Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

  HIRAM I’ll send for Dr. Bullett.

  RISSA I doctorin’ him.

  HIRAM But fever—

  RISSA I makin’ quinine. Be ready soon.

  HIRAM I—are you sure …? I think I should get Bullett.

  RISSA (Without looking up) He put his eyes back?

  Silence.

  HIRAM I—I wanted to tell you, Rissa—I wanted to tell you and ask you to believe me that I had nothing to do with this. I—some things do seem to be out of the power of my hands after all … Other men’s rules are a part of my life …

  RISSA (For the first time looking up at him) Why? Ain’t you Marster? How can a man be marster of some men and not at all of others—

  HIRAM (The question penetrates too deeply and he looks at her with sudden harshness) You go too far—

  RISSA (With her own deadly precision) Oh—? What will you have done to me? Will your overseer gouge out my eyes too? (Shrugging) I don’t ’spect blindness would matter to me. I done seen all there was worth seein’ in this world—and it didn’t ’mount to much. (Turning from him abruptly) I think this talkin’ disturb my boy.

  HIRAM looks at the face which will not turn to him or comfort him in any way and slowly rises. He starts out and we follow him into the darkness several feet, a dejected, defeated figure, which suddenly collapses. He cries out for help and one by one the lights of the cabins go out and doors close. He crawls a little on the grass, trying to get back to RISSA’s cabin. Inside, we see her at the table again, preparing another cloth for HANNIBAL. She lifts her eyes and looks out the window to see the figure of the man she can distinctly hear crying for help. She lowers her lids without expression and wrings the cloth and returns to HANNIBAL’s bedside and places it over his eyes and sits back in her chair with her hands folded in her lap. We come down on her face as she starts to rock back and forth as HIRAM’s cries completely cease.

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN:

  EXTERIOR. THE VERANDA—EVENING.

  MARIA sits, dressed completely in black, not moving and not looking where she stares. EVERETT comes up the steps; he wears a Confederate Officer’s uniform and a mourning band.

  EVERETT Mother …

  His manner with her is that of someone seeking very hard to distract another from grief.

  What would you think if I got the carriage and took you for a nice long ride in the cool, out near the pines—?

  MARIA No, thank you, son.

  EVERETT Oh do—it would be so refreshing and cooling for you, and tomorrow I think you should treat yourself to a nice social call on the Robleys—

  MARIA (Pulling her shawl about her a bit) Thank you, Everett, but I find it chilly right here tonight. And your father never cared for the Robleys.

  He starts to argue a little, but looks at her and changes his mind and relaxes back in his chair and lets his eyes scan the darkness in front of him, where his plantation lies stretched out, as a gentle hymn rises up from the quarters, the same one as in the introduction—“Steal Away to Jesus.”

  EVERETT Yes—you’ve right. Let’s just sit here in the peace and the quiet. The singing is pretty tonight, isn’t it?

  MARIA (Looking dead ahead) Peaceful? Do you really find it peaceful here, Everett?

  EVERETT Sure it is, Mother. (Enthusiastically) Things are going to go well now. Zeb is beginning to understand how I want this place run; the crops are coming along as well as can be expected, and the slaves have settled down nicely into the new routine of the schedule. Everything is very orderly and disciplined. (Touching her hand gently) Above all, there is nothing for you to worry about. This thing will be all over soon and I’ll be home before you know it and everything will be back to normal. Only better, Mama, only better …

  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.”

  NOTES ON TWO SONGS:

  “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 rig
ht 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 awaiting”—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.

  What Use Are

  Flowers?

  A CRITICAL BACKGROUND

  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.…

  —LORRAINE HANSBERRY,

  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.

  —ROBERT NEMIROFF

  What Use Are Flowers?

  A Fable in One Act

  “Lullaby baby

  What’s rustling there?

  Neighbor’s child’s in Poland

  Mine’s who knows where”

  —Bertolt Brecht

  from Mother Courage

  CHARACTERS

  An elderly and scholarly hermit.

  A party of children of about nine or ten years old.

  The scene is a vast rocky plain at the edge of a great forest.

  SCENE I

  A plain somewhere in the world; darkness and wind. The HERMIT appears from left—an old and bearded man in the residue of manufactured garb and animal skin—he walks with a stick and carries his life’s possessions in a bundle. He surveys the area as best he can in the half-light, shuffles to an outcropping of rock at right and crawls up into a crevice and goes to sleep. As he sleeps, the light comes up slowly and the CHILDREN appear, on their knees, in stark silence. They are stalking a small creature. The most arresting thing about them, aside from their appearance, which is that of naked beasts with very long hair, is their utter silence—for not one of them is beyond the age of ten. The old man sleeps on. The light is that of dawn.