Authors: Lorraine Hansberry
Les Blancs (22 page)
It was with this understanding that Lorraine set to work. And with this understanding that Schary informed NBC that he had
engaged as his first writer the young black winner of the year’s Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the best play on Broadway. The announcement was made to a roomful of top network brass. Schary recounts their response thusly:
“There was a long moment of silence. And then the question was asked: ‘What’s her point of view about it—slavery?’
“I thought they were pulling my leg, and so I answered presently, gravely: ‘She’s against it.’
“Nobody laughed—and from that moment I knew we were dead.”
Schary, however, refused to give in and so he said nothing to Lorraine, preferring not to burden her as long as a fighting chance remained. In the months that followed, down to the very day that “death” became official and his own contract with NBC was quietly dropped, he never once suggested in any way that the playwright’s vision be compromised.
Meanwhile, Lorraine began work in the Main Reading Room of the Forty-second Street Library, the Schomburg Collection in Harlem, and at home, poring over her own rather extensive collection of works on the slavery era. She consulted transcripts of the pre-War
Congressional Record
sent up from Washington, studied sermons and speeches, diaries and journals and newspaper accounts of slave insurrections, pondered auction notices and “wanted” posters for runaway slaves and bills of sale for men and women, and inevitably thought of her grandmother as slowly the arguments and abstractions of a century before began to come alive. For her ultimate goal was to write not history but drama:
What I think a dramatist has to do is to thoroughly inundate himself or herself in an awareness of the realities of the historical period and then dismiss it. And then become absolutely dedicated to the idea that what you are going to do is to create human beings whom you know in your own time, you see. So that all of us sitting out in the audience feel that, “Oh yes, we know him.” No matter what period … we must feel, “I have had this experience, I have known this person.” So that once you know the realities of the time, you use them really as residue at the back of the head. So that, you know, you don’t have them go out and get into an automobile, but where
the human emotion is universal in the
time
sense as well as the world sense.
*
The essential view of “the realities of the time,” of slavery, that Lorraine Hansberry brought to
The Drinking Gourd
—the “residue at the back of the head”—this is nowhere better summarized than in a letter she wrote some years later to the
Village Voice
. Dated January 11, 1964,
*
it is a letter so pertinent to the themes and characters explored in the play that it is worth quoting extensively. Its point of departure was the
Voice
’s review of another work, James Weldon Johnson’s
Trumpets of the Lord:
To the Editor:
I have not yet seen “Trumpets of the Lord” and know nothing of the production save that it is in the hands of some extraordinarily gifted and capable people, Mr. Donald McKayle and Miss Vinnette Carroll.
But the show apart, I was amazed, and amused, to learn from Mr. Michael Smith’s review that
he
is amazed at the utilization of Hebraic history and myth in the folk materials of American Negroes! That he suspects the present production of having used “Israeli-Egyptian” relations to promote the “integration” aspirations of what he takes to be the “recent” militancy of Negroes.
He must first be told that anyone would be hard pressed to put together such a program that
was
devoid of either protest or biblical content. There are excellent and rather glaring reasons why this is so and I am afraid that suspicions to the contrary are a confession of ignorance of the nature of American slavery. But I have long since learned that it is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald—they just dressed more attractively and their accents are softer. (I
know
I switched tenses.)
The slavocracy was neither gentle nor vague; it was a system of absolutism: he who stood up and preached “discontent”
directly
had his courageous head chopped off; his militant back flogged to shreds; the four points of his limbs fastened down to saplings—or his eyes gouged out.… Learning to read or write was variously corporally
and capitally punishable; and, of course, from the beginning of the slave trade all expressions of what might have been a unifying force among the New World Blacks, African cultural survivals, were conscientiously and relentlessly destroyed.
Consequently, it should not be difficult to understand how the slaves used, and ingeniously used, the only cultural tools permitted them: the English language and the Bible. (Think of “Go Down Moses!” in that light and you will swiftly discover why what must be the mightiest musical phrase in the entire musical literature of a great musical culture was assigned by my forebears to the only people they had ever heard of who “got away”—and that proudly—from bondage, the ancient Israelites.)
Interestingly,
The Drinking Gourd
took its title from a spiritual, a song of the Underground Railroad which derived, in turn, from the old slave metaphor for the Big Dipper which points to the North Star, the symbol and beacon to freedom for many an escaped slave seeking his way North in the Southern night. (Frederick Douglass similarly named his abolitionist journal
The North Star
.) Songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Steal Away to Jesus” (also used in the play) were ingenious examples of the “signal” songs employed by the slaves to pass on secret messages and double meanings concealed in “innocent” imagery. Folklorist Irwin Silber’s
Songs of the Civil War
provides revealing commentaries on these two songs, which I have included as an addendum to the play. It was to such uses of “the only cultural tools permitted them” that Lorraine’s letter referred. It continues:
The simple fact is, black sedition in the United States was defined by the reality that surrounded it, which was the armed white camp which was the slave-south: less than a million big slave owners who had thoughtfully [enlisted the support] of the impoverished poor white in the maintenance of his “property.”
Negro protest and revolt is not new. It is as old as the slave trade. Negroes came here fighting back. They mutinied on the high seas; they organized hundreds of insurrections which were ruthlessly and predictably put down; they indulged in sabotage, mutilation, murder and flight, and fled into the quite unfriendly ranks of the Union armies by the tens of thousands to return as largely unpaid, hardly
uniformed and equipped fighting soldiers and spies and service personnel of the reluctant “freedom” armies.…
Why then did it [black revolt] fail? Black folk constituted four million unarmed and illiterate people circumscribed by twice their number of hostile elements including, above all, to the genius of the slaveholding South, those six or seven million poor whites who, pathetically, regarded themselves as the interested protectors of the system that impoverished them. For the return of fugitives there was money and a reassurance that his miserable life was better than a black man’s. And very little else. But it worked. The Negro and his culture came up under encirclement.…
It was out of this reality—and this strong sense of the continuity of black oppression past and present—that
The Drinking Gourd
emerged.
To Dore Schary, former studio head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and himself the author of
Sunrise at Campobello
, the play Lorraine handed him was, as he looks back on it now, “a powerful, marvelous script that might have been—with the cast we had in mind and a little luck—one of the great things we’ve seen on television.” Within days of receiving it, he called to say that Henry Fonda had agreed to play the Soldier, he was negotiating with Laurence Olivier for the role of Hiram, and that a comparable cast was in the making; he was passing the script on to NBC.
Their response was not long in coming. On August 30, 1960, Lorraine learned of it in the morning paper—neatly summarized by
New York Herald-Tribune
TV columnist Maree Torre under the headline “Dore Schary Tells Why TV Shies From Civil War.” The column began with a quoted news release so classic that one can only suppose it was NBC’s press agent who later wrote the releases for President Johnson on Vietnam:
NEWS ITEM
: “NBC has solved the problem of producing a Civil War series without offending the South. It will pit brother against brother so that both sides will have their innings in the projected series, ‘The Canfield Brothers,’ formerly known as ‘The Blue and the Gray.’ ”
“And what about the ‘projected’ Civil War series,” wondered Miss Torre, that cannot be “altered to conform to the ‘safe, bland, inoffensive’ canons” of television?
After two years, she informed the reader—“during which time Mr. Schary turned in one script and four outlines (‘all excellent,’ in NBC’s words)”—his contract had expired and would not be renewed. “I would say that my failing,” Schary told her, “was that I could not turn the series into ‘a Wagon Train’ of the Civil War … the slavery issue … is a very sensitive area.… ” Mr. Schary was returning to the theater. Moreover, the column concluded, all other Civil War network projects, including one announced “during a bold brave moment” by ABC and another to have been supervised for CBS by Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton, were being shelved.
Yet, interestingly enough, the story did not end quite there. For months thereafter occasional calls would come from friends on the fringes of the industry or simply with tomorrow’s TV column in hand, to report that perhaps the project was being revived. A story by
New York Post
columnist Bob Williams (10/5/60) is typical:
NBC’s long-projected 90-minute exploration of the institution of slavery may yet be emancipated from a desk drawer in the program department.…
For the slavery project … NBC programming vice president David Levy still cherishes some hope. Attached to the script is a memo from his pad which says: “This is superb.”
To us, he said:
“I want it on the air. I believe it should go on. It’s a program that says something about the peculiar institution of slavery.”
Yet even if, in off-guard moments, one indulges a fantasy—that television might somehow have been induced to preserve a relatively realistic portrayal of slavery—I realize as I look back upon it now that there were two things that irretrievably and immutably doomed
The Drinking Gourd
.
The first had to do with Lorraine Hansberry’s view of history and its effect upon people, which was inseparable from her essential nature as a dramatist. What interested her in
The Drinking Gourd
, as to one degree or another in all her works, was the dissection of personality in interaction with society. Not personality viewed in the abstract, as some universal, unchanging “human nature,” but as human nature manifesting itself under the impact of a particular
society, set of conditions, way of life. Her object was not to pose black against white, to create black heroes and white villains, but to locate the sources of human behavior, of both heroism and villainy,
within
the slave society.
What was so troubling, so damning about
The Drinking Gourd
was not, I believe, its frankness but, oddly enough, its
fairness:
the objectivity of its approach to character and the nature of the indictment that resulted. It was not even the horrors she showed—the fact that the young black hero was to be shown on perhaps fifty million American home screens being blinded for the statutory crime of learning to read—but the fact that she insisted upon empathizing as well with the
white
forced to blind him! In a medium not noted for the avoidance of horror, an industry whose stock-in-trade is violence, one might suppose that this image could be tolerated. But the approach to Zeb Dudley and Hiram Sweet was something else again.
For it is one thing for the black writer to view the
black
as victim, but to also view the
white
as victim is to step entirely outside the racial categories upon which the society stands. That is an act of effrontery far more disquieting because, in the very act of extending a hand to whites, it strips them of their claim to uniqueness, and presupposes on the black playwright’s part a degree of liberation, an absolute equality to treat both black and white as if they are exactly alike: that is, in the profoundest sense, as human beings, linked victims of a society that victimized both (which is not the same thing at all as suggesting that our suffering or degree of responsibility for that society is equal).
Moreover, if only the black is viewed as victim, the impact may touch the conscience of the viewer, but at the same time, to white America, it is vaguely reassuring: the failure to deal with the complexity of “our” motivations—the fact that we “suffer” too—confirms the sense of apartness. (“You see! They can’t understand us any more than we can understand them. We are different species.”) If this view is powerfully and dramatically rendered, it may arouse guilt—but guilt too removed to require anything more than a surface commitment to kindness, amelioration, reform—that “we” treat “them” better than “we” have
within the system
. But
The Drinking Gourd
goes for the gut: it takes on the system itself, requires that
we examine ourselves, and what it implies is revolution. Revolution within and without. Not guilt but action. It shatters the myth that the Civil War was anything other than a tragic
necessity
, a revolution that
had to be
fought not out of some doubtful benevolence to the slaves but for the good of the whole nation. And it suggests, in whatever degree art can ever affect attitudes, the appropriateness if need be of means perhaps equally drastic, if we are ever to complete the revolution that was left unfinished a hundred years ago and thereby free us all.
