[In the following essay, Billingslea-Brown explores the effect of anti-miscegenation laws in the framework of social repression of Blacks through established legal mechanisms.]

Between American jurisprudence and literary expression by African Americans, there is multifaceted relationship, one that has at its center questions of freedom and identity. It may be argued, in fact, that the impulse to creative expression by African Americans arises, in part, from the need to legitimize the human and cultural identity of the African on American soil.¹ In the legal history of the United States, that collective human identity, from the colonial period to Dred Scott and Jim Crow, has been constructed in particular ways.

Without doubt, there have been seminal instances where law for people of African origin and descent has been an instrument for constructive social change. More frequently, law has been, as Haywood Burns asserts, the vehicle by which generalized racism was made particular and converted into standards and policies of subjugation and social control (1973, 157). African American literature has offered a critique of that control, interrogating and reconceptualizing freedom and identity, as formulated by law, for African Americans. This paper examines the dramatic representation of the legal and sociocultural mechanisms of subjugation and control in Alice Childress's Wedding Band (1973). In particular it explores how anti-miscegenation laws, bolstered by tradition and authority, regiment the lives of both black and white characters, constraining collective and individual quests for freedom, dignity, and identity.

Subtitled “A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” Wedding Band is a play which situates struggle and contradiction in the very polarities it sets forth and displaces. It is a play about legalized segregation and illegal interracial relations. It is a play about the ideology of white supremacy and the complexities of ethnic, communal bonding. Julia Augustine, an “attractive, brown woman about thirty-five” is a seamstress who has maintained a ten-year liaison with a white baker, Herman, a greying “strong, forty-year old working man.” The setting is South Carolina in 1918, a time when it was “unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any woman of either the Indian or Negro races, or any mulatto, mestizo, or half-breed, or for any white woman to intermarry with any person other than a white man.”² Ultimately the play is about identity, dignity, and what Childress herself calls the “blight of legalized limitation.”³

For ten years, Julia has maintained her relationship with Herman on the hope and the vague intent of going North where they would be allowed to marry. On their tenth anniversary, Herman brings Julia a wedding band on a gold chain but becomes suddenly ill while still in her house. With the help of her neighbor Mattie and her landlord Fanny, Julia summons Herman's mother and sister and arranges to get him, under the cover of night, away from her house to a doctor. In the process, Julia and Frieda, Herman's mother, have a hateful confrontation which ends with Julia's forcefully dismissing the entire family, Herman included, from her house. Herman returns the next day, deathly ill from influenza, but carrying steamboat tickets for passage North. After a series of events forces an honest confrontation between the two as racial and historical beings, Herman dies in Julia's arms. Before his death, Julia creates for him the image of their final departure on a steamboat North.

The situation, the characters, and the action in Wedding Band all spring from the historical period. The year, 1918, was not only the year of the devastating influenza or “swine flu” epidemic which claimed more than 11 million lives, but also the year before the infamous “red summer”. Triggered in part by the return of black soldiers whose European experience in World War I had thrown into sharp relief the de facto and de jure segregation in the United States, the “red summer” of 1919 was so named for the more twenty race riots in cities across the nation and the rampant lynchings of black men⁴ several of them soldiers in uniform. Through a dramatic situation drawn from history and focused through history, the play delineates how law regiments social identity and constrains personal freedom.

Alice Childress has explained that part of her intent in Wedding Band was to point out and explore “[the] thousands of state laws on the books which shape our lives and the opinions formed about us” (Childress 1966, 17). With regard to what she calls “anti-woman” laws, she perceives that black women have been particularly oppressed, “… degraded by law, and by popular opinion which was shaped and formed by that law” (19). How popular opinion and law control Julia's experience and her ten-year relationship with Herman resonates throughout the text. Because of popular opinion, she has had to move frequently within the Carolina town. Soon after she moves to Fanny's “backyard” community, she explains to her new neighbors, Lula and Mattie,

Always movin' one place to another, lookin' for some peace of mind. … One year I was in such a lovely colored neighborhood, but they couldn't be bothered with me, you know? … And that's why I thought yall wanted to tear my house down this mornin' … 'cause you might-a heard 'bout me and Herman ….

(Childress 1973, 91)

Julia's account of her displacement and alienation delineates how law, in the service of anti-miscegenetic ideology, carries the accent of popular opinion; and how popular opinion, as Childress herself discerns, is influenced and shaped by law. Julia understands all too well the power of popular opinion when she explains, “some people … well they judge, they can't help judgin' you”(91).

A near-nomadic existence has enabled Julia to evade legal prohibitions. But when she confesses to Mattie and Lula that her relation with Herman is not one of financial exploitation, that if permitted to do so legally, they would marry, she is not able to escape communal disapproval. She finds herself confronted with familiar responses. Suddenly Lula must leave to cut her paper roses and Mattie has to make a batch of candy. After their embarrassed, hasty departures, Julia thinks to herself,

… that's always the way. What am I doing standin' in a backyard explainin' my life. Stay to yourself, Julia Augustine. Stay to yourself.

(Childress 1973, 92)

In this new community, as in the others, Julia has acquired a certain “exilic status” which raises for her critical questions of identity. In relation to law, to miscegenation statutes in particular, Julia's identity as a ‘Negro woman’ means one thing—most notably her inability to marry a white man. In Fanny's ‘backyard’ community, however, it is not Julia's identity as a ‘Negro woman’ which is problematic. Rather it is her identity as a Negro woman in intimate relation with a white man. Although to Herman she is the “brown girl in the pretty shirt-waist,” it is precisely her identity in relation to him which constitutes her status as “outsider within” (Hill-Collins 1986, 514). In other words, the boundaries of her identity are being continually repositioned in relation to varying points of reference.⁵ The inevitability and the necessity of multiple, shifting identities delineate how Julia, like black women throughout history, must continually negotiate the ideological strictures and legal strategies which restrict and regiment her life.

Regimentation and the struggle against regimentation resonate throughout the text, suggesting that while legal strategies for subjection and domination constitute a major part of what may be called “systemic oppression,” the domination is never absolute and always carries with it the seeds of its own subversion. The ideology which privileges human dignity manages to resist legalized assaults on that dignity and subvert the ideology of racial superiority and exclusivity. In the strategic moment that opens the second act, the text delineates how law enters and functions in that process.

As the scene opens, Herman has been stricken with influenza and lies in Julia's bed in a “heavy, restless sleep.” Julia expresses her anxiety to Mattie and Fanny and wants to call a doctor.

JULIA.
He's had too much paregoric. Sleeping his life away. I want a doctor.
FANNY.
Over my dead body. It's against the damn law for him to be laying up in a black woman's bed.
MATTIE.
A doctor will call the police.
FANNY.
They'll say I run a bad house.
JULIE.
I'll tell them the truth.
MATTIE.
We don't tell things to police.

(Childress 1973, 104)

Fanny's refusal to allow Julia to call a doctor and Mattie's quiet declaration, “We don't tell things to police,” demonstrate a particular strategy for resistance and subversion: that of withholding knowledge and information to destabilize established bases of authority (Davies 1994, 108). And here the resistance, which occurs on the level of both speech and action, is negation. It is not so much what these women do, but what they do not do, not what they say, but what they do not say that constitutes the mechanism for destabilization. Equally important, in decentering and destabilizing authority, they assert an identity based on agency rather than victimization.

The authority and legitimacy of the doctor and the police who would be white and male are circumvented by two black women, Mattie and Fanny, who essay to induct a third, Julia, into the politics of evasion and resistance. In this way, the play articulates the dialogic interaction between those “models of legitimacy” entrusted to uphold law as “universal, transcendent truth” and those who resist “legalized limitation.”

Since she is not allowed to call a doctor herself, Julia suggests a slightly different alternative.

JULIA.
I'll hire a hack and take him to a doctor.
FANNY.
He might die on you. That's police. That's the workhouse.
JULIA.
I'll say I found him on the street.
FANNY.
Walk into the jaws of the law and they'll chew you up.

(Childress 1973, 104-105)

The image of the law as voracious entity ready to devour those in violation references the view that for African Americans, the dominant experience of law is that of victim (Burns 1973, 156). In relation to Herman, Fanny's comment expresses a particular irony, especially with regard to the laws which make it illegal for him to be in a black woman's bed. As Childress has explained, miscegenation statues were enacted, in great part, to “protect white [male] southerners from the legal claims of half-black children, some of whom were the only offspring of their white master” (1966, 15). The irony is that the laws enacted to exonerate white males from the consequences of cohabitation with black women are the very ones which endanger Herman's life.

When Julia insists for a final time on calling a doctor, trying to convince Fanny of the real danger Herman is in, Fanny's response shows yet another way they are all constrained by law.

Do it, we'll have yellow quarantine sign on the front door—“Influenza.” Doctor'll fill out papers for the law … addresses … race … No, you call a doctor, Nelson won't march in the parade tomorrow or go back to the army. Mattie'll be outta work, Lula can't deliver flowers.

(Childress 1973, 105)

To circumvent the laws criminalizing black-white cohabitation, Julia, Fanny and Mattie risk violating yet another law, that which requires influenza victims to be quarantined. As forms of control and subjugation, both written and unwritten laws assume a colonizing function. Not only is everyone affected by Julia's and Herman's violation, but the effects are multiple and the violation carries consequences for the entire backyard community. Julia's submissive response after Fanny's tirade, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm the one breakin' laws” inscribes how law militates against her not only economically and socially, but psychically. She feels guilt for the hardships her actions bring upon her neighbors.

While Wedding Band, according to Childress, is about “black women's rights,” the particular ways in which legal systems enable and reinforce patriarchal forms of relations for both black and white women are also delineated in the play. Childress explains why.

… 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 included. …

(quoted. in Curb 1980, 59)

Patriarchal authority as reflected in law is experienced differently for black and white women. Just as the black woman's experience of racist law is gender-specific and different from that of black men, the white woman's experience of patriarchy is shaped by class and ethnicity. For Frieda, Herman's mother, class and ethnicity are very significant power mechanisms circumscribing her life. It is through her characterization and that of her daughter, Annabelle, that the play articulates the complexity and contradiction in the experience of the southern white woman.

First of all, as the daughter of white sharecroppers, Frieda is concerned principally with economic and social advancement. It is because of social aspirations that she uses her second name, Thelma, to disguise her German ethnicity. At the same time, she is clearly a white supremacist. As indicated by the epithets she hurls at Julia, she accepts the most denigrating stereotypes about blacks. More important, to gain social acceptance, she forces Herman at age five to memorize and recite a speech by John C. Calhoun for the Knights of the Gold Carnation, or the K.K.K. At Herman's bedside, she reminisces,

… When he wasn't but five years old I had to whip him so he'd study his John C. Calhoun speech … Yes indeed, for recitin' that John C. Calhoun speech … Herman won first mention and a twenty dollar gold piece.

(Childress 1973, 116)

Her attitude about law, especially to the degree it upholds white privilege, is to obey. “Live by the law. Follow the law—law, law of the Land,” she tells Herman on his deathbed. Jim Crow laws and anti-miscegenation laws legitimize Frieda's personal “truths” and so she uses one of those “truths,” that of the supposedly universal human preference for sameness, to justify her supremacist views on race and to assuage her fear of difference. “There's something wrong about mismatched things, be they shoes, socks or people,” she tells Herman.

In the most succinct expression of her “truth” and her sense of “power over,” she tells Julia, “I'm as high over you as Mount Everest over the sea. White reigns supreme … I'm white and you can't change that.” However, moments before in a confidential revelation to her daughter, Annabelle, she expresses feelings of powerlessness, resentment and deep disappointment.

I put up with a man breathin' stale whiskey in my face every night … pullin and pawin' at me … always tired, inside and out … Gave birth seven … five-a them babies couldn't draw breath.

(Childress 1973, 117)

While Frieda manipulates ideologies of racial superiority and exclusion to exercise power and control over Julia, she is herself manipulated by ideologies of class and sexuality which regulate her own choices. Her inability to recognize the operation of power in these systems is not lost on Herman. In her defense, he explains to Julia,

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

(Childress 1973, 106)

As Julia's and Frieda's experiences are shaped by ideological systems reflected in law, so are Mattie's. Deserted by her abusive first husband, Mattie marries a second time, despite the fact that state laws do not permit divorce. Because she does not have “papers” attesting to the legality of her second marriage, Mattie is denied her husband's military benefits, the allotment that would be sent to her from his service in the Merchant Marines.

For Mattie, the “blight of legalized limitation” manifests itself in particular forms of economic and social deprivation. Economic deprivation, at one point, had necessitated her taking a job as laundress in a house ill-repute, causing her social standing within her community to suffer. Mattie nevertheless challenges the category of legal authority with regard to marriage and does it ironically by using tradition. As a total complex of norms, values, ideas, and patterned behavior constituting culture, tradition, like law, signifies authority. Sociologist Orlando Patterson, in fact, has suggested that law is sometimes dependent on tradition for authority (1982, 37).

Although she knows full well that her first marriage has not been legally dissolved, Mattie uses the authority of tradition to challenge the authority of law and to claim legitimacy for her second marriage. “We was married,” she tells Julia, “on Edisto Island. I had a white dress and flowers. … Everything but papers. We couldn't get papers.” When Julia reminds her, “You can't marry without papers,” Mattie's response is,

Reading from the Bible makes people married, not no piece paper. We're together eleven years, that oughta-a be legal [my emphasis].

(Childress 1973, 122)

With the suggestion that tradition, that is reading from the Bible, could or should transform law, Mattie's assertion articulates the dialogic interaction between the two. Just as law stands in opposition to tradition, tradition undermines law with each challenging, penetrating, and carrying the accent of the other. In other words, although law may seek authority in tradition, it is entirely possible for tradition to struggle for the same authority as law.

Law, tradition and authority, for Lula and her adopted son, Nelson, a black soldier in the south of 1918, operate differently. For Nelson, white supremacist groups like the Knights of the Gold Carnation and the K.K.K. embody authority. For these groups, the black male body in particular is a target of power and control. Fanny recounts to Julia in the first scene that local whites had thrown a pail of dirty water on Nelson the day before, apparently for being in uniform and displaying a “bodily rhetoric of honour.”⁶

Demonstrating the manifestations of control, not just on the body, but on the psyche as well, Fanny blames Nelson for the attack. “A black man on leave got no right to wear his uniform in public … that's flauntin' yourself” (Childress 1973, 80-81). Likewise when Nelson attempts to explain his anger to Lula, “Mama, you supposed to get mad when somebody throw a pail-a water on you,” her response is, “it's their country and their uniform, so just stay out-a the way.” In the second act when Nelson accosts the white salesman, the Bellman, for walking into his mother's house without knocking, the Bellman tells him, “Don't let your uniform go to your head, Boy, or you'll end your days swinging from a tree” (Childress 1973, 123).

The mechanisms which make possible the control and subjugation of the black body, through extra-legal means, constitute a matrix of domination which includes not only the ideology of white supremacy, but the authority of tradition. Still the same tradition is used by Nelson's adopted mother, Lula, to subvert the very control mechanisms which at one time threatened her son's life. Years earlier, manipulating the language and mannerisms of the “mammy,” Lula had convinced local whites not to send Nelson to prison. She explains to Julia,

A few years back I got down on my knees in the courthouse to keep him off-a the chain gang. I crawled and I cried, “Please white folks, yall's everything. I'se nothin', yall's everything. I'se nothin', yall's everything.”The court laughed-I meant for ‘em to laugh … then they let Nelson go.

(Childress 1973, 125)

While law, with the authority of tradition, reaches and manipulates bodies, it never completely destroys, for the characters in Wedding Band the possibility of agency or the formation of collective identity. Jim Crow, in fact, encouraged such collective formations for both blacks and whites. In the final scene of the play when Julia gives Mattie the wedding band, the gold chain and the tickets north, she announces, “You and Teeta are my people … my family. Be my family.” Mattie in turn acknowledges and affirms Julia's return to community with the response, “We your people whether we blood kin or not.”

Moments later, Julia affirms the same right to dignity and agency for Annabelle and Frieda. After she has refused them entry to her house and Frieda has threatened to call the police to force her to do so, Julia acknowledges Frieda's freedom and right to act, as a white woman, in her own interest.

JULIA.
(Not unkindly.) Do whatever you have to do. Win the war. Represent the race. Call the police. (She enters her house, closes the door and bolts it. HERMAN'S MOTHER leaves through the front entry. FANNY slowly follows her.)

(Childress 1973, 133)

Julia's equating “winning the war” with “calling the police” with “representing the race,” situates the intersection of the several ideologies and institutions which assure subjection and impose “relations of docility-utility” upon racial minorities. Having reentered her own racial community, Julia accords Frieda the right to do the same, partly because through her own struggle, she has risen above these institutionally and legally imposed relations of docility.

Although Julia and Herman violate the law, attempt to rise above the law, and in some way transcend the law, it is important to note that they never denounce it. Whereas Mattie advocates transformations of the law, asserting that her eleven-year common-law marriage to October “ought-a be legal,” Julia never suggests anything of the sort. When Herman tells her on his deathbed, “I failed you in every way … I didn't give you my name,” Julia replies, “You couldn't … was the law.” Likewise Herman acknowledges that “whatever is wrong … [it's] not the law” (Childress 1973, 131). Here Alice Childress's statement of intent with regard to her representation of marriage law in the play is illuminating.

In order to deal effectively with the problems created by marriage laws, it was necessary to make sure that the play not be interpreted as one which advocates the inter-marriage of races. … Therefore no character could plead the cause of inter-marriage and none suggest the changing of law.

(1967, 20)

The fact that both Herman and Julia, though in violation of the law, still respect the law translates the play's ultimate statement on law as perhaps the principle power mechanism society uses to control certain forms of extrovert human behavior, interracial sexual behavior in particular. Childress explains more specifically,

The story of Wedding Band gradually took shape as the result of a reaction to hearing that old chestnut quoted time and time again—“The two free-est things in the country are the black woman and the white man.” The more often it was repeated the more often I wondered what kind of freedom the originator of that remark had in mind.

(1967, 18)

On many levels, Wedding Band is an exploration of that “kind of freedom.” It is a freedom that may transcend law, authority and tradition. It is a freedom that frequently arises from resistance, solidarity, and agency. It is the peculiar freedom Julia associates with “dignity.”

HERMAN.
What's dignity? Tell me. Do it.
JULIA.
Well, it … it. … It's a feeling—It's a spirit that rises higher than the dirt around it, without any by-your-leave. It's not proud and it's not 'shamed. Dignity “Is”. …

(Childress 1986, 98)

Notes

1. In the preface to her bibliography, Black Arts and Black Aesthetics, 2d ed. (Atlanta: First World Publishers, 1981), Carolyn Fowler advances the notion that African American art legitimizes the human and cultural identity of African Americans.

2. See Pauli Murray, ed. States' Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati: Women's Division of Christian Service, 1952), 417.

3. Alice Childress, “Why Talk About That?” Negro Digest (April 1967): 21. With regard to the necessity of protesting laws which infringe on civil rights, Childress writes, “Those conscious of living in the blight of legalized limitation will continue to be engrossed in the controversy of ‘to be or not to be’ … free.” [my emphasis] Hereafter references to this article will be cited parenthetically in the text.

4. See David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Random House, 1979), 17-20.

5. This is an appropriation of Stewart Hall's statement on “boundaries of difference” quoted in Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 154. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

6. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 35.

References

Burns, Haywood. 1973. Black people and the tyranny of American law. Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 407 (May): 156-66.

Childress, Alice et al. 1966. The Negro woman in American literature. Freedomways (1st Quarter): 15-19.

Childress, Alice. 1967. Why talk about that? Negro Digest (April): 17-21.

Childress, Alice. 1973 (1986). Wedding band. In Nine plays by black women. Ed. Margaret Wilkerson. New York: New American Library.

Curb, Rosemary. 1980. An unfashionable tragedy of American racism: Alice Childress's Wedding band. MELUS 7: 57-68.

Davies, Carole Boyce. 1994. Black women, writing and identity: Migrations of the subject. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House.

Fowler, Carolyn. 1981. By way of preface: balancing on the brink. Black Arts and black aesthetics: A bibliography. Atlanta: First World.

Hill-Collins, Patricia. Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems 6 (December): 514-532.

Lewis, David Levering. 1979. When Harlem was in vogue. New York: Random House.

Murray, Pauli, ed. 1952. States' laws on race and color. Cincinnati: Women's Division of Christian Service.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.