Becoming Old by Suffering

The idea of the black woman becoming old by suffering from the extraordinary tensions of being a mother to black children and of having to care for the well-being of her family in a white-dominated society is indeed a topos that is repeated in many plays by African-American female playwrights. In Mary Burrill’s one-act play They That Sit in Darkness (1919), for example, the mother character even dies of exhaustion from her duties as mother and laundress for white families at the end of the play.

First published in a special issue of The Birth Control Review on “The Negroes’

Need for Birth Control, As Seen By Themselves,”²⁹³ They That Sit in Darkness is a propaganda play that takes part in the contemporary discourse on birth control by pointing at the tragic results of poverty and limited access to education for black women in the South. In the context of black women’s right to reproductive freedom, birth control was

“beginning to be seen as a necessary and desirable part of health care”²⁹⁴ in that repeated childbearing was often hazardous to the health of black women, as Burrill’s play points out. It focuses on the poor working-class family of Malinda Jasper who is the mother of seven children, “a crest-fallen, pathetic looking little group – heads unkempt, ragged, undersized, under-fed” (TTSD 180), ranging in age from a one-week old infant to seventeen-year-old Lindy. Her husband is absent during the whole action so that the focus is completely set on Malinda and her situation.

Although Malinda is only “thirty-eight” (TTSD 179), she is described as “a frail, tired-looking woman” (TTSD 179) who “walks unsteadily” (TTSD 182), speaks “with

293 Mary Burrill, "They That Sit in Darkness: A One-Act Play of Negro Life.," The Birth Control Review: Dedicated to Voluntary Motherhood. The New Emancipation: The Negroes' Need For Birth Control, As Seen By Themselves 1919. The Birth Control Review was published by Margaret Sanger, who wrote several papers and articles on the question of women’s reproductive freedom in the first three decades of the 20^th century (cf. Margaret Sanger, Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman and University Publications of America, The Margaret Sanger Papers: Collected Documents Series (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1996)).

294 Jamie Hart, "Who Should Have the Children? Discussions of Birth Control among African-American Intellectuals, 1920-1939," The Journal of Negro History 79.1 (1994): 81. For further information see also Jessie M. Rodrique, "The Black Community and the Birth Control

Movement," Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

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extreme weariness” (TTSD 181), and repeatedly leans her head “wearily against the back of the rocker” (TTSD 181) or “sinks […] exhausted” (TTSD 180) into it. In spite of her poor health, Malinda has to work because she knows that “dey ain’t no ravens flyin’

‘roun’ heah drappin’ us food. All we gits, we has to git by wukin’ hard!” (TTSD 181) The hard work does not leave her the strength or the “time tuh look at’er [her children’s]

sperrits” (TTSD 182). “When Ah git through scrubbin’ at dem tubs,” she explains, “all Ah kin do is set in dis cheer an’ nod – Ah doan wants tuh see no chillern!” (TTSD 182)

This representation of Malinda as an old, worn-out woman is supported by the introduction of the white character Miss Elizabeth Shaw, “in the regulation dress of a visiting nurse” (TTSD 180). In contrast to Malinda, Elizabeth Shaw does not suffer from premature ageing. As a nurse, she knows about birth control, but is not allowed to pass on this knowledge to Malinda, as she explains:

My heart goes out to you poor people that sit in darkness, having, year after year, children that are physically too weak to bring into the world – children that you are unable not only to educate but even to clothe and feed.

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!

(TTSD 182)

Although Elizabeth has sympathy for Malinda and her situation, and although she would like to tell her “what [she] [has] a right to know,” she has to follow the law that enforces an inequality between black and white women. Malinda’s death at the end of the play suggests that it is this enforced lack of black female self-determination which accelerates black women’s becoming old by suffering. When Malinda dies, her eldest daughter Lindy, who is said to be leaving for college at the beginning of the play, instead has to take her mother’s position. When Lindy enters the stage in the last scene, “the light has gone from her face for she knows that the path now stretching before her and the other children will be darker even than the way that they have already known” (TTSD 183). The ending suggests that the circle of children, poverty, and the mother’s premature ageing will repeat itself in the next female family generation. The presence of Mary Ellen, Lindy’s six year old sister, as the only other female character on stage, as well as the fact that Burrill chose Unto the Third and Fourth Generations as the title for a revised version of the play in

1930 further support this focus on black motherhood as a burden that will finally affect all female generations of the Jasper family.²⁹⁵

Another play in which the black mother character is presented as becoming old by suffering is Mercedes Gilbert’s Environment (1931), which focuses on Mary Lou Williams and her struggle for the well-being of her family in New York City’s Harlem during the time of the Great Depression. Hoping for a better life in the North, the family had left their home in the rural area of Durham, North Carolina, one year before the action starts. The Williams’ home consisting of a “poorly furnished combination dining room and kitchen” (EN 204) equipped with a “delapidated [sic] table in the center of the floor” (EN 204) testifies to the family’s financial shortcomings. Unable to find a job, Mary Lou’s husband has become a violent drunkard who has to flee from the police so that Mary Lou is forced to work up to the point of exhaustion to support her family, which she tries to hide from her children. Only when she is alone on stage does she “drop[] her head on table and sob[]” (EN 206), telling herself: “Oh! but I’m tired. I worked hard today, but I must work hard, to just barely live” (EN 214). When Mary Lou forbids her son Carl, who “can’t stand to see [her] working like this, night and day” (EN 206), to quit school and go to work in order to support his mother, he asks her: “But, what about you?

You have grown twenty years older, and you’re working yourself to death” (EN 206).

Mary Lou had “left home a beautiful woman, full of hope,” but within only one year she has become “broken in health and mind” (EN 205).

It is only when the family finally escapes from Harlem and returns to their former home in Durham that Mary Lou can recover her mental and physical strength. In direct contrast to their apartment in Harlem, the living room is now furnished with a “large settee, comfortable chairs and living room table, piano” and there is “a general air of comfort, and prosperity” (EN 220). When Jackson, a bad acquaintance from Harlem, appears and intends to destroy the newly found idyll and happiness of her family by revealing that her son is an ex-prisoner, Mary Lou has the courage to confront him, threatening him: “If you say one word, if you try to disgrace my boy and I, and send him

295 In 1930 the revised version received the Junior Play Award by Emerson College in Boston, MA, where Burrill had graduated as one of the first African Americans in 1904. It was published in the school’s yearbook the same year. For more information see Henry L. Gates and Jennifer Burton, eds., Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and Others: The Prize Plays and Other One-Acts Published in Periodicals (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996).

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back to the life, he has just got away from, I’ll kill you” (EN 225). At the end of the play Mary Lou has regained her former power and strength and is determined to fight for the preservation of her family’s recovered happiness and security.

This idea of the mother character regaining her strength in the prospect of a better future for herself and her family is also presented in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, in which the character Ruth sacrifices her own dreams and health for the benefit of her family. According to the stage directions Ruth is “about thirty” (RIS 515) and

[w]e can see that she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face. In a few years, before thirty-five even, she will be known among her people as a “settled woman.”

(RIS 515)

In her social role as wife and mother, Ruth is caught in an exhausting daily routine of housekeeping and working as a laundress in order to support her family. She is very aware of their financial shortcomings so that she continues to work although she “look[s]

like [she] could fall over right here” (RIS 521) as her mother-in-law puts it. When Ruth realizes that she is pregnant, she even considers having an abortion in order not to place an additional burden on the family. Ruth’s tiredness and frustration with life are only interrupted when she learns about the new home that her mother-in-law Lena has bought:

RUTH […] Well – well! – All I can say is – if this is my time in life – my time – to say good-bye – (and she builds with momentum as she starts to circle the room with an exuberant, almost tearfully happy release) – to these God-damned cracking walls! – (she pounds the walls) – and these marching roaches! – (she wipes at an imaginary army of marching roaches) – and this cramped little closet which ain’t now or never was no kitchen!...

then I say it loud and good, Hallelujah! and good-bye misery… I don’t never want to see your ugly face again! (she laughs joyously, having practically destroyed the apartment, and flings her arms up and lets them come down happily, slowly, reflectively, over her abdomen, aware for the first time perhaps that life therein pulses with happiness and not despair) (RIS 538; italics and emphasis original)

Ruth reacts with enthusiasm and “jubilance” (RIS 537) to the prospect of escaping the family’s run-down apartment in Chicago’s Southside and moving into a new home with

“a whole lot of sunlight” (RIS 538). It is in this moment that Ruth decides for her unborn

child as the gesture towards her abdomen indicates. She gains new strength and confidence to fight for the realization of her dream of having a better life in the new home. When it seems that the family has lost all its money and is not able to move into their new home, she is the only one who does not despair and promises her mother-in-law

“with urgency and desperation” (RIS 550):

Lena – I’ll work… I’ll work twenty hours a day in all the kitchens in Chicago… I’ll strap my baby on my back if I have to and scrub all the floors in America and wash all the sheets in America if I have to – but we got to move… We got to get out of here…

(RIS 550)

On moving day Ruth’s exhaustion and weariness are finally gone and she has regained her power and strength. When the curtain rises, her voice can be heard in a “triumphant surge, a penetrating statement of expectation”: “Oh, Lord, I don’t feel no ways tired!

Children, oh, glory hallelujah!” (RIS 540) As the stage directions point out, at the end of the play the audience of A Raisin in the Sun can witness how Ruth is finally “coming to life” (RIS 553).

It is indeed this idea of black women coming to life that feminist playwrights Ntozake Shange and Judith Alexa Jackson focus on in their plays, encouraging their target audience of black women to find self-love and strength in themselves.