The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page A

reading this book, and she thought, ‘This would make a perfectly
darling
play.’
    “So she wrote the first few scenes and called out her Negro butler, chauffeur, and maid, and read it to them and asked, ‘Now, isn’t that the way you poor, downtrodden colored people feel about things?’ ‘Why, yes, Miss Frings,’ they answered; and ‘I thought so,’ says the playwright.”—And so we go on. And on and on.
    The point of this introductory column—for the readers of the
Urbanite
will be hearing a great deal from me—is that the theater is perishing for the lack of vitality. Vitality, humanly and artistically speaking, has only one source, and that source is life. Now, the life actually being led on this continent is not the life which we pretend it is. White men are not what they take themselves to be, and Negroes are very different—to say the very least—from the popular image of them.
    This image must be cracked, not only if we are to achieve a theater—for we do not really have a theater now, only a series of commercial speculations which result in mammoth musicals, and “daring” plays like
Compulsion
and
Inherit the Wind
, which are about as daring as a spayed tomcat—this image must be cracked if we intend to survive as a nation. The Negro-in-America is increasingly the central problem in American life, and not merely in social terms, in personal terms as well.
    I intend, from time to time, in discussing the theater, to return to this point, for I think the time has come to begin a bloodless revolution. Only by a more truthful examination of what is really happening here can we realize the real aims of the theater, which are to instruct through terror and pity and delight and love. The only thing we can now do for the “tired businessman” is to scare the living daylights out of him.
    Both the Albee plays at the York Theatre—
The Death of Bessie Smith
and
The American Dream
—left me rather waiting for the other shoe to fall. Both plays seemed to promise more than they delivered; but I am not at all certain that I know what it is that they promised. This is not, by the way, meant as a complaint or as a joke. I don’t mind—in the theater, at any rate—having my cozy expectations swept out from under me; and I’m the type that enjoys being forced to ask myself just what the author had in mind. I was hardly ever moved “to the heart,” as we say, by either of the Albee plays, but I
was
mystified, enraged, amused, and horrified. I don’t know if you will like them or not, but I think you ought to see them.
    To take the plays in the order in which they were presented:
The Death of Bessie Smith
takes place in the Deep South, much of it in a thoroughly demoralizing hospital. There is not a single attractive person in this play, unless one excepts the offstage Bessie Smith, and the good-natured but simple-minded type who takes her on the journey which ends in her death.
    Neither Bessie nor this man have much to do with the main action of the play. There is a question in my mind as to whether they really do much to illuminate it, but we will discuss this in a moment. In the course of the play, Bessie Smith dies offstage and this is the extent, on the surface, anyway, of her connection with this drama.
    The play’s principal concern—I
think
—is with the character of a white Southern nurse. “Character” is perhaps not quite the word I want; rarely has less character been presented at greater or more unsympathetic length. I hesitate, possibly because I am a coward, to suppose this creature is intended, in any way, to represent the fair ladies of the South. And yet, she is clearly of no interest in herself, except clinically; and I must add that as I watched her, my own memories of Southern faces came flooding back, bringing with them the near-certainty that this horror, this emptiness, might very well be what the Southern face—and particularly the faces of the women—hide. I imagine that