SOURCE: "The Cherokee Night of R. Lynn Riggs," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Autumn, 1988, pp. 45-59.

"An absorbed race has its curiously irreconcilable inheritance. It seems to me the best grade of absorbed Indian might be an intellectual Hamlet, buffeted, harrassed, victimized, split, baffled—with somewhere in him great fire and some granite. And a residual lump of stranger things than the white race may fathom" (Letter to [Barrett H.] Clark, 10 March 1929). This statement by part-Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs recognized, early on, the failure of the assimilation policy for Native Americans. The theme of the play he was writing, The Cherokee Night, might also be stated thus: the combination of American Indian and white blood in his veins, like the combination of American Indian and white cultures in his life, set the "absorbed" Indian, or part-Indian American at war within himself as well as within society. The combinations refused to mix and cancelled out each other.

Riggs saw that the pure-blood Indian people had known who they were and where they had come from—but their mixed-blood descendants were tragic figures between two worlds. Whatever options his characters chose in order to cope—violence, crime, alcohol, apathy, or denial of their origins—only led them further into tragedy. The characters articulate this theme variously in the seven scenes of the play, each of which is like a separate vignette; five characters introduced as young adults in the first act are seen in various stages of their lives, from infancy, when the father of two of them dies as a fugitive from the law, to middle age when one sister lives in poverty, while the other has denied her heritage to live in a wealthy white man's world.

Riggs's controversial theory is commonly accepted today. The United States had tried a sequence of Indian policies, from annihilation to separation, and back to assimilation: annihilation in early wars, then separation to reservations and Indian Territory, then the opening of Indian lands to resettlement, undermining tribal authority. A typical policy statement was made by Thomas J. Morgan, new Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior in 1899:

The Indians must conform to "the white man's ways," peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization.… They can not escape it, and must either conform or be crushed by it. [Now That the Buffalo's Gone: A Study of Today's American Indians, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., 1982]

American Indian children were systematically removed from their tribal homes and sent to white schools. "The boarding schools were often effective in their short-term goals of teaching English to Indian youth, moving children away from intimate contact with tribal/reservation conditions, and conversion to Christianity," wrote Sally J. McBeth, [in Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-Central Oklahoma American Indians, 1983]. "Historical factors such as the breakdown of reservations in Oklahoma and land allotment were also at work promoting the eventual disintegration of the tribe and complete assimilation. This assimilation, however, did not and has not occurred.

But Native Americans refused to vanish as a people. The boarding school, intended as separation, became a pan-Indian unifying force. For the first time, members of various tribes shared a common language, English, and became self-conscious as Indians. "At the same time, the retention of one's Native language in Oklahoma continued to be a positive affirmation of the desire to maintain one's heritage despite immense pressures to the contrary." Riggs's play demonstrates the failure of assimilation policy, through the havoc it wreaked on individual lives.

Riggs (1899-1954) did not live to see the eventual rebellion in the 1960s and later, when Indian people and other American ethnic groups resolved to reclaim their culture and take pride in their racial and historical heritage. But this play, the only one he wrote that dealt with his Cherokee heritage, powerfully demonstrates the uniquely tragic situation of young part-Indian people such as he knew during the early years of this century. He is best known as writer of Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1931 Theater Guild hit on Broadway, which in 1943 was revised as the musical Oklahoma! At the time, Americans knew little of Indian ways, except for the Hollywood movie stereotypes Riggs abhorred. None of his twenty-five plays dealt directly with Indianness except The Cherokee Night, a play which ought to be recognized for its insights as well as its dramatic intensity.

Although this play was performed only in college and experimental theaters, it was published by Samuel French in 1936, and it deserves attention as authentic American Indian literature. I will analyze both the play and some of Riggs's concerns, expressed in his own notes about the performances he directed at the University of Iowa in 1932. Riggs said in informal notes that the scenes illustrate these qualities of the Cherokees: "bravery, sense of ritual, independence, pride, cunning, fierceness, aesthetic sense, in sum their authentic glory … [and] present perversion of these qualities."

First, let us review briefly the situation of the Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma leading up to the time of the play, 1895-1931. Although many had died on the "Trail of Tears" which forced their resettlement in the mid-nineteenth century, the Cherokees in Oklahoma had reestablished their tribal government, founded both a male and female seminary, and using Sequoyah's written syllabary of their language, had published a newspaper in Tahlequah, The Cherokee Advocate. But the Civil War again devastated the tribe, physically, politically, and economically. They lost thousands of their cattle and were then forced to give up large tribal land holdings for resettlement. The Cherokees freely intermarried with non-Indians, at least seven hundred of them as early as 1877.

Into this social upheaval Riggs brings his part-Indian characters, taking them from infancy or childhood into their thirties, then reverting in the final scene to 1895 and a full-blood chief, the dignified forebear of the tragedies to come. One-sixteenth Cherokee himself, Riggs saw in the psyche of the early twentieth-century, mixed-blood Cherokee a unique form of modern alienation, a stream of natural emotion that had been thwarted and turned aside by the overriding white culture. The resulting inner conflicts tore at the banks of his stability, his energy, his hope.

Throughout the play Riggs used the landmark Claremore Mound as a visual symbol, seen either as the immediate location of a scene or as a distant feature of the horizon: in an 1817 territorial war on this broad, flat-topped hill, Cherokee warriors massacred residents of an Osage village. This bloody last battle between the tribes is well remembered. Legends are told relating to the battle, which ended many things, including a way of life based on tribal loyalty.

In addition to the book's explanatory prologue, Riggs wrote pages of detailed directions. Among his papers in the Lynn Riggs Memorial Collection at Rogers State College, Claremore, Oklahoma, are informal notes listing: what characteristics of the Cherokee are portrayed; costumes, reflecting for the most part the clothing of the poor, rather than stereotyped "Indian" garb; and a "drum plot" giving directions for an off-stage drum beat, varying in intensity with the drama and making transitions between scenes. Written for a production he directed at the University of Iowa in 1932, these notes shed much light on his intentions in this experimental play. It was also presented in 1932 at Hedgerow Theatre near Philadelphia, in 1934 at Syracuse University, and in a 1936 Federal Theatre production in New York City.

Riggs said on several occasions that he considered the nonchronological sequence of the play's seven scenes essential to his meaning, to the cyclical causes and effects which visit the frustrations and failings of the fathers on the sons from generation to generation. When urged to structure the play more traditionally, he refused, although popular audiences of the Thirties found it somewhat confusing. The play as structured, though presenting much action, is more symbolic than realistic, and thus experimental.

His introduction to the published version explains:

They are citizens without a state. They are wayfarers on a dark road—and the dangers without are as nothing to the devils within. Driven as they are by urges impossible for them to understand, their actions are apt to be incalculably inadequate, or, on occasion, theatrically violent—like a river clawing at and destroying a countryside.… And his night is usually black with storm, and unlighted by lamp or star.

He wrote that though the play takes place in Indian Territory before Oklahoma statehood, "it might have been about any Indian tribe or about any strong racial strain, especially those whose emotional equipment is rich and complicated."

Although the scenes of the play are arranged nonchronologically, for the sake of clarity I will discuss them in chronological order.

Scene VII, 1895, titled "The Cherokee Night," takes place in and around the cabin of John Gray-Wolf, who is playing a Cherokee song on a drum for his eight-year-old orphaned grandson. A wounded outlaw, Edgar Spench (also known as Edgar Breeden) stumbles in and Gray-Wolf tries to stop the bleeding in his side. Spench raves, "Sump'n always drove me on.… Bad blood. Too much Indian, they tell me" [Busset Mantle and The Cherokee Night: Two Plays by Lynn Riggs, 1936].

"Not enough Indian," Gray-Wolf says. "I'm full-blood Cherokee. I live peaceful. I ain't troubled. I remember the way my people lived in quiet times. Think of my ancestors. It keeps me safe. You, though—like my boy. He's dead. He was half white, like you. They killed him, had to kill him. Not enough Indian.

When the white posse arrives and kills Spench, his wife Marthy, mother of their small son Gar, and Florey, who is carrying Spench's illegitimate daughter (Bee) arrive. Marthy says to her dead husband, "You was hounded day and night, inside and outside. By day, men. At night, your thoughts. Now it's over.… But here's your son. In him your trouble. It goes on. In him. It ain't finished.… Your disgrace, your wickedness, your pain and trouble live on a while longer. In her child, in my child. In all people born now, about to be born.… Someday, the agony will end.… Maybe not in the night of death, the cold dark night, without stars. Maybe in the sun."

Riggs's stage notes in the published play close the denouement: "A far-away look is in Gray-Wolf's eyes, a quality of magnificent dignity and despair as if he mourned for his own life, for the life of his son, for his grandson, for Spench, for the women, for a whole race gone down into darkness." With a drumbeat like a slow pulse, the cabin interior fades and the snow-dusted Claremore Mound looms again in the background.

Riggs's informal notes said that scene VII means

Cherokee night, epitomized by the desperado, who fulfills in himself both defeat from the whites, and defeat from within. Finally shot in cold blood, perhaps not caring very much, because of the loss of blood, literally.

Projection of the strain—in the unborn child, Bee, the absent child, Gar, and the little grandson. Projection of application beyond race, beyond personal interpretation.…

In Scene IV (1906), three boys, Gar Breeden, Hutch Moree, and Art Osburn, explore "The Place Where the Nigger Was Found," a black man who was murdered the night before in a gambling game on Claremore Mound. The language expresses the attitudes of white Oklahomans at the time, when blacks had been "run out of Claremore." Art, a dark, brooding character, says "Niggers'll kill—and not keer!" The boys whip up a mock frenzy to show their own bravado about bloodshed—but then they find an Ace of Spades, a tin cup, and, pushing aside leaves, they find blood on their hands. As they run terrified, the ghostly form of a large, black man rises from among the leaves and yawns as if very much at home. Riggs commented in his notes: "Cherokee remnants of blood-lust become terrifying to the possessor. White strain makes its expression imaginatively impossible." He contrasts this blockage with the Negroes' apparent "natural lithe functioning."

Scene V, "The High Mountain" (1913) demonstrates the spiritual fervor of a fundamentalist white sect in a church on Eagle Bluff, overlooking the Illinois River and the town of Tahlequah—an Indian town, seat of the Cherokee Nation. Gar Breeden, now 18, being chased by a shotgun-toting white man, seeks refuge in the church. His entry disturbs the ecstatic chants of worship, led by the preacher, Jonas.

Gar tells the preacher privately, "It's all shut up in me, it's drivin' me crazy!" He had been expelled from Oklahoma A&M College, where his guardian had sent him, but no longer felt he belonged in Claremore. "No place for me anywhere! Come down to Tahlequah yesterday to see if—to see—I thought this bein' the head of—Listen, I'm half Cherokee. I thought they could help me out here, I thought they—Old men sittin' in the square! No tribe to go to, no Council to help me out of the kind of trouble I'm in. Nuthin' to count on!"

Seeing possibilities in the intense young man, Jonas tries to persuade him to accept the faith and to join the sect he calls—ironically—"People of the Lost Tribe, God's Chosen." He also offers to train Gar to succeed him as preacher, saying: "There's no help from the Cherokees. They're dying out. They're hardly a Tribe any more. They have no order of life you could live. Their ways are going. Their customs change. That part of you can never be fulfilled. What's left? You must look to heaven! Like us!"

When Gar refuses, Jonas tells the people to chain him to a post and they threaten to kill him—but the Klaxon horn of an approaching car signals his rescue. The sect members have stolen goods and livestock from the Cherokees in Tahlequah and must look to their own safety. This scene represents the climax of the play, revealing that there is neither spiritual nor physical refuge for the Cherokees. It is followed by the tragic denouement in Gray-Wolf's cabin, even though the scenes are out of chronological order by 18 years.

Much non-fiction has been written, pro and con, about the white man's effort to capture the American Indian's fundamentally religious spirit. Many believed—correctly—that the "heathen" religions of the tribes must be rejected if the Indian were ever to assimilate.

Historically, there was no such thing as a single Indian religion; spiritual concepts and systems differed from tribe to tribe. All of them, however, served the same individual and collective purposes, working for the survival, unity and well-being of the people, ensuring order, balance and harmony.… (Josephy).

But instead of the tribal council, Gar finds only the sterile remnants, "Old men sittin' in the square."

Josephy agreed with Riggs that the various Indian religions were imprinted in racial memory,

awesomely pervasive and relentless, the inner skein of collective and individual life.… To individual Indians, deep spiritual feelings and reverence for all of creation were as much a part of their being as their physical features and personality. Spiritual power flowed like energy from their bodies, guiding their thoughts and actions by day and entering their dreams at night. It counseled and directed them throughout their lives, endowing them with values and a world view that gave meaning to their existence.…

In general, however, Congress and the administrations in Washington regarded them [missionaries] as the best civilizing influence and came to rely on them increasingly as agents to guide the Indians toward assimilation.

Scene I, "Sixty-Seven Arrowheads," introduces six part-Indian young adults having a picnic on Claremore Mound in 1915. They are Gar Breeden, Hutch Moree, and Art Osburn, whom we met as children, Bee Newcomb (the unborn child of Florey met earlier, now a waitress, but turning to prostitution), Viney Jones, a schoolteacher, and Audeal Coombs, a "beauty operator" not heard of later.

A ghostly teepee and muffled drumbeat introduce the scene, which again is haunted by the spirits of past blood-lettings. Gar says the others should feel what he feels—a spiritual presence because they are "sitting on the graves of a lot of dead Cherokees." Old Man Talbert is discovered nearby, chopping at the ground in search of arrow-heads. He tells them a ghost story, of the Cherokee spirits he has seen charging over the Mound, returning with long-haired Osage scalps "swishin' and drippin'" at every Cherokee belt. To a drum-beat accompaniment, Talbert recites a poetic message he received from the ghostly Cherokee chief in the form of a traditional Native American oration. The specter says (through Talbert): "Now you've saw, you've been showed. Us—the Cherokees—in our full pride, our last glory! This is the way we are, the way we was meant to be!" He recounts the glory of the battle:

But this was moons ago; / We, too, are dead. / We have no bodies, / We are homeless ghosts, / We are made of air!

"Who made us that, Jim Talbert? Our children—our children's children! They've forgot who we was, who they are!" Saying the young have "sunk already to the white man's way," he adds,

The grass is withered. / Where the river was is red sand. / Fire eats the timber. / Night—night—has come to our people!

Talbert, in a fearful frenzy, says because of the ghosts he must dig up the mountain if necessary, till he finds sixty-seven arrowheads and gives them to the Cherokees. "When they touch 'em, they'll remember. The feel of flint in their handsl" But saner minds know that even the touch of flint cannot bring back the life that was.

In the next three chronological scenes, we catch up with Hutch Moree in 1919, Art Osburn and Bee Newcomb in 1927, and Viney Jones in 1931.

Scene VI, "The White Turkey," 1919: Hutch, a light-haired, slow-witted oil field teamster, has moved in with nineteen year-old Kate Whiteturkey, on her family farm near Bartlesville. Strong-willed, spoiled, wearing expensive but gaudy clothes, Kate tells Hutch's brother George not to try to get Hutch away from her. "I got three Stutzes, and I'm gonna have an airplane next month." Newly rich from Osage oil lands, she has bought Hutch ten silk shirts, six pairs of shoes, and his own Stutz Bearcat car. Her family farms no more. She drives her cars everywhere, but is bored with places. She tells George, "It's just his [Hutch's] hard luck to be born part-Cherokee instead of full-blood Osage. He might just as well be white trash for all the good bein' Indian does him."

George, who has been away finishing college, says, "He's got 80 acres of land, his allotment, in Rogers County. Good land, too." When Hutch enters, George tells him, "They're making that new road from Claremore north through Vinita and on up to the Kansas line. It would be a good job for you, get you away from this—all this. Your teams are in the pasture, idle. They ought to be working. You ought to be working." Hutch loses his new-found confidence, returns to his former stuttering, but still resents his brother's call back to responsibility. He is not strong enough to take up the hard road again.

Scene II, "The Hatchet": In 1927, Bee is put in the Rogers County Jail cell next to Art's cell. Supposedly charged with drunkenness, Bee is being paid to get a confession from Art that he killed his Osage wife. He confesses that he hated the older woman whom he married for security. When they were going up the river, he beat her with a hatchet and dumped her out of the boat to drown. His confession is recorded, and he will hang. Bee feels guilty, but takes her $25 and leaves. Riggs noted that the scene illustrates "Cherokee hate—and maladjustment because of it. Also rancor, bitterness, sadism, wildness, cupidity."

Scene III, "Liniment," 1931: Viney, 41, no longer a schoolteacher but wife of the mayor of Quapaw, visits the humble home of her sister Sarah after ten years of silence between them. Sarah's daughter Maisie, a child-wife at 17, has been hoping for fifty cents to buy liniment for her mother's rheumatic knees. But Sarah's pride will not let her accept the money from critical Viney. She says to Viney, "Be mean and cunning and full of hate, like the Indian. Be greedy and selfish the way the white man is. None of what's good.…" The sisters will probably not see each other again. Both ways of life have failed these women. Riggs noted informally that Viney's resilience, which made her white, was in this case, "a defeat also, because it cheats her, makes her life thin and fictitious." His finale to these life stories was to return to the dignified Gray-Wolf and a better time but a bitter prophecy.

Riggs's notes direct his play to open with drum beats, the basic unit of Indian music: "Bass drum 6 beats; baritone drum 4; Pause." This rhythm recurs at the end of Scene IV, just before the intermission, recalling the audience to the beginning and thus reiterating the timelessness of the scenes. Scene II begins with an unaccented bass beat "like rain on the roof." The baritone drum then mingles its "8-to-the-bar" beat with the recorded hymn, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee." Recorded bird whistles join the drum at the end of this Scene II, and both sound at the beginning of the next. Switching register, the bass drum beat opens Scene IV and comes to a crescendo with the violent expressions of the boys. In the midst of Scene VI, one loud bass-drum exclamation blends to a two-beat measure, then to an unaccented beat, the play ending with the pattern of the beginning: "Bass 6, baritone 4, Pause.…" He was this specific because untrained non-Indians are unable to imitate these patterns extemporaneously. Obviously Riggs, an accomplished singer and guitarist, used this tribal rhythm to connect his non-chronological scenes. The patterns will recall anyone who has ever heard an authentic Indian drum to the scene of unfamiliar rituals.

In the Thirties, New York audiences seemed bewildered. Playwright Sidney Howard, in a 1936 letter to theatre historian Barrett H. Clark, wondered if the movies would be the best vehicle for this play. Perhaps the stage for Cherokee Night exists best between book covers, where the characters are easier to follow.

In October 1933, almost a year after the first productions of Cherokee Night, Riggs reviewed his work to see whether the imperatives of his material were misdirecting the play. Often accused of being, though original, too inflexible, Riggs wrote his friend and agent Barrett Clark at Samuel French, Inc.

The point of my doing the production at Iowa was to see whether the play worked that way or not. It did work—nearly everybody will testify to that. Some day the producers will learn that if a play has a certain structure there is a reason for it… However, I'll try to see how much I can feel the play some other way. I doubt if I can.

And of course, he couldn't. The play begins with young adults, takes them to mid-life, back to childhood, and in the end to the generation before their birth.

Riggs also gave directions for the costuming. At the 1915 picnic, impudent Bee wears a richly-colored dress and silk stockings. The men wear wide-beaded belts and moccasins with their blue jeans and work shirts. Viney wears a hat, middy blouse, and long skirt. More prosperous in 1931 at her sister's house, Viney wears a Eugenie hat and fur coat. But Sarah, who is poor, wears a Mother Hubbard dress and gray knitted shawl. In 1919, Kate Whiteturkey, the Osage woman newly rich from oil headrights, has a modern rich-colored short dress, expensive but not in good taste. Hutch, who lives with her, wears a white silk shirt with red stripes, detachable silk collar, and necktie. Nothing especially Indian here, except for beaded belts and comfortable moccasins. Riggs's point was that these twentieth-century Indians most often wore the clothing of the poor, not the feathers or breech-cloths of movie Indians.

Although the play is essentially tragic, Riggs was happy in its creation, begun in France as he was finishing Green Grow the Lilacs in 1930, on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Working on it later in Provincetown theatre colony on 20 October 1930, he wrote Clark that the old Indian, a real nobleman, in his "triumphant comprehension … makes the whole play dignified and austere beyond my first feeble calculation." Therefore, Gray-Wolf's declaration had to be his denouement.

Riggs saw in the situation of the Cherokee in this century the universal problem of alienation that has occupied modern writers. Like the Indians, exiles in their own homeland, mankind's vital stream of natural emotion has been dammed by modern society—and therefore, the stream tears at the banks of his psyche.

Riggs's people in Cherokee Night are in many ways like himself. He spent many childhood hours playing by the imposing Claremore Mound, close by the country grave of his Cherokee mother, who died when he was a toddler. He often felt, as he said of the Cherokee, that his strongest, most primitive emotions had no outlet. Covertly homosexual, he, too, was often driven by urges impossible for him to understand, his actions apt to be, as he said, "incalculably inadequate." Although completely non-violent, a genial person with many friends, Riggs in his plays and especially his poems recognized always that underground stream. He was frequently withdrawn and moody, and at these times conscious of "devils within."

Riggs makes abundant mention in this play of Oklahoma's native flora and fauna, as well as Cherokee history and legend. Gray-Wolf, for example, tells his grandson about the brave warrior who put his soul in the top of a sycamore tree for safety while he went into battle. But bravery also includes stoic acceptance in his advice to his grandson: "When death wants you, it's better to sit and wait."

Noted playwright Paul Horgan said in a 1981 interview that this is the greatest of Riggs's many Oklahoma plays and should be revived. At the very least, it should be read, for its insight into its part-Cherokee characters and its historical perspective on their Indian Territory/Oklahoma life in the first third of this century.