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The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women's TheaterAuthor(s): Joyce MeierSource: MELUS, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Revising Traditions Double Issue (Autumn - Winter, 2000), pp.

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The Refusal of Motherhoodin African American Women's Theater

Joyce MeierUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor

As Darlene Hine and Kate Wittenstein show in their recentstudy of slavery, African American slave women practiced sexualabstinence, abortion, and infanticide as strategies of resistance,exemplifying their refusal to participate n and help perpetuate asystem that treated their bodies and their children's bodies asproperty. But the reality of the black woman who refusedparticipation in a racist and patriarchal system by refusingmotherhood continued even after slavery was abolished in thiscountry, as early twentieth-century drama by black women writersattests. Though written past the period where, as MargaretWilkerson writes, the institution of slavery "made the blackwoman the legal instrument of her people's slavery" and injustice"intruded into her most private moments" (viii), these playsexpress a strong melding of the personal and the political, as theyshow how historical oppression recurs in the present, and how theblack woman's body continues to be the site of both dominationand resistance. As thematic antecedents to Toni Morrison's 1987novel Beloved, Angelina Grimke's Rachel (1916), GeorgiaJohnson's Safe (1930?), Shirley Graham's It's Morning (1938-40),and to a lesser extent Alice Childress's Mojo (1971) and AishahRahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a BirdDies in a Gilded Cage (1977) all demonstrate the difficulty ofblack motherhood n this country.

These plays feature heroines who refuse motherhood and/orchild rearing because they cannot bear the alternative of birthingand raising a child in a culture that discriminates on the basis onrace, class, and gender. Instead of critiquing he heroine's actions,these works clearly explain why such decisions are made in asociety that at worst resorts to lynching and at best withholds

MELUS, Volume 25, Numbers 3 / 4 (Fall / Winter 2000)





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JOYCE MEIER

employment and educational opportunities or black youth at the

sametime it renders black mothers

powerlessto

protecttheir

ownchildren from experiencing the wrongs of racism. Finally, MayMiller's Thorns and Nails (1933) takes this theme a step further osuggest how the system of racism wrongs white mothers and theirchildren as well. The play shows how terribly wrong a whitemother's privileged assumption s that she can actually protect herown (white) child against the wrongs of racism and by extensionclassism and sexism as well.

What such works demonstrate are the peculiar ramifications orblack women of what Lindsay Patterson calls the "Nigger Mo-ment": when, in Patterson's words, a black person "loses his inno-cence. . . discovers he is a 'nigger' and his mentality shifts gears"(quoted in Brown-Guillory, "Images" 234). For the black womendepicted in these plays, such moments often relate to their realiza-tion of their powerlessness as mothers when through he examplesof a relative or a family friend or even a casual acquaintance, hey

are forced to witness the murder or pain of a young black person,usually male. Experiencing the boy's pain as an extension of theirown, these mothers then make their decision. Denied voice andpower, they choose to give up the child they are having or alreadyhave.

Perhaps because of their "morbid" subject matter, the wordapplied to Grimke's play when it first appeared, he first three ofthese plays have not exactly had a high production rate. Rachel

was first performed on March 3, 1916 by the Drama Committee ofthe NAACP; while there were two other productions within twoyears (one in New York City, the other in Cambridge, Massachu-setts), the play was not performed again until the Spelman Players(of Spelman College) revived it in 1991. Of the several playsJohnson submitted to the Federal Theatre Project, a government-sponsored arts program that was part of the Works Projects Ad-ministration of the late 1930s, none, Safe among them, was ever

produced. Moreover, while plays by Grimke, Miller, Childress,and Rahman are available in several anthologies, only one ofGraham's plays has been published, and Johnson's Safe has onlyrecently been published, thanks to the recuperative fforts of KathyA. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens in Strange Fruit; prior to 1998,Johnson's play resided for years in the Federal Theatre Project

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AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S THEATER

Script Collection in the Research Center for the Federal Theatre

Projectat

GeorgeMason

Universityin

Fairfax, Virginia.1The

refusal of the black mother to mother, and the angst she experi-ences as a mother unable to protect and nurture her children,clearly is not a "safe" one, much less easily performed or welcomein the public venue of the stage. Still, perhaps because this subjectso touches the heart of American experience, it runs like a persis-tent thread hrough much of black American iterature.2

Angelina Weld Grimke (distinguished from the abolitionist of

the same name, who was the playwright's great aunt) was bornin

1880 and lived most of her life in Washington, D.C., where she,like May Miller, was a teacher. Her father, a prominent ournalist,served as both U.S. Counsel in Santo Domingo and as Vice-President of the NAACP. Not surprisingly, his organization wasone of the great forums for African American theatre, along withperiodicals such as Opportunity and Crisis Magazine, the latteredited by W.E.B. DuBois. Creative impetus for African American

playwrights was also provided by the African American socialscene in Washington D.C., evolving at least partly around HowardUniversity's Alain Locke as well as the homes of Miller andJohnson, two of the playwrights discussed here. As ElizabethBrown-Guillory puts it, "Nearly all of the early black womenplaywrights [including Grimke and Miller] [were] connected withthe Washington D.C. area. . . . where so many of them attendedHoward University," which Brown-Guillory describes as a seminal

college for training black teachers and artists (Their Place 5).Excluded from the more commercialized Broadway scene, theseearly women playwrights wrote to "reach the hearts of blackpeople across the nation. .. the black community where their playswere produced in black-owned and operated community theatres,churches, schools, social club halls, and homes" (Brown-Guillory,Their Place 4).

How better to reach the black community than through depic-

tions of the black home, especially by exploring the mother-childdynamic? It is not surprising hat such plays focus on the domesticsetting: "the kitchen, dining room, or living room," as KathyPerkins claims (Black Women Playwrights 2). Perkins asserts thatplays by African American women frequently open with a womansewing, cooking, cleaning, or praying-rarely outside or far from

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the home (2). But this was often the playwright's exact point, asshe

struggledto

depictthe

pervasiveeffects of racism on the black

family and in the black home (Perkins 2).For all its domestic sentimentality, and perhaps partly because

of it, as I will argue later, Grimke's Rachel is the ironic foremotherto the text of black motherlessness. In his introduction o the play,James V. Hatch claims that Rachel is in the "Louisa May Alcotttradition"; Rachel's feelings are both "Victorian and precious" o amodem day audience (138). But Grimke's contemporaries must

have recognized the potentially subversive undertow of the play;after seeing it performed, a minority section of the NAACP sodissented from what they perceived to be Rachel's "propagandaplatform" hat they formed the Howard Players organization whichpromoted a "purely artistic approach" instead (Perkins, BlackFemale Playwrights 9). Moreover, when the play was eventuallypublished in 1920, other critics charged Grimke with advocatingrace genocide (Perkins, Black Female Playwrights 9). Apparently,

these early audiences and readers were acutely aware of the play'spainful message.

In her play, Grimke creates the appropriately and perhapsironically) named Loving family. The young heroine, Rachel, isdescribed as the ideal would-be mother: rhapsodizing over theneighborhood children and drawing them to her, beloved by all,and in turn loving the "little black and brown babies best of all"(143). For Rachel, motherhood is an ideal and a vocation: "Ma

dear, because I love them best, I pray God every night to give me,when I grow up, little black and brown babies-to protect andguard" (143). While Grimke's somewhat idealistic depiction ofRachel seems overdrawn, he sharpest points in the play occur withRachel's slow-dawning realization of the implications of racismand the subsequent diffusion of her idealistic view of motherhood.It is as though Grimke sets up this idealism to make the impact ofits loss all the more intense and to undermine he very signs of the

respectability to which the members of this middle-class blackfamily aspire. One by one, home, art, and education are renderedmeaningless in the context of menial labor, lack of opportunity,and the persistent practices of racism that pervade the worldoutside of the Loving home. Rachel's brother, his best friend, andRachel herself all learn, for example, the futility of their education

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since the jobs for which they are eminently qualified remain closed

to people of color.The growing disillusionment of these characters egarding heir

identity as "Negro" and its implication for their relative powerless-ness in the job market is paralleled by Rachel's gradual discoveryof how powerless she may be as a mother. First, Rachel and herbrother learn the secret of the lynching of their own father andbrother eighteen years ago by a Southern mob. Ironically, thefather has been lynched for denouncing in a "Coloured" paper the

lynching of another man; in turn, his son is lynched for trying tosave the father. From this story, Rachel learns of the inability ofher family members to protect one another and their kind againstthe onslaught of racism. Through her mother's pained account ofthe lynching, Rachel encounters firsthand the agony of blackmotherhood rendered powerless in a racist society. Experiencingher mother's pain as her own, Rachel comes to realize that "Then,everywhere, everywhere, throughout he South, there are hundreds

of dark mothers who live in fear, terrible, suffocating fear, whoserest by night is broken, and whose joy by day in their babies ontheir hearts is three parts pain. . . . why-it would be moremerciful-to strangle the little things at birth" 149). The theme ofinfanticide, even if only conjecture at this moment in AfricanAmerican women's drama, s thus introduced.

Secondly, Rachel experiences gradually the painful awakeningof Little Jimmy, the little boy her family adopts as the lost son'sreplacement. Just as Jimmy learns in school the meaning of racismand so comes to suffer the abuse of his classmates and school-teacher, so too does Rachel learn to distrust her own bright hopesof becoming a mother since having a child would mean bringinginto the world a human being who will suffer like Jimmy. What isthe use? she asks, as she watches this bright young boy's growingpain and cynicism. In such a world, Grimke asks, what is the use ofmothering a boy and of teaching him to read, as indeed Rachel andher family teach Jimmy, if he will still end up abused, denigrated,and possibly lynched in the end? Thus, the play's lighter moments,when the family labors to clean behind Jimmy's fingernails and tocorrect his grammar are more than offset by the undertow of thesecond story of black despair.

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The third transformative moment in the play occurs when

Rachel encountersMrs. Lane and her

daughter Ethel,a

little blackgirl whose experience of racism in the school system, from bothteachers and classmates alike, has been so demoralizing hat she isabsolutely terrified of all people, adult and child, black and white.Given Ethel's dysfunctional behavior, as well as Rachel's earlierdeclarations about infanticide, Mrs. Lane's blunt statement that ifshe had another child, she'd kill it, "It's kinder" 159), comes as ashock that the reader/viewer nonetheless has been half-expecting.

Rachel's decision to commit a kind of infanticide (for sheconsiders it so) by refusing to marry and so bear children is all themore shocking when juxtaposed against her earlier gay platitudeson mothering. Readers acknowledge the power of this disharmony.Robert Fehrenbach ees this dysjunction n terms of the "contrast-ing structure of the play," as "each act focuses on one particulardemonstration f racial prejudice, each of which is juxtaposed witha potential happiness which is destroyed by racism" (99). William

Storm describes it in pathological terms as he analyzes the almostincestuous nature of the brother-sister elationship between Racheland Tom, the oddly insular quality of the Loving home as a retreatfrom the threatening world outside, and the near hysterical qualityof Rachel's laughter as she gradually descends into depression andmadness. Helene Keysser calls the play "dialogic" as she describesthe tensions between Rachel's equally impassioned "yes" and"no"; through Rachel, Grimke asks what does it mean to love as a

mother and to be a black American woman? (228). In Keysser'sview, abortion becomes the only way to authenticate Rachel's"hybrid self," her "double existence as woman and black person"(228).

For me as for these readers, the very strength of Grimke's playis its vacillation among seemingly contradictory perspectives. Theplay works through a layering of epiphanies whereby Rachel ismade increasingly aware of the implications of racism for her

identity as a budding young woman and would-be mother. Her"Victorian" and "genteel" proclamations ironically mimic thedominant American ideals of her time: Christianity, motherhood,cleanliness, education, good grammar. For example, when Rachelexclaims "And so this nation-this white Christian nation hasdeliberately set its curse upon the most beautiful-the most holy

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thing in life-motherhood " (149), her conflation of mothering andholiness mirrors the words of President Theodore

Roosevelt,who

went around he country n the first decade of the twentieth centuryexhorting white native-born Americans to have children n order topreserve the national character Thurer 231). According to BarbaraEhrenreich and Deidre English, the year 1900 inaugurated the"century of the child" (after the title of Ellen Ray's 1909 bestsel-ler), which in turn led to a cult of white, privileged motherhoodthat leaders such as Roosevelt espoused. Yet three years after

Mother's Day was instituted as a national holiday in 1913, D.W.Griffith produced his popular, racist film Birth of a Nation (1915),to which Rachel was a "middle-class response" (Hatch, Roots 34)3But Grimke's intent was not just to challenge the stereotypes ofblack people in the film by presenting earned blacks who adheredto middle-class ideals, but also to show the tremendous ncongrui-ties between such ideals and the realities of black existence.4 In thevery first year of the century, for example, more than 100 Negroes

were lynched (Perkins, Black Female Playwrights 10); between1865-1895, over 10,000 lynchings occurred (Davis 184, alsoGunning).

In the end, even though she is very much in love with one of herbrother's friends, Rachel refuses motherhood and marriage,exclaiming that "no child of mine shall ever lie up on my breast,for I will not have it rise up, in the terrible days that are to be-andcall me cursed" (161). Tearing apart he bouquet of roses given her

by her loved one, Rachel symbolically sees herself as killing offher own unborn children. Half-mad, she ends the play afraid tosleep since every time she does, her "children" [the imaginarychildren of the future, as well as those she knows from the past]will come to haunt her, begging her "not to bring them here-tosuffer. . . . No more need you come to me-weeping, weeping.You may be happy now-you are safe" (172).5

Thus, Grimke, as do other early black playwrights, complicates

and rewrites the stereotype of the black mammy who gives her lifefor her child and presumably the children of others, those of herwhite master or employer. Rachel is the antecedent to moremoder black-authored plays, where, as James V. Hatch puts it,"No longer is she [the modem black woman] depicted as theoverly devout, hard-working, uffering matriarch, he prostitute, or

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the faithful (and/or dumb) servant; instead she emerges as a real

human being of dimension, having needs and desires" (BlackTheatre USA 711). Instead of showing the "birth of a nation,"Rachel shows the thwarted births of black children born into thesystem of racism. Rachel thus opposes the many instances of"broad arce and low comedy" which Alain Locke cites as typicalrepresentations of the Negro in early twentieth-century Americantheatre 123).

Thus, too, the play is a contemporaneous move beyond what

Jessie Fauset criticized as an over-emphasis on the Negro "gift oflaughter" 159 ). As I have suggested, Rachel's laughter n the playis deeply ironic and in some cases almost mad as the irreconcilablecontradictions between the ideals of the dominant culture and therealities of her life render her. Indeed, the entire play challengesand critiques traditional Christian beliefs, partly through the motifof laughter. Echoing her earlier observation of her mother, whoseems to laugh "at sacred things" such as motherhood and God,

Rachel too comes to "laugh" by the end: "You terrible laughingGod. You can laugh, Oh God Well so can I" (161); indeed, Rachelsees herself as better ("kinder") han the Christian God since shewill follow Jimmy's suggestion that as a rule it is better to "kill atonce" rather han "torture" ver time; she will refuse to bring intothe world the children she, like her mother before her, cannotprotect from what her mother calls the "truth": he wrongs ofracism. Eventually, Mrs. Loving finds her own salvation, as she

puts it, in her faith in a beautiful God related to her sacred memo-ries of dead husband and son, especially the husband whose moralcourage is like that of the "old prophets in the Bible" (148); thisfaith leads her to exclaim that "There never lived anywhere-or atany time-any two white or more beautiful souls" than her hus-band and son, souls crucified on the tree/cross of lynching, sheimplies (148).

Christian salvation becomes linked with blood, tears, and ironic

laughter. Caught up in the futility of finding a job despite hiscollege degree in engineering, however, Tom cannot claim thatsame salvation as his own; as he says, "our [black people's] handsare clean;-theirs [white people's] are red with blood-red withthe blood of a noble man-and a boy. They're nothing but low,cowardly, bestial murderers. The scum of the earth shall suc-

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ceed.-God's justice, I suppose " (153).6 Aware of the limits she

will experience as mother, Rachel too cannot find salvation. As sheputs it, "God is laughing-We're his puppets.-He pulls thewires,-and we're so funny to Him. I'm laughing too-because Ican hear-my little children weeping" (161). No matter how oneviews Rachel, her struggle (and those of the rest of her family) ismeant to be taken seriously; her story is a tragedy.7

Hence, Rachel provides an ironic counterpart o the eugenicsmovement in this country, which was well-organized by the 1920s.

Holding to the possibility of social control through the applicationof principals of "biological efficiency," the movement wasfreighted with notions of elitism and racism (Kennedy 115). Yetfor every play written about the need for poor people to practicebirth control in order to control the burgeoning birth rate and anever-ending cycle of poverty, as was the African American MaryBurill's play They That Sit in Darkness (1919), written for theBirth Control Review,8 there were voices such as Grimke's that

told another story. Actually, for the first 40 years of this century,reproductive rates fell among the black population in this country(Davis 7). A contributing actor might have been the very lynchingthat playwrights Johnson and Miller describe in their works, notonly for its effect on the black male population, but on the femaleas well. Plays such as Safe suggest that despite the falling birthrate, some black mothers may have been so appalled at the systemof racism into which they were bringing their children that they

made a conscious choice not to have them. Racism as well aspoverty motivated their decision.

Serving as an important ransition between older extant black-authored plays such as Grimke's Rachel and the later works ofsuch writers as Alice Childress (Miller 364), Johnson's one-actplay Safe is a much harsher version of Rachel. Where infanticide sonly hinted at in Rachel (projected by Mrs. Lane, imagined byRachel), it actually occurs in Safe as a mother's attempt o keep her

newborn son "safe" from the effects of racism she has just wit-nessed actually ends in her murdering him. Taking place in 1893but written sometime in the 1930s, Safe depicts a pregnant womanwho witnesses the lynching of a 17-year-old boy. The experience,especially the boy's cries for his mother, is so horrific that itprecipitates both Liza's labor and her subsequent strangulation of

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JOYCE MEIER

her newborn son. The play is terse and compact, the action swiftand

abrupt.Even

so,Liza's transformation s

presented by degrees,as first she exclaims over and over again to her own mother,Mandy, "Oh my God, did you hear that poor boy crying for hismother-he's jest a boy-jest a boy-jest a little boy" (12), andsecondly, as she twists Mandy's advice to "remember your ownlittle baby-you got him to think about-you got to born him safe"(12) to mean, as we discover at the play's end, that "safe" meanssafe from the lynchers, safe from the effects of racism, safe in the

only way to guarantee uch "safety"-safe asin

dead. Once again,it is a black woman's vicarious suffering for a young person of herrace as well as her awareness of her own powerlessness to helphim that leads her to resist. Knowing she is powerless to protectboth her own children and the children of others, she is driven toenact what power she has, even negatively. Denied voice herself,she speaks powerfully through her actions.

Georgia Johnson's Safe is one of three anti-lynching plays she

wrote. Though none of these plays were performed, Johnson'sworks form an important historical record since they handle thesubject of lynching from the perspective of the black woman whois also a mother. Born in 1886 in Atlanta, Johnson spent most ofher life in Washington, D.C., where her husband worked as Re-corder of Deeds under President William Howard Taft. There, herhome became a gathering place for black intellectuals and artists,including May Miller. Like Johnson, Miller lived in D.C., using

her home as a meeting place for black artists, including ToniMorrison. Also like Johnson, Miller wrote protest plays on suchsubjects as lynching, as well as historical plays on famous AfricanAmericans. It is interesting to speculate about the creative ex-change that took place among these women, especially on thesubject of motherhood.

Miller's primary anti-lynching play, Nails and Thorns, whichwon a prize in the Southern University writing contest of 1933,

features the negative effects of a lynching on a white woman; thisplay both critiques and sympathizes with the position of the maincharacter, who is only partially sensitive to issues of race and class.Here, the sheriffs wife Gladys protests her husband's inability(and unwillingness) to protect fully the black prisoner under hiscare. As she says in an early conversation with her husband,

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"remember t isn't only the Negroes that suffer" in a lynching;

instead, "Everytime

any injusticeis done or

any disgrace fails,all

of us feel it. Our children feel it" (315). The legacies of the lynch-ing and racial injustice become the "nails and thorns" whichGladys fears will be passed on to her children.9

Still, Gladys never becomes aware of how her status as a whitewoman contributes o the system of racism she decries: she neverseems to notice that it is the accusation of the rape of a whitewoman that sparks the lynching in the first place. Nor does she

learn that her husband's attempt to stop the lynching unravelswhen someone in the mob yells at him, "S'posin' it was your wife[that had been raped]?". Gladys remains equally oblivious to theironies of the situation of her black servant Annabel, who takescare of Gladys's child in order to support her own children, eventhough Annabel tries to remind Gladys, "Yes'm, mah chillun's all Igot, too. If 'twasn't foh 'em, I wouldn't be aworkin' all the time'till I's ready to drop." Nor does Gladys recognize that Annabel,

too, is disempowered by the impending lynching; she is toopreoccupied with her own reaction to notice Annabel's comment:"Then come a time lak tonight an' I git to thinkin' that mah sonshas gotta grow up in this town, too, an' 'sposin' aftah all mah workthey ends lak that" 320).

Thus Miller presents the failure of a potential alliance betweenwomen across racial and class lines. Thinking only of her own"Junior," who represents he future generations of whites who will

share the burden of this town's "sin" of lynching a black man,Gladys rushes out into the mob, clutching her son to her in thehopes that the sight of him will stop the lynchers. Instead, the mobgoes wild, stampedes her baby to death, and the hysterical Gladysreturns home, ironically claiming she is glad her son is dead since"He'll never have to see a lynching" (325). A variation of thetheme of the refusal of motherhood, Miller's play delineates thenegative consequences of racism for the white woman. While

proposing its potential, the play also suggests the ultimate futilityof such cross-class and interracial alliances.10While Miller eventually gave up playwriting to pursue another

talent, poetry, a medium, says James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian,that she "felt should not serve as a lecture platform" 308), Johnsonin contrast used her poetry to develop the same political themes

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about the ramifications of racism on the life of the black motherthat

appearedin

Safe.In her 1922 volume of

poemsentitled

Bronze, for instance, Johnson includes a series of poems on thesubject which she entitled "Motherhood." Intensely lyrical andpersonal (Johnson herself had two sons), these poems cry out aboutthe mixed joy and pain of black motherhood in racist America.Admitting that her son is "thrall to prevalent conditions," thenarrator-mother f one of these poems exclaims:

Ah,did I dare

Recall he pulsing ife I gave,And fold him n the kindly grave 42)

In another poem, addressing the black child himself, the mothersays:

Don't knock at my door, ittle child,I cannot et you in,

You know not what a world his isOf cruelty and sin....

You do not know he monster menInhabiting he earth,

Be still, be still, my precious hild:I must not give you birth. 43)

As the sequence progresses, other poems, more optimistic, pray

that the man-child, the "very acme of my woe / the pivot of mypride" (49), will win his "star-ways" ince "A new day has begun"(50). Thus this poem sequence ends on a note of hope and promisethat Johnson's play Safe denies.

If Johnson's poetry rejects the pessimism of Safe, Graham'sone-act play It's Morning returns o it. Written between 1938 and1940 (along with two other plays) at Yale University, where shewas awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship in creative writing, Gra-

ham's play portrays a slave mother who commits infanticide ratherthan see her children sold down river. Even though only one of herplays was eventually published, all of Graham's works, includingIt's Morning, have been presented by various college and theatregroups throughout the country. An able civil rights activist andadministrator, s well as an accomplished composer, designer, and

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director, Graham studied music at both Howard University and

Oberlin College, where she eventually earned a Masters degree.She also studied music in Paris, where she met numerous Africanswho taught her the music of various African countries (Perkins,Black Female Playwrights 209). Graham s known for her champi-oning of the work of W.E.B Dubois (whom she married n 1951),her writing of a number of historical biographies on prominentAfrican Americans, and her creation and production of Tom-Tom,the first all-black opera to be produced on a professional level in

America. The opera also traces African music to the United States.Graham's musical background and interest in her African rootsinform It's Morning as well.

Occurring on the eve of the end of the Civil War, the playfocuses on Cissie, a slave woman who decides, as did Sethe fromToni Morrison's recent novel Beloved, to kill her children, four-teen-year-old Millie and ten-year-old Pete, rather than see themsold down the river as the master plans to do the next day. In the

case of Millie, Cissie's dilemma is especially acute. Millie is abeautiful young girl who is being sought by the old slave masterwho plans to rape her, just as Cissie herself, once also a beautiful,spirited young girl ("Black as a berry an' lovely as da night, /Slender an' swift as a young colt," 215), had been raped, and sotransformed nto a "hounded coon / [who] crawls tuh his hole tolick his bleedin' wounds" (215), at least according to the slaveaunts of the story. Acting as a Greek chorus, or perhaps more to

the point, the "response" part of the "call-and-response" f tradi-tional African American prayer-meeting and musical forms, theaunts Phoebe/Rose/Sue serve as a triad commenting on the dramawhich unfolds in front of them as they explain that young Millie is"lak a flower" whom Cissie watches day and night, fearing that"Millie's singin' days am gone" (215).

It is Grannie, the oldest slave on the plantation, who providesthe inspiration and precedent for Cissie's tragic decision. In a

"cracked, singsong voice," Grannie describes "dat 'oman / longtime gone? Dey say she straight rom jungles / in da far off Africa"(216). In Grannie's words, this ancestral woman becomes mythic:"straight ak tree, an' tall, / swift as a lion an' strong as any ox. /Da sugah cane went down fo' huh big knife. .. An' sing / Sheuster sing out in da fields" (216). As with Millie, however, this

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singing is to be stilled: when this slave woman receives news that

her sons have been sold down river, she kills them before morningwith the very knife that is the ironic sign of her labor, the fruits ofwhich are not hers anymore than the symbolic fruits of her body.Cissie listens to this story and then acts. Laughing with a terrible,ironic laugh reminiscent of Rachel's (indeed, Rose comments that"Cissie, dere, lafd loudes' of us all," 220), Cissie proposes a partyand proceeds to exhaust her children with revelry throughout henight so that they will sleep in the dawn when she attempts to

murder hem; she succeeds with the daughter but fails with her son.The next morning, after Millie's death, Cripple Jake commentsthat "Hebbin is a high an' a holy place, Da chillluns done nowrong, Dyin' will bring 'em joy, Da good book says, 'Lam's inHis bosom-safe" (221), the last a word that echoes back to thetitle and entire impetus of Johnson's play. As though unable tospeak further about the unspeakable, the chorus of aunt-womenbegin to rock back and forth, singing and humming. Their singing

of a spiritual ("Ah want Jesus tuh wak wid me") sets up a counter-part to Uncle Dave's ironic "Kain't yo' trus de Lawd, daughtah?",ironic because in this play, God comes too late in the form of a"radiant messenger," a white boy-soldier who appears to tell thisslave household that the Civil War is over and that the slaves arenow free. Cissie, her face described as a "deeply chiseled mask inebony," an echo of the ancestral igure Grannie described, tells thewhite boy, "yo' come too late. / See how huh [Millie's] red blood

falls hyear in da sun, / Hit's warm an' pure. ... Come, dip yo'han's in it" (223). Symbolically, the boy becomes allied with theBiblical Roman leader Pilate, who tried to "wash his hands clean"after allowing Jesus Christ o be taken away for crucifixion.

As Graham's play shows us, the white God and his messengerhave come too late to avoid this crucifixion, the slaughter of thisinnocent "Lamb," he black child. As in Grimke's play, Graham'splay both draws upon and implicitly critiques the meaning of

Christian mythology and religion for the black woman who tries tomother. As with Grimke's work, too, the mother-heroine's plightreflects that of other black women. Grimke's admission (viaRachel's) that "everywhere, everywhere, throughout the South,there are hundreds of mothers who live in fear, terrible suffocatingfear, whose rest by night is broken, and whose joy by day in their

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babies on their hearts is three parts-pain" (149) prefigures

Graham's use of the totemic, ancestral igure, whose act of infanti-cide is repeated n the next generation of mothers.The final two plays considered here, Childress's Mojo and

Rahman's Unfinished Woman, exemplify a more muted and recentversion of the themes I cite above. Written in the 1970s, both ofthese plays emphasize the economic vulnerability of the singleblack mother who chooses to give up her child rather than raisehim or her in poverty. The contemporary playwright Alice Chil-

dress is known for both her plays and her novels, for children andadults alike; her children's story A Hero Ain't Nothing But aSandwich (1973), which she adapted for film, was chosen as aNotable Book by the American Library Association and wasnominated for both the Newberry Medal and National BookAwards. Mojo, the play I discuss here, was performed by the NewHeritage Theatre in Harlem, New York, in 1970. In this play, theaction of refusing to mother takes place in the past; indeed, it is

only recalled years later in the scene of the play's present. As Irenevisits her ex-husband Teddy, she is prompted by the exigencies ofher own ill health and the upcoming dangerous operation she facesto confess to him the secret of the child they once had: "The reasonI asked you to be my husband was... I wanted to have a baby...and I wanted you for the father. .. I went off and had the baby"(14). In this last reckoning of the final days before her operationand possible death, Irene also admits she gave the baby up to a

more prosperous couple because she got "scared bout leavin her[the baby] around here and there. . . I got to bein sorry that Ibrought a child here who might be like us... knocked about" 14).

Irene's subsequent self-torture echoes that of Rachel. LikeRachel, Irene realizes the implications and seeming hopelessnessof bringing a poor black child into the world, at least the poverty-ridden and racist world which these plays so painfully critique.Implicit in her words is also an acute awareness of her lack of

viable job opportunities, her assumption hat she will have to leavethe baby "around here and there" as she struggles to make endsmeet by working in the kinds of menial domestic service jobs thathave been traditionally available to poor women of color. Yet inthe final analysis, Irene's confession of the lost child, as well as herand Teddy's celebration of blackness and the successes they

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imagine for their child, strengthen her in her present crisis, andenable her to face that

upcoming"white room" of the

hospitalwith

"some Black in my soul" (22).Aishah Rahman's play Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's

Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977), which MargaretWilkerson calls an "underground lassic" (197), similarly portraysthe difficulties of motherhood n a racist (and classist) society. Thesetting alternates between the boudoir of the wealthy white womanPasha, where the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker spent his

final days, and the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers, wherea cluster of pregnant, unmarried women-one white woman, oneLatina, and the rest African American-face the difficult decisionof whether or not to keep the children they will soon bear.Throughout the play, the wail of Parker's sax parallels and ex-presses the pain these single mothers experience, as well as thecries of their children, both unwanted and desired, soon to be borninto a world that will not value their existence. Unfinished Woman

was first produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival in June1977; it has also been produced at the New York UniversitySchool of the Arts, California State University at Sacramento'sUniversity Theatre, and the Mobile Theater of the New YorkShakespeare Festival (Wilkerson 202).

In the play, Rahman challenges both racism and sexism whenshe has Wilma, one of the black mothers, claim that the "bed is thegreat equalizer. Don't you know the black boys and the white boys

all hand out the same shit" (207). Yet such criticism of men istempered by the Bird scenes, which so clearly express the pain ofblack men who remain ostracized by society and whose greattalents go unrecognized and unacknowledged. It is further compli-cated by Rahman's analysis of class difference since each of thegirls' backgrounds and corresponding needs differ. For example,the socially aspiring Paulette wars with the poorer Wilma; none ofthe other girls has much sympathy or the Puerto Rican Consuelo's

struggle with Catholicism; and all the girls ostracize Mattie, who isa juvenile delinquent. Hence the divisions among the girls arebased on class and religion as well as race.

Like Miller, Rahman also questions and undermines he "privi-lege" of the white woman. When the white mother in the play,Midge, is asked about the presumably "privileged place" she

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occupies, Midge replies, "What privilege? The privilege of raising

myblack

baby by myself?Or the

privilegeof

givingit

awaylike it

never existed. Walking down the streets with it, trying to ignorethe smirks of both blacks and whites who are offended by mymulatto bastard. Cause that's just what people like you will call mybaby" (226).

Midge also provides an ironic counterpart o Pasha, who craves,and is refused, a child by Bird; like the white musicians whoappropriate Bird's music for themselves, Pasha clearly wants to

appropriate Bird and his aura, his genius, for her own uses. AsParker's wealthy mistress, Pasha seems to have everything butwhat she wants most: a child by Parker. In fact, we learn she hashad several abortions at his urging, decisions, it is implied, that shedeeply regrets. In contrast, the pregnant girls respond to Midge'squestion, "Why didn't any of us have an abortion?", with theacknowledgement hat for them, money was a key issue. Thus, theone white woman (Pasha) wants a child by a black man and

cannot have one; the other (Midge) is having a child and does notwant it.Finally, all the pregnant women contrast with the presumably

more privileged nurse who is both their "caretaker and jailer" inthe play, according to Alicia Kae Koger (100). Covering up herown past loss of a child, the child she is now raising as a "niece"rather than a "daughter" o avoid the onus of the label "singlemother," Nurse Jacobs exemplifies the very conflict between the

social outcasts under her charge and the society at large; sherepresents the society that chastises its single mothers as well asthe mothers themselves; she is at once punisher and punished,perpetrator nd victim (Koger 100).

The effect of all these voices is of an antiphonal nterplay thatKoger claims has its roots in jazz and in the call-and-responseformat of traditional African and antebellum music. As in Gra-ham's play, Rahman's five pregnant women (and their nurse) serve

as a chorus, a response to the periodic "call" of Parker's impas-sioned musical and vocal solos which are interspersed hroughoutthe play. Bird and his music, his spirit, live on in the children thesewomen will bear, Rahman mplies, if the children are permitted olive. After an intense acceleration of short bursts of dialogue fromthe Hide-A-Wee women, each stating the essence of her needs, an

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acceleration that mimics the intense, improvisational nature ofjazz, Koger argues, the play ends with Wilma's scream as shegives birth to her child; the scream occurs at the same instant a jazznote of Parker's is blown on the saxophone. As both sounds fade,Parker dies and the eponymous Charlie Chan, the minstrel-likeMaster of Ceremonies who introduces and "narrates" he play, canbe heard asking if a "Baby's cry / Be Bird's musical notes / Thathang in the air. . . forever?" 237). Bird's wordless music comes toexpress Wilma's pain: the mixed agony and beauty of her loveaffair and the subsequent oy and pain she experiences at the birthof her child.

Bird's music connects Wilma to herself, expresses her experi-ence which by extension is the experience shared by all women, anunspeakable ambivalence about mothering that she and the otherstry to describe, and ultimately cannot as in Consuelo's comment:"You ever read in the newspaper about women who kill babies?...I'll kill my baby-NO I love my baby. Oh I don't know" (225).

EchoingRachel, Liza, and the mother-narrator f Johnson's

poem-sequence, Consuelo's outburst also seems to be expressed throughParker's music. At another point in the play, when Parker's musicis at a similar crescendo, Wilma recounts to the audience hermemories of lovemaking and the

sound Bird's horn... tugging at me, taking me back o a memorywas born with. Following he music's heartbeat took a journey Icould no longer avoid and along the way I helped a newborn babyoverboard slaveship. joined hands with my mother s she took hermother's hand and I took my place in the circle of black womensinging old blues. (221)

Whether through gospels/spirituals, as in Graham's play, or theblues/jazz of Rahman's, the suffering of African American moth-ers and their "herstory" f pained mothering is expressed throughmusic.

Thus, these plays not only emphasize the same theme, but mayuse similar techniques such as music to convey the unspeakableangst of the mother-heroine. Moreover, the use of the totemicancestor or prior mother suggests the pervasiveness of the prob-lem: the legacy of painful mothering passed through the genera-tions or crossing class and even racial lines; no one, even white

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women who also may be mothers, is free from the wrongs these

plays delineate and critique. In the tradition of Grimke's Rachel, anumber of these plays implicitly respond to the valorization ofwhite, upper-class motherhood (and sexuality) which exists at theexpense of women (and men) of color. These plays depict thefailure of potential alliances of mothers across class and/or raciallines. Finally, the theme of (ironic) laughter serves as counterpartto the seriousness of the mother-heroine's actual dilemma; the useof a chorus provides commentary and/or contrast; and the implicit

rewriting of Christianity occurs through the imagery of the lynch-ing tree/cross, the bloodied (white) hands, and the crown of thorns,suggested by the bouquet of rose-blossoms Rachel tore. Throughsuch images and devices, these writers tend to critique dominantmiddle-class ideals of education, employment, and Euro-Americanculture n light of the actual lack of opportunity or people of color;indeed, the disjunction between ideal and reality is at the heart of anumber of these works.

In the final analysis, for whom were these plays written? JamesV. Hatch argues, as did Grimke herself, that Rachel was writtenand produced for two audiences: a black audience and a white one"that needed to know and to suffer empathetically he injustices ofthe characters" Black Theatre USA 137).11 I would argue thatthese plays also speak expressly to women: to the black motherswho suffer as well as to the white mothers who remain obliviousdespite the fact they could potentially reach across the chasm of

race and class to share and help alleviate that suffering by resistingracism in their own lives. Plays such as these make clear theproblematic nature of motherhood or black women in this culture(and perhaps for mothers in general), not due to the mothersthemselves but to a culture that so limits options for both motherand child. Although these plays take place once slavery is abol-ished, each nonetheless echoes African American slave women'spractice: that is, their decision to move outside a racist economy by

refusing to participate n it, even at great loss to themselves and toothers. Showing us why such decisions are made, these playsbecome a powerful vehicle for change because theatre provides apotential space for audience identification, on the parts of bothblacks and whites, with the seemingly inescapable dilemmas theseheroines face. As a painful undertow in black American theatre,

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136 JOYCE MEIER

these plays delineate the impact of racism in the lives of the black

mother and the children that this system renders so vulnerable.

Notes

1. Because this essay grows out of a paper I gave at the Modem LanguageAssociation several years ago, before Strange Fruit appeared, I have chosen touse as reference my copy of the original typescript of Safe from the GeorgeMason University archives.2. Indeed, I am convinced that Toni Morrison's four years with the Howard

Players helped to familiarize her with some of the very plays-and themes-thatI describe here. Associated with Howard University, this group performedhistorical plays about and by African Americans both in Washington D.C. andon tour. This dramatic nfluence is in addition to Morrison's own acknowledgedstudy of African American history which she encountered as a book editor andpublisher. While at Random House, for example, Morrison edited The BlackBook, what she calls a Whole Earth Catalogue vis-a-vis black people: "Whatemerged was a series of real-life stories which for me said something veryspecial about black women. The desperate need to nurture one's children s whatinforms everything about them. And the system that prevents that" (Smith 51).Like her editorial work with these texts on African American history, her theatrework must have helped acquaint Morrison with some of the very issues andplays I describe here, which in turn informed Morrison's writing of her novelBeloved.3. Grimke's play may be considered a response to Griffith's film in two ways:first, her presentation of educated, genteel African Americans with tight-knit andhighly valued familial and community structures, countering Griffith's stereo-typical representation f the black, newly freed slave, lost without his/her whitemaster. Most importantly, however, is her presentation of the black mother for

whom full mothering s denied; this clearly differs from Griffith's single-mindedidealization of the white, upper-class mother of the South. For more related tothis subject, see Grimke's own defense of her play, as quoted in note 7.4. Of course white women writers of the period also critiqued his emphasis onwhite, upper-class motherhood as an ideal; I am thinking of Kate Chopin's TheAwakening (1899), which depicts the dilemma of a privileged white woman whocannot fit this ideal, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The YellowWallpaper," where the "ideal" mother goes mad, since she is given nothingmeaningful o do with her life, and Gilman's 1915 utopian novel Herland, wheremothering is happily shared by all the society, rather than just the biologicalmother, as just a few examples.5. Indeed, Rachel is the foremother of Georgia Johnson's play Safe, and thisword "safe" s the very last-and powerful -word of Grimke's play.6. An implicit link between the lynching (of blacks) and (white) commercialsuccess is thus made as it was also made by Grimke's contemporaries da B.Wells and Pauline Hopkins. These writers, Hazel Carby points out, demon-





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strated that lynching and rape are the "two political weapons of terror wielded

by the powers behind internal colonization" (Carby 271); such acts of atrocitywere used to keep both the black man and black woman "down" in their"proper" economic as well as social places. In Grimke, the fear of rape issuggested as one motivation for Rachel's isolation in the home when at theplay's end, Rachel reveals an incident that occurred when she was twelve, and"some big [white] boys chased me and called me names.-I never left the houseafterwards-without being afraid" 172).7. In my view, there is some evidence in the play that Rachel's pained awarenessof her powerlessness as a black mother will eventually lead to suicide; I am

thinkingof the

placewhere she tells

Jimmy,and without

explanation,hat this is

the "last time" she will sing him to sleep (164); and then at the end of the play,when she tells John: "Life is so short.... And, John, after I am dead-promiseme, promise me you'll love me more.... I'll need love then" (171).8. Even so, as Brown-Guillory points out, Burrill's emphasis here is to showhow "poverty strips many black parents of the ability to nurture heir children,especially spiritually" Their Place on Stage 9).9. The "nails and thorns" bear symbolic resonances with Rachel's torn bouquetof roses. I am referring to the scene when one by one Rachel destroys theblossoms of a plant which her lover John Strong has sent her. In the earlier play,

the torn petals are conflated with Rachels' lost children; in Miller, the flowersare absent; only the thorns remain. In addition, the deaths of the two youngpeople (one black and one white) in Miller's play mirror Christ's death on thecross; here the Christian iconography suggests the burdens of the sin whichfuture generations of whites must bear.10. Another play which explores this theme of frustrated alliances betweenAfrican American and Anglo mothers is Corrie Crandall Howell's 1925 "TheForfeit" (as printed in Perkins's and Stephen's Strange Fruit, 94-102). In thisplay, Howell depicts a white woman actively supporting the lynching of aninnocent black man for a crime her own son has committed.11. Among Grimke's papers, located in the Moorland-Spingam Research Centerat Howard University, is her response to some of the criticism directed againsther play: "the appeal [of Rachel] is not primarily o the colored people, but tothe whites. .. the white women of this country are about the worse enemies withwhich the colored race has to contend. My belief was then that if I could find avulnerable point in their [white women's] armour, f I could reach their hearts...then perhaps instead of being active or passive enemies they might become, atleast, less inimical and possible friendly. ... If anything can make all womensisters underneath heir skins, it is motherhood" quoted in Perkins 9).

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Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. "Images of Blacks in Plays by Black Women."Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture 47 (1986): 230-37.

-. Their Place on Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport:Greenwood P, 1988.

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Carby, Hazel V. "On the Threshold of Women's Era: Lynching, Empire, andSexuality in Black Feminist Theory." Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 262-77.

Childress, Alice. Mojo and String: Two Plays. New York: Dramatists PlayService, 1971.

Davis, Demoral. "Toward a Socio-Historical and Demographic Portrait ofTwentieth-Century frican-Americans." lack Exodus: The GreatMigration rom the American South. Ed. Alferdteen Harrison. Jackson:UP of Mississippi, 1991. 1-19.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of theExperts'Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

Fauset, Jessie. "The Gift of Laughter." Black Expression: Essays by andabout Black Americans n the Creative Arts. Ed. Addison Gayle. NewYork: Weybright & Talley, 1969. 159-65.

Fehrenbach, Robert. "An Early Twentieth-Century roblem Play of Life inBlack America: Angelia Grimke's Rachel (1916)." Wild Women n theWhirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renais-

sance. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Bruns-wick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 89-106.

Graham, Shirley. It's Morning. Black Women Playwrights: An Anthology ofPlays Before 1950. Ed. Kathy A. Perkins. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1989.211-24.

Grimke, Angelina. Rachel. Black Theater, U.S.A: Forty-Five Plays byBlack Americans 1948-1974. Ed. James V. Hatch. New York: FreePress, 1974. 139-72.

Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of AmericanLiterature 1890-1912. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Hatch, James V. "Angelina Grimke." Black Theatre USA: Forty-Five Plays byBlack Americans 1948-1974. Ed. James V. Hatch. New York: FreePress, 1974. 137-38.

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1938. Ed. Leo Hamalian and James B. Hatch. Detroit: Wayne State U,1991. 15-41.

Hine, Darlene, and Kate Wittenstein. "Female Slave Resistance: The Economicsof Sex." The Black Women Cross-Culturally. Ed. Filomina Chioma Steady.New York: Schenkman, 1981. 289-300.

Johnson, Georgia. Bronze: A Book of Verse. Boston: B.J. Brimmer, 1922.-. Safe; A Play on Lynching. Federal Theatre Projects Records, George

Mason University. Fairfax, Virginia.Kennedy, David M. Birth Control n America: The Career of Margaret Sanger.

New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Keysser, Helene. "Rites and Responsibilities: The Drama of Black American

Women." Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Ed. EnochBrater. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 226-40.

Koger, Alicia Kae. "Jazz Form and Jazz Function: An Analysis of UnfinishedWomen Cry in No Man's Land While A Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage."MELUS 16(1989-90): 99-111.

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Locke, Alain. "The Drama of Negro Life." Black Expression: Essays by andabout Black Americans n the Creative Arts. Ed. Addison Gayle. New York:Weybright & Talley, 1969. 123-33.

Miller, Jeanne-Marie. "George Douglas Johnson and May Miller: ForgottenPlaywrights of the New Negro Renaissance." CLA Journal 33 (1990): 349-66.

Miller, May. Nails and Thorns. The Roots of African-American Drama: AnAnthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938. Ed. Leo Hamalian and James B.Hatch. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991.

Perkins, Kathy A. "Introduction." lack Female Playwrights: An Anthology ofPlays Before 1950. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 1-17.

-. "The Impact of Lynching on the Art of African American Women."Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Ed. Perkins andJudith L. Stephens. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 15-20.

". "Shirley Graham." Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology ofPlays Before 1950. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 207-10.

Rahman, Aishah. Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Diesin a Gilded Cage. In 9 Plays by Black Women. Ed. Margaret R. Wilkerson.New York: New American Library, 1986. 197-237.

Smith, Amanda. "Toni Morrison." Ed. Sybil Steinberg. Publishers Weekly 232

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Storm, William. "Reactions of a 'Highly-Strung Girl': Psychology and DramaticRepresentation n Angelina W. Grimke's Rachel." African AmericanReview 27 (1993): 461-71.

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