Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

  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.

  In order to achieve this, The Drinking Gourd depicted, as never before in a television script, the crimes of American slavery. But the purpose was not merely to set the record straight, or to condemn the whites who perpetrated, profited from, or by their silence acquiesced in the crimes. Far more important, it was to focus on the system that required the crimes, the culture that shaped the Southern white personality in its countless variations, maimed it, distorted it, turned ego into a monstrous and all-devouring thing. In the process, the facts of white villainy could not be ignored. The extremes of white behavior in the slave South—the cruelties, the brutalities—had to be shown; they were integral to the system for essential reasons, not of color but of economics and psychology, reasons that were set forth concisely and brilliantly in passages like the following from W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, which the playwright marked and often cited:

  The Southern planter suffered not simply from his economic mistakes—the psychological effect of slavery upon him was fatal. The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; they expected deference and self-abasement. Their “honor” became a vast and awful thing, requiring wide and insistent deference. Such of them as were inherently weak and inefficient were all the more easily angered, jealous, resentful, while the few who were superior, physically or mentally, conceived no bounds to their power and personal prestige. As the world had long learned, nothing is so calculated to ruin human nature as absolute power over human beings.

  But that was precisely the point: to show the extremes that the system produced not as aberrations but in their relation to the culture, to suggest how and why they grew logically and inevitably out of the “peculiar institution.”

  And that is why in conceiving The Drinking Gourd, Lorraine chose not to concentrate on the system’s “monsters”—the “Rhetts and Scarletts” described in her letter or their equivalent, young Everett Sweet—but on quite a different cut of human being. As her central white character she chose Hiram Sweet: a good man, a sympathetic hero, a man who epitomizes the best virtues the society claims for itself. And a man, moreover, who understands the evils of the system and consciously tries to impose his will upon it, tries to live by the code of benevolent paternalism the South professed but could not maintain.

  Hiram Sweet is defeated because he had to be. The system demands it, and demands it for very sound and practical reasons; reasons which form the core of his conflict with Everett, his son, and Macon Bullett, the aristocrat, over hours of work, the use of overseers and the conditions under which his slaves shall labor. For the simple fact of the matter was that by the mid-nineteenth century, when the play takes place, slavery itself, as an economic system, had become outmoded and, increasingly, not viable. In competition with the advanced industrial economy of the North, the planter found himself facing curious difficulties inherent in the system of production. He could not avail himself of higher wages as a means of inducing better work or a larger labor supply. He could not allow his labor to become overly trained, skilled or educated, because education might well be turned against the master himself. And psychologically, he required ignorance as the proof of his own superiority. He could not hire or fire at will and had to bear the burden of the old and the sick and inefficient whom he could not simply destroy or allow to starve to death en masse if he expected even a modicum of cooperation from their mothers, brothers and children in the fields. And, finally, with the one-or two-crop system mass slave labor required, he could not even maintain the fertility of the land. Slavery was its own worst enemy, and by the 1850s “King Cotton” had “burned out” the land to such a degree that the system could survive only by (1) shifting its emphasis from the production of crops to the production of slaves (as happened in the Old aristocratic South which found itself transformed, slowly but surely, into a primarily slave-breeding region—in the last decade of slavery fully 50,000 to 80,000 slaves were shipped from the border states alone to the lower South); (2) acquiring new lands to the West and South, Mexico and the Caribbean and even, as some Confederate military plans envisioned, through the conquest of Brazil (it was this desperate need for expansion that perhaps more than any other factor precipitated the collision course with the North over Kansas, the West and the ordering of national priorities); and (3) in any event, ever more intensive and brutal exploitation of the slave—that is, greater and greater “excesses” of the sort that defeat Hiram Sweet and ultimately bring about his death. For the individual planter, no matter what his wishes, the choice was clear: either adopt the methods of Everett or go under.

  HIRAM I—I wanted to tell you, Rissa—I wanted to tell you and ask you to believe me, that I had nothing to do with this. I—some things do seem to be out of the power of my hands after all … Other men’s rules are a part of my life …

  RISSA Why? Ain’t you Marster? How can a man be marster of some men and not at all of others—

  It is in this very real, not merely metaphorical, sense that, as I suggested at the beginning, The Drinking Gourd examines “what a master might be.” It is a study of the limits of individual freedom within an evil system. And it is because of this that it acquires, within the limitations of the condensed and abbreviated ninety-minute form, some of the elements, and above all the sense of inevitability, of classical tragedy, in which the hero smashes himself against the walls of immutable circumstance, the victim of his own tragic flaw—which is, in this case, his humanity, the absolute contradiction between the human being and his society that makes it impossible to preserve the humanity of the one within the context of the other.

  The second consideration that, I would suggest, doomed The Drinking Gourd has to do with the character Rissa and the inviolability of a cherished American myth.

  In the essay “The New Paternalists,” Lorraine Hansberry wrote:

  America long ago fell in love with an image. It is a sacred image, fashioned over
centuries of time: this image of the unharried, unconcerned, glandulatory, simple, rhythmical, amoral, dark creature who was, above all else, a miracle of sensuality. It was created, and it persists, to provide a personified pressure valve for fanciful longings in American dreams, literature, and life, and it has an extremely important role to play in the present situation of our national sense of decency.

  I think, for example, of that reviewer writing in a Connecticut newspaper about A Raisin in the Sun, which had opened for the first time in New Haven the night before, and marvelling, in the rush of a quite genuine enthusiasm, that the play proved again that there was a quaint loveliness in how our “dusky brethren” can come up with a song and hum their troubles away. It did not seem to disturb him one whit that there is no single allusion to that particular mythical gift in the entire play. He did not need it there; it was in his head.

  And she went on in the essay to discuss why this was so. The myth was “necessary because”:

  … in almost paradoxical fashion, it disturbs the soul of man to truly understand what he invariably senses: that nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable.

  Guilt would come to bear too swiftly and too painfully if white America were really obliged quite suddenly to think of the Negro quite as he is, that is, simply as a human being. That would raise havoc … White America has to believe not only that the oppression of the Negro is unfortunate (because most of white America does believe that), but something else, to keep its sense of the unfortunate from turning to a sense of outrage … White America has to believe the Blacks are different—and not only so, but that, by the mystique of this difference, they actually profit in certain charming ways which escape the rest of us with all our engrossing complexities.

  Now, the myth of which she is speaking has many variations. But there is one that is particularly sacred, one that has provided a special solace and reassurance to the white conscience from the earliest days of slavery to our own time, and that is the image of the Black Mammy: the Black Mother figure, patient, long-suffering, devoted and indomitable, heroic if need be, but above all loving. And forgiving. A kind of black superwoman, repository of all the sins that the whites have visited upon the blacks, who by her very existence confirms that blacks are not human in the sense that we are: who receives evil and returns good, however sternly or cantankerously, and thereby proves, out of her soulful eyes and warming heart and healing laughter and all-encompassing bosom, that somehow everything comes out all right in the end. It is this legendary figure, persisting in song and story, popular fiction and the most serious art, that has endlessly provided the Hattie MacDaniels to our Vivien Leighs, the Louise Beavers to our Claudette Colberts, but also the Nancys and Dilseys in William Faulkner (“brave, courageous, generous, gentle and honest … much more brave and honest and generous than me,” as Faulkner said in an interview) and the Berenices in Carson McCullers.

  In the Centennial symposium referred to earlier, Lorraine and James Baldwin discussed the scene in Member of the Wedding that occurs when the young black nephew of Berenice is being chased by a lynch mob, and Berenice takes the young white boy who is her charge, whom she has reared from childhood, and in that moment her preoccupation is with the child; her concern is with the white boy, not the black man about to be lynched. “Now the point,” for Lorraine, was not to disparage the play (which, she said, “I happen to think was a lovely play”) or the talent of the author, but to demonstrate that writers like McCullers and Faulkner were prisoners of a myth which made it impossible for them to reflect fully and adequately the realities of such a moment because:

  … the intimacy of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the reverse. So that William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend—who means every word when she is telling it to him and who expresses to him profoundly intimate thoughts—but he has never heard the truth of it. It is physically impossible. So that I am saying that for you* this scene is a fulfilling image … because you haven’t either.

  And Baldwin carried the point a step further:

  It’s an absolutely incredible moment, as Lorraine points out … Now this doesn’t say anything about the truth of Negro life, but it reveals a great deal about the state of mind of the white Southern woman who wrote it … Southerners have an illusion and they cling to it desperately—not only Southerners, the whole American republic does—and these characters come out of a compulsion. And Dilsey … is Faulkner’s proof that the Negroes who … have been worked and worked and worked and worked for nothing, and who have been lynched and burned and stolen, etc., for generations have forgiven him. The reasons the walls in the South cannot come down—the reason that the panic is so great—is because when the walls come down the truth will come out …

  It is in relation to this psychic need—this compulsion to cling to illusion—that Rissa in The Drinking Gourd makes an impermissible breach in the walls. She literally reverses the image. And the thing that is so troubling about her, so subversive of everything we have told ourselves, is that she seems at first to be the same woman, cut from the same cloth, as that other archetypal Black Mother: she is devoted to Hiram, Christian to the core, bound to the system, embodying all the virtues we have come to expect—“more brave and honest and generous than me.” Only with one profound difference: She is the same woman observed not from the white consciousness but the black. And therefore, as Lorraine Hansberry wrote of her counterpart, Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, she may be:

  … wrong, ignorant, bound over to superstitions which yet lash down the wings of the human spirit and yet, at the same time, apparently she is … an affirmation. She is the only possible recollection of a prototype whose celebration in the mythos of the culture of the American Negro began long before the author was born. Lena Younger, the mother, is the black matriarch incarnate, the bulwark of the Negro family since slavery, the embodiment of the Negro will to transcendance. It is she, who in the mind of the black poet scrubs the floors of a nation in order to create black diplomats and university professors. It is she, while seeming to cling to traditional restraints, who drives the young on into the fire hoses. And one day simply refuses to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. Or goes out and buys a house in an all-white neighborhood where her children may possibly be killed by bricks thrown through the windows by a shrieking racist mob.

  But whereas it might have been possible in the case of A Raisin in the Sun for America to deceive itself about this other—more outspoken and militant—side of Lena, not so with Rissa in The Drinking Gourd. In Raisin, as the example of that New Haven critic so wondrously illustrates, it was possible to ignore the play and what it was saying in the rush to embrace Mama.*

  But what is merely implicit in Mama becomes explicit in The Drinking Gourd. For Rissa unmistakably completes the journey that Lena had started on—and thereby reverses the sacred image. In Member of the Wedding the Black Mother ministers to her white surrogate son while the black man is murdered. In The Drinking Gourd she ministers to her own son and lets the white man—the good white man who has cared for and treated her almost as an equal—die pleading for her help. In effect, she murders him—and, what is more, steals his guns and places them in the black hands of her children; and in that moment the universe itself—the entire mythos on which stands four hundred years of black-white relations in this country—comes unhinged.

  It is a simple act. A simple, human, motherly act of vengeance for a son wronged which, in any other context but America’s, should have been anticipated as entirely natural and inevitable. And yet here it is cosmic, too frightening in its implications to contemplate, because it says: We are human and if you misjudge that fact you will live to pay the consequences.

  It was an act which could not, in any
circumstance, be tolerated on television.

  At midnight, December 31, 1961, C.Y.W. (the Centennial Year that Wasn’t), “all right, title and interest in and to The Drinking Gourd” reverted to the playwright. And in 1965, after her death, I decided the time might be ripe to try again. After all, not a few things had happened in the intervening years: civil rights was now the law of the land, Martin Luther King had come out of jail to win a Nobel Prize, television was proclaiming a new image, “serious” drama was about to come back, and an occasional black face could even be seen in the commercials. Accordingly, a letter and a copy of the script to Florence Eldridge and Frederic March—and a prompt response: Mr. and Mrs. March would be happy to portray the Sweets, Hiram and Maria, if a production could be arranged. Claudia McNeil expressed similar interest in Rissa, and with that—the assurance that a truly distinguished cast could be assembled—the wheels went into motion.

  I need not have bothered.

  To the executive producer of Hallmark Playhouse The Drinking Gourd was “a beautiful script … but frankly … not the sort of thing the sponsor is looking for. Hallmark is a family show and—well, you know …” To CBS Playhouse it was not “contemporary” enough. To NBC’s Experimental Theatre it was not “experimental” enough. And to assorted executives at all three networks there was a new wrinkle now: The Drinking Gourd had become “offensive.” “Well, that is, times have changed. Negroes are into their own thing now. They don’t want to be reminded that they once were slaves …”

  Not until 1967 did even a portion of The Drinking Gourd reach the airwaves, and then hardly in the manner anticipated. That was when, to commemorate the second anniversary of the playwright’s death, WBAI, a small noncommercial radio station, broadcast the two-part program “Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words,” taped by sixty-one of the country’s leading actors. The program included two scenes from The Drinking Gourd, with James Earl Jones as Hannibal, Cicely Tyson as Sarah, Rip Torn as Everett and Will Geer as the Preacher. One of these scenes was later used in the biographical play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and it has been gratifying to find it consistently one of the most commented-upon moments in the play, both in the New York reviews and across the country. In 1972, this scene was at last seen on television as a part of the NET motion picture of the same title—but in one decade of trying, that is the closest The Drinking Gourd has gotten to the medium for which it was conceived.