and a model of citizenship. This model American, car¬ rying “the mainstream of culture inside himself” and becoming “a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and univer¬ sal,” is the subject of McPherson’s second short story collection, Elbow Room (1977). In the manner of Walt Whitman’s persona in “Song of Myself,” who announces “I resist anything better than my own diversity,” McPherson explores in the twelve stories of Elbow Room the complexity of individuals, of this vast country, and of its many cultures. His epigraph, from Sterling Brown’s “Long Gone,” celebrates change, movement, ex¬ ploration— I don’t know which way I’m travelin’— Far or near, All I knows fo’ certain is I cain’t stay here.

McPherson’s personae are indeed moving out of existing stereotypes, or they are contending with individuals who would impose limits based on sex, race, class, or region. In a fine demonstration of resistance to tradi¬ tional labels, the Southern-born black narrator of “Why I Like Country Music” confesses to his wife, Gloria, that he likes square dancing and country music, both associated with his first love. Gloria, a third-generation Northerner, warns him not to make such a confession in public. She does not understand the cultural environment of his youth, which blended Yankee and Confederate folkways and preserved a synthesis of traditions represented in May Day celebrations featuring “both the ritual plaiting of the Maypole and square dancing.” McPherson makes a similar use of the charac¬ ter John Butler’s Southern past in “The Faithful.” He portrays this black minister-barber as one who clings to tradition despite changing times. Butler admits that change is hard at his age, and he firmly believes that “You can shape a boy’s life by what you do to his hair.” He refuses, therefore, to update either his sermons or his haircuts, even though both his congregation and his barbershop customers have begun seeking services elsewhere. When Tom¬ my Gilmore appears at the barbershop with the request, “Gimme a ’fro,” Butler gives him a “school¬ boy” instead, thereby sealing his fate in the com¬ munity. In several amusing scenes, McPherson combines racial and religious cliches to expose the uncritical habits of thought resulting in characters’

In “A Sense of Story,” McPherson presents an interesting reverse-of-the-coin in his portrayal of Robert L. Charles, who is on trial for murdering Frank Johnson, his employer. Charles boldly states the truth, in his refusal to be stereotyped according to race, sex, class, and region. A proud man and a brilliant mechanic, Charles creates a lubricant for foreign cars. Entrusting the formula to Johnson, Charles expects commendations, salary increases, and promotions. Instead, in answer to his questions about the formula, he receives condescending smiles and a standard reply of “No. No. Not Yet.” Feeling cheated, humiliated, and confused by John¬ son’s lack of integrity, Charles shoots him and calm¬ ly waits to be arrested. As complex as McPherson’s stories are, it is not surprising that the facts in Charles’s case are presented alongside notes con-

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cerning the reelection of judges and amid argu¬ ments contrived to prevent Charles from becoming the first to die under a new capital punishment statute. Here, as in “Problems of Art,” “An Act of Prostitution,” and other stories, McPherson ex¬ plores the dubious opportunity for gaining equal justice through law. Violence, the threat of violence, and remem¬ bered violence are important, respectively, in “The Story of A Dead Man,” “The Silver Bullet,” and “The Story of a Scar.” All three stories are set in black communities and all three deal with the attempts of one or more characters to gain status and respectability. “The Story of a Scar” recounts a series of ironies in which scholarly, ambitious Billy Crawford stabs his girl friend and Teddy Johnson, a flashy hustler and numbers man. Only in retro¬ spect does Crawford’s girl friend take notice of clues to his character, such as his “cold” comment about temper. She remembers that “it was like a window shade flappin’ up from in front of his true nature. . . .” Using bold images and striking similes, McPherson provides another graphic illustration of the danger of classifying individuals, especially if one acts on incomplete information. Partial information resulting in misunder¬ standing establishes the opening conflict in “A Loaf of Bread,” a story in which Nelson Reed organizes his neighbors in picketing Harold Green, a white grocer who charges high prices for items sold in the black community and lower prices for them at his stores in white communities. Though Reed

of understanding greater than in the title story “Elbow Room.” In “Widows and Orphans” Clair Richards and Fredricka Burton are accomplished young women from the Watts section of Los Angeles, living proof, in Mrs. Burton’s words, that “we got to be doing something right.” When Clair is presented a civic achievement award by the Pro¬ gressive Association of Greater Watts, her mother confesses that she “slaved many’s the day to put her through school and give her all the things I never could have, bein’ a widow woman and all.” More¬ over, Louis Clayton, the narrator, realizes that his life is vastly different from that of his father, a barely literate textile worker who lived and died in Baxter, North Carolina. Pointing up the differ¬ ences representative of his and his father’s genera¬ tions, the narrator, a liberally trained college teacher, reviews his travels “from New York to Bos¬ ton, from Boston to Chicago — at each stop resting, learning, growing always into something more than he had been. It had seemed to him an easy process, much like shedding old skins.” Appropriately, the speaker for the awards banquet emphasizes the reification of values and goals, but the point of the story is made memorable by Mrs. Richards, who admonishes in broken English, “So I want all of y’all to remember, it don’t make no nevermind where you come from, just so you get somewheres.” The journey’s end as established on one level in “Widows and Orphans” and on a higher level in the title story, “Elbow Room,” involves acknowledg¬ ment and acceptance of several styles and values, an acculturation allowing for many different ways of viewing the world. Virginia Frost of “Elbow Room,” while working out the difficult problems associated with her interracial marriage, summarizes this point: “When times get tough, anybody can pass for white. Niggers been doing that for centuries. . . . But . . . wouldn’t it of been something to be a nigger that could relate to white and black and everything else in the world out of a self as big as the world is? . . . That would have been some nigger!” Promise that such an individual will someday emerge is pro¬ vided by the declaration that Daniel P. Frost, Virgi¬ nia and Paul Frost’s son, “will be a classic kind of nigger.” Moreover, the writer-narrator ends the account by betting his “reputation on the ambition, if not the strength, of the boy’s story.” The wager made by the fictional author of “Elbow Room” characterizes McPherson’s own goal and achievement; for, like him, McPherson has sought to avoid “caste curtains,” racial antagonism, and bitterness expressed in one-dimensional lives. The stories of Elbow Room are filled with laughter,

and Green see themselves as good men, neither man understands the other’s problems, and, there¬ fore, each considers the other as exploitative and evil. In dramatic reversals, both Green and Reed show evidence of a new awareness, thereby prov¬ ing the value of communication and introducing a symbolic truth of human nature. There is added significance in that McPherson seldom deals so ex¬ plicitly as he does in “A Loaf of Bread” with minor¬ ities and their causes. In fact, on this issue, he has commented, “I look for situations where there’s a meshing, and I try to look at the values that come into conflict there. . . . When I write at my best I try to look for the human situation. . . .” At his best in “A Loaf of Bread,” McPherson brings together the black community’s cause and the basic humanity common to the black and white communities. In addition to the growth of individuals and communities, there is also the growth and develop¬ ment of entire generations. Nowhere is the sense of achieving greater than in “Widows and Orphans,” and nowhere is the sense of attaining higher levels

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DLB 38 ciary, would give something in return. McPherson has given generously through his writing and his teaching (currently at the Writers Workshop, Uni¬ versity of Iowa). Believing that positive “change will probably come through aesthetic rather than poli¬ tical processes,” he has provided a model for all the beneficiaries of his generation as well as for others who wish to aid in effecting what he sees as a “real and worthwhile” change in our society.

optimism, frustration, dread, trickery, anger, embarrassment, exploration, change, and all the other feelings and experiences of humans every¬ where. The characters are post office employees, professors, ministers, domestics, businessmen, ex¬ convicts, and mechanics who live alone or as part of nuclear families. Unlike the characters of Hue and Cry, who are generally unsuccessful in their rela¬ tionships, the personae who insist upon making “elbow room” engage in life’s battles with integrity of mind and spirit. During the eight years following publication of Hue and Cry, McPherson achieved an angle of vision wide enough to enclose and meld the various individuals, groups, and cultures repre¬ sented in America, an achievement clearly demon¬ strated in Elbow Room. McPherson’s works have established him as a major voice and brought him many deserved hon¬ ors, and it is anticipated that the novel on which he is working will justify even greater attention. First, the novel form will challenge him to deal with the complexities of American culture on a scale larger than that of the short story. Second, following the lead of Ralph Ellison, his mentor, he will likely reiterate the interdependence of black American and American culture, a task for which Ellison’s example has prepared him. He affirmed his debt to Ellison in April 1984, in a tribute which he was invited to give when Ellison received the first Lang¬ ston Hughes Award from City College in New York. He cited his effort to complete a fifteen-year reading program “necessary for such leaps of the imagination . . . such insights . . . such creative ideas” as Ellison’s, commenting further that these ideas “chart new directions for individuals and for nations.” Third, he will continue to honor the terms of a contract made long ago with his parents and other older blacks who remained silent about racial conflict with the expectation that he, as their benefi¬

References: “Big Payoff for Brilliance,” Ebony, 37 (December 1981): 77, 78, 82; Edith Blicksilver, “The Image of Women in Selected Short Stories by James Alan McPher¬ son,” CLA Journal, 22 (June 1979): 390-401; Robert Bone, “Black Writing in the 1970s,” Nation, 227 (16 December 1978): 677-679; Robert Fikes, Jr., “The Works of an ‘American’ Writer: A James Alan McPherson Bibliogra¬ phy,” CLA Journal, 22 (June 1979): 415-423; Hoyt Fuller, “Some Other Hue and Cry,” Negro Digest, 18 (October 1969): 49, 50, 88; Granville Hicks, “Literary Horizons,” Saturday Re¬ view, 52 (24 May 1969): 47, 48; Irving Howe, “New Black Writers,” Harper’s Maga¬ zine, 239 (December 1969): 130, 131, 133, 135, 137, 141, 144, 146; “Hum Inside the Skull: A Symposium,” New York Times Book Review, 13 May 1984, pp. 28-29; Rosemary M. Laughlin, “Attention, American Folk¬ lore; Doc Craft Comes Marching In,” Studies in American Fiction, 1 (Autumn 1973): 220227; David Llorens, “Hue and Cry,” Negro Digest, 19 (November 1969): 86, 87; Bob Shacochis, “Interview with James Alan McPherson,” edited by Dan Campion, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies (1983): 7-33

194

Arthenia J. Bates Millican (1 June 1920-

)

Virginia Whatley Smith North Carolina A & T State University

BOOKS: Seeds Beneath the Snow: Vignettes from the South (New York: Greenwich, 1969); The Deity Nodded (Detroit: Harlo Press, 1973); Such Things from the Valley (Norfolk, Va.: Millican, 1977). OTHER: “Fire as the Symbol of a Leadening Exis¬ tence in Going to Meet the Man,” in Jaynes Bald¬ win, edited by T. B. O’Daniel (Washington: Howard University Press, 1977), pp. 170-180. PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: FICTION

“Lost Note,” Delta, 19 (1965): 46-52; “Wake Me Mama,” Black World, 20 (July 1971): 57-68; “The Second Stone,” Last Cookie, 1, no. 1 (1972): 37-42; “Good Grazin,” Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, 1, no. 1 (1975): 67; “Homesick,” Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, 1, no. 1 (1975): 68-70;

Arthenia J. Bates Millican (photograph by Larry Robinson)

ades; yet she has achieved a degree of national recognition as a creative writer only recently. Poet, folklorist, short-story writer, novelist, critic, and scholar, Millican has struggled with a writing career which only flourished in her later life. To say the least, she has been a “late bloomer,” but a woman of the times, since it has been the paradox of her lifestyle-bridging the academic and the common worlds — which has made her a spokesperson for the downtrodden, the hopeless, the rejected, but above all, the redeemable. When Millican was born as Arthenia Bernetta Jackson on 1 June 1920 in Sumter, South Carolina, her family was anything but downtrodden or hope¬ less. For a black family of the 1920s, they were of moderate means, as well as intellectually and re¬ ligiously oriented. Her parents, Calvin Shepard Jackson and Susan Emma David, were both profes¬ sional people who believed in nurturing their chil¬ dren’s minds. Millican’s father was a Bible school teacher at the First Baptist Church in Sumter and a public school teacher who eventually rose to be-

“Blame it on Adical,” Callaloo, 1 (December 1975): 45-57; “On Clean Cooking,” Mahogany of Baton Rouge (June 1979): 9. NONFICTION

“The Higher Fatality in Madame Bovary,” Southern University Bulletin, 46 (September 1959): 109114; “Sound of the Lyre Off Main Street U.S.A.,” Negro American Literature Forum, 2 (Spring 1968): 1114; “The Creative Spirit,” The Baptist Advocate of Baton Rouge (2 April 1983): 1-2; W. E. B. DuBois: The Editor’s Role in AfroAmerican History,” The Baptist Advocate of Baton Rouge (2 February 1984): 1-2. In some ways, Arthenia J. Bates Millican per¬ sonifies the people about whom she writes. She has had the strength to persevere in the face of over¬ whelming obstacles. Beginning on a note of early promise, her writing career has spanned many dec-

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points in Millican’s writing career, for it was there that she learned about real creative writing. Profes¬ sionally, Millican had risen from high school in¬ structor at Westside High School in Kershaw, South Carolina, to department chairman at Morris Col¬ lege in Sumter, South Carolina, when she decided to attend Atlanta University. It was a wise step, for while studying for her masters degree from 1947 to 1948 she came under the influence of Langston Hughes — her first creative writing teacher. Hughes had a different idea about what poetry should mean and what it should represent. He taught her to write in free verse and idiom, and encouraged her to draw ideas from real life experi¬ ences on common and ordinary subjects. Hughes’s suggestions coincided with ideas that Millican had already harbored, for she had become aware of her love for working-class and poor people during her youth, particularly during the depression which hurt her family financially for many years. As a teenager, she was always curious about the common folk and the backstreets of town even in defiance of her mother, who remained class conscious despite her straitened circumstances. When Millican eventually married two non¬

come a minister and high school principal. Although his public school teaching took him away from home during the week when Millican was small, he was a man deeply involved in his family and the church when he was at home on the weekend. And Millican’s mother, descended from missionary Baptist ministers, was a well-educated woman and extremely class-conscious. She felt as her predecessors did that the church was the bul¬ wark of building good citizenship. From the age of three until twenty-one when she finished college, Millican spent weekdays and weekends involved in the church and in a learning atmosphere—reciting dialogues, reading parables, learning lyrics to songs or performing in church plays. Her formative years were enriched by an atmosphere of intellectual stimulation. Millican’s father was a well-read intellectual who exposed Millican, the eldest, and her other seven brothers and sisters to all forms of the clas¬ sics— from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe to Paul Laurence Dunbar. Because of his own interest in literature, he wanted and encouraged Millican to become a poet. At age ten, she wrote her first poem and at sixteen, Millican had her first poem pub¬ lished. By the time she had finished Lincoln High School and Morris College in 1941, both in Sumter, she had acquired a reputation at both schools as the local poet laureate. She was unique because few students pursued the arts since it was an impractical vocation and not one in which a black person was expected to earn a living. After college, Millican made an initial step to launch a writing career, but her efforts dwindled as

professional men, her mother never forgave her for becoming “common.” At any rate, Hughes not only made Millican conscious of ordinary people as sub¬ jects in her literature during her year at Atlanta University, but in some respects, he emancipated her. There had been no real national consciousness of black literature since the Harlem Renaissance, so Hughes’s teachings forced her to become more cul¬ turally aware. She never forgot his lessons and gradually began to use free verse and common themes in her poems, even though it was quite a few years after she took his class. She attempted to write her masters thesis on the prolific black writer, li¬ brettist, diplomat, James Weldon Johnson, but scholarly research was impossible since he had been dead less than ten years. As an alternative, she wrote “Protest and Vindication in the Poetry of Carl Sandburg.” Even though Sandburg was not black, his lines in the poem, “Good Morning America,” seemed to define what Millican wanted to do with her life: “Go alone and away from all books,/go with your own heart/into the storm of human hearts and see if somewhere/in that storm there are bleeding hearts In 1949, a series of events took place which brought Millican close to the heart of human suffer¬ ing so well prophesied in Sandburg’s poem. The climate in South Carolina disagreed with her and ill health forced Millican to accept a teaching position

rapidly as they had begun. Equipped with an En¬ glish degree, she went off to teach in several high schools in South Carolina. In 1946, she published four poems in Poetry Broadcast. “Where Will it Be?,” “Voyage End,” “Tell Me,” and “Down the Santee River Way” were written in the style and tone stressed in school. Ten years elapsed between these poems and others of the same nature, namely, “Not Love” (1956) followed by “Bereft” (1958) and “I Did Not Call it Love” (1962). Sometimes naive and mundane, these poems are romantic and deal with various aspects of love and death. Unlike some of her later work, they are stylistically rather than thematically problematic. While attending school Millican had learned to im¬ itate poets like Longfellow and Tennyson, and she developed the “pitter-patter” verse style of her models (a trait which she has found difficult to obliterate). Graduate school was one of the first turning

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in Virginia. Her reduction in professional status from chairman to instructor was in keeping with the social climate of Halifax, Virginia. Unlike Sumter and other areas where she had been, Halifax Train¬ ing School and its surrounding neighborhood were rustic. She taught in a rural, backwoods school where they even had potbellied stoves to heat the building. In this setting Millican’s engagement to a former classmate, a psychiatric social worker who had ideas of moving to New York City to pursue his career, deteriorated. He resented Millican’s attach¬ ment and loyalty to her family. As their friction grew and their relationship deteriorated, Millican met and became interested in a local man. Her first marriage to a nonprofessional man brought Millican into the midst of a segment of people who later became the subjects of her first prose work. Noah Bates had not attained more than a ninth grade education when they married on 11 June 1950, but he was a successful man unto him¬ self and his wife. He made more money as a laborer than she did as a schoolteacher, but he brought her more wealth through his family and friends. They moved into a community of old ladies—wives of laborers and menial workers themselves whose favorite pastime was sitting on each other’s porch, gossiping, dipping snuff, and telling tall tales. Com¬ fortable in her habitation, Millican enjoyed the ban¬ ter of oral history and literature during her stay from 1950 to 1955, and she was unconsciously gathering ideas for future use. When her marriage to Noah Bates ended in divorce in 1956, Millican’s literary and creative in¬ terests underwent a productive surge. She spent a year teaching at Mississippi Valley State before moving on to Southern University in 1956, where she spent the bulk of her academic career until her retirement in 1980. Along with the onslaught of romantic poems of heartache previously cited, she published “To A True Leader” (1957), “Admoni¬ tion” (1958), and “Surmise” (1958). She became a campus poet since the majority of these poems appeared in various periodicals published by

in fiction and had read extensively European and American authors. Now she harked back to Henry James for guiding principles in developing her tales. She began with a kernel idea and then let the story develop from that point. The result was “The Bottoms and the Hills.” The collection consisted of thirteen tales re¬ volving around the lives of agrarian people. While that effort seemingly should have launched Milli¬ can as a fiction writer, the result was nil. Like many black writers, Millican could not find a publisher for her work. She considered succumbing to one of the vanity presses; however, she was advised against this route by a local historian. Although the manu¬ script was sent to Arnuru Publications in 1972, and to Commonground Press in 1977, it has never been published in any form. One of her more recent stories, “The Second Stone” (1972), is written in the folkloric style of her manuscript stories, only the setting was moved from Virginia to Louisiana. In her Louisiana setting, Millican spent the next thirteen years trying to gain a sense of direc¬ tion and control over her writing, unsure whether her forte was prose or poetry. While her contem¬ poraries Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker zoomed into national prominence, Millican re¬ mained relatively obscure other than to a localized area. She published a number of poems during the period from 1956 to 1969, but her participation in the Chautaugua Writer’s Workshop in July 1962 appears to have been the most influential in moti¬ vating her to write. Stylistically and thematically, Millican has shown real innovation in her scathing funeral attack in “Wishes” (1962), her love sonnet to sin in “Beat Boy” (1963), and her tribute to a mother’s pain in “A Woman’s Gift” (1964). Although finally published and beset with artistic frustrations, she built a sound reputation as an educator, critic, and scholar in this same period of time. Her articles appeared in the Southern Uni¬ versity Bulletin, Negro American Literature Forum, and the College Language Association Journal, where she also served as an advisory board member. In 1963, Millican was named to Who’s Who in America and to the Who’s Who in American Women in 1966. In the late 1960s, she began work on a Ph.D. which she acquired from Louisiana State University in 1972, finally writing her dissertation on James Weldon Johnson “ . . . In Quest of an Afro-Centric Tradi¬ tion for Black American Literature.” And with her second marriage—this time to Wilbert Millican, a dockworker with Kaiser Aluminum, on 14 August 1969, Millican settled down in East Baton Rouge Parish, continuing her split-level existence between

Southern University. Millican wrote one of her best poems during this time—“An Alien from the U.S.A.” (1958) which was an outgrowth of her ideas for a collection of folktales. This was her experimental stage of working on common themes and in vernacular. In her ears, she could hear her mother-in-law’s voice as she had once narrated her tall tales. Being a poet, Millican’s craft now became an asset, for her sense of poetic rhythm enabled her to duplicate the accents and dialects in her prose. She had always had an interest

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Dust jacket for the 1975 Howard University Press edition of Millican'’s first book, stories of life in the rural South

Lynchburg, with fictional one-horse towns and vil¬ lages such as Randle Town and Dubose Crossing. But the most significant quality of the volume has been the characterizations, which show a Jamesian influence. In his theory of fiction, James stated: “What is character but the determination of inci¬ dent? What is incident but the determination of character?” Millican has followed such a scheme, depicting incidents which define character. She has demonstrated a remarkable ability to draw lifelike characters in both mannerism and speech pattern. The bulk of the stories center on young people in various stages of development, and their painful experiences of growing up in a world of adult ex¬ pectations. In the first portrait, “Silas,” Millican focuses on a fifteen-year-old backwoods and backwards, unaggressive young man who has been thrust into a man’s world and a man’s job for economic reasons. Silas’s ignorance of the rules of manhood, his over¬ sensitivity, and his cowardliness precipitate the death of a man who has come to his def ense. In this tragic manner, Silas has to learn that men do not

the formal, academic world and the working class one. Nineteen sixty-nine was a breakthrough year for Millican in terms of discovering whether her literary talent was poetry or fiction. She published Seeds Beneath the Snow upon which the bulk of her literary reputation has been established. Published by Greenwich in 1969 and republished by Howard University Press in 1975, the work has steadily gained a national reputation as one of the most important collections of short stories in the last dec¬ ade. Aptly dubbed “message stories” by Nikki Giovanni, the twelve vignettes personify the will, resiliency, and perseverance of the agrarian people of Virginia, although the setting for this work is South Carolina. Millican thought of Virginians as late-blooming seeds which have managed to survive despite a life-thwarting blanket of snow. Like the seeds, these South Carolinians, and their children in particular, struggle under adverse conditions. The portraits are unique because of their real¬ ism. Millican has interspersed the real names of places in South Carolina, such as Wedgefield and

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express their feelings and, above all, they do not cry. Such foolishness and tragedy is contrasted in another story, “Runetta,” about a young girl who dies of pneumonia out of stubbornness and vanity. In “Little Jake,” the reader follows the develop¬ ment, from his childhood to adulthood, of a “bad seed” who has been made into a monster by an overprotective and insipid mother. In “Home X and Me,” Millican has interlaced humor with pain. It is a good example of the trials and tribulations of a country bumpkin learning the basic rules of cook¬ ing and hygiene in a modern classroom. Without a doubt, the most unique of the twelve vignettes is the short story “Dear Sis.” Writ¬ ten in epistolary style, the letters form a dialogue between a young brother, who has suddenly dropped out of high school and joined the Navy, and his older sister, who has been away at college and away from the events which have precipitated his hasty departure. Like most of the stories, the exchange of letters reveals the lack of communica¬ tion between the growing teenager and his adult peers who enforce rigid rules as a survival mecha¬ nism in a world that they already know is oppressive and destructive. The critical reception of Seeds Beneath the Snow was most favorable, particularly in the mid-1970s with its republication. Millican has been compared to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and even to Thomas Hardy. In a 1970 review in the Washington Post, Millican was touted for her “primitive themes,” so akin to Har¬ dy’s “representing those people who are destitute but not hopeless.” The 1973 College Language Asso¬ ciation Journal review commended Millican for her uniqueness as a “local colorist” who “concentrated her attention, not on scenes, but on characters,” thereby making them identifiable to other people in the South. And Freedomways, in 1974, dubbed her work “a fiction of revelation.” In contrast, the negative comments have had more to do with editorial and publication mechanics than Millican’s craftsmanship. The Greenwich pub¬ lication was fraught with editing flaws, and it had an unattractive layout. Howard University Press has rectified these glaring problems by publishing a well-edited and attractive hardcover volume in 1975. One of the last vignettes of Seeds Beneath the Snow, “A Ceremony of Innocence,” was extracted from Millican’s novel, The Deity Nodded, published in

Southern black woman. The plot focuses on her search for religious truth and the disparities be¬ tween the Christian and Islamic religions, the latter of which she ultimately chooses to follow. The novel moves from the protagonist’s childhood and adolescence, during which the innocent Tisha ques¬ tions traditional Christian principles, to her initia¬ tion into the adult world of experience through her loss of innocence, pregnancy, and hasty marriage. She eventually finds religious truth. Tisha’s subse¬ quent flight to the North and eventual return to the South become her personal odyssey of selfawareness. Her journey brings her into contact with the riotous living of New York City, a righteous Chris¬ tian Scientist whom she compares with Christians she has known, and the gracious lifestyle of the black and white bourgeoisie. Being of common stock herself, and having seen through the veneer and hypocrisy of the social classes, she discovers more humanity exists among the outcast and destitute. Her most important discovery, however, is the Na¬ tion of Islam. In light of all of the inequities she encounters in terms of race, religion, and society, the Christian deity seems to have been partial to some and forgotten others. Tisha is able to find sustenance and direction in her life through the Muslim religion that allows for salvation in this world rather than in the next. Her rejection of Christianity ultimately leaves her an outcast in her family, but a woman self-assured and aware of her place in the world. The clashes between Tisha Dees, her family, society, and orthodox religion were based on actual experiences in the Jackson family. Millican de¬ veloped the character of Tisha Dees on her sister, Mrs. Catherine J. Alia, who converted to the Mus¬ lim faith, and in doing so, created a family schism. However, Millican and her sister had both grown dubious of the Baptist religion in the mid-1950s— there were just too many gaps between reason and faith which remained unanswerable. While her sis¬ ter eventually converted to the Muslim faith, Milli¬ can converted to Catholicism. While researching the Muslim religion for her novel, Millican altered her own opinion of the Mus¬ lims. Initially, she had planned to treat the Muslim religion as a “hate” religion in her novel. However, she was impressed by a warm and personal letter from the Honorable Elijah Muhammed giving her permission to use extracts from one of his books. The letter, written in 1965, arrived at a time when Millican’s Catholic religion was letting her down. She was recovering from surgery and was confined

1973. Like the Bildungsroman, The Deity Nodded is a novel of education, centering on the illegitimate birth, adoption, and maturation of Tisha Dees, a

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Arthenia J. Bates Millican

deaths. Born under the sign of death from her namesake, Rena at fifteen has fulfilled prophecy. Her baptismal gown has become her burial shroud. Millican created realistic incidents depicting the evil system of slavery which destroyed the people caught within its grip. In contrast, “Where You Belong” is set in the 1940s, and reveals the evils following the aftermath of slavery, namely assimila¬ tion, and black people’s adoption of snobbery and class exclusion. Again, Millican returns to the famil¬ iar surroundings of South Carolina. The story fo¬ cuses on a young female college graduate from a poor and insignificant background who goes to her first teaching job in a suburban area, only to en¬ counter snobbery and social ostracism. Like Tisha Dees, Gindy Mason has to learn the hard way about how a woman must protect her reputation. Like Tisha, she discovers humaneness among the com¬ mon folk where she acknowledges that she belongs. Like her characters, Arthenia J. Bates Millican 'has discovered where she belongs. Since 1965, her literary sketches have appeared in a number of periodicals, including Black World, Delta, Callaloo, and Obsidian. Millican’s long struggle with her craft has earned her a reputation as one of the best Southern fiction writers in the last decade. She has also made numerous appearances as a guest lectur¬ er and featured poet. In 1977, she and other col¬ leagues at Southern University, Baton Rouge, formed a group called the Academic Humanists whose purpose was to bridge the gap between academia and the community. Her first lecture for the group in Fall 1977 was on the subject of “Black Women in Creative Arts — The Politics of Culture.” She addressed the Wickers School in New Orleans on 22 January 1981 on the topic of “Images of Children as Reflected by Black Female Writers.” On 28 March 1981 at the Four C’s Conference in Dal¬ las, Texas, she spoke on “Politics: Finding the Means for the Creative Art and the Mundane.” And she was honored by Scenic High School, Baker, Louisiana, at its “Meet the Author” program, at which time she spoke on the “Genesis of a Fictional World.” Much of this creative activity came after Millican retired from a full professorship at South¬ ern University in 1980. Her free time has allowed her to “get in touch” with herself and fully release her creative energies. Ignored by major antholo¬ gists in the past, Millican is being acknowledged in the 1980s for her contributions to American letters.

to her home, although she desperately desired to see a priest. Yet none visited her until the end of her second month of recuperation. Elijah Muhammed’s letter was timely and its personal salutation and message reassuring. At that point, Millican could understand why her sister had made her choice. The reception of The Deity Nodded has been positive, although it has not gained as wide a popu¬ larity as Millican’s first book. Its popularity has been more Southern and regional, even though it has been listed as required reading for a course on black women writers at Cornell University. With two books published, Millican found the 1970s a period of unprecedented renown, both artistically and academically. Her struggle, having taken so long, was finally rewarded. She was cited in the Outstanding Educators of America (1973); Personal¬ ities of the South (1975); Contemporary Authors (1975); The World’s Who’s Who of Women (1975); and the Dictionary of International Biography (1975). She was also honored at a reception held by the Archivist of the United States (1975) and in July 1976, Millican was awarded a $6,000 Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to devote her time exclusively to writing. While her popularity was gaining momentum, Millican continued to write and publish poems. She published “Now” and “Metamorphosis” in 1973, but her best poems came after this period. “Tran¬ script” (1975), with its autobiographical bent, is one of the best self-descriptive poems of Millican as an educator and a person. Throughout the poem, she uses the black verb form, “I be,” denoting her un¬ documented struggles, common to all black people, which have made her success possible. Some of her best poems — “Our Boy is Dead,” “Homecoming,” and “Silver Anniversary”—have yet to be pub¬ lished. She is at her best when writing on the gutlevel issues of ordinary folk, crying the weary blues as in “Prayer for Deformity” (unpublished) and “The Lord Didn’t Give me Much” (1979). Under the 1976 NEA Creative Writing Fel¬ lowship, Millican wrote one short story into which she has drawn the lyrical and spiritual songs of slavery, against which she contrasts the trials and tribulations of that life. “Rena” is a short story in¬ cluded in a volume entitled Such Things from the Valley (1977) which also includes her prizewinning short story, “Where You Belong” (which won Milli¬ can the NEA grant). “Rena” is a tragic love story surrounding a May/December romance. Both Rena and the romance are doomed from the begin¬ ning, which the narrative discloses in flashback as the story opens on the tragic note of the lovers’

Interviews: “Legitimate Resources of the Soul: An Interview

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Ron Milner

with Arthenia Bates Millican,” Obsidian: Black American Literature in Review, 3, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 14-34;

Papers: Millican’s papers are at the South Garoliniana Li¬ brary of the University of South Garolina, where they have established an Arthenia Bates Millican file for the preservation of her manuscripts. The Janies Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Library at Yale University contains manuscripts, typescripts, and first edition copies of her work.

“Reflections: Arthenia Bates Millican,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Litera¬ ture, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Par¬

ker and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Garden Gity: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), pp. 201209.

Ron Milner (29 May 1938-

)

Beunyce Rayford Cunningham Daytona Beach Community College

BOOK: What the Wine-Sellers Buy (New York: French, 1974). PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Who’s Got His Own, New York, American Place Theatre, 12 October 1966; The Warning—A Theme for Linda, in A Black Quartet, New York, Chelsea Theatre Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 25 April 1969; The Monster, Chicago, Louis Theatre, October 1969; M( ego) and the Green Ball of Freedom, Detroit, Shango Theatre, 1971; What the Wine Sellers Buy, New York, New Federal Theatre, 17 May 1973; Season’s Reasons, Detroit, Langston Hughes Theatre, 1976; Crack Steppin, Detroit, Music Hall, November 1981; Jazz-set, Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum, 1980. OTHER: The Warning, in A Black Quartet, by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Ben Caldwell (New York: New American Library, 1970), pp. 37-114; “Black Magic, Black Art,” in Five Black Writers, edited by Donald B. Gibson (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 296-301; “Black Theater—Go Home!,” in The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 288-294; Who’s Got His Own, in Black Drama Anthology, edited by Milner and Woodie King, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 89-145.

Ron Milner (photograph by Bert Andrews)

PERIODICAL

PUBLICATIONS: The Monster, Drama Review, 12 (Summer 1968): 94-105; M(ego) and the Green Ball of Freedom, Black World, 20 " (April 1971): 40-45.

201

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Ron Milner

Intense expression and psychological probing joined with a deep regard for the urban family have made playwright Ron Milner a pioneering force in the contemporary Afro-American theater. Indeed, emotional power has been the hallmark of his work since 1966, when his first play, Who’s Got His Own, became the first work by a black to be staged at the American Place Theatre. As a high school student in Detroit, Milner made his commitment to writing in a characteristi¬ cally dispassionate and analytical way: “The more I read in high school, the more I realized that some tremendous, phenomenal things were happening around me. What happened in a Faulkner novel happened four times a day on Hastings Street. I thought why should these crazy people Faulkner writes about seem more important than my mother or my father or the dude down the street. Only because they had someone to write about them. So I became a writer.” Having juggled basketball and writing while attending Northeastern High, Milner later briefly attended Highland Park Junior College and the Detroit Institute of Technology. In 1962 he won a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship for the purpose of finishing a novel, “Life With Father Brown,” which remains unpublished. Then in 1964 he joined Woodie King in the Concept East Theater in Detroit. King went to New York with a touring company that was performing three plays by Mal¬

THE AMERICAN PLACE THEATRE Wynn Handman Artistic Director

.Sidney Lanier President presents

WHO'S GOT HIS OWN by

RONALD MILNER Directed by

Lloyd Richards Scenery and Costumes by Kert Luiulell Lighting by Roger Morgan

CAST (in order of appearance) Tina Jr.

Glynn Turman

Clara

Barbara Ann Teer

Mother

Estelle Evans

Reverend Calver

L. Errol Jaye

First Deacon

Sam Laws

Second Deacon

Rocer Robinson

TIME:

Continuing Past

PLACE:

Detroit — Central City

ACT I

Afternoon

ACT II

Evening

ACT III

Morning

STAFF FOR “WHO’S COT HIS OWN” Production Stage Manager .WLtiint Technical Director Crew

Master Electrician Property Mistress Costume Muster

PpTF.il C.Vf.AMBOS Divio Dh.ts Jvmes E. Dwykii Jam it. Zakkai, M. M. Stretcher. Vernon Lobii, John Barrett, Rich mid Dunham Emii if. Saint Lot, (Ay Denis Ken Kothe Pom y McLean Put, (it.over

l his play was first done by The Amercican Place l heat re as a Rehearsed Reading directed h\ Hoodie King, Jr. on O't. 17,

1965.

Cast list for the first full production of Milner’s psychological

colm Boyd. Milner went to New York to join Harvey Swados’s writing workshop at Columbia University, and because, under the mentorship of Langston Hughes, he was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. Milner joined up with King at the American Place Theatre, which was just being formed. Administering to the “damaged” black psyche of his audiences has been perhaps Milner’s central concern as a dramatist since he first took serious note of literature in high school. Thus, the play which introduced him to New York audiences in October 1966, Who’s Got His Own, is mainly psycho¬ logical in thrust. The embattled family which Mil¬ ner presents is involved in a struggle to get to the bottom of their damaged relationships with one another. The play opens with the funeral of a harsh father, Tim Bronson, and concludes with a tenta¬ tive rebirth for his long-suffering widow and his embittered son and daughter, Tim, Jr., and Clara. The unsuspected truths which Mrs. Bronson is driven to reveal about their father ultimately enable Tim and Clara to see the lives of their parents with new, though still troubled, eyes. What is primarily at issue in the play is the question of black manhood,

study of a black family’s relationships

the expression of which has historically been thwarted. Milner dramatizes this issue by making his protagonist a highly combative and alienated son, torn by despair over ever being able to respect or love a father he has long since written off as a fierce tyrant at home and a coward at work. After his mother’s revelations, he is pitted against the hidden forces of family history embedded in that rejected father’s past. The play toured the state colleges in New York State before it returned to New York City for a run at the New Lafayette Theatre in 1967. Between Who’s Got His Own and the produc¬ tion of his next play, The Warning, in 1969 Milner was active on the academic front. During the years 1966-1967, the author was writer-in-residence at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he came to know Langston Hughes, who encouraged him in his advocacy of black aesthetics. The Warning—A Theme for Linda was staged as part of A Black Quartet, a set of four short plays by

202

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Ron Milner

Milner, Ben Caldwell, Ed Bullins, and Amiri Bara¬

had not been large, his work had received impor¬ tant New York productions. He had also become well known on the academic front through college performances of his work as well as through his activities as a campus speaker and writer-in¬ residence. Milner has observed with characteristic humor, “I’ve taught at college more than I’ve attended.” In the 1970s he emerged as an important essayist. “Black Theater—Go Home!” and “Black Magic, Black Art” offer eloquent arguments for the need of the black artist to cultivate a black audience, and they stress the importance of the jazz musician as a model for the writer. Also, in association with Woodie King, Jr., again, the playwright undertook the editing of Black Drama Anthology (1972) while achieving commercial success with What the Wine Sellers Buy, which opened in New York at the New Federal Theatre on 17 May 1973. Finally, Milner went home to Detroit to create the sort of communi¬ ty-based black theater he had been advocating in his essays. Throughout the 1970s, Milner’s fascination with the young people he refers to as the Jackson Five generation had a strong hold on his imagina¬ tion. Coupled with this interest in these young peo¬ ple and their music was his growing concern over the destructive role model provided by the pimp. Nowhere is this concern better illustrated than in What the Wine Sellers Buy, a play which depicts the pressures on a seventeen-year-old Detroit youth, Steve Carlton, to try the hustler’s life and to start by turning his own sweetheart, Mae, into a prostitute. Milner says that the movie Superfly was partly re¬ sponsible for his turning to this subject: “I’ve actual¬ ly seen a 10-year-old boy sniffing salt—not cocaine; he didn’t have any concept of what cocaine was— but salt, because he wanted to look like Superfly. You see enough cases of this and it suddenly be¬ comes important enough to write about.” There are also strong autobiographical elements in the hero’s situation: “A similar incident happened to me when I was young. But I think I would have just passed over it, except that I saw the same thing happening to other guys as well—young guys who were clear¬ headed and intelligent, and able to achieve, sudden¬ ly using all their energies to turn over dope. They’d bought a system of values that says anything you do to get a car or money or clothes is all right.” Rico, the pimp who tries to corrupt Steve, also serves as an indictment of the American businessman in par¬ ticular and of American society in general: “The people who pollute the air and water for profit have no right to point fingers at Rico. . . . When he talks

ka. Produced by Woodie King, the plays opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Chelsea The¬ atre Center on 25 April 1969. In The Warning Milner takes up the theme of black manhood again, but this time it is explored exclusively through the painful and bitter recollections of women. Like Clara in Who’s Got His Own, the grandmother in The Warning is abnormally wary of black men. The play focuses on the predicament of Linda, a seventeenyear-old girl who has been brought up in a house¬ hold of women in a poor section of Detroit. Flanked by a grandmother who hates men and a mother who has retreated to drinking, Linda struggles to learn what it really means to be a woman. The grandmother answers her inquiries by relating how the grandfather the girl worships had inadvertently caused the death of one of his baby daughters through his alcoholism. In spite of what she learns about the weak and ruined men in her family, Lin¬ da resolves to take her chances with men and not to end up defeated like her mother or embittered like her grandmother. One learns about Linda’s dilemma through a series of dream episodes involving her adoring grandfather, a lecherous old neighbor, and her somewhat neglectful, intellectual boyfriend, Don¬ ald, who is cast in her dream as a knight-errant and is armed with a huge phallic pencil. After the grandmother’s terrifying revelations, Linda puts aside her life of daydreams about men in favor of a serious, physical relationship. She proposes to Donald that they put aside their somewhat platonic relationship and become lovers, provided that he is prepared to be a genuinely strong man to match the strong woman she is determined to become. Staged in October 1969 at the Louis Theatre in Chicago, The Monster departs from Milner’s two previous plays by combining the theme of black manhood with the question of political leadership on a black college campus. The action takes the form of a satirical charade in which an academic dean is subjected to a deprogramming experiment in which he is given a truth serum by militant stu¬ dents. The unmasking here is aided by a demon¬ stration of the dean’s bizarre Black Identity kit com¬ posed of such items as a false chest and false testi¬ cles, confirming Milner’s mastery of absurdist the¬ ater techniques. By the end of the 1960s, Ron Milner had established himself as a skillful craftsman and a compelling dramatist as well as a forceful spokes¬ man on behalf of the aesthetic and economic inde¬ pendence of the black playwright. While his output

203

Ron Milner

DLB 38

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