freeze the rhythm onstage. As African American playwright Carlton Molette observed in a comment that applies equally well toBlues for Mister Charlie, “The Amen Corner is at its worst as a play precisely when it is at its best as literature.”

The Amen Corner

Nowhere are these difficulties seen more clearly than in Baldwin’s treatment of the tension between institutionalized religion and moral integrity in The Amen Corner. Like Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Amen Corner challenges the dichotomy between the holy Temple and the sinful Street, a tension that shapes the play’s entire dramatic structure. Accepted unquestioningly by most members of Sister Margaret Alexander’s congregation, the dichotomy reflects a basic survival strategy of blacks making the transition from their rural Southern roots to the urban North during the Great Migration. By dividing the world into zones of safety and danger, church members attempt to distance themselves and, perhaps more important, their loved ones from the brutalities of the city. As Baldwin comments in his introduction to the play, Sister Margaret faces the dilemma of “how to treat her husband and her son as men and at the same time to protect them from the bloody consequences of trying to be a man in this society.” In act 1, Margaret attempts to resolve the dilemma by forcing her son David, a musician in his late teens, into the role of servant of the Lord while consigning her estranged husband Luke, a jazz musician, to the role of worldly tempter. Having witnessed the brutal impact of Harlem on Luke, she strives to protect her son by creating a world entirely separate from his father’s. Ultimately, however, the attempt fails as David’s emerging sense of self drives him to confront a wider range of experience; meanwhile, Luke’s physical collapse, which takes place in the “safe zone,” forces Margaret to acknowledge her own evasions. The most important of these, which reveals Margaret’s claim to moral purity as self-constructed illusion, involves her claim that Luke abandoned his family; in fact, she fled from him to avoid the pain caused by the death of a newborn daughter, a pain associated with sexuality and the Street.

As he did in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin treats the collapse of the dichotomies as a potential source of artistic and spiritual liberation. David recognizes that his development as a musician demands immersion in both the sacred and the secular traditions of African American music. Margaret attempts to redefine herself in terms not of holiness but of an accepting love imaged in her clutching Luke’s trombone mouthpiece after his death. Both resolutions intimate a synthesis of Temple and Street, suggesting the common impulse behind the gospel music and jazz that sound throughout the play. The emotional implications of the collapse of the dichotomies in The Amen Corner are directly articulated when, following her acknowledgment that the vision on which she bases her authority as preacher was her own creation, Margaret says: “It’s a awful thing to think about, the way love never dies!” This second “vision” marks a victory much more profound than that of the church faction that casts Margaret out at the end of the play. Ironically, the new preacher, Sister Moore, seems destined to perpetuate Margaret’s moral failings. Although Sister Moore’s rise to power is grounded primarily in the congregation’s dissatisfaction with Margaret’s inability to connect her spiritual life with the realities of the Street (Margaret refuses to sympathize with a woman’s marital difficulties or to allow a man to take a job driving a liquor truck), she fails to perceive the larger implications of the dissatisfaction. Sister Moore’s inability to see the depth of Margaret’s transformed sense of love suggests that the simplifying dichotomies will continue to shape the congregation’s experience.

Thematically and psychologically, then, The Amen Corner possesses a great deal of potential power. Theatrically, however, it fails to exploit this potential. Despite Baldwin’s awareness that “the ritual of the church, historically speaking, comes out of the theater, the communion which is the theater,” the structure of The Amen Corner emphasizes individual alienation rather than ritual reconciliation. In part because the play’s power in performance largely derives from the energy of the music played in the church, the street side of Baldwin’s vision remains relatively abstract. Where the brilliant prose of Go Tell It on the Mountain suggests nuances of perception that remain only half-conscious to John Grimes during his transforming vision, David’s conversations with Luke and Margaret focus almost exclusively on his rebellion against the Temple while leaving the terms of the dichotomy unchallenged. In act 3, similarly, Margaret’s catharsis seems static. The fact that Margaret articulates her altered awareness in her preacher’s voice suggests a lingering commitment to the Temple at odds with Baldwin’s thematic design. Although the sacred music emanating from the church is theoretically balanced by the jazz trombone associated with Luke, most of the performance power adheres to the gospel songs that provide an embodied experience of call and response; taken out of its performance context, the jazz seems a relatively powerless expression. As a result, The Amen Corner never escapes from the sense of separation it conceptually attacks.

Blues for Mister Charlie

Blues for Mister Charlie reconsiders the impact of simplistic dichotomies in explicitly political terms. Dedicated to the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the four black children killed in a 1963 Birmingham terrorist bombing, the play reflects both Baldwin’s increasing anger and his continuing search for a unified moral being. Loosely basing his plot on the case of Emmett Till, a black youth murdered for allegedly insulting a white woman in Mississippi, Baldwin focuses his attention on the unpunished white murderer of Richard Henry, who is killed after returning to his minister father’s Southern home to recover from a drug addiction. Baldwin establishes a black-white division onstage as an extension of the sacred-secular dichotomy; the two primary sets are a black church and a white courthouse, both of which are divided into two areas, Whitetown and Blacktown. Underscoring the actual interdependence of the constituting terms, Baldwin insists in his stage directions that the audience be aware of the courthouse flag throughout scenes set in the church and of the Cross during scenes set in the courthouse. Periodically, the dialogue brings the connections between seemingly disparate realities into the foreground. Richard’s father, Meridian, responds to the liberal white newspaperman Parnell’s surprise over the intensity of rage and hatred in the black community following Richard’s death: “You’ve heard it before. You just never recognized it before. You’ve heard it in all those blues and spirituals and gospel songs you claim to love so much.” The tentative rapprochement of Parnell, Meridian, and Richard’s lover Juanita at the end of the play provides an image of a potential community capable of acknowledging the complexity of transforming both the rage and the past failures of perception into a political and moral action. When Parnell, employing a term with particularly charged meaning in the context of the southern Civil Rights movement, asks if he can “join you on the march,” Juanita’s tempered acceptance—“we can walk in the same direction”—represents a profound attempt not to invert the black-white dichotomy following the acquittal of Richard’s murderer, Lyle Britten, an acquittal in which Parnell is implicated by his inability to challenge the underlying structure of the white legal system.

As background for this resolution, Baldwin develops three central themes: the growing anger of young blacks, the impact of this anger on the older members of the black community, and the white psychology that enables apparently normal individuals to perpetrate atrocities without remorse. The theme of anger focuses on Richard, whose experiences both in New York and in Mississippi generate an intense bitterness against all whites. Articulating a militant credo that Baldwin finds emotionally comprehensible but morally inadequate, Richard tells his grandmother,I’m going to treat every one of them as though they were responsible for all the crimes that ever happened in the history of the world—oh, yes! They’re responsible for all the misery I’ve ever seen . . . the only way the black man’s going to get any power is to drive all the white men into the sea.

Backed up by his vow to carry a gun with him at all times, Richard’s militancy comes into direct conflict with his grandmother’s and his father’s traditional values of endurance, hope, and Christian compassion. Ironically, Richard’s compassion for his grandmother leads him to give his gun to his father, an act that leaves him defenseless when attacked by Lyle. Baldwin suggests that some adjustment between unbridled violence and naïve faith will be necessary if blacks are to put an end to their victimization without emulating the moral failures of their white persecutors.

Baldwin’s comments on Blues for Mister Charlie emphasize the importance of the portrait of the white persecutor to his overall design. Attributing his reluctance to write drama to a “deeper fear,” Baldwin stresses his desire to overcome his own dichotomizing impulses and “to draw a valid portrait of the murderer.” Unfortunately, the dramatic presentation of Lyle Britten in many ways fails to fulfill this desire. Obsessed with racial honor, especially as it involves white women, Lyle seems more sociological exemplar than rounded individual. Despite the fact that he has had at least one sexual relationship with a black woman, Lyle’s obsession with interracial sex, grounded in a deep insecurity that leads him to respond violently to any perceived threat to his sense of masculine superiority, dominates every aspect of his character. While sociological works such as Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970) and Calvin Hernton’s Sex and Racism in America (1965) support the general accuracy of the diagnosis, Baldwin nevertheless fails to demonstrate its relation to aspects of Lyle’s experience not directly involved with the obsession. Lyle’s monologues on his poor white heritage and his sexual experience sound stilted and contrived, especially when juxtaposed to a generally unconvincing presentation of whites in the play. Parnell’s monologue on “the holy, the liberating orgasm,” for example, seems more a didactic parody of Norman Mailer’s The White Negro (1957) than an aspect of his character.

Although in his fiction Baldwin demonstrates a profound understanding of the psychological reality and aesthetic power of silence, Blues for Mister Charlie veers sharply toward an overelaboration that undercuts the validity of his portrait of the white persecutors. This in turn weighs the play more heavily than Baldwin intended toward the black perspective, reinforcing rather than challenging the underlying dichotomy. The conversations among Parnell, Lyle, and Lyle’s wife, Jo, concerning their attitudes toward race and sex seem wooden and static largely because they articulate attitudes that if consciously acknowledged would dictate changes in behavior in any realistic, as opposed to demoniac, characters. Although it would be possible to interpret the monologues as Eugene O’Neill-style stream-of-unconsciousness passages, the dialogue subverts the effectiveness of the technique, suggesting that Baldwin has simply failed to come to terms with the silence of his characters’ personalities. Although Blues for Mister Charlie advances Baldwin’s belief that imposing dichotomies on experience leads inexorably to emotional and physical violence, it nevertheless perpetuates a dichotomy between abstract statement and concrete experience. Baldwin’s decision not to return to drama after Blues for Mister Charlie seems an acknowledgment that he is much more comfortable with forms in which his voice can assume a concrete reality of its own, transforming tensions that in his drama remain unresolved.