SOURCE: "An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress's Wedding Band," MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 57-67.

[In the following essay, Curb explores Childress's portrayal of women in her dramas, particularly Wedding Band.]

Alice Childress, a serious contemporary playwright whose work has received little scholarly recognition, has been working in American theater for four decades. Born a decade before Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress produced her first play, Florence, ten years before Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Childress was, in fact, the first black woman to have a play produced on the professional American stage, and she is still writing successful drama in the 1980s. Not only has she had eight serious plays produced, but she has also published two children's plays, two novels, a nonfiction collection of interviews with black women who work as domestics, and an anthology of scenes from plays by black Americans as exercises for black actors. Like Hansberry, Childress has affirmed a deep commitment to social and political causes that promote human rights for black people and women. Unlike Hansberry, however, Childress features black women as protagonists in her fiction and drama.

As an early troupe member of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, Alice Childress performed leading roles for many years before she wrote Florence in 1949. The one-act play, set in a Jim Crow railroad station in the deep South, features an encounter between a black woman and a white woman across a little fence separating them. The white woman attempts to demonstrate her cordiality and lack of prejudice toward Negroes by recounting the plot of her brother's best-selling novel about a "tragic mulatto" girl (a favorite black stereotype for white writers of the thirties and forties) but she unmasks her racist condescension. Angered, the black woman changes her plans to go to New York to retrieve her daughter Florence, who is struggling with little success to become a professional actress. She sells back her train ticket and wires the money to Florence with the message: "Keep trying."

Following successful performances of two other short plays featuring humble characters, Childress initiated Harlem's first all-union Off-Broadway contracts recognizing the Actor's Equity Association and Harlem Stage Hand Local Union. Based on her own backstage struggles as a professional actor, director, and playwright, Childress presented Trouble in Mind, her first full-length play, in 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York. The play ran for 91 performances and won the Village Voice Obie Award for the best original Off-Broadway play of the 1955–56 season.

Like Florence, Trouble in Mind uses an interracial cast but features the struggles of a lone middle-aged black woman in the face of subtle racism from white liberals and the woman's final heroic affirmation of black pride. As the play opens, veteran Wiletta Mayer arrives for the first rehearsal of Chaos in Belleville, her first leading role in a serious Broadway play. Although the play purports to be an accurate treatment of racial tension in the deep South, in fact, it reinforces the same demeaning black stereotypes Wiletta has been trying to escape throughout her career in the theater. After the white director forces a method acting technique on her, Wiletta drops her mask of "Tommish" hypocrisy, which she has always used when working with white directors, and admits that she finds the character impossible; the mother she plays would not send her son out to face a lynch mob. To emphasize the faulty characterization, she asks the director if he would send his son out to be killed. He snaps back at her: "Don't compare yourself to me." Having unmasked the liberal director's hidden racism, Wiletta leads a cast walk-out even though it is clear that her heroism may result in professional suicide.

Early in the sixties Childress wrote her second full-length serious drama, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, about the tragic results of anti-miscegenation laws and what Childress calls "anti-woman" laws in the South after Reconstruction, and still in force in the first decades of the twentieth century. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1920, the playwright witnessed the suffering of women legally isolated and restricted by the inhumane laws. In essence, the laws which Childress found especially noxious freed the fathers (black and white) of the children of black women from any responsibility for their offspring, and disinherited black women and their children from property rights. Not only was sexual mixing of races strictly prohibited by law, but simply the birth of a mulatto child was proof of the mother's guilt and justified her conviction. Black and white women both suffered under such laws, and each suffered alone, since a woman's testimony about the paternity of her child was not considered valid.

Wedding Band dramatizes the anguish and repercussions surrounding an interracial love affair in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1918. Julia Augustine, a thirty-five-year-old black seamstress with an eighth grade education, has violated both state anti-miscegenation laws and the common mores of the working class by continuing a monogamous love relationship with a white man for ten years. Childress considers the play to be a vigorous political statement protesting the denial of black women's rights during a period of American history rarely featured in current literature about racial struggles. Childress has remarked:

Wedding Band dealt with a black woman and a white man, but it was about black women's rights. I took Herman as an understanding, decent human being. But he could not give her [Julia Augustine] protection in a society where the law is against them. He couldn't marry her. I didn't give him a last name because if Julia couldn't have it, I felt no need to give it. No one has questioned this. The woman is the one most denigrated in such situations. I wrote the play because the only thing I saw about such things was the wealthy white man and his black mistress. But most of the interracial couples then and now didn't come from the wealthy but from working class people. So I took a seamstress and a baker, and this made it an unpopular topic for a lot of people who prefer the portrayal of upper strata whites. The play shows society's determination to hold the black woman down through laws framed against her. There are similar laws framed against white women, and, of course, unwritten laws. I never run out of subject matter for writing about women's rights particularly black women, but white women too, which I have included in Wedding Band.

As the play opens one Saturday morning in summer 1918, Julia Augustine greets her first full day in a working-class ghetto populated by a variety of ethnic groups. Her immediate neighbors are all black women surviving more or less alone. Julia's landlady, Fanny, self-appointed representative of the black race, seems delighted with her new tenant, the only one who has paid in advance. She pries mercilessly into Julia's meager material goods. Eagerly Fanny relays gossip about the other renters: that Mattie worked in a "sporting house," and that Lula adopted a son after she "killed" her natural one. Mattie appears to be a boisterous, high-spirited woman so destitute that she scolds her eight-year-old daughter, loud enough to wake the neighborhood, just after the opening curtain, for losing a quarter.

Lula wins Julia's sympathy by confiding rather than prying initially. Because Lula had suffered such abuse from her husband that she sought consolation from a friend, she tells Julia, she neglected to watch her son, who wandered out and got killed on the railroad track. Her adopted son, Nelson, now full grown, is home on leave from the army. Fanny considers it "unnatural" for Lula to live alone with such a handsome muscular boy, not her blood kin, but fails to recognize or acknowledge her own attraction for him. Nelson rebuffs Fanny's unsubtle advances, but he flirts with Julia and begs her for a date.

Pursued by Nelson and probed by Fanny, Mattie, and Lula, Julia breaks down at the end of the scene and reveals that she cannot marry the man she has "been keepin' company with" because he is white. As a prelude to Julia's shocking revelation, Mattie flatly states, "Man that won't marry you thinks nothin' of you. Just usin' you." Mattie's rigid judgment is ironic in the light of her subsequent revelation that she is not legally married to October, the man with whom she has shared most of her adult life. Mattie tells Julia that her first husband left her after years of habitual battering and verbal abuse. Even though she and October were married in a religious ceremony on Edisto Island eleven years ago, the state of South Carolina only recognizes her first marriage. After Julia's confession, Mattie concludes that Julia is carrying on the affair for money: "You grit your teeth and take all he's got; if you don't, somebody else will…. Rob him blind. Take it all. Let him froth at the mouth. Let him die in the poorhouse—bitter, bitter to the bone."

Relentlessly, but compassionately, Childress characterizes Julia's neighbors as petty and narrow-minded in their racist assumptions and defensive obsessions about their need for social status. If an all-pervasive racism has conditioned the women to be suspicious of white cordiality, it has also toughened them with the stamina necessary for survival. By characterizing Mattie as ruthlessly greedy and conniving, Childress succeeds in illuminating a significant truth of American social history: desperately impoverished and overpowered black women have so long been used as commodities by white men that the only relationship Lula and Mattie can imagine between a black woman and a white man is one of exploitation. They simply advise Julia to exploit the man as much as he is exploiting her. Childress dramatizes the assumption early in the scene by having the poor white bell man, who sells linens to black women, proposition Julia and offer to pay her for sexual favors with stockings. She drives him out, raging: "Beneath contempt, that's what you are…. I wish you was dead, you just oughta be dead, stepped on and dead." Her fury ironically foreshadows her driving Herman and his family from her house at the end of the third scene.

When Julia tries to explain to her neighbors that she and Herman love each other, even though he is not rich or prominent, the other women judge her crazy or a fool. What sticks in Julia's mind at the end of the scene is a phrase she read aloud from October's letter to illiterate Mattie: "Two things a man can give the woman he loves … his name and his protection." Sadly Julia realizes that Herman can provide neither as long as they stay in the South.

Herman, a poor forty-year-old baker, makes his first entrance at the beginning of the second scene, set that evening. When Julia's neighbors eye his shabby appearance with scorn, Julia scolds him for not wearing his good suit. The scene richly exhibits both the tenderness and beauty as well as the ordinariness of Herman and Julia's love. Herman brings Julia an elaborately decorated wedding cake to celebrate their tenth anniversary and a gold wedding band, which she has long desired as a symbol of their commitment, to wear on a chain around her neck until they can be legally married. Eagerly they make plans to sail on the Clyde Line to New York, where anti-miscegenation laws will not thwart them. Herman voices chagrin that they must wait until he sells his bakery and pays back a loan to his mother. Their delays seem also to be influenced by their reluctance to leave the familiar city and by apprehension about the challenge which life in the North presents. Their dialogue provides exposition about Herman's family, work, financial situation, and the homey intimacy of their relationship; Herman does not even know his own size in socks or where to buy them because Julia has been taking care of his clothes for years. (Childress frequently selects unerringly accurate details which succeed in illuminating the intimate nature of a relationship better than a speech peppered with flowery protestations of devotion.)

The scene also reveals that Julia and Herman tread gently on racial issues. Julia has a tendency to make generalizations about "white folks" and Herman thinks Julia is one of "the good kind of colored folks"—implying that he thinks most are not good. A racist slur which Herman's mother once uttered to hurt her son, he had incautiously mentioned to Julia, who has never forgotten it. Herman's mother, a woman with social aspirations, always out of reach, once remarked to her daughter: "Annabelle, you've got a brother who makes pies and loves a nigger." Recalling the remark in the context of their current stalemate situation, Julia complains to Herman: "Sometimes I feel like fightin' … and there's nobody to fight but you…."

Just as Childress characterizes Julia's neighbors as narrowly cautious, she exhibits the pair of star-crossed lovers as flawed. They are not heroic crusaders for sexual liberation, civil rights for minorities, or racial equality. They show neither a desire for martyrdom nor for masochism. However, although they are not battling for social justice, their situation has opened their eyes to the narrowness of their lives and the pettiness of those who restrict them. Herman says, "My mother is made out of too many … little things … the price of carrots, how much fat is on the meat … little things make people small. Make ignorance—you know?" As in her other plays, Childress dramatizes the daily frustrations and minor crises that tempt the impoverished to despair and self-hatred. She demonstrates that maintaining personal dignity and hope for the future in the midst of destitution and social rejection can be heroic. In fact, all of the characters who appear in Wedding Band merit admiration simply for surviving. Considering the hostility of Herman's family and Julia's neighbors, it is remarkable that Julia and Herman never doubt each other's love.

At the end of the first act, Herman is stricken with influenza. Childress skillfully interweaves two historical catastrophes here. The influenza epidemic, which swept the country in 1918 and left eleven million dead, provides the moral dilemma which creates the plot. The anti-miscegenation laws force Julia to face impossible choices. She could call a doctor, not only risking their arrest but also endangering the property and reputation of the landlady and the livelihood of everyone who lives in these rental houses. She could hire somebody to transport Herman to a doctor, but he might die on the way. In any case, she could be arrested for transporting a white man under suspicious circumstances. She could patiently wait for Herman's recovery. But the statistics are against her; most influenza victims are dying, and she knows it. If Herman dies in her house, Julia faces the same legal charges from the coroner that a doctor might present. She decides to send for Herman's mother and sister, who can take Herman to a doctor, even though she knows that she faces their hatred and scorn. She also faces prosecution for violating the law which demands that influenza victims be kept under quarantine. For fear of the laws, even Herman's mother chooses to wait until dark to transport him. Thus his life is jeopardized by unjust laws.

By the opening of the second act, Julia's situation has reached a crisis which tightens the tension leading to her climax of rage and anguish at the end of the scene. Fanny refuses to let Julia call a doctor: "They'll say I run a bad house." Fanny knows well the difficulty with which she has won her social and economic position:

Julia, it's hard to live under these mean white folks … but I've done it. I'm the first and only colored they let buy land 'round here…. When I pass by they can say, "There she go, Fanny Johnson, representin' her race in-a approved manner" 'cause they don't have to worry 'bout my next move. I can't afford to mess that up on account-a you or any-a rest-a these hard-luck, better-off-dead, triflin' niggers.

Childress portrays Fanny as a black woman with white-identified values, but she is even more harsh in her characterization of Herman's mother and sister, poor white women who lamely glean what little dignity they can from bolstering their belief in white superiority and condemning Herman for lowering himself to love a black woman. Both white women secretly envy Julia who has known love and passion in a way they have not and probably will not. The sister says to Herman, "Most excitement I've ever had was takin' piano lessons." Later Herman's mother also mentions the emptiness of a life confined to duty and service to other people's needs and pleasures: "I put up with a man breathin' stale whiskey in my face every night … pullin' and pawin' at me … always tired, inside and out." Childress does not invite her audience to mock white sexuality but to pity the pathetic anguish of a tired old woman.

In her compassion for all her genteel but poor characters, Childress describes the indignities suffered by even the least desirable characters. Although she portrays Herman's mother and sister, the only two white women who appear in any of her plays of the sixties, as racists, she analyzes their motivations within the context of their own suffering. Childress has called Herman's mother thus:

A victim of terrible circumstances. No one was able to sit down with her and take her hands in theirs and explain anything. No one was able to say, "We thank you for what you've done. We understand what you've been through." But rather a series of detestations goes on. I treat her with compassion as a woman. I feel that my liberation is not to become as unjust as those who deny my rights. My liberation is not to change places with those who have practiced racism against me.

Herman's mother clings desperately to meager symbols of respectability. Because Annabelle once played a concert in a church, she calls her daughter a "concert pianist." From her first entrance, Herman's mother insults Julia. She makes the same assumptions Lula and Mattie did: Julia is Herman's whore out to exploit him. As Julia's fury mounts, Herman's mother demands to have all of Herman's things that are at Julia's house so that she can burn them. She prompts the delirious Herman to recite a racist speech by John C. Calhoun, which she had whipped him to memorize when he was five, for the Knights of the Gold Carnation (a white supremacist group similar to the Ku Klux Klan). Crazed with fever, Herman grasps the porch post and begins to recite the speech. Julia explodes.

The scene erupts into name calling—the climax of the action:

HERMAN'S MOTHER. Nigger whore … he used you for a garbage pail …

JULIA. White trash! Sharecropper! Let him die … let 'em all die … Kill him with your murderin' mouth—sharecropper bitch!

Julia orders Herman and his family out and continues to scream wildly even after they have gone.

Julia's temporary insanity rages through most of the last scene. Wearing the wedding dress she had been keeping carefully packed away in her hope chest, Julia scatters the rest of the chest's precious contents around the room in a drunken furor. Then Mattie appears and the sudden recognition that she is not the lone victim of legal injustice sobers her somewhat. Mattie tearfully laments that she cannot get any family benefits from the Merchant Marines since she has no state marriage license. The anti-woman state law forbidding divorce punishes Mattie just as the anti-miscegenation laws restrict Julia's freedom and happiness.

Herman arrives, clutching two tickets for the "black deck" on the steamboat to New York. When Herman staggers into the house, Julia gives the tickets and her wedding band to Mattie. She locks out Herman's mother and sister when they come. As the final curtain falls, Julia holds Herman in her arms, imagining that they are riding the steamer to New York. Julia's firm stand—taking Herman in and locking his mother and sister out—dramatically demonstrates her assertion of her rights, even though such a gesture lacks any public effect or crusading zeal. Furthermore, Julia's moment of self-awareness and recognition of her fate is tinged with hysteria.

The two plays which follow Wedding Band in Childress's career feature similar strong women. Wine in the Wilderness portrays black characters separated by class, education, and political/cultural conditioning. Childress wrote the play for WGBH television in Boston as the first drama in the series, On Being Black, in 1969. In the play Tommy-Marie, a factory worker in her thirties wearing mismatched clothes and a cheap wig, and fleeing from the ravages of a race riot, agrees to model for a black artist. What she does not realize at the outset is that Bill and his two friends—snobbish, college-educated, and self-consciously Afro-American—actually hold Tommy in contempt as their image of a "messed-up chick." When she recognizes their scorn, her rage fuels her self-assertion. She uncovers the hypocrisy of their affectations by pointing out their self-hatred: "You don't like flesh and blood niggers…. You comin' on 'bout how we ain' never together. You hate us, that's what! You hate black me." The clusters of images which Childress carefully arranges contrast Bill's artificial and exotic ideal with the real live Tommy, that familiar woman on the streets of Harlem, as has been pointed out by Janet Brown.

In Mojo: A Black Love Story, first presented in 1970, Irene pays a visit to her former husband, Teddy, before entering the hospital for serious cancer surgery. She tells him that she always loved him even though she finds it difficult to express her feelings, and that they have a daughter. Irene shares with Teddy her newly discovered black pride and her need for blackness as a psychic shield against the whiteness of surgery. However Irene's self-assertion and sense of affirmation have occurred before the play opens and merely manifests itself through her courageous revelations to Teddy.

In the seventies Childress devoted her talent and energy to writing fiction and drama for children and adolescents. A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich won the Jane Addams Honor Award in 1974 as a young adult novel and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award from the University of Wisconsin in 1975. In 1977 the film version won the Virgin Islands Film Festival Award. In 1979 Childress published A Short Walk, a novel for adults featuring the life story of a spunky and courageous black woman from the beginning of the century to her death in the seventies. The character has both the earthy grit and assertive energy of Childress's dramatic heroines.

Through essentially solitary struggles, Childress's strong women forge through barriers not only of race and sex, but also class, education, and age which threaten to keep them poor and powerless to a recognition of personal worth. Jeanne-Marie Miller comments: "Childress's women characters not only transcend their predicaments but often function as catalysts for change in those whose lives they touch."

Although all of Childress's published work deserves to be read, Wedding Band is her finest and most serious piece of literature and deserves comparison with the most celebrated American tragedies. Like Childress's other plays, it features an ordinary black woman past her prime. What we have here is that Julia's soul-searching in the midst of her moral dilemmas takes place on stage; her confusion is fully dramatized. The problems which face Julia are complicated by a convergence of historical and political dilemmas with which a woman of her education and conditioning is ill-prepared to cope. That she and the other flawed women in Wedding Band survive is tenuous but believable.

Childress's mode of characterization is unflinching realism. Earthy dialogue and crude figurative language characterize the "nitty-gritty" characters who populate her plays as bursting with vitality and a fully realized sensuality. No saints or villains clutter Childress's dramatis personae. In Wedding Band, racism and the desire for respectability obsess both black and white characters. Every ethnic minority suffers insults. Herman is angered when someone with an excess of patriotism writes, "Krauts … Germans live here," on the side of his house. Suffering from the racist jeers of others does not, however, prevent Herman's mother from calling Julia, "Dirty black nigger," or Julia from calling her, "Kraut, knuckle-eater, redneck." In an earlier scene, the black and white children together, Teeta and Princess, jump rope to the racist rhyme: "Ching, ching, Chinaman eat a dead rat…. Knock him in the head with a baseball bat." Later when they make fun of the "Chinamerican" man down the street, Mattie tells them, "If he ketches you, he'll cook you with onions and gravy." Fanny accuses the sign painter of being a "black Jew" when he refuses to return her money after he misspells a word in her sign.

Name-calling and racist insults bolster the fragile dignity of the member of any ethnic minority desperate to be thought respectable or at least higher on the ladder of social respectability than someone else. Clinging to symbols of respectability is the only way to survive the rejection of the larger society. In a similar way, Fanny brags about her silver tea service, her English china, and her Belgian linen; Julia keeps her hope chest. In an absurd attempt to conceal Julia's indiscretion from the children, Mattie tells them that Herman is Julia's husband—"a light colored man."

The antagonist of Wedding Band seems to be the whole system of government-sanctioned oppression and the conservative status quo fearful of change. However, Childress's uneducated characters lack the ability to understand the nature of the enemy or to articulate their own victimization. Herman and Julia are not presented as the American version of Romeo and Juliet, although their plight invites comparison. They lack the requisite youth and beauty, social prominence and wealth, romantic perfection. They are weak, confused, superstitious, lonely, and impatient; no empires crumble when catastrophe strikes them. Herman's death and Julia's madness create nothing to nurture the healing of racial hatred. However, despite their insignificance, they are brave and honest enough to carry on a love affair threatened by criminal penalties because they know instinctively that love is stronger than unjust laws.

Wedding Band dramatizes more than a tragic love affair. It presents the social, economic, moral, religious, legal, political, historical, psychological context in which a black woman like Julia Augustine makes independent decisions that affect her life and the lives of everyone she touches.

Despite its literary merits, Wedding Band has been largely ignored by producers as well as scholars. Early in 1965 Loften Mitchell wrote:

Wedding Band had a rehearsed reading in 1963. Immediately after that it was optioned for a Broadway showing. To date it has changed hands at least five times. Yet, Wedding Band is, to all who have heard it, an exceptionally well-written, humorous dramatic piece, positive in its approach and fully-deserving a first-rate production.

The University of Michigan gave Wedding Band a full production in 1965. It took seven years more for the play to reach a larger recognition. In November 1972, Joseph Papp produced it at the New York Public Theatre. In 1973 the American Broadcasting Company presented a televised version of the play on prime time. Ruby Dee, who played the leading role in both the Public. Theatre and television productions, comments:

There is a tragedy here that cannot be underestimated. Alice Childress is a splendid playwright, a veteran—indeed, a pioneer. She has won awards, acclaim, and everything but consistent productions. It is difficult to think of a play by a white writer earning the reviews that Wedding Band earned in 1965 and then having to wait until 1973 to reach the New York stage.

It proves one thing: We may salute and savor the glory of the black theatrical pioneer, but in a land where materialism is all-important, the real salutes take longer.

Exactly why it took so long for Wedding Band to reach large American audiences can only be guessed. Childress herself guesses that the content was unpopular. However, no producer told her directly: "We just don't do serious plays featuring middle-aged black women," or "We'll only consider an interracial love story if it's scandalous, violent, and terribly romantic." Nobody refused to produce it because the historical period play was out of vogue. Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that a play such as Wedding Band was doomed to be passed over in the sensational sixties and early seventies because it offers an unbloody plot with unglamorous characters, in an unfashionable setting, in an unflinchingly realistic style. No wonder one opening night New York theater critic dismissed it as "an appealing but inconsequential little period play about miscegenation … ready for a Jerome Kern score." Another belittled it as "a romantic play that does not entirely escape the charge of sentimentality … a sweet old love story about hard, dusty times in a hard, dusty place." One can only conclude that the critic, Clive Barnes, had more of an eye to his own prejudices and expectations than to the play on stage. No careful reader would give the play the following judgment: "The writing is rather old-fashioned in its attempt at Ibsenite realism, and neither the situation nor the characters really change from the beginning of the play to the end."

Far from being "old-fashioned," the writing in Wedding Band offers the authenticity of the regional dialect in the diction of the period. Necessarily, the dialogue sounds stilted to a contemporary ear. Although Childress's realism owes much to Ibsen and Chekov, it cannot for that reason be dismissed as out-of-date. After all, realism has proved to be a successful mode for most of what are considered the great American tragedies. However, it is no doubt true that Wedding Band failed to win popular acclaim for the very reason that it deserves to be re-read and re-evaluated by serious scholars: it is an authentic portrait of American racism in a rarely dramatized historical period with credible characters.