James Baldwin has written, in “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” that Americans
… are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
The Drinking Gourd was one small key to unlocking that history. “They put it away in a drawer” and it remains in a drawer where, from time to time, as the impact of who Lorraine Hansberry was and what she was trying so urgently to tell us continues to grow in the country and among the young especially, I shall be tempted to withdraw it for another submission. But I am not hopeful of the results. I am gratified, of course, that the present edition will at last enable a number of those who could not see it to read the script; students will now have access to it, it will find its way into anthologies, be commented upon in doctoral theses, and no doubt a certain number of letters will arrive each year asking, Can’t something be done about getting it on? But as to the audience for whom it was written and the medium for which the work was conceived—the only one in which its full power and artistry can be realized * —I am afraid the time is not yet.
And not likely until there is a much deeper commitment than at present, on the part of whites as well as blacks, to release us from history, complete the revolution, and once and for all confront the challenge posed in the final lines of The Drinking Gourd:
SOLDIER … it is possible that slavery might destroy itself—but it is more possible that it would destroy these United States first. That it would cost us our political and economic future. (He puts on his cap and picks up his rifle) It has already cost us, as a nation, too much of our soul.
—ROBERT NEMIROFF
* “I want no part of this nonsense,” Schary later told a reporter in commenting upon “television’s timidity about letting its audience in on the final result of the Civil War.… They want to call it the War Between the States. I would rather call it the War of the Rebellion.… The slaves were subjects of an evil. They wanted freedom.”
* From an interview with film director Frank Perry on the N.E.T. program Playwright at Work.
* But to my knowledge, never completed or mailed.
* A white panelist
* In effect, as Ossie Davis observed in a most trenchant piece, white America “captured” Lena, turned her into what she was not, made this ghetto domestic—wife of a porter, mother of a chauffeur—into the “middle class” (!) Mama that suited us. We shut out the fact that the quest of her whole being had been toward “freedom” and “a pinch of dignity too,” and comforted outselves, above all, with what we insisted was the play’s “happy ending”—rather than facing the idea of the confrontation with racist mobs into which Mama is surely leading her embattled brood as the curtain comes down.
* In reading The Drinking Gourd, the fullness of treatment in some areas makes it easy to forget sometimes that it is a work for a very special medium: not the printed page or even the theater but an art form that is above all filmic—in which dialogue is only one, and often not the primary, means of exploring character and relationships. An art form in which the juxtaposition of a face against the Big Dipper, for example, the panning shot of a line of slaves, or the agitated flicking of a riding crop on a boot—the close-up of Zeb Dudley’s clenching hands or the eyes of Hannibal or the tightened lips of Rissa—can say more of character, its recesses and potentials, than a thousand words. As they appear, then, on the printed page, the men and women of the Sweet plantation are conceived as essences only, outlines for the camera to fill. For the language of film is the image not the word—and they must await the physical reality of the actors, the environs and the selective camera eye that will give them life.
The Drinking Gourd
An Original Drama for Television
“Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man—that slavery is his natural and normal condition.”
—Alexander H. Stephens,
Vice President of the Confederacy
CAST OF CHARACTERS
(In order of appearance)
THE SOLDIER
SLAVES—MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN
RISSA
SARAH
JOSHUA
HANNIBAL
HIRAM SWEET
MARIA SWEET
TWO MALE HOUSE SERVANTS
EVERETT SWEET
TOMMY
DR. MACON BULLETT
ZEB DUDLEY
ELIZABETH DUDLEY
Two DUDLEY CHILDREN
THE PREACHER
COFFIN
A DRIVER
FOLLOWING PRELIMINARY PRODUCTION TITLES: Introduce stark, spirited banjo themes.
MAIN PLAY TITLES AND CREDITS
FADE IN: UNDER TITLES
EXTERIOR. TWO SHOT: HANNIBAL, TOMMY—BRIGHT DAY.
HANNIBAL is a young slave of about nineteen or twenty. TOMMY, about ten, is his master’s son. It is HANNIBAL who is playing the banjo, the neck of which intrudes into close opening shot frame.
CAMERA MOVES BACK TO WIDER ANGLE to show that TOMMY is vigorously keeping time by clapping his hands to the beat of the music. They are seated in a tiny wooded enclosure. Sunlight and leaf shadow play on their faces, the expressions of which are animated and happy.
If workable, they sing, from top.
At completion of titles:
Fade out
ACT ONE
FADE IN:
EXTERIOR. HIGH-ANGLED PANNING SHOT: AMERICAN EAST COAST—DUSK.
PAN down a great length of coast until a definitive mood is established. Presently the lone figure of a man emerges from the distance. He is tall and narrow-hipped, suggesting a certain idealized American generality. He is not Lincoln, but perhaps Lincolnesque. He wears the side whiskers of the nineteenth century and his hair is long at the neck after the manner of New England or Southern farmers of the period. He is dressed in dark military trousers and boots which are in no way recognizable as to rank or particular army. His shirt is open at the collar and rolled at the sleeves and he carries his dark tunic across his shoulders. He is not battle-scarred or dirty or in any other way suggestive of the disorder of war; but his gait is that of troubled and reflective meditation. When he speaks his voice is markedly free of identifiable regionalism. His imposed generality is to be a symbolic American specificity. He is the narrator. We come down close in his face as he turns to the sea and speaks.
SOLDIER This is the Atlantic Ocean. (He gestures easily when he needs to) Over there, somewhere, is Europe. And over there, down that way, I guess, is Africa. (Turning and facing inland) And all of this, for thousands and thousands of miles in all directions, is the New World.
He bends down and empties a pile of dirt from his handkerchief onto the sand.
And this—this is soil. Southern soil. (Opening his fist) And this is cotton seed. Europe, Africa, the New World and Cotton. They have all gotten mixed up together to make the trouble.
He begins to walk inland, a wandering gait, full of pauses and gestures. You see, this seed and this earth—(Gesturing now to the land around him) only have meaning—potency—if you add a third force. That third force is labor.
The landscape turns to the Southern countryside. In the distance, shadowed under the incredibly beautiful willows and magnolias, is a large, magnificently columned, white manor house. As he moves close to it, the soft, indescribably sweet sound of the massed voices of the unseen slaves wafts up in one of the most plaintive of the spirituals.
VOICES
“Steal away, steal away,
Steal away to Jesus.
Steal away, steal away home—
I ain’t got long to stay here.
; My Lord he calls me,
He calls me by the thunder.
The trumpet sounds
within-a my soul—
I ain’t got long to stay here.
Steal away, steal away,
Steal away to Jesus.
Steal away, steal away home—
I ain’t got long to stay here.”
Beyond the manor house—cotton fields, rows and rows of cotton fields. And, finally, as the narrator walks on, rows of little white-painted cabins, the slave quarters.
The quarters are, at the moment, starkly deserted as though he has come upon this place in a dream only. He wanders in to what appears to be the center of the quarters with an easy familiarity at being there.
This plantation, like the matters he is going to tell us about, has no secrets from him. He knows everything we are going to see; he knows how most of us will react to what we see and how we will decide at the end of the play. Therefore, in manner and words he will try to persuade us of nothing; he will only tell us facts and stand aside and let us see for ourselves. Thus, he almost leisurely refreshes himself with a drink from a pail hanging on a nail on one of the cabins. He wanders to the community outdoor fireplace at center and lounges against it and goes on with his telling.
SOLDIER Labor so plentiful that, for a while, it might be cheaper to work a man to death and buy another one than to work the first one less harshly.
The gentle slave hymn ends, and with its end comes the arbitrarily imposed abrupt darkness of true night. Somewhere in the distance a driver’s voice calls: “Quittin’ time! Quittin’ time!” in accompaniment to a gong or a bell. Silent indications of life begin to stir around the narrator. We become aware of points of light in some of the cabins and a great fire has begun to roar silently in the fireplace where he leans. Numbers of slaves begin to file, also silently, into the quarters; some of them immediately drop to the ground and just sit or lie perfectly still, on their backs, staring into space. Others slowly form a silent line in front of the fireplace, holding makeshift eating utensils. The narrator moves to make room for them when it is necessary and occasionally glances from them out to us, as if to see if we are truly seeing.
There is, about all of these people, a grim air of fatigue and exhaustion, reflecting the twelve to fourteen hours of almost unrelieved labor they have just completed. The men are dressed in the main in rough trousers of haphazard lengths and coarse shirts. Some have hats. The women wear single-piece shifts, some of them without sleeves or collars. Some wear their hair bound in the traditional bandana of the black slave women of the Americas; others wear or carry the wide straw hats of the cotton fields.
These people are slaves. They did not come here willingly. Their ancestors were captured, for the most part, on the West Coast of Africa by men who made such enterprise their business.
We come in for extreme close-ups of the faces of the people as he talks, moving from men to women to children with lingering intimacy.
Few of them could speak to each other. They came from many different peoples and cultures. The slavers were careful about that. Insurrection is very difficult when you cannot even speak to your fellow prisoner.
All of them did not survive the voyage. Some simply died of suffocation; others of disease and still others of suicide. Others were murdered when they mutinied. And when the trade was finally suppressed—sometimes they were just dumped overboard when a British Man-o’-War got after a slave ship. To destroy the evidence.
That trade went on for three centuries. How many were stolen from their homeland? Some scholars say fifteen million. Others fifty million. No one will ever really know.
In any case, today some planters will tell you with pride that the cost of maintaining one of these human beings need not exceed seven dollars and fifty cents—a year. You see, among other things there is no education to pay for—in fact, some of the harshest laws in the slave code are designed to keep the slave from being educated. The penalties are maiming or mutilation—or death. Usually for he who is taught; but very often also for he who might dare to teach—including white men.
There are of course no minimum work hours and no guaranteed minimum wages. No trade unions. And, above all, no wages at all.
As he talks a murmur of low conversation begins among the people and there is a more conspicuous stir of life among them as the narrator now prepares, picking up his tunic and putting it across his shoulder once again, to walk out of the scene.
Please do not forget that this is the nineteenth century. It is a time when we still allow little children—white children—to labor twelve and thirteen hours in the factories and mines of America. We do not yet believe that women are equal citizens who should have the right to vote. It is a time when we still punish the insane for their madness. It is a time, therefore, when some men can believe and proclaim to the world that this system is the—(Enunciating carefully but without passion)—highest form of civilization in the world.
He turns away from us and faces the now-living scene in the background.
This system:
The CAMERA immediately comes in to exclude him and down to a close-up of a large skillet suspended over the roaring fire which now crackles with live sound. Pieces of bacon and corn pone sizzle on it. A meager portion of both is lifted up and onto a plate by Rissa, the cook. She is a woman of late years with an expression of indifference that has already passed resignation. The slave receiving his ration from her casts a slightly hopeful glance at the balance but is waved away by the cook. He gives up easily and moves away and retires and eats his food with relish. A second and a third are similarly served.
The fourth person in line is a young girl of about nineteen. She is SARAH. She holds out her plate for service but bends as she does so, in spite of her own weariness, to play with a small boy of about seven or eight, JOSHUA, who has been lingering about the cook, clutching at her skirts and getting as much in her way as he can manage.
SARAH Hello, there, Joshua!
JOSHUA I got a stomick ache.
RISSA (Busy with her serving) You ain’t got nothing but the devil ache.
SARAH (To the child, with mock and heavily applied sympathy) Awww, poor little thing! Show Sarah* where it hurt you, honey.
He points his finger to a random place on his abdomen; clearly delighted to have even insincere attention.
Here?
She pokes him—ostensibly to determine the place where the pain is, but in reality only to make him laugh, which they both seem to know.
Or here? Oh, I know—right here!
She pokes him very hard with one finger, and he collapses in her arms in a fit of giggling.
RISSA If y’all don’t quit that foolin’ ’round behind me while I got all this here to do—you better!
She swings vaguely behind her with the spatula.
Stop it, I say now! Sarah, you worse than he is.
SARAH (A little surreptitiously—to Joshua) Where’s your Uncle Hannibal?
The child shrugs indifferently.
RISSA (Who overhears everything that is ever spoken on the plantation) Uh-hunh. I knew we’d get ’round to Mr. Hannibal soon enough.
SARAH (To Rissa) Do you know where he is?
RISSA How I know where that wild boy of mine is? If he ain’t got sense enough to come for his supper, it ain’t no care of mine. He’s grown now. Move on out the way now. Step up here, Ben!
SARAH (Moving around to the other side and standing close) He was out the fields again this afternoon, Aunt Rissa.
RISSA (Softly, suddenly—but without breaking her working rhythm or changing facial expression) Coffin know?
SARAH Coffin know everything. Say he goin’ to tell Marster Sweet first thing in the mornin’.
RISSA (Decision) See if you can find that boy of mine, child.
SARAH pushes the last of her food in her mouth and starts off. RISSA halts her and hands her a small bundle which has been lying in readiness.
His supper.
EXTERIOR. MOONLIT WOODS.
Sarah emerges from the woods into a tiny clearing, bundle in hand.
SARAH (Calling softly) Hannibal—
The camera pans to a little hillock in deep grass where a lean, vital young man lies, arms folded under his head, staring up at the stars with bright commanding eyes. At the sound of SARAH’s voice off-camera we come down in his eyes. He comes alert. She calls again.
Hannibal—
He smiles and hides as she approaches.
Hannibal—
She whirls about fearfully at the snap of a twig, then reassured crosses in front of his hiding place, searching.
Hannibal—
He touches her ankle—she screams. Laughing, he reaches for her. With a sigh of exasperation she throws him his food.
HANNIBAL (Romantically, wistfully—playing the poet-fool) And when she come to me, it were the moonrise … (He holds out his hand) And when she touch my hand, it were the true stars fallin’.
He takes her hand and pulls her down in the grass and kisses her. She pulls away with the urgency of her news.
SARAH Coffin noticed you was gone first thing!
HANNIBAL Well, that old driver finally gettin’ to be almost smart as a jackass.
Les Blancs Page 17
