Blues for Mister Charlie

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1995

  Copyright © 1964 by James Baldwin

  Copyright renewed 1992 by The James Baldwin Estate

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by The Dial Press, New York, in 1964.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baldwin, James, 1924–1987

  Blues for Mister Charlie: a play / by James Baldwin. — 1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-4974-7

  1. Racism—United States—Drama. I. Title.

  PS3552.A45B5 1995

  81′.54—dc20 94-23842

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Blues for Mister Charlie, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the world, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings, permissions for which must be secured in writing from the estate of the author in care of Vintage Books, 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022.

  Cover design by Marc J. Cohen

  Photograph by Henry Grossman

  v3.1

  To the memory of

  MEDGAR EVARS,

  and his widow and children,

  and

  to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Notes for Blues

  Cast of Characters

  Act I

  Act II

  Act III

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Notes for

  BLUES

  THIS PLAY HAS BEEN on my mind—has been bugging me—for several years. It is unlike anything else I’ve ever attempted in that I remember vividly the first time it occurred to me; for in fact, it did not occur to me, but to Elia Kazan. Kazan asked me at the end of 1958 if I would be interested in working in the Theatre. It was a generous offer, but I did not react with great enthusiasm because I did not then, and don’t now, have much respect for what goes on in the American Theatre. I am not convinced that it is a Theatre; it seems to me a series, merely, of commercial speculations, stale, repetitious, and timid. I certainly didn’t see much future for me in that frame-work, and I was profoundly unwilling to risk my morale and my talent—my life—in endeavors which could only increase a level of frustration already dangerously high.

  Nevertheless, the germ of the play persisted. It is based, very distantly indeed, on the case of Emmett Till—the Negro youth who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The murderer in this case was acquitted. (His brother, who helped him do the deed, is now a deputy sheriff in Rulesville, Mississippi.) After his acquittal, he recounted the facts of the murder—for one cannot refer to his performance as a confession—to William Bradford Huie, who wrote it all down in an article called “Wolf Whistle.” I do not know why the case pressed on my mind so hard—but it would not let me go. I absolutely dreaded committing myself to writing a play—there were enough people around already telling me that I couldn’t write novels—but I began to see that my fear of the form masked a much deeper fear. That fear was that I would never be able to draw a valid portrait of the murderer. In life, obviously, such people baffle and terrify me and, with one part of my mind at least, I hate them and would be willing to kill them. Yet, with another part of my mind, I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes. Something in the man knows—must know—that what he is doing is evil; but in order to accept the knowledge the man would have to change. What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness. The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual darkness which no one can describe.

  But if it is true, and I believe it is, that all men are brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand this wretched man; and while we probably cannot hope to liberate him, begin working toward the liberation of his children. For we, the American people, have created him, he is our servant; it is we who put the cattle-prodder in his hands, and we are responsible for the crimes that he commits. It is we who have locked him in the prison of his color. It is we who have persuaded him that Negroes are worthless human beings, and that it is his sacred duty, as a white man, to protect the honor and purity of his tribe. It is we who have forbidden him, on pain of exclusion from the tribe, to accept his beginnings, when he and black people loved each other, and rejoice in them, and use them; it is we who have made it mandatory—honorable—that white father should deny black son. These are grave crimes indeed, and we have committed them and continue to commit them in order to make money.

  The play then, for me, takes place in Plaguetown, U.S.A., now. The plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity: and this raging plague has the power to destroy every human relationship. I once took a short trip with Medgar Evers to the back-woods of Mississippi. He was investigating the murder of a Negro man by a white storekeeper which had taken place months before. Many people talked to Medgar that night, in dark cabins, with their lights out, in whispers; and we had been followed for many miles out of Jackson, Mississippi, not by a lunatic with a gun, but by state troopers. I will never forget that night, as I will never forget Medgar—who took me to the plane the next day. We promised to see each other soon. When he died, something entered into me which I cannot describe, but it was then that I resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting this play done. We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.

  James Baldwin

  New York, April, 1964

  Cast of Characters

  (in order of appearance)

  ACT I

  MULTIPLE SET, the skeleton of which, in the first two acts, is the Negro church, and, in the third act, the courthouse. The church and the courthouse are on opposite sides of a southern street; the audience should always be aware, during the first two acts, of the dome of the courthouse and the American flag. During the final act, the audience should always be aware of the steeple of the church, and the cross.

  The church is divided by an aisle. The street door upstage faces the audience. The pulpit is downstage, at an angle, so that the minister is simultaneously addressing the congregation and the audience. In the third act, the pulpit is replaced by the witness stand.

  This aisle also functions as the division between WHITETOWN and BLACKTOWN. The action among the blacks takes place on one side of the stage, the action among the whites on the opposite side of the stage—which is to be remembered during the third act, which takes place, of course, in a segregated courtroom.

  This means that RICHARD’s room, LYLE’s store, PAPA D.’s joint, JO’s kitchen, etc., are to exist principally by suggestion, for these shouldn’t be allowed to obliterate the skeleton, or, more accurately, perhaps, the framework, suggested above.

  For the murder scene, the aisle functions as a gulf. The stage should be built out, so that the audience reacts t
o the enormity of this gulf, and so that RICHARD, when he falls, falls out of sight of the audience, like a stone, into the pit.

  In the darkness we hear a shot.

  Lights up slowly on LYLE, staring down at the ground. He looks around him, bends slowly and picks up RICHARD’s body as though it were a sack. He carries him upstage drops him.

  LYLE: And may every nigger like this nigger end like this nigger—face down in the weeds!

  (Exits. BLACKTOWN: The church. A sound of mourning begins. Meridian, Tom, Ken and Arthur.)

  MERIDIAN: No, no, no! You have to say it like you mean it—the way they really say it: nigger, nigger, nigger! Nigger! Tom, the way you saying it, it sounds like you just might want to make friends. And that’s not the way they sound out there. Remember all that’s happened. Remember we having a funeral here—tomorrow night. Remember why. Go on, hit it again.

  TOM: You dirty nigger, you no-good black bastard, what you doing down here, anyway?

  MERIDIAN: That’s much better. Much, much better. Go on.

  TOM: Hey, boy, where’s your mother? I bet she’s lying up in bed, just a-pumping away, ain’t she, boy?

  MERIDIAN: That’s the way they sound!

  TOM: Hey, boy, how much does your mother charge? How much does your sister charge?

  KEN: How much does your wife charge?

  MERIDIAN: Now you got it. You really got it now. That’s them. Keep walking, Arthur. Keep walking!

  TOM: You get your ass off these streets from around here, boy, or we going to do us some cutting—we’re going to cut that big, black thing off of you, you hear?

  MERIDIAN: Why you all standing around there like that? Go on and get you a nigger. Go on!

  (A scuffle.)

  MERIDIAN: All right. All right! Come on, now. Come on.

  (Ken steps forward and spits in Arthurs face.)

  ARTHUR: You black s.o.b., what the hell do you think you’re doing? You mother—!

  MERIDIAN: Hey, hold it! Hold it! Hold it!

  (Meridian wipes the boy’s face. They are all trembling.)

  (Mother Henry enters.)

  MOTHER HENRY: Here they come. And it looks like they had a time.

  (Juanita, Lorenzo, Pete, Jimmy, all Negro, carry placards, enter, exhausted and dishevelled, wounded; Pete is weeping. The placards bear such legends as Freedom Now, We Want The Murderer, One Man, One Vote, etc.)

  JUANITA: We shall overcome!

  LORENZO: We shall not be moved! (Laughs) We were moved tonight, though. Some of us has been moved to tears.

  MERIDIAN: Juanita, what happened?

  JUANITA: Oh, just another hometown Saturday night.

  MERIDIAN: Come on, Pete, come on, old buddy. Stop it. Stop it.

  LORENZO: I don’t blame him. I do not blame the cat. You feel like a damn fool standing up there, letting them white mothers beat on your ass—shoot, if I had my way, just once—stop crying, Pete, goddammit!

  JUANITA: Lorenzo, you’re in church.

  LORENZO: Yeah. Well, I wish to God I was in an arsenal. I’m sorry, Meridian, Mother Henry—I don’t mean that for you. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand Meridian here. It was his son, it was your grandson, Mother Henry, that got killed, butchered! Just last week, and yet, here you sit—in this—this—the house of this damn almighty God who don’t care what happens to nobody, unless, of course, they’re white. Mother Henry, I got a lot of respect for you and all that, and for Meridian, too, but that white man’s God is white. It’s that damn white God that’s been lynching us and burning us and castrating us and raping our women and robbing us of everything that makes a man a man for all these hundreds of years. Now, why we sitting around here, in His house? If I could get my hands on Him, I’d pull Him out of heaven and drag Him through this town at the end of a rope.

  MERIDIAN: No, you wouldn’t.

  LORENZO: I wouldn’t? Yes, I would. Oh, yes, I would.

  JUANITA: And then you wouldn’t be any better than they are.

  LORENZO: I don’t want to be better than they are, why should I be better than they are? And better at what? Better at being a doormat, better at being a corpse? Sometimes I just don’t know. We’ve been demonstrating—non-violently—for more than a year now and all that’s happened is that now they’ll let us into that crummy library downtown which was obsolete in 1897 and where nobody goes anyway; who in this town reads books? For that we paid I don’t know how many thousands of dollars in fines, Jerome is still in the hospital, and we all know that Ruthie is never again going to be the swinging little chick she used to be. Big deal. Now we’re picketing that great movie palace downtown where I wouldn’t go on a bet; I can live without Yul Brynner and Doris Day, thank you very much. And we still can’t get licensed to be electricians or plumbers, we still can’t walk through the park, our kids still can’t use the swimming pool in town. We still can’t vote, we can’t even get registered. Is it worth it? And these people trying to kill us, too? And we ain’t even got no guns. The cops ain’t going to protect us. They call up the people and tell them where we are and say, “Go get them! They ain’t going to do nothing to you—they just dumb niggers!”

  MERIDIAN: Did they arrest anybody tonight?

  PETE: No, they got their hands full now, trying to explain what Richard’s body was doing in them weeds.

  LORENZO: It was wild. You know, all the time we was ducking them bricks and praying to God we’d get home before somebody got killed— (Laughs) I had a jingle going through my mind, like if I was a white man, dig? and I had to wake up every morning singing to myself, “Look at the happy nigger, he doesn’t give a damn, thank God I’m not a nigger—”

  TOGETHER: “—Good Lord, perhaps I am!”

  JUANITA: You’ve gone crazy, Lorenzo. They’ve done it. You have been unfitted for the struggle.

  MERIDIAN: I cannot rest until they bring my son’s murderer to trial. That man who killed my son.

  LORENZO: But he killed a nigger before, as I know all of you know. Nothing never happened. Sheriff just shovelled the body into the ground and forgot about it.

  MERIDIAN: Parnell will help me.

  PETE: Meridian, you know that Mister Parnell ain’t going to let them arrest his ass-hole buddy. I’m sorry, Mother Henry!

  MOTHER HENRY: That’s all right, son.

  MERIDIAN: But I think that Parnell has proven to be a pretty good friend to all of us. He’s the only white man in this town who’s ever really stuck his neck out in order to do—to do right. He’s fought to bring about this trial—I can’t tell you how hard he’s fought. If it weren’t for him, there’d be much less hope.

  LORENZO: I guess I’m just not as nice as you are. I don’t trust as many people as you trust.

  MERIDIAN: We can’t afford to become too distrustful, Lorenzo.

  LORENZO: We can’t afford to be too trusting, either. See, when a white man’s a good white man, he’s good because he wants you to be good. Well, sometimes I just might want to be bad. I got as much right to be bad as anybody else.

  MERIDIAN: No, you don’t.

  LORENZO: Why not?

  MERIDIAN: Because you know better.

  (Parnell enters.)

  PARNELL: Hello, my friends. I bring glad tidings of great joy. Is that the way the phrase goes, Meridian?

  JUANITA: Parnell!

  PARNELL: I can’t stay. I just came to tell you that a warrant’s being issued for Lyle’s arrest.

  JUANITA: They’re going to arrest him? Big Lyle Britten? I’d love to know how you managed that.

  PARNELL: Well, Juanita, I am not a good man, but I have my little ways.

  JUANITA: And a whole lot of folks in this town, baby, are not going to be talking to you no more, for days and days and days.

  PARNELL: I hope that you all will. I may have no other company. I think I should go to Lyle’s house to warn him. After all, I brought it about and he is a friend of mine—and then I have to get the announcement into my paper.

  JUANITA: So it is tru
e.

  PARNELL: Oh, yes. It’s true.

  MERIDIAN: When is he being arrested?

  PARNELL: Monday morning. Will you be up later, Meridian? I’ll drop by if you are—if I may.

  MERIDIAN: Yes. I’ll be up.

  PARNELL: All right, then. I’ll trundle by. Good night all. I’m sorry I’ve got to run.

  MERIDIAN: Good night.

  JUANITA: Thank you, Parnell.

  PARNELL: Don’t thank me, dear Juanita. I only acted—as I believed I had to act. See you later, Meridian.

  (Parnell exits.)

  MERIDIAN: I wonder if they’ll convict him.

  JUANITA: Convict him. Convict him. You’re asking for heaven on earth. After all, they haven’t even arrested him yet. And, anyway—why should they convict him? Why him? He’s no worse than all the others. He’s an honorable tribesman and he’s defended, with blood, the honor and purity of his tribe!

  (WHITETOWN: Lyle holds his infant son up above his head.)

  LYLE: Hey old pisser. You hear me, sir? I expect you to control your bladder like a gentleman whenever your Papa’s got you on his knee.

  (Jo enters.)

  He got a mighty big bladder, too, for such a little fellow.

  JO: I’ll tell the world he didn’t steal it.

  LYLE: You mighty sassy tonight.

  (Hands her the child.)

  Ain’t that right, old pisser? Don’t you reckon your Mama’s getting kind of sassy? And what do you reckon I should do about it?

  (Jo is changing the child’s diapers.)

  JO: You tell your Daddy he can start sleeping in his own bed nights instead of coming grunting in here in the wee small hours of the morning.

  LYLE: And you tell your Mama if she was getting her sleep like she should be, so she can be alert every instant to your needs, little fellow, she wouldn’t know what time I come—grunting in.