It was in such a year that NBC proposed to celebrate the Centennial of the Civil War with a series of “five special shows” which, according to the announcements, “promise to be one of the most important events of coming TV seasons”—a series which, apart from its unusual content, was to be written by prominent playwrights whose participation was, among other things, intended to mark the return of serious drama to the airwaves. Lorraine Hansberry’s The Drinking Gourd was to open the series. It was the only script actually completed. Its subject was slavery, its subtitle “The Peculiar Institution,” and unlike most writers on the subject, its author brought to it some quite private and intimate insights of her own. Insights which could be traced back as far as a child’s trip South and her first “startled” view of her grandmother:
All my life I had heard that she was a great beauty and no one had ever remarked that they had meant a half century before! The woman that I met was as wrinkled as a prune … and always seemed to be thinking of other times. But she could still rock and talk and even make wonderful cupcakes which were like cornbread, only sweet … She died the next summer and that is all that I remember about her, except that she was born in slavery and had memories of it and they didn’t sound anything like Gone with the Wind.…
The Drinking Gourd did not sound anything like Gone with the Wind either. And that fact cannot be separated from what happened to it.
In a symposium on the “Negro Writer in America,” a freewheeling discussion recorded by radio station WBAI at the start of the Centennial Year, January 1, 1961, with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nat Hentoff and Emile Capouya as the participants, Lorraine Hansberry told a little of the story:
… They asked me for it. They paid me for it—and if I may say so, in contradiction of everything that we have said, Langston, rather well—and then I read in the newspaper that some studio official—a vice president … had attached a notation to it saying, moreover, that they thought it was “superb” … and then they put it away in a drawer.…
What happened to The Drinking Gourd was not, of course, unique. On one level it can be viewed as simply one more in the long and, by now, traditional line of casualties of the Great Wasteland. Yet on another, there is more to the story. For the drawer that closed on The Drinking Gourd also managed to slam shut on every other publicly announced network plan to seriously commemorate the single most important event of our national life in the second half of the nineteenth century—the war that freed four million Americans, cost the lives of several million others, opened the floodgates to our economic transformation into the nation we have become, and dominated our politics directly for a generation and, indirectly, ever since.
In that light, the fate of The Drinking Gourd was and is relevant for reasons that are worth examining.
In the symposium cited earlier, Lorraine Hansberry took the occasion to amplify why she had agreed to write the play in the first place:
… You said, I thought rather beautifully, a number of times how this question—the Negro question—does tend to go to the heart of various and assorted American agonies, the Negro question does, beginning with Slavery itself. And I am so profoundly interested to realize that in these 100 years since the Civil War very few of our countrymen have really believed that their Federal Union and the defeat of the slavocracy and the negation of slavery as an institution is an admirable fact of American life. So that it is now possible to get enormous books on the Civil War and to go through the back of them and not find the word “slavery,” let alone “Negro.”
We’ve been trying very hard—this is what Jimmy and I mean when we speak of guilt—we’ve been trying very hard in America to pretend that this greatest conflict didn’t even have at its base the only thing it had at its base: where person after person will write a book today and insist that slavery was not the issue! You know, they tell you it was the “economy”—as if that economy was not based on slavery. It’s become a great semantic game to try and get this particular blot out of our minds, and people spend volumes discussing the battles of the Civil War, and which army was crossing which river at five minutes to two, and how their swords were hanging, but the slavery issue we have tried to get rid of. To a point that while it has been perfectly popular, admirable, the thing to do—all my life since Gone with the Wind—to write anything you wanted about the slave system with beautiful ladies in big, fat dresses screaming as their houses burned down from the terrible, nasty, awful Yankees … this has been such a perfectly acceptable part of our culture that the first time that I know of that someone came to me and asked me to write ninety minutes of television drama on slavery—which, if you will accept my own estimate, was not a propaganda piece in either direction but, I hope, a serious treatment of family relationships by a slave-owning family and their slaves—this is controversial. This had never been done.…
Yet one man, at least, believed it could be done. And so Dore Schary, long one of the more socially committed producers in Hollywood and on Broadway, had asked Lorraine to a meeting and assured her that, controversy or no, she would have full freedom to confront the historical truth. The series, he explained, was to be an honest, objective dramatization of the issues underlying the war. It was to begin with (1) her portrait of slavery, and follow with works based on (2) the confrontation of pro-and anti-slavery forces in the U.S. Senate in the decade preceding secession; (3) the origins of the Confederacy; (4) the mobilization of the Union; and (5) the drawing of first blood. How frank could it be? “As frank as it needs to be,” said Schary.*
It was with this understanding that Lorraine set to work. And with this understanding that Schary informed NBC that he had engaged as his first writer the young black winner of the year’s Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the best play on Broadway. The announcement was made to a roomful of top network brass. Schary recounts their response thusly:
“There was a long moment of silence. And then the question was asked: ‘What’s her point of view about it—slavery?’
“I thought they were pulling my leg, and so I answered presently, gravely: ‘She’s against it.’
“Nobody laughed—and from that moment I knew we were dead.”
Schary, however, refused to give in and so he said nothing to Lorraine, preferring not to burden her as long as a fighting chance remained. In the months that followed, down to the very day that “death” became official and his own contract with NBC was quietly dropped, he never once suggested in any way that the playwright’s vision be compromised.
Meanwhile, Lorraine began work in the Main Reading Room of the Forty-second Street Library, the Schomburg Collection in Harlem, and at home, poring over her own rather extensive collection of works on the slavery era. She consulted transcripts of the pre-War Congressional Record sent up from Washington, studied sermons and speeches, diaries and journals and newspaper accounts of slave insurrections, pondered auction notices and “wanted” posters for runaway slaves and bills of sale for men and women, and inevitably thought of her grandmother as slowly the arguments and abstractions of a century before began to come alive. For her ultimate goal was to write not history but drama:
What I think a dramatist has to do is to thoroughly inundate himself or herself in an awareness of the realities of the historical period and then dismiss it. And then become absolutely dedicated to the idea that what you are going to do is to create human beings whom you know in your own time, you see. So that all of us sitting out in the audience feel that, “Oh yes, we know him.” No matter what period … we must feel, “I have had this experience, I have known this person.” So that once you know the realities of the time, you use them really as residue at the back of the head. So that, you know, you don’t have them go out and get into an automobile, but where the human emotion is universal in the time sense as well as the world sense.*
The essential view of “the realities of the time,” of slavery, that Lorraine Hansberry brought to The Drinking Gourd
—the “residue at the back of the head”—this is nowhere better summarized than in a letter she wrote some years later to the Village Voice. Dated January 11, 1964,* it is a letter so pertinent to the themes and characters explored in the play that it is worth quoting extensively. Its point of departure was the Voice’s review of another work, James Weldon Johnson’s Trumpets of the Lord:
To the Editor:
I have not yet seen “Trumpets of the Lord” and know nothing of the production save that it is in the hands of some extraordinarily gifted and capable people, Mr. Donald McKayle and Miss Vinnette Carroll.
But the show apart, I was amazed, and amused, to learn from Mr. Michael Smith’s review that he is amazed at the utilization of Hebraic history and myth in the folk materials of American Negroes! That he suspects the present production of having used “Israeli-Egyptian” relations to promote the “integration” aspirations of what he takes to be the “recent” militancy of Negroes.
He must first be told that anyone would be hard pressed to put together such a program that was devoid of either protest or biblical content. There are excellent and rather glaring reasons why this is so and I am afraid that suspicions to the contrary are a confession of ignorance of the nature of American slavery. But I have long since learned that it is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald—they just dressed more attractively and their accents are softer. (I know I switched tenses.)
The slavocracy was neither gentle nor vague; it was a system of absolutism: he who stood up and preached “discontent” directly had his courageous head chopped off; his militant back flogged to shreds; the four points of his limbs fastened down to saplings—or his eyes gouged out.… Learning to read or write was variously corporally and capitally punishable; and, of course, from the beginning of the slave trade all expressions of what might have been a unifying force among the New World Blacks, African cultural survivals, were conscientiously and relentlessly destroyed.
Consequently, it should not be difficult to understand how the slaves used, and ingeniously used, the only cultural tools permitted them: the English language and the Bible. (Think of “Go Down Moses!” in that light and you will swiftly discover why what must be the mightiest musical phrase in the entire musical literature of a great musical culture was assigned by my forebears to the only people they had ever heard of who “got away”—and that proudly—from bondage, the ancient Israelites.)
Interestingly, The Drinking Gourd took its title from a spiritual, a song of the Underground Railroad which derived, in turn, from the old slave metaphor for the Big Dipper which points to the North Star, the symbol and beacon to freedom for many an escaped slave seeking his way North in the Southern night. (Frederick Douglass similarly named his abolitionist journal The North Star.) Songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Steal Away to Jesus” (also used in the play) were ingenious examples of the “signal” songs employed by the slaves to pass on secret messages and double meanings concealed in “innocent” imagery. Folklorist Irwin Silber’s Songs of the Civil War provides revealing commentaries on these two songs, which I have included as an addendum to the play. It was to such uses of “the only cultural tools permitted them” that Lorraine’s letter referred. It continues:
The simple fact is, black sedition in the United States was defined by the reality that surrounded it, which was the armed white camp which was the slave-south: less than a million big slave owners who had thoughtfully [enlisted the support] of the impoverished poor white in the maintenance of his “property.”
Negro protest and revolt is not new. It is as old as the slave trade. Negroes came here fighting back. They mutinied on the high seas; they organized hundreds of insurrections which were ruthlessly and predictably put down; they indulged in sabotage, mutilation, murder and flight, and fled into the quite unfriendly ranks of the Union armies by the tens of thousands to return as largely unpaid, hardly uniformed and equipped fighting soldiers and spies and service personnel of the reluctant “freedom” armies.…
Why then did it [black revolt] fail? Black folk constituted four million unarmed and illiterate people circumscribed by twice their number of hostile elements including, above all, to the genius of the slaveholding South, those six or seven million poor whites who, pathetically, regarded themselves as the interested protectors of the system that impoverished them. For the return of fugitives there was money and a reassurance that his miserable life was better than a black man’s. And very little else. But it worked. The Negro and his culture came up under encirclement.…
It was out of this reality—and this strong sense of the continuity of black oppression past and present—that The Drinking Gourd emerged.
To Dore Schary, former studio head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and himself the author of Sunrise at Campobello, the play Lorraine handed him was, as he looks back on it now, “a powerful, marvelous script that might have been—with the cast we had in mind and a little luck—one of the great things we’ve seen on television.” Within days of receiving it, he called to say that Henry Fonda had agreed to play the Soldier, he was negotiating with Laurence Olivier for the role of Hiram, and that a comparable cast was in the making; he was passing the script on to NBC.
Their response was not long in coming. On August 30, 1960, Lorraine learned of it in the morning paper—neatly summarized by New York Herald-Tribune TV columnist Maree Torre under the headline “Dore Schary Tells Why TV Shies From Civil War.” The column began with a quoted news release so classic that one can only suppose it was NBC’s press agent who later wrote the releases for President Johnson on Vietnam:
NEWS ITEM: “NBC has solved the problem of producing a Civil War series without offending the South. It will pit brother against brother so that both sides will have their innings in the projected series, ‘The Canfield Brothers,’ formerly known as ‘The Blue and the Gray.’ ”
“And what about the ‘projected’ Civil War series,” wondered Miss Torre, that cannot be “altered to conform to the ‘safe, bland, inoffensive’ canons” of television?
After two years, she informed the reader—“during which time Mr. Schary turned in one script and four outlines (‘all excellent,’ in NBC’s words)”—his contract had expired and would not be renewed. “I would say that my failing,” Schary told her, “was that I could not turn the series into ‘a Wagon Train’ of the Civil War … the slavery issue … is a very sensitive area.… ” Mr. Schary was returning to the theater. Moreover, the column concluded, all other Civil War network projects, including one announced “during a bold brave moment” by ABC and another to have been supervised for CBS by Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton, were being shelved.
Yet, interestingly enough, the story did not end quite there. For months thereafter occasional calls would come from friends on the fringes of the industry or simply with tomorrow’s TV column in hand, to report that perhaps the project was being revived. A story by New York Post columnist Bob Williams (10/5/60) is typical:
NBC’s long-projected 90-minute exploration of the institution of slavery may yet be emancipated from a desk drawer in the program department.…
For the slavery project … NBC programming vice president David Levy still cherishes some hope. Attached to the script is a memo from his pad which says: “This is superb.”
To us, he said:
“I want it on the air. I believe it should go on. It’s a program that says something about the peculiar institution of slavery.”
Yet even if, in off-guard moments, one indulges a fantasy—that television might somehow have been induced to preserve a relatively realistic portrayal of slavery—I realize as I look back upon it now that there were two things that irretrievably and immutably doomed The Drinking Gourd.
The first had to do with Lorraine Hansberry’s view of history and its effect upon people, which was inseparable from her essential nature as a dramatist. What interest
ed her in The Drinking Gourd, as to one degree or another in all her works, was the dissection of personality in interaction with society. Not personality viewed in the abstract, as some universal, unchanging “human nature,” but as human nature manifesting itself under the impact of a particular society, set of conditions, way of life. Her object was not to pose black against white, to create black heroes and white villains, but to locate the sources of human behavior, of both heroism and villainy, within the slave society.
What was so troubling, so damning about The Drinking Gourd was not, I believe, its frankness but, oddly enough, its fairness: the objectivity of its approach to character and the nature of the indictment that resulted. It was not even the horrors she showed—the fact that the young black hero was to be shown on perhaps fifty million American home screens being blinded for the statutory crime of learning to read—but the fact that she insisted upon empathizing as well with the white forced to blind him! In a medium not noted for the avoidance of horror, an industry whose stock-in-trade is violence, one might suppose that this image could be tolerated. But the approach to Zeb Dudley and Hiram Sweet was something else again.
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