Set in the US South of his day, James Baldwin’s 1964 play centers on the irreconcilable problems that race creates, and his play offers no easy solutions. Both black and white characters suffer from the “plague” that is race. The overarching metaphor of a disease on the social body is played out not only in violent episodes, including murder, but also in every character’s normal everyday business. By positioning the destructive power of this scourge as a disease and as a place (Plaguetown), Baldwin emphasizes its ubiquity: it is invasive and contagious. It is so widespread and well-established that is has become chronic—it is no longer an epidemic. The frailty of all human relationships, which he tells us the plague always destroys, is only sometimes negated by the resilience of select relationships between several characters, showing that Baldwin remains guardedly optimistic when compared with the existentialism that clearly influenced him.

The play shocked viewers and readers by frankly presenting brutal attacks on the black characters. These attacks were drawn from real events in the years he was writing the play. In particular, he dedicates it to Medgar Evers, murdered in 1963, with whom he had traveled in Mississippi earlier that year, and the children killed in the Birmingham church bombing. Even more, given their relative youth and the circumstances of their deaths, Richard is similar to Emmett Till, who was murdered in 1955 after a confrontation in a store. (See discussion in Malburne-Wade 2016). Richard does not acquiesce to what others might deem appropriate roles for African American men in towns ruled by whites—deference, docility, subservience. Not merely refusing to accept Lyle’s rejection and ouster from his store, he lashes out at the white man in sexual terms, mocking his manhood.

In presenting Richard as not meek and passive, Baldwin boldly chose to create a character who is all-too-human and not a martyr. He thereby raises questions of free will and predestination in keeping with the play’s evocations of Christian theology, especially through the character of Richard’s father, the pastor Meridian Henry. This question surfaces in Lyle’s declaration about his actions. “I had to kill him! I’m a white man.” While in some regards, this is a self-serving rationalization, in other respects, his statement extends Baldwin’s plague theme, a disease that destroys everyone from within. Because Richard’s murder occurred in the past, much of the play’s action revolves around the ways that his family and the other townspeople are affected by it later. Meridian’s shift away from pacifism as a philosophy and set of behaviors goes hand in hand with the rejection of passivity and the inevitability of living in a system that supports racial injustice.

This play, like much of Baldwin’s work overall, fits well within the corpus of African American literature on the 1950s and 1960s, especially as it comments on contemporary conditions in the United States. In other respects, however, it also connects with anti-colonial and postcolonial critiques from authors in other countries and their colonies. This is most obvious in its resonance with Camus’s The Plague (1947) in which he says that “each of us has the plague within him.” Part of the disease’s danger was that it dragged on and people became inured to it: “nothing is less sensational than pestilence,” Camus wrote, “and by reason of their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous.” Like in Baldwin’s Plaguetown-Anytown, too many people had become so infected by racism that they had lost their faith in their ability to change it. Baldwin’s optimism emerges through Meridian’s rejection of state oppression and newfound path of activism.

Malburne-Wade, Meredith. 2016. “Confrontation and Challenge: Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie as a Response to the murder of Emmett Till.” In Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama. n.p.: SpringerLink.