Transcript Mulatto: A Play of the Deep South (1930) by Langston Hughes

Mulatto: A Play of the Deep South
(1930)
by Langston Hughes
Part I of II
Lynching:
Historical and Theatrical Precedents for Mulatto
In Abraham's Bosom is a play by American
dramatist Paul Green. Its original Broadway
run starred Charles Gilpin as an AfricanAmerican farmer from North Carolina whose
efforts at self-improvement are thwarted by
segregation and a lynching that is figured as
inevitable. Though most audiences felt the
play to be progressive, many of the young
writers associated with the New Negro
Movement and/or the Harlem Renaissance
felt that Green’s characters were little more
than “darky” stereotypes, especially in its
representation of an inarticulate mother and
her equally inarticulate mulatto son
(Hughes’s Cora and Robert’s eloquence stand
in stark opposition to their “counterparts” in
Green’s lynching play). Green received the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work in 1927.
Lynching:
Historical and Literary Precedents for Mulatto
Strange Fruit: Georgia and Lynching
1)
2)
3)
4)
Between 1882 and 1930 the American South experienced an epidemic
of fatal mob violence that produced more than 3,000 victims, the vast
majority of whom were African Americans. More than 450
documented lynchings occurred in Georgia alone. Lynching refers to
the illegal killing of a person by a group of others. It does not refer to
the method of killing. Lynching victims were murdered by being
hanged, shot, burned, drowned, dismembered, or dragged to death.
In 1930, the year Hughes penned Mulatto, more lynchings occurred in
Georgia than in any other state.
Hughes had a voluminous correspondence with Walter White, who
headed the N.A.A.C.P from 1931 to 1955. White’s Fire in the Flint
(1924) was loosely based on his own investigations of mob violence in
south Georgia. White also wrote Rope and Faggot (1929); one of the
most influential nonfictional analyses of the causes, patterns, and rates
of southern lynchings. This work debunked the “big lie” that lynching
punished black men for raping white women and it provided White
with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern
culture that nourished this form of blood sport. He marshaled statistics
demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted
for less than 30 percent of all lynchings. Despite the emphasis on
sexual issues in instances of lynching, White insisted that the fury and
sadism with which white mobs attacked their victims stemmed
primarily from a desire to keep blacks in their place and control the
black labor force.
Hughes wrote several letters to White praising him for both his books
and his tireless (and life-threatening) campaign against lynching in the
South, particularly in his native-state of Georgia.
The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and
Abram Smith. August 7, 1930.
Walter Francis White
1893-1955
The Harlem Renaissance Call for a New Theater
and Hughes’s “Note on Commercial Theater”
1) African American cultural leader like Alain
Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois actively
encouraged the development of a black
theater.
2) In 1926, in the paged of the Crisis, Du Bois
(Hughes childhood [and life-long] hero)
called for a Little Theater movement in
black communities, stipulating that the
plays be “about us,” “by us,” “for us”, and
“near us.”
3) Alain Locke (the so-called “Dean of the
New Negro Movement” and one of
Hughes’s mentors)recommended the Irish
Abbey Players, who toured the U.S. in
1911 and were credited worldwide with
creating a theatre capable of depicting the
Irish folk, as a model for a genre of theatre
capable of expressing “the Drama of
Negro Life”
•
•
•
•
“The Criteria for Negro Art” (1926)
The Negro artist has a special relationship to freedom that binds him to truth, justice, and their
synthesis in the Beautiful. Thus his art, in seeking beauty, will always be propaganda and
propaganda is the function of Negro Art (it must be so to fight other forms of propaganda that
prove destructive to the black community).
“The apostle of beauty thus becomes the apostle of truth and right not by choice but by inner and
outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by truth and justice; and slavery only
dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the truth or recognize an ideal of justice. “
“Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter
shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for
gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for
propaganda.”
“I do not doubt that the ultimate art coming from black folk is going to be just as beautiful, and
beautiful largely in the same ways, as the art that comes from white folk, or yellow, or red; but the
point today is that until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human.
And when through art they compel recognition then let the world discover if it will that their art is as
new as it is old and as old as new. “
RK-In other words, Dubois imagines a world where racism disappears when the humanness of all men
(as recognized in their art) surpasses the importance of race, but until black art compels recognition,
Negroes will not be rated as human
The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
Double Consciousness and The Republic
DOUBLE
CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE
“OFFERING”
TO THE
REPUBLIC:
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
We the darker ones come even now not altogether
empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure
human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American
Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet
melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are
Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis
of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and
smartness.
Double Consciousness in Hughes’s Early
Poetry: “Epilogue”
Alain Locke:
Key Points from his introduction to The New Negro
1)
That the “Old Negro” was more of a
myth than a man, created to serve
the purposes of debate.
2)
That New Negro “self-understanding”
finds its origins and future potential
in artistic production. In other words,
the New Negro will, in essence, write
his way into a new selfunderstanding.
3)
That the New Negro collective of
young artists (that would later come
to be known as Harlem Renaissance
writers) represented a new phase not
just in Negro Art, but in Negro
identity. Their works were infused
with a renewed self-respect and selfdependence that was, in turn, giving
the Negro community as a whole a
new kind of leadership and positive
self-definition.
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain: The
Aesthetic Manifesto for Black Nationalism
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie
Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored
near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing
about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart
of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black
fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their
white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer
of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now
intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear
or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are
not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are
pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we
know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within
ourselves.
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” Nation 122 (June 23, 1926): 692-94
1) Socio-economic factors do indeed play an important, and at times determining,
role in the artistic production of the American Negro.
2) However, these very same socio-economic factors have, over time, given rise to
(and perpetuated) a nearly irreducible cultural difference between whites and
blacks that cannot be trumped by class alone.
3) The fact that middle- and upper-class Negroes both “ape” American culture and
are ashamed of the artistic and cultural production of the black masses bares
witness to this irreducible difference. Moreover, it is this inferiority complex that
constitutes the “racial mountain” that must be climbed if the Negro artist is to
discover himself and his people.
4) The cultural production of the black masses—which also constitutes their social
fabric—has been and is being mined (with the advent of the New Negro) to
produce art that has been and will be acclaimed internationally as separate and
distinct from so-called American Art both because it is produced by Negroes who
have resisted “American standardization.”
5) The cultural production of the black masses is indeed rooted in “the inherent
expressions” of Negroes in America and in the “eternal tom-tom beating in the
Negro soul,” but this “inherent” or “eternal” quality is not a function of racial
essentialism. Rather, it is the product of historical circumstance—the
manifestation of revolt against the oppressiveness of the white world.
6) Thus, “true Negro art” is (and will be) the product of Negro artists who are not
ashamed of their race’s individuality, and who recognize that “true negro art”—
art mined from the cultural production of the Negro masses—is governed by
what might be labeled proto-black-nationalist criterion that need not and is not
concerned with the criterion that governs the artistic production of “American
Standardization.”
The “Mulatto Theme” in Hughes’s Early
Poetry: “Cross”
The “Mulatto Theme” in Hughes’s Early
Poetry: “Ruby Brown”
The “Mulatto Theme” in Hughes’s Early
Poetry: “Mulatto”
Defining and Redefining the Mulatto
Census, The Tragic Mulatto, The Revolutionary Mulatto
1)
2)
3)
"Mulatto" was an official census category until 1930. In the south of
the country, mulattos inherited slave status if their mother was a
slave, although in Spanish and French-influenced areas of the South
prior to the Civil War (particularly in New Orleans), a number of
mulattos were also free and slave-owning. During the years 1700 –
1800, the term mulatto represented a American Indian child ; it was
not used to represent mixed ancestry . The definition changed after
the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1868.
Lydia Maria Child introduced the literary character that we call the
tragic mulatto in two short stories: "The Quadroons" (1842) and
"Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843). She portrayed this light skinned
woman as the offspring of a White slaveholder and his Black female
slave. This mulatto's life was indeed tragic. She was ignorant of both
her mother's race and her own. She believed herself to be White
and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language
polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her "negro blood"
discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her White
lover, and died a victim of slavery and White male violence. A similar
portrayal of the near-White mulatto appeared in Clotel (1853), a
novel written by Black abolitionist William Wells Brown. Hughes’s
friend and contemporary, Nella Larsen, brought the tragic mulatto to
the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance in her novel “Quicksand”
with the tragic fate of the novel’s heroine, Helga Crane.
In Southern Plantation culture, the mulatto—especially when
educated--was commonly associated with rebellion and revolt.
Nearly all Southern slave revolts (whether it was the case or not)
were blamed on mulatto agitation. The theory behind the
stereotype was simple: “pure-blood” Negroes lacked the intelligence
to coordinate a revolt.
Production History and Karamu House
1) Although written in 1930, Mulatto was not staged until 1935.
2) It was first produced at the famous Karamu House by the Gilpin Players who made
Hughes their official playwright in residence in 1930.
3) The play was substantially altered for Broadway (a rape scene was added in which
Norwood rapes Sallie without Hughes’s knowledge).
4) Although the Broadway production received terrible reviews, it was a spectacular
success and ran for more than a year before touring.
5) It was the largest grossing play written by an African-American for decades, finally
yielding that distinction to A Raisin in the Sun.
6) The play was banned in several cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago
7) Karamu House is the oldest African-American Theater in the United Sates. In
1915, Russell and Rowena Woodham Jelliffe, graduates of Oberlin College in
nearby Oberlin, Ohio, opened what was then called Settlement House and
established as a place where people of different races, creeds and religions could
find a common ground. Many of Hughes’ plays debuted at Karamu House, and it
remains a cultural Mecca to this very day.
Explaining Some of the Text’s Anachronisms
The Production History of Mulatto in Hughes’s Own Words
Explaining Some of the Text’s Anachronisms
The Production History of Mulatto in Hughes’s Own Words
Explaining Some of the Text’s Anachronisms
The Production History of Mulatto in Hughes’s Own Words
Key Themes, Symbols, and Polemics
1) Mulatto is, in part, anti-lynching play that explores
miscegenation in a familial context, and metaphorically on
a national one.
2) Intra-caste Prejudice
3) The unspoken as a tool of survival and oppression
4) The unspoken as a specter
5) Lines
6) Crosses
7) Double Consciousness, Double Standards, Doppelgangers
8) Sunsets
9) The Moon
10) Acting vs Being Black