Authors: Lorraine Hansberry
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.
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.
—R
OBERT
N
EMIROFF
*
“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.
“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
C
AST OF
C
HARACTERS
(
In order of appearance
)
T
HE
S
OLDIER
S
LAVES
—M
EN
, W
OMEN
, C
HILDREN
R
ISSA
S
ARAH
J
OSHUA
H
ANNIBAL
H
IRAM
S
WEET
M
ARIA
S
WEET
T
WO
M
ALE
H
OUSE
S
ERVANTS
E
VERETT
S
WEET
T
OMMY
D
R
. M
ACON
B
ULLETT
Z
EB
D
UDLEY
E
LIZABETH
D
UDLEY
Two D
UDLEY
C
HILDREN
T
HE
P
REACHER
C
OFFIN
A D
RIVER
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
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
.