Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II 9780814708408

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Staging Faith

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Staging Faith

Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

Craig R. Prentiss

a NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in Craig Prentiss, “‘Terrible Laughing God’: Challenging Divine Justice in African American Antilynching Plays, 1916–1945,” ed. Anne P. Rice, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 18 (Summer 2008): 177–214. References to Internet Websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Prentiss, Craig R.   Staging faith : religion and African American theater from the Harlem renaissance to World War II / Craig R. Prentiss.        pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8147-0795-1 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-0808-8 (pb : alk. paper)  1.  African American theater—History—20th century. 2.  American drama—African American authors—History and criticism. 3.  Theater—Religious aspects. 4.  Religion in literature.  I. Title.   PN2270.A35P74 2013   792.089’96073—dc23 2013018429 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For the boys in my life: Peter Brett Prentiss Ben and Cole

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 Setting the Stage

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2 New Territory

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3 Lynching and the Faraway God

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4 Caught within the Shadow

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5 Blackness in the Image of God

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Conclusion

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List of Acronyms Notes Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

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Illustrations

2.1 Program for the Krigwa Players Little Theatre, 1926

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3.1 Angelina Weld Grimké

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3.2 Georgia Douglas Johnson

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3.3 Regina Andrews

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3.4 Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

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3.5 Mulatto

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4.1 May Miller

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5.1 Owen Dodson

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Preface and Acknowledgments

In early 1997, my father sent me a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates juxtaposed August Wilson’s vision for an autonomous African American theater with a vibrant tradition of fairly lowbrow, melodramatic plays touring the country attracting large black audiences, sometimes grossing several million dollars. My father forwarded the article to me because he knew of my academic interest in questions of racial identity, and because theater is in my family’s DNA. In 2009, my father retired after nearly four decades as an actor and theater professor at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Through my early twenties, I weighed the prospect of attempting an acting career (and like many academics, I continue seeing myself as a frustrated actor). I met my wife, Shana, doing summer stock, and she continues inspiring high school students as a talented theater teacher. On my mother’s side, my cousins include Barbara Heliodora, a renowned Brazilian director, critic, and scholar. Roberto Athayde is a prolific playwright whose Miss Margarida’s Way earned Estelle Parsons a Tony nomination. Patricia Scott Bueno, Dudu Sandroni, and Paula Sandroni have all dedicated their lives to the Brazilian stage. I take great pride in my family’s theatrical exploits. For these reasons, my father’s sending me Gates’s article on African American theater did not seem out of the ordinary. However, something in the article caught my eye. Gates focused on a play entitled My Grandmother Prayed for Me. The play was not high art (Gates said it “makes ‘Good Times’ look like Strindberg”), but it was clearly a theological narrative. It told the story of a grandmother struggling to raise her drug-addled daughter and two grandsons. Based on Gates’s description, the play focused on bringing them “back to God” and included rousing gospel songs. Audience members cried out “Hallelujah!” and “Testify!” as characters delivered impassioned pleas for living their lives “right for the Lord.”1 Gates suggested that the play was fairly standard fare for the theatrical tours he was describing, so I wondered what scholarly work had been done on the topic. Very slowly, over the following months and years, I researched what had been published that grappled with these scripts from the perspective of their religious messages (“religious” in the context of this study will refer to practices, beliefs, and social organizations authorized by appeals to the supernatural). I found nothing. In the process, I started picking up scripts by African American authors, only to find religious themes being front and >>

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Center for Research in Black Culture and Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Beinecke Library and Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library supported my research with a Billops-Hatch Fellowship, and Randall Burkett was a stunningly welcoming host during my time there. My home institution, Rockhurst University, supported me with two summer Presidential Grants and a sabbatical that funded both writing and several research trips. An Individual Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion was especially helpful during my work on antilynching plays. Research and writing for this book were supported by both a Summer Stipend and a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Several friends and colleagues took the time to read sections of this book at various stages of its production, or engage in discussions that helped my writing. These include Shana Prentiss, Jim Jeffries, Randy Petilos, Tom Ward, Robert Vigliotti, Bill Stancil, Daniel Stramara, John Kerrigan, Dan Martin, Pete Bicak, Cynthia Cartwright, Kate Nicolai, Renee Michael, and Pellom McDaniels III. A very special thanks goes out to Gerry Butters, who took the time to read the manuscript while lying on the beach in Hawaii! Judith Stephens gave me good advice in the early days of my research. Feedback on conference papers dealing with dimensions of this book from Anthony Pinn and Barbara Savage was especially appreciated, as were the insightful criticisms of Peter Rachleff and the anonymous readers provided by NYU Press. Many thanks to Laura Bryon at Donnelly College, my friend Mike Zogry, and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas for inviting me to share my research with them. Their questions and suggestions were invaluable, especially those of Randal Jelks. If ever an entire field of study owed a significant portion of its existence to the toil of one individual, the field of African American theater history is indebted to the tireless efforts of James V. Hatch. Professor Hatch and his wonderful wife, Camille Billops, welcomed me into their Manhattan home, which houses a massive collection (much of which has now been moved to Emory University). Professor Hatch was always quick to respond to my annoying queries over the past several years, and I think it is fair to say that he paved the way for me and many other students of African American theater history. Several dear friends housed me during my research trips. These include Jason and Betsy Bernstein, Christian and Mindy Harvat, Jeremy and Kerry Sclar, Renee Sentilles, Roger and Murm Sherman, Mike and Liz Yeager, and

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of “Help us Lawd,” “Tell ’em brother!,” “Amen,” and other scripted lines intended to be heard by the audience as spontaneous bursts of emotion. After an emotional crescendo, 1st Minister descends upon his congregation, collection plate in hand, hauling in the cash as they strike up a chorus of the old spiritual “Bye and Bye.” The white Boy confirms the depiction was precisely what he himself experienced at Mandy’s church. The white Girl is shocked by the “primitive” nature of the scene, while the Boy reiterates that “Negroes are primitive people.” Yet his prejudices run beyond an acceptance of stereotypes to a level of such contempt he declares President Lincoln was wrong to free the slaves. His animosity, it turns out, stems from an encounter with Mandy’s young son, who shined shoes to earn money. Her son stood up to the white Boy, who had called him “Sambo.” When the white Boy refused to pay him for the shine, the black child stole the money and ran off.7 “Now we’re getting somewhere!” the voice over the loudspeaker interjects. “Negroes are black! They’re happy people, because they like to dance. They’re very religious. And they’re little black thieves.” Shortly thereafter, the play adopts a somber tone as we follow the young “Bootblack” to Mandy’s home. It is a profoundly dysfunctional home, where Mandy struggles to keep order and bring up each child “like a Christian,” only to be rebuffed by her children’s rage. Their rage is spawned by a culture that degrades them at every turn, from the violent racists they escaped in the South, to the white teachers who called them “apes,” to the employers who refused to hire them because of their color. The family has taken whatever steps necessary to survive, including prostitution for one of Mandy’s daughter’s. Yet their overriding concern is the illness of Mandy’s youngest daughter, who is on the verge of death and needs to be hospitalized. It is through this circumstance that we learn of the appalling effects of racism at Newark’s City Hospital.8 With the stereotype that blacks are innately happy effectively shattered, Hughes Allison sets out to convince the audience that African American religion resists simplistic characterization as well. The 1st Minister makes an appearance in Mandy’s home but is greeted with anything but the zealous and seemingly blind faith depicted earlier in the play. While Mandy remains the 1st Minister’s defender, her children pay him little respect. “We ain’t got no Ark to ride out this flood [of troubles]. And Reverend, you ain’t breaking your back to git us one either!” says one of her children. When 1st Minister protests that he has “come here to hep you-all,” Mandy’s eldest daughter retorts with a sarcastic “Is that so!” Contemptuously, she says: “Well, I’m going to tell you, Ma, and all the rest of you . . . we need more than prayer.” Later in the scene, upon expressing his indignation with the racism at City

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It would be another five years before Newark City Hospital hired its first African American staff member.12 Whether Hughes Allison’s play had any measurable impact on galvanizing the movement for the hospital’s integration is difficult to know. Still, that Allison saw fit to dedicate a significant portion of his script, aimed squarely at demanding justice to redress employment discrimination at a hospital, to exploring popular conceptions of African American religious life is noteworthy. “What is a Negro?” was the question that guided It’s Midnight over Newark. Could it have been answered to the satisfaction of Allison and his audience without dealing with religion? And what did Allison hope to get across in his attempt to undermine the stereotype that all African Americans placed total faith in their ministers and engaged in highly emotional religious practices focused on otherworldly rewards? Allison was born in South Carolina before moving to Newark as an elevenyear-old in 1919. His mother was a concert pianist, and his grandfather had been a Reconstruction era judge. Allison himself, one of the few nonwhites on campus, graduated with degrees in English and history from the Swedish Lutheran Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey, before pursuing his career as a writer. These details suggest his own religious experience placed him at some distance from the “jackleg” preacher and the wailing “lower class” congregation he described in the first act of the play. The solemn processional of black Episcopalians was far more consistent with Allison’s own exposure to Christianity and the image he hoped to project. A preference for order over “chaos,” for restraint over emotion, for the three-point sermon over an ad-libbed rendition of call-and-response was in keeping with the religious experiences of many African Americans with an upbringing and educational level similar to Allison’s own, and the black playwrights of this period were culled largely from these very circles.13 To understand Allison’s felt need to address religion when answering the question “What is a Negro?” and his desire to problematize popular conceptions of African American religious life, we need to situate It’s Midnight over Newark in its context at the intersection of profound intellectual, artistic, and demographic changes that had taken place in the decades preceding its performance, months shy of America’s entry into World War II. By doing so in the pages that follow, we will see that plays have been a vital site for conveying and contesting various theological perspectives within African American communities. Plays can be understood as many things, but at one level they are arguments—arguments for what the world is or what the world should

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these scripts explicitly promoted a humanistic worldview, and in a few rare cases, a post-Christian perspective. Presenting God as a distant, passive observer to human suffering (especially African American suffering), or even questioning the very existence of God, was evident most commonly in plays dealing with the crisis of lynching. Furthermore, playwrights were concerned with exposing and chastising beliefs and attitudes they deemed irrational, antimodern, and superstitious, whether rooted in Christian traditions or African religious customs as these authors understood them. Education was typically presented as the antidote for irrationality. While plays interrogating troublesome features of religion far outnumbered those that did not, a handful of scripts did evangelize a Christian message, sometimes chiding secularism directly. More common were plays that creatively adapted biblical stories, offering interpretations aimed at racial uplift. Notably, these were often written by playwrights known to be agnostic. Playscripts come into being through interaction between individual authors and the cultures they inhabit. Characters are developed and plots are conceived in relation to the myriad social elements that shape an author, including the class dynamics, gender identities, racial hierarchies, commercial trends, prevailing practices of artistic form, memes transmitted through the contemporary zeitgeist, and the countless human encounters impacting the author before a script is composed. Sometimes scripts intend to deliver a message or make a point (in the manner W. E. B. Du Bois described when he spoke of theater as a form of “propaganda”).15 At other times, playwrights, like other writers, reject claims of messages altogether. Instead, they understand their work to be driven by the characters they imagine, developing plotlines only as an outgrowth of staying “true” to the characters they create. In other words, some playwrights might scoff at the claim that any message, bias, or normative worldview shapes their work. Yet, this study proceeds under the assumption that all forms of cultural production have the potential to shed light on the culture in which they were produced. It would appear that in only a few cases, addressing religion was the primary motive for writing the scripts discussed here. Still, as thoughtful individuals, both conscious of the many ways religion functioned in the broader African American community and aware of the stereotypes that had formed among whites about black religious life (though perhaps not always aware of the stereotypes they themselves had formed about black religious life), these playwrights signal religious concerns in their scripts, even if unintentionally at times. Only in the past two decades has scholarship on early twentieth-century African American theater begun to garner the attention it deserves, though it still commands far less interest than plays written after World War II. On

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with which the public, performative features of African American Christian churches operated did as well. As the “unchallenged center of black community life,” churches were the preeminent site for autonomous collective action.19 “In the absence of access to certain kinds of freedom and power,” Judith Weisenfeld reminds us, “the formation of the black religious community gave many people the experience of other sorts of economic and spiritual liberty.”20 As such, church affairs garnered the attention of African Americans beyond their walls. Inevitably, competing visions of what the religious lives of an “uplifted race” might look like clashed.21 It’s Midnight over Newark By the time Hughes Allison’s It’s Midnight over Newark was performed at the Mosque Theatre in 1941, Allison had been bequeathed a complicated legacy that shaped the contours of his play. This book tells the story of that legacy. It argues that while Allison could have chosen to answer the question “What is a Negro?” without addressing religion, doing so not only would have neglected a significant aspect of African American culture but also, more precisely, would have neglected a central element in the theatrical representation of African American life in the years leading up to his play. Allison confronts more than two decades’ worth of white playwrights (and some black playwrights as well) almost reflexively linking highly emotional, loud, and seemingly chaotic religious services to African American life on the stage, wishing instead to present another possibility for black identity. Allison’s desire to counter the popular link between black religion and unrestrained emotion, irrationality, and a fixation with a life to come at the expense of the transformation of this world in the here and now places him in harmony with many African American playwrights writing for a quarter of a century before him. While hardly a homogeneous collection of individuals—diverse in their interests, beliefs, and artistic sensibilities—these playwrights were deeply affected by concerns common to educated social elites within the broader African American population. Among those concerns was the fear that certain ways of being religious posed a threat to the long-term advancement of the race. Allison’s choice to address religion while signaling wariness about the baggage that often accompanied it builds on a pattern evident in scripts by black playwrights that has been largely ignored by scholars until now. The pages that follow survey a range of artistic responses to religion by African American playwrights active in the years before World War II. The first chapter provides the necessary context for making sense of these plays

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direct competition with theaters, movie houses, and dance halls for the attention of their younger members.6 As conservative churches struggled against theater, many theologically progressive churches sought ways to connect with the theatrical realm to benefit their congregations and keep young members engaged. Some came to see theater as a potential partner in improving the lot of the working class. One minister explained theater could be “useful not only in affording tired brain-workers the very best recreation possible to them when they live in towns and cities, but also affording intellectual stimulus of a moderate kind, and often stirring the heart and quickening the emotions by noble ideals, nobly presented.” While this description bore little resemblance to the reality of most commercial theater, it pointed to new opportunities for partnership.7 Black playwrights writing by the 1920s inherited this history of tensions between theater and church, as well as the bridges opened to theater by progressive congregations. Yet the scripts they wrote reflected a range of social forces, not the least of which was the changing class dynamics within the broader African American community. And nothing impacted these dynamics as profoundly as the Great Migration. The massive influx of southern blacks into northern cities forever altered the trajectory of both artistic and religious life among African Americans. Therefore, making sense of the manner in which religion was portrayed in early twentieth-century African American theater requires familiarity with the class relations affecting the lives of black playwrights, the state of theatrical development within the African American community, and the important religious movements during this era. The Great Migration through the Lens of Class Northern black elites had always seen themselves as responsible for leading southern blacks out of their oppression, but they were unprepared for hundreds of thousands of these migrants arriving at their doorsteps. Much has been written about the disorientation felt by these new city dwellers, stripped of familiar surroundings and left to carve their own niches in an unfamiliar terrain. The process of establishing new social networks involved extensive experimentation, as cities such as Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, became laboratories dedicated to reconstructing not only personal identities but racial identities as well. Migrants provided new audiences for the arts while flooding theaters and cabarets with fresh talent. New businesses were opened, new political alliances and opportunities emerged, and the energy migrants brought with them created

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“robbed of their due part of ” the educated, entrepreneurial, and upwardly mobile African American population by 1910.12 Bearing in mind that the African American elite rarely, if ever, possessed the economic security of the wealthiest whites, the impact this prosperous subsection of blacks had upon shaping the social and cultural order of their new racially defined communities was disproportionate to their numbers. In Washington, DC, for instance, many blacks were distinguished precisely for conformity to “Victorian values.” Building on the work of scholars like Constance McLaughlin Green, Wilson J. Moses argued that Washington’s African American population, replete as it was with figures of status and accomplishment, has been largely ignored because it failed to “conform to vulgar perceptions of black culture.” Being visible to historians required that black culture conform “to the patterns of urbane exoticism found in jazz and the blues,” Moses insisted, that were measured “solely in terms of their usefulness in undermining any vestiges of Victorian civilization that survived.” Yet precisely these survivals characterized the culture of many who greeted the new arrivals from the South after 1916.13 Though Harlem was decidedly more bohemian and volatile than Washington leading up to the Great Migration, it had attracted a thriving professional population reflecting the values common to the privileged classes. This Victorian ethos developed in Western Europe as a way of mitigating the unprecedented changes to its ancient social order during industrialization. Predictably, conformity to the rules circumscribed by this ethos loomed large in efforts by black political, cultural, and economic leaders to adapt to the sensibilities of the white elite. In this environment, Robert Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, and other newspapers published weekly “guidelines for migrant behavior” by 1917, including rules regulating language, clothing, and personal carriage. Abbott’s desire to shape the behavior of newly arrived southerners reflected the unease with which they were greeted by the long-established African American population in these cities. As Wallace Best described the situation in Chicago, “Longtime residents felt at liberty to scrutinize every aspect of migrant speech, dress, and behavior.”14 This tendency toward scrutiny is reflected in playscripts as well. Celebrating markers of refinement, including speech, dress, and emotional reserve, was a response to white supremacist culture whose portrait of blacks onstage, and in literature, popular magazines, and film, typically degenerated into the grotesque features of minstrelsy. Kevin Gaines has explained how qualities of the uplift ideology that took hold of the black elite are best read as rejections of minstrel characterizations and of a racial order guided by social Darwinist certainty that blacks were inherently incapable of

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who had been reared and educated within a “genteel tradition” whose loss he lamented, and later generations that had migrated north.16 African Americans elites were, in the aggregate, a combination of southern “mulattoes who assimilated the morals and manners of the slaveholding aristocracy” mixed with a “nucleus,” as David Levering Lewis described it, of free blacks, descended from tiny colonial populations concentrated in Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Providence, Rhode Island, gradually augmented by Underground Railroad fugitives and, after the Civil War, by Southerners with some or all of the endowments of pedigree, professional distinction, good morals, and acceptable racial admixture (that is, derived from antebellum liaisons).

A scan of names among the leadership rosters in organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) only confirms Lewis’s generalization regarding their social location. “Notwithstanding debates over tactics,” Lewis reminded, “those NUL and NAACP leaders fully shared the same cultural values.”17 Before the Great Migration, those values reflected the Victorian virtues with which they were raised, emphasizing the omnipresent notion of “character” along with thrift, social status, industry, temperance, order, emotional restraint, and firmly held rules for social interaction and domestic responsibilities. Cultural historian Martin Summers has used the term “producer values” to describe Victorian virtues such as these. Yet he maintained that these values were soon superseded by the “consumer values” of a migrant middle class measuring itself by its purchasing power, possessions, leisure practices, as well as “physical and sexual virility.”18 It was precisely this shift in values that Frazier lamented in his critique of the post–World War II black middle class. Education had been the quintessential status marker among the Talented Tenth, and colleges and universities served as a cauldron for the inculcation of Puritan morality and Victorian sensibilities into the 1920s. Nearly all of the premier African American colleges, including Howard, Fisk, and Atlanta University, were founded by predominantly white Christian missionary organizations. On these campuses, “restrictions upon amusements and the profanation of the Sabbath” were the rule, while regular attendance at chapel and studying the Bible were augmented by a steady stream of guest speakers from the Young Men’s Christian Association or the Young Women’s Christian Association. Frazier observed that “the whole emphasis of these various meetings was to give students a sentimental and moral as opposed

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First, a stage theory of religion was advanced, usually articulated as religion involving the primitive/emotional (that is, the religion of blacks and dark-skinned peoples) to the rational/spiritual (that is, the religion of white Europeans and Americans). Second, this normative liberal Protestantism denigrated bodily movement or ecstatic religious experience and physical displays of various kinds. Third, it [liberal Protestantism] was a religion that was deemed scientific and hence modern.21

As a consequence of this theory, many popular strands of Christianity that developed among African Americans in the South, as well as in newly formed congregations in the North after 1916, were viewed as the antithesis of modern. African American intellectuals responded to this essentialist view of black religion with a different interpretation—no less essentialist but far less degrading. The Souls of Black Folk reveals that W. E. B. Du Bois had imbibed the romantic racialist conception that descendants of Africa were possessed of a “deep religious feeling” and represented “the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence.” Yet Du Bois was troubled by what he perceived as the emotionalism and otherworldliness of so many black churches. Though more aware of exceptions to this style than most, he frequently critiqued “The Negro Church” (a category he was instrumental in constructing) for its passivity, a trait he feared was inseparable from Christian doctrine. In its place, Du Bois envisioned a more activist church, pooling its resources for the cause of political action promoting justice. Emotionalism, however, remained subject to Du Bois’s scorn not only for violating his Victorian sense of propriety but, more important, for distracting from the social activism he hoped to cultivate in black churches. Du Bois’s contemporary Howard University sociologist Kelly Miller went so far as to argue in 1914 that the Talented Tenth needed to assert its leadership over black churches and replace its current stock of preachers: “Let none imagine that because people are ignorant and lowly, their moral and spiritual leaders do not require all discipline, learning, culture and practical wisdom that the completest education can afford.” The black clergy was possessed of the sort of ignorance “that God Himself winks at; but He will not wink at this ignorance if it is allowed to continue in the generations to come.”22 Undeniable divisions existed among African Americans as to the style and content of Christian worship. Carter Woodson traced these divisions to the late nineteenth century when, for most former slaves, “old-time religion was good enough for them.” This meant “they rejoiced to be able to sing in freedom the songs of their fathers, and deemed it a privilege to testify in ‘their

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the artistic sphere. As David Krasner explained, “The notion of authenticity mediated, to a certain degree, the conflict between science and the irrational: it valued scientific evidence, but drew its influence from the emotive effect of irrationality.”24 Not satisfied with a cultural inheritance shaped largely by the sensibilities of white missionaries, the very class of elite African Americans that had so often scorned behavioral and ideological vestiges of their enslaved southern ancestors would now turn back to the South in search of enduring features upon which they hoped to ground their own artistry. They negotiated the difficult terrain of inspiring racial pride, promoting social advancement, and cultivating wealthy (and often white) benefactors, within the constraints of a racist society. The plays examined in this study emerge from these discordant concerns. Theater and the “Negro Folk” Movement The “Negro folk” movement arose as an ideological filter that rendered the lives of southern, rural, and poor African Americans the touchstone for “authenticity” among black (and white) artists and intellectuals.25 No more vivid example of celebrating the folk exists than the 1925 publication of the influential anthology The New Negro. Alain Locke’s “Foreword” argues for “ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social change and progress, but still more in the internal world of the Negro mind and spirit.” Yet while Locke identifies the urban excitement of Harlem as “home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism,’” the artistic and intellectual gifts that flow from the “mind and spirit” of the “New Negro” are grounded instead in a folk inheritance. “Here in the very heart of the folk-spirit are the essential forces” of the New Negro, Locke insists, and “folk interpretation is truly vital and representative only in terms of these.”26 Anne Elizabeth Carroll distilled Locke’s claim as meaning that “what is truly characteristic of African American identity is sensed in the folk spirit and expressed through folk culture.”27 The markers of this culture included spirituals, “the Blues,” boisterous religiosity, dialect, conjuring, and patient suffering. Indeed, The New Negro was saturated with both images and words that sought to harness the creative and spiritual energies of the folk.28 The folk movement’s formal origins are typically traced to the founding of the British Folk-Lore Society in 1878, having as its stated mission and scope the exploration of cultural narratives and practices throughout the world. By 1880, Joel Chandler Harris’s publication of Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation generated popular interest in American folk traditions among both whites and blacks.29 The American

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English, and the priceless folk lore as the uncultured expression of illiterates,—an utterly conscious effort to forget the past, and take over, suddenly, the symbols of that culture which had so long ground their bodies and spirits in the dirt. The newer voices, at a more comfortable distance, are beginning to find a new beauty in these heritages, and new values in their own lives.32

Even in Johnson’s analysis, it is clear that the “newer voices” to which he refers are the progeny of that “generation” of letters and sophistication for whom “the uncultured expression of illiterates” stirred offense. African American folk culture came into its own only when it received the imprimatur of the Talented Tenth for whom its vernacular cadences remained a familiar but nonnative tongue. A corner had been turned, and the literati, at least, cast a new eye toward the folk. Writing in the 1950s, Frazier recalled the chilly reception that Paul Laurence Dunbar engendered when he—“the first Negro poet to treat with humor and sympathetic understanding the Negro rural folk”—utilized dialect in his work. Dunbar was castigated by black elites for his presentation of “common negroes” prior to his death in 1906. Frazier contrasted this to James Weldon Johnson’s “O Black and Unknown Bards,” which was widely celebrated after its publication in 1917. Johnson embraced the field workers who had created the spirituals—the very spirituals that had once been rejected as retrograde by the African American elite. Though debates about dialect continued to rage, the change in attitude was real.33 Notably, American theater’s first taste of the folk movement came not from African American culture but from Ireland. Actors from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre toured the United States in 1911 and 1912, commanding widespread attention and critical acclaim. A meeting between Lady Gregory, a collector of Irish folklore, and W. B. Yeats, at Lady Gregory’s home in 1898 gave birth to the Abbey Theatre. The two conspired to put the “spirit of the nation” into dramatic form, and agreed that this spirit was best captured in the depiction of Irish folk culture, including its religion.34 Though widely praised, in practice the concept sometimes drew the ire of audiences. John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World prompted riots for its violation of Victorian mores, its depiction of the rural peasantry in a fictive Irish county as being steeped in monotony and violence, and its perceived insults to the Roman Catholic Church.35 The experience illustrated the difficult struggle playwrights (both white and black) often faced when portraying the folk and folk religion (typically from the vantage point of their own higher social status), without being accused of presenting a caricature.36

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the medium for which African Americans possessed an innate gift, only the insights of African American playwrights were judged capable of eliciting black talent to the fullest. The path to Richardson’s hoped-for “Negro Drama” was fraught with tensions. The rising stars of the New Negro movement, so often weaned in the genteel embrace of their Victorian forebears, found themselves marrying their learned suspicion toward black southern culture with their emerging confidence that within the very cadences and convictions they had been conditioned to revile, existed the authentic voice of the “Negro folk.” Among the many fault lines to which these competing attitudes gave rise, religion was one of the most difficult to negotiate, precisely because of its importance to the overwhelming majority of African Americans across class and regional boundaries. Imagining a God that demanded either action or passive submission, engagement with the world or separation from it, heartfelt experience or reasoned reflection, had consequences in the here and now. Still, the challenge did not prevent playwrights from trying to address religion. Paths for the African American Theater If there was agreement among African American intellectuals and artists as to the importance of developing a “Negro theater” comparable to the Irish, Russian, Scandinavian, and Yiddish theaters that had taken root, the intent of the “Negro theater” was still contested. Theater historian Samuel A. Hay developed the now oft-repeated thesis that African American theater proceeded along two paths with distinct emphases. The first (and most dominant) path developed according to the vision of W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw drama as a method of “uplift and education.” For Du Bois, theater was a powerful means to an end: justice and full citizenship. By portraying African American humanity in its many forms onstage, instead of a series of stock characters that fulfilled white expectations and fantasies about African American identity, theater would be an important tool for changing attitudes. Having famously written, “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists,” Du Bois came to believe that for African Americans, theater’s highest purpose was served when plays were written to advance the race.42 As Hay put it, Du Bois believed that the struggle for racial equality “required that the drama show people not only as they actually were but also as they wished to be.” And as one of the most prominent patrons of young African American artists as editor of the Crisis, Du Bois carried weight.43 The playwriting contests sponsored by the Crisis, as well as

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be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. 4) Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.”47 Notwithstanding the contested nature of “what it means to be a Negro today,” this standard became a benchmark for measuring the success of African American drama for years to come, even with its potential for glossing over genuine differences in the experiences of blacks in America. Realism and the Little Theatre Movement All of this movement in the world of African American theater was spurred on by important developments in American theater as a whole. Stylistically, plays were changing, and a new theatrical world was breaking away from the pervasive melodramatic style of the late nineteenth century, and from the dominance of burlesque-extravaganza in the culture of theater, in the direction of theatrical realism. Realism sought to make theater appear indistinguishable from everyday life. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, more plays were written using the metaphor of the “fourth wall,” eschewing the traditional practice of actors delivering lines to the spectators and turning their heads toward the seats to give knowing glances or wicked grins. Instead, actors performed as if the audience were not present, interacting only with one another in a style as true to life as possible.48 The Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky, was at the vanguard of this new movement. Stanislavsky developed a performance method intended to reveal the actor’s interior life through a character. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, François Delsarte’s “scientific” attempt to create a method of acting relying on precise bodily poses, postures, and facial expressions signifying the range of human emotions had been tremendously influential (and continued to be through much of the silent film era). With Stanislavsky, however, no longer would the hyperexpressive poses aimed at conveying emotions such as joy, terror, or pain be the job of the actor. Instead, these emotions would come from within and be exposed to the audience through the actor’s living them and channeling them through a character. Yet such a performance technique demanded appropriate scripts with which to work, and the Moscow Art Theatre found them in the plays of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, often considered the originator of the realistic play.49 Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre, and André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (established in Paris in 1887 and specializing in cutting-edge plays) were distinguished by their emphasis on artistic experimentation taking precedence over commercial profitability. In America, such efforts came

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the next two decades, the most commercially successful plays dealing with African American life were typically written by white authors for the benefit of largely white audiences. Yet even while white playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, and Marc Connelly understood themselves to be writing scripts portraying African Americans in a positive light, their work reflected and promoted a range of degrading stereotypes that black artists continue to struggle against today. Sterling Brown’s influential 1933 article, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” distilled the history of African American treatment in white literature and plays into seven stereotypes: “(1) The Contented Slave, (2) The Wretched Freeman, (3) The Comic Negro, (4) The Brute Negro, (5) The Tragic Mulatto, (6) The Local Color Negro, and (7) The Exotic Primitive.” To Brown’s list, playwright Randolph Edmonds added “the Mammy,” “the Oversexed female or vampire” (whom Edmonds notes was “usually mulatto”), “the Shiftless Negro Servant,” the “Happy-go-Lucky Male,” and three stereotypes directly relevant to religion: the “Superstitious Male or Female,” “The Witch Doctor or Conjurer,” and the “Dialect Speaking Preacher or Elder.” At times, these stereotypes would overlap in a character, but in the hands of white authors, deviation from at least some of these clichés was rare.54 “Brutus Jones” in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones (1920) blends “the exotic primitive” with the “the brute Negro,” descending into a savage state as he escapes to the jungle of the small Caribbean island where he became a dictator.55 Not long after this production, O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) featured “Jim,” a highly educated and sophisticated African American, defying many stereotypes. But his marriage to a childhood friend—a far less sophisticated white woman named “Ella”—prompted troubling developments. Ella’s fixation with Jim’s blackness becomes the hallmark of her insanity. The play ends with both characters reverting to preadolescent states, and Jim abandoning his dreams of being a lawyer to remain, instead, her “little boy.”56 Paul Green was perhaps the white author most widely praised by African Americans for his portrayal of black characters, but even he could not escape resorting to stereotypes, as Owen Dodson observed when noting that Green “portrays the no count darkie in his The No-Count Boy as another rider of dreams.”57 Moreover, Green’s plays were almost uniformly grim in their depiction of black hopelessness in a white racist culture. African American religion was given a problematic treatment in plays by white authors as well. Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures (1930), later made into a Hollywood film, reeked of sentimentality for plantation life as rural African Americans possessed a childlike faith in a heaven resembling a fish fry. The play and the subsequent film sparked widespread criticism

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in Washington, DC. It was promoted by the “Medical Review of Reviews” as an authentic portrayal of social pathology and was deemed so shocking that nobody under twenty years old was admitted to the theater.63 Almost as soon as the play began, the audience was treated to an “old coal-black Negress” chanting concocted spirituals built around phrases like “trouble in my soul” and “Devil gwine to git yo.” The refrains were peppered throughout the play’s duration. Goat Alley also featured another “very old Negro” who is described as “patriarchal-Calvinistic,” though he is deathly afraid of “evil spirits” and keeps them away by sprinkling salt on his doorsteps (presumably an old conjuring trick). Nan Bagby Stephens—a white, southern woman—featured gullible, simple, black Christian believers falling for a con artist and rapist preacher in her 1923 play, Roseanne, at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Stephens believed herself to be presenting an authentic portrait of African American life. “Maybe it was because my slave owning ancestors were fond of their darkies and treated them as individuals,” she once stated, “that I see them like that. It seems to me that no one, not even the negroes themselves, can get the perspective reached through generations of understanding such as we inherited.”64 The play was adapted in 1925 by the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux for Body and Soul, emphasizing “scathing criticism of black clergy.”65 The 1927 stage version of DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, cowritten with his wife, Dorothy, years before George Gershwin adapted it for the opera Porgy and Bess, was built around spirituals. One reviewer wrote that “music is literally woven into the entire texture of the atmosphere and action. From the first curtain to the end, the Negroes are singing in joy and sorrow. To eliminate the singing were to rob the production of its power.”66 Gershwin’s adaptation helped cement the image of the essentially faithful African American with songs like “O Lawd I’m on My Way,” and “Oh, Doctor Jesus.” Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom, playing on Broadway in the same year as Porgy, was also laced with spirituals, as well as a moving, impromptu sermon by the play’s protagonist. Green’s 1934 play, Roll Sweet Chariot, was entirely chanted in the style of a spiritual. Russian immigrant Em Jo Basshe’s play Earth, also premiering in 1927, was inspired by Basshe’s conviction that “superstition . . . determined the peculiar religious experience of the broad mass of black folk.” The result was a plot revolving around the battle between a Christian congregation and the “heathen gawd” of a Voodoo practitioner, yet the play’s core message was that the application of superstition by both Christians and their opponents to overcome poverty and suffering was misguided.67

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what came to be known as fundamentalism. In response to the attention the trial garnered, America’s largest black religious organization, the National Baptist Convention, passed an antievolution resolution. The A.M.E. Church Review, mouthpiece of the second-largest African American denomination, took a hard stance against evolution despite a significant number of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) ministers having “embraced theistic evolution enthusiastically.”69 At the same time, as historian Jeffrey Moran has shown, secular black intellectuals utilized the Scopes trial as an opportunity to highlight negative features of southern culture and located white southern resistance to evolution in their fear of science’s exposing the absurd fiction of “racial purity.”70 Nevertheless, as a leading black newspaper summarized it in August 1925, African Americans were “by far and large, fundamentalists in religion.”71 As the twentieth century began, Baptists and Methodists dominated the African American religious scene, with Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Congregationalist churches containing a disproportionate number of the educated, business, and professional classes among their ranks. The most significant change in the next three decades was the growth of Holiness and Pentecostal churches among blacks, especially in northern cities beginning with the Great Migration.72 In practice, Holiness and Pentecostal churches possessed a separatist streak, often encouraging members to avoid interaction with a larger culture that most deemed both sinful and irredeemable. Notably, the growth of Holiness and Pentecostal churches in the North coincided with the gentrification of many Baptist and Methodist churches that had previously catered to the lowest economic tier of African Americans prior to the Great Migration.73 The turmoil of the Great Migration also ushered in many religious movements that deviated substantially from prevailing Christian teachings. These new movements attracted public and scholarly attention disproportionate to their actual hold on the African American population, but they were significant as sites for religious experimentation. Among the most influential was Father Divine’s interracial Peace Mission movement, which proclaimed Christ’s second coming in the person of Father Divine and the possibility of eternal life on earth. Bishop Charles M. “Daddy” Grace’s United House of Prayer for All People grew out of the Pentecostal movement’s faith healing. Adorned by the flamboyant personality of “Sweet Daddy Grace” himself, fire-hose baptisms and public parades distinguished the church’s ministry. Prophet F. S. Cherry’s Black Hebrew association was one of many organizations to “reclaim” Jewish identity for African Americans, much as Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple reclaimed Black Muslim identity.

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absurd. Salvation was a gift of God’s grace bestowed on individuals; it was not a reward for the collective activities of a population committed to achieving justice, equality, and peace on this earth, they maintained. The Social Gospel posed a challenge within many Protestant denominational bodies and created fissures that were never fully healed. Although the divisions were theological, they frequently manifested themselves along class lines, with elites—who saw themselves at the vanguard of racial progress—being far more amenable to the idea that by uplifting the less fortunate members of their race, they were fulfilling God’s will. The Great Migration also threw into stark relief the differences between the theologies both of those clergy educated and trained for the ministry—particularly in the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Episcopalian denominations—and of those untrained ministers whose authority rested solely upon the faith of their flocks instead of the imprimatur of denominational authorities. Milton Sernett cautioned that generalizations linking ministerial education levels to denomination are difficult to sustain. A correlation between church size and income level would have proved far more accurate, with larger and wealthier denominations demanding a welleducated ministry.78 Denominations like the AME Church, which had once thrived on an egalitarian approach to the ministry, shifted gears in the late 1800s under the stewardship of figures like Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, who not only derided uneducated clergy but insisted upon a more solemn and orderly church service than was typical among black Methodists in the South. On the eve of the Great Migration, it was not uncommon for northern ministers to brag about their services being “as quiet and dignified as the most dignified of our white churches and white ministers.”79 In addition to the division between educated and uneducated ministers, another education gap—that between the congregation and the clergy—also arose during this time period. Educated, professional African Americans were feared to be increasingly indifferent to Christianity, as were their children. By the 1930s, the alarm bells were sounding all over. Harry V. Richardson, then a chaplain at Tuskegee Institute and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, penned a diatribe against the New Negro’s relationship to Christianity. In Richardson’s eyes, despite continued prejudice, the New Negro was distinguished by “greater opportunities for higher education and cultural development.” Richardson, himself a man in his thirties, suggested that despite its opportunities, his generation was soft, overly focused on social prestige, and lazy. He went on to divide the New Negro into three prevailing types with respect to their religion. He described the “Shammists” as a subgroup of New

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situation in the Crisis guided by the same assumptions as Thirkield. “Antichurch” attitudes emerging among young African Americans resulted not from their “questioning the validity of religion” so much as their “questioning the value and validity of the Christian church.” An increase in a “vitalized and intelligent” ministry was a necessity to stem the antichurch tide within the growing ranks of college-educated African Americans.84 Nearly all the African American playwrights in early twentieth century could be counted among the ranks of the college educated. As we shall see, a disproportionate number of them were also alienated from Christian churches. Whether these writers were raised in the North, as most were, or transplanted from the South, the Great Migration impacted the way they saw the world. As a group, their class status rendered the religious lives of so many new city dwellers foreign and even a bit threatening to the urban black social elites who collectively hoped, along with Willis Richardson, for the establishment of a thriving “Negro Drama.” Paradoxically, in the very people whose theological outlook and worship style they saw as antagonistic to the advancement of the race, these playwrights located an “authentic” expression of black life in America. Anxious to paint a different picture of African American life than that being painted by white playwrights, these authors utilized many of the same markers of black religiosity within a very different framework. Their scripts often spoke directly to African American audiences about religion’s place in black life, even while at times satisfying the expectations of white audiences with the music, expression, and cadences of an approach to religion that these authors were often simultaneously undermining. As the following chapter will illustrate, this early generation of black playwrights succeeded in creating space for a criticism of religious thought and practice grounded in humanism and conditioned by the concerns of the African American intelligentsia.

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2 New Territory “As long as our bellies are empty, We will follow any God.” —“Leader,” in Owen Vincent Dodson’s Divine Comedy

Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s book Setting Down the Sacred Past examines Protestantism’s role in fostering an “Afro-Christian consciousness” by looking at “historical narratives” produced by African Americans through the nineteenth century. After 1900, however, she writes that “one cannot avoid the feeling something fundamental had shifted.” Elaborating, she continues: “What seems most novel, in retrospect, is that when the advocates of the New Negro staked their claims in the 1910s and 1920s, they did so by self-consciously rejecting the Christian piety of their forebears.”1 Although we discuss some exceptions to Maffly-Kipp’s assertion in the final chapter of this book, something had clearly changed. From the vantage point of 1938, Benjamin Mays pointed to “new territory” in African American theological discourse by the Harlem Renaissance, characterized by “a strong tendency to doubt God’s value to the Negro” in the struggle for rights and prosperity. Black writers increasingly portrayed God as “having outlived His usefulness,” sometimes even rejecting God’s existence. Mays wisely placed these tendencies in the context of post–World War I disillusionment but emphasized that circumstances for African Americans added a distinctive layer to the frustration and doubt—a layer revealing itself most vividly in the arts.2 The carnage of World War I stifled the moral certainty, optimism, and confidence in social progress typifying many Americans in the years before the conflict. Malaise, dissatisfaction, and a sense the ground had permanently shifted marked the popular fiction of the postwar era. For the economically prosperous, consumerism and revelry filled the void. While conservative Christians had always been sufficiently tethered to the doctrine of original sin to be wary of the Progressive Era’s quasi-utopian expectations in light of social change and scientific advancement, theological liberals were especially disoriented by the war’s horror. The nascent fields of sociology, economics, and political science once fed Social Gospellers as they read >> 39

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and churches by and large did not correct this.” A pervasive sense that black churches lacked the means to adequately address their challenges reinforced alienation from Christianity for some. “What [churches] offered instead,” writes Pinn, “involved theological slight of the issue, wrapped in an otherworldly orientation and the rhetoric of spiritual renewal above all else.”10 The hopes of those who journeyed north in the Great Migration soon gave way to grim realities of high unemployment on the heels of a postwar labor surplus in the cities. Even when unemployment improved by 1923, African Americans continued struggling for adequate wages, contributing to high levels of urban poverty.11 Black economic gains in the latter half of the twenties would be shattered by the Great Depression as the decade closed. Important demographic changes with respect to labor and class marked these decades. Clergy had dominated the African American professional ranks in the South before the Great Migration, constituting as much as 50 percent of that subgroup.12 Educational opportunities and migration diversified the professional classes. With females constituting only a tiny minority of the clergy’s overall membership, the proportion of black male clergy reached its peak near 1930 but dropped by roughly 35 percent a decade later. Alternative career paths for educated African Americans in fields like teaching and medicine expanded.13 One study observed that “by the 1930s . . . occupations that provided ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’ leadership functions for the community” declined as “more ‘secular’ and ‘technical’ occupations such as medicine and law” rose considerably. These changes diminished the prestige and social status of clergy. Furthermore, the African American elite became considerably less southern by the 1930s, with a higher proportion of its ranks being born in the North and Midwest. Religiously, these social elites were far more likely to belong to traditionally white churches than their African American cohorts. Another study found that affiliation with predominantly white denominations including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics accounted for just over 40 percent of the black bourgeoisie during the 1930s, with Baptists at only 26 percent, despite being the largest African American denomination.14 Though critical of conservative Christianity, Carter Woodson was troubled by the growing divide between college-educated blacks and the masses of black Christians. In his 1933 classic, The Mis-education of the Negro, Woodson bemoaned: One of the most striking evidences of the failure of higher education among Negroes is their estrangement from the masses, the very people upon whom they must eventually count for carrying on a program of progress. Of this, the Negro churches supply the most striking illustration.

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profits.”18 Randolph’s accusation may have been fueled by the fact that churches (especially large ones) were often saddled with high mortgages, necessitating an endless stream of fund-raisers.19 Though Randolph’s cynicism was common among secular African Americans, profit motive was a charge continually leveled by many through the years, especially during the Great Depression. Of course, despite these challenges, Christian churches remained the dominant institutional influence in African American communities during this period. A burgeoning humanist movement was largely limited to intellectual elites and a small number of working-class radicals. Moreover, as Anthony Pinn explained, African American humanism had a distinctive flavor in light of Christianity’s importance to the prevailing black corporate identity. Despite sharing the tendencies of European humanism (confidence in the centrality of the individual, confidence in human potential, suspicion of supernatural claims, and a growing disbelief in God), African American humanism was distinguished by “an appreciation for African American cultural production and a perception of traditional forms of black religiosity as having cultural importance as opposed to any type of ‘cosmic’ authority.”20 The simple fact of black Christianity’s power in the community “required an understated rejection, a truce—of sorts—with the notion of God.” Pinn stressed, however, that “this truce emerges not because of a personal reversal of opinion, but rather as a means of maintaining a connection with a communal reality,” pervasive among African Americans. As Juan M. Floyd-Thomas phrased it, when discussing humanism among African Americans, the term is better understood not “as a repudiation of faith” but instead as a “redirection of faith in the work of human heads and hands rather than heavenly help to resolve the problems of the world.”21 Since the binding mythology of the vast majority of African Americans was deeply rooted in religion, then the continued use of that mythology’s vocabulary—its God talk—was paramount to one’s capacity for identifying with and negotiating one’s status among African Americans. Critiques leveled against elements of Christianity in the plays examined in this chapter generally support Pinn’s contention that such a “truce” existed, though more radical critiques emerging by the 1930s put that truce to a test. If there is a trajectory evident in the plays critical of Christianity written during this time frame, it is a move from a concern with false morality and hypocrisy in the earlier years toward a deeper questioning of the value of Christianity to African Americans at all. Plays by Eulalie Spence and Willis Richardson interrogate religious hypocrisy, sometimes playfully, sometimes with intensity. Andrew Burris’s You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in asks whether authentic morality can stand separately from the church, and the more radical plays of Langston Hughes and Owen Dodson challenge core Christian claims.

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Maza assumes the meeting has been called to address her father’s alcohol abuse. When accused of pregnancy, she attacks Aunt Cassie and cries, “You hateful, evil-minded old hag! You sneak! How dar yuh say such a thing ’bout me!” The inquisitors are undeterred. Parson Williams invokes the prophet Isaiah, pleading with Maza to “put away de evil of yuh doin’s from befo’ mah eyes,” and the council enthusiastically responds with hearty “amens” and “glory glory [s].” The scene transforms into a lively church service, which Spence continues for six pages. A blend of hellfire, brimstone, and the hope of redemption marks Parson Williams’s inspired preaching, working his flock into a frenzy. Maza is stunned, while her two young suitors’ jealousy is piqued.32 The scene’s chaos is deflated when Maza’s “Mom” arrives, bewildered at the spectacle before her. Mom’s sister, Aunt Cassie, shamelessly levels the indictments. However, Mom reveals that she is the pregnant one. This possibility never crossed the minds of the accusers, who sit in stunned disbelief. Parson Williams, eager to deflect blame from himself, angrily lashes out at Aunt Cassie for bringing them “here ter-night on a fool’s errand!” The others smell blood and join the parson’s attack. Mom, however, with “biting sarcasm,” refuses to indulge their self-forgiveness. “Sorry tuh spile yuh pleasure!” Mom presses the council, “Reckon yuh’s had a pretty good time, ain’t yuh? Oh, yuh needn’t trubble ’splainin! Yuh’s done yuh dooty as yuh seen it, Gawd help yuh!” The embarrassed inquisitors pick up their camp chairs and file out in silence.33 As Mom comforts her daughter and directs scorn toward her “fool” husband, Doug, the family hears a song being sung by the members of the church council as they walk in the distance: “Ah met mah sister de odder night / She call me by mah name. / An’ jes’ as soon’s mah back wuz turned / She scandalize mah name. / Yuh call dat a sister? / No! No!” As the curtain falls, we are left with the intriguing double entendre of the word “sister.” Mom’s sister, Aunt Cassie, betrayed her trust and the trust of her niece by meddling. Still, we cannot overlook that “sister” also alludes to the churchwomen who have appointed themselves judge and jury over the personal affairs of this family. Fool’s Errand taps into the ritual complaints that churches frequently serve as cauldrons for gossip and backbiting.34 Willis Richardson and the Callous Church Few playwrights were as influential in the development of African American theater as Willis Richardson, distinctive for his willingness to investigate the internal dynamics of black life in America. Theater historian Leslie Catherine Sanders grouped Richardson among those who “desired not only

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choice is uncertain, though we know that Richardson’s connection with Christianity deteriorated over time. His descendants note that by his death in 1977, Richardson was an avowed atheist. Though his politics leaned toward socialism, so much so that he was forced to sign a loyalty oath after falling under the suspicion of his employers in 1947, we cannot know if his rejection of Christianity grew primarily from his politics. His clear break with Roman Catholicism, however, can be pinpointed to the very year he signed the loyalty oath. His daughter Noel committed suicide, and the Richardson family’s parish, Saint Augustine’s (affiliated with an order of African American nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence), refused to bury her. While his daughter Shirley succeeded in persuading another Roman Catholic church to take Noel’s remains, the event crystallized Richardson’s alienation from the church.39 As we shall see, both in this chapter and in chapter 4, criticism of conservative Christianity and depictions of Christians as callous were frequent themes of Richardson’s plays long before the painful rejection of his daughter’s remains. In 1929, Richardson published a one-act hinting at his cynicism toward Christian churches entitled The Idle Head. Edward C. Williams, a playwright who had been Richardson’s Latin teacher and principal at the M Street School before becoming a librarian at Howard, judged the play “the best . . . he had seen written by a member of our race.”40 Another critic dismissed it as little more than a morality tale instructing, “Don’t steal no matter for what purpose.”41 A less literal-minded reading of the script may have yielded a different interpretation. The story revolves around a struggling family. “George Broadus” was fired from his job for refusing to grovel when a white man threw him a quarter and called him “Sambo.” He lives off the goodwill of his mother and sister, unable to find a job for being too prideful. Trouble arises when “Brother Harris,” the pastor of the church his mother and sister attend, insists that the Broadus family owes the church nine dollars. When “Mrs. Broadus” and her daughter explain their financial plight, Brother Harris is unmoved and derides George’s pride as foolish. He threatens to take the women off the church’s “honor roll” and ban them from Bible class, leaving Mrs. Broadus in tears.42 Richardson has set up an equation in The Idle Head in which appeasement and a willingness to tolerate humiliation in the guise of Brother Harris and the church are pitted against race pride, symbolized by George. At various points, George rejects the servile status he is assigned, including refusing to walk through the back door at the home of a wealthy white woman (to the chagrin of her black chauffeur). When he learns of the pastor’s visit, he claims the pastor is on a quest for “a new suit” and insists that “he always

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when his father came at her violently. The news enrages John Henry. Convinced at first that she is lying, he threatens to use his crutch to crack her skull. It is clear that John Henry admired his dead father and wanted to think the best of him. Yet when the truth of his stepmother’s words sets in, his frustration at not being able to seek revenge on the dead man takes hold. He leaves the apartment with bitter words toward Ma Dorsey for having withheld the truth from him for all this time. “Miss Agnes,” a friend and fellow church member, comes to the door. Her conversation with Ma Dorsey establishes Mr. Jim’s ordeal with the police after his being accused of purse snatching. Ma Dorsey is convinced the real culprit was the “young imp, John Henry.” Mr. Jim then arrives, distraught about his encounter with the police, who released him for lack of evidence and his good standing in the community. Yet he is more troubled by the reaction of church members to the rumors. Quick to judge, several fellow congregants call for his expulsion from the church. Demoralized by their accusations, Mr. Jim contemplates leaving town. The play concludes with John Henry being hit by a car outside the apartment. A white doctor who witnessed the accident insists he needs surgery to be saved but demands money in advance. A wounded John Henry is dragged to the door to plead for help from his stepmother and Mr. Jim, but they use his dire circumstances to force him to confess stealing Mr. Jim’s money and then framing him for purse snatching. “You goin’ to bawl me out when Ah’m flat o’ ma back and helpless?” asks John Henry, before relenting and admitting his guilt. Neither Ma Dorsey nor Mr. Jim is moved by John Henry’s despair. A shocked Miss Agnes reminds Mr. Jim, “You’re a good Christian man . . . and a Christian knows how to forgive,” prompting him to lend John Henry the money. Yet before the transaction takes place, Ma Dorsey demands that John Henry pray for God’s forgiveness. “Ah don’t know how to pray,” says John Henry, pleading for his stepmother’s guidance through prayer. As they begin the “Our Father,” he strains to say “it’s too late” before dying at Ma Dorsey’s feet. There is no pity or sorrow in her words. She only declares, “Another imp gone to the devil.” Miss Agnes, stunned by her indifference, reminds her that John Henry died in prayer. “Them prayers didn’t come from his heart,” Ma Dorsey concludes as the curtain falls, “they only come from his lips, the Imp!”45 One might read Richardson’s portrait of John Henry as that of a bad man getting his just desserts. Yet the story also reveals a man who never had a chance in his environment. His deformity was brought about by his father’s cruelty, while Ma Dorsey’s own callousness created a loveless world for him. Even something as simple as learning how to pray was denied him by his

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torn between her devotion to Clem and her desire for” the approval of the local church community. She opens the door to “Mrs. Doshia Braggs” and “Mrs. Mahala Turner,” who have come to persuade Eliza to join their church. Burris describes Doshia Braggs as “a militant defender of the faith, willing to die for her God, and for Piney Grove Baptist Church of which she is a deaconess.” Mrs. Mahala Turner is derided as “the kind of person who has no thought of her own, who willingly and thoughtlessly sanctions whatever anybody else says, particularly someone like Mrs. Braggs.”50 Their visit proves disquieting. Through the veneer of kindness, they chide Eliza for “livin’ in sin” with Clem and plant the seeds of tension by spreading a rumor that Clem’s visits to the bank in Gennessee are really a pretense for “one gran’ spree wid dem fas’ girls.” Braggs gossips that Clem is the illegitimate grandson of a wealthy colonel who bankrolls the couple, providing their nice home and paid-off land. Clem’s supposed “white blood” explains both why he “is so uppity” and his hesitation to marry Eliza. “De white blood in ’im don’ wan’t ma’y huh ’cause she black an’ ain’ good uhnough.” Eliza insists, however, their farm has been paid off thanks to the couple’s hard work, and the colonel’s sole gift was a plow and a dollar bill when their oldest child was born. The encounter disturbs Eliza, but the churchwomen now see the couple’s financial security as a potential source to fund a new church. Before leaving, they insist on holding a revival committee meeting in the Colemans’ home.51 Upon the women’s departure, we are introduced to “Mammy Caroline,” the town’s elderly midwife, who recalls Clem’s real story. Clem’s mother died at the birth of his baby sister. Refuting the churchwomen’s rumors, Mammy explains that Clem’s father was not the son of a colonel but a hotheaded man who escaped slavery with the help of some “Yankee folks.” Her focus changes when the Coleman children report being called “bastards” by kids at school. Their story leads Mammy Caroline to pressure Eliza to join the church. Where the churchwomen were motivated by greed, Mammy Caroline fears for the couple’s souls. She insists that Clem’s mother’s dying wish was that Mammy care for her children “an’ bring ’em up in de feah o’ God.” Interestingly, Burris follows Mammy’s prayerful speech with evidence of her intense superstition. Upon hearing a screech owl, Mammy calls on Eliza to find one of Clem’s old shoes and turn it upside down to nullify the owl’s power to foreshadow an imminent death with its call.52 Burris’s choice to link faith with superstition reflects a common conflation in black-authored plays of this era. Clem Coleman is a “good-looking,” light-skinned thirty-eight-year-old whose “gentleness and kindliness” are occasionally betrayed by his stubbornness and quick temper. We learn quickly that he is quite hostile toward the local church. A distant church bell sparks a litany of insults. “Well, dere goes

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preacher’s insistence that salvation required a true dunking was enough proof for him. The other church members shout in approval. Clem and Eliza are like Doubting Thomas, Scruggs declares, and need to join the church, be baptized, and get married before the preacher to be “‘spectable folks.” Clem is losing his patience and asserts that he and Eliza are married, having lived together for twelve years. Deacon Scruggs accuses them of living in sin and adultery, and asks a congregant to read a prooftext. The reader loses his place and instead recites John 8:7: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Scruggs, perhaps unaware of the irony, corrects him and points him to the passage he had wanted read aloud—Hebrews 15:4: “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled; but whore-mongers and adulterers God will punish.” The language shocks the room (Burris writes they are “startled that such a word [whore-mongers] is in the Bible”), and Clem leaps up at the insult. Proving his exegetical skills surpass those of Scruggs, he cries, “But dat Bible don’ say you got to have no papahs to marry. Hit don’ say you got to go ’fo’ no preachah to marry. I done looked thoo dis heah book from back to back an’ I ain’ nevah seen nowheah wheah it say how you got to marry an’ who got to marry you. All it say is marry.”55 Scruggs is defeated and scratches “his head meditatively.” Being defeated is not the same as acknowledging defeat, however, and Scruggs shifts the debate to Clem’s lack of authority to interpret the Bible. “How you ’spec’ a hard-shell sinnah lak you gwine know ’bout de Bible when you ain’ seed God?” he asks. Pathetically, Scruggs points to “ejucated white folks” getting married in church with papers as validation. With his own character challenged, Clem turns the tables on the group and begins, without “callin’ no names,” running through a list of congregants engaged in gambling, drunkenness, and illicit affairs. Mrs. Doshia Braggs, having had enough of Clem’s exposé, shouts him down with charges that he is bound for hell and that only Jesus was without sin. She asserts, wrongly but with absolute confidence, that “Jesus, de Son o’ God, done said, don’ do ez I does, but do ez I tells you to do.” Scruggs responds, reinforcing the satiric effect of Burris’s scene, “Dem sho is gospel words, sho’s you bo’n. God knows dey is.” Seeing that reason is futile, Clem calls an end to the meeting, and the congregants depart, convinced that righteousness has prevailed.56 The play’s aesthetic force comes in act 2, written entirely as a service at the Piney Grove Baptist Church. Burris packs the service with constant music, fiery sermons, and ecstatic emotions elicited from the actors. The congregation anticipates that the Coleman family will be attending the service, but Burris depicts them steeped in gossip. We witness congregants engaged in judgment, gambling, and even lust as we learn that “Reverend Obadiah

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is after his money. Moments later, “Cissie Brown,” a woman rumored in act 2 to have been carrying on an affair with Reverend Tukes, appears at the Colemans’ front door. Burris describes her as a “malignant type of person,” whose interactions with Clem are “familiar and flirtatious.” Cissie speaks to the Colemans as if she is an old and close friend, though Clem reminds her that it is the first time she has been in their home. We learn that long ago, she and Clem dated, and she belabors that point, creating considerable awkwardness with Eliza in the room. She formally announces that Clem has been elected a deacon and immediately solicits Clem’s contribution toward the building of a new church. Cissie’s mission ends in failure, but not before Eliza catches her making a pass at Clem.59 When Eliza is alone, she receives another visitor: Reverend Tukes, who sets his sights on Eliza. He drowns Eliza in compliments about her looks and holds out a promise that takes Eliza completely by surprise: he will make her a deaconess. Filled with pride at the offer and profoundly flattered, she is soon deflated by the truth. “I been thinkin’ ’bout you since de firs’ day I seed you,” says the reverend, “sometime I even dreams about you.” Approaching Eliza, he says, “I been wantin’ you foh a long time. Don’ be skeered, I ain’ go’n’ hurt you. . . . Ain’ us preachahs got nachul feelin’s jes lak othah folks?” Eliza’s resistance is strong, despite his persistence. “De Lawd give us dese heah feelin’s, ain’ He? An’ He meant foh us to use ’em, else He wouldn’ta gi’ ’em to us,” he presses, but Eliza is unmoved by his theological reasoning. When her disinterest becomes apparent, he tries to plant the seed of doubt by lying that he has witnessed Clem’s own infidelity. This only leaves Eliza angrier. Finally, realizing none of his tactics will lure Eliza into his amorous clutches, Reverend Tukes backtracks, insisting he was “jes puttin’ [Eliza] thoo de tes’ an’ you is done stood up undah it lake a true soljah o’ de cross.” He then “bows sanctimoniously and goes out grinning broadly.”60 The play’s denouement begins when Clem returns and Eliza bravely recounts the rumors of his being the grandson of a wealthy white colonel and the stories of his infidelity. After Clem refutes the rumors to her satisfaction, she tells him about the scandalous visit of Reverend Tukes. Clem then calmly picks up the marriage papers, lights a match, and sets them on fire. “Burnin’ de papahs ain’ go’n’ keep us from bein’ ma’ied,” says Eliza. “I knows’ dat,” replies Clem. “I jes don’ wan’ nothin’ ’roun’ dis house dat lowdown preachah had his hands on. An’ what’s mo, I ain’ go’n’ have dem folks at de church an’ nobodoy tellin’ me how to live. I don’ wan’ none of ’em comin’ roun’ heah no mo’.” In fact, Clem resolves to send his children to live with his wealthy sister in Saint Louis, Missouri. “Much es I hates to see ’em leave, I knows hit’s de only way foh ’em to live in peace,” Clem reasons.

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as much controversy. Late into Hughes’s career, conservative religious groups denounced Hughes as a Communist sympathizer and an “atheist” while publicly protesting his poetry readings.63 Hughes’s emergence as one of the nation’s foremost African American poets can be traced to a series of poems published in 1921 by the Crisis, including his landmark piece, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” written while traveling to visit his father in Mexico four years earlier.64 Unlike most of his peers, he had known a measure of acclaim well before graduating in 1929 from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He was raised largely by his grandmother until her death when he was twelve, while his father followed business interests to Mexico and his mother followed work wherever it would take her. At the age of thirteen, while staying at the home of the Reeds, friends of his grandmother who had kindly taken him in upon her death, Hughes had his most memorable encounter with Christianity. He described in his autobiography the expectation that he would be saved before “Auntie Reed’s” church community. She had given him confidence that God was a presence in his life and that he “could see and hear and feel Jesus” within his soul. Yet when the moment arrived when he and other children would be called from the mourner’s bench to the altar to proclaim their salvation publicly, Hughes and another boy remained seated. “I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting—but he didn’t come,” Hughes recalled. Auntie Reed sobbed, the minister prodded. Then the boy next to him relented, whispering under his breath to Hughes, “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved,” before approaching the altar. Finally, Hughes got up, but he felt nothing. The “waves of rejoicing” that surrounded him only compounded his shame. He went to bed that night in tears—tears his Auntie Reed assured him were flowing “because the Holy Ghost had come into” his life. “But I was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied,” he wrote, “that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me.”65 While Jesus was no longer an object of Hughes’s faith, Jesus remained a part of his art. The cadence and drama of the African American churches Hughes grew up attending fed his language and symbolism, powerfully enhancing his means of conveying lived experiences of black Americans. As his biographer Arnold Rampersad put it, “The drama of religion appealed to him, not its dogma: Jesus was dead, ritual was alive.”66 Although his life experiences undermined his faith in the Christian message, another ideological framework, Communism, resonated with Hughes, helping to assure Christianity’s relegation to an aesthetic interest. Hard hit by the Great Depression,

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Goodbye, Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova, Beat it on away from here now, Make way for a new guy with no religion at all— A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME— I said, ME!

Though more than a decade later he would claim the poem was nothing more than “an ironic protest against racketeering in the churches,” it reflected Hughes’s mind-set during this phase of his life.70 The same can be said of two of Hughes’s plays, Angelo Herndon Jones (1935) and a play cowritten with his close friend, Arna Bontemps, When the Jack Hollers (1936). Angelo Herndon Jones is structured around the promise of a young black Communist, Angelo Herndon, a coal miner arrested in Georgia for organizing an interracial protest on behalf of the unemployed in 1932. The charge was “insurrection,” but the combined concerns of Herndon’s Communism with his transgression of racial codes by bringing blacks and whites together in common cause appear to have been the subtext of his prosecution. Herndon’s legal ordeal drew national attention until 1937, when the Supreme Court finally overturned his sentence. The play’s set featured a large poster of Angelo Herndon on a wall in the center of the stage. On either side of the poster, two distinct narratives play out.71 The first narrative involves two prostitutes. “Sadie Mae” and “Lottie” stare at the poster of the handsome Angelo Herndon and the “mass meeting” it advertises, dreaming that such a man could save them from their difficult lot. They struggle to make ends meet and are forced to pay off the “Negro Cop” with their last quarter in order to continue their work unharassed. Eventually they head into a car with two white men whose exploitation they are willing to endure in the hope of a good tip.72 The second narrative involves “Viola” and her mother, “Ma Jenkins,” who live in a more upscale neighborhood. They are broke and unable to pay rent. Moreover, Viola is pregnant by her boyfriend, “Buddy Jones,” which scandalizes her mother. In the face of their poverty and joblessness, Ma Jenkins only responds with faith in “de Lawd.” “I wish the Lord would pay our rent then,” Viola announces with disdain. “He will, don’t worry,” Ma Jenkins replies. Viola’s lack of faith and her sense of helplessness leave Ma Jenkins at her wit’s end. “Shut up doubtin’ de Lawd, Viola, and get up from there and help me wash these clothes, or go look for a job. . . . I ain’t been sendin’ you to school all your

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of the Ku Klux Klan being hosted at a fish fry by the black family around which the play revolves, as both come to recognize that their common suffering and hunger stem from the exploitative plantation owner whose fields they till. Though more humorous than some of Hughes’s ultra-earnest calls to class unity, the play hoped to inspire the message of the common cause of the rural proletariat.78 On the religious front, When the Jack Hollers makes light of Christian piety while equating the potency of Christianity to that of African conjuring traditions. “Aunt Billie Boxer,” the community’s conjurer and midwife, develops charms and potions to satisfy the desires of many of the play’s central characters, in between (and sometimes during) her bouts of drunkenness. Her spells typically amount to commonsense solutions dressed up in exotic potions and incantations. For instance, Sid Lowery, a poor white farmer who moonlights as a Klansman, comes to Aunt Billie for a spell that will put an end to his nightly arguments with his wife when returning from the fields. When Aunt Billie realizes that Sid fails to listen to his wife’s concerns, stifling their passion for one another, she gives him two items. The first is a pouch with special herbs that he is to put underneath his pillow. Each time he wakes up in the night, he is to lean over and kiss his wife. The second is her phony “Holy Water from Jerusalem,” which he must hold in his mouth at the next instance his wife begins an argument. Only when she finishes every word she has to say is Sid to go outside, spit out the water, and return to give her a passionate kiss and suggest they go for a “crawl in the hay.”79 The efficacy of Aunt Billie’s spells is questioned early on as “Viney,” the hardworking Christian mother who labors to keep her immediate and extended family fed, notes that she “ain’t never seen no spell [of Aunt Billie’s] what had much effect on white folks.” Viney is the least sentimental of the play’s characters and is quick to judge. When her niece “Rose” relays her excitement about a party hosted by the “Young and Sanctified Club” of her church, Viney labels the crowd a “collection of sinners [that] don’t even know how to shout yet!” Yet even Viney’s piety reaches its limits in the face of her poverty and the hunger of her family and friends. Upon being upbraided for shouting “damnation,” she reasons that her irreverent language is justified “when we ain’t got a cent.” The play is built more upon characters than a central plot. The subplots include the family’s concern for the lovely Rose, who is entangled in an exploitative relationship with the white plantation boss whose advances she accepts largely out of fear. Rose’s real love is “Bogator,” the younger brother of Viney’s husband, “Mouse.” Added to the mix is the return of Rose’s mother, “Queen Esther,” from years away in Memphis. Queen Esther’s luck has run

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finger in blueing and draw a ring around its navel I tells her to give it castor oil, too. And the castor oil is what works! (BOGATOR draws near to listen) Sure, I sells black cat’s bones, and I brews mare’s tea, and I makes charms out of horse-hair— and I sells them to fools like you and Sid Lowery so’s I can get a few pennies together to drink my licker and holler. But I don’t believe in it! No, sir! BOGATOR: Don’t you really, Aunt Billie? AUNT BILLIE: I certainly don’t—jest like lots of ministers don’t believe in what they preach. Now you take Lovelady, for inster. Ain’t a bigger devil on wheels! BOGATOR: But he preach good. AUNT BILLIE: Sure, he preach good. That’s how he gets away with it. I talks good too, when I’m selling Love Lucky Lode Stones.

When Bogator asks what she actually does believe, Aunt Billie responds: “I don’t believe in nothing but life and death, son, that’s all. I brings people into this world, brews a few spells for them while they’s here, then, something bigger’n me takes them out.” In her confession, Aunt Billie reveals a level of wisdom that Reverend Lovelady does not seems to possess. As the play comes to a close and Reverend Lovelady prepares for a town-to-town evangelizing journey with Queen Esther, he gives no hint that he is even aware of being a fraud. As in Angelo Herndon Jones, Hughes portrays Christianity as impotent and adds a depiction of a preacher as parasite for good measure.80 “Christ Is the Power in You” Owen Dodson spent his youth at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, where Owen’s father, Nathaniel, was the Sunday school superintendent. Its pastor for most of Dodson’s childhood, the Reverend James B. Adams, earned acclaim for developing the church’s choir, becoming a hallmark of Concord Baptist and perhaps nourishing Dodson’s love for performance.81 Sundays in the Dodson household were built around church, from morning Sunday school through evening youth meetings. The family gathered in the living room before church to read scripture aloud and be inspected for neatness and proper attire, suggesting a home where attention to Christian piety was the rule. Congregants at Concord Baptist viewed themselves as “the better class of colored people,” and this elitism was shared by the Dodsons. In 1914, the year Owen was born, Nathaniel appeared among the luminaries featured in the “Men of the Month” column in the Crisis. He

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represents Christ’s body.” Sadness and desperation pervade the play’s opening, as a chorus divided into two sections exchange pained descriptions of life in the Great Depression. Notably, the Chorus describes the phrase “the Lord will provide” as nothing more than “an echo Whispering in and out of these Winter branches.” Over and over again it asks, “Where is Christ?” This question runs throughout the play, and as his characters search, Dodson makes plain his belief they are looking in all the wrong places.88 Dodson describes the Chorus as “a tattered army of the poor.” A “Priest” from a “high church” denomination, perhaps Roman Catholic, “appears in full regalia” and “makes the sign of the cross” while swinging incense. The Chorus begs for bread, warmth, and comfort, asking, “Where is our Master, Christ?” In an unctuous but sincere manner, the Priest tells them, “Christ is here and in your homes. Go home now and pray. Take the dusty hymnal down from the dusty shelf. Polish the silver rosaries again. Re-set the crooked cross. Re-clothe the naked Christ. Go back to your homes and light the flameless candle.” Invoking high church rituals that they presumably had abandoned, his only prescription for their needs is prayer. The Chorus persists, explaining that its members’ “skin is frozen to the bone,” but the Priest responds only with platitudes: “The Lord’s children are never alone or cold. Go home and pray. Prayer changes things.” The Chorus insists it has prayed and nothing has changed. “Go home and pray!!” the Priest demands. “We have no homes!!!” the Chorus replies. Exasperated and impotent, the Priest simply yells, “Go home and pray!!!” louder than before, makes the sign of the cross, swings his incense, and disappears. After lingering only briefly on the government’s failure to help the poor, Dodson quickly reverts to the theological framework with which he began. We witness a horrifying scene of a mother with a baby at her breast discovering that the child has died. “Where is Christ? Where is Christ?” the Chorus persists.89 The play moves to the home of “Rachael Jackson,” a pious churchwoman who has weathered the Depression more comfortably than her friend “Cora.” Rachael’s main concern is that her church’s pews are emptying and it “ain’t got the old spirit.” Cora is unsympathetic, insisting that Rachael “shouldn’t complain none. No ma’m you got de blessin’s right here. I have to scratch ’bout for food and a place to lay dis head. Hit ain’t no paradise I tells you.” Cora’s health suffers as well. Yet she is drawn to a new figure in town who “calls himself de Apostle of Light. Some folks calls him Christ come back. Say he’s healin’ folks,” while providing food and shelter. Rachael is skeptical. “I puts ma trust in the Lawd. He’s takin’ care of me so far.” For Cora, however, the life God gave her has been painful. Though Rachael tries mollifying her with a trite remark about God working “in a mysterious way, his wonders

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They would happily “pawn the halo about the head of Christ . . . To soothe our rumbling bellies.”93 The despairing Rachael is the last member of her congregation. She kneels before her “Preacher,” who spews fire and brimstone at a nearly empty church. “When death the invader comes,” the Preacher warns, “an’ you have to stand before His great white throne. What shall you say? Shall you say you have deserted his Church? O my people. . . . What shall you say? Come back, come back.” But the Preacher’s dire warnings do not restore Rachael’s lost confidence in her faith. “Cora was right,” admits Rachael. “I done given all for the church an’ what happens. My son is gone, ma girl is gone, ma friend is gone. I wants some joy. Some little joy, not loneliness, not death.” Her Preacher is left spouting the same hollow words she herself once spoke to Cora: “If you would have your life you must lose it first.” Yet the words awaken something in Rachael. “I said that once. It don’t sound so good now.” She too moves toward the Apostle of Light.94 As act 1 closes, we are at the Church of the Apostle of Light listening to testimonials from Cora and the former prostitute with tuberculosis, now known as “Mother Humility.” They have been transformed by their encounter with the Apostle. Cora tells us, “There ain’t no Gawd beyond the clouds. He’s right here with us.” Mother Humility has been healed and testifies, “He’s the true an’ livin’ GOD.” Finally, the Apostle arrives, and his followers kneel before him. He speaks: I come to earth because dust has blown into my people’s eyes and blinded them: shut out my eternal light. O my people. I come because there’s been iron resting on your hearts, with no one to lift the weight but me.  .  .  .  I come with my body before you but I’ve been with you. I’m with you always. I’m in your heart. Ain’t you glad? O my people. I’m leading you into the promised land: heaven on earth. O my people ain’t you glad? Are you with me? . . . I come bringing light. Pray because prayer changes things. Don’t have to pray out loud because I hear you when your mind talks. Ain’t you glad? Pray in darkness, I see you. Pray with your mouth shut, I hear you. . . . The kingdom is here. Manna is here. Shelter, guidance is here. Ain’t you glad?

As Dodson brings the act to an end on this high note, the Apostle’s followers shout with joy, and thrilling music overtakes them.95 As joyfully as the first act ends, act 2 chronicles the Apostle’s fall. Rachael’s children plot to rescue her from wasting her “last years on something false and cheap.” Cyril’s visit to the Apostle’s church is an exercise in

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insurance, and their savings. Still others insist that “he is death-proof ” and is merely testing their faith. All the while, Rachael grieves over Cora’s corpse. “A cross of light” is cast over their bodies and brings with it a change of heart in Rachael. She calls out to the “Gawd that I prayed to before,” humbly pleading forgiveness for herself, for Cyril, and for Cora. “She’s still one of your children. Forgive her now that she’s dead.” Rachael finishes by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.100 Until this point, Divine Comedy has been a full-throated indictment of both mainstream Christianity and cult movements built around figures like Father Divine who were springing up in African American communities during this era. Yet Dodson is not content to leave his play at the level of an indictment. Instead, his last scenes advocate a progressive and deeply humanistic reading of Christianity. We never learn Cyril’s fate, but his last words, repeated over and over again, are “Turn to yourselves!” Rachael, slowly recovering, calls out to the Chorus, “O listen, you poor an’ forgotten, an’ you of little faith: Pray to that cross, ’cause when you prays to it You prays to the Christ in you that done stood against a great big hill of pain. . . . Lift your hands to the cross, lift them to yourselves an’ your strength.”101 Then Rachael repeats: “CHRIST IS THE POWER IN YOU,” and Dodson’s stage direction make clear: “She says this with more emphasis than anything else in her speech.”102 The Chorus, recovering from the shock of losing the Apostle, as if waking from a dream, turns to the choral Leader and announces: “We feel no Christ, no power in His cross. We feel our strength now, but not His strength and power. Tell us leader: Where is this Christ in us? Where is this Christ in us in this new Winter?” The Leader, echoing Rachael, replies that Christ “is the new strength you feel; He has clasped the burning hand of Autumn and led the harvest into this Winter. He was the far-off dream of your uniting. He is the dream made real. The pain made courage. The hope made living. He is ourselves when you throw off the sackcloth of submission. When you wipe the begging eye of tears.” The Chorus repeats his last words, “He is ourselves when we throw off the sackcloth of submission, When we wipe the begging eye of tears.” In a concluding crescendo, two halves of the Chorus engage in an antiphonal triumphal declaration: SEMI-CHORUS: We need no prophets. SEMI-CHORUS: (like an echo) This Winter is Autumn. SEMI-CHORUS: We need no miracles. SEMI-CHORUS: We are the miracle. ALL: We are the miracle. We are the earth itself.

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Prayers and utterances expressing confidence in God’s abiding love and justice are met with silence and, ultimately, violent death. Though written largely by authors who were still engaged in the institutional church to some degree and who had not rejected the possibility of a God, theodicy emerges as a narrative element within a wide range of contexts. I have classified these plays according to four major themes: refusal of motherhood plays, exposing the church plays, awakening human agency plays, and futility of prayer plays. Nearly every play addressed will have elements of more than one theme, but this grouping simplifies our analysis. Refusal of Motherhood Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) most famously reflected a theme that has been featured in African American literature for nearly a century: refusing motherhood or preferring a child’s death to that child’s suffering.8 Antilynching plays written by Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and May Miller used this theme not only to protest white mob violence but also as a means of highlighting the dissonance between common religious beliefs and lived experience. All three plays not only challenge God’s justice directly but implicitly measure the very value of life itself against the circumstances in which life is lived. Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916) was the first antilynching play written by an African American.9 Identified by theater historian Samuel A. Hay as “the first play by an African American woman to be publicly performed,”10 Rachel was commissioned by the NAACP to combat the racist propaganda of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation released a year earlier.11 The play centers around the choice of “Rachel Loving”—a young woman with an uncanny desire for parenthood—to remain childless. Grimké’s selection of the name Rachel was likely and allusion to the “barren” Rachel in Genesis who envied Leah for bearing Jacob many children before herself giving birth to Joseph (Gen. 29:31–30:24). Moreover, embedded in the tale of King Herod killing the children of Bethlehem, Matthew 2:18 invokes Jeremiah 31:15 describing “Rachel weeping for her children. . . because they are no more.”12 The Loving family lives in a modest apartment, supported by “Mrs. Loving’s” work as a seamstress. Despite their low income, the family epitomizes the values of a rising middle class with their hard work and commitment to education. As the play begins, Mrs. Loving cannot help but laugh at her eighteen-year-old daughter Rachel’s idealistic longing for motherhood. “It is not kind to laugh at sacred things,” chides Rachel.

Figure 3.1. Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel was commissioned by the NAACP to counteract the racist propaganda of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. Photo reproduced with permission of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 76

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“When you laughed, it was as though you laughed at God.” “It was the best in me that” longed for a house full of babies—“It was God!” Rachel believes that God spoke to her directly, much as the Virgin Mary experienced with the Annunciation. Still early in act 1, the appearance of a three-year-old neighbor, “Jimmy,” triggers Mrs. Loving’s need to reveal a terrible secret about her children’s past. Having long believed their father and half brother had abandoned the family, they learn that a decade earlier, to the day, both had been lynched outside of the Loving home as Rachel and her brother “Tom” slept inside. “Christian people—in a Christian land,” Mrs. Loving bitterly describes the killers, who were “all church members in good standing.” The murder cut so deeply that Mrs. Loving went a long period without being able to pray. The revelation stuns Rachel and her brother and sends Rachel into a cycle of contemplation that threatens everything she once believed. Perhaps the only thing African American children like Jimmy had to look forward to was a life of suffering. “And so this nation, this white Christian nation,” Rachel reflects, “has deliberately set its curse upon the most beautiful—most holy thing in life—motherhood! Why—it—makes—you doubt—God!” With these words, Grimké sets in motion a series of events and monologues that only deepen our doubt of God. Early in act 2, Jimmy has moved in with the Lovings. While Mrs. Loving sees it as an answer to her prayers—“God’s ways are strange and very often beautiful,” she observes—Grimké infuses irony into the mother’s pious reflections as we learn the reason for Jimmy’s presence rests with the death of his parents, “the only two to take the smallpox” in the entire apartment. Soon, Tom enters the fray, wondering why blacks continue to wallow in poverty while whites guilty of making black people suffer are celebrated and prosper. Invoking a sardonic parallel to the beatitudes, Tom says bitterly, “The scum of the earth shall succeed. . . . God’s justice, I suppose.” The climax of the theodicy discourse in Rachel comes at the end of act 2 when Rachel meets a young girl who has been devastated by racial slurs hurled at her by both her peers and her teacher. The news prompts Rachel to lash out at God: You were making a mock of me; you were laughing at me. I didn’t believe God could laugh at our sufferings, but He can. We are accursed, accursed! We have nothing, absolutely nothing. . . . You God!—You terrible, laughing God! Listen! I swear—and may my soul be damned to all eternity if I do break this oath—I swear that no child of mine shall ever lie upon my breast.  .  .  .  You can laugh, Oh God! Well, so can I. (bursts into terrible,

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atmosphere. Moreover, judging from the list of names, the meetings exposed Johnson to some of the most progressive thinkers of her day. As a little girl, Johnson watched as her mother was baptized in the Chattahoochee River by Reverend Tillman of the Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. She later recalled her mother’s involvement in the church, as well as her sister singing in the church choir.18 Johnson herself was an organist at the First Congregational Church in Atlanta, where she attended Sunday school,19 and later joined the First Congregational Church in Washington, DC—the elite interracial church tied to the founding of Howard University.20 Late in life, she associated herself with the Baha’i Church, a religious tradition known for its attempts to bridge social boundaries, especially race.21 The extent of her affiliation with Baha’i is not clear, though her exposure to the movement may have come from Alain Locke, who, as Christopher Buck’s research has revealed, was himself a Baha’i from 1918 until his death in 1954. Baha’is took considerable effort missionizing African Americans in Washington during the early twentieth century, emphasizing their teaching of “race amity.”22 What little can be pieced together of Johnson’s theology beyond her plays reveals faith in a loving God, but also a theological liberalism and an openness to non-Christian ideas about religion. In her archived material is a small pile of loose-leaf paper, which Johnson labeled her “bible.” Each sheet of paper contained a pearl of wisdom or inspirational phrase from sources ranging from scripture to popular “secular” figures like Walt Whitman and Henry George, giving us insight into the sort of ideas that appealed to Johnson. Among dozens of phrases are the following: “A million years from now man may be a really noble creature”; “The eyelids of man have been sewn together, as it were, and his ears stuffed with cement”; “Time is no good solvent for injustice”; “Tolerance is not enough”; “Tolerance: he who loves not lives not & he who loves most lives most”; “Men resemble gods in doing good to their fellow men”; “The eternal life is not the future life. It is life in touch with the true order of things—LIFE IN GOD”; and “The love of mankind is the only road that leads to God.” She quoted Buddha as saying “hatred does not cease by hatred at any time. Hatred ceases by love.” She even includes a question that was likely a reflection of her own search: “What is the best religion and most tolerant?”23 Johnson’s “bible” indicates she was caught in a bittersweet dance between immense love for humankind and immense frustration with its failures. If she had ever been inclined to Calvinism in her early life, she clearly had abandoned notions of total human depravity and helplessness before God by her adult years.

Figure 3.2. Georgia Douglas Johnson, one of the most prolific African American playwrights of the prewar era, hosted salons in her Washington, DC, home, bringing together some of the most influential artistic figures of the New Negro movement. Photo reproduced with permission of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 80

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That Georgia Douglas Johnson collected such sayings for her personal, self-styled “bible” is in keeping with her character. Gloria Hull remarked that Johnson “seems to have relied heavily on inspirational clichés” throughout her life.24 Yet these “clichés” clearly resonated with Johnson and helped her to meet the struggles she faced as an African American woman, thrown into financial turmoil after her husband’s death in 1925. Her syndicated weekly newspaper column, “Homely Philosophy” (something akin to an advice column geared toward everyday problems), carried “a message of hope, cheer and tonical vigor that is inspirational.”25 The optimistic messages may have been intended as much for Johnson’s own benefit as for those readers for whom she wrote. Among the very few of Johnson’s poems with religious overtones, one prominent example of her wrestling with God’s silence in the face of suffering can be found in part of her 1922 poem, “The Suppliant”:

Long have I beat with timid hands upon life’s leaden door, Praying the patient, futile prayer my fathers prayed before, Yet I remain without the close, unheeded and unheard, And never to my listening ear is borne the waited word.

The reference to the “futile prayer my fathers prayed before” indicates the poem is about racial oppression, and notably these prayers are “unheeded and unheard.” Though Johnson’s faith in God persisted throughout her life, at times her patience in the ultimate triumph of justice wore thin, and this theological challenge is addressed in her work.26 Despite a disposition that was, by all accounts, hopeful,27 Johnson presents us with antilynching plays that suggest an author struggling to find hope—or the presence of God—in light of lynchings. In 1929, Johnson wrote Safe, a play echoing Angelina Grimké’s 1919 story, “The Closing Door,” published in Birth Control Review. Grimké’s narrative featured a mother putting her newborn son to death upon hearing of her brother’s lynching.28 In Johnson’s short play, a pregnant “Liza Pettigrew” finds her happiness shattered upon witnessing a young man being dragged by a white mob to his hanging for the “crime” of hitting a white man who had slapped him across the face over a business dispute. Upon learning of the assembling lynch mob, Liza hopes aloud that her child is not a boy. “Hush, honey, that’s a sin,” says her deeply religious mother. “God sends what he wants us to have—we can’t pick and choose.” Throughout the scene her mother reminds us that God is in charge. Liza goes into labor and, seconds later, we hear a baby’s cry in

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and his comments were solicited.31 They were not favorable. In a memorandum to Juanita Jackson, the special assistant to NAACP executive secretary Walter White, Morrow called the skit “superficial” and “hurriedly done.” More significantly, the skit violated his sense of what NAACP propaganda should entail. “I am referring, of course,” he wrote, “to broken and bad English; helplessly calling upon the Lord when disaster overtakes us; referring to our inability to hold meetings on time and over-emphasizing spirituals.” To the Bowdoin-educated Morrow, a minister’s son no less, Johnson’s portrayal of African American life did not comport with the image the NAACP should “show to the public.”32 Though the original script appears to be lost, Morrow’s comments— which Johnson probably never saw—indicate his having read the early drafts of what would eventually become Johnson’s 1938 play, A Bill to Be Passed, first recovered by Judith Stephens from the files of the Library of Congress.33 Also in the files is a script entitled And Yet They Paused, apparently an earlier draft of A Bill to Be Passed that contained additions reflecting the NAACP staff ’s precise suggestions.34 A Bill to Be Passed takes place over four scenes, moving back and forth from a small church in Mississippi to the halls of the U.S. Congress. The play opens in the church where the “Reverend Timothy Jackson” is calling together a meeting of his congregants. We learn the church has sent “a delegate” to Congress charged with reporting back to the congregation on the fate of an unnamed antilynching bill. The church meeting is peppered with spirituals. A woman announces that “Joe Daniels,” a black man who had been driven out of town for bootlegging—more precisely, for competing with white bootleggers!—was being accused of murdering of a local (white) shopkeeper. A mob was gathering, and a lynching was sure to follow. Instead of praying for the life of Joe Daniels, Reverend Jackson calls for prayers that Congress will pass antilynching legislation in due time. The reverend is convinced that “these white folks” in the mob “won’t make no move to stir up trouble while Congress is sittin’ right now, trying to put a stop to this very thing!” The scene ends with a prayer expressing hope that God’s love will penetrate the hearts of the legislators now debating the bill. In the following scene, we meet the church’s delegate, “Henry Williams”— a well-educated young man—hovering outside the doors of the congressional gallery with a “Reporter” and a church elder named “Jasper Greene.” The Reporter relays bits and pieces of information from the debate to Williams and Greene. The men grow tired of the stalling tactics used by the “handful of crackers” obstructing the legislation. “They want to keep us on the cross!” Henry Williams says, struggling to make sense of their callousness.

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Even with the hopeful ending demanded by the NAACP, we are presented with a Reverend Jackson who naively believes the mob violence would be restrained by national politics, who can only respond with prayers for swift justice, and who sits helplessly in darkness with his congregation as yet another black man is shredded by white vigilantes. Moreover, the play’s protagonist, Henry Williams—the real link between the activity in Washington and the world of the congregation—is moved to question God’s existence in the face of a morally numb Congress. Among the most severe indictments of the church as God’s instrument among the antilynching plays is Regina Anderson Andrews’s one-act Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, produced at the Harlem Experimental Theatre in 1931. One of her biographers describes Andrews as having been “reared in a black Victorian household in Chicago’s Hyde Park district by a father [an attorney] who counted W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson among his friends and clients.” A librarian by trade, she was educated at Wilberforce University in Ohio and at the University of Chicago, before moving to New York and marrying a state assemblyman, William T. Andrews. Regina Andrews was instrumental in helping Du Bois create the Krigwa Players and was later a founder of the Harlem Experimental Theatre. As Georgia Douglas Johnson had done in Washington, DC, Andrews played host to her own regular salon in Harlem, entertaining an array of Harlem Renaissance notables.36 While having been raised within the “genteel tradition,” Andrews was said to have “scorned” it. Yet her own membership in a largely white United Methodist Church in Mahopac, New York, later in life suggests that her religious sensibilities were not aligned with those of the southerners who transformed her childhood Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park.37 Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, which draws from folk movement stylistics, reveals an author who inherited a discomfort with what she imagined to be the religious customs of the folk. Andrews stressed the incompetence and futility of a group of ministers and townspeople organizing in a small Baptist church against the wrongful indictment of an African American man named “Wash Thomas.” The play begins with an extended, long-winded prayer petitioning for God’s “mercy and compassion” on the accused, and for the strengthening of the congregation’s faith. The droning prayer is only a prelude to the running theme of the play, as continuous rambling worship, punctuated with multiple spirituals, ultimately stifles the congregation’s efforts to take swift action. Andrews describes the church as “a shabby little place of worship” in the black section of a Mississippi town. Those attending the meeting trickle in

Figure 3.3. Regina Andrews, author of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, was the first African American to become a supervising librarian for the New York Public Library system. Photo by Campbell Studio, reproduction courtesy of the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 86

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slowly. “John Gaddie” calls the meeting to order, reminding attendees that business was to have started half an hour earlier. “Rev. Lumpkin,” the Baptist minister of the church, is the evening’s main speaker. Andrews describes Lumpkin as speaking “with the Negro minister’s usual ponderousness tempered with sincerity,” as he takes the podium to focus the people on the issue at hand. Rev. Lumpkin recounts his days of prayer over the fate of the young prisoner. “Just yesterday,” he recalls, Wash Thomas “put his big hand in mine and said ‘Rev. Mah time is getting short, say a little prayer.’ . . . Are we going to let this terrible crime be committed in the name of justice? Are we going to let an innocent black man be crucified?” The congregation shouts “No,” and Rev. Lumpkin assures them that “the Lord is with us, and we are going to save him.” The meeting creeps on slowly. In fact, two pages of Regina Andrews’s original script are missing, and the play barely misses a beat as speech after self-congratulatory speech occupies the focus of the congregants. Eventually, John Gaddie recalls “the most important part of our meeting here tonight.” They are convinced that Mississippi’s governor promised the accused a competent defense attorney if the community could raise $300. Yet rather than move to begin raising the money, Gaddie insists that “first we must have a committee to handle the money.” He names several people, but his speech is interrupted by the sound of bells and barking dogs that briefly draws the attention of the congregants away from his speech. “We must ask for your attention and interest friends—fires occur every day.” Gaddie is soon interrupted again by “Rev. Sampson,” whom Andrews describes as “obviously a jealous minister from another Baptist church.” Rev. Sampson expresses his discomfort with entrusting the money (that has not yet been raised) to the committee Gaddie has named. Sampson protests until he is ultimately placated by being put on the committee himself. Finally the fund-raising begins, but with nearly every donation, the action pauses for shouts of praise and thanks. Andrews’s portrayal of the slowmoving scene is clearly intended to make a point about her view of the congregants as being utterly self-absorbed because in the midst of the frenzy, a young man named “Sammy,” who earlier had left the church unnoticed as the bells were ringing and dogs were barking, reenters. “Stop it!” Sammy cries, “Fer Gawd’s sake, stop it! Deys got im!” The congregants are confused. “Yes, dey got him!” the young man explains. All de time you niggahs is been raising dis money—(hurls some of it on the floor) deys been stringin’ Wash Thomas up a tree. . . . I slipped out a here about an hour ago while you niggahs was doin’ what de white folks

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Figure 3.4. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, by Regina Andrews, was produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre in 1931. The play satirized the impotence of black churches in the struggle against lynching. Photo by Campbell Studio, reproduction courtesy of the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

For nearly four decades, Mary Burrill, a 1904 graduate of Emerson College, taught English at the M Street School in Washington, DC. A contemporary of Angelina Weld Grimké’s (she was also her lover when the two were young),38 Burrill was credited with fostering the talents of important Harlem Renaissance era playwrights like Willis Richardson, May Miller, and James Butcher.39 Drawing heavily from the aesthetic impulses of the folk movement, Burrill’s one-act Aftermath illustrates starkly the silence of God in the face of African American suffering. Burrill published the play in the Liberator, a periodical edited by the influential socialist Max Eastman, on the heels of the “Red Summer” of 1919.40 As the play opens, Burrill draws our attention to a Bible resting “on the mantel over the hearth.” We hear “Mam Sue,” the matriarch of a small family widowed after the lynching of her husband,

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displays two loaded military pistols. Not only does Burrill direct John to place “the pistols on the mantel,” but she chooses to highlight the symbolism by his placing the pistols “on the very spot where the Bible has lain.” In essence, the otherworldly hopes of Mam Sue and the rest of the family are, with John, usurped in favor of John’s understanding of the rough-and-tumble reality of the Jim Crow South, asserting his own agency. John gazes upon the open Bible and wonders what his father has been reading. He reads aloud: “But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, an’ do good to them that hate you.” The dichotomy between the sentiment and his experiences as a soldier are striking. “That ain’t the dope they been feedin’ us soljers on!” he exclaims. “Love your enemies,” he scoffs. “It’s been—git a good aim at ’em, an’ let huh go!” Mam Sue scolds him: “It sound lak yuh done fu’git yuh Gawd!” John responds with a carefully rendered reflection on the power of prayer: No, Mam Sue, I ain’t fu’got God, but I’ve quit thinkin’ that prayers kin do ever’thing. I’ve seen a whole lot sence I’ve been erway from here. I’ve seen some men go into battle with a curse on their lips, and I’ve seen them same men come back with never a scratch; an’ I’ve seen men whut read their Bibles befo’ battle, an’ prayed to live, left dead on the field. . . . An’ I b’lieve it’s jes like this—beyon’ a certain point prayers ain’t no good! The Lawd does jes so much for you, then it’s up to you to do the res’ fu’ yourse’f. The Lawd’s done His part when He’s done give me strength an’ courage: I got tuh do the res’ fu’ myse’f!

The play builds toward the unintended revelation by a neighbor woman that John’s father was, in fact, killed. Demanding to know who was responsible, Millie relents and reveals to John the names of those in the mob. “I’ve been helpin’ the w’ite man git his freedom, I reckon I’d bettah try now to get my own!” John announces, preparing to seek revenge for his father’s murder. Millie and Mam Sue are terrified. “John’s gwine to kill hisse’f,” cries Millie, fully aware that surviving an altercation with his father’s white killers is bound to be short-term and will result in John’s own lynching as well. “Oh, mah honey, don’ yuh go do nothin’ to bring sin on yo’ soul!” pleads Mam Sue. “Pray to de good Lawd to tek all dis fiery feelin’ out’n yo’ heart!” She tells John that Reverend Moseby will be returning soon to pray with him. But John turns to his mother and yells, “This ain’t no time fu’ preachers or prayers!” The play ends with John heading out into the darkness seeking revenge despite the inevitability of his own demise.41

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much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds an outlet in lynching.”45 White’s views did not escape the notice of Benjamin Mays, who recorded The Fire in the Flint as an example of “protest” against religion and some conceptions of God.46 Peter Mason was an African American who worked for thirty-three years with the prominent white theatrical producer Charles Frohman before Frohman died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.47 In Mason’s playscript, Kenneth Harper’s ambivalence toward Christianity that had been featured in the novel is largely unaddressed. Still, Mason adds an element pervasive in antilynching dramas. At the end of act 3, as Kenneth is about to exit Mrs. Ewing’s home, he says to her: “God knows I have tried to live right and keep out of trouble. I’m armed now and if they [those whom Mrs. Ewing has just warned are conspiring against him] try and jump me I am going to fight like hell and try and take some of them with me.” Mason added the words “to live right,” as if to emphasize Harper’s blamelessness before God more completely. But Harper’s willingness to fight suggests he has rejected the theology of the “other cheek” advocated by religious figures earlier in the book and playscript. Instead, he favors taking a stand, even if it means violence. With this, Mason adds a line invoking God that is absent in White’s novel. Mrs. Ewing puts her hand on Harper’s shoulder and says: “You will be careful Kenneth. God protect you. You had better go now. God grant you, reach home quickly and safely.” These theologically colored invocations are undermined immediately when Kenneth steps out of the house and is attacked by his assailants. Although subtle, the line deviates from Walter White’s narrative enough to succeed in linking it rhetorically to a long line of antilynching plays in which God’s protection is nowhere to be found. In Mulatto (1935), the agnostic Langston Hughes blends a portrait of an indifferent God with that of a black man taking a stand against his own oppression. Mulatto tells the tragic story of an early twentieth-century white plantation owner in Georgia, “Colonel Norwood,” and his black family. “Cora,” his servant with whom he fathered three children, has lived in the colonel’s home since his wife died years earlier.48 While he protected his biological offspring from the cruelty of the plantation overseer and educated two of his three children, he refuses to fully acknowledge his paternity and demands their submission to him. Trouble develops when his light-skinned son, “Robert,” attempts to claim his rightful place as the son of one of the town’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens but finds himself forced to face racism’s grim reality. Having stirred the wrath of the whites in town for arguing with a white woman, Robert finds himself in a

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The child of Archibald Grimké, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and the niece of a prominent Washington, DC, minister, Francis Grimké, with whom she lived for many years,53 Angelina Weld Grimké changed in theological perspective from her youthful hopefulness,54 to one of despair for a distant and silent God.55 Her writings mirror that change. Beyond her published works, Grimké’s diary reveals her increasing concern for God’s remoteness. In an entry from New Year’s Eve, 1911, she opens what she entitles “My Prayer for the Coming Year” with this phrase: “Dear, beautiful God, who art so far away, come thou close to me day by day.” In the context of a prayer devoted largely to chastising herself for her failures, her feeling that God is “so far away” is given heightened significance. Strikingly, Grimké uses precisely this characterization in her draft of Mara. In an intimate scene between Mara and Lester, Mara states that she “was hoping God was at his window pane— watching.” Earlier Mara explained that the moon was God’s windowpane. The manuscript reveals that Grimké edited the words that followed. Originally, Mara was to have said, “I am so little, and so far from Him.” But she replaced these last words with the phrase “He is so far away,” echoing verbatim language from her diary years earlier.56 Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote two versions of a one-act play, A Sunday Morning in the South, in 1925. One script was known as the “White church version,” while the other was known as the “Black church version.”57 Though the basic plotline is the same in both scripts, several significant differences separate the stories. Both versions portray the arrest and eventual lynching of “Tom Griggs,” a hardworking nineteen-year-old African American who dreams of becoming a lawyer to protect black men from being charged with crimes they did not commit. The “Black church version” begins with “Sue Jones,” Tom’s sixty-year-old grandmother, singing a spiritual as she calls her grandsons to breakfast. We hear bells ringing from the black church next door. “Liza Twiggs,” a friend of Sue’s, is on her way to the church when she steps in for some coffee and gossip. We hear the congregation singing “Amazing Grace,” as Liza divulges news that “the white folks” are hunting for a black man who attacked a white woman the night before. Spirituals from the church continue as the police arrive to question Tom regarding his whereabouts the night before. Rejecting Tom’s alibi, a second officer brings in a “White Girl” and asks if Tom is the man. “I—I’m not sure . . . but . . . but he looks something like him,” she replies. With further prompting, the girl says grudgingly, “Y-e-s. . . . I think so.” Tom is taken away, terrified, as Sue protests. As Tom leaves, Liza prays “Sweet Jesus, do come down and hep us this morning. You knows our hearts and you knows this po

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The second scene, however, brings Sue to the white church. We hear the congregation singing hymns. Yet instead of finding the church a place of solace and refuge, Sue is greeted with suspicion and disdain by the white “Usher” as she tries to enter and speak to “Judge Manning,” her potential savior. Judge Manning finally appears at the door “looking vexed.” Sue tells him the story of what has happened to her grandson and implores him: “God knows whut’ll happen—Do fur God’s sake, go take charge of him and save him. He ain’t done no harm—’fore God he ain’t!” The judge dismisses her emotions—“I expect you’re all roused up over nothing . . . it’s Sunday morning, nobody’s going to do anything to your grandson today.” Sundays are apparently too sacred for such foul acts. Eventually the judge relents and heads back into the church to retrieve his hat. By the time he returns, Sue has overheard a member of the mob celebrating the lynching of her grandson. She clutches her heart and dies on the steps of the church. To the melody of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, we hear the white congregants sing, “Going home, going home, yes I’m going home,” as the curtain falls. Both versions of A Sunday Morning in the South maintain a common plot outline, yet their theological discourse differs considerably. In the “Black church version,” Johnson takes pains to present the women on the stage maintaining faith in God’s intervention and a merciful Jesus. Tom’s death, however, functions as a mockery of their hopes and a challenge to God’s justice and power. Conversely, while the “White church version” maintains some of this critique, the overwhelming thrust of the play casts light on the hypocrisy of white Christians and their failure to act, or to even be bothered by the gruesome reality of the evil around them. Churchgoing whites are complicit in their passivity, if not in their very actions. There is no definitive indicator as to whether Johnson intended that these two plays be performed for different types of audiences, but close reading of the text may suggest that she had a white audience in mind when composing the “White church version,” and an African American audience in mind with the “Black church version.” The “White church version” is considerably the more didactic of the two. Consider this piece of dialogue in the “White church version” when Sue and Liza discuss lynching and the fabricated claims of white accusers: SUE: And do you know Liza, I don’t believe half of ’em is tellin’ the truth. They holler out “rape” at the drappin’ of a hat. Half these tales is lies, just lies.

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summary of the history of African American life. Though lynching is not the sole focus of the narrative, the play begins on “a bare stage” with the exception of “a lynch rope and an auction block,” two symbols that neatly encapsulate the struggles of the African diaspora in America. About a third of the way into the play, a “Young Man” is lynched by a mob in Alabama. Hughes follows the lynching with the entrance of a “Mulatto Girl” reciting a poem. Way down South in Dixie, (Break the heart of me!) They hung my dark young lover To a cross road’s tree. Way down South in Dixie, (Bruised body high in air) I asked the white Lord Jesus What was the use of prayer. Way down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree.

Though used as part of the dialogue in Don’t You Want to Be Free? the poem also stood alone in a collection of Hughes’s work under the title “Song for a Dark Girl.”61 In casting “Lord Jesus” as white, and asking him “what was the use of prayer,” Hughes calls into question the access black Americans have to a white God. The futility of prayer is evident in James Weldon Johnson’s short play in verse Brothers—American Drama (1935) depicting a character named only “The Victim” engaging “The Mob” before his death. The Victim speaks on behalf of his battered race against the insults of The Mob and tries to answer the question posed to him: “Then who, why are you?” In the midst of his reply, The Victim explains: “In me the muttered curse of dying men / On me the stain of conquered women, and/Consuming me the fearful fires of lust / Lit long ago, by other hands than mine. / In me the down-crushed spirit, the hurled-back/prayers / Of wretches now long dead—their dire bequests.” Johnson’s image of the “hurled-back prayers” reflected the agnosticism he confessed at the time, as well as his belief that God had ceased to be a useful tool in the struggle for social progress.62 Abram Hill, best known for helping establish the American Negro Theatre in 1940, wrote Hell’s Half Acre63 in 1938 about the hopelessness of exacting justice against white men who flaunt their lynching of a black man.64 Hill, a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, draws our attention to the hypocrisy of white Christianity and the passivity of black Christians, but the play calls us especially to notice God’s absence in the face of tragedy. “Granny,” an elderly in-law of the victim, assures her enraged granddaughter that violent retribution is not the answer to those who butchered her granddaughter’s husband, “Rufus.” She implores her, “Just trust in the Lawd. . . . Just trust in Jesus.” Yet when the play ends, Granny’s home is being burned to the

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Though Ma Bailey expresses her concerns that all the black residents in town will be slaughtered by a white mob for her son’s transgressions against the racial code, Betty assures her that “God will help you folks.” Despite Ma Bailey’s initial reservations, she comes to see Betty’s love for her son as evidence of God’s own “miracle.” When Betty herself later despairs, Ma Bailey says, “Have faith, chile, faith. It’s abrought us poor colored folks through a heap o’ trouble. Da Lawd works in mysterious ways, we leaves things in his hands an’ whatever he does—is best.” The Reverend Miles arrives and proclaims that while this marriage may not be legal according to the state, it is legal in God’s eyes. The wedding is interrupted by angry members of the black congregation, but it continues in secret behind closed doors. When the congregants learn that the couple has been married, they are consumed with fear. As the church “Deacon” puts it, Clyde and Betty have committed an act of “wickedness dats agoin’ ter bring down de fires ob hell on all our heads.” But Reverend Miles assures them that this marriage “is de will o’ Gawd. . . . Love lak Gawd is No respector of persons.” Just as the angry congregants relent and leave, the baby is born. But Betty’s health is failing. “Oh, God—don’t let her die!” Clyde cries. You don’t care if she’s white—do you God? We’re all your children and you’re our ONE Father  .  .  .  I couldn’t help loving her  .  .  .  I didn’t mean to transgress your law or the law of man  .  .  .  And I love my race too— God . . . I want to live to help them. I want her to live to help me—help them! If I have sinned . . . take away my dream forever. Let ME die—not her . . . so that she can raise our son to do what I have failed to do . . . To lead my people to a RICHER—FULLER—FREEDOM!!

Betty does die. And Clyde is lynched. If the rhetorical weight of the play had not been so clearly geared toward garnering sympathy for the sincerity of the young couple’s love, one could argue that the script intended to cast a negative judgment upon interracial love. Yet the narrative choices Ralf Coleman makes render this judgment impossible. Instead, we are left asking why God failed to answer Clyde’s prayers. Theodicy Plays Two scholars in particular, Orlando Patterson and Donald Mathews, have shed light on the way religion informs our understanding of lynching, particularly in the South. Patterson attended primarily to comparisons between

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instructive. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s play Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930) is the story of a mother, “Pauline,” whose son faces a lynch mob for having “brushed against a white woman on the street.”71 Upon learning the news of her son’s impending death, Pauline springs into action and dispatches her daughter’s fiancé, “Dr. Grey,” to the Governor’s house with a ring she retrieves from her jewelry box. “Just give him this ring,” says Pauline, “. . . and say, ‘Pauline sent this. She says they goin to lynch her son born 21 years ago.’ Mind you, say 21 years ago. Then say, listen close. ‘Look into his eyes and you’ll save him.’” The implication is clear, that the Governor is her son’s biological father. Pauline begins to petition God for help and pleads to her daughter: “Trust in God. . . . I’ve got faith in Him, faith in . . . in the Governor. He won’t fail.” We are left unsure which “He” won’t fail (God or the Governor?), but Pauline’s faith in God’s power to respond to her prayers is strong. She beckons “sweet Jesus” to intervene by coming “down and rise with this wild mob tonight. Pour your love into their wicked hearts.” Uncharacteristically within the genre of antilynching plays, Pauline’s son is saved—not as a result of the mob having had “their wicked hearts” turned by God, but instead by the presence of the state militia sent by the Governor. Notably, what sets the would-be victim in Blue-Eyed Black Boy apart from the victims in Johnson’s earlier plays is his white, powerful father and his blue eyes. Among all the antilynching plays written by African Americans, God’s presence is felt only when injury to whiteness is at stake. Would God have been portrayed as so merciful if the boy’s eyes were brown and his ancestry exclusively African? African American playwrights were not alone in challenging lynching. Between 1909 and 1945, twenty-five antilynching plays were written by white playwrights. Several of these were generated through play contests sponsored by the Association for Southern Women against Lynching, an organization founded in part to counteract the claim that many lynchings were carried out to preserve the honor of white women.72 What is remarkable about these plays in comparison to those written by African Americans is the near-total absence of theodicy themes. Religion played a significant part in many antilynching plays written by white authors, but the focus was almost exclusively upon the hypocrisy of white Christians. The complicity of God in this acknowledged evil was almost nowhere to be found. Although eighteen of the twenty-five still extant antilynching scripts written by African Americans contained language that challenged God’s justice or very existence, only one by a white playwright—Paul Green’s 1926 hit, In Abraham’s Bosom—calls upon the audience to question God’s role in the lynching of African Americans.73

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a facet of omnipotence—coercion—in favor of persuasion with the ultimate triumph of grace still in question.76 None of these traditional approaches to theodicy are evident in the antilynching plays we have examined. Some, including the works of Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, reconcile evil by questioning whether God even exists. Most, however, might profitably be seen as precursors to what came to be called “protest theodicy.” Coined by theologian John Roth as he grappled with Holocaust narratives written by Elie Wiesel and others, protest theodicy provides no answers but cries out in the face of perceived evil. “Granted, this theodicy finds God’s total goodness lacking,” writes Roth; “however disharmony intensifies concern for moral goodness. Yearning for harmony with God is felt, and yet that yearning must not and cannot be satisfied unless things change for the good.”77 Russell McCutcheon has observed that “all theodicies are at their root political.” As such, he attempted to redescribe theodicies as “sociodicies,” or “discourses on the status and legitimacy of this or that ‘world.’”78 Black playwrights had clearly judged the world of white supremacy to have abdicated its legitimacy. Yet they were writing from within a cultural and religious milieu where God delivered blacks from bondage and was said to have a plan for African Americans. Though appeals to the prophecy of Psalm 68:31, predicting that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God,” had peaked by the end of the nineteenth century, organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association continued to keep the Ethiopian prophecy in public consciousness through its anthem, “Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers,” and speeches by Marcus Garvey. The Negro’s Church (1933), by Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson, cataloged the continued and frequent use of the prophecy in sermon.79 Confidence in a divine plan for African American people remained operative in large circles. More important, by all accounts churches continued to be the centerpiece of the African American cultural network, providing not only spiritual solace but the primary source for social networks.80 As such, it was nearly impossible to engage the politics of meaning within African American society without addressing the ideology from which the church arose, an ideology articulated through the language of theology. Within this ideological framework, the continued subjugation of the African American people meant that questions needed to be asked. Did God really care? Was God really just? Was God white? Did God really exist? For the playwright, answering these questions was vital if the political reality of oppression and subjugation was to be effectively addressed. As we have seen, these authors were up to the task and weaved theodicy into their narratives and into the voices of the characters they created for

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Burris’s You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and A Bill to Be Passed, May Miller’s Nails and Thorns, Regina Andrews’s Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, Mary Burrill’s Aftermath, Langston Hughes’s Mulatto and When the Jack Hollers (written with Arna Bontemps), Angelina Weld Grimké’s Mara, Abram Hill’s Hell’s Half Acre, and Ralf Coleman’s Swing Song, that the South itself is associated with not only a culture of violent racism but also hyperreligiosity, corrupt churches, and superstitious theologies. Of those playwrights, only Andrew Burris and Georgia Douglas Johnson had grown up in the South, while Arna Bontemps had moved out of the South by the age of three and Abram Hill by the age of thirteen.5 All these authors made their homes in what was once Union territory. Within northern consciousness (especially that of progressives), the South itself became a stock character in plays and stories where certain behaviors and attitudes were taken for granted in a way that similar behaviors and attitudes set in Vermont or the Upper East Side of New York City would have required explanation. Although racism, superstition, and hyperreligiosity could be found in the North as well, along with plenty of examples of Jim Crow, African Americans sensed a difference in the South. Farah Jasmine Griffin noted that in migration narratives written through the Great Depression, “the South is never a site of possibility for the migrant.” Regarding religion, some northerners relished poking fun at southern religiosity, black or white. H. L. Mencken famously described the region as “a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.”6 The 1925 Scopes trial (the first to be broadcast nationwide on the radio) only calcified the image of southern backwardness among northerners, both black and white. The quality of education to which they had access was one difference many African Americans perceived between the North and the South. Progress made in southern black education during Reconstruction had been thwarted by the 1880s. The “corrupt bargain” of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, whose popular vote loss was exchanged for an Electoral College win by removing the last Federal troops from the conquered Confederacy, left white southerners free to reinstate black subjugation through both legal and extralegal means. A rising imperialist impulse captured American political sentiments and brought with it a new array of pseudoscientific proclamations that blacks were incapable of benefiting from educational opportunities to the same extent as whites. Howard University historian Rayford Logan characterized the period from 1890 until World War I as “the nadir of American race relations,” and the educational sphere was no exception.7

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Reds.”12 His sermons focused heavily on African Americans’ role in God’s providential plans. Like the Israelites of old, their fate depended upon their obedience to God’s will, which Grimké linked with promoting social justice and welfare on earth. This theological view lent itself to a progressive politics. Coupled with an intellectual and challenging approach to preaching, Grimké met the needs of his highly educated congregation, who “expected their pastor to be a strong ‘race man’ speaking prophetically against the evils of race prejudice and on behalf of the rights of blacks as American citizens in the nation and as Christians in the church.”13 The progressive streak at Grimké’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church extended to May’s father, Kelly Miller, who doubted Christian mythology while embracing the humanistic features of the faith.14 Like many of her social status, May Miller conceived of her relationship to the less privileged among her race as burdened with the responsibility of helping them advance through service. Selected to deliver the valedictory address at Howard University’s 1920 commencement, Miller dedicated her speech to the concept of noblesse oblige.15 She invoked the feudal age, when nobility, in her view, owed more to the peasant than the peasant owed in return. In the modern world, she said, “when birth and position count for little and wealth power and prestige depend upon personality . . . the only true distinction is that of education.” Interestingly, she gave no hint that race played a role in delimiting opportunities for her and her classmates. At this Howard graduation ceremony, surrounded by both current and soon-to-be movers and shakers of the African American world, Miller reconstituted America’s social hierarchy outside the penumbra of white supremacy. Her world was divided into two spheres: “that of the ignorant and that of the educated.”16 She left no doubt for her peers as to their own status: “We are the nobility of the present day and must therefore assume the obligations of the nobility.” Miller framed these obligations theologically, echoing her pastor, Francis Grimké, as the means by which we fulfill our duty to God.17 Miller’s noblesse oblige ideology manifested itself in one of her earliest attempts at playwriting. Her one-act Within the Shadow won first prize in Howard’s 1920 playwriting contest. It told the sad story of “Mammy,” a “woman of the old south,” who continues residing on the property of Master Williams, the plantation owner to whom her own parents were enslaved. Mammy recounts memories of the plantation master riding from his house down the hill with the Ku Klux Klan to abduct and kill her father. She describes her anguish when her daughter, “Angie,” became pregnant by the plantation master’s son, who headed north to marry a white woman, escaping the shame of his liaison. That anguish was compounded by Angie’s

Figure 4.1. May Miller wrote several scripts emphasizing the value of education as an antidote to religious superstition. Photo reproduction courtesy of Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

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death in childbirth, leaving a daughter, “Betsy,” for Mammy to raise on her own. With pained resignation, Mammy attributes each tragic event in her life to God’s will.18 Today, the Williams boy has returned with his own son to the plantation he abandoned. On the same day, Betsy befriends “Ellen Lee,” described as “a graduate of a northern college” and “a well dressed dark-complexioned young woman of evident culture.” She is on her way to teach at a school in South Carolina but has missed the train. Betsy kindly invites her to stay the night in Mammy’s home. The short play is structured as a contrast between the world of suffering inhabited by Mammy and Betsy, and the world of hope, culture, and possibility inhabited by Ellen Lee. Betsy describes Ellen as “butiful an’ straight,” unlike the women of her community who were “bent.” Miller’s characters describe the heavy loads carried by children who grow up physically deformed, “twisted in de legs an’ bent in de baks.”19 Both Mammy and Betsy believe that escaping these deformities requires only loving God and being good. Ellen proffers an alternative explanation: “Way up north where I live there are lots and lots of beautiful children. Doctor Civilization and his nurse, Education, has made them so. And now Nurse Education is going with me to South Carolina to make more beautiful children.” It dawns on Ellen that Betsy could profit by following her to South Carolina to be educated, but Mammy fears the abandonment. “Ah can’t spar’ huh,” Mammy insists, “shuh’s all Ah’se got.” Her resistance continues until Betsy innocently lets her know that she has just found a new playmate, the young white boy who just arrived from the North. When Mammy realizes that the boy is Betsy’s half brother, the thought of Betsy facing the same fate as her dead mother, Angie, is ominous: “Dose dat lib wid-in de shado’ de shado’ mus’ fall on, an’ now its mah own putty li’l Betsy.” She finally relents and sends Betsy off with Ellen for an education and a chance for a better life, “out o’ de shado’ ob de hous’ on de hill.”20 Miller taught English and speech for two decades at Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore, Maryland. She married John Sullivan at the age of forty-one, and they returned to Washington, DC, in 1944 after she was diagnosed with a heart ailment, convincing her that life would be cut short (she would go on to live past her ninety-sixth birthday). The metaphor of “the shadow” employed in Within the Shadow reflected her view that blacks in the South were largely outside the reach of “civilization.” It colored her conception of southern black Christianity as well. For a woman who had written college papers on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, on the history of English religion since its pagan roots, and on the tendencies of “savages” to attribute spirits to inanimate objects, Miller’s Christianity demanded both decorum

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refuses his efforts. Her interrogation soon follows: “So yuh tol’ ’um yuh’d go aplayin in uh trashy no-count show in uh wicked theayter, huh?” Sampson protests that the show is not “trashy” but was the very show they had seen pretty pictures of in the Sunday paper. This job, he explains, would give countless people the chance to hear his music, arguing that all music comes from God. Marthy is unpersuaded.26 When Marthy accuses Sampson of turning his back on God, he shoots back that “sometime I think He done de turnin’.” Marthy scolds him for being wicked, but Sampson continues, “bitterly”: SAMPSON: ’Twas wicked when mah mammy call me Sam’son, she awantin me tuh grow big an’ strong so as I ’ud work an’ buy de farm. I seen huh die tryin’ tuh do de things I warn’t strong ’nough to do—me uh puny, sickly boy name Sam’son. MARTHY: He know bes’. SAMPSON: Yuh warn’t thinkin’ dat when I war ploughin’ an’ workin in dat dry, brown Car’lina lan’ dat nebber grow nuthin’ much but straggly corn an’ sparse cotton, an’ me haf sick all de time. MARTHY: But didn’ Gawd lead you out ob dat? SAMPSON: An’ what’s dere fuh me tuh do heah? I work an’ tug all day lon’ on de wharf an’ at night dere’s uh achin’ back an’ three dollar tuh show fuh mah time. Mah body ain’t big ’nough fuh dis kind ob work an’ I ain’t got sense tuh do what dem eddycated ones kin do.

On the verge of relenting, Marthy says, “But ’member I tol’ yuh no good kin ebber come ob it ’cause it’s cuss’d.” Sampson insists that God would never curse the only thing he had been graced to do well. Suddenly overcome with fear, Marthy recalls a biblical passage about God punishing children for the sins of their parents. She recounts a dream about being dressed in white, heading to church to be married while carrying her baby. “De ol’ folks ustuh say as how when yuh dream of marriages dey war certain death an’ dat white war uh sho’ sign ob sorrow.” Through the medium of old-world superstition, Marthy links any potential problems with her already troubled pregnancy to Sampson’s wish to play music in a Broadway show. She becomes “hysterical,” convinced that God will punish Sampson’s musical pursuits.27 Marthy leaves for her room as Jim returns to practice again with Sampson. As the two reminisce about beautiful dancing women, the lighthearted moment gives way to sadness as a “terrified whisper” from Marthy signals something is wrong with her in the next room. Sampson calls a midwife

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among the most resistant to join the woman suffrage movement initially, but it won over many by implementing a “southern strategy” aimed at promoting the woman’s vote as a means of locking in white supremacy in the South. Jim Crow laws, of course, would continue to strip African Americans of access to the ballot. The hostility between black men and white suffragists continued through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.29 In the midst of these tensions, W. E. B. Du Bois used the pages of the Crisis (the very magazine that published Richardson’s play The Deacon’s Awakening) to bridge the gap and advocate forcefully on behalf of woman suffrage. Appealing to the higher principle, Du Bois asked readers to separate the politics from the more important claim that true democracy demands that women, both white and black, merit the vote. With more than twenty essays in the years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment and an entire issue titled “Woman Suffrage Number” in 1912, the mouthpiece of the NAACP stood firmly with the suffragists.30 Historian Evelyn Kirkley has shown that while religious arguments were hardly the primary form of discourse in debates over woman suffrage, appeals to scripture were not uncommon among either supporters or opponents of women’s access to the ballot. Among conservatives, confidence that God conscribed women to the private sphere, leaving the public sphere to men, was ubiquitous. Claims that suffragists were “disposed to complain of the will of God Almighty, and not the will of man,” or that advocating for the “freedom of women” was tantamount to advocating “the overthrow of the Religion of Christ,” were less common but not difficult to find.31 When Willis Richardson addressed the question of woman suffrage in The Deacon’s Awakening, he set aside the issues of racism in the woman suffrage movement and grand political strategies entirely, focusing instead on the dynamics of patriarchy in families dominated by conservative, staunchly Christian black men. Two families are brought together by their church and their daughters’ friendship with one another. “Ruth Jones” and her friend “Eva” are students at Howard University, and both are active suffragists. Ruth is slated to deliver a speech to the Voting Society aimed at encouraging women to resist pressure to stay home on Election Day. She conspired with her mother, “Martha,” to keep both the speech and the meeting a secret from her father, “Deacon David Jones,” who, like Eva’s father, “Sol,” opposes woman suffrage. Yet news of the meeting has slipped out, and Deacon Jones plans on attending solely to record the names of women from his church in attendance, so that they can be brought before the council of deacons and punished. “We don’t mean to have the women in our

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play ends, the men “are standing like two schoolboys who have been getting a scolding.”34 Three features of The Deacon’s Awakening give insight into Richardson’s reading of religion. First, not only was the prime antagonist a deacon of his church, but Richardson saw fit to feature this fact in the play’s title. Though there were nonreligious contexts in which Richardson might have depicted the struggle for women’s rights, he utilized the sphere of Christian church life as the locus for women’s oppression. Notably, while Martha nonchalantly accepts her husband’s intransigence as she patronizingly assures him that he will come to accept things as they are as soon as he “wake[s] up,” the men never really awaken. They recognize that they are outnumbered and outsmarted but never acknowledge they are wrong. Instead, they are resigned to simply watch the times pass them by, serving as Richardson’s commentary on the decreasing relevance of conservative Christianity to the modern world. His attitude is amplified by the second feature of the play giving us insight into Richardson’s mind-set. The punishment these Christian men deem fitting for their progressive daughters is to end their education at Howard. Their reflexive association between education and progressive ideals reflects a deep social fissure in African American culture, with Richardson— who could not afford attending Howard despite a scholarship, and always regretted not having been able to do so—clearly siding with those on the educated side of the line. Finally, Richardson links conservative Christianity to the South in the characters of the Deacon and Sol, without ever explicitly identifying their roots. Though this is not a dialect play in the classic sense, both Deacon Jones and Sol speak with southern accents. Their “Ah’s” and their manner of dropping the letter “g” at the end of words reflect their roots in black southern culture before their being transplanted to the northern city in which the play takes place. The three women, however, speak with perfect diction in grammatically sophisticated sentences. Though originally a child of the South, Richardson reflected the social circles he cultivated after moving to Washington, DC, as a boy. Arguing on behalf of women’s rights, Richardson leads his audience to locate the conflict not simply in a contest of the sexes but in a contest of cultures. One culture combines faith, patriarchy, and region into a potent blend of reactionary ideology, while the other combines high educational aspirations, social graces, and bold selfesteem into a force for progress. In this conflict, conservative Christianity was bound to end up the loser. If The Deacon’s Awakening presents a hopeful message for ideological progressives that Christian patriarchy will eventually bow to the liberating forces of the modern age, A Pillar of the Church, written in the 1920s and

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of the room. He says later, “I don’t believe in dancin’ at all,” a belief clearly culled from his religious upbringing. When Mrs. Knight, one of May’s teachers, pays a visit to the Fishers to ask if they would consider sending their youngest daughter, Geneva, to their school as well, the story reaches a distressing climax. Mr. Fisher challenges the school’s curriculum. “The books [May] reads,” says Fisher, “I’ve been lookin’ at some of them, and to tell the truth I don’t like them a bit.” “Which ones in particular?” asks Mrs. Knight. “The novels,” Mr. Fisher replies. “I don’t believe in young girls readin’ novels. The other books are all right, but—what do you have novel readin’ for anyhow?” “That’s part of the English course,” Mrs. Knight replies. “The grammar ought to be enough,” insists Mr. Fisher. “Don’t you teach that?” Mrs. Knight explains they do, “but grammar only gives rules, so to speak, of the language. These other books broaden the mind of the student, give the student a clear idea of how the language is artistically used by masters of writing.” Fisher responds, “These novels are nothin’ but stories. Why don’t you teach them facts, plain newspaper and Bible?”37 The play ends with neither of the Fisher girls being able to attend the school. Patriarchy informed by Christianity has triumphed over a humanistic education for women. The girls will be sent to a church school instead. Though the conclusion of A Pillar of the Church is less uplifting than that of The Deacon’s Awakening, there are clear parallels between the two plays. Christianity is linked with patriarchy, otherworldliness, and a lack of education in both plays. Moreover, as in The Deacon’s Awakening, Richardson betrays his prejudices when his antagonist speaks in the dialect of African Americans from the Deep South, which in Mr. Fisher’s case includes frequent use of poor grammar (ironically, given his inclusion of grammar among the few subjects that should be taught in school), while Mrs. Fisher speaks with standard diction in grammatically correct sentences. Finally, both plays betray Richardson’s discomfort with forms of Christianity he viewed as harmful to black progress. Richardson’s The New Generation continued his pattern of writing plays with strong women as the central characters, but it shifts the religious concern from Christianity to the complex stew of African folk traditions lingering in the South. The play dramatizes the surrender of southern superstition to the power of northern education and the use of science and reason to combat conjure. “Aunt Hespeth” is an old woman known throughout her small southern town as a practicing conjurer. She is also a nearly constant presence at the home of “Sarah Sherman” and her sister “Linda,” two women in their forties. In recent weeks, Sarah has cared for her sister, who grew sick and weak after Aunt Hespeth cast a spell on her. Aunt Hespeth lets us know

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is deeply concerned about her Aunt Linda’s health. As Lucy, who is studying to be a nurse, tries to get to the bottom of Linda’s illness, she is shocked to learn that her mother and aunt have not utilized modern medicine and called upon a doctor. She is more “disappointed” to learn that they presume Linda’s ailment is caused by Aunt Hespeth’s spell. “Oh, Aunt Linda, are you still believing in things like that?” “I can’t help believing it,” Linda insists, “I’m almost flat on my back.” Lucy’s suspicions grow when she learns that Aunt Hespeth provides the only food her aunt has been eating and will not allow her any other meals. Just then, Aunt Hespeth returns. After insisting on a kiss from Lucy, she proceeds to comment on the stylish clothes Lucy wears and expresses her hope that Lucy has not become “stuck up.” When Sarah has dinner prepared, tension starts to mount. Lucy, convinced that mischief is afoot, lets Aunt Hespeth be alone with Aunt Linda to feed her. Aunt Hespeth tells Linda that there is too much food for her to eat so she does Linda the favor of eating it for her. She eats voraciously, leaving only a portion on which she surreptitiously sprinkles a mysterious white powder. The other women return to the room before Aunt Hespeth has had a chance to put the plate in front of Linda. When Linda reports that Aunt Hespeth prevented her from eating her whole meal, Lucy confronts Aunt Hespeth angrily, asking, “What right did you have to eat it?” Unfamiliar with defiance, Aunt Hespeth declares, “I don’t let nobody, white or black, talk to me like that.  .  .  .  Don’t you know I’m the boss of this town?” Lucy is unmoved. “You may be the boss of this town, but you surely are not the boss of this house.” Aunt Hespeth threatens her with spells that make people crawl on their knees and eat grass, and render them weak as kittens. Still, Lucy does not back down. Instead, she gives Linda a new plate of food and insists that she eat it. While Aunt Linda is frightened by Aunt Hespeth’s threats, she cannot help herself and begins to devour the meal, appearing stronger with each bite. Aunt Hespeth continues her threats, while Lucy demands, with equal vigor, that each woman publicly declare her unbelief in spells. When poor Annie, who has always feared Aunt Hespeth, hesitates, Lucy wisely uses language she knows will give Annie strength. “You wouldn’t be anybody’s slave, would you?” she asks Annie. “No, I wouldn’t be a slave,” Annie replies. “Then tell [Aunt Hespeth] you won’t be anybody’s slave.” Richardson notes that Annie is “aroused by the word slave,” and she soon recognizes Aunt Hespeth’s terror as a form of enslavement. “I won’t be a slave for a soul,” Annie declares. With all the women turned against her, Aunt Hespeth departs a defeated woman. The now strengthened Linda joins Aunt Maria in a leap as the two elderly women click their heels as the curtain falls.39

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bewilderment and amusement at his mother’s superstitious fears, but he delays his departure long enough to pay his respects. Aunt Dinah is irascible and does not hesitate to remind John of the spankings she gave him as a “snooty nosed boy.” “Yes, I remember that too,” says John, triggering an angry tirade from Aunt Dinah, who takes John’s failure to include a “ma’am” after his “yes” as a sign of disrespect. “Is dat der kind o’ manners dey learn ya in dat school yer went ter?” John is confused by Aunt Dinah’s failure to recognize that he is “a man now,” believing this status should absolve him of speaking to the elderly as if he were a child. The tense banter continues until Aunt Dinah dispatches him to see Reverend Moore.43 When John leaves, Aunt Dinah begins pressing Mandy for food while Mandy stalls and tries to change the subject. Similar to Aunt Hespeth’s feelings about Lucy in The New Generation, Aunt Dinah also expresses concern that John may become “too stuck up and big-headed” after his sojourn north. Mandy, however, is completely confident that her son will keep a level head and serve the Lord “like a good Christian.” Aunt Dinah’s hunger brings her back to the subject of food, and she asks Mandy directly for some chicken and cake. She angers when Mandy explains her food shortage predicament. Showing no gratitude for the sacrifices Mandy has made for her in the past, Aunt Dinah points “her lean forefinger at Mandy” before leaving and says, “Maybe yer think dis is goin’ ter be der happiest day yer ever had, Mandy Smith,” with John returning home from college, “but look out it don’t be der saddest. It’s been a long time since Ah put a cuss on anybody, but Ah’m tellin’ yer ter look out!” Mandy is overcome with fear. As she tries to make herself busy, alone in the house, she accidentally drops a plate on the floor. “There! That’s the first bad luck!” she cries, convinced that the broken plate is an omen. “Ah wonder if anything else is goin’ to happen? That old woman put a cuss on me, sure as you’re born she did; and somethin’ else is bound to happen.”44 Mandy’s fear prompts her to succumb to Aunt Dinah’s requests, gather some food, and head out the door to appease the witch in the hopes that her curse will be lifted. However, she is met at the door by John, who has returned rather quickly from his visit to Reverend Moore. “You didn’t stay over there many minutes,” she notes. “We disagreed,” says John. “Disagreed! Disagreed about what?” Mandy demands, surprised. JOHN: We disagreed about things generally and about church in particular. [MANDY]: What you mean by that? How could you disagree with him about church when you learned your Sunday School lessons under him? You learned everything you know about Gawd and the church under him.

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progressive ideas winning out over conservative Christian theological teachings, it might not be a stretch to suggest that John’s conceptions of God and the church would stand up to the criticisms of his mother and Reverend Moore.48 Given the lack of textual evidence and the fact that A Pillar of the Church ends in despair, we cannot know what might have been written. A genuine confidence in the power of education and reason is pervasive in the plays of Willis Richardson and May Miller. However, that confidence does not always extend to the conviction that Christianity will embrace modernity in the march toward progress. These plays appeal to an audience convinced of a gap between the reasoning of the educated class and those locked in subcultures where Christian teachings or African folk traditions set the paradigm for knowledge. At the same time, they illustrate that these paradigms are powerful. Only in Miller’s Within the Shadow and Richardson’s The New Generation are we given the sense that those once steeped in the old ways have ultimately exchanged their old views for the new. Moreover, in an era in which millions made this symbolic exchange with their feet by migrating to the North, Miller and Richardson share an understanding of the South as the progenitor of reactionary faith and antimodern forces. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, the wellsprings of the Christian tradition were not always linked to reaction and intransigence but were at times touchstones for imagining a racial progress and a bright destiny for the African diaspora.

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5 Blackness in the Image of God “Oh, remain with your flocks and fields and vineyards, to covet, to sweat, to die and know no peace. I go to the sun.” —“Ham,” in Zora Neale Hurston’s The First One

The humanistic impulse in early twentieth-century African American cultural expression, with its concern for corruption and hypocrisy in black Christian churches, its denigration of religiously grounded superstition and ignorance, and its uncomfortable sense that God remains a distant observer to suffering or absent altogether, is an underdeveloped topic in the scholarship on African American life. The plays we have examined reflected the attitudes of a fairly narrow class of cultural producers whose conflicted attitudes toward Christianity’s place in the struggle for racial uplift registered prominently in their scripts. The overwhelming majority of black playwrights before World War II were members of this small class. Christian theological language, however, pervaded African American literary and political discourse. Even authors who rejected theism, like Langston Hughes, Owen Dodson, or James Weldon Johnson, continued employing the language and symbolism of Christian mythology in their work, while challenging its core beliefs.1 Writers like these saw theater as a medium through which they could imagine blacks extracting themselves from a premodern and unenlightened Christianity, or moving beyond Christianity altogether in favor of absorption into a nonracial proletarian front. Though these attitudes were common, Christianity was not always depicted as a problem, but instead as a vehicle for progress and spiritual renewal. The plays discussed in this chapter frame Christianity in a positive light and utilize the Bible as raw material to tell stories affirming the dignity of the African American people. For authors like Marita Bonner and Randolph Edmonds, faith is presented as a cornerstone of individual and collective advancement. In the hands of May Miller and Zora Neale Hurston, scripture could be creatively fashioned to cast blacks in a special role within God’s providential order, while Owen Dodson employs the Gospels to invoke the sacredness of black humanity. >>

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together the gospel extravaganza. Built largely on notes and a few scripted entries between large choral and dance numbers, Heaven Bound utilized traditional gospel hymns to tell the story of two dozen pilgrims facing the temptations of Satan (complete with red suit, horns, and tail) on their path toward the pearly gates of heaven. Most performances were ad-libbed in the early years, though the choral pieces were set and expertly choreographed. Soon, white crowds poured in to the all-black church to see what Theatre Guild Magazine called “the first great American folk drama.” The spectacle was eventually turned into a touring production and a Federal Theatre Project show. Heaven Bound is still performed annually at Big Bethel AME Church.4 Marita Bonner and Revolutionary Theater Plays such as Appearances and Heaven Bound do not fit neatly into the religious-themed works of African American playwrights in the early twentieth century, the former due to its New Thought theme, and the latter due to its minimal script and almost total reliance on gospel songs and improvisation. But both were clear forms of theatrical evangelization. Such evangelizing had precedents decades earlier. Nearly all of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman’s plays, along with her poems and essays, were published in the A.M.E. Church Review. The wife of an AME preacher, Tillman wrote works that reflected the Victorianism of her day, while skillfully promoting racial advancement by creating “black heroines who, by exemplifying courage, self-sacrifice, moral purity, and spiritual piety, served as models for black people.”5 By the 1920s, however, Tillman’s brand of earnest moralizing had given way to the more self-consciously artistic style of Marita Bonner. Bearing in mind that there were undoubtedly plays written by Bonner’s contemporaries for performances in churches and Sunday schools that have been forever lost to us over time, Bonner’s approach to evangelizing would likely have struck Tillman as a dramatically different enterprise. Marita Bonner was born in 1898 and raised just outside of Boston in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her mother was the daughter of a free woman who married a slave in Virginia, and in doing so set him free. Her father was a skilled machine operator who valued education and put his son and two daughters through college, perhaps with the assistance of funds from the family’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Boston.6 Bonner majored in English and comparative literature at Radcliffe College, where she won awards for her music and was a founding member of her African American sorority. Despite her success there, she was barred from

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His mother henpecks him throughout, insisting he change wording or challenging him for using a nonbiblical story. After some delays, Elias launches into the meat of his sermon: an allegory about a potmaker and a roomful of pots. Unlike your typical inanimate pot, these pots can listen and talk. Each pot was made essentially the same, Elias explains, but the potmaker reveals they have the potential to change. At their best, they can become glorious pots of gold. At their worst, however, they would become pots of tin. To become pots of gold, they need only refrain from spilling the contents the potmaker had put in them. When one of the pots tells the potmaker that it suffers from a crack, the potmaker gently fixes it with dirt and spit. Elias’s potmaker only asks the pots to do what they were meant to do, and he has given each pot the means to carry out its task.11 Elias describes the potmaker leaving his pots, closing the door, and turning out the lights. In the darkness, some pots become nervous. Before long, several pots are falling over, spilling their contents onto the floor. When the potmaker returns, he sees that some remained upright, while the fallen, empty pots had failed him completely. The vigilant, upright pots are rewarded when the potmaker turns them into gold. Based on the proportion of the contents preserved, some pots are turned to silver, others to brass. But the empty, broken pots are turned to tin. Upon finishing his story, Elias looks to his listeners and explains: “Them pots is people. Is you all. If you’ll keep settin’ on the truth what God gave you, you’ll go be gol’. If you lay down on Him, He is goin’ to turn you to tin. There won’t be nothin’ to you at all. You be as empty as a tin can.” Just as Jesus came into the world as the same man who died on the cross, Elias preaches, we are called to preserve our divine gifts.12 Elias’s father cheers him on while his mother wonders whether a real congregation will accept the idea of talking pots. Lew Fox, “in a tone too nice, too round, too rich to be satisfactory,” compliments Elias on his sermon and then asks Lucinda to join him for a glass of water—though it is obvious the two will take the opportunity to kiss while out of the sight. Afterward, Lucinda returns and begins arguing with Elias’s mother, leading to a ferocious fight with Elias himself. Elias questions Lucinda’s venomous speech. She attacks his abilities as a provider. Elias “aint even got sense enough to keep a job!” she yells. “Get a job paying good money! Keep it two weeks and jes’ when I’m hoping you’ll get a little money ahead so’s I could live decent like other women—in my house—You had to go and get called of God to quit and preach!” She scoffs at his insistence that God chose him to preach and berates him for forcing her to live under the same roof as his mother.13

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blood sacrifice can generate a new order as the framework for the play. The Purple Flower takes place in a timeless land, with a set made up of two levels, one much higher than the other. Dominating the stage on a high hill is “Flower-of-Life-At-Its-Fullest,” standing as tall as a pine tree. As beautiful as the flower is, Bonner informs us that only the “White Devils” have access to it. The White Devils inhabit the hill, while below in the valley live a people Bonner simply calls “Us.” Interestingly, the skin of the Us people ranges from dark black to white. Whether this suggests that the Us includes oppressed people of all races or includes only those of mixed African and European ancestry with skin light enough to “pass” for white is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the White Devils—complete with horns on their heads—are dedicated to keeping the Us off the hill and away from the Flower-of-Life-At-Its-Fullest.17 Each speaking member of the Us represents a particular faction of people. Bonner’s characters reflect multiple perspectives one might see within any African American community. For instance, they debate the words of the “Leader” (a stand-in for Booker T. Washington), who insists that hard work will pave the way for the Us to reach the hilltop. Bonner and many others had lost faith in Washington’s message by the late 1920s, and as one “Young Us” explains, “Work doesn’t do it. The Us who work for the White Devils get pushed in the face—down off of Somewhere [the name given to the high land of the White Devils] every night.”18 The characters suggest many ways of reaching the Flower-of-Life-AtIts-Fullest. Ancient wisdom and book-learning are called into question, for books were written by the White Devils themselves. When an Old Man cries out to God and pleads, “Lord! Why don’t you come by here and tell us how to get Somewhere,” a Young Man scolds him for speaking to God in that way. Bewildered, the Old Man insists he has spoken to God in this way for seventy years. “Yes!” the Young Man explains, “three score and ten years you been telling God to tell you what to do. Telling Him! . . . Well, if he is all powerful, God does not need you to tell Him what to do.” The Old Man is confused, and he challenges the Young Man to explain the point of prayer. “Don’t talk so much to Him!” the Young Man retorts. “Give him a chance! He might want to talk to you, but you do so much yelling in His ears that he can’t tell you anything.” Bonner is suggesting that God can still provide answers, but our concern with dictating the terms of God’s interaction with us leads to our failure to listen for the answers God may provide.19 Another Old Man relays a message from God, but this Old Man acts like a conjurer, filling a pot of iron with dust from the earth. “Old Us that are

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They ripened crops of cotton, watering them with our blood. Finest Blood, this is God’s decree: ‘You take blood—you give blood. Full measure—flooding full—over—over.” First Blood then heads off into the bushes in the shadows and calls out to the White Devil, “God speaks to you through me—Hear Him! Him! You have taken blood; there can be no other way. You will have to give blood! Blood!” Like a parable forcing its audience to grapple with its implications, Bonner ends the play with these stage directions: “Let the curtains close leaving all the US, the WHITE DEVILS, Nowhere, Somewhere, listening, listening. Is it time?”22 The Purple Flower can be understood as a call to revolution, but it cannot be separated from the Ethiopianist tradition of earlier African American works, involving both a claim of divine destiny and a confidence that Africa’s descendants will ultimately supersede the European civilization. Like the God of the ancient Hebrews, Bonner’s God sets his black tribe against its enemies to do battle for God’s glory. As in The Pot Maker, Marita Bonner utilizes theater as a venue for evangelizing God’s will. Whereas The Pot Maker frames doing God’s will in terms of a fairly traditional set of moral precepts that must be followed, The Purple Flower imagines God’s will reaching far beyond personal moral choices, into an epic clash of peoples marked by color and character. Randolph Edmonds When he was eighteen years old, Sheppard Randolph Edmonds took a trip to New York City and, serendipitously, saw a play at the Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue and 131st Street in Harlem. He later described himself as having “got religion” that evening, engendering a love for the stage that guided the rest of his life. Edmonds came to be known as the “dean of black theater” and was instrumental in developing drama programs at African American colleges across the South. In addition to his productivity, Edmonds was notable for the extent to which his Christian faith and moral framework shaped his scripts. Unlike most black playwrights of this era, Edmonds made his career in the South after years of northern education, and his sympathy toward southern culture as more than an exotic stage prop came through in his stories.23 Randolph Edmonds, the name he used as an author, was known to his friends as “Shep.” His parents were born slaves in Virginia, and his father, a sharecropper, gained notoriety as one of the first literate African Americans in his town. Edmonds remembered his house being visited by people eager for his father to write on their behalf. Randolph Edmonds majored in

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Also instructive of Edmonds’s perspective toward Christianity were his feelings about Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures. Though admitting that Connelly’s rendering of black belief in heaven resembling a fish fry “failed to present aspects of a living religion in terms of its believers,” Edmonds was far more forgiving than most black critics. Connelly’s misrepresentations were irrelevant. Instead, “Mr. Connelly achieved something far greater. He gave a deeply moving picture of God as the friendly father of all people. He showed that in our realistic and scientific world, God still cares for mankind, His children; and that He is worried and perplexed about their behavior, and He wonders why they do not turn away from their sin and follow Him.” Thus, Connelly’s play was a remarkable theological achievement. Indeed, Edmonds proclaimed that “no greater message has ever come from behind the footlights.”28 Though religion is common in the more than two dozen scripts Edmonds penned during his lifetime, one play in particular revealed his concern with secular tendencies among the African American intelligentsia of his day, while featuring his sympathy for Christianity’s place in the lives of southern blacks. Old Man Pete is a devastating indictment of a generation Edmonds feared had lost its roots. Annamarie Bean wrote that with Old Man Pete, “Edmonds literally taps into a ‘coldness’ he sensed in the [Harlem] community toward anything or anyone rural by the middle-class urbanites.”29 These urbanites are represented by “John,” “Maria,” and “Sam,” the three children of “Pete Collier” and his wife, “Mandy.” Now residents of Harlem, having left the Virginia of their youth for the excitement and sophistication of the city, they are well dressed and reside in stylishly furnished, posh apartments. Yet each regrets having encouraged their parents to move to Harlem to be with them. The play begins on a bitterly cold night in John’s apartment. He has called a meeting of his siblings, having grown tired of lodging his parents in his own home and hoping to share the burden. A conversation between Maria and her husband, “Wilmur, ” informs us that Pete and Mandy are attending an early church service. “Yeah, I know,” says Wilmur, “they’ve gone to that sanctified dump on 133rd Street again. I wish they would go around there and stay.” The line is unsettling, as Wilmur violates the often unspoken code prohibiting openly insulting one’s in-laws. Maria calls him “unkind,” but Wilmur stands his ground: I am tired of being made the laughing stock of Harlem. Everywhere I go somebody asks me, “Where is your pa?” “Where is your ma?” “Did they

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conversation revolves around alcohol, cigarettes, and games. One of the guests asks John about his father, setting off a round of “snickers” among the partygoers. “I fail to see the joke,” says John, defensively. The raucous festivities continue until Pete steps out of his room to search for chewing tobacco. “You and your old tobacco make me sick,” says Vivian. Pete then makes the mistake of telling Vivian that “good gals don’t smoke,” sparking Vivian’s outrage. Mandy assures her that Pete meant no harm. “No. You never mean any harm,” cries Vivian. “You are always doing something dumb that you don’t mean. I know what you want. You just want to start your usual sermon about wild parties and drinking whiskey. I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it!” Pete challenges John to stand up to his wife after Vivian dared insulting John’s mother, but John impotently asks: “What can I do, Father?” John’s submission is a cue to Vivian that she is free to attack. She calls Pete a “grey headed old fool” and challenges him to stand up to her. “She’s too brazen,” says Pete. “A gal lak dat ought tuh be horse whupped. She ain’t got no manners.” An enraged Vivian responds, “You ought to learn some manners yourself. You act like somebody half civilized. The idea of your talking about whipping somebody! (Crying.) You get out of my house, the both of you! Get out!” She compounds the insult by revealing, “It ain’t no use of your going to Maria’s, nor Sam’s neither. They were here this evening, and neither one would take you. You’d better go back to the sticks where you came from.” John pathetically pleads for the quarrel to stop, but Vivian claims that he is “not man enough” to admit he feels the same way. When Pete challenges John to take a stand against Vivian, John demurs. Pete and Mandy leave, vowing to return to Virginia.33 The play’s final scene takes place in a bitterly cold, snowy Central Park. Pete and Mandy are walking to the train station despite the harsh conditions. Mandy begs to sit and rest, but Pete insists that the station is not much farther. Confronting her exhaustion and the twenty-below-zero temperatures, she dares suggesting that they return to John’s apartment. “Ah’d ruther go to hell and burn in torment fire a thousand yeahs befo’ Ah’d go back tuh dat ungrateful house,” replies Pete. After a few more pleas to rest, Pete succumbs, and the two sit on a park bench for Mandy to catch her breath. Mandy begins falling asleep as Pete shakes her to stay awake. “Let me sleep jes’ a little longer,” begs Mandy. “All right, jes’ a little longer den,” says Pete. As Mandy drifts into sleep, Pete begins a monologue, reflecting on the heartless city “whar nobody cares whether yuh lives er dies.” He yearns for the bucolic comfort of Virginia. Exhausted, he rambles, “Ah heahs de horses neighing and de pigs is squealing. Dey is hongry, Mandy. Le’s go feed

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The Bible on Stage Much scholarship has focused on the way African Americans read themselves into the tales of slavery and oppression marking the lives of the ancient Hebrew people in scripture. These stories were co-opted as the raw material for spirituals, originating in field labor on southern plantations and kept alive in church services, choirs, and civil rights marches. Though W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term “sorrow songs” to describe them, he was certainly aware that, along with the grief they conveyed came an abiding faith in ultimate deliverance.36 Historian of religion Eddie Glaude moved beyond spirituals to argue that the Exodus narrative itself provided the discursive template for black nationalism in the nineteenth century. By “elevating their common experiences to biblical drama,” African Americans employed Exodus in sustaining “hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and disillusionment.”37 Exodus ends with a description of God’s presence as a pillar of cloud floating above the tabernacle—a cloud whose movements would guide the Hebrew people through the desert. Like the Israelites, black Christians were faced with the question of where, precisely, did God intend for them to go? Identification with the Hebrew tribe and an abiding trust in a triumphal divine plan came to be enmeshed over time, shaping the contours of artistic and political expression for many African Americans. The wellsprings of biblical material inspiring African American voices of the nineteenth century were not tapped out in the twentieth. This is evident not only in the work of playwrights who continued to anchor themselves within the sustaining framework of Christianity but also in the work of those whose Christian commitments were strained. Following in their ancestor’s footsteps, several black playwrights invoked those same biblical narratives to recast their social and political world with an eye toward racial uplift. Frameworks lifted from the pages of scripture were transformed into tales reflecting the situation of blacks struggling for full citizenship. The first of these plays we will examine, May Miller’s Graven Images, sprang from historian Carter G. Woodson’s efforts to promote a new black historical consciousness. The other two biblically inspired plays, by Zora Neale Hurston and Owen Dodson, make use of scripture in ways reflecting decidedly different moods and intentions. Setting aside the question of whether Christianity advanced or restrained the race, they forged their own renderings of Jewish and Christian tales, enabling them to speak to the politics of race in the early twentieth century.

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traditional educational settings but also in Sunday school classes.39 Negro History Week provided a launching pad for discussing black history in an otherwise Eurocentric academic environment. Finally, in 1937, Woodson inaugurated the Negro History Bulletin, aimed especially at primary and secondary school teachers.40 Carter Woodson understood the difference between biblical narrative and history. Though the two overlapped at times, his stewardship of the journal indicated a refusal to conflate biblical authority with scientifically grounded historical method. Still, Woodson perceived a link between the Bible and the study of history in two areas. First, the Bible had instilled in many African Americans a thirst for continuing studies in history. By reading the Bible, African Americans “not only found what a minister of limited education could point out, but facts drawn from the best thought of the Ancient world.” He went further to argue that reading biblical tales “did more than lead to the reading of literature of a kindred nature. Some read books on ancient and medieval history, and finally works on the history of modern Europe.”41 Bible stories, in Woodson’s estimation, were valuable primers for cultivating an interest in the past. The second link between the Bible and the study of history rested in the common need to rescue both from distortions wreaked by a racist culture. “In schools of Theology,” Woodson wrote, “Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro sometimes almost to the point of starvation. Deriving their sense of right from this teaching, graduates of such schools can have no message to grip the people whom they have been ill trained to serve.”42 Therefore, not only redeeming the message of Christianity but rehabilitating the African characters of biblical narrative from the clutches of European and Euro-American exploitative exegesis made common cause with the task of educating African Americans about their noble ancestry. As mentioned, Carter Woodson’s work intersected with May Miller’s life, resulting in a striking example of the confluence of historical consciousness with religious imagination in the service of developing a forward-looking African American identity. May Miller’s play Graven Images was written for amateur performance at schools, churches, Sunday schools, and community centers. The publication and widespread dissemination of this play resulted from Woodson’s efforts. Graven Images appeared in a 1930 collection commissioned by Woodson, edited by Willis Richardson, and published by Woodson’s Associated Publishers. The anthology, Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, and all its plays were designed to be performed by young adults and children. Miller stipulated that Graven Images was best suited for

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It is my belief that when he determined to invent in the souls and characters of a race  .  .  .  he did not stand within the golden gates of heaven and point to the advanced and the educated and the distinguished white race but think that he with finger projected pointed to the unadvanced, the uneducated, and the undistinguished negro. Just as he transformed darkness to a world do I think he is determined to change the negro to the greatest race of the world. The white race today may spit upon them saying you soulless black man but, but some day they will be compelled to look up to the negro. . . . [I]t is left to us the rising generation to help the negro open out a way whence his splendor may escape.49

These youthful reflections on seeking divinity in the actions of humanity foreshadowed Miller’s adult work. A theological liberal like her father, Miller rejected the Calvinist emphasis on human depravity so common among those migrants to the North who had been weaned on hellfire and brimstone.50 In the 1980s, May Miller was given a questionnaire by English scholar Winifred Stoelting for an essay on Miller’s life Stoelting was preparing for a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Miller was asked whether the depiction of religion in her work could be fairly described as affirming “the humane, the universal, and the potentially divine in the human condition.” Miller did not write out a response to the question. She merely underlined, boldly, the words “humane,” “universal,” and “potentially divine in the human condition.”51 It would be hard to imagine more appropriate words to describe May Miller’s perspective in Graven Images.52 The play is based on a story in the book of Numbers about Moses’s sister, Miriam, and his brother, Aaron (12:1–16). Numbers 12:1 tells us that “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married (for he had indeed married a Cushite woman).” The Cushite woman was presumably Zipporah the Midianite (though the text is not explicit). Nor does the text indicate why Miriam and Aaron were displeased by Moses’s marriage to the Cushite woman. The name “Cush” is often translated as “Ethiopia” and appears to refer to the land of Nubia south of Egypt. Some modern interpreters—shaped by categories of race marked by skin color—have taken the complaints of Miriam and Aaron to refer to Zipporah’s dark skin.53 While this interpretation almost certainly imputes modern hierarchies of skin color onto the intentions of the ancient biblical authors, the fact that God’s punishment of Miriam is an ailment that turns her skin “as white as snow” (12:10) has been characterized as potentially ironic.

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May Miller’s play, performed in black churches, schools, and colleges across the country, poignantly reflects the manner in which biblical narrative can be appropriated in the construction of a positive social identity— one in which “blackness” reflects the image of God. By casting Miriam as a representative of white supremacy, complete with modern concerns of socalled miscegenation, “blood purity,” and fear of “contamination” through the dilution of “whiteness” as it came to be imagined, Miller’s African American audiences were reassured not only of their worth but of God’s favor as well. Zora Neale Hurston Reframing Ham The life, death, and resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston’s remarkable artistic and academic career are well-trodden ground for scholars. Her talents as a writer, storyteller, and researcher combined to enable the young student of pioneer anthropologist Franz Boas to blend extensive fieldwork in African American life with her own life experiences for a collection of novels, stories, and plays that continue to be relevant today. Her tumultuous childhood was lived out in the shadow of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, Florida, where her father was a preacher. Life in the church shaped Hurston, though not in the manner that her father might have chosen for her. Hurston’s stories, as well as her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, were peppered with references to scripture and spirituals. Her first sustained interaction with the Bible occurred after being locked in a room after a whipping from her mother, stuck with only the scriptures to read to pass the time. From the start, she was captivated by the stories: tales of “smiting” and revenge and conflict. Hurston never hesitated to invoke her own ideal of God, yet it was clear that the God to which she subscribed bore little resemblance to the God she encountered in the Bible or the Christian church.57 “As early as I can remember, I was questing and seeking,” wrote Hurston. Her search was sparked by the dissonance between the stories about God that she heard and the troubled state of the world and the church that she encountered in daily life. “It seems to me true,” she wrote, “that heavens are placed in the sky because it is unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine—hence, religion.” Prayer struck her as a strange attempt to persuade a God who was already said to have an elaborate plan for the universe. It seemed to Hurston “a cry of weakness.” Creeds were a form of wish fulfillment fantasy that, while consoling to some, held no value for her. Hurston’s unorthodox though decidedly spiritual sensibility is beautifully described in her autobiography:

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slaves/Shall he be to his brothers.” And he said, “Blessed be the LORD / The God of Shem; / Let Canaan be a slave to them. / May God enlarge Japheth, / And let him dwell in the tents of Shem. / And let Canaan be a slave to them.”61

The biblical tale was used to justify the enslavement of Africans, and to provide a rationale for the continued subjugation of blacks in America after emancipation, despite the fact that there is no reference to color in the text itself.62 But while the narrative served their oppressors, African Americans themselves recoded the tale as one of potential uplift. The phrase “children of Ham” became a shorthand for slaves and their descendants, connecting them to great African civilizations of the past. Ham’s children included not only Canaan but also Cush (roughly Ethiopia), Put (associated with Libya), and finally Mizraim, meaning Egypt.63 Though there continues to be debate over the precise regions to which these terms referred, all but Canaan itself (ironically, named for the only one of Ham’s children who was cursed) are linked directly with Africa. In the hands of African Americans, being aligned with the “children of Ham” provided fertile ground for cultivating pride rather than suffering derision. Having traced their lineage to Ham, African Americans used the Ethiopianist prophecy of Psalm 68:31 to mark a discursive path through which they could undermine the stigma associated with their once shunned patriarch and recognize themselves as participants in a divinely ordained destiny. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the foundation of a glorious lineage stretching back to ancient Egypt was being constructed in the pulpits of black churches. James Theodore Holly, a descendant of freed slaves who eventually became the first African American bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the bishop of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, developed a dispensational theology by 1884 that divided human history into three phases. The Semitic dispensation (named for the descendants of Shem) resulted in the composition of scripture. The Japhetic phase “coincided with the apostolic or evangelical period, the age of the Europeans, who had been commissioned to spread the gospel.” The fullness of time, however, would be marked by the Hamitic dispensation through which the millennial age prophesied by Revelation would be initiated. “That what has been a curse to them [the Children of Ham] under Gentile tyranny will become a blessing to them under the mild and beneficent reign of Christ,” wrote Holly, “and thus will be realized the double but adverse significations of the Hebrew word barak . . . which signifies to ‘bless,’ and also ‘to curse.’ . . . The curse of Canaan, dooming him to be a servant of servants unto his brethren . . . will

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his siblings who, Hurston tells us, “are all middle-aged and clad in dingy garments.” The wives of Ham’s brothers—characters Hurston essentially invents for the purposes of the narrative—are significant to the play, for it is their bitter jealousy of Ham and the favoritism that Noah shows to him that motivate their actions. Immediately Shem’s wife, “Mrs. Shem,” scolds Ham and his wife for bringing “nothing” to sacrifice for Jehovah. Ham takes issue with his sister-in-law and reminds her that they “bring flowers and music to offer up. I shall dance before Jehovah and sing joyfully upon the harp that I made of the thews of rams.” But his protests do nothing to mollify the wives of his siblings, who are convinced that Ham is lazy and that his artistic gifts do not merit his father’s praise.68 The action shifts to Noah and his family recalling the horrors of the Flood and reflecting on the painful images continuing to plague their memories. Ham’s wife, “Mrs. Ham,” tearfully recalls her own mother begging for shelter during the storm. Yet Mrs. Shem displays no sympathy. “She would not repent,” Mrs. Shem coldly insists as she eats her meal “vigorously.” Turning to Mrs. Ham, she strikes an accusatory tone and says: “Thou art as thy mother was—a seeker after beauty of raiment and laughter. God is just. She would not repent.” Mrs. Ham is hurt by her sister-in-law’s words and asks, rhetorically, “And why must Jehovah hate beauty?”69 After establishing her characters, Hurston moves the play closer to the biblical narrative. Noah gets drunk, apparently to help dull his painful memories of the Flood, and walks to his tent. When Ham sees his father passed out and naked, he laughs and jokes, bawdily, “He is no young goat in the spring. . . . The old Ram, Ha! Ha! Ha! He has had no spring for years!” Both sisters-in-law see an opportunity to turn Noah against his favorite son and convince their husbands, Shem and Japheth, to wake Noah and inform him that he had been teased about his nakedness. Without being told who was guilty of the insult, Noah, still drunk, calling himself “the lord of the Earth,” pronounces a curse against his mocker. Not only would the mocker have no part of his inheritance, but Noah adds, “His skin shall be black! Black as the nights, when the waters brooded over the Earth! . . . Black! He and his seed forever. He shall serve his brothers and they shall rule over him.” As he pronounces his curse, Noah’s wife, fearful of its implication, begs him to stop his drunken rant.70 Hurston’s version of the myth adds another element missing from the biblical account: regret. Ham’s jealous siblings and in-laws had not anticipated Noah’s curse. When they hear Noah unwittingly condemn Ham to blackness, they desperately plead with Jehovah to ignore Noah’s words. When Noah discovers he has cursed Ham, he cries, “Oh, that I had come alive out of my

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tale).73 Taylor Hagood’s more detailed analysis shares Hemenway’s reading of the play as attempting to subvert white racist readings of the Ham myth. Hagood notes that “the audience understands that Ham’s  .  .  .  characteristics,” including his musicality, happiness, and artistry, which, in Hurston’s hands, predate Ham’s blackness, “now are characteristics of blackness and therefore ‘negative’ signifiers where they had first been ‘positive’ signifiers of his whiteness.” He concludes, “By presenting Ham’s curse as an arbitrary rather than a predetermined ‘essence,’ Hurston deconstructs the very framework of black signifiers. At the same time, she derides the neat concepts of justice allegedly inherent in that white patriarchal framework and exposes its supremacist flaws.”74 The most extensive commentary on the play to date, however, portrays it as an unintentionally reactionary reading of black identity. Susan Gubar’s 1997 book, Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, accuses Hurston of “apparent complicity in using the story [of Ham] to justify the expulsion of blacks from political power and spiritual primacy.” Though Gubar sees Hurston as having “struggled to rescue the biblical myth from the bigoted uses to which it had been put,” and as having “struggled to supply a potentially liberating counter-commentary,” in the end she judges Hurston’s efforts as having failed. Instead, Gubar notes that whiteness in Hurston’s play is “so primordial that it remains invisible, unnamed, taken for granted, naturalized.” Though subversive readings of The First One, such as those proposed by Hemenway and Hagood, were admittedly “attractive,” Gubar conceded that they “cannot fully account for the effect of Hurston’s early effort at revisionary mythmaking.” She concludes instead that “at the end of the play, Ham goes off stage and the audience is left wondering about a future awakening.” We are left with “the happy-go-lucky Ham [who] seems to submit with a grin to his unjust exclusion from the human community. . . . Ham embarks on his exile in true minstrel style, strumming his harp and blithely singing,” and ultimately “perpetuates ideas about the ugliness, the secondariness, and the carnality of black people.”75 Gubar’s commentary on The First One confronts any interpreter of Hurston’s work with a range of challenging exegetical issues. I would suggest, however, that in addition to falling prey to a degree of presentism in her interpretation—arguably a difficult trap to avoid for any scholar—Gubar neglects the extent to which African Americans had already established a history of subverting the racist interpretation of the Ham mythology and had engaged in a reading of the tale as empowering. Gubar provides a threepage overview of the history of racist uses to which the Ham myth had been put and insists that “only an understanding of these noxious elaborations

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but you stay put. Finally you gonna be betrayed to th head earth man and you gonna die dreadful but you Ma son an I teach ya ta do all things well. You go on down there an show ‘em th sweetness an th truth a heaven. Ain’t gonna be easy. But I raised ya right. . . Just this time a year, there was a lady called Mery an’ she had a child an her husband Joseph he didn’t know what to do cause they was poor an’ didn’t have no place ta go. (Footsteps in distance) So they creep inta a barn an’ lay th little Jedus Christ baby in a heap a straw and th stars come out awful big an shinin’, especially one star.80

Ma’s story is interrupted by the sound of a guitar, and three hobos enter the scene. One is a Mexican named “Ramone,” clothed in a “serapi [sic] and a Mexican hat,” while the other two, “Carl” and “Steve,” are not described. Dodson’s Depression era rendering of the Three Wise Men of Matthew’s gospel succeeds in validating the parallels both readers and audience members have made to this point in the play between this suffering family on the run and the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That Dodson’s theatrical version included two older siblings—siblings capable of giving voice to Dodson’s theological message—does nothing to detract from the parallel. The men stand in reverence of the baby, then soon depart, leaving Ramone’s serape to protect the woman and her daughter from the cold, as well as a bundle filled with food for the family to eat. When Ma discovers the food, she says, “thank ya ma God. I’ve born a son in yo’ image. Thank ya for the hope that ya sent in our weakness.”81 The softness of the moment is broken by Pa’s return and his confession that the white mob has captured young Roddie and is using him to guide them back to the family’s hiding place. Knowing that she has raised Roddie to always tell the truth, rendering impossible the thought of his deceiving the angry mob to allow for the family’s escape, Ma resigns herself to their being discovered and her husband being lynched. Pa desperately begs for her forgiveness, having instigated the brutality through his act of stealing. “Ya done it for me. For ya own folk,” Ma reassures him. “Ain’t nothin ta forgive. Beside we done had a son tonight an’ that’s worth all the fire.” Pa wishes aloud that he could do something to help Roddie, but he recognizes that fighting against the crowd would be “like hittin’ a oak tree with ya fist.” Ma rejects the comparison, for the white mob “ain’t no oak tree. They was never made from God. They made themselves hateful an’ greedy an’ slimy like Mitchell’s pond.” Still, in a moment of profound empathy, she says, “But life ain’t been crystal for them either,” perhaps Dodson’s nod to the common plight of the working class. Roddie returns, but the mob is right behind him. They burned his feet before he gave in to their demands, and now they are moments away from

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to which he was alluding. “Ah yes, I see—you view these plays [the raucous musicals] for what they are, and you are right. I view them for what they will become, and I am more than right. I see their future,” the director consoled the two interviewers. Reinhardt theorized that for every major development in theater, a return to an element that “has been previously subordinated or neglected” was required. Today’s theater demanded a return to “the most primitive and most basic aspect of drama for a new starting point.”4 So where did Reinhardt identify the “primitive” while watching black performers on a stage? “Pantomime,—the use of the body to portray emotion.” He gushed to Locke and Johnson, “Your people have that art—it is their forte—it is their special genius.” The interviewers were not put off by Reinhardt’s remarks. On the contrary, despite consciously rejecting the grotesque features of minstrelsy contrived under the demands of a racist social order, the two themselves were not untouched by romanticized, essentialist renderings of “the Negro.” The director’s comments only confirmed their conviction that African Americans would stand at the vanguard of a new theatrical movement. This primitive capacity to portray emotion bodily was now being exploited by insensitive white directors, Reinhardt continued, but in time it would be “utilized.” Significantly, Reinhardt proceeded to clarify his position. He insisted that blacks would not impact the conventional aspects of theater, “not the story, not the acting in the conventional sense, not the setting, not even the music, and certainly not the silly words.”5 Instead, American theater would be transformed by “the voices, the expressive control of the whole body, the spontaneity of motion, the rhythm, the bright emotional color” of the African American actor. The director conceded that his own capacity to develop these features for the advancement of theater would require him to “saturate [him]self with the folk spirit.” When Locke and Johnson explained that America already had the resources in several “promising Negro playwrights, several attempts at a Negro theater, [and] a college department of dramatics” at Howard University, Reinhardt resisted their appeals to the work that had already been carried out for the advancement of African American theater: That is interesting, most interesting—but I am afraid of that sort of thing. It is too academic. I fear there is too much imitation in it. My last word is, be original—sense the folk-spirit, develop the folk idiom,—artistically, of course, but faithfully; and above all, do not let that technique of expression which is so original, so potent, get smothered out in the imitation of European acting, copied effects.

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African Americans were inclined toward biblical literalism, we know of none among the playwrights in this study who shared this outlook. If, as black intellectuals complained, most African Americans celebrated Christianity in churches marked by a focus on afterlife and judgment rather than thisworldly concerns, it would appear that very few, if any, of the playwrights in this study attended such churches in their adult lives. If agnostics and atheists accounted for a tiny fraction of African Americans as a whole, they accounted for a disproportionate number of black artists. Even those writers who advocated Christian themes in their plays, or used biblical narratives to celebrate the race, never endorsed the elements of Christian practice so often derided at the front lines of modernity. These writers were likely to identify with the “New Negro” and to see themselves as instruments of racial uplift and social change. How could religion, as important as it was to most African Americans, be spared their critical gaze? When I started this project, I was taken aback by how little scholarship had been done in the area of religion and African American theater. I am now left wondering to what extent the failure of black theater to satisfy the demand for a primal art—“pure emotion, almost independent of words or setting,” as Reinhardt imagined it—has resulted in the scant attention it has received. With its written scripts, its dedication to form, its rehearsal periods lasting weeks and sometimes months, has black theater been consigned to the status of far-distant cousin of music and dance for its failure to satisfy expectations of unmediated access to raw, primitive humanity? Music and dance are more effective, after all, at maintaining the fictive pretense of spontaneity, concealing the countless hours spent in dedication to these crafts. This book began with a consideration of the contemporary theatrical tradition Henry Louis Gates Jr. described in his 1997 article in the New Yorker, a tradition saturated with religious melodrama. We have seen that despite the fact that staged church services, spirituals, and gospel music were central to drawing attention to several plays written by African Americans in the early twentieth century, those playwrights fashioned their scripts to undermine the stereotype that instinct, emotion, superstition, otherworldliness, irrationality, and blind faith were innate features of African American religious life. Only in a few rare cases could one argue that conservative theology was defended at all, and in the vast majority of plays, the theological (or antitheological) assumptions common to this assembly of educated, urban, and cosmopolitan playwrights shaped their representations of black religious life. The complex story of the way African American religion’s cultural construction journeyed from these playwrights to the melodramas Gates described in his essay still needs to be written.

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List of Acronyms

AWGC BHC BRBML BRTC ESP GCP GDJC LHP LOC MARBL MBOC MMP MSRC NYPLPA ODC RAP SCRBC SLRI WRP

Angelina Weld Grimké Collection (MSRC, Howard University) Billops-Hatch Collection (MARBL, Emory University) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University) Billy Rose Theatre Collection (NYPLPA) Eulalie Spence Papers (Schomberg) Glenn Carrington Papers (Schomberg) Georgia Douglas Johnson Collection (MSRC, Howard University) Langston Hughes Papers (BRBML, Yale University) Library of Congress Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (Emory University) Marita Bonner Occomy Collection (SLRI, Harvard University) May Miller Papers (MARBL, Emory University) Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University) New York Public Library of the Performing Arts Owen Dodson Collection (BRBML, Yale University) Regina Andrews Papers (Schomberg) Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library Schlesinger Library, Radcliff Institute Willis Richardson Papers (NYPLPA)

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notes

Note to Preface 1. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Dept. of Disputation: The Chitlin Circuit,” New Yorker 72 (February 3, 1997): 44–55, esp. 50, 52. Notes to Introduction 1. “Discrimination Exposed in ‘It’s Midnight over Newark,’” New York Amsterdam News (May 17, 1941); E. Quita Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era: Beyond Formal Horizons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 4; Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41–42; Hughes Allison, The Trial of Dr. Beck, 1937, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL000013). 2. Hughes Allison, It’s Midnight over Newark, 1941, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL005954); “Discrimination Exposed in ‘It’s Midnight over Newark,’” New York Amsterdam News (May 17, 1941). 3. Al Dalzell, promotional flyer in “Clippings: It’s Midnight over Newark by Hughes Allison,” BRTC, NYPLPA; “The Talk of the Town: Chornya,” New Yorker (January 21, 1939): 14–15; “Georgette Harvey,” Internet Broadway Database, www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=67758, accessed July 17, 2012. 4. “William A. Grew,” Internet Broadway Database, www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=9087, accessed July 17, 2012; Al Dalzell, promotional flyer in “Clippings: It’s Midnight over Newark by Hughes Allison,” BRTC, NYPLPA. 5. Allison, “It’s Midnight over Newark,” act 1, 2. 6. Ibid., 3-8 (emphasis in original). 7. Ibid., 8-14. 8. Ibid., 15-20. 9. Ibid., 21-29. 10. Ibid., act 2, 33-63. 11. Ibid., 40-41. 12. Sandra Moss, “North Jersey Medical Society,” in Encyclopedia of New Jersey, ed. Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 589. 13. Bernard L. Peterson Jr., Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 27; April >>

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Girl’: Psychology and Dramatic Representation in Angelina W. Grimké’s Rachel,” African American Review 27 (Autumn 1993): 461–71; Michelle Hester, “An Examination of the Relationship between Race and Gender in an Early Twentieth Century Drama: A Study of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Play Rachel,” Journal of Negro History 79 (Spring 1994): 248–56; Winona L. Fletcher, “From Genteel Poet to Revolutionary Playwright: Georgia Douglas Johnson,” Theatre Annual 30 (1985): 41–64; C. C. O’Brien, “Cosmopolitanism in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Anti-lynching Literature,” African American Review 38 (Winter 2004): 571–87; Will Harris, “Early Black Women Playwrights and the Dual Liberation Motif,” African American Review 28 (Summer 1994): 205–21; Laura Dawkins, “From Madonna to Medea: Maternal Infanticide in African American Women’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance,” Literature Interpretation Theory 15 (2004): 223–40. William Fox, A Brief History of Wesleyan Missions on the Western Coast of Africa (London: Aylott and Jones, 1851), 613; William O’Bryan, A Narrative of Travels in the United States of America (Dublin, 1836), 175; Letter from Ka-Le to John Quincy Adams, in Ellen Strong Bartlett, “The Amistad Captives: An Old Conflict between Spain and America,” New England Magazine 22 (March 1900): 85; Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Lanham, MD: Madison House, 1997), 138. Larry G. Murphy, “‘All Things to All People’: The Functions of the Black Church in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” in Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 134. Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3. I borrow the phrase “uplifted race” from Marlon B. Ross’s essay “Racial Uplift and the Literature of the New Negro,” in A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 151–68.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture: 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 67–72, 123–42, esp. 129–30. 2. Metcalfe, “A Bit Late,” Wall Street Journal, n.d., found in “Clippings: Anderson, Garland,” “Scrapbook for ‘Appearances’ Including Photographs of Garland Anderson,” BRTC, NYPLPA. 3. Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 110; cites Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile: The

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1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35–83. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine, 37. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1–14, 67–99, esp. 3, 2, 76, 4. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States (1957; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962), 133, 27. David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites, 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 71 (December 1984): 549. Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7–8. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 66–71. Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–41, esp. 1, 31, 37. Ibid., 121. Barbara Savage, “W. E. B. Du Bois and ‘The Negro Church,’” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 237; Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 141–76, esp. 162–63, 166; Kelly Miller, Out of the House of Bondage (1914; New York: Arno Press, 1969), 204, 212. Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (1921; Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1972), 224–27 (emphasis mine); Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 179–81; Harvey, Through the Storm, through the Night, 101. Savage, “W. E. B. Du Bois and ‘The Negro Church,’” 239; Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 85. On the rejection of the genteel ethos, see Malcolm Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers since 1910 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), esp. 12–25; David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 17. Some have distinguished the term “folk” from that of the “masses,” rendering the latter reflective of urban populations, with the former connoting rural, nonindustrial people. See, for instance, William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 155–57. I have not drawn that distinction in this book. The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1992), xxv, 14. While Locke popularized the term “New Negro,” it was coined by Harlem socialist activist Hubert Harrison nearly a decade earlier. See Perry, Hubert Harrison, 8.

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32. 33.

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Richardson, “The Hope of a Negro Drama,” 338; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32 (October 1926): 296. Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” Harlem 1 (November 1928): 12. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Holt, 2000), 165; on Locke and the folk, see Leigh Anne Duck, “‘Go there tuh know there’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotype of the Folk,” American Literary History 13 (Summer 2001): 265. Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 218; cites Montgomery Gregory, “A Chronology of the Negro Theatre,” in Plays of Negro Life, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Harper Brothers, 1927), 409–23. Freda L. Scott, “Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance,” Theatre Journal 37 (December 1985): 433–34; Ethel Pitts Walker, “Krigwa, a Theatre by, for, and about Black People,” Theatre Journal 40 (October 1988): 347–56; Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 223; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,” Crisis 32 (1926): 134. Scott, “Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance,” 434. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson Education, 2008), 323–87; Bertha Malnick, “The Moscow Art Theatre: A Jubilee, 1898–1948,” Slavonic and East European Review 27 (May 1949): 563–67. Constance D’Arcy Mackay, The Little Theatre in the United States (New York: Holt, 1917), 1–2; Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1925), 4–5. James L. Highlander, “America’s First Art Theatre: The New Theatre of Chicago,” Educational Theatre Journal 11 (December 1959): 285–90; Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 228–30. For examples, see “Letter from Ruth Bryant to Willis Richardson, June 29, 1927,” Folder 2, Correspondence B, Willis Richardson Papers, BRTC, NYPLPA; “Downie Thespians Still on the Go,” Chicago Defender (May 25, 1935), 24; Regina Andrews, “Written Reflections,” Box 19, Regina Andrews: Professional and Civic Activities, Writings, Miscellaneous, RAP, SCRBC; Fredi Washington, “Your Secretary Reports,” Negro Actor (April 18, 1934): 3, Box 27, Negro Actors Guild Collection: Printed Materials (MG259) “Newsletters” SCRBC; Newsletter 1, no. 5 (September 1940), Box 27, Negro Actors Guild Collection: Printed Materials (MG259), SCRBC; Shirley Basfield Dunlap, “Rose McClendon,” in

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Press, 1998), 69–70; Lois Brown, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 460. Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, Porgy: A Play in Four Acts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927); María Frías, “AfricanAmerican Women Artists in Paris: Sex and Politics in Josephine Baker’s La Revue Nègre (1925), and Maya Angelou’s Porgy and Bess (1954),” in Nor Shall Diamond Die: American Studies in Honour of Javier Coy, ed. Carme Manuel and Paul Scott Derrick (Valencia, Spain: University of Valencia, 2003), 149; Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 154–75. George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess (1935; New York: American Theatre Press, 1976); Paul Green, In Abraham’s Bosom, in The Field God and In Abraham’s Bosom (New York: Robert McBride, 1927), 13–141; Paul Green, Roll Sweet Chariot: A Symphonic Play of the Negro People (New York: Samuel French, 1935); Em Jo Basshe, Earth: A Play in Seven Scenes (New York: Macaulay, 1927), esp. Eric Walrond’s quote in “Introduction,” x, and 113. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 136. Emphasis mine. Kathryn Lofton, “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 171–91, esp. 185. Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 68. Jeffrey P. Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism,” Journal of American History 90 (December 2003): 891–911. Jeffrey P. Moran, “The Scopes Trial and Southern Fundamentalism in Black and White: Race, Region, and Religion,” Journal of Southern History 70 (February 2004): 101; cites Norfolk Journal and Guide (August 1, 1925): 1. Baer and Singer, African American Religion, 45–52. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine, 110. See Jill Watts, God, Harlem, U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Marie W. Dallam, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Elly M. Winya, The Church of God and Saints of Christ: The Rise of Black Jews (New York: Garland, 2004); C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 1994). For more on the Social Gospel, see Robert T. Handy, The Social Gospel in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Martin

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James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews,” New York Age (March 29, 1917); cited in Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 125; Essay discussed in Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the African American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 34–36. Clifton H. Johnson, “America’s History of Inequitable Racial Policies,” Crisis 85 (June–July 1978): 194. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 14. Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 237–38. Jan Voogd, Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 1–6; Stanley B. Norvell and William M. Tuttle Jr., “Views of a Negro during the Red Summer of 1919,” Journal of Negro History 51 (July 1966): 209–10. Anthony B. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 18–19; cites Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of the African American People, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Gareth Canaan, “‘Part of the Loaf ’: Economic Conditions of Chicago’s African American Working Class during the 1920’s,” Journal of Social History 35 (Autumn 2001): esp. 147–52. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 55. E. Wilbur Bock, “The Decline of the Negro Clergy: Changes in Formal Religious Leadership in the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Phylon 29 (1st Quarter, 1968): 50–54. David McBride and Monroe Little, “The Afro-American Elite in the 1930s: A Historical and Statistical Profile,” Phylon 42 (2nd Quarter, 1981): 105–19, esp. 107–8, 114, 118. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933), 52–53. W. A. Daniel, The Education of Negro Ministers (New York: George H. Doran, 1925), vi, 33, 41, 53–54, 101. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, rev. ed. (1945; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 418–19. A. Philip Randolph, “The Failure of the Negro Church,” Messenger 2 (October 1919): 6; Cynthia Taylor, A. Philip Randolph: The Religious

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Dorothy B. Porter, “Phylon Profile XIV: Edward Christopher Williams,” Phylon 8 (4th Quarter, 1947): 319; Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art (New York: Duffield, 1918), 101; Gray, Willis Richardson, 16. Hatch and Shine, introduction to The Idle Head, in Black Theater U.S.A., 233. Willis Richardson, The Idle Head, in Black Theater U.S.A., 234–37. Ibid, 236–40. Willis Richardson, Imp of the Devil, in Black Drama (Alexander Press, 2012) (PL001229). Ibid. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 125. An “Andrew Marion Burris” is included among enlisted soldiers in the book Index to Arkansas’ World War I Soldiers from Lee, Monroe, and Phillips Counties, ed. Desmond Walls Allen (Conway, AR: Arkansas Research, 2002). Southern Workman 49 (May 1920): 237; Crisis 21 (March 1921): 224; “Andrew M. Burris (1898–c. 1977),” in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 125. Regina Andrews, “Written Reflections,” Box 19, Regina Andrews: Professional and Civic Activities, Writings, Miscellaneous, RAP, SCRBC; Bernard L. Peterson Jr., Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 45–46. Andrew M. Burris, You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in, in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 128–30. Ibid., 130–36. Ibid., 136–41. Ibid., 143–44. Ibid., 144–49. Ibid., 149–58. Ibid., 158–61. Ibid., 161–79, esp. 165, 173. Ibid., 179–83. Ibid., 183–85. Ibid., 185–92. Ibid., 193–96. Ibid., 196–99. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1941–1967, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 305–6. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Crisis 22 (June 1921): 71; Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902–1941

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Owen Dodson, Divine Comedy, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL000397), 2-8, Ibid. Ibid., 8-12. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14-26. Ibid., 40-42. Ibid., 43-47. Ibid., 48-55. Ibid., 56-58. Ibid., 66-67. Ibid., 68-72. Ibid., 72-75. Ibid., 84 (emphasis mine). Ibid. Ibid., 85-86.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Litany in Atlanta,” Independent (October 11, 1906): 856–58, esp. 856; see also Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond, ed. Anne P. Rice (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003): 114–16. 2. Rice, Witnessing Lynching, 113. 3. Statistics listed in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 134–35; Hall cites NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching (New York: NAACP, 1919) and Supplements (1919–28); also cites The Negro Year Book: Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1931–1932, ed. Monroe Work (Tuskegee, AL: Negro Yearbook Publishing, 1931), 293; see also Judith L. Stephens, “Lynching Dramas and Women: History and Critical Context,” in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, eds. Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998), 8; on change in proportion of black to white lynching victims, see Frank Shay, Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), vi. 4. On the Christianization of African Americans, see Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Raboteau notes that by 1890, 33 percent of African Americans were church members, and by 1936 the number had grown to 44 percent, Canaan Land, 79, 144; on evangelization, see Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African American Religion: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation, 2nd ed., ed. (Knoxville:

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Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel, in Black Theatre U.S.A., Volume 1: Plays by African Americans: The Early Period 1847–1938, rev. ed., ed. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 133–68. Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 220. Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 220. I am deeply indebted to Bill Stancil for drawing my attention to these biblical parallels. Citations come from The New Oxford Annotated NSRV: With the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Review of “Rachel” from Baltimore American (September 20, 1920), n.p., Box 33-13, Folder 225, AWGC, MSRC, Howard. Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 155. Most recently, Judith Stephens published The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 155–60; Stephens, The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1–7; see also her reminiscences about Atlanta University, Box 162-1, Folder 23, GDJC, MSRC, Howard. Stephens, The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, 14–15; Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 165–66; “Personal Papers—List of Salon Attendees,” n.d., Box 162-1, Folder 4, GDJC, MSRC, Howard. “Letter from Georgia Douglas Johnson to Rev. William Holmes Borders, January 5, 1962,” Box 162-1, Folder 24, GDJC, MSRC, Howard. “Letter from Georgia Douglas Johnson to ‘The Pastor’ of the First Congregational Church in Atlanta, January 5, 1962,” Box 162-1, Folder 25, GDJC, MSRC, Howard. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 189. “Letter from Georgia Douglas Johnson to Glenn Carrington, October 15, 1959,” Box 6, Correspondence (F–J), GCP, SCRBC. On Locke as well as Baha’i’s organization in Washington, DC, see Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 2005), esp. 31–90. Johnson’s “Bible,” Box 162, Folders 25, 26, 29, GDJC, MSRC, Howard. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 186. Ibid., 185. Georgia Douglas Johnson, “The Suppliant,” in Bronze: A Book of Verse (Boston: Brimmer, 1922). Johnson’s “Bible” and “Collected Sayings,” Box 162, Folders 25, 26, 29, GDJC, MSRC, Howard; Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 185–186.

188 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

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Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13–15; Strange Fruit, 121–22; see also Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 226, 362. “Anderson, Regina,”Harlem Reinaissance Lives, 13; ”Regina Anderson’s curriculum vita” Box 1, Folder 1, Personal Papers, 1920–1986: Personal Activities, SCRBC. See letter from “Mamie Burrill to Angelina Weld Grimké, July 1911,” Box 38-1, Folder 2, AWGC, MSRC, Howard. Burrill eventually lived with her partner, Lucy Slowe, Howard University’s dean of women; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 575; cites Lucy D. Slowe Collection, letters in Box 90-1, MSRC, Howard. Strange Fruit, 79–81. Citations from Aftermath taken from Mary Burrill, “Aftermath,” in Black Theatre U.S.A., 176–82. Strange Fruit, 79–80. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (New York: Praeger Press 1988), 9; Black Theatre, U.S.A., 175–76; see Strange Fruit, 79–80; letter from “Mary P. Burrill to W. E. B. Du Bois, May 22, 1928,” W. E. B. Du Bois Collection, University of Massachusetts Library Special Collections, Amherst; also Billboard 40 (May 19, 1928): 7. Peter Mason, The Fire in the Flint, Folder 8, Box C-299, NAACP Papers, Manuscript Reading Room, LOC. Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1924), esp. 72, 104–9, 168. Ida E. Jones, “Contacts without Fellowship: Lynching, the Bible and the Christian Community,” Black History Bulletin 65–66 (July 2002–December 2003): 52; cites Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Knopf, 1929): 40 (emphasis mine). Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature (New York: Russell and Russell, 1938), 209–11. “Letter from Walter White to Blanche Knopf, August 22, 1929,” Folder 5, Box C-299, Films and Plays, Fire in the Flint, NAACP Papers, Manuscript Reading Room, LOC; on Frohman, see Rob Betz et al., “The Lusitania Resource: Mr. Charles Frohman, Saloon Class Passenger,” http://web.rmslusitania.info:81/pages/saloon_class/frohman_charles. html, accessed September 21, 2006. Langston Hughes, Mulatto, 1935, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012), (PL000782); originally published in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move, ed. Leslie Catherine Sanders (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

190 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

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Langston Hughes, Scottsboro, Limited, 1931, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL000785); originally published in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move. Langston Hughes, Don’t You Want to Be Free?, 1937, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, , 2012) (PL000767); originally published in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1926; New York: Knopf, 1973), 172. James Weldon Johnson, “Brother—American Drama,” in Saint Peter Relates an Incident (1935; New York: Penguin, 1993), 27–29; on Johnson’s religious views, see Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature, 234–36. Hill’s choice of title may have been a play on the title of Erskine Caldwell’s controversial 1933 novel, God’s Little Acre, which sympathized with the struggles of the southern working class. Abram Hill, Hell’s Half Acre, 1938, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL000712); Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 348–49. Theodore Ward, Sick and Tired, 1937, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL001556); Ward studied writing at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin. Lew Peyton, A Bitter Pill, in Did Adam Sin? And Other Stories of Negro Life in Comedy and Drama Sketches (Los Angeles: Lew Peyton, 1937), 60–78. Ralf Coleman, Swing Song (1937), unpublished manuscript found in No. 927, Box 7, Folder 9, BHC, MARBL, Emory. Orlando Patterson, “Rituals of Blood: Sacrificial Murders in the Postbellum South,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 23 (Spring 1999): 123–27; see also Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Donald G. Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion 3 (2000), http://jsr.fsu.edu/mathews.htm, accessed July 14, 2012; Mathews notes Trudier Harris’s use of the scapegoat theory in Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice.” Citations from Georgia Douglas Johnson, Blue-Eyed Black Boy, in Strange Fruit, 116–20. On the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching’s (ASWPL) play contest, beginning in 1936, see ASWPL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Pattee Library, Penn State University, Micro A218,

192

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

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Religiosity and Moral Attitudes: Explaining Cross-National Effect Differences,” Sociology of Religion 63 (Summer 2002): 157–76; Stan Albrecht and Tim Heaton, “Secularization, Higher Education, and Religiosity,” Review of Religious Research 26 (September 1984): 43–58; Bernard Lazerwitz, “Some Factors Associated with Church Attendance,” Social Forces 39 (May 1961): 301–9. “The Looking Glass: The Negro and Religion,” Crisis 17 (March 1919): 236–37, reprinted from an essay by Philip A. Holmes in the Boston Evening Record, n.d. (emphasis mine). Trudier Harris, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 1–2, 16. Though technically Washington, DC, was situated below the MasonDixon Line, Harris’s thesis is best understood as applying to residents of the city that housed the federal government against which the Confederacy rebelled. “Obituary: Abram Hill, 76; Theatre Pioneer,” Los Angeles Times (October 13, 1986). Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who Set You Flowin’? The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10; John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (1972; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 55. Rayford Logan, The Negro in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), chap. 4; for an overview of the challenges African Americans faced in the sphere of education, see Harvey Wish, “Negro Education and the Progressive Movement,” Journal of Negro History 49 (July 1964): 184–200, esp. 185–87. Wish, “Negro Education and the Progressive Movement,” 185–87. Benjamin Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 84–85, 43–44; on the African American population of Atlanta in 1920, see Herman Skip Mason Jr., Black Atlanta in the Roaring Twenties (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 1997), 8. May Miller, “Obituary of Annie May Butler Miller,” n.d. (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), Box 1, MMP, MARBL, Emory; a second obituary, probably written by Elsie Austin, who delivered it at Annie May Miller’s funeral, contained information about Miller’s service to the YWCA, Box 1, MMP, MARBL, Emory. W. E. B. Du Bois’s addendum to Francis J. Grimké’s article “Segregation,” Crisis 41 (June 1934): 174. “May Miller, 1917 diary entry, Sunday, May 13” (not yet cataloged at the time of my research) Box 14, MMP, MARBL, Emory; Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (1921; Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1972), 279.

194 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

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Bill Edwards, “‘Perfesser’ Bill’s Guide to Ragtime and Traditional Jazz Composers: James P. Johnson,” www.perfessorbill.com/ragtime4b_alt. shtml, accessed June 22, 2011. May Miller, The Cuss’d Thing (1926), 2–10, in Box 7 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. Ibid., 10–12. Ibid., 12–14. Ibid., 15–20. For an overview of this controversy, see Garth E. Pauley, “W. E. B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His Crisis Writings,” Journal of Black Studies 30 (January 2000): 383–410, esp. 386, 389, 39. Ibid., 383–410. Evelyn A. Kirkley, “‘This Work Is God’s Cause’: Religion in the Southern Woman Suffrage Movement, 1880–1920,” Church History 59 (December 1990): 507–22, esp. 507, 512. Willis Richardson, The Deacon’s Awakening, in Black Theatre U.S.A., Volume 1: Plays By African Americans: The Early Period, 1847-1938, rev. ed., ed. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 218–19. Ibid., 219–21. Ibid., 221–22. Willis Richardson, A Pillar of the Church, in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940, ed. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 32–33 (emphasis mine). Richardson’s connection of the word “old” with the “Bible” and his use of the word “but” to explain that while the family is “good living,” they are also (unfortunately, problematically, unusually) “extremely religious people.” Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34–44, esp. 42. Willis Richardson, The New Generation, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL001238). Ibid. M. Budd, “The Shell Road Witch,” Crisis 8 (June 1914): 91–93. Willis Richardson, The Curse of the Shell Road Witch, in Black Drama (Alexander Street Press, 2012) (PL001216), 2–5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6–12. Ibid., 12–17. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 22–23. I am thinking specifically of Richardson’s plays, A Pillar of the Church and The Deacon’s Awakening.

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Marita Bonner, “The Pot Maker (A Play to Be Read),” Opportunity 5 (February 1927): 43. Ibid., 44. Ibid. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45–46. Marita Bonner Occomy, “Tin Can,” Opportunity 12 (July 1934): 202–5; 12 (August 1934): 236–40; story found in Box 1, Folder 5, MBOC, SLRI, Harvard. Arlene Clift Pellow, “Marita Bonner Occomy,” in Notable Black American Women, vol. 2, ed. Jessie Carney Smith (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 503–6. Marita Odette (Occomy) Bonner, “The Purple Flower,” in Black Theatre U.S.A., 207–8. Ibid., 208; Hatch and Shine, Black Theatre U.S.A., 207. Marita Bonner, “The Purple Flower,” in Black Theatre U.S.A., 209–10. Ibid., 210–11. Ibid., 211–12. Ibid., 212. “Recorded interview with Randolph Edmonds, conducted by James V. Hatch (August 21, 1973),” Artist and Influence: Oral History Interviews, Series 7, BHC, MARBL, Emory; Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 262–66. Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 262–66. Bernard L. Peterson Jr., The African American Theatre Directory, 1816– 1960 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 55; Christine Rauchfuss Gray, “Randolph Edmonds,” in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, vol. 1, A–J, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 329; Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 262–63. Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 263. Randolph Edmonds, “Education in Self-Contempt,” Crisis 45 (August 1938): 262–63, 266, 278, esp. 262; as a follow-up to this article, Edmonds wrote “Out-of-Date Colleges,” Crisis 45 (November 1938): 251–53, 262. Randolph Edmonds, “The Negro in the American Theatre, 1700–1969,” 32, an unpublished study that was delivered as a paper at the American College Theatre Festival in Washington, DC, 1969. The study was found bound at the BRTC, NYPLPA. Annamarie Bean, “Playwrights and Plays of the Harlem Renaissance,” in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 91–105, esp. 99.

198 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

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Charles Harris Wesley, “Recollections of Carter G. Woodson,” Journal of Negro History 83 (Spring 1998): 145–46. May Miller, “The American Negro in Present-Day Literature,” n.d., from collection of college papers in Box 2 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. May Miller, “1934 diary entry, Saturday, March 3,” Box 14 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. For example, “An Evening Prayer,” written at the age of thirteen: “God, Father over all, Help me climb the heavenly wall; Help me reach the golden hall, Where I may rest my wearied brow upon thy breast; Lord, hear me now, Amen,” found in Box 1 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. May Miller, “The Negro,” handwritten note, n.d., found in Box 1 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. May Miller, “Obituary of Annie May Butler Miller,” n.d., Box 1 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory; questionnaire filled out by May Miller for research of Winifred Stoelting, n.d. The questionnaire was used in Stoelting’s article on Miller found in “May Miller,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets since 1955 41, ed. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris (Detroit: Gale Press 1985), 241–47. Found in Box 8 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. “Questionnaire,” provided by Winifred Stoelting in Box 8 (not yet cataloged at the time of my research), MMP, MARBL, Emory. May Miller, Graven Images, in Black Theatre U.S.A, 334–41. David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 27–28. Goldenberg mentions D. S. Margoliouth, Edward Ullendorf, Henry Highland Garnet, John G. Fee, Frank Cross, Richard Elliott Friedman, Robert Bennett, Claudia Camp, and N. F. Gier; ibid., n. 227. Ibid., 335–38. Ibid., 338–40. Ibid., 340–41. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), esp. 40, 215. Ibid., 225–26. Ibid., 217. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (New York: National Urban League, 1927). Taken from The Torah: A Modern Commentary, ed. W. Gunther Plaut (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), 68–69. For detailed study on the origins of Ham mythology in connection to race, see Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham; on the use of Ham mythology,

200

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

>

201

Ibid. Ibid.

Notes to Conclusion 1. James Weldon Johnson, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” Harper’s 157 (November 1928): 769–76, esp. 771. 2. Kathryn Lofton, “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 172; Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–41. 3. Lofton, “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,” 176. 4. Alain Locke, “Max Reinhardt Reads the Negro’s Dramatic Horoscope,” Opportunity 2 (May 1924): 145–46 (emphasis mine). 5. Emphasis mine. 6. Emphasis mine. Locke, “Max Reinhardt Reads the Negro’s Dramatic Horoscope,” 145–46. 7. Dunbar cited in Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 38. 8. Judith Weisenfeld, “‘The Secret at the Root’: Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson’s Run, Little Chillun,” Religion and American Culture 21 (Winter 2011): 41. 9. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 164. 10. Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 7-8.

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Howard University, 17, 19, 26, 36, 48–49, 79, 109, 111–13, 140, 148, 165 Howard University Players, 26 Hughes, Langston, 6, 43, 58–66, 72, 78, 88, 93–95, 100, 107, 111, 131, 184n67 Hull, Gloria, 81 Humanism, 6–7, 10, 37, 43, 60, 66, 71, 74, 88–94, 109, 113, 123, 131, 149, 162 Hurston, Zora Neale, 12, 22, 78, 131, 145, 151–58 Ibsen, Henrik, 27 Idle Head, The, 49–50 Imp of the Devil, 50–52 In Abraham’s Bosom, 31, 105 Irenaeus of Lyons, 106 Irish folk movement, 23–24 It’s Midnight over Newark, 1–5, 9, 164 Jackson, Juanita, 83, 85, 188n34 Johns Hopkins University, 112 Johnson, Charles S., 11, 22–23, 152, 164–66 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 6, 48, 75, 78–85, 94, 96, 105, 109, 111, 134, 148, 188n33, 188n34 Johnson, Hall, 172n16 Johnson, James Weldon, 23, 30, 40, 94, 101, 107, 131, 163, 166 Journal of American Folklore, 21 Journal of Negro History (Journal of African American History), 146 Julius Rosenwald Foundation, 140 Karamu Theatre, 52 Kinmont, Alexander, 18 Kirkley, Evelyn, 119 Krasner, David, 21, 172n16 Krigwa Little Negro Theatre, 26, 44–46, 85, 92 Lafayette Theatre (Harlem, NY), 139 Lewis, David Levering, 17, 26 Lewis, Theophilus, 20 Lincoln University (PA), 59, 101 Little Theatre movement (“Art Theatre” movement), 27–28, 72 Lofton, Kathryn, 32, 164

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Richardson, Willis, 6, 24–25, 37, 47–52, 72, 78, 89, 109–10, 118–29, 147 Rider of Dreams, 30 Roll Sweet Chariot, 31 Roman Catholic Church, 23–24, 41, 48–49, 67, 184n67 “romantic racialism,” 18–19, 164 Rose McClendon, 28 Rose McClendon Players, 28 Roseanne, 31 Roth, John, 107 Run Little Chillun, 172n16 Safe, 81–82 “Sanctified” churches, 12, 33, 63 Sanders, Leslie Catherine, 47 Savage, Barbara, xiii, 20 Schuyler, George, 20 Scopes Trial (Dayton, TN), 32–33, 111 Scottsboro, Limited, 100 segregation, 1, 4, 12 Sernett, Milton, 35 Shelton, Ruth Gaines, 46 Sick and Tired, 102 Sklar, George, 106 Social Darwinism, 15–16, 18–19 social elites, 5–9, 13–17, 19–21, 26, 34, 41, 43, 48, 109–16, 131–32, 144, 166 Social Gospel movement, 34–35, 39–40 Sons of Ham, The, 154 Souls of Black Folk, The, 19, 32 South: in literature, 110–12 Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts (National Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, 140 Southern Star, The, 158–62 Spence, Eulalie, 44–47, 72, 110 St. Martin’s Episcopal Church (Harlem), 28 St. Philip’s Episcopal Church (Harlem), 28 Stancil, Bill, xiii, 187n12, 190n50 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 27 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 118 Star of Ethiopia, The, 172n16 Stephens, Judith, xiii, 74, 83, 188n33 Stephens, Nan Bagby, 31 Stevedore, 60, 106 Stoelting, Winifred, 149

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