The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938

By Abram Hill, George A. Towns, Jodie Edwards and 14 more

While many historically significant or interesting plays by white playwrights are easily found in anthologies, few by early African American writers are equally accessible. Indeed until the 1970s, almost none of these early plays could be located outside of a library.

The Roots of African American Drama fills this gap. Five of the thirteen scripts included here have never been in print, and only three others are presently available anywhere. The plays represent a variety of styles—allegory, naturalism, realism, melodrama, musical comedy, and opera. Four are full length, eight are one-acts, and one is a skit. Their subjects include slavery, share-cropping, World War I, vaudeville, religion, and legend and mythology.

In making their selections, the editors used a variety of criteria to insure each play is dramatically sound and historically important. They also searched for those scripts that were unjustly consigned to obscurity. Each selection begins with headnotes that place it in its historical and cultural context. Biographic information and a bibliography
of other plays follow each script, providing readers with added sources for study.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 1992
• ISBN: 9780814338476

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Introduction: Two Hundred Years of Black and White Drama

James V. Hatch

In 1949, Langston Hughes published a poem entitled A Note on Commercial Theatre. The second verse reads:

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what’s about me—

But someday somebody’ll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me—

Black and beautiful—

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it’ll be

Me Myself!

Yes, it’ll be me.

A white reader may have exclaimed, What is he sore about? Those were good shows with great black stars!

They were. But these shows and many black plays did not present an image that Mr. Hughes could recognize as black. Much black theater in the last twenty years can be understood in this light: the attempt of black playwrights to present honest black images on an American stage that for two centuries presented dishonest ones, written by white playwrights.

The Great White Way

One of the best mirrors we can find to illuminate the subtleties of racism is the mirror of traditional theater history. The misshapen images reflected in this cracked glass sprang from American culture, and here white and black people can see themselves awry, images distorted into grotesqueries.

Many people believe that black theater began with Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and that whatever preceded Hansberry did not amount to much. They are wrong. Black theater stretches back into antiquity, and for Afro-Americans, shared glory with the dark-skinned pharaohs of Egypt is as legitimate as shared glory with the Greeks for Western Caucasians. However, until recently, Egypt, the site of the most ancient monuments where religious ritual flourished, was excised politically from the African continent by Western historians who labeled the culture of the pharaohs not an African but a Semitic-Hamitic triumph. With Egypt and Arab North Africa skimmed off the top of the continent, the world’s most ancient rituals (the Memphite dramas and the birth and death of Osiris) disappeared from African history to become objects of Middle Eastern studies or a separate area of study, Egyptology. Only in the late twentieth century have scholars again identified the Negroid features of the pharaohs of the Upper Nile with the people south of the Sahara.

Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or Ibsen should not be invidiously compared to the African tradition—which was often an improvisational oral, musical, and community affair as contrasted to the white, copyrighted, individually conceived product that marks Western capitalism. This is not to say that a black playwright like August Wilson or a black actor like James Earl Jones cannot adopt the European tradition as an alternative form; in this genre a black artist using a Western tradition is analogous to a white musician employing ragtime, jazz, or bebop.

Another approach is to dissolve the dichotomy altogether in favor of the humanist approach, to assume that human nature is universal (Shakespeare belongs to all races and all times). The humanist approach is appealing for the sweet truth in it, but culture does create differences in perception. Shakespeare saw Othello the African through Western eyes and not necessarily as an Ashanti, a Zulu, or even a Berber might have conceived himself.

On the other hand, African and Western traditions are strongly represented in today’s black theater—sometimes by the same artist. And why not? A Black American can feel that he or she has a stake in both traditions. However, few will grant the white artist the same right, because white artists creating in the black traditions have often indulged in commercial and racial exploitation. This point will be made clear by a brief look at nineteenth-century American drama, particularly the stereotypes as set down by Sterling Brown in the famous essay Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors (1933).

Early white American drama was imported from the English stage. Although the first African may not have stepped upon England’s shores before 1554, the black image had entered English theater earlier through two diverse images of kings: Balthasar and Lucifer. In the fourteenth century, the Christmas pageants presented the Magi bearing gifts to the Christ child, and just as the kings represented the homage of the entire world, Balthasar symbolized the darker races. By the sixteenth century, other forces of darkness had appeared on stage in the guise of black-faced devils and demons. In the seventeenth century, the English masques used black-faced figures much as the English aristocrats used black page boys—for novelty and display. In 1605, Inigo Jones designed Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness for Queen Anne of Denmark. The queen and her ladies blackened their faces, a very loathsome sight. In the more serious mode of revenge tragedies, the Renaissance black king (then called a Moor or a blackamoor) became a captive and took bloody revenge upon his Christian captors. For two or three hundred years, the black image on stage remained an anomaly, something exotic, something outside daily experience, until the slave trade changed all that. As slavery became the blue-chip investment of its day, the tradition from Balthasar to Oroonoko faded away, leaving the once noble Othello as Friday, a wretch whose very appearance convicted him of sin, leaving him fit only to be a servant to the entrepreneur Robinson Crusoe.

It is not surprising then that the first black character who appears in an American drama—in a play The Disappointment, or The Force of Credulity (1767)—is named Raccoon, the animal from which the racial epithet coon derives. Some scholars have maintained that Raccoon is not a Black but Dutch or something other; the point is moot, for other stereotypes are in the offing.

Tracing the development of the servant / slave character at the hands of white playwrights is painful and repetitious, but a few examples are necessary to show how they corrupted the black image in diction, thought, and character, and at the same time to note how these distortions have been countered by black playwrights.

First, diction. In a very early play, The Candidates (1770) by Robert Mumford, the black servant Ralpho asks his master for a new livery. The master gives Ralpho a cast-off suit of his own (yes, even then), and the white author has Ralpho express his enthusiasm over the secondhand livery: Gads! This figures of mine is not reconsiderable in its delurement. . . . The girls I’m thinking, will find me desisible. This introduction of pre-Sheridan malapropisms for comedy was a device that white authors used for one hundred and fifty years. But they did not leave bad enough alone.

By 1845, the diction of the servant had developed into near jibberish. In Fashion by Anna Cora Mowatt, the opening scene shows Zeke examining his new dashing scarlet livery before Millinette the French maid:

ZEKE: Dere’s a coat to take de eyes ob all Broadway! Oh! Miswsy, it am de fixins dat make de natural born gemman. A libery forever! Dere’s da pair ob insuppressibles to stonish de colored population.

MILLINETTE: Oh, oui, Monsieur Zeke, (aside) I not comprend one word he say!

Most African languages, like the French, did not employ the voiced or unvoiced th phonene of English. The African substitution of a d for th as in dere for there in the eighteenth century soon became associated with slavery and ignorance. However, to American ears, Charles Boyer’s French substitution of z for th in za Casbah sounded romantic and chic.

Black playwrights recognized many ways in which black people used English according to class, region, and social strata. Mary Burrill in Aftermath (reprinted here) has placed her drama in a backwoods cabin in South Carolina. The people use an initial r but not a final one. They employ the Middle English hit for it, and, to a marked degree, their dialect is not different from that of backwoods whites. George A. Towns, author of The Sharecropper (reprinted here), grew up in southern Georgia and records a very similar speech; however, Miss Jones, the black schoolteacher in that play, speaks standard English, and the white landlord has his own dialect variation: You jes tell ’im to git away fum here. . . . None of the dialects is used to degrade the characters or to make them appear comic. Nor does Zora Neale Hurston use dialect to wring comedy out of the biblical narrative The First One, reprinted here.

It is quite different from northern urban black diction as recorded by Alice Childress or Ed Bullins, which itself is different from diction in Dallas as written by Ted Shine. Some authors frankly show that Blacks often speak two languages, black and white dialects.

In No Place to Be Somebody (1969) by Charles Gordone, the black man, Gabe, speaks to the audience in Act II:

We moved out of that dirty black slum

Away from those dirty black people

Who live in those dirty black hovels

Amid all of that garbage and filth.

In Act III, Gabe speaks again to the audience in a different dialect:

They’s mo to bein’ black than meets the eye!

Bein’ black, is like the way ya walk an’ talk

It’s a way of lookin’ at life

Bein’ black is like sayin’ "Wha’s happenin’

Babeeee!" an’ bein’ understood.

Bein’ black has a way of makin’ ya call

somebody a mu-tha-fuc-kah an’

really meanin’ it!

White playwrights distorted black characters by means other than diction. Whites came to deny their own common sense. One of the all-time favorite scenes of northern white audiences was the manumission of the slave. An early example appears in The Triumph of Love by J. Murdock. The master offers Sambo his freedom. After kissing the skirt of his master’s coat, Sambo cries: "Oh marsa George, I feel how I never feel before. God bless you. (cries) I must go, or my heart burst. (exits)"

That a man offered his freedom takes it is only common sense to an American twenty years after the Declaration of Independence. Yet fifty years later some writers had forgotten their common sense. Here is the same scene from an antiabolitionist play, The Guerrillas (1862) by James MacCabe. Marse Arthur has just offered Jerry his freedom:

JERRY: Marse Arthur, yous jokin’.

ARTHUR: No, Jerry. I am serious. You are free.

JERRY: (indignant) A free nigger? I don’t want to be free. . . . What I want to be free for? (with feeling) Marse Arthur, I been in your family eber since I was born. If youse tired of old Jerry jis’ take him out in de field and shoot him, don’t set him free, please don’t. . . .

This scene and its many variations became increasingly popular in the South and the North after the Civil War. Although the basis of slavery was economic, white greed and the guilt of that greed were softened by lies that whites told themselves in their theaters; whites were obsessed with the idea that black people loved them. Blackening their faces with hog fat and burnt cork, they repeated these lies to themselves until they believed them.

Black playwright William Wells Brown, himself a three-time runaway slave, knew what black people wanted. In his fine play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (reprinted here), there is a low-comedy character named Cato who has played the stupid servant for five acts. Abruptly, Cato runs away to Canada, an action that no white playwright ever dreamed of writing for a comic darky. Once safe, Cato sings:

Massa gave me his ole coat, an’ thought I’d happy be,

But I had my eye on the North Star, an’ thought of liberty.

Ole massa lock de door, an den he went to sleep,

I dress myself in his bess clothes, an’ jump into the street.

More than a century later, discarding the stupid darky disguise, the maid in Ed Bullins’s The Gentleman Caller (1966) murders her employers and assumes the role of the madam. The black folk were in disguise all right, but under that black mask there was no white face.

Among the most vicious of these stage lies was the consciously constructed myth that the black was a coward. Although an estimated sixty-five thousand black soldiers died in the Civil War, the coward’s image flourished as the white man’s fantasy. Here is a scene from Defending the Flag (1894) by Laura Downing:

SNOWBALL: What’s dat you saying ’bout Gineral Grant? Yo’ ain’t gwine fer to be a sojer, aire you, Marse Rob? You’se too little fer to be a sojer.

ROBBIE: And you’re too big not to be a soldier, Snowball.

SNOWBALL: (shaking) Me—me a sojer, Marse Rob?

ROBBIE: Why of course. Here are all these brave men from the North giving their lives to free your people—you sit right down and let them do all the fighting. Aren’t you ashamed?

SNOWBALL: Um—um—um. S-say, Miss Bee wants me. Y-yes she does.

ROBBIE: No, she don’t either. You’re just trying to get away. Say, Snowball, what would you do if you were in battle?

SNOWBALL: You don’t neber cotch dis chile in no battle, no sah! Say, Miss Bee she done wats me.

ROBBIE: You’re a coward, and I’m going to Miss Trixy myself and tell her to send you to the war to make a soldier out of you.

SNOWBALL: (running to door after him) No-no, don’t please, Marse Rob, I-I. Oh! Day’ll sen’ me off fer sojer sure, and’-an’—I’ll done git my head shot off—an’ den how’ll I feel?

These scenes were not the exceptions but the rule. Defending the Flag was written in the same year that 134 Blacks were lynched.

Against these stage lies, black authors wrote plays to demonstrate the black person’s courage. William Easton wrote about the slave uprising and the war for independence in Haiti in his play Dessalines (1893). Dessalines, the hero of the play, is a black man whose courage inspires his soldiers to defeat the French army. George A. Town’s The Sharecropper depicts one farmer’s courage against the theft of his crops, and Willis Richardson’s The Chip Woman’s Fortune (reprinted here) quietly suggests another kind of courage, the bravery of keeping on keeping on.

Three black plays present the dilemma of the black man fighting for white America: Mary Burrills’ Aftermath, the story of a veteran returning to the segregated South; Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918), which questions whether Blacks should accept combat duty in World War I; and Randolph Edmond’s Yellow Death (1935), which examines the black soldier’s role in the Spanish American War. All three plays conclude that Blacks should serve because they are American, but in turn, Blacks should be accorded the full rights of citizenship or they will fight for them.

In contemporary black drama, the black soldier is shown in other aspects. In Imamu Baraka’s Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), the black soldiers kill the whites and cut off their heads. Or, again, black soldiers suffer in-group racism because of white-only standards in Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Story (1981). Both dramas feature black counterversions of a white stereotype, the Brute.

The Brute Negro, as Sterling Brown clearly reveals, was a white man’s fictional creation, a black beast given to rape, pillage, and murder in its final apotheosis, the monster King Kong. The touchstone of this monster was hatred—hatred for whites, for his community, even for himself. No good could come from him. No matter how many police were fielded against him, he would appear on the lawns, in the schools, in the banks, and in the bedrooms of white America to confront his creator.

The Brute flourishes in white drama at the turn of the century, when white oppression-through-violence was at its peak. After several early tentative appearances, the Brute makes his full entrance as Sampson in Green and Grismer’s The New South (1893) as a very mean darky. His most famous role was in the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1906), first a novel, then a play, and finally D. W. Griffith’s classic Birth of a Nation. His long life at the hands of white authors began to dwindle after the 1920s with Heyward’s Porgy in the person of Crown, although twenty years later the black actor Canada Lee was cast as the bestial Caliban serving a white master in a successful version of The Tempest (1945).

But the Brute was one white stereotype that some black writers were interested in keeping alive, because the image acquired reality in black experience. There was Stagolee, immortalized in the ballad:

The high sheriff told the deputies

"Get you pistols and come with me.

We got to go ’rest that badman

Stagolee."

The deputies took their pistols

And laid them on the shelf.

"If you want that badman Stagolee

Go ’rest him by yourself."

Bad man and baad man have opposite meanings; the second means so tough, so fine, so Black and strong that he is good. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song depicts a baad man. John Henry as presented in Theodore Browne’s Natural Man is baad. Jack Johnson, the boxer, was a baad man.

Caleb in Joseph Cotter, Sr.’s play Caleb the Degenerate (1901) is a baad man, the complete antithesis of the virtues the black man supposedly aspired to. Caleb drinks, blasphemes, lies, kills his parents, and snorts cocaine; he rebels in the tradition of Satan, and the reader can’t help admiring him. Another important play in the tradition is Randolph Edmond’s one-act, Bad Man (c. 1930). Thea, the baad man, dies to save a cabin full of brothers and sisters from a lynch mob.

In an excellent essay on this folk character, Professor William Wiggins, Jr., points out that the baad nigger traditionally had (1) an utter disregard of death and danger; (2) a great concentration on sexual virility; (3) a great extravagance in buying cars, clothing, and so on; and (4) an insatiable love of having a good time. This is not the portrait of a boy who knows how to keep his place. No wonder that in white drama influenced by the Puritan tradition he always has to be killed.

The most perceptive twist given to the Brute came from Richard Wright. In Native Son (1941), Wright lays the blame clearly on the white society for denying Bigger Thomas an education, a job, and self-respect. The play was only a partial box-office success when it opened in March of 1941. In Wright’s radio drama adapted from his short story Big Black Good Man, a Danish hotel keeper mistakes a baad sailor for the Brute and suffers comic consequences.

By the 1960s, the Brute became increasingly articulate and socially aware of who his real enemy was. Twenty years earlier Bigger had to have a Jewish lawyer articulate his pain, but the black protagonist Walker Vessal of The Slave (1964) by Imamu Baraka speaks for himself and supervises the apocalyptic eruption that brings down the curtain on white civilization in America.

In the dramatic criticism of black drama, such men as Walker qualify in existential terms as antiheroes. Yet white critics, through a decade of French and American antiheroes, never designated black characters as such. For the same reason, men like Bobby Seale, Steve Biko, George Jackson, and Nelson Mandela were often labeled by the white press as criminals instead of the revolutionaries they were; the black press called them Freedom Fighters. The white community still sees the Brute as a bad nigger, but Blacks have long respected him as a baad cat.

A number of black plays make use of baad men of varying degrees: Richard Henry in Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) by James Baldwin; Johnny in No Place to Be Somebody (1969) by Charles Gordone; and one of the cleverest, Art in Goin’a Buffalo (1966) by Ed Bullins, because he is able to fool not only the whites but even his black friends. The climax to this tradition is Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweetback and his film imitators in Shaft, Slaughter, and Blacula.

A close cousin of the Brute is the Exotic Primitive. While the driving force of the former is hatred, the mainspring of the Primitive is having a good time—wine, women, and song. He might occasionally become angry in a crap game, but his razor is always reserved for people of his own color. The Exotic Primitive is a later white creation, reaching his vogue in the 1920s, during the black so-called renaissance when whites voyaged to Harlem to hear hot jazz, to see black bodies writhe in savage dance, to drink bootleg gin, and to catch an echo of the dark laughter, suggesting the raw jungle.

One of the first white playwrights to exploit this tradition was Ridgley Torrence in a one-act, Granny Maumee (1917). Granny raises the ghost of her dead son by means of voodoo rites in a scene of strong theatrical appeal. The possibilities were more thoroughly exploited by Eugene O’Neill in The Emperor Jones (1920), a classic of white man’s exotica. Other plays in the exotic mode were Earth (1927) by Jo Em Basshe; Goat Alley (1921) by Ernest Culberston; Porgy (1927) by Dubose and Dorothy Heyward; and Carmen Jones (1943) by Oscar Hammerstein. Some black writers contributed their own versions, such as St. Louis Woman (1946), based on a script written in the 1930s by Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps. Although this tradition might be said to have climaxed in 1930 with Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures, the genre limped into the 1940s, when the World War II phrase racial tolerance was replaced by integration, and some middle-class Blacks let it be known that they did not have rhythm, never carried razors or sat on stoops sipping Thunderbird.

With the partial failure of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of Black Power groups in the mid-1960s, the black integrationist middle class found itself labeled white, an intolerable position because whites also rejected them. Black became beautiful, and Black was defined as that which was distinct from white, that which whites hated, and that which whites had caused some black people to hate in themselves. Consequently, shaking ass to funky music, grinding with a righteous right leg, eating greens and grits, the use of muthafukah, and a general life-style of loud and wrong were welcomed back as expressions of the real black soul.

This conflict between the real Black Soul and the Bourgeois Negro was dramatized in Wine in the Wilderness (1969) by Alice Childress. Tommy, a soul sister from the streets of Harlem, is set up by Bill, a middle-class painter, to be mocked and exploited; however, by the end of the play, Tommy’s vitality and honesty, springing from roots of black culture, win out over the flabby middle class. There are interesting variations within this theme. Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man (1965) pits a tough black woman lesbian against a Negro college boy. In Gentleman Caller (1966) by the same author, the black maid triumphs over her white employers, as does the protagonist in Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961). One of the soundest trouncings the middle class gets is in Rosalee Pritchett (1970) by Carlton and Barbara Molette. In this play, the bridge-playing set refuses to give up its white allegiance even after several white national guardsmen rape one of its members.

The black woman has never threatened the white psychic crotch in the way that the black male does. She has been given employment denied to her man. The stereotype of the matriarch, or the Mammy who loved her white family, began in the mid-nineteenth century. Chloe in Mrs. Sidney Bateman’s Self (1856) offers to sell herself to save her white mistress from bankruptcy. (Contrast Chloe with Mrs. Love in black writer Ted Shine’s Contribution more than one hundred years later, where the black woman poisons her white folks and gets away with it because the white folks are convinced that she loves them.) The Mammy character, when not loving white folks, is denouncing her husband as a lazy, no-good nigger. Piling up plays like a topless stack of wheat cakes, she had survived in all her indignation right up to Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy portrait in Gone with the Wind, the greatest all-time box-office grosser in motion picture history, still pushing the image of Blacks-as-retarded at our neighborhood theaters and in our living rooms.

The strong black woman exists; she has to. But black playwrights have presented her with an important difference: she does not love white folks, but she does love her black man; she understands why he cannot find work, his feelings of panic, his madness, his drinking. Owen Dodson’s The Shining Town (reprinted here) is a bitter and poetic picture of the woman who must slave as a domestic during the Depression because her husband is denied work; she expresses her anger, not against him, but against the system that deprives him of his manhood. In Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own (1966), a mother teaches her son that he must love his father because the old man has paid his dues. Three other fine plays of black family life that portray the male-female conflict in terms of an understanding woman are Richardson’s The Chip Woman’s Fortune, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959); James Baldwin’s Amen Corner (1954); and one of the most extensive examinations of the southern middle-class family of the last generation, Thomas Pawley’s The Tumult and the Shouting (1969).

Of course there are male-female conflicts in modern black drama. Nora and Leon in Joseph S. Mitchell’s Help Wanted (reprinted here) quarrel bitterly because he cannot find work; but when the crisis comes, Aunt Nora defends him against the whites even though he is forced to become a strikebreaker. In the postvaudeville skits of Butterbeans and Susie, marital conflict rages in hyperbolic vitriol, provoking laughter through exaggeration. However, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) declared a real male-female war that initiated a series of plays examining black women’s roles in the feminist movement.

Black women playwrights—and there has been an unbroken line, from Katherine D. Tillman’s often naive Aunt Betsy’s Thanksgiving (reprinted here) to the sophisticated symbolic drama of Adrienne Kennedy—have written about the male-female world in a variety of ways. In Angelina Grimke’s Rachel (1916), the heroine strongly supports the black man but hates the white society so much that she refuses marriage because she does not wish to bring children into an ugly world. May Miller in 1933 wrote Nails and Thorns (reprinted here) as a contribution to a long list of anti-lynching dramas. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston, in The First One (reprinted here), poked fun at the original race prejudice on earth, that between Noah’s family and his son, Ham. Other black women’s viewpoints on this subject include Myrtle Livingston, who in a one-act, For Unborn Children (1926), condemns a black man for choosing a white woman over his own kind. Alice Childress’s Mojo (1970) suggests that black men and women can work out their differences if they love and respect each other as equals.

In recent years, there has been a considerable number of black women playwrights. Today’s list includes Adrienne Kennedy, Sandra Sharp, Glenda Dickerson, Vinnette Carroll, Vinie Burrows, Aishah Rahman, Judi Ann Mason, Sharon Stockard Martin, Micki Grant, Alice Childress, Glory Van Scott, Lynda Patton, Martie Charles, J. E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, Abby Lincoln, Barbara Molette, Elaine Jackson, Elaine Flagg, China Clark, Lorna Littleway, Shauneille Perry, Endisha Holland, Zoë Walker, J. P. Gibson, Kathleen Collins, Veona Thomas, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and, of course, Hansberry and Shange.

Among the many black modern women writing for the stage, Adrienne Kennedy is a true poet of the theater and probably the most experimental of all black playwrights. Her play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) concerns a girl’s identity: her father is black, her mother white. If Blacks and whites alike have declared that mixing races is bad, how is the girl to accept both parts of her inheritance?

According to the official white myth, mixing the races was bad for whites although it might improve the Negro. Nevertheless, on stage persons of mixed blood must die, even if the black blood be but one drop. The best known of this genre was Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859). Zoe, the octoroon, looks white. George, not knowing she is a Black, proposes to her; instead of being happy, Zoe is in despair and finally explains to George.

ZOE: And what shall I say? I—my mother was—no, no—not her! Why should I refer the blame to her? George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers: do you see the nails are of a bluish tinge?

GEORGE: Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark.

ZOE: Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white?

GEORGE: It is their beauty.

ZOE: Could you see the roots of my hair you would see the same dark fatal mark. Do you know what that is?

GEORGE: No.

ZOE: That is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that drop poisons all the blood; those seven bright drops give me love like yours—ambition like yours—but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing—forbidden by the laws—I’m an Octoroon!

This popular play had its last professional revival in 1961 at the Phoenix Theatre in New York City. Its popularity with white audiences was based on more than its theatricality.

The tragic-mulatto myth continued down through Edward Shelton’s The Nigger (1909), in which the hero is about to be elected governor until his black past is discovered, to Eugene O’Neill’s uninformed attempt to examine the issues in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924).

Unfortunately, O’Neill’s Negro is such a weakass that the premise of the story is defeated. The original production starred the young Paul Robeson, who at one point kissed his white wife’s hand. The newspapers predicted a race riot. Nothing happened. Finally the film Lost Boundries (1949) capped that tradition. In 1968, the American audience watched Jack Johnson (James Earl Jones) climb into bed with his white woman in Howard Sackler’s Great White Hope, but any objections were nicely taken care of by her death before curtain time.

Black writers have also been opposed to miscegenation. For Unborn Children (1926) by Myrtle Livingston has the grandmother and the sister severely condemn the black man who wishes to marry a white woman. Langston Hughes’s first Broadway play, Mulatto (1935), depicted a mixed race and the mixed-up son of a white plantation owner and his black house servant. The son returns home to demand his inheritance, kills his father, and is killed in turn.

This stage tradition of the tragic mulatto has survived contrary to historical reality. Despite all the visual evidence that thousands and thousands of mulattos enliven the populace, black and white writers have insisted on killing off their stage counterparts in an expression of ideological preference. An important modification to this trend is Alice Childress’s lovely, human play Wedding Band (1966), and related to it is Mitchell’s Help Wanted, in which the light-skinned hero refuses to pass even though doing so may lead to a job and prosperity.

Before we discuss black theater as a separate history, there is one last nineteenth-century nexus with white theater to be explored: the minstrel show, recognized as America’s first original contribution to theater form.

The minstrel show originated on the southern plantation. White historians have suggested that the show took place as an entertainment for Ole Massa. Black historians say that the singing, dancing, and improvised dialogues were for the slaves’ own amusement and, further more, that much of the material was cannily conceived satire on the master and his house servants. Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t a’goin’ there referred to the white Christians.

By the eighteenth century, the richness of black culture was receiving the compliment of imitation and exploitation. White performers in blackface sang and danced black music, often passing it off as their own creation. A black singer, Picayune Butle, wrote a song he named Old Zip Coon. George Nichols, a white performer in Purdy Brown’s Circus, introduced the song as his own, calling it Turkey in the Straw.

In the early 1830s, a white showman named Daddy Rice witnessed a jump dance performed by a black boy. Taken with the lad’s originality, Rice blackened his own face and entitled his grotesque imitation Jumping Jim Crow. So popular did Rice’s act become that Jim Crow became a generic term for Negro.

White minstrel shows formally began in 1842 with the antics of Dan Emmett, the supposed composer of Dixie. In the forty years that followed, hundreds of white men donned hog fat and burnt cork to make thousands and thousands of dollars by mimicking and distorting black music, black speech, black dance, and black culture, a tradition that was to last into the mid-twentieth century with Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Amos and Andy. Even T. S. Eliot drew upon it for his play Sweeny Agonistes.

After the Civil War, several black minstrel troupes appeared, but to succeed they had to imitate their imitators, and they too blackened their faces and drew white and red circles around their mouths and eyes. Pauline Hopkins in 1879 wrote Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (reprinted here) for her family’s troupe, the Hopkins’ Colored Troubadours; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation. By the late 1880s, the minstrel tradition was losing steam, and a number of black composers and writers turned to creating musicals and variety shows. There were two great decades of black musicals. The first was ragtime—from Clorindy; or The Origin of the Cake Walk (1898) by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to The Red Moon (1909) by Bob Cole and Rosamund Johnson. The second, the jazz decade, was from Shuffle Along (1921) by Miller, Lyles, Sissle, and Blake, to The Blackbirds of 1928. One composer, Shirley Graham, in 1932 wrote an opera, Tom-Tom (reprinted here) using African themes and rhythms. Although recognition of their contributions to the American stage has been slow (Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha waited sixty years to be acclaimed), nonetheless, without these black artists the American musical might still be waltzing with an umpah-pah-pah to the descendants of Merry Widow and Naughty Marietta.

Minstrel imagery died hard. In 1959, Jean Genet picked up the blackface tradition and reversed the roles, giving the black actors white faces. The Blacks enjoyed a long run in New York, providing a number of black actors with work. Today, many black theater artists reject Genet’s play as a negative image of black nationalism; they see the play’s thesis (that Blacks will come to power only to behave like whites) as a variety of white man’s propaganda meant to keep Blacks in their place.

The tradition received its final comeuppance in Douglas Turner Ward’s one-act Day of Absence (1965), which must be understood as a reversal of the minstrel show role. If the play is performed by whites, it simply is not funny; but performed by blacks in white-face, it is hilarious because the inversion becomes a satire upon a mask. How much of its hilarity depends on our knowledge of what went down in a hundred years of stereotyping the comic Negro? Perhaps the minstrel show and the early musicals with the comic darky character are partially responsible for a peculiar phenomenon—the relative absence of comedy in black drama. In the hundred and fifty years of black play-writing, except for a few plays by Langston Hughes and some one-acts by Eulalie Spence and Ruth Gaines Shelton, comedy was rare until Abram Hill’s On Strivers Row (reprinted here), a witty satire on the middle class. Nightclub acts, vaudeville skits like those of Butterbeans and Susie, and comic operas like those of Williams and Walker were perhaps written more for black audiences than white. Modern satire really came into its own with Purlie Victorious (1961) by Ossie Davis and reached its apogee with George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1987).

This does not mean that black people never mocked white audiences. Hurston’s The First One derides those who believe that racial differences are destiny. The black dancer Avon Long slapped his ass toward the white audience in