Authors: Lorraine Hansberry
Les Blancs (32 page)
The camera starts to pan away from them and moves down the veranda in through the front door, into the foyer and across to the darkened dining room, where it discovers, at low angles which do not show her face
,
RISSA
’s
figure in the darkness standing before the gun cabinet, which she opens with the key which hangs at her waist. She removes the gun with stealth and closes the cabinet carefully and turns as we follow her skirts and rapidly moving bare feet across the dining room into the dark kitchen and out the back way. Waiting in the darkness outside is
the boy
,
JOSHUA
.
Still unseen above her waist, she takes him by the hand and they go at a half-run toward and into the woods. We stay with them until they come to
HANNIBAL
’s
clearing where
SARAH
stands, poised for traveling, and trembling mightily. Just beyond her is the figure of a man, seated, waiting patiently—the blind
HANNIBAL. RISSA
locks the other woman’s hand about the child’s, thrusts the gun into
SARAH
’s
other hand, and moves with them to
HANNIBAL
,
who rises. There is a swift embrace and the woman and the child and the blind man turn and disappear into the woods
.
RISSA
watches after them and the singing of “The Drinking Gourd” goes on as we pan away from her to the quarters where the narrator last left us. Only now, his musket leans against the fireplace. Once again the slaves are gone. He walks into the scene with his coat on now—buttoning it with an air of decided preparation. He looks at us as he completes the attire of a private of the Grand Army of the Republic
.
SOLDIER
Slavery is beginning to cost this nation a lot. It has become a drag on the great industrial nation we are determined to become; it lags a full century behind the great American notion of one strong federal union which our eighteenth-century founders knew was the only way we could eventually become one of the powerful nations of this world. And, now, in the nineteenth century, we are determined to hold on to that dream. (
Sucking in his breath with simple determination and matter-of-factness
) And so—
Distinct military treatment of “Battle Cry of Freedom” of the period begins under
.
—we must fight. There is no alternative. 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.
Fade out
The End
*
Invariably pronounced “Say-rah.”
*
Perhaps “Lord, How Come Me Here?,”6 “Motherless Child,” “I’m Gonna Tell God All of My Troubles.”
“FOLLOW THE DRINKING GOURD” and “STEAL AWAY”
*
FOLLOW THE DRINKING GOURD
. The most effective weapon employed by the Negro slaves in the war of attrition against their white masters was escape. Each year, hundreds of thousands of dollars in valuable slave property vanished from the South—borne mysteriously on the midnight trains of the Underground Railroad. This highly secret Abolitionist organization earned its name through the extra-legal activities of thousands of Negro and white Americans who maintained a continuous line of way-stations and hiding places for fleeing Negroes. The Fugitive Slave Law came into existence in a vain effort to stem this annual floodtide of escape.
This song is based on the activities of an Underground Railroad “conductor” by the name of “Peg Leg Joe.” Joe was a white sailor who wore a wooden peg in place of his right foot which had been lost in some seafaring mishap.
Peg Leg Joe would travel from plantation to plantation in the South, offering to hire out as a painter or carpenter or handyman. Once hired, Joe would quickly strike up an acquaintance with many of the young Negro men on the plantation and, in a relatively short period of time, the sailor and the slaves would be singing this strange, seemingly meaningless song. After a few weeks, Joe would hobble on and the same scene would be enacted at another plantation. Once the sailor had departed, he was never heard of again.
But the following spring, when “the sun come back and the first
quail calls,” scores of young Negro men from every plantation where Peg Leg Joe had stopped would disappear into the woods. Once away from the hounds and the posses, the escaping slaves would follow a carefully blazed trail—a trail marked by the symbol of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot.
Traveling only at night, the fleeing man would “follow the drinking gourd,” the long handle of the Big Dipper in the sky pointing steadfastly to the North Star—and freedom. Following the river bank, which “makes a mighty good road,” the slave would eventually come to the place “where the great big river meets the little river”—the Ohio River. There, “the old man was a-waiting”—and Peg Leg Joe or some other agent of the Underground Railroad was ready to speed the escapee on his way to Canada.
A good story, perhaps, or is it just an old folk legend? H. B. Parks of San Antonio, Texas, one-time chief of the Division of Agriculture in the State Research Laboratory, writes:
One of my great-uncles, who was connected with the (underground) railroad movement, remembered that in the records of the Anti-Slavery Society there was a story of a peg-legged sailor, known as Peg Leg Joe, who made a number of trips through the South and induced young Negroes to run away and escape.… The main scene of his activities was in the country immediately north of Mobile, and the trail described in the song followed northward to the head waters of the Tombigee River, thence over the divide and down the Tennessee River to the Ohio.
Parks’ uncle went on to confirm the story of the sailor’s use of the song as a guide to the escaping slaves.
STEAL AWAY
. It is hard to think of a melody in any music more plaintive, more fragile, less militant in spirit and tempo than this, one of the most beautiful of the old spirituals. And yet, history shows that “Steal Away” was one of the most widely used “signal” songs employed by the slaves when they wanted to hold a secret conclave somewhere off in the woods.
And on closer examination, the song is seen to abound with the subterfuge and double-meaning imagery which a secret message
would require. The “green trees bending” and the “tombstones bursting” certainly might refer to specific meeting places, and it takes little imagination to visualize the lightning-struck hollow tree or abandoned barn meant by the singer as he sang out, “He calls me by the lightning.”
One researcher believes that the song was written by Nat Turner, leader and organizer of one of the most famous of the early nineteenth-century slave revolts. In any event, the song has lasted as a memory of secret, clandestine revolt, and as a musical testament to the creative capacity of the people whose heritage it is.
*
From
Songs of the Civil War
, edited by Irwin Silber, Bonanza Books, a division of Crown Publishers, by arrangement with Columbia University Press, 1960.
Flowers?
Despair?
Did someone say despair was a question in the world? Well then, listen to the sons of those who have known little else if you wish to know the resiliency of this thing you would so quickly resign to mythhood, this thing called the human spirit.…
—L
ORRAINE
H
ANSBERRY
,
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
In a 1962 letter to Mme. Chen Jui-Lan of the Department of Western Languages and Literature, Peking University, Peking, China, Lorraine Hansberry referred to a work “in draft”
… which treats of an old hermit who comes out of the forest after we have all gone and blown up the world, and comes upon a group of children.… The action of the play hangs upon his effort to impart to them his knowledge of the remnants of civilization which once … he had renounced.… He does not entirely succeed and we are left at the end, hopefully, with some appreciation of the fact of the cumulative processes which created modern man and his greatness and how we ought not go around blowing it up.
She called it “a bit of a fantasy thing … a play about war and peace.”
What Use Are Flowers?
was conceived, in late 1961, as a fantasy for television. Its inspiration was not William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, to whose setting it bears such striking resemblance—Lorraine read that novel a year after completing it—but Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
, which had deeply affected and provoked her. Originally titled
Who Knows Where?
(from a line in Bertolt Brecht’s
Mother Courage
) the play was in effect her answer to the questions of life and death, survival and absurdity which Beckett had posed in such novel, compelling terms.
Yet
Godot
was only one of the more striking expressions of the prevailing attitudes of a generation that had come to maturity under the shadow of the Bomb, to which the young black playwright brought a quite different point of view. In her first public address as a writer, to a conference of black artists and intellectuals, she affirmed the need for black writers to devote themselves to
all
aspects of the freedom struggle, including that which opposed the forces of despair, destruction and war in the world. And in conclusion she struck a personal note, recalling a conversation she had had with a friend who was “by way of description, an ex-Communist, a scholar and a serious student of philosophy and literature.” Together, she told the audience, they had “wandered … into the realm of discussion … which haunts the days of humankind everywhere—the destruction or survival of the human race”:
“Why,” he said to me, “are you so sure the human race should go on?
You
do not believe in a prior arrangement of life on this planet. You know perfectly well that the reason for survival does not exist in nature!” …
I answered him the only way I could. I argued on his own terms, which are also mine: that man is unique in the universe, the only creature who has in fact the power to transform the universe. Therefore it did not seem unthinkable to me that man might just do what the apes never will—
impose
the reason for life on life. That is what I said to my friend—I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and—I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.
In order, however, that there be no possible confusion or misconception about the sources of a “wish” so unfashionably and unabashedly affirmative—nor about the assumptions on which it was
based—Lorraine went on immediately to define the particular life experience out of which her assessment came. She described the life of a child “born on the Southside of Chicago … black and a female … in a depression” between two world wars. While she was still in her teens, she told the audience, “the first atom bombs were dropped on human beings.” She recalled a physical attack upon her person that had been “the offspring of racial and political hysteria.” She spoke of the loss of friends and relations “through cancer, lynching and war … drug addiction and alcoholism and mental illness,” and pictured a period spent working at New York’s Federation for the Handicapped with victims of “congenital diseases that we have not yet conquered, because we spend our time and ingenuity in far less purposeful wars.” She described “street gangs, prostitutes and beggars” and the “thousand … indescribable displays of man’s very real inhumanity to man,” to which she—“like all of you”—had been witness. And then she concluded:
… I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life. But rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.
Coming two years after these words were spoken,
What Use Are Flowers?
was, in more fanciful terms, the playwright’s answer to Beckett and to her young friend: an entry in the continuing dialogue of our time on the value and purpose of life, which, in one form or another, was to constitute the core of her writing until her own death at thirty-four.
What Use Are Flowers?
was never submitted in its original form to television. The experience of
The Drinking Gourd
led the playwright, before completing it, to recast it tentatively for the stage. But the transition between the two media was not fully realized to her satisfaction when, early in 1962, she set it temporarily aside. It would, for example, take an extraordinary director to achieve on the stage the sustained performances from the “wild” children that could easily—and marvelously—be evoked on film. In thinking about the
problem, Lorraine had hypothesized as one possible solution a new form: a fantasy on two levels that would juxtapose the old man’s soliloquies against modern dancers portraying the children. The idea intrigued her and she always planned to return to the play to try it. But it was to remain an idea only.
In 1967, three scenes from
Flowers
were recorded by Melvyn Douglas, Morris Carnovsky and Lee J. Cobb for the radio program “Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words,” and one of these, as enacted by John Beal, was featured in the play
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
. The experience of working with these actors (and others like Moses Gunn, who took over the role) suggested minor modifications, cuts and a few outstanding touches that have been incorporated into the final text.