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Politics, Passion, Prejudice: Alice Childress's Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

NICKY CASHMAN
NICKY CASHMAN
Affiliation:
Aberystwyth University.
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Abstract

Last night I dreamed of the dead slaves – all the murdered black and bloody men silently gathered at the foot-a my bed. Oh, that awful silence. I wish the dead could scream and fight back. What they do to us …

Julia Augustine, Wedding Band

Historical and universal issues of love and hate, patriarchy and bigotry prevail in Alice Childress's tragic drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Originally written in the early 1960s, the play was not printed or performed professionally until 1966, despite some interest in producing the play on Broadway. Hence, due to its alleged controversial subject matter, the play remained largely unknown to mainstream audiences. Childress, it seems, unfashionably portrays a long-standing, committed interracial relationship set in 1918 South Carolina. This representation conflictingly juxtaposes with the well-documented fervent civil rights period of the mid-1960s. Additionally, with predominantly black and white male civil rights activists peacefully enforcing laws upholding desegregation in the South, Childress demonstrates segregation's insidious nature primarily through the insightfulness and experience of black women. This perceptiveness introduces what Childress herself penned as “anti-woman laws,” patriarchal norms that made living incredibly difficult for black and white women alike.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , December 2009 , pp. 407 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Alice Childress, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1973; first published 1966). Page references are given in parentheses in the text.

2 With regard to Childress's aesthetic achievements with Wedding Band, it is important to mention the contemporary plays Dutchman (1964) by Amiri Baraka, the plot of which suggests an erotic relationship between a black man and a white woman, and Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) by Adrienne Kennedy, whose female protagonist is a light-skinned African American.

3 Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

4 Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed., Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 91.

5 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (New York: Praeger, 1990), 29.

6 Curb, Rosemary, “An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress's The Wedding Band,” Melus, 7, 4, Ethnic Women Writers II, “Of Dwelling Places” (Winter 1980), 57–68, 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 La Vinia Delois Jennings, “Segregated Sisterhood: Anger, Racism, and Feminism in Alice Childress's Florence and Wedding Band,” in C. Marsh-Lockett, ed., Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage (New York: Routledge, 1999), 142.

8 I believe Childress achieves a more nuanced and balanced political approach than, for instance, Baraka or Kennedy, whose aesthetic achievements could arguably be considered more spectacular.

9 William W. Demastes, ed., Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 8.

10 Dedria Bryfonski, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume XII, Alice Childress, (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1980), 104.

11 Ibid.

12 Kathy Russell, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 40.

13 Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), 3.

14 Ibid.

15 Russell, 16.

16 Ibid.

17 In connection with Julia, historical representations of the “tragic mulatta” originate in nineteenth-century melodrama such as Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859), and earlier literary short stories such as ‘The Quadroons’ (1842) by Maria Lydia Child.

18 Russell, 40.

19 Images available at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. See www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/menu.htm. The above image contains the words, ‘I know you're not particular to a fault, /Though I'm not sure you'll never be sued for assault, /You're so fond of women that even a wench/Attracts your gross fancy despite her strong stench.’ See http://racerelations.about.com/od/racerelationships/a/interracialcoup.htm.

20 US Supreme Court, Pace v. State of Alabama, Section 4184, 106 U.S. 583 (1883), 29 Jan. 1883. See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com.

21 See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1.

22 U.S. Supreme Court, Loving v. State of Virginia, 388, U.S 1 (1967), 12 June 1967. See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com.

23 For further advertisements see http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/women.htm.

24 Catherine Wiley, “Whose Name, Whose Protection: Reading Alice Childress's Wedding Band,” in June Schlueter, ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 188–90.

25 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, twice vice president of the United States, was one of the giants of nineteenth-century American politics. See http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/CALHOUN/jcc1.html.

26 In Georgetown, Charleston and Beaufort, African Americans comprised around 85% of the total population. They became signifiers both of the new prosperity and of the promises that the compromises of the Constitution held out to southerners – that in a slave society all white men could indeed be equal.

27 This use of cultural memory, of the play-within-the-play, can also be found in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones (1921) and Childress's own Trouble in Mind and Wine in the Wilderness.

28 On Sunday 15 September 1963, a Klan member was seen placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. At 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded, killing Denise McNair (aged 11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14), who had been attending Sunday school class. See http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm.

29 Randal Maurice Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).