Enacting the South

Especially in early 20^th-century plays the South is presented as a place of racism, inequality, and racial violence. The Southern environment supports the feeling of racism and racial prejudice that characters such as Emmaline in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925) have to struggle with.

Color Struck takes place in Jacksonville, a “Southern City,” “twenty years ago and present” (CS 89) and, as the title indicates, focuses on the black heroine Emmaline, or Emma, and her life-long struggle with the hue of her skin color. In a place that is considered the cradle of slavery the black female character’s desire “to turn white”⁹¹ is especially strong. Emma has internalized the racism that surrounds her to such an extent that she is not able to see her beauty and to accept herself as a black woman throughout the twenty years presented on stage. The main conflict lies in her jealousy towards lighter-skinned women which destroys her relationship with her lover John, “a light brown-skinned man” (CS 89). As John puts it: “She so despises her own skin that she can’t believe any one else could love it!” (CS 102) In the end it is this lack of self-love that even kills Emma’s daughter. When John returns after a twenty-year absence in the North in order to finally marry his love, he learns that Emma has given birth to “a very white girl” (CS 89) who suffers from a severe illness. John repeatedly asks Emma to get a doctor, but Emma hesitates, not wanting to leave John with her “mulatto” (CS 100) daughter, whose prettiness and light-skin make her a rival. Shocked by Emma’s self-contempt that even makes her jealous of her own daughter John exits the stage, “on the verge of tears” and “closing the door after him” (CS 102). Emma’s daughter finally dies before the doctor arrives. When the doctor asks her why Emma did not call him sooner, she replies that she “couldn’t see” (CS 102), being caught in the darkness of her racist

91 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991): 54.

3. Slave Ancestors and Mythic Geography: TheCultural Narrative of Slavery on Stage 44

self-contempt. The inescapable force of her racial thinking is emphasized in the fact that she remains in the “Southern city” of Jacksonville throughout the play, while we learn that John, who does not suffer from a damaged self-love, escapes to the North. In the end it is Emma’s internalized racism and her lack of self-love and self-acceptance that cause the tragedies of her life, making her lose both her love and her daughter.

While Hurston examines the psychological effects of racism in her play, Mary Burrill’s They That Sit in Darkness (1919) focuses on the social and legal status that black Americans had in the South’s white-dominated society in the early 20^th century. The action takes place “in a small country town in the South” (TTST 179) and deals with discriminatory laws of contraception and birth control. The play was written for the Birth Control Review in September 1919, featuring a special issue on “The Negroes’ Need for Birth Control, as Seen by Themselves,” and points to the fatal effects of a lack of education on birth control knowledge for African-American working-class women in the South. The play depicts the family of Malinda Jasper, a mother of seven children, who has to do heavy work as a laundress to feed her family, even just one week after giving birth to her youngest child. She is “a frail, tired-looking woman of thirty-eight” (TTSD 179) and dies of exhaustion in the course of the play. Although Elizabeth Shaw, a “visiting nurse” (TTSD 179), sees how much Malinda suffers from her hard work and from having to bear too many children, she is not allowed to tell her how to escape this cycle of poverty and children. She explains: “Malinda, when I took my oath as nurse, I swore to abide by the laws of the State, and the law forbids my telling you what you have a right to know!” (TTST 182) Malinda, however, knows that she does not have any rights in the South, not even when her own daughter Pinkie is raped by a white man as she explains to Miss Shaw:

MRS. JASPER (sadly) Yuh nevah seed Pinkie ‘cause she lef’ ‘fo’ yuh come heah. She come ‘tween Miles an’ Aloysius – she warn’t right in de haid – she wuked ovah tuh Bu’nett’s place – Ah aint nevah been much on my gals wukin’ round dese white men but Pinkie mus’ go; an’ fus thing we know Bu’nett got huh in trouble.

M^ISS S^HAW Poor, poor girl! What did you do to the Burnett man?

MRS. JASPER (with deep feeling) Lor’, Mis’ ‘Liz’beth, cullud folks cain’t do nothin’ to white folks down heah! […]

(TTSD 181; italics and emphasis original)

Malinda knows that black people in the South do not have any rights, making them powerless against white injustice. She knows that “cullud folks cain’t do nothin’ to white folks down heah,” not even in the case of physical violence. The explicit reference to the situation of black people “down heah” implies that things might be different in the North, but in the South Malinda has to accept the inferior position that she is put in.

This legally and socially enforced powerlessness of black people to act against racial violence is most obvious with regard to the practice of lynching. In the first decades of the 20^th century many African-American authors such as Myrtle Smith Livingston and Angelina Weld Grimké wrote anti-lynching plays, aiming to protest against this violent form of oppression that was especially widespread in the 1920s.⁹²

Livingston’s one-act play For Unborn Children (1926) is set “somewhere in the South” (FUC 185) in the 1920s. It focuses on the love relationship between black Leroy Carlson and white Selma Frazier, whose mixed relationship is considered a taboo in the South at that time. Leroy’s grandmother, Grandma Carlson, and his sister Marion are constantly worried about his life and his well-being because of ”the sentiment down here”

(FUC 186) as they say. Marion says that “[i]t’s terrible not knowing whether he’s all right or if some mob has – (buries her face in her hands)” (FUC 185; italics original). Leroy is very aware of the danger that he and Selma are in, so that he intends to leave the South and to “go north someplace” (FUC 185). He explains to his grandmother: “O, Granny, I hate to leave you and sis; but you know we can’t stay here and marry, confound these laws! It will be better for us to go some place where we aren’t known, anyway” (FUC 186). Grandma Carlson and Marion try to persuade him to abandon his love, pointing out that he would betray both his race and his unborn children if he married her. Leroy reconsiders his relationship and his plans to marry Selma, especially when he learns that his own mother, a white woman, “hated” her biracial children and “never could stand the sight” (FUC 187) of him and his sister. While he is thinking, “sit[ting] with his head bowed in his hands” (FUC 187), Selma suddenly arrives and tries to warn him of the

92 As Judith L. Stephens points out in her introduction to a collection of early lynching plays:

“Lynchings reached their peak in 1892 when 255 individuals (155 black victims, 100 white) were killed by lynch mobs. As the years progressed, the number of lynchings decreased, but the ratio of black to white victims increased. Of the 100 lynchings recorded from 1924 to 1928, 91 of the victims were black and 9 were white” (Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens, eds., Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998): 8).

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white mob that is approaching. She begs him to hurry but it is too late and voices shouting

“’Lynch him! ‘The dirty nigger!’ ‘We’ll show him how to fool around a white woman!’”

(FUC 187) grow louder as a crowd of white men nears the house. Leroy does not try to escape but interprets this mob as a sign of God’s will. “Looking heavenward” he says:

“Thy will be done, O Lord!” (FUC 187) Like a martyr, Leroy finally “walks out to his death victorious and unafraid” (FUC 187), accepting the expected punishment for his

“mistake” (FUC 187) of loving a white woman in the South.

While Leroy is not able to escape “the sentiment down here,” Mrs. Loving in Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) had left the South some ten years ago in order to safe her life and the lives of her children. In this lynching drama that is set in a

“northern city” in the “first decade of the Twentieth Century,”⁹³ the South signifies a cruel past that Mrs. Loving, the oldest character on stage, talks about to her children Rachel and Tom. She explains that she fled to the North with Rachel and Tom after the lynching of her husband Mr. Loving and her son George. In an act of “conversational remembering”⁹⁴ she reveals this long-kept family secret and re-tells what happened in the South some ten years ago, when “the wrongs of the Negro – ate into [the] soul” (RA 143) of her “utterly fearless” (RA 143) husband:

He edited and owned, for several years, a small Negro paper. In it he said a great many daring things. I used to plead with him to be more careful. I was always afraid for him. For a long time, nothing happened – he was too important to the community. And then – one night – ten years ago – a mob made up of the respectable people in the town lynched an innocent black man – and what was worse – they knew him to be innocent. A white man was guilty. I never saw your father so wrought up over anything: he couldn’t eat; he couldn’t sleep; he brooded night and day over it. And then – realizing fully the great risk he was running, although I begged him not to – and all his friends also – he deliberately and calmly went to work and published a most terrific denunciation of that mob. The old prophets in the Bible were not more terrible than he.

(RA 143-144)

93 This information is included in the play’s original publication in Boston by the Cornhill Company in 1920. This version is reprinted in Angelina Weld Grimké and Carolivia Herron, Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

94 Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung: 16.

In spite of threats to his life Mr. Loving did not retract his article so that one day “some dozen masked men came to [their] house”:

We were not asleep – your father and I. They broke down the front door and made their way to our bedroom. Your father kissed me – and took up his revolver. It was always loaded. They broke down the door. (a silence. She continues slowly and quietly) I tried to shut my eyes – and I could not. Four masked men fell – they did not move any more – after a little. (pauses) Your father was finally overpowered and dragged out. In the hall – my little seventeen-year-old George tried to rescue him. Your father begged him not to interfere. He paid no attention. It ended in their dragging them both out.

(pauses)

(RA 144; italics original)

In order to escape a similar fate, Mrs. Loving decided to go North with Tom and Rachel.

“I couldn’t bring you up – in the South” (RA 144) she tells her children. Rachel fully understands her mother’s decision as she realizes that “everywhere, everywhere throughout the South, there are hundreds of dark mothers who live in fear, terrible, suffocating fear, whose rest by night is broken, and whose joy by day in their babies on their hearts is three parts – pain” (RA 145). By fleeing to the North, Mrs. Loving was able to escape the constant fear for her life and the lives of her children. For her, the “northern city” that they now live in represents a place of safety, a promised land, and a refuge.

However, although their mother’s escape to the North has enabled Tom and Rachel to grow up without the constant threat of racial violence and lynching mobs, they have to struggle with racism and racial prejudice in the North, too.