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In October's issue, to illustrate the American "original sin" of slavery, Nathan Thomas told a heartwrenching, irony-laced story of two mid-19th century actors, a black man (Ira Aldridge) who couldn't make a living in his craft on the American stage and thus decamped to Europe, and a white man (Thomas Dartmouth Rice) who made a name for himself by creating, in blackface, the character of Jim Crow.
Thomas makes his point in a pointed way: "Consider: a black man left his country because he couldn't play for white audiences. A white man makes his fortune by playing a black man for white audiences. This is America in all of its amazing contradiction."
It is still America in all its amazing contradiction, even on October 7, 2009. On that day, I had a reading done of my full-length play Ain't Ethiopia by a theatre in New York, MultiStages (Lorca Peress, Artistic Director). Here's the précis of the play: "After whites lynch his wife, an African-American man goes to Spain in 1937 to fight Franco only to find that he must face down the home-town fascists who murdered her if his life, and his wife's death, is to mean anything."
Jesse Colton, the man who goes to Spain, escapes from the Mississippi delta where his life means nothing, to New York, where he falls in with the Harlem Division of the Communist Party and undergoes a political education that broadens and sharpens him. While in Spain, he connects with a Hemingway wanna-be, Dewey Moore, a friendship that begins in mistrust and ends in a covenant: when Jesse decides to return home to confront his wife's killers, knowing that his death will be the result, Dewey agrees to be his witness and bear the story and pictures to the wider world. In such rolls of the dice some sort of social justice might come forward.
No talk-back was scheduled, but I made the rounds of the audience because I wanted to hear the responses to a play where not only did the "hero" die but the hero was also a black man choosing to sacrifice himself, in an act of love for his murdered wife, as a way to make justice "stick" where it needed to stick most: in local hearts and local minds, where the global becomes local, the ideological turns personal.
As with all Bell curves, most of the comments clumped into the complimentary middle, but a few stood out, not so much because they opposed each other but because they illustrated how the "background radiation" of Thomas' original sin still hisses through our cultural cosmos. A young African-American woman felt that handing off the mission of bringing Jesse's story to the wider world to a white reporter undercut the power of Jesse's act and implied that black people had to depend upon white people, yet again, to achieve the justice they deserve.
A few white audience members had a problem believing that a young man from the Mississippi delta would ever have had the intellect to understand the grand theories underscoring the Spanish civil war. As one woman put it to me in an email: "I also had trouble reconciling a mistreated Black (a man fighting oppression) with whole political philosophies; i.e., Communism, Anarchism, Fascism (in a country fighting oppression)... "
However, none of these same people seemed to have any problem with several of the white characters (who came from similar backgrounds) understanding the larger theories, including a Polish working-class dissident who revered the Communist Manifesto (and lost an eye in defending it), a proletarian Irish anarchist from Belfast, and a village of Spanish peasants. Why was such skepticism reserved just for Jesse?
Several other white people elevated Jesse's action into high-level moral principle, sloughing off its color to make it "universal." As one person put it, "Congratulations!! I was totally enthralled with your fascinating, impassioned, and eloquent antiwar play...I look forward to seeing it fully produced when someone somewhere has the good sense to see its timely relevance, it's generous heart, and poetic cry in the wilderness of this war ravaged world."
As much as I appreciated this encomium, Ain't Ethiopia is not an anti-war play — it's a play about a black man taking charge of his life in the best way he knows how.
I suppose all of this could simply be chalked up to the expected diversity of opinion and insight in a room filled with fifty arts-inclined people coming at the work from at least fifty different angles. And perhaps I've prejudiced my hearing by tuning it to a particular frequency instead of letting it be broad-spectrumed and agnostic.
But it is also true that even in this day and this age, with a black man's presence in the White House offering us all the chance to eradicate the original sin, that the original sin comes roaring back in the "tea parties" and Glenn Beck-inspired rants and healthcare town hall meetings — and in lesser venues like play readings.
The woman who made the statement about the "mistreated Black" also said this: "As to your overall story, I felt you were rehashing old, well-documented issues. Nothing new here." I wish that she were right — but she's not. There is still a color divide — W.E.B. Du Bois' "color-line," stated way back in the ancient year of 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk. Jesse's sacrifice, and Dewey's report of it, still have a long way to go.
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